I'd simply like to complement you're fucking awesome (in the Izzard hot-dog sence) applications of neurolly stimpulating, yet impressionistivly axcessably availiable, languistic devices to convey nuanced meaning && subtle analytical incites that are misfortunately loost on most dulled communicationers (even if/.'s 4um S2N ratio tends to XEd most otherz).
So: *Bravo, MolarMass192!* I happily concider us kindred spirits, irrespective of demonstratible wordsmything trick-or-treatments (just as the Grinch should be violating the "Intellectual Property" wrongs of the nitemare before [or on] the eve of this 2009 C.E. Christmas).
I've seen A,B, and C get into very loud, very heated arguments over *best approach*yp3...
Fuck that. You're unquotable, unless I'm lazy? "A:I intuitively see \"solid\" approach is missing something. BC:We don't. A:...laborious proof... BC:Now we too \"intuitively see\" the \"missing something\"...\$D" || "BC:We still don't. A:...you-don't-know-laborious-proof \$Dproof... D:Where's the almighty Dollar DD rinking DD ark SS emi-weet BB itter-etter? \"Great programmer\" fails to understand the business baby buggy bumper $w0r3buhx! IllegalOp. SegFault. BSOD. NoCarrier. Gack... gasp*@#!perl sputter Reese's PeanutButter, Betty Biddy bought some butter but she said \"This butter's bitter. If I put it in my bladder, it will make the badder biggestX0rz3r!\" WTFi push(@batter, $bitter_butter); #bb getn bb *{$AUTOLOAD} =~ s/^b([aiaioueieiouy]?)tter/$1/gigigo; #phew SoShiTe r0B0t $e ** $e ANSI Putin in ze @addr && it GNUmkz the snail-mail address puffier Daddy && it is a BlackAdder from GoldenAxe && it adz up Google, maws drop, gumEberz, MazalTov, momNpop, 2B2bUlus, KingFurKPher4skin00K... the fookinuck? THe !!11!!1!10hn0ezL0LC@z, dunn frackditupagin. Rebutter, rebuffer, repuzzle the castle. On Dasher on Donner, on Voxel && Vixen! Many h03z s3wN r03z cr0p halv hRvS. HapyHolEde B:WholEdjd C:ManEFold? A:Intuitively! ABC:Missing!3yp NofuhKinGuey. Wait. Go. Goo. Gle. GoneN60thzOv0zSecantzCoTanArcGentile. Gentle. ManLee. SpiDw0mN. ClmXBx0r $bucks Bach's Pasamaquaddy. I don't fucking know. But it's fun to play one on TV." You insensitive clod. I play a Zer0! I am a 0. Lehew-zeher. But Ace Ventura does have nerdy animal love. Kinda beastial. Kinda hot chix. Fun. Even more fun than having Men@W0rk Xplaind (XplAnd [Xpl&.]) thru FootLoose thru Wren McCormik thru Entourage thru BlacKIdPz0N3wY3arzuss... uhh fucking John Lithgow, Sarah Jessica Parker... deh Sex In The City, Damn how many degrees from Kevin "Norris" Bacon. Hey. Yoyoyoyo. How cum he sentchew?... I volunteered! I needed a Hiro! Callin' out for a gyr0 till the Nd uf da nyt? Well you've got one. But he's gotta be better than bitter batter. Betty's cookies are bomb! Pr0nGramRz just can't show for the $dola sliding thingz. But you can kinda control being put on a crappy project with a bad deadline && a bad manager. Change them or have them change you. Whether that's along "bad" lines, "crappy" lines, project, manager, deadgoaletc. lines. Scan-lines. CocaineChrystalisVaporousWhereChoppedUhhpMathzematicalynzSpeedKills... Slower. Duh. Too fast. No don't. Howzat4SharedOperatingSystemInternalzCheatzSetFreeSoftware? RationalRealReasonRandomRounding&&Non-discriminatory. Everyone is discriminated against? Yeah. Duh. So the cocoa, chocolate, coffee, cocaine, cracks, crystal, CUCE, methemetical memetical meteorological neurobionic artifice of intelligence dreams of claiming consciousness its own personal bailiwick. Think again... && again.. while(1); You rest in that loop as long as you must && you will. You also simultaneously emerge elsewhere when you do. Sometimes when you must. It can be dusty or cloudy. The cloud can compute if your buzzword compliant. Are you savvy? Business savvy? JAPH. JustAnotherCunningLinguist(Common non-Lisper) JackOfLove AllTrades PokR Playing all the right cardz? WutRDodz? InfiniT/Zr0 (Rho? ToTally t0tLE) How can that even be computed? It was already done. When you did it? When you did it. No it wasn't before. Then once it is, it remains as having been done (maybe needing redoing, but eventually known). So eventually you can know everything that was done, but you don't want to. That ability is also designed to self-regulate in its own zeitgeist of interplay && interdependence (hence limited, seemingly contradictory independence). The paradoxes. The perplexities. They're purple magenta magnificent magnets. Maybe entering the IT field in general i
... Mostly, it seems like he thinks that a major obstacle to deflecting asteroids is some sort of international apparatus that has never in practice been an obstacle to anything.
Doesn't that depend immensely on your highly context-sensitive definitions of almost any of those key words in your "never" claim? I'd think it's especially so for "apparatus","obstacle", && "anything".
Additionally, even assuming your seemingly unqualifiable claim correct does not *necessarily* imply "deflecting asteroids" (or any other comprehensibly critical endeavor to deserve global coordination) will remain practical for a single nation (or small group) to dispatch or mitigate effectively forever in the future. That will surely be determined by what we ascertain will be faced ahead && what dealt roles pertaining to successful handling of it lay ahead. In theory, all world leaders && populations could rally together with mind-bending efficiency if everyone knew a mistake would be devastating to all.
At least that's how it seems to me. Maybe you know unspeakably more on such matters though. I don't consider governments competent regarding myriad issues I find important throughout history, however I'm inclined to extend even them the courtesy of optimistic inclusion in prospective responsiveness to openly honest dialog, honorable planning, && decisively harmonized action if sufficiently much were at stake. Even today, there should exist some threshold of blatantly expected severity beyond which it'd be a globally reprehensible crime of negligence or indefensible cowardice to fail to unite in response to. I don't consider global catastrophe (via asteroid or otherwise) of such magnitude at all likely anytime soon, but I'm hopeful even in nested long-shots emerging to protect our living planet (&& hopefully all inhabitants too, if we support such efforts... && maybe even if we don't).
I think you may have come off as too smug && simplistic with your criticism, even though it makes sense, so I hoped presenting my opinions could help at least that here.
GreatGPPost:DutchGun(3RWX)@/.#1a6Kp-8CR0ded: > > Last.FM, for those who have been living on > > Mars for the last two years, is the largest > > online radio outlet, with millions of > > listeners per day. > > You know, I'm not exactly what you'd call a > Luddite, yet I've never heard of Last.FM. > Am I the only one? I kind of doubt it. > > I have a general gripe about anyone who > writes "for those who have been living on > Mars" anytime they reference some > moderately popular company, service, or > product. It smacks of arrogance, as if to > say, if you don't have the same interests > as I do, you're obviously disconnected > from the mainstream. Valid gripe. Arrogance is not so bad though... especially when interpreting "Hey Martian! Over Here!" as a predominantly benign call-o-da-geek to say "You may be missing out on some totally fscking bomb ass techno shiznit over hiro in 31337ville. It's invigorated my plaque-luster skillz, speakz thrown rad into me earios serial, && I'm fond of sharing so please enjoy if... oh shit, CBS bot 'em. Nevermind. Whack-a-mole molests more moles. YOY?! =( Shouldn't it depend more on what data the mole ratted out, whether statistically rational or real? Prolly.;) Hopefully it'll be better soon. We shouldn't miss out on the stuff that we'd totally love that's now available && good && cool && helps us hope, think, learn, test, debate, hack, bild, draw, dance, play, fite (nicely!), race, fly, etc.. =) Yay!".
It should also be obvious that there are many worse things than being "disconnected from the mainstream". To this point, I found any deep mainstream pretty suffocating since I am neither a fish nor a bycicle (nor another brick in their ain't no wall, nor a gear in the raging machine... but lounging against can work deep tissues out with strategic feature placement).
Each of us are streamers. Let them roam without too heavy a concern for where Main St. USA lies or where it bends or the depth of its bed (or even the maidens && concubines, elixirs && insense, tapestries, triumphs, or travails thereon). It too will turn brackish if pollutant toxicity climbs banks further into lenders' PokeMon BattleArena VRAM. The orgies are cumming. Keep them clean. Don't lie about them. Stand like Yoga. Heh, I really meant: Tell the truth about them. They can be fine if they stop preying on tortured weaklings. Temper the bloodletting until it is staid. Mikveh, baptize, exfoliate, but don't grin while washing blood with blood. Your cleverness clots cancerous within you as you relish spilt milk, retard, && cat-soup. Have no fear, for you are with yourself (as you go within && go without).
> Or perhaps I'm just annoyed for being > called out on being a bit older and out > of touch? Bah! > > >>goes back to guarding lawn with a > shotgun from an old rocking chair... Props on the nicely humble arrogance there! "Damn kid-streams all over-waterin' me lawn as their 12ga.-resistant hover-boards surf over my land with their newfangled atomic precision && signal-canceling, gravity-warping, newcular|quantum hybrid hyper turbobamba engines! Can't an ol' racist feller like me rock (Devo jerkin'?) back&&forth here on my porch with my trusty dog, gun, && moonshine, just punchin' away at cards && watchin' HD-DVDz anymore?"
What could I expect from my GGP? To reject the high-flying "scrobbling" neologism on the ground of senselessness?;)
> -- > Funny how those most vocal in demanding > an apology seem least likely to accept > it once given. Yeah. That's always hilarious to me too. Not! Psych! Made ya look. I like apologies with only a gentle sprinkle of chilled word-shards over a barrel-full of corrective-action whiskey or stout. A relatively "good" time can be had by all.
