Re:This is where a tablet pc would be nice
on
War of Honor
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· Score: 2
You say palmtops are crippled by their miniscule storage? I have a Sony Clie with a 64 meg memory stick, and I could put every single one of the ebooks from the HH CD-ROM on board and still have room to spare (if I didn't have so many other ebooks on there already, that is). And it's got a nice high-res screen with adjustible fonts for easy reading, too.
There are several reasons given, depending on who you ask and when. Among the big ones are:
Too expensive: The show costs an awful lot to produce, as SF shows tend to, and apparently Sci-Fi's in a bit of a money crunch. The high production cost wouldn't be so bad, except...
They don't own the show; Henson does, as part of the production agreement (though they each finance half the show's cost). Which means SFC doesn't get the back-end income from syndication and DVD/video and such to recoup their costs. Adding to the problem is the fact that...
The show's fandom isn't expanding: Farscape is keeping the fans it has, but it's not causing more people to come to watch the show. See, that's the problem with shows that build up a lot of backstory...if you haven't watched the first four seasons, you have no idea what's going on. (This problem has been noted in other mega-arc-based shows, such as Andromeda.) SFC wants shows that suck more people in (and get them watching SFC). And finally, it's been said that...
SFC is supposedly moving away from "space-based" shows and heading more toward the "paranormal," in keeping with the latest fads/trends in the TV people are watching. Which makes you wonder why they even bother calling themselves "sci-fi," but there you go.
I dunno...I'd characterize the commercial as "quirky," but not necessarily bad. And in the end, it really doesn't matter how good or bad the commercial is; the important thing is that it's getting aired and getting publicity for the campaign. These people aren't giving up, and if it gets me more episodes of the show, I have to say more power to them. This thing has gone farther than any save-our-show campaign I can recall...it's going to be interesting to see where it ends.
That's kind of funny, because it gives me a bit of a warm feeling to know that those who come after me will be able to learn a lot about me from Google Groups and www.archive.org, should they feel like looking me up. Sort of my own small bit of immortality.
Yep. Another book that was different from the movie. I read the book first, and was deeply disappointed in the movie; it would have been so much better if they'd stuck to the plot about the gang of bandits rather than inventing an imaginary country.
I think that in some ways, XXX was a parody of James Bond. Just look at the opening sequence where the tuxedo-clad agent meets his end.
And the scene where XXX and the girl are racing along the highway, and she's trying to figure out the instruction manual seems to me to be an inverse reference back to The Spy Who Loved Me where the female KGB agent was able to use the weapons in the car as expertly as if she'd been trained on them, because she'd stolen the plans for the car the year before.
Just be sure you don't end up with a book I picked up in a used bookstore a while ago because it looked amusing: the novelization of The Spy Who Loved Me, written by Maibaum's co-script-writer for that movie. Apparently the filmmakers were uncomfortable about the movie being so different from the book, so they wanted to put something on store shelves that people would at least recognize as similar. Quite bizarre.
Many people don't realize this, but the fact is, Fleming never intended to write the James Bond books just for the sake of writing them. From the very beginning, he had his eye on lucrative TV/movie adaptations. The very first adaptation was of Casino Royale in 1959, on an otherwise forgettable CBS anthology TV series. It made James Bond American and put him in the CIA. (I saw a tape of that episode in Best Buy years ago, before I knew what it was, and I'm still kicking myself for not buying it.) The rights issues surrounding this early sale led to the subsequent Casino Royale Woody Allen parody.
When interest arose in making movies from his books (largely because President Kennedy was seen reading Dr. No), Fleming told the Broccolis, in effect, "If you can use the plot, use it. If you can just use the title, use it. I don't care, as long as you pay me."
If you're wondering how I know this, I took an intersession course in James Bond a couple years ago at my local college (Southwest Missouri State University)'s media department. It was most informative.
(Did you know that Ian Fleming also did the concept development work for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? Or that all three leads from the Bond-copycat series The Avengers ended up with roles in James Bond movies?)
So, essentially, this writer is advocating becoming a griefer player simply because a real-life restaurant he doesn't like is showing up in the game. Even though he seems to have his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, it's still annoying.
