If you want to see a live action movie with some of the spirit of the Aeon Flux shorts, I suggest you see Run Lola Run (unfortunately a Sony product.. caveat emptor)
Well, I can see one source of potential income, Karaoke, which might be worth some money to them. I know a lot of people who buy Karaoke VCDs so they can sing My Way, Imagine or another popular song. (Personally, I'd prefer Dream Island Obsessional Park, but that's just me.)
Of course, the VCDs my friends buy usually come from the Thai black market.. (and occaisionally have significant, silly-sounding mistakes in the lyrics).
Hey, such things are essential for Karaoke night, and some of the sushi bars and korean restaurants in the area probably make money from karaoke too... I wonder if they'll figure out a way to charge karaoke singers, too. In that case, I hope a defense can be that the accent makes the song utterly incomprehensible so you can't prove they were actually singing it...
Ancient spirits of evil, transform this decaying form, to
MUMM-RA, THE EVERLIVING! mulrhahaha!
Yeah, he was kind of preachy.
Re:Education decaying into retold legends of glory
on
Why We Fight
·
· Score: 1
what the consequences are for asking everyone to enjoy being a Barbarian for an hour. Rome falls.
I wonder if the ghosts of the 6,600 Sparticani that were crucified along the side of the Via Appia after their slave revolt during the time of the Roman Republic thought it was a great tragedy that Rome fell? (Rome didn't fall for years after this, the Ceasar's came first. And Rome was notoriously brutal in it's suppression of it's enemies, "the barbarians," long before this. Barbarians mostly get a bad rap.)
Heh, you haven't been going to the right universities. If you had you would know that what you call "chivalry" is actually just the hallmark of patriarchal oppression and what you call "heroism" is just a way of oppressing the proletariat by capitolist warmongers. I think another such academic put it best, "Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!"
Horatio Jackson: Ah, the officer who risked his life by singlehandedly destroying *six* enemy cannon and rescuing ten of our men help captive by The Turk.
Heroic Officer: Yes, sir.
Horatio Jackson: The officer about whom we've heard so much.
Heroic Officer: I suppose so, sir.
Horatio Jackson: Always taking risks far beyond the call of duty.
Heroic Officer: I only did my best, sir.
Horatio Jackson: Have him executed at once. This sort of behavior is demoralizing for the ordinary soldiers and citizens who are trying to lead normal, simple, unexceptional lives. I think things are difficult enough without these emotional people rocking the boat.)
Hard as it is to believe though, there are some people working on college campuses who take such strange ideas quite seriously. I know from personal experience.
2. Evil video game companies (which is reduntant as creating video games is the equivalent of selling poisoned milk to school children according to the article) are spending money to encourage colleges to create courses teaching people how to add poison to milk for schoolchildren.
3. All video games are evil and violent, including such games as Nintendo's Mario.
4. In conclusion, video games are evil and video game design courses have no place on a college campus or even existing at all.
How worrying is this? Well, academia has a lot of strange people working in it sometimes as professors. (When I was at school, one of my tenured professors would proudly boast that he was a card carrying communist. This was in the 80's when Reagan was in the White House and communism wasn't popular. Incidentally, I liked him, he had a good sense of humor but he was dead serious about the communism.) On the other hand, I have found some great articles from people in academia defending video games either directly or simply because they are disgusted by the lack of intellectual rigor of some famous opponents of video games.
I've never heard of this University, so here's the Wikipedia Article it doesn't sound particularly out there.
Obviously he has never heard of Metroid but I imagine his spin on that would be to take the most negative and sleazy interpretation.
Maybe he's after some of the great riches realized by Lt. Col. David Grossman or the likely more modest earnings of Jack Thompson. I expect more and more people like this will come out of the woodwork and start bashing games. Maybe we'll see public burnings like with D&D.
Hmm, look, the first thing it asks me for it my age. Of course, if I were 12, I'd just make up an age to get in, but it looks like it is trying to get me to identify my age, that's the main thing.
So, the Website for a movie about a psychotic serial killer with the tagline "Oh yes, there will be blood..." no age restrion. The Website for Dawn of War slightly humorous RTS about the Warhammer 40K universe, you have to know how to select an old enough age on a drop down box.
Which would I rather have my 10 year old accessing? No contest, Dawn of War, she might get nightmares from Saw 2. Not that I think either is going to turn her into a violent serial killer.
It just seems odd that you guys jumped in with both feet and bought three stores.
The only thing I can think of to differentiate yourself from the majors right now is to stock imports and the means to play them. In this way you will have things that the big chains mostly don't have. When I was contracting in Virginia I loved to drive out to this one non-chain store that carried imports. Ideas can be had from NCS and Lik Sang. Get a few Messiah NEX systems, and some old NES games for them to appeal to the nostalgic market.
There was one rap group that used a Beats of Rage mod to advertise themselves, though I have no idea how that worked out for them.
The biggest problem though is getting people actually to the store. If you could get people to come once a week, for some kind of competitive game night, they might buy or at least come back.
I thought this article about Animenation was interesting:
5. Since you can't compete with the big stores on price, you have to have some sort of differentiator that make people come to your store instead. Arcades might be a solution, I dunno. I actually think the idea of an "Adults Only" section is worth a try; you can stock it with a bunch of Japanese adult "dating sim" titles and charge high prices for them.
Well, be careful, as this may be illegal depending on how your local government feels about it, (Supreme Court Denies Castillo Appeal). The Castillo case was actually in Texas, so you might be safe in a more liberal part of the country:
Fund board member Neil Gaiman says, "I think the hardest thing to believe is that Jesus was found guilty of selling an adult comic, from the adult section of the store, to an adult police officer, and convicted because the DA convinced the jury that all comics are really intended for children. I can't imagine a world in which the same argument would have worked for books or for films -- and I'm afraid that highlights why comics retailers (and artists and writers and publishers) still need a Defense Fund, and still need to be defended."
Now, I realize that the was a comic book case, over the manga Legend of the Overfiend if anyone is interested. But the Japanese H-Dating Sims are about the same as far as adult content. I could see a DA doing the same thing with a video game, "I don't care what type of evidence or what type of testimony is out there, use your rationality, use your common sense. Comic books [replace with Video Games -- ed.], traditionally what we think of, are for kids. This is in a store directly across from an elementary school and it is put in a medium, in a forum, to directly appeal to kids. That is why we are here, ladies and gentlemen.... We're here to get this off the shelf."
The Supreme Court let this stand, so the First Amendment doesn't apply to comic books anymore and I'd imagine by extension to any medium that is seen as "for kids." The video games rating system might offer protection but I'd still think twice about it.
Sigh, looks like it is time once again to debunk the writings of Lt. Col. David Grossman, who is the person that Dr. Sears cites as his authority in this article. I could just point everyone to this article, Grossman-ism: Media Violence and Mad Social Science. It's a very good, scholarly article (with a lot of sarcastic wit so it isn't boring) that does a thorough job of debunking Grossman's primary assertion, that up until recently human beings have been basically psycologically unable, in the majority, to kill each other in armed conflict.
However, I already pointed to this in a previous comment on yet another article on the coming ban on 'M' rated games. (I really don't know how long it will take, but I believe it is coming so be prepared for it.)
So, in the interest in presenting new research on the subject of this impressive charlatan, I present this, The Dave Grossman Debate. The author tends to use emotional rhetoric too much but is understandably upset by the implications of Grossman's writing, which is that police officers and military personel are being turned into homicidal zombie killbots by the new 'murder simulators' that also happen to be the basis of the evil videogames that are poisoning our children:
Your allegations imply that deadly force is routinely employed in a manner that is the product of a conditioned response. The troubling implication is that police don't use professional judgment on a case-by-case basis..... they merely pull triggers as a matter of conditioning!
Even though the rhetoric is a little emotional for my taste (I prefer the dryer sarcastic wit of the other article) this article is dense with statistical and historical information debunking Grossman.
Of course, none of this is going to matter to the believers.
Ayn Rand once wrote a play that was about a trial, The Night of January 16th. The play was experimental, members of the audience were selected to be the jury. The play had different endings depending on whether the jury selected guilty or innocent as the verdit.
Now, this was a fairly successful play, of course the author is one of the most polemical in history, but let's pretend that another author created the play so we can leave Objectivism out of it. Is the fact that the author includes in her play an interactive element enough to dismiss the play as "not art?"
If not, where does this put Ebert's criticism of games?
Actually, this site is useful...
If you want to know why the video game rating system is in the current crisis it is in:
The following was excerpted from the NIMF Video Game Report Card:
Using data generated by PSVratings, a content-based ratings system measuring actual levels of profanity, sex, and violence, we found that games in 2004 were on average more violent, contained more sexual content and had more profane language when compared to games from the late '90s. In the '90s only 16% of the M-rated games contained any profanity at all and only 33% contained sexual content. By 2004 all (100%) of the M-rated games contained some level of profanity and sexual content. The actual figures shot through the roof. The games we analyzed from last year were 30 times more likely to contain profanity than those from the '90s, and the average prevalence of sexual content increased a whopping 800%. Kids are six times more likely to see nude or partially nude figures in M-rated video games today than they were in the late 1990s. Yet the ratings haven't changed. -- PSVratings Provides Crucial Data for NIMF's 10th Annual Video Game Report Card: Ratings Accuracy Plummets from 'B-' in 2004 to 'F' in 2005
This isn't loony Jack Thompson here, these are the people who are actually behind the current legislation. Why are they upset?
Well, here's what I believe happened. In the original crisis, the one that created the rating system, the two games that drove the rating system were Night Trap a pretty mild probably PG-rated vaguely interactive B-Horror movie and Mortal Kombat a game where poorly animated cartoon characters killed each other in humorously gruesome ways. (I can't give more info on how bad Night Trap actually is because even though I was one of 5 people in the US with a SegaCD, I didn't buy it. I'm going by the footage they showed during the hearings to damn it. Oh, and someone will probably argue that the characters in Mortal Kombat aren't cartoon characters. Well, then when Monty Python made cartoons using cutouts of photographs, those weren't cartoons either.) Huge amounts of hyperbole about these video games came out of Washington, and the games industry basically allowed Washington to get away with it (indeed the game industry itself was divided, with Nintendo being one of the causes of the crises trying to harm their competitor, SEGA. Nintendo sent the video tape to their friends in Congress that precipitated the whole thing.)
Well, those two games became the top of the ratings, the M-Rated games, but they were milder than what kids could see in an episode of Beavis and Butthead or indeed The Simpson's (really there is some gruesome stuff on The Simpson's remember the fog that turns people inside out?).
So, the games industry came out with a rating system, and I guess they figured they didn't need to try to license the movie rating system, so they created their own. While the system was roughly analogous to the movie rating system, the truth was that at least on the top end, an R-Rated movie could be much more graphic than an M-Rated game. Oh, and the wonderful full-motion video thing that people tried to foist on the game playing public collapsed, so you ended up with years of poorly animated cartoony games especially when polygons became big. (Really, go back and look at some of those old 3-D Playstation games. They didn't exactly have realistic imagery, did they?) Oh and no nudity or real profanity in the games at all.
So, people got used to defacto censorship in video games. Nothing really worse than Mortal Kombat was allowed. Really the 90's were a kind of golden age for the pro-videogame censorship people.
Well, this would go neatly together with Spiderman being based on The Fountainhead as objectivist creator Steve