Popular songs that have used a vocoder effect with hard transitions between pitches
Unpopular songs that use a vocoder include Neil Young's "Trans", a record so poor it caused his record company to sue him for deliberate career suicide.
I think the WTC and the Challenger accident are orders of magnitude apart. The latter was a tragedy, but an accident and the fatalities were few. The WTC was a premeditated act of murder on a grand scale, with far reaching and deadly consequences. Thats a major real difference.
Similarly, here in the UK after Princess Diana died, the media were obsequious, but in the pubs the gags were coming within 24 hours. With the Dunblane shootings (in which a lone psycho killed a class of small kids and their teacher) there were (and are) almost no jokes.
I think the public has a better sense of the relative seriousness of these events than the media give us credit for.
It deprives the movie goers of a delightful character and a mystery to take away with them.
The mystery being: "Why the hell didn't they cut that tree-hugging, drivel-spouting, badly dressed hippy, since he clearly has no relevance to the rest of the movie."
To my mind, Sam is the everyman hero of the books, yet his role seems to be being played down
I agree with your assessment, but I don't think its really true of the first volume. Sam doesn't step outside his slightly-dim-lickspittle/bumpkin role until Books 4 and 6 of LoTR, so we can hardly expect the first movie to reflect otherwise.
Re:LOTR will never get best picture
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Madness of Richard III
Well, ignoring the fact that its "George", you should bear in mind that that story is not completely true (although "not totally untrue".
it's always going to be a dreary mainstream serious film.
Maybe, that that wasn't always the case.
The Deer Hunter Annie Hall One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. Midnight Cowboy The Apartment On The Waterfront The Lost Weekend It Happened One Night All Quiet On The Western Front
all won best picture. Some were comedies, some weren't mainstream and none of them are dreary.
Re:LOTR will never get best picture
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 3, Interesting
what person would be so insensitive to vote for the best picture for a film entitled The Two Towers in this post 9-11 age
Ignoring this (splendid) troll, what I found most interesting about the Oscar ceremony was that, early on, Whoopi made a joke based around the September 11th events. (A reference to "the national tragedy suffered this year" turned out to be about Mariah Carey's acting career). This is a sea change compared to every previous reference in the US media, which quite understandably, has tended to treat as beyond any joke. My desire to indulge in uninformed psychology tells me this must mean something about the nation's mood, but I don't know what.
Of course, Tom Cruise's nauseatingly self-congratulatory "we need Hollywood more than ever" intro took the edge off this.
But Nora Ephron's tribute to New York movies was brilliant. In fact, the short specially-produced films were the highlight of the entire show.
Re:How many do you think Two Towers is going to wi
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Next year's Oscars may not have as many other good films. Do you think that the Two Towers is the likely canidate for next years?
But it will have the next Star Wars installment to battle for the technical visual effects/art design/make up/costume. On top of that, the make up will be less novel (excluding new characters: Ents) plus the desire for a consistent visual will mean they'll still be using (essentially) last years tech.
Re:but what about . . .
on
Nethack 3.4.0
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· Score: 2, Insightful
but how about a belligerent carnivore--now there's a twist. Penalized for eating anything *but* a vegetarian . ..
Well slashem has the vampire character race, that can't eat any normal food, but only suck the blood from very fresh corpses (and IIRC living baddies).
Without my bones files, how will I ever remember to avoid taking on a floating eye in melee? Or grabbing that cockatrice corpse?
Thats not what bones files are for. Thats record files. Bones files are saved levels on which you can find the corpses of previous characters, kill their ghost and loot them of their (now cursed) booty.
Apparently the game developers are asking for a 1000 times performance increase...
Developers: We want a 1000 times speed increase
Sony: Would you settle for a press release containing a bunch of buzzwords
Developers: Which ones?
Sony: Let me think: "distributed computing", "biotechnology", "linux", "grid computing" and "Moore's Law"
Developers: OK, if you throw in some hookers at the next Comdex in Vegas
Sony: Deal
Re:See slashem for example!!!
on
Nethack 3.4.0
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· Score: 4, Funny
It is still turn-based... so what?
Are you kidding, thats kind of terrible design decision that made Chess such a short lived fad.
Re:What's the big deal about Nethack?
on
Nethack 3.4.0
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· Score: 3, Informative
There are some good things in Slash'em and I would like to see some of them brought to Nethack.
Many of the have been. There are loads of features in NH3.3 that came from slashem and its predecessors. Besides, when I build slashem, I compile out the many features I don't like (firearms, the black market, a couple of others).
Try playing as a doppelgangen monk... It's like riding through the dungeon in a wheat thresher.
So don't do it. Nobody forces you to play a monk, and you can configure it so that RNG doesn't give you one. Experienced players hate Monks, but they're great for newbies to get a feel of the game, and the vegetarianism is a nice twist.
(Besides, IMHO its the slashem Drow whos unbalanced. But who cares, its a game.)
Tell me they've got rid of the horrible "configure the thing by editting config.h" and replaced it with autoconf or somesuch. I don't mind picking out the game options by hand, but making sure it uses the right term\(cap|lin\)/ncurses library is a pain in the ass.
I don't deny that Bush is doing climate research. But bear in mind that the first (literally) things Bush did were
tear up the Kyoto protocols
allow oil drilling in Alaska.
These are not the actions of a man who feels the need to keep the environmental lobby onside. And, as you suggest, its not nearly enough money to do that anyway. Having said that, I don't think Bush is (quite) the environmental ogre he's made out, and this money might be a genuine expenditure for research in climate change. But there have been plenty of previous large scale studies (the IPCC, for instance), so I can't allay the suspicions that he's going to keep commisioning research till he gets the result he wants.
few Yanks would claim to begin to understand UK politics, but I have repeatedly run into Brits who think they understand US politics
Because US politics matter in the rest of the world, and get lengthy coverage in the UK media. The converse is not true (very few USians care about UK politics, and who can blame them?) Actually, if the Bay Area Fox and NBC affiliates are anything to go by, the UK gets better coverage of US politics than parts of the US.
Having said that, I'm a particular Amerophile. Not only do I follow US politics, but I can explain the infield fly rule.
Are you seriously suggesting that George "Dig Up Alaska" Bush, in hock to his britches to oil companies, has a hidden agenda to keep Greenpeace on his side?
Slashdot Mirror
Lets see:
Reference to Hitler? Check
Slippery slope fallacy? Check
Utterly unsupported reference to "logic"? Check
You sir, are a troll.
I think the WTC and the Challenger accident are orders of magnitude apart. The latter was a tragedy, but an accident and the fatalities were few. The WTC was a premeditated act of murder on a grand scale, with far reaching and deadly consequences. Thats a major real difference.
Similarly, here in the UK after Princess Diana died, the media were obsequious, but in the pubs the gags were coming within 24 hours. With the Dunblane shootings (in which a lone psycho killed a class of small kids and their teacher) there were (and are) almost no jokes.
I think the public has a better sense of the relative seriousness of these events than the media give us credit for.
YM "utter bollocks from start to finish." HTH
Batting Practice.
The time before a baseball game when the players come out and practice hitting 80MPH fastballs into the bleachers.
Or possibly "Best Picture"
Maybe, that that wasn't always the case.
The Deer Hunter
Annie Hall
One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest.
Midnight Cowboy
The Apartment
On The Waterfront
The Lost Weekend
It Happened One Night
All Quiet On The Western Front
all won best picture. Some were comedies, some weren't mainstream and none of them are dreary.
Of course, Tom Cruise's nauseatingly self-congratulatory "we need Hollywood more than ever" intro took the edge off this.
But Nora Ephron's tribute to New York movies was brilliant. In fact, the short specially-produced films were the highlight of the entire show.
Developers: We want a 1000 times speed increase
Sony: Would you settle for a press release containing a bunch of buzzwords
Developers: Which ones?
Sony: Let me think: "distributed computing", "biotechnology", "linux", "grid computing" and "Moore's Law"
Developers: OK, if you throw in some hookers at the next Comdex in Vegas
Sony: Deal
So don't do it. Nobody forces you to play a monk, and you can configure it so that RNG doesn't give you one. Experienced players hate Monks, but they're great for newbies to get a feel of the game, and the vegetarianism is a nice twist.
(Besides, IMHO its the slashem Drow whos unbalanced. But who cares, its a game.)
Tell me they've got rid of the horrible "configure the thing by editting config.h" and replaced it with autoconf or somesuch. I don't mind picking out the game options by hand, but making sure it uses the right term\(cap|lin\)/ncurses library is a pain in the ass.
(Anyway, I'm a slashem addict myself)
My favourite obscue(ish) reference is also recent, from the one where the go to Japan:
Marge: "You liked Rashomon."
Homer: "That's not how I remember it."
See Rashomon
One for the set theorists:
Whats yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?
Zorn's Lemon
- tear up the Kyoto protocols
- allow oil drilling in Alaska.
These are not the actions of a man who feels the need to keep the environmental lobby onside. And, as you suggest, its not nearly enough money to do that anyway. Having said that, I don't think Bush is (quite) the environmental ogre he's made out, and this money might be a genuine expenditure for research in climate change. But there have been plenty of previous large scale studies (the IPCC, for instance), so I can't allay the suspicions that he's going to keep commisioning research till he gets the result he wants.Because US politics matter in the rest of the world, and get lengthy coverage in the UK media. The converse is not true (very few USians care about UK politics, and who can blame them?) Actually, if the Bay Area Fox and NBC affiliates are anything to go by, the UK gets better coverage of US politics than parts of the US.Having said that, I'm a particular Amerophile. Not only do I follow US politics, but I can explain the infield fly rule.
Are you seriously suggesting that George "Dig Up Alaska" Bush, in hock to his britches to oil companies, has a hidden agenda to keep Greenpeace on his side?
PS: In the phrase "As an unabashed flag waiver", the word "waiver" doesn't mean what you think it means.