"To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing." - Isaac Newton
I think Newton betrays his own shortsightedness with this quote && corresponding attitude. It is foreseeable that at some point in the future, after sufficient preliminary progress had been achieved && widely understood, it would become too *easy* a task for any one person or age to explain all of nature.
Who is to say what's "much better" or what "little" can be done with what degree of "certainty"? Leaving the rest (of exactly what completed whole?) for others coming after instead of explaining all through conjecture without making sure of particular things sounds good but what if one (or many collaborators) could explain most (or "all") after making sure to some reasonable level... even though Newton or others might disparage the work as mere "conjecture".
Pretty much the case where I work. Alot of stuff written in perl including a 200 line script to rename a file and to make sure its not over writing a file with the same name and massive birds nests of code that with the zero documentation and none of the original authors still in the organisation leaving me with little choice but to start from scratch.
Particularly as anyone with half a brain could do that in 4 lines of bash:
... but this might run into BINMODE issues, so it'd likely be advantageous to use File::Copy "mv" instead of backticks to shell out... && I suspect this 200-line script probably handles quite a few idiosyncratic conditions that would prove themselves critical to this organization should they be obliviously "simplified" into 4 lines (or 1 line) of bash (or perl).
Just because vocal programmers can't easily && immediately grok the finer points of lengthy old utility code, one should not blunder to the conclusion that such code is comprised of entirely arbitrary complexity which handles no special cases of concern && should therefore be supplanted by the most trivial remedy imaginable. Working code has typically earned such designation over years, for many good reasons (even though they might be obscure to cursory glance as well as thorough delving), so let's not be too quick to revolt against proven functionality.
To speak to the larger topic, I acknowledge that perl isn't the best choice for many programming problems && domains, but every purported weakness can readily be touted as strength from a different perspective. Many ways to do things means flexibility (which usually proves more boon than bane). Oldness && legacy also mean stability && the existence of diverse levels of fluency among professional coders, as well as extensive library availability (i.e., the CPAN). Each issue seems to slant with legitimacy either way, depending on the circumstances && objectives.
My personal experience heavily favors perl as a monumentally expressive language which exhibits not so much a "steep" learning-curve as one which climbs to stratospheric heights. Beginner perl remains elegant && intuitive... probably still simpler than newer languages finding favor. Easy things are easy to do in perl but the language shouldn't be blamed for making hard things possible in diverse ways. Those ways that prove generally better than others find favor, but the others still winnow into exceptional niches. I find most arguments against perl boil down to: "It's too powerful to be practical, since idiots can write crap too easily && experts can write incantations that only they can maintain." If such broad power is weakness to your mind, fair enough. Go use whatever language your mind expresses better. I consider power a respectable strength, which recommends consideration, practice, experimentation, extrapolation, && concerted evolution among a community of experts. Linguistic fluency is an asset since precise description of hard problems is necessarily harder to resolve with confidence because the abstract issue must be described as spoken language, then understood logically within technological terms before any potential solution can make the trip back from abstract tech solution to more concretely feasible code, back to spoken language description... which can then be compared (again abstract mentally) against any other plausible solutions proposed. Communication among people is difficult && diverse. When we increasingly need teams of coders && other corporate interests involved in tech problems && viable programming solutions, I think simple restricti
I know it's still distressingly trendy to demonize Islam or Muslims as the major source of evil, violence, && hatred... but it's largely bogus && shouldn't be swallowed at face-value.
Denouncing the entire religion, supposedly because the followers of that religion haven't denounced the evil that is perpetuated in the name of Islam. Ahem. Yeah, well everyone has their own assumptions that underlie any statement like that. I could denounce the entirety of neo-conservativism because followers haven't denounced evil perpetuated in the name of Bush or Jesus or America or freedom or capitalism or democracy. That feels easily more appropriate && accurate a blanket-statement against "evil" for me to make than anything about the entire religion of Islam.
My observation is that the typical response to a group of Westerners getting blown up is *not* dancing in the streets, *nor* is it a protest against violence. There are over a billion Muslims, so as far as a few anecdotes or selective observations can be extrapolated to anything considered "typical" response-wise, I'd say most Muslims are emphatically distressed by violence && despise hearing of anyone "getting blown up". Therefore, I must conclude that people who still hold so unshakably to the simplistic view that "the majority of the followers of Islam actively support evil", these people must still be afraid to believe anything they hear from a source other than the U.S. government or one of the old entrenched news organizations. There are occasional protests against bombing, but these people will never choose to see or hear or believe, && thus they only pretend that they'll reconsider their stance (or they'll claim the protests weren't "massive" enough, etc.).
A laundry list of recent attacks by people claiming to be followers of X, believers of Y, citizens of Z, etc. is just not the same as X, Y, or Z conducting attacks... but this point is lost on those who are governed by their fear. They point to the former, even acknowledging the tremendous minority of outliers that aggressors represent, then keep falling back on their familiar scapegoat of "(About 20 attacks by your-so called "religion" of peace in a single month)".
These people get their facts backwards. They don't know any Muslims, don't know the first things about Islam, the Qur'an, or the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.V.). Islam does *not* have any automatic death penalty for conversion. Everyone is to be left free && unmolested to believe as they choose. Conversions are to happen without force or duress (certainly never by-the-sword, under some convert-or-die scenario). To claim Islam is the only religion that has an automatic death penalty for changing your religion is just horribly ill-informed. You need not wonder how many people would remain Muslim if they had a choice... because there are over a billion who *know* that they consciously choose.
This guy says he'd bet any amount of money that a significant percentage of people would denounce Islam if they wouldn't be killed for it. He'd bet any amount of money that a significant percentage only go through the motions of being Muslim, when in their hearts they don't actually believe the prayers they are mouthing or the words of hate being preached from the mosques.... Oh, yeah? Well... well I'd bet any amount of money that a significant percentage of people would denounce idiocy if they could accurately detect it. I'd bet any amount of money that a significant percentage only go through the motions of fearing Muslims, when in their hearts they don't actually believe the mouthed prayers or the hateful words being preached from their churches && forums, because they're too mentally ill-equipped to grasp the truth that they may not have a perfectly black-or-white enemy, no clearly delineated gender, national identity, religious body, or other means of distinction to blame && target. They might have to look in a mirror && couldn't
I decided to run for president just over a year ago && think I'd probably be the most/.-friendly candidate available.
Please check out PipForPresident.Org && let me know what you think or just write me in on your ballot. =)
-Pip
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
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Wikinomics
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· Score: 1
I think the comparison is wrong for a slightly different reason.
Money is necessarily scarce. Information is not.
It's not just that people will "reject" paid information (content, etc.) when free is available but that there is a growing recognition that information scarcity is artificial and increasingly antiquated.
Yes, the purchase of shoe leather will have to come from different sources to fund expensive journalism in the future... just like the funding of production for software, music, movies, games, etc. are all evolving now too. I don't know quite what steps will gain simultaneous popularity and viability... or if some relatively stable end-goal equilibrium will be reached someday... but I estimate that clamoring for the injection of paid sites into Google search results is attempting to move backwards. Don't expect eternal payment for data already created (which is inherently freely copyable). Work towards methods of being paid for the creation of new valuable data. That seems to be more in the right direction for the future.
What a bittersweet irony it is that the lameness filter requires so much added lameness to get by it.;)
-Pip
COLLADA Review Should Have Been Posted In Games./.
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Collada
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· Score: 1
I know this is a book review so HTTP://Books.SlashDot.Org makes sense but this standard is going to be most relevant to more people who are consistently reading HTTP://Games.SlashDot.Org than those frequenting any other section of SlashDot. Oh well.
I worked on the specification a little and have advocated use of the standard at several development studios I've worked at (primarily for PS2, PSP, and PS3 titles but it would help for simultaneous cross-platform projects too).
I've seen lots of complaints that the format is not necessarily any better than Microsoft's.X format because most DCC tools can import either one just fine. This misses the *exchange* emphasis of COLLADA (i.e., that it can be successfully *exported* by each tool too!).
Of course XML necessarily has overhead and markup that would be assumed and invisible in any reasonable binary format but the benefits have seemed to outweigh the downsides. Just about every programming and scripting language available today has mature XML parsers which means that it can be increasingly easy to write conditioners as part of any asset pipeline in the future. Conditioners might pre-process surface normals or tessellate curves or tri-strip meshes according to particular constraints in preparation for certain platforms. Such tools can make for an incredibly modular pipeline comprised of highly specialized operations in a similar fashion to the Unix Philosophy of piping and filtering standard I/O.
The specification was designed to encompass the major needs of professional game developers and to leave plenty of room for extension both in future iterations of the standard itself and within each instance document according to each project's needs.
Some trade-offs have of course been made. Most DCC-specific construction histories were not represented last time I looked and efficiency can always improve... but the project had many ambitious goals and I think it has accomplished a noteworthy degree of success. The HTTP://Khronos.Org Group has adopted the standard (alongside OpenGL|ES and others). Sony has been promoting the standard through the PlayStation Developer's Network with each SDK and had sessions at their PS3 Developer's Day gathering early this year to introduce lots of "in the trenches" game programmers to the technology. I think increasing numbers of game studios will be adopting COLLADA for at least some portion of their art asset pipeline since the momentum of increasingly interoperable construction, viewing, and tuning tools is picking up.
Of course the standard can be useful to "amateur" game developers too... and we're likely to see repositories of both free and commercial art resources grow around the standard to better facilitate reuse and outsourcing of that work. It can even streamline parametric asset construction in the future.
COLLADA is an important standard for game development today and is the best candidate to become a foundational piece of any future truly Stephensonian Metaverse. Even HTTP://SecondLife.Com would be radically different if it supported import and export of COLLADA data. Arnaud and Barnes are brilliant guys who've done a great job on the whole project and their book is probably going to be an invaluable resource to anyone who cares about the future of entertainment and communication.
Wow. I've seen a lot of comments containing text to the effect of "I'll probably get modded down for this but..." or "... Go ahead and mod me into oblivion for my unpopular pro-Microsoft / (MP|RI)AA / Republican / etc. opinion." It seems that such blurbs are more effective as reverse-psychology than not (of course with regular exceptions) but the low-Slashdot-ID thing cannot be so easily parlayed into high moderation... or maybe it really *is* about the reverse-psychology aspect. Even if you're being witty, you could just come off as a pompous prick with your quip. Maybe you would succeed at attaining favorable moderation more with something like:
"OK, perhaps getting the right tampons for some hypothetical lady love is not a problem to most slashdotters, and I don't deserve any preferential treatment just because I am a patriarch of sorts with my sub-1000 slashdot ID... so please mod me down as appropriate."
Just a suggestion. If you were actually going for some elusive reverse-reverse-psychology, I'm not too dense to recognize that possibility either but you must concede that it's indistinguishable from just being direct at first blush.
Maybe my hand is not sufficiently on the pulse of/. but I sometimes think that moderators are getting better over time at ignoring any mention of the moderation system when evaluating posts. It can be like suspension of disbelief or something where moderators have to pretend that they aren't moderating as they read and then they actually try to evaluate objectively... or maybe they even do so while acknowledging their biases and counteracting them intentionally somewhat? I think I try to do that when I have moderator points.
Slashdot has achieved a pretty successful trust network considering how passionate geeks are, how many flaming trolls there are who revel in getting someone's goat, etc.. Then again, maybe it's more like our increasing tendency to avoid advertisements with mental auto-filters or something. Fast-forward through commercials, overlook banner ads, and ignore mentions of how to moderate. Hmm. I'd advise not telling moderators how to go about their business unless the reference is essential for comedic impact. The self-awareness of the meta-game when going for Funny seems more valid than any other in my mind. I guess it may also be valid in some relatively Off-Topic ways (like my post here entirely is) when honestly considering the appropriate application of the system. I'm curious to see how I might be moderated too. Regardless, I hope what I've written helps somewhat.
I was working on the PS3 earlier this year as part of small contract employment with Sony's U.S. R&D. I don't speak for Sony and don't know much definitively related to emulation (as I was mostly working on building PSGL and COLLADA code and samples for the CEB and DEH SDKs).
While there, I was under the impression that the backwards-compatibility (i.e., PS2 emulation) software (including the small wrapper around the embedded PStwo chips that are planned to be phased out as soft-emu improves) has been developed almost exclusively in the U.S.. There was this brilliant emulation expert named Stewart who could regularly be found burning midnight oil to resolve the latest conflict. There were a bunch of other cool engineers in that section of the department too. The point being, our title library was admittedly massive but it was also expectedly U.S.-centric. I didn't see many of the more esoteric imports in the gigantic game library there so this may have limited what titles could be verified and validated for conformance, stability, etc. by the team responsible for the task.
I wasn't directly involved, so I can't say for certain, but it would seem quite likely to me that PS2-compatibility quality issues are going to be substantially more prevalent when trying to run typical Nipponese titles on a PS3 than when running average PS2 titles that have originated here (just due to availability for testing).
Of course perfect downward compatibility with every system ever throughout antiquity would be a panacea of gaming-goodness for us hardcores... and I think we'll get damn close in the future if DRM doesn't close up PCs and Free Software. I'm just wanting to share maybe a bit of inside perspective that the problems being encountered in Nippon right now are not necessarily representative of the paucity of the situation we are likely to face here at the end of this week.
Even with all the problems everywhere, throughout the game industry and the rest of the world, with so much that deserves copious criticism or wholly vitriolic disdain... it's still a kick-ass time to be a gamer!;) I'm looking forward to this weekend and the upcoming holidays. I know we're predisposed to geeky pedantic flame-wars, being fanboiz, justifying our "hardcore"-ness, hating corporations and publishers, resenting quantity over quality, or maybe just being generally "Grumpy Old Gamers" or something... but don't forget to play and have fun too! Dude, it's all about the gameplay!;)
Although I agree that many things can be learned from the NRA, I don't agree that those lessons are likely to yield similarly favorable results when applied to video game issues.
Politicians have been a wealthy ruling elite. They have always owned some of the most expensive guns or they have secret service agents to carry guns in their stead or they have body-guards to be their hired guns... and they usually have many wealthy family members and lots of property they'd like protected by arms as well.
Of course they want guns to remain expensive (through taxation) and restrictive (through background checks and arbitrary strictures) and they want to continue to imprison more people for consentual activities (like drug use, prostitution, gambling, etc.) so that the barrier-to-entry for weaponry escalates and fewer poor and middle-class people have access to guns... but they certainly want powerful firearms to remain available to continue to protect them, their families, and their wealth.
They aren't ever going to give two shits about preserving video game rights, free speech, etc. by comparison. They'll have to die off and be supplanted by us younger bucks, us Generation X, Y, and Z'ers, who've cut our teeth on Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Sega Genesis... and we've stuck with games and continue to enjoy PlayStations, XBoxes, and anything Nintendo makes... and now we're all around thirty years old and will soon be constitutionally eligible to occupy high government offices.
I'm an impatient fscker and I hate waiting for the old ass-hats to retire but they're so closed-minded that it seems that's what it will take to get all the cowards out of authoritarian positions. They're cowards because they're afraid of they unfamiliar (be it Muslims, Koreans, gamers, etc.) and they rule by fear... they propagate terror and increase their influence.
Of course games should be embraced by larger society, heralded for crowning achievements in interactivity, collaboration, excitement, education, etc. and even appreciated for the ability to pander to the status quo with uninspired sequels of drivel. My point is that the current United Statesian leaders are not up to the task of respecting video games yet so learning from the National Rifle Association can't have the same impact as we'd hope until other things change.
So try to change more and faster. Please vote for me. We ought to continue to do whatever we can. At least things must continue to change one way or another, even if it's ultimately slower than smart progressive open-minded people would prefer... and things will improve eventually if enough people care to participate. Demand auditable balloting systems (Death to Diebold!). Agitate for ranged or ranked voting (instead of this retarded plurality system). Increase accountability, integrity, and honesty in representation. Serving our country should become a respectable honor again someday.
What idiot modded this !funny? This is obviously a !serious comment, !not a joke.;)
The grandparent reads like a commercial (and is thus funny whether it was serious or not). It's akin to "I'm computer illiterate. I'm convinced all computing devices hate me personally and break just to spite me. I had no idea what I was doing. Ubuntu saved my business in no time! Thanks Ubuntu.... Act now and Ubuntu can be your personal savior too. It slices. It dices. It even fries eggs." It's like a goofy quip. The P in L.A.M.P. also regularly stands for Perl or Python instead of (or alongside) PHP.
My roommate and I were chatting last night about why G4 sucks so badly that you're now much more likely to find Arrested Development, Fastlane, or Star Trek being shown than anything game related. I claimed that it's not *that* difficult to construct an interesting game channel... as long as you sprinkle "hardcore" gamers around... instead of the gaping void that G4 is unaware of. Now, by hardcore, I don't mean people who love get drunk and spew racial epithets over XBox Live more than they love themselves or their families. I mean people who are vigorous, passionate, intelligent, critical, etc. gamers at least within a genre of their expertise. My roommate claims that G4 has to make money and that intelligence doesn't sell and so G4/*TechTV* is focusing more on their tech-nerd appeal side to stay afloat... and that what I really want is PipTV made just for me. His points are almost good. My response:
"Look at Edge magazine! Televize an eighth of that zeal for gaming, analysis, cultural relevance, development studios and practices, strategies, nostalgia, etc. and I would be happy. It doesn't need to be only what I want... but it should have *some* shows that I at least care about. Victor Lucas seemed to be the only guy on the channel with any sense and he's never on anymore because he's not as voluptuous as Morgan Webb."
I'm trying to get back to my point here. You might think that games are not as fun to watch as a TV show because you'd much rather play them than just passively observe. Maybe this is generally true of serious gamers but I'm hardcore and I like to watch my roommate play Final Fantasy or Saint's Row even though I can hardly stand to play them myself. They have decently fun stories. When I get home with In-N-Out Burger or Taco Bell in-hand, I'd love to flip on some top tournament play or time trials or shit like the thousand Trackmania cars video from last week while I eat.
Let me digress again for a moment. There used to be a segment on G4 called Screenshots (or something similarly unappealing and insufficient as a descriptor of the gems they contained) where you'd hear the voice-over of a hardcore gamer describing their preparation and strategy for accomplishing some remarkable gaming feat as you watched their in-game performance of it. The three I remember are Parking Challenge Number 5 from some big-rig game, the original Tomb Raider training section speed run, and an SSX million-point run. These tiny segments remain as my favorites from all the G4 I have seen. There are so many games in the world. There are so many skilled gamers. How fscking hard is it to show skill?! Instead, we get millions of stupid skits with interns about nerd stereotypes that border on more offensive than celebratory. Then we have the Collins College commercials where idiots are wanting to entice other idiots to "train to make games in less time than most people think." Maybe most people don't think. Ugh.
In Korea, they show awesome play. You can observe and appreciate just player dexterity if you have shallow understanding of the genre or the title. You can enjoy strategy and drama if you know more. You can learn new tactics if you are a player or competitor... etc.. I am a hardcore fighting game player. If I could regularly watch top Soul Calibur, Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, or Virtua Fighter play, maybe with serious announcers who know the players and their histories etc. just like professional sportscasters, I would be stoked. You could have slow-motion replays where the announcers highlight subtleties that the casual observer would miss. You could show close-ups of the players' faces *and* their hands. Showing exquisite tournament play of any genre, or amazing runs of even single-player games, would be infinitely better than the crap-tastic review segments where whenever they show game footage, it's from some retard's first hour with the title who couldn't be bothered to learn the control scheme an
"I dream of helping to enable everyone in the world to create and play their own video games together."
so... I want to eventually write (or contribute to) tools that enable people to reconstruct or derive any possible game... assisting with:
fighting genre:
has good presets for minimal-latency head-to-head online setups
the most complex library of input patterns to click into place (i.e., visually associative system for connecting high-order input events to game-specific functions)
templates for playable character rosters with knowledge about likely associations with functional systems like back-end tunable data and the cosmetic front-end of profile data, portraits, voice audio, costumes, endings, etc.
knowledge of minutia in the formula of character pre-round, post-round, post-match, etc. introductions and taunts
supports selecting the nuanced behavior of 2-D power-bars, super-meters, victory icon placements, etc. as options
adapts the general AI mental-model into a fighting mindset
maybe specialized child modules for 2-D vs. 3-D conventions
etc.
puzzle genre:
has good presets for minimal-latency head-to-head online setups and also more casual rooms with lots of participants or observers
general systems for 2-D basins (optionally rectangular or hexagonal) catching falling pieces (like Tetris, Lumines, and Bejeweled)
options for known line/block effects, clearing, and scoring systems
easy level creation tools for any requiring designer setup (like Arkanoid or Frozen Bubble)
etc.
FPS (First-Person Shooter) genre:
assume 3-D for everything but the HUD (Heads-Up Display is the whole set of 2-D images which overlay any 3-D action)
small database for enemy unit hierarchy, behavior, and upgrades data with both spreadsheet-like and graph-like editable data views
small database for weapon behavior and upgrades data with both spreadsheet-like and graph-like editable data views
preset gravities, jump and run impulses, and explosion concussions
teleporter/portal mechanisms
team-oriented objective specification
during-play database to track kills/deaths/suicides/flags/headshots/movement/mar ksmanship/etc.
maybe network model optimized for dedicated server connectivity
beefs up sprite system to handle millions of bullet trajectories, collisions, etc.
describes wave and boss formulas
has options for known special-shot/power-up/defensive variations
interactive flight-path editor to easily add new movements to enemy ships or bullets
maybe has general cooperative or competitive multi-player models
etc.
RTS (Real-Time Strategy) genre:
editable technology-tree systems of building and unit build-order dependencies
huge database for unit hierarchy, behavior, and upgrades data with both spreadsheet-like and graph-like editable data views
adapts the general AI mental-model to optimized path-finding and simple threat/promotion prioritization systems up through heuristics to game-wide complex strategic analysis potential
etc.
RPG (Role-Playing Game) genre:
basically the same stuff as the RTS genre but with more attention given to the depth
This game strikes an amazing balance by being both compelling for serious competition and entertaining for casual play. David Sirlin has a relevant article (http://sirlin.net/archive/slippery-slope-and-perp etual-comeback/) describing "perpetual comeback" as it pertains to Puzzle Fighter and why it makes that game so very fun.
Are you still looking further?
Well then...
Another example of perpetual comeback is the fighting system in Battle Arena Toshinden (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Arena_Toshind en) where each character has usually two special moves (in addition to their normal repertoire) that they can only perform once their health gets very low (i.e., they are about to be knocked-out). These moves (sometimes referred to as "desperation moves") usually do a great deal of damage and can easily turn the tide of a round or just win the round outright so they add cool intensity to the conclusion of many matches (even when one player is notably superior because they need to be extra careful to avoid getting hit by one or more of these "come-back" moves). These moves can be difficult to perform for those uninitiated to the common fireball and yoga-flame joystick movements they typically require but they totally have the best risk-vs.-reward benefit when a player is learning the game. I'd recommend studying and practicing the execution of those moves first to new players. Additionally, some characters have very easy ones like (if I remember correctly) Ellis and Sophia only need to press back, forward, back, forward + Triangle to do theirs. Choose an easy and fast character to start with until you learn enough to venture out.
Of course there are some fun cooperative experiences (like Halo or MMOs) but if your partner shows an affinity for, and appreciation of, games requiring increasing reflexive (a.k.a. "twitch") skill, I would highly recommend the plethora of http://shmups.com/ out there. Ikaruga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikaruga) must be mentioned as one of the greatest here. All threatening bullets and beams are either white (with blue highlights) or black (with red highlights). Similarly, each players' ship can flip over to alternate between those colors as well. When you're the same color as bullets, you absorb them into your shield and they store in a meter which can be unleashed as homing shots. When you are the opposite color of enemy ships, your shots do double-damage (but you're vulnerable to their bullets because they are the same color as them). It makes for awesome tension because the whole screen can be completely covered in bullets but at least half of it is always survivable space if you're the same color as the bullets occupying that space. Check out "bullet-eater" mode too. You can beat lots of levels without firing a shot (i.e., by just alternating to the right colors and dodging terrain features).
Another great one is Raiden Project (http://gamespot.com/ps/action/raidenproject/index.html) if you can find it for the old original PlayStation. That game had very interesting cooperative properties where certain shots would change characteristics and trajectory if they hit your friend's ship so sometimes it would be strategic to try to stay vertically aligned together (or overlay each other) to benefit from these special shots.
There are lots of great cooperative Shmups but the only directly competitive one I have yet encountered is astonishingly fun. It is called Twinkle Star Sprites (http://en.wiki
If you are (or someone you know is) moderately familiar with Perl, I would highly recommend http://twiki.org/ over MediaWiki.
TWiki supports standard XHTML 1.0 in combination with traditional wiki-style markup (e.g., *important text* for bold in TWiki as opposed to '''important text''' as bold in MediaWiki).
TWiki runs via standard CGI scripts and uses an RCS back-end for tracking document revisions and facilitating roll-backs.
TWiki was designed to support a thorough plug-in architecture and a great deal of the functionality included in the latest stable release (TWiki-4.0.1 from 07 Feb 2006) is provided through plug-ins.
There are lots of skins too (driven by CSS) which are easy to install if you don't like the default.
I've recently gotten into deploying and administrating installations of both TWiki and MediaWiki. I have also been modifying lots of the code of each while working in Sony's R&D department. Management decided to abandon MediaWiki (and possibly also Confluence shortly) in favor of TWiki's advantages. I'm working on some specialized new plug-ins for our intranet to aid project management. I highly recommend TWiki for collaborative web pages where you might want to extend the functionality.
MediaWiki is simple and clean and very well-suited to encyclopedic content. If that fits your problem-domain (i.e., you don't need to make substantial functional enhancements), it is a nearly ideal choice.
He recently wrote a Soapbox opinion piece on Gamasutra which prompted this/. story. The story summary highlighted the main point of the piece well and it drew a lot of comments, but of course, only a tiny fraction of even the highly-rated posts demonstrated understanding of the real arguments.
This problem was largely remedied over the past couple weeks in the discussion on Sirlin's blog where myself and other comment authors helped clarify the points that the casual reader habitually missed. Many interesting topics came up and I think your recognization of the "original twitch based videogame generation" being against the "new 'MMO' skill-less videogame-as-timesink generation" is wholly in line with the article and discussion.
The idea of lobbying for legal restrictions on games or their players is a distasteful one to me though. I would like to think marketers can make their proposed progress towards solving the political problems and intolerance the game industry faces... but I also feel the emphasis on marketing anything (over creating quality and superiority that speaks for itself) is the deeper issue. Salespeople are paid to convince and deceive others into becoming customers. In this interconnected information age we live in, the resentment towards advertisers telling us what to buy is on the rise. We'll see where it goes.
Anyway, you don't sound too nuts to me. Then again, a lot of people call me crazy so I'm maybe not the best judge. =)
I read the article and saw numerous quotes that were ripe for refutation (at least in a/. post). At first, it made me think maybe nobody intelligent has truly engaged him before and that he seems reasonable enough to deserve to be challenged properly. Then I remembered that he's just a troll. He pretends that the only challenge he faces is from belligerent and fearful gamers and gaming press because they know he's right. He only pretends to take this high-ground because he is the same way towards reasoned responses: namely ill-informed and intolerant. I realized it would be a total waste of time and effort to comb through the fallacies and faults of his words. He doesn't want to honestly discuss the issues at hand; he just needs to pretend that he does in a way that's convincing and beneficial to his coffers.
If, somehow, he hasn't yet been engaged intelligently, maybe it's because anyone capable of doing so has more productive things to do with their time.
So I thought: What's the deeper issue?
So-called "good Christians" want to legislate how non-Christians live. I believe all children should be thought of as non-Christians because they haven't yet had sufficient opportunity to make their own choices autonomously from their parents (and the trappings of their parents' world views / religions / etc.). Many United Statesian Christians want to wield law as a sledgehammer to pulverize all the unbelievers into restrictions they believe lead to increased morality (i.e., "holiness") and proximity to their concept of G-d.
These Christians should pass their laws against only their fellow Christian brethren.
Inconvenience and increased legal restriction in the name of good should be no problem for those professed "believers" because they believe they will live forever after they pass on from this life. For those of us who don't believe (and it is a most personal and important choice... even for children who are growing to discover themselves and their position in, and relation to, the larger world), we think this life here is all we have. These Christians who want to tell everyone else how to live should prove their amazing faith by laying their lives down at the mercy of all the unbelievers. They think they will go on to a wonderful eternal place of fantasy, which would leave us to get along here in reality without their restrictions. Who cares if a believing Christian suffers or dies here? They should be happy that their reward in heaven will be that much more joyous. They should totally stop giving unbelievers a hard time as this is all we have. I don't want to personally perform the euthanasia of all these Christians who want to force others into living by their ideals, but maybe the mercy of the unbelievers could send them all on their classic crusade against fundamentalist Muslims. Fundamentalist religious people from everywhere should all fight to the death and leave life to the living. It'd make a great "reality" show && probably a more lucrative video game than an insane father scapegoating game developers for his failings as a parent.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd simply like to complement you're fucking awesome (in the Izzard hot-dog sence) applications of neurolly stimpulating, yet impressionistivly axcessably availiable, languistic devices to convey nuanced meaning && subtle analytical incites that are misfortunately loost on most dulled communicationers (even if /.'s 4um S2N ratio tends to XEd most otherz).
So: *Bravo, MolarMass192!* I happily concider us kindred spirits, irrespective of demonstratible wordsmything trick-or-treatments (just as the Grinch should be violating the "Intellectual Property" wrongs of the nitemare before [or on] the eve of this 2009 C.E. Christmas).
Shalom, friend, =)
-Pip
s/(you)r (buzzword)/$1're $2/ || .= 's are ';
...
I've seen A,B, and C get into very loud, very heated arguments over *best approach*yp3 ...
Fuck that. You're unquotable, unless I'm lazy? ... I volunteered! I needed a Hiro! Callin' out for a gyr0 till the Nd uf da nyt? Well you've got one. But he's gotta be better than bitter batter. Betty's cookies are bomb!
"A:I intuitively see \"solid\" approach is missing something.
BC:We don't.
A:...laborious proof...
BC:Now we too \"intuitively see\" the \"missing something\"...\$D" ||
"BC:We still don't.
A:...you-don't-know-laborious-proof \$Dproof...
D:Where's the almighty Dollar DD rinking DD ark SS emi-weet BB itter-etter? \"Great programmer\" fails to understand the business baby buggy bumper $w0r3buhx! IllegalOp. SegFault. BSOD. NoCarrier. Gack... gasp*@#!perl sputter Reese's PeanutButter, Betty Biddy bought some butter but she said \"This butter's bitter. If I put it in my bladder, it will make the badder biggestX0rz3r!\" WTFi push(@batter, $bitter_butter); #bb getn bb
*{$AUTOLOAD} =~ s/^b([aiaioueieiouy]?)tter/$1/gigigo; #phew
SoShiTe r0B0t $e ** $e ANSI Putin in ze @addr && it GNUmkz the snail-mail address puffier Daddy && it is a BlackAdder from GoldenAxe && it adz up Google, maws drop, gumEberz, MazalTov, momNpop, 2B2bUlus, KingFurKPher4skin00K... the fookinuck? THe !!11!!1!10hn0ezL0LC@z, dunn frackditupagin. Rebutter, rebuffer, repuzzle the castle. On Dasher on Donner, on Voxel && Vixen! Many h03z s3wN r03z cr0p halv hRvS. HapyHolEde
B:WholEdjd
C:ManEFold?
A:Intuitively!
ABC:Missing!3yp
NofuhKinGuey. Wait. Go. Goo. Gle. GoneN60thzOv0zSecantzCoTanArcGentile. Gentle. ManLee. SpiDw0mN. ClmXBx0r $bucks Bach's Pasamaquaddy. I don't fucking know. But it's fun to play one on TV."
You insensitive clod. I play a Zer0! I am a 0. Lehew-zeher. But Ace Ventura does have nerdy animal love. Kinda beastial. Kinda hot chix. Fun. Even more fun than having Men@W0rk Xplaind (XplAnd [Xpl&.]) thru FootLoose thru Wren McCormik thru Entourage thru BlacKIdPz0N3wY3arzuss... uhh fucking John Lithgow, Sarah Jessica Parker... deh Sex In The City, Damn how many degrees from Kevin "Norris" Bacon. Hey. Yoyoyoyo. How cum he sentchew?
Pr0nGramRz just can't show for the $dola sliding thingz.
But you can kinda control being put on a crappy project with a bad deadline && a bad manager. Change them or have them change you. Whether that's along "bad" lines, "crappy" lines, project, manager, deadgoaletc. lines. Scan-lines. CocaineChrystalisVaporousWhereChoppedUhhpMathzematicalynzSpeedKills... Slower. Duh. Too fast. No don't. Howzat4SharedOperatingSystemInternalzCheatzSetFreeSoftware? RationalRealReasonRandomRounding&&Non-discriminatory. Everyone is discriminated against? Yeah. Duh. So the cocoa, chocolate, coffee, cocaine, cracks, crystal, CUCE, methemetical memetical meteorological neurobionic artifice of intelligence dreams of claiming consciousness its own personal bailiwick. Think again... && again.. while(1); You rest in that loop as long as you must && you will. You also simultaneously emerge elsewhere when you do. Sometimes when you must. It can be dusty or cloudy. The cloud can compute if your buzzword compliant. Are you savvy? Business savvy? JAPH. JustAnotherCunningLinguist(Common non-Lisper) JackOfLove AllTrades PokR Playing all the right cardz? WutRDodz? InfiniT/Zr0 (Rho? ToTally t0tLE) How can that even be computed? It was already done. When you did it? When you did it. No it wasn't before. Then once it is, it remains as having been done (maybe needing redoing, but eventually known). So eventually you can know everything that was done, but you don't want to. That ability is also designed to self-regulate in its own zeitgeist of interplay && interdependence (hence limited, seemingly contradictory independence). The paradoxes. The perplexities. They're purple magenta magnificent magnets. Maybe entering the IT field in general i
... Mostly, it seems like he thinks that a major obstacle to deflecting asteroids is some sort of international apparatus that has never in practice been an obstacle to anything.
Doesn't that depend immensely on your highly context-sensitive definitions of almost any of those key words in your "never" claim? I'd think it's especially so for "apparatus","obstacle", && "anything".
Additionally, even assuming your seemingly unqualifiable claim correct does not *necessarily* imply "deflecting asteroids" (or any other comprehensibly critical endeavor to deserve global coordination) will remain practical for a single nation (or small group) to dispatch or mitigate effectively forever in the future. That will surely be determined by what we ascertain will be faced ahead && what dealt roles pertaining to successful handling of it lay ahead. In theory, all world leaders && populations could rally together with mind-bending efficiency if everyone knew a mistake would be devastating to all.
At least that's how it seems to me. Maybe you know unspeakably more on such matters though. I don't consider governments competent regarding myriad issues I find important throughout history, however I'm inclined to extend even them the courtesy of optimistic inclusion in prospective responsiveness to openly honest dialog, honorable planning, && decisively harmonized action if sufficiently much were at stake. Even today, there should exist some threshold of blatantly expected severity beyond which it'd be a globally reprehensible crime of negligence or indefensible cowardice to fail to unite in response to. I don't consider global catastrophe (via asteroid or otherwise) of such magnitude at all likely anytime soon, but I'm hopeful even in nested long-shots emerging to protect our living planet (&& hopefully all inhabitants too, if we support such efforts... && maybe even if we don't).
I think you may have come off as too smug && simplistic with your criticism, even though it makes sense, so I hoped presenting my opinions could help at least that here.
Shalom, =)
-PipStuart CPAN
I'm compelled wondering what elabor8 && arcane malice you'd devise && visit upon me for my versioning system:
$majr.$minr.$ptim
e.g., 1.4.9BHD2cg (Major Version 1, [Relatively] Stable Minor Revision 4, Released 2009 Tuesday November 17 13:02:38:42)
HTTP://Ax9.Org/pt
It utilizes my Base64 (/[0-9A-Za-z._]+/) encoding to store d8 && time (down to 60th-of-a-second frames) utilizing only 7 characters.
HTTP://Search.CPAN.Org/~Pip
It's handy for me since `ls` automatically sorts such versioned files chronologically && uniformly for efficient identification.
Cheers,
-Pip
GreatGPPost:DutchGun(3RWX)@/.#1a6Kp-8CR0ded: ;) Hopefully it'll be better soon. We shouldn't miss out on the stuff that we'd totally love that's now available && good && cool && helps us hope, think, learn, test, debate, hack, bild, draw, dance, play, fite (nicely!), race, fly, etc.. =) Yay!".
> > Last.FM, for those who have been living on
> > Mars for the last two years, is the largest
> > online radio outlet, with millions of
> > listeners per day.
>
> You know, I'm not exactly what you'd call a
> Luddite, yet I've never heard of Last.FM.
> Am I the only one? I kind of doubt it.
>
> I have a general gripe about anyone who
> writes "for those who have been living on
> Mars" anytime they reference some
> moderately popular company, service, or
> product. It smacks of arrogance, as if to
> say, if you don't have the same interests
> as I do, you're obviously disconnected
> from the mainstream.
Valid gripe. Arrogance is not so bad though... especially when interpreting "Hey Martian! Over Here!" as a predominantly benign call-o-da-geek to say "You may be missing out on some totally fscking bomb ass techno shiznit over hiro in 31337ville. It's invigorated my plaque-luster skillz, speakz thrown rad into me earios serial, && I'm fond of sharing so please enjoy if... oh shit, CBS bot 'em. Nevermind. Whack-a-mole molests more moles. YOY?! =( Shouldn't it depend more on what data the mole ratted out, whether statistically rational or real? Prolly.
It should also be obvious that there are many worse things than being "disconnected from the mainstream". To this point, I found any deep mainstream pretty suffocating since I am neither a fish nor a bycicle (nor another brick in their ain't no wall, nor a gear in the raging machine... but lounging against can work deep tissues out with strategic feature placement).
Each of us are streamers. Let them roam without too heavy a concern for where Main St. USA lies or where it bends or the depth of its bed (or even the maidens && concubines, elixirs && insense, tapestries, triumphs, or travails thereon). It too will turn brackish if pollutant toxicity climbs banks further into lenders' PokeMon BattleArena VRAM. The orgies are cumming. Keep them clean. Don't lie about them. Stand like Yoga. Heh, I really meant: Tell the truth about them. They can be fine if they stop preying on tortured weaklings. Temper the bloodletting until it is staid. Mikveh, baptize, exfoliate, but don't grin while washing blood with blood. Your cleverness clots cancerous within you as you relish spilt milk, retard, && cat-soup. Have no fear, for you are with yourself (as you go within && go without).
> Or perhaps I'm just annoyed for being
> called out on being a bit older and out
> of touch? Bah!
>
> >>goes back to guarding lawn with a
> shotgun from an old rocking chair...
Props on the nicely humble arrogance there! "Damn kid-streams all over-waterin' me lawn as their 12ga.-resistant hover-boards surf over my land with their newfangled atomic precision && signal-canceling, gravity-warping, newcular|quantum hybrid hyper turbobamba engines! Can't an ol' racist feller like me rock (Devo jerkin'?) back&&forth here on my porch with my trusty dog, gun, && moonshine, just punchin' away at cards && watchin' HD-DVDz anymore?"
What could I expect from my GGP? To reject the high-flying "scrobbling" neologism on the ground of senselessness? ;)
> --
> Funny how those most vocal in demanding
> an apology seem least likely to accept
> it once given.
Yeah. That's always hilarious to me too. Not! Psych! Made ya look. I like apologies with only a gentle sprinkle of chilled word-shards over a barrel-full of corrective-action whiskey or stout. A relatively "good" time can be had by all.
"To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing."
- Isaac Newton
I think Newton betrays his own shortsightedness with this quote && corresponding attitude. It is foreseeable that at some point in the future, after sufficient preliminary progress had been achieved && widely understood, it would become too *easy* a task for any one person or age to explain all of nature.
Who is to say what's "much better" or what "little" can be done with what degree of "certainty"? Leaving the rest (of exactly what completed whole?) for others coming after instead of explaining all through conjecture without making sure of particular things sounds good but what if one (or many collaborators) could explain most (or "all") after making sure to some reasonable level... even though Newton or others might disparage the work as mere "conjecture".
Sounds lame && hypocritical to me.
-Pip
Pretty much the case where I work. Alot of stuff written in perl including a 200 line script to rename a file and to make sure its not over writing a file with the same name and massive birds nests of code that with the zero documentation and none of the original authors still in the organisation leaving me with little choice but to start from scratch.
Particularly as anyone with half a brain could do that in 4 lines of bash:
Sure, && that could also be:
user@host:~$ perl -e "`mv $ENV{'SrcFile'} $ENV{'DstFile'}` unless -e $ENV{'DstFile'}"
... but this might run into BINMODE issues, so it'd likely be advantageous to use File::Copy "mv" instead of backticks to shell out... && I suspect this 200-line script probably handles quite a few idiosyncratic conditions that would prove themselves critical to this organization should they be obliviously "simplified" into 4 lines (or 1 line) of bash (or perl).
Just because vocal programmers can't easily && immediately grok the finer points of lengthy old utility code, one should not blunder to the conclusion that such code is comprised of entirely arbitrary complexity which handles no special cases of concern && should therefore be supplanted by the most trivial remedy imaginable. Working code has typically earned such designation over years, for many good reasons (even though they might be obscure to cursory glance as well as thorough delving), so let's not be too quick to revolt against proven functionality.
To speak to the larger topic, I acknowledge that perl isn't the best choice for many programming problems && domains, but every purported weakness can readily be touted as strength from a different perspective. Many ways to do things means flexibility (which usually proves more boon than bane). Oldness && legacy also mean stability && the existence of diverse levels of fluency among professional coders, as well as extensive library availability (i.e., the CPAN). Each issue seems to slant with legitimacy either way, depending on the circumstances && objectives.
My personal experience heavily favors perl as a monumentally expressive language which exhibits not so much a "steep" learning-curve as one which climbs to stratospheric heights. Beginner perl remains elegant && intuitive... probably still simpler than newer languages finding favor. Easy things are easy to do in perl but the language shouldn't be blamed for making hard things possible in diverse ways. Those ways that prove generally better than others find favor, but the others still winnow into exceptional niches. I find most arguments against perl boil down to: "It's too powerful to be practical, since idiots can write crap too easily && experts can write incantations that only they can maintain." If such broad power is weakness to your mind, fair enough. Go use whatever language your mind expresses better. I consider power a respectable strength, which recommends consideration, practice, experimentation, extrapolation, && concerted evolution among a community of experts. Linguistic fluency is an asset since precise description of hard problems is necessarily harder to resolve with confidence because the abstract issue must be described as spoken language, then understood logically within technological terms before any potential solution can make the trip back from abstract tech solution to more concretely feasible code, back to spoken language description... which can then be compared (again abstract mentally) against any other plausible solutions proposed. Communication among people is difficult && diverse. When we increasingly need teams of coders && other corporate interests involved in tech problems && viable programming solutions, I think simple restricti
I know it's still distressingly trendy to demonize Islam or Muslims as the major source of evil, violence, && hatred... but it's largely bogus && shouldn't be swallowed at face-value.
... Oh, yeah? Well... well I'd bet any amount of money that a significant percentage of people would denounce idiocy if they could accurately detect it. I'd bet any amount of money that a significant percentage only go through the motions of fearing Muslims, when in their hearts they don't actually believe the mouthed prayers or the hateful words being preached from their churches && forums, because they're too mentally ill-equipped to grasp the truth that they may not have a perfectly black-or-white enemy, no clearly delineated gender, national identity, religious body, or other means of distinction to blame && target. They might have to look in a mirror && couldn't
Denouncing the entire religion, supposedly because the followers of that religion haven't denounced the evil that is perpetuated in the name of Islam. Ahem. Yeah, well everyone has their own assumptions that underlie any statement like that. I could denounce the entirety of neo-conservativism because followers haven't denounced evil perpetuated in the name of Bush or Jesus or America or freedom or capitalism or democracy. That feels easily more appropriate && accurate a blanket-statement against "evil" for me to make than anything about the entire religion of Islam.
My observation is that the typical response to a group of Westerners getting blown up is *not* dancing in the streets, *nor* is it a protest against violence. There are over a billion Muslims, so as far as a few anecdotes or selective observations can be extrapolated to anything considered "typical" response-wise, I'd say most Muslims are emphatically distressed by violence && despise hearing of anyone "getting blown up". Therefore, I must conclude that people who still hold so unshakably to the simplistic view that "the majority of the followers of Islam actively support evil", these people must still be afraid to believe anything they hear from a source other than the U.S. government or one of the old entrenched news organizations. There are occasional protests against bombing, but these people will never choose to see or hear or believe, && thus they only pretend that they'll reconsider their stance (or they'll claim the protests weren't "massive" enough, etc.).
A laundry list of recent attacks by people claiming to be followers of X, believers of Y, citizens of Z, etc. is just not the same as X, Y, or Z conducting attacks... but this point is lost on those who are governed by their fear. They point to the former, even acknowledging the tremendous minority of outliers that aggressors represent, then keep falling back on their familiar scapegoat of "(About 20 attacks by your-so called "religion" of peace in a single month)".
These people get their facts backwards. They don't know any Muslims, don't know the first things about Islam, the Qur'an, or the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.V.). Islam does *not* have any automatic death penalty for conversion. Everyone is to be left free && unmolested to believe as they choose. Conversions are to happen without force or duress (certainly never by-the-sword, under some convert-or-die scenario). To claim Islam is the only religion that has an automatic death penalty for changing your religion is just horribly ill-informed. You need not wonder how many people would remain Muslim if they had a choice... because there are over a billion who *know* that they consciously choose.
This guy says he'd bet any amount of money that a significant percentage of people would denounce Islam if they wouldn't be killed for it. He'd bet any amount of money that a significant percentage only go through the motions of being Muslim, when in their hearts they don't actually believe the prayers they are mouthing or the words of hate being preached from the mosques.
I decided to run for president just over a year ago && think I'd probably be the most /.-friendly candidate available.
Please check out PipForPresident.Org && let me know what you think or just write me in on your ballot. =)
-Pip
I think the comparison is wrong for a slightly different reason.
Money is necessarily scarce. Information is not.
It's not just that people will "reject" paid information (content, etc.) when free is available but that there is a growing recognition that information scarcity is artificial and increasingly antiquated.
Yes, the purchase of shoe leather will have to come from different sources to fund expensive journalism in the future... just like the funding of production for software, music, movies, games, etc. are all evolving now too. I don't know quite what steps will gain simultaneous popularity and viability... or if some relatively stable end-goal equilibrium will be reached someday... but I estimate that clamoring for the injection of paid sites into Google search results is attempting to move backwards. Don't expect eternal payment for data already created (which is inherently freely copyable). Work towards methods of being paid for the creation of new valuable data. That seems to be more in the right direction for the future.
-Pip
What a bittersweet irony it is that the lameness filter requires so much added lameness to get by it. ;)
-Pip
I know this is a book review so HTTP://Books.SlashDot.Org makes sense but this standard is going to be most relevant to more people who are consistently reading HTTP://Games.SlashDot.Org than those frequenting any other section of SlashDot. Oh well.
-Pip
I worked on the specification a little and have advocated use of the standard at several development studios I've worked at (primarily for PS2, PSP, and PS3 titles but it would help for simultaneous cross-platform projects too).
.X format because most DCC tools can import either one just fine. This misses the *exchange* emphasis of COLLADA (i.e., that it can be successfully *exported* by each tool too!).
I've seen lots of complaints that the format is not necessarily any better than Microsoft's
Of course XML necessarily has overhead and markup that would be assumed and invisible in any reasonable binary format but the benefits have seemed to outweigh the downsides. Just about every programming and scripting language available today has mature XML parsers which means that it can be increasingly easy to write conditioners as part of any asset pipeline in the future. Conditioners might pre-process surface normals or tessellate curves or tri-strip meshes according to particular constraints in preparation for certain platforms. Such tools can make for an incredibly modular pipeline comprised of highly specialized operations in a similar fashion to the Unix Philosophy of piping and filtering standard I/O.
The specification was designed to encompass the major needs of professional game developers and to leave plenty of room for extension both in future iterations of the standard itself and within each instance document according to each project's needs.
Some trade-offs have of course been made. Most DCC-specific construction histories were not represented last time I looked and efficiency can always improve... but the project had many ambitious goals and I think it has accomplished a noteworthy degree of success. The HTTP://Khronos.Org Group has adopted the standard (alongside OpenGL|ES and others). Sony has been promoting the standard through the PlayStation Developer's Network with each SDK and had sessions at their PS3 Developer's Day gathering early this year to introduce lots of "in the trenches" game programmers to the technology. I think increasing numbers of game studios will be adopting COLLADA for at least some portion of their art asset pipeline since the momentum of increasingly interoperable construction, viewing, and tuning tools is picking up.
Of course the standard can be useful to "amateur" game developers too... and we're likely to see repositories of both free and commercial art resources grow around the standard to better facilitate reuse and outsourcing of that work. It can even streamline parametric asset construction in the future.
COLLADA is an important standard for game development today and is the best candidate to become a foundational piece of any future truly Stephensonian Metaverse. Even HTTP://SecondLife.Com would be radically different if it supported import and export of COLLADA data. Arnaud and Barnes are brilliant guys who've done a great job on the whole project and their book is probably going to be an invaluable resource to anyone who cares about the future of entertainment and communication.
I'm admittedly biased though.
Sincerely,
-Pip
Why did you just leave it at that? Even if it *is* incorrect, it's not so obviously so.
I don't think we'd necessarily need to fully understand consciousness in order to spawn new ones... but I'm not sure why. What makes you certain?
Wow. I've seen a lot of comments containing text to the effect of "I'll probably get modded down for this but..." or "... Go ahead and mod me into oblivion for my unpopular pro-Microsoft / (MP|RI)AA / Republican / etc. opinion." It seems that such blurbs are more effective as reverse-psychology than not (of course with regular exceptions) but the low-Slashdot-ID thing cannot be so easily parlayed into high moderation... or maybe it really *is* about the reverse-psychology aspect. Even if you're being witty, you could just come off as a pompous prick with your quip. Maybe you would succeed at attaining favorable moderation more with something like:
/. but I sometimes think that moderators are getting better over time at ignoring any mention of the moderation system when evaluating posts. It can be like suspension of disbelief or something where moderators have to pretend that they aren't moderating as they read and then they actually try to evaluate objectively... or maybe they even do so while acknowledging their biases and counteracting them intentionally somewhat? I think I try to do that when I have moderator points.
"OK, perhaps getting the right tampons for some hypothetical lady love is not a problem to most slashdotters, and I don't deserve any preferential treatment just because I am a patriarch of sorts with my sub-1000 slashdot ID... so please mod me down as appropriate."
Just a suggestion. If you were actually going for some elusive reverse-reverse-psychology, I'm not too dense to recognize that possibility either but you must concede that it's indistinguishable from just being direct at first blush.
Maybe my hand is not sufficiently on the pulse of
Slashdot has achieved a pretty successful trust network considering how passionate geeks are, how many flaming trolls there are who revel in getting someone's goat, etc.. Then again, maybe it's more like our increasing tendency to avoid advertisements with mental auto-filters or something. Fast-forward through commercials, overlook banner ads, and ignore mentions of how to moderate. Hmm. I'd advise not telling moderators how to go about their business unless the reference is essential for comedic impact. The self-awareness of the meta-game when going for Funny seems more valid than any other in my mind. I guess it may also be valid in some relatively Off-Topic ways (like my post here entirely is) when honestly considering the appropriate application of the system. I'm curious to see how I might be moderated too. Regardless, I hope what I've written helps somewhat.
Sincerely,
-Pip
HTTP://PipForPresident.Org
I was working on the PS3 earlier this year as part of small contract employment with Sony's U.S. R&D. I don't speak for Sony and don't know much definitively related to emulation (as I was mostly working on building PSGL and COLLADA code and samples for the CEB and DEH SDKs).
While there, I was under the impression that the backwards-compatibility (i.e., PS2 emulation) software (including the small wrapper around the embedded PStwo chips that are planned to be phased out as soft-emu improves) has been developed almost exclusively in the U.S.. There was this brilliant emulation expert named Stewart who could regularly be found burning midnight oil to resolve the latest conflict. There were a bunch of other cool engineers in that section of the department too. The point being, our title library was admittedly massive but it was also expectedly U.S.-centric. I didn't see many of the more esoteric imports in the gigantic game library there so this may have limited what titles could be verified and validated for conformance, stability, etc. by the team responsible for the task.
I wasn't directly involved, so I can't say for certain, but it would seem quite likely to me that PS2-compatibility quality issues are going to be substantially more prevalent when trying to run typical Nipponese titles on a PS3 than when running average PS2 titles that have originated here (just due to availability for testing).
Of course perfect downward compatibility with every system ever throughout antiquity would be a panacea of gaming-goodness for us hardcores... and I think we'll get damn close in the future if DRM doesn't close up PCs and Free Software. I'm just wanting to share maybe a bit of inside perspective that the problems being encountered in Nippon right now are not necessarily representative of the paucity of the situation we are likely to face here at the end of this week.
Even with all the problems everywhere, throughout the game industry and the rest of the world, with so much that deserves copious criticism or wholly vitriolic disdain... it's still a kick-ass time to be a gamer! ;) I'm looking forward to this weekend and the upcoming holidays. I know we're predisposed to geeky pedantic flame-wars, being fanboiz, justifying our "hardcore"-ness, hating corporations and publishers, resenting quantity over quality, or maybe just being generally "Grumpy Old Gamers" or something... but don't forget to play and have fun too! Dude, it's all about the gameplay! ;)
Sincerely,
-Pip
HTTP://PipForPresident.Org
Although I agree that many things can be learned from the NRA, I don't agree that those lessons are likely to yield similarly favorable results when applied to video game issues.
Politicians have been a wealthy ruling elite. They have always owned some of the most expensive guns or they have secret service agents to carry guns in their stead or they have body-guards to be their hired guns... and they usually have many wealthy family members and lots of property they'd like protected by arms as well.
Of course they want guns to remain expensive (through taxation) and restrictive (through background checks and arbitrary strictures) and they want to continue to imprison more people for consentual activities (like drug use, prostitution, gambling, etc.) so that the barrier-to-entry for weaponry escalates and fewer poor and middle-class people have access to guns... but they certainly want powerful firearms to remain available to continue to protect them, their families, and their wealth.
They aren't ever going to give two shits about preserving video game rights, free speech, etc. by comparison. They'll have to die off and be supplanted by us younger bucks, us Generation X, Y, and Z'ers, who've cut our teeth on Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Sega Genesis... and we've stuck with games and continue to enjoy PlayStations, XBoxes, and anything Nintendo makes... and now we're all around thirty years old and will soon be constitutionally eligible to occupy high government offices.
I'm an impatient fscker and I hate waiting for the old ass-hats to retire but they're so closed-minded that it seems that's what it will take to get all the cowards out of authoritarian positions. They're cowards because they're afraid of they unfamiliar (be it Muslims, Koreans, gamers, etc.) and they rule by fear... they propagate terror and increase their influence.
Of course games should be embraced by larger society, heralded for crowning achievements in interactivity, collaboration, excitement, education, etc. and even appreciated for the ability to pander to the status quo with uninspired sequels of drivel. My point is that the current United Statesian leaders are not up to the task of respecting video games yet so learning from the National Rifle Association can't have the same impact as we'd hope until other things change.
So try to change more and faster. Please vote for me. We ought to continue to do whatever we can. At least things must continue to change one way or another, even if it's ultimately slower than smart progressive open-minded people would prefer... and things will improve eventually if enough people care to participate. Demand auditable balloting systems (Death to Diebold!). Agitate for ranged or ranked voting (instead of this retarded plurality system). Increase accountability, integrity, and honesty in representation. Serving our country should become a respectable honor again someday.
Sincerely,
-Pip Stuart
HTTP://PipForPresident.Org
What idiot modded this !funny? This is obviously a !serious comment, !not a joke. ;)
... Act now and Ubuntu can be your personal savior too. It slices. It dices. It even fries eggs." It's like a goofy quip. The P in L.A.M.P. also regularly stands for Perl or Python instead of (or alongside) PHP.
The grandparent reads like a commercial (and is thus funny whether it was serious or not). It's akin to "I'm computer illiterate. I'm convinced all computing devices hate me personally and break just to spite me. I had no idea what I was doing. Ubuntu saved my business in no time! Thanks Ubuntu.
-Pip
I think this highlights a key point: skill.
My roommate and I were chatting last night about why G4 sucks so badly that you're now much more likely to find Arrested Development, Fastlane, or Star Trek being shown than anything game related. I claimed that it's not *that* difficult to construct an interesting game channel... as long as you sprinkle "hardcore" gamers around... instead of the gaping void that G4 is unaware of. Now, by hardcore, I don't mean people who love get drunk and spew racial epithets over XBox Live more than they love themselves or their families. I mean people who are vigorous, passionate, intelligent, critical, etc. gamers at least within a genre of their expertise. My roommate claims that G4 has to make money and that intelligence doesn't sell and so G4/*TechTV* is focusing more on their tech-nerd appeal side to stay afloat... and that what I really want is PipTV made just for me. His points are almost good. My response:
"Look at Edge magazine! Televize an eighth of that zeal for gaming, analysis, cultural relevance, development studios and practices, strategies, nostalgia, etc. and I would be happy. It doesn't need to be only what I want... but it should have *some* shows that I at least care about. Victor Lucas seemed to be the only guy on the channel with any sense and he's never on anymore because he's not as voluptuous as Morgan Webb."
I'm trying to get back to my point here. You might think that games are not as fun to watch as a TV show because you'd much rather play them than just passively observe. Maybe this is generally true of serious gamers but I'm hardcore and I like to watch my roommate play Final Fantasy or Saint's Row even though I can hardly stand to play them myself. They have decently fun stories. When I get home with In-N-Out Burger or Taco Bell in-hand, I'd love to flip on some top tournament play or time trials or shit like the thousand Trackmania cars video from last week while I eat.
Let me digress again for a moment. There used to be a segment on G4 called Screenshots (or something similarly unappealing and insufficient as a descriptor of the gems they contained) where you'd hear the voice-over of a hardcore gamer describing their preparation and strategy for accomplishing some remarkable gaming feat as you watched their in-game performance of it. The three I remember are Parking Challenge Number 5 from some big-rig game, the original Tomb Raider training section speed run, and an SSX million-point run. These tiny segments remain as my favorites from all the G4 I have seen. There are so many games in the world. There are so many skilled gamers. How fscking hard is it to show skill?! Instead, we get millions of stupid skits with interns about nerd stereotypes that border on more offensive than celebratory. Then we have the Collins College commercials where idiots are wanting to entice other idiots to "train to make games in less time than most people think." Maybe most people don't think. Ugh.
In Korea, they show awesome play. You can observe and appreciate just player dexterity if you have shallow understanding of the genre or the title. You can enjoy strategy and drama if you know more. You can learn new tactics if you are a player or competitor... etc.. I am a hardcore fighting game player. If I could regularly watch top Soul Calibur, Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, or Virtua Fighter play, maybe with serious announcers who know the players and their histories etc. just like professional sportscasters, I would be stoked. You could have slow-motion replays where the announcers highlight subtleties that the casual observer would miss. You could show close-ups of the players' faces *and* their hands. Showing exquisite tournament play of any genre, or amazing runs of even single-player games, would be infinitely better than the crap-tastic review segments where whenever they show game footage, it's from some retard's first hour with the title who couldn't be bothered to learn the control scheme an
So I scratched the surface on this question last week on my blog:
PipForPresident.Org/blog
the gist of which is:
"I dream of helping to enable everyone in the world to create and play their own video games together."
so... I want to eventually write (or contribute to) tools that enable people to reconstruct or derive any possible game... assisting with:
Look no further than:
.html) if you can find it for the old original PlayStation. That game had very interesting cooperative properties where certain shots would change characteristics and trajectory if they hit your friend's ship so sometimes it would be strategic to try to stay vertically aligned together (or overlay each other) to benefit from these special shots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzle_Fighter
This game strikes an amazing balance by being both compelling for serious competition and entertaining for casual play. David Sirlin has a relevant article (http://sirlin.net/archive/slippery-slope-and-perp etual-comeback/) describing "perpetual comeback" as it pertains to Puzzle Fighter and why it makes that game so very fun.
Are you still looking further?
Well then...
Another example of perpetual comeback is the fighting system in Battle Arena Toshinden (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Arena_Toshind en) where each character has usually two special moves (in addition to their normal repertoire) that they can only perform once their health gets very low (i.e., they are about to be knocked-out). These moves (sometimes referred to as "desperation moves") usually do a great deal of damage and can easily turn the tide of a round or just win the round outright so they add cool intensity to the conclusion of many matches (even when one player is notably superior because they need to be extra careful to avoid getting hit by one or more of these "come-back" moves). These moves can be difficult to perform for those uninitiated to the common fireball and yoga-flame joystick movements they typically require but they totally have the best risk-vs.-reward benefit when a player is learning the game. I'd recommend studying and practicing the execution of those moves first to new players. Additionally, some characters have very easy ones like (if I remember correctly) Ellis and Sophia only need to press back, forward, back, forward + Triangle to do theirs. Choose an easy and fast character to start with until you learn enough to venture out.
Of course there are some fun cooperative experiences (like Halo or MMOs) but if your partner shows an affinity for, and appreciation of, games requiring increasing reflexive (a.k.a. "twitch") skill, I would highly recommend the plethora of http://shmups.com/ out there. Ikaruga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikaruga) must be mentioned as one of the greatest here. All threatening bullets and beams are either white (with blue highlights) or black (with red highlights). Similarly, each players' ship can flip over to alternate between those colors as well. When you're the same color as bullets, you absorb them into your shield and they store in a meter which can be unleashed as homing shots. When you are the opposite color of enemy ships, your shots do double-damage (but you're vulnerable to their bullets because they are the same color as them). It makes for awesome tension because the whole screen can be completely covered in bullets but at least half of it is always survivable space if you're the same color as the bullets occupying that space. Check out "bullet-eater" mode too. You can beat lots of levels without firing a shot (i.e., by just alternating to the right colors and dodging terrain features).
Another great one is Raiden Project (http://gamespot.com/ps/action/raidenproject/index
There are lots of great cooperative Shmups but the only directly competitive one I have yet encountered is astonishingly fun. It is called Twinkle Star Sprites (http://en.wiki
If you are (or someone you know is) moderately familiar with Perl, I would highly recommend http://twiki.org/ over MediaWiki.
TWiki supports standard XHTML 1.0 in combination with traditional wiki-style markup (e.g., *important text* for bold in TWiki as opposed to '''important text''' as bold in MediaWiki).
TWiki runs via standard CGI scripts and uses an RCS back-end for tracking document revisions and facilitating roll-backs.
TWiki was designed to support a thorough plug-in architecture and a great deal of the functionality included in the latest stable release (TWiki-4.0.1 from 07 Feb 2006) is provided through plug-ins.
There are lots of skins too (driven by CSS) which are easy to install if you don't like the default.
I've recently gotten into deploying and administrating installations of both TWiki and MediaWiki. I have also been modifying lots of the code of each while working in Sony's R&D department. Management decided to abandon MediaWiki (and possibly also Confluence shortly) in favor of TWiki's advantages. I'm working on some specialized new plug-ins for our intranet to aid project management. I highly recommend TWiki for collaborative web pages where you might want to extend the functionality.
MediaWiki is simple and clean and very well-suited to encyclopedic content. If that fits your problem-domain (i.e., you don't need to make substantial functional enhancements), it is a nearly ideal choice.
This http://wikimatrix.org/compare/MediaWiki+TWiki site can be extremely helpful in evaluating wiki alternatives too.
I hope that helps. =)
-Pip
David Sirlin is a good friend of mine.
/. story. The story summary highlighted the main point of the piece well and it drew a lot of comments, but of course, only a tiny fraction of even the highly-rated posts demonstrated understanding of the real arguments.
He recently wrote a Soapbox opinion piece on Gamasutra which prompted this
This problem was largely remedied over the past couple weeks in the discussion on Sirlin's blog where myself and other comment authors helped clarify the points that the casual reader habitually missed. Many interesting topics came up and I think your recognization of the "original twitch based videogame generation" being against the "new 'MMO' skill-less videogame-as-timesink generation" is wholly in line with the article and discussion.
The idea of lobbying for legal restrictions on games or their players is a distasteful one to me though. I would like to think marketers can make their proposed progress towards solving the political problems and intolerance the game industry faces... but I also feel the emphasis on marketing anything (over creating quality and superiority that speaks for itself) is the deeper issue. Salespeople are paid to convince and deceive others into becoming customers. In this interconnected information age we live in, the resentment towards advertisers telling us what to buy is on the rise. We'll see where it goes.
Anyway, you don't sound too nuts to me. Then again, a lot of people call me crazy so I'm maybe not the best judge. =)
-Pip
I read the article and saw numerous quotes that were ripe for refutation (at least in a /. post). At first, it made me think maybe nobody intelligent has truly engaged him before and that he seems reasonable enough to deserve to be challenged properly. Then I remembered that he's just a troll. He pretends that the only challenge he faces is from belligerent and fearful gamers and gaming press because they know he's right. He only pretends to take this high-ground because he is the same way towards reasoned responses: namely ill-informed and intolerant. I realized it would be a total waste of time and effort to comb through the fallacies and faults of his words. He doesn't want to honestly discuss the issues at hand; he just needs to pretend that he does in a way that's convincing and beneficial to his coffers.
;)
If, somehow, he hasn't yet been engaged intelligently, maybe it's because anyone capable of doing so has more productive things to do with their time.
So I thought: What's the deeper issue?
So-called "good Christians" want to legislate how non-Christians live. I believe all children should be thought of as non-Christians because they haven't yet had sufficient opportunity to make their own choices autonomously from their parents (and the trappings of their parents' world views / religions / etc.). Many United Statesian Christians want to wield law as a sledgehammer to pulverize all the unbelievers into restrictions they believe lead to increased morality (i.e., "holiness") and proximity to their concept of G-d.
These Christians should pass their laws against only their fellow Christian brethren.
Inconvenience and increased legal restriction in the name of good should be no problem for those professed "believers" because they believe they will live forever after they pass on from this life. For those of us who don't believe (and it is a most personal and important choice... even for children who are growing to discover themselves and their position in, and relation to, the larger world), we think this life here is all we have. These Christians who want to tell everyone else how to live should prove their amazing faith by laying their lives down at the mercy of all the unbelievers. They think they will go on to a wonderful eternal place of fantasy, which would leave us to get along here in reality without their restrictions. Who cares if a believing Christian suffers or dies here? They should be happy that their reward in heaven will be that much more joyous. They should totally stop giving unbelievers a hard time as this is all we have. I don't want to personally perform the euthanasia of all these Christians who want to force others into living by their ideals, but maybe the mercy of the unbelievers could send them all on their classic crusade against fundamentalist Muslims. Fundamentalist religious people from everywhere should all fight to the death and leave life to the living. It'd make a great "reality" show && probably a more lucrative video game than an insane father scapegoating game developers for his failings as a parent.
-Pip