Fortunately, TSO home owners have methods of dealing with griefers.
Well, this is only half true. There aren't any really fat Sims, but there are some definitely paunchy body types, even in the original game...people with pot bellies.
The only thing I use my Yahoo account for is reading YahooGroup mailing lists that are too traffic intensive for me to want to yank them down to my personal mailbox anyway. Oh, and participating in the PepsiStuff promotion whenever they're running it. Doesn't matter to me if they give me four megabytes or a zillion, or let me send 3 attachments or 300; I've got an account on a friend's always-on personal Linux box to receive email, and that's good enough for me.
DVDs (until someone comes up with a regionhack for the Linux Netstream 2000 drivers, or else makes Ogle play DVDs without interlacing artifacts)
My cheap little Yahoo digital camera toy
KaZaa (yeah, giFT works great, but it doesn't have very many people using it compared to KaZaa, which means I'm more likely to find the stuff I want there)
MS Word (to edit my resume; I haven't yet been able to find a Linux WP that will work on my system and read/save MS correctly)
But I use Linux for everything else. Thank goodness for dual boot!
You might find this website interesting: the True Stella Awards, put together by Randy "This Is True" Cassingham. Every week, he writes up another ludicrous lawsuit.
If you want to know how cheap DVDs really are, I've been told that General Mills is now giving DVDs away in cereal boxes. A friend of mine has told me that boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch where he is have The Muppets Take Manhattan or a Jackie Chan Adventures disc packed in with them. Freaky.
This whole magnetic field going away thing sounds like it could be very harmful to life on earth. Fortunately for us, Hollywood predicted this incipient crisis, and has come up with the solution.
Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, radio astronomer and musician, has already done this sort of thing. (Plus, as her collaboration with Thomas Dolby ("Quantum Mechanic") proves, she also has a great singing voice.:)
Fortunately, not all publishers are so inclined. (And y'know, if I'd had to choose one to be good about digital copying and stuff, I think Baen would have been the one I would have chosen anyway--since it publishes science fiction and fantasy, and not all the boring tripe that usually ends up on best-seller lists.)
Remember that, as Lessig himself said, the oral arguments are only the tip of the iceberg. The real meat of the thing is in the opinions and other documents filed by the lawyers of both sides. The Q&A time provides opportunity for them to request clarifications, but most of their deliberations will be based on the printed pages. Prognosticating based on oral arguments alone can be misleading.
Doesn't seem to be just a "rumor." I did a websearch and turned up this article:
Jackson also mentioned a major part of the
Lord of the Rings novel that will be cut from the films: the Scouring of the Shire at the end of The Return of the King. Jackson's only explanation for this is that it didn't really "work," so the films' only homage to it will remain the vision Frodo received from Galadriel's mirror.
A friend of mine read somewhere (not sure where) that the Return of the King segment is going to end soon after the ring pitches into Mount Doom, and that all the "burning Shire" stuff was amply covered in the Galadriel prophecy. The cut was made because today's "leave between the final kiss and the credits" movie audiences generally wouldn't have the patience to watch on for half an hour after the climax. (For similar reasons, an ending segment was cut from Disney's Aladdin that revealed the lamp vendor to be the genie in disguise...nobody stuck around to watch it.)
(The subject of this post is borrowed from a nearby restaurant, which has a habit of putting up little amusing jokes or sayings on its street sign. The other side of the sign currently says "I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.")
On looking at the article, which really isn't more detailed than the blurb given in Slashdot, the big thing that strikes me is that McCallum is generalizing. Some people don't watch movies much anymore, and some people pirate them...therefore, nobody watches movies anymore, and everybody pirates them. (Shades of Yogi Berra, who described New York City as being a place where nobody owns a car, but everybody drives.) I think the reality is going to be a bit less extreme. There are people who don't go to movies for the reasons given earlier in this thread; there are also people who find big-screen movies thrilling and fascinating regardless of the environmental problems. I know that the only reason I haven't been taking in more movies lately is that I only recently got a job and money to spend on it again.
Furthermore, using Titanic as a baseline for comparison is disingenuous at best...almost no movie can equal the success of Titanic. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime smash hits that achieves insane popularity due to combinations of factors that nobody can predict (or, oftimes, explain). Expecting all movies, or even a tenth of all movies to be Titanics is like expecting all fantasy novels to be Lord of the Rings, or all children's books to be Harry Potter. Sturgeon's Law still prevails.
(McCallum apparently has also not realized that, without new movies being made, there will be no new DVDs...so perhaps the problem could be self-correcting.)
Fortunately, being famous does not mean one is any more likely to be correct.
The funny thing is, people have bemoaned the impending death of the box office since time immemorial. The first thing that was going to kill movies was television. And true, it did (along with the busting-up of the vertical monopolies held by movie studios) fundamentally change the movie-going experience, turning what had been a whole evening's worth of entertainment (newsreel, shorts, B movie, feature) into a single movie presentation. On the other hand, it also improved movie presentations dramatically, as the studios went to panoramic widescreen and more use of color to draw audiences back out of the home.
And then there was Valenti's prediction that VHS would kill movies. As you can see, it hasn't.
I don't think that DVDs necessarily mean the end of movies, either. Though if it means studios start to concentrate on quality, putting an end to the sort of crap movies that seem to dominate the box office these days, that could be a blessing. (No more Adam Sandler, please! No more Tom Green!) There are some films that you just have to see on the big screen, and I've been known to drive all the way from Springfield, Missouri to Kansas City to see films that may not make it down here. (I'm considering such an expedition to see Spirited Away, for instance, even though I've already seen it on a DIVX ripped from the Japanese DVD.) But I could be an exception to the general rule...
I actually kind of like the trailers, especially if they're funny. Aside from getting a chance to see what movies are coming up, they give the audience a chance to settle down and shut up, and provide a window of opportunity for latecomers to get in without missing the film or disrupting the audience.
I found an article on the 'net some time ago which noted that blondes and redheads produced different (more effective?) pheromones than brunettes. It was quite an interesting article, from about the mid 1970s; unfortunately, when I try to google on it now, all I find are human pheromone perfume advertisements.
Slashdot Mirror
You say palmtops are crippled by their miniscule storage? I have a Sony Clie with a 64 meg memory stick, and I could put every single one of the ebooks from the HH CD-ROM on board and still have room to spare (if I didn't have so many other ebooks on there already, that is). And it's got a nice high-res screen with adjustible fonts for easy reading, too.
Too expensive: The show costs an awful lot to produce, as SF shows tend to, and apparently Sci-Fi's in a bit of a money crunch. The high production cost wouldn't be so bad, except...
They don't own the show; Henson does, as part of the production agreement (though they each finance half the show's cost). Which means SFC doesn't get the back-end income from syndication and DVD/video and such to recoup their costs. Adding to the problem is the fact that...
The show's fandom isn't expanding: Farscape is keeping the fans it has, but it's not causing more people to come to watch the show. See, that's the problem with shows that build up a lot of backstory...if you haven't watched the first four seasons, you have no idea what's going on. (This problem has been noted in other mega-arc-based shows, such as Andromeda.) SFC wants shows that suck more people in (and get them watching SFC). And finally, it's been said that...
SFC is supposedly moving away from "space-based" shows and heading more toward the "paranormal," in keeping with the latest fads/trends in the TV people are watching. Which makes you wonder why they even bother calling themselves "sci-fi," but there you go.
I dunno...I'd characterize the commercial as "quirky," but not necessarily bad. And in the end, it really doesn't matter how good or bad the commercial is; the important thing is that it's getting aired and getting publicity for the campaign. These people aren't giving up, and if it gets me more episodes of the show, I have to say more power to them. This thing has gone farther than any save-our-show campaign I can recall...it's going to be interesting to see where it ends.
That's kind of funny, because it gives me a bit of a warm feeling to know that those who come after me will be able to learn a lot about me from Google Groups and www.archive.org, should they feel like looking me up. Sort of my own small bit of immortality.
Yep. Another book that was different from the movie. I read the book first, and was deeply disappointed in the movie; it would have been so much better if they'd stuck to the plot about the gang of bandits rather than inventing an imaginary country.
I think that in some ways, XXX was a parody of James Bond. Just look at the opening sequence where the tuxedo-clad agent meets his end.
And the scene where XXX and the girl are racing along the highway, and she's trying to figure out the instruction manual seems to me to be an inverse reference back to The Spy Who Loved Me where the female KGB agent was able to use the weapons in the car as expertly as if she'd been trained on them, because she'd stolen the plans for the car the year before.
That female agent's code name? Triple-X.
Just be sure you don't end up with a book I picked up in a used bookstore a while ago because it looked amusing: the novelization of The Spy Who Loved Me, written by Maibaum's co-script-writer for that movie. Apparently the filmmakers were uncomfortable about the movie being so different from the book, so they wanted to put something on store shelves that people would at least recognize as similar. Quite bizarre.
Many people don't realize this, but the fact is, Fleming never intended to write the James Bond books just for the sake of writing them. From the very beginning, he had his eye on lucrative TV/movie adaptations. The very first adaptation was of Casino Royale in 1959, on an otherwise forgettable CBS anthology TV series. It made James Bond American and put him in the CIA. (I saw a tape of that episode in Best Buy years ago, before I knew what it was, and I'm still kicking myself for not buying it.) The rights issues surrounding this early sale led to the subsequent Casino Royale Woody Allen parody.
When interest arose in making movies from his books (largely because President Kennedy was seen reading Dr. No), Fleming told the Broccolis, in effect, "If you can use the plot, use it. If you can just use the title, use it. I don't care, as long as you pay me."
If you're wondering how I know this, I took an intersession course in James Bond a couple years ago at my local college (Southwest Missouri State University)'s media department. It was most informative.
(Did you know that Ian Fleming also did the concept development work for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? Or that all three leads from the Bond-copycat series The Avengers ended up with roles in James Bond movies?)
Um, there's no such stat as "cool". ITYM "fun"?
At any rate, McDonald's commercials are always trying to paint them as a "fun" place to eat, so I can sort of see them asking for that.
So, essentially, this writer is advocating becoming a griefer player simply because a real-life restaurant he doesn't like is showing up in the game. Even though he seems to have his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, it's still annoying.
Fortunately, TSO home owners have methods of dealing with griefers.
Well, this is only half true. There aren't any really fat Sims, but there are some definitely paunchy body types, even in the original game...people with pot bellies.
The only thing I use my Yahoo account for is reading YahooGroup mailing lists that are too traffic intensive for me to want to yank them down to my personal mailbox anyway. Oh, and participating in the PepsiStuff promotion whenever they're running it. Doesn't matter to me if they give me four megabytes or a zillion, or let me send 3 attachments or 300; I've got an account on a friend's always-on personal Linux box to receive email, and that's good enough for me.
Games (Starcraft, Half-Life, The Sims)
DVDs (until someone comes up with a regionhack for the Linux Netstream 2000 drivers, or else makes Ogle play DVDs without interlacing artifacts)
My cheap little Yahoo digital camera toy
KaZaa (yeah, giFT works great, but it doesn't have very many people using it compared to KaZaa, which means I'm more likely to find the stuff I want there)
MS Word (to edit my resume; I haven't yet been able to find a Linux WP that will work on my system and read/save MS correctly)
But I use Linux for everything else. Thank goodness for dual boot!
You might find this website interesting: the True Stella Awards, put together by Randy "This Is True" Cassingham. Every week, he writes up another ludicrous lawsuit.
If you want to know how cheap DVDs really are, I've been told that General Mills is now giving DVDs away in cereal boxes. A friend of mine has told me that boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch where he is have The Muppets Take Manhattan or a Jackie Chan Adventures disc packed in with them. Freaky.
This whole magnetic field going away thing sounds like it could be very harmful to life on earth. Fortunately for us, Hollywood predicted this incipient crisis, and has come up with the solution.
Check out Black Mask for a lot of nicely-formatted pubdom e-books, including many from Gutenberg but also some that Gutenberg doesn't have.
Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, radio astronomer and musician, has already done this sort of thing. (Plus, as her collaboration with Thomas Dolby ("Quantum Mechanic") proves, she also has a great singing voice. :)
Fortunately, not all publishers are so inclined. (And y'know, if I'd had to choose one to be good about digital copying and stuff, I think Baen would have been the one I would have chosen anyway--since it publishes science fiction and fantasy, and not all the boring tripe that usually ends up on best-seller lists.)
Remember that, as Lessig himself said, the oral arguments are only the tip of the iceberg. The real meat of the thing is in the opinions and other documents filed by the lawyers of both sides. The Q&A time provides opportunity for them to request clarifications, but most of their deliberations will be based on the printed pages. Prognosticating based on oral arguments alone can be misleading.
A friend of mine read somewhere (not sure where) that the Return of the King segment is going to end soon after the ring pitches into Mount Doom, and that all the "burning Shire" stuff was amply covered in the Galadriel prophecy. The cut was made because today's "leave between the final kiss and the credits" movie audiences generally wouldn't have the patience to watch on for half an hour after the climax. (For similar reasons, an ending segment was cut from Disney's Aladdin that revealed the lamp vendor to be the genie in disguise...nobody stuck around to watch it.)
Maybe in the four hour edition...
(The subject of this post is borrowed from a nearby restaurant, which has a habit of putting up little amusing jokes or sayings on its street sign. The other side of the sign currently says "I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.")
On looking at the article, which really isn't more detailed than the blurb given in Slashdot, the big thing that strikes me is that McCallum is generalizing. Some people don't watch movies much anymore, and some people pirate them...therefore, nobody watches movies anymore, and everybody pirates them. (Shades of Yogi Berra, who described New York City as being a place where nobody owns a car, but everybody drives.) I think the reality is going to be a bit less extreme. There are people who don't go to movies for the reasons given earlier in this thread; there are also people who find big-screen movies thrilling and fascinating regardless of the environmental problems. I know that the only reason I haven't been taking in more movies lately is that I only recently got a job and money to spend on it again.
Furthermore, using Titanic as a baseline for comparison is disingenuous at best...almost no movie can equal the success of Titanic. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime smash hits that achieves insane popularity due to combinations of factors that nobody can predict (or, oftimes, explain). Expecting all movies, or even a tenth of all movies to be Titanics is like expecting all fantasy novels to be Lord of the Rings, or all children's books to be Harry Potter. Sturgeon's Law still prevails.
(McCallum apparently has also not realized that, without new movies being made, there will be no new DVDs...so perhaps the problem could be self-correcting.)
Fortunately, being famous does not mean one is any more likely to be correct.
The funny thing is, people have bemoaned the impending death of the box office since time immemorial. The first thing that was going to kill movies was television. And true, it did (along with the busting-up of the vertical monopolies held by movie studios) fundamentally change the movie-going experience, turning what had been a whole evening's worth of entertainment (newsreel, shorts, B movie, feature) into a single movie presentation. On the other hand, it also improved movie presentations dramatically, as the studios went to panoramic widescreen and more use of color to draw audiences back out of the home.
And then there was Valenti's prediction that VHS would kill movies. As you can see, it hasn't.
I don't think that DVDs necessarily mean the end of movies, either. Though if it means studios start to concentrate on quality, putting an end to the sort of crap movies that seem to dominate the box office these days, that could be a blessing. (No more Adam Sandler, please! No more Tom Green!) There are some films that you just have to see on the big screen, and I've been known to drive all the way from Springfield, Missouri to Kansas City to see films that may not make it down here. (I'm considering such an expedition to see Spirited Away, for instance, even though I've already seen it on a DIVX ripped from the Japanese DVD.) But I could be an exception to the general rule...
I actually kind of like the trailers, especially if they're funny. Aside from getting a chance to see what movies are coming up, they give the audience a chance to settle down and shut up, and provide a window of opportunity for latecomers to get in without missing the film or disrupting the audience.
I found an article on the 'net some time ago which noted that blondes and redheads produced different (more effective?) pheromones than brunettes. It was quite an interesting article, from about the mid 1970s; unfortunately, when I try to google on it now, all I find are human pheromone perfume advertisements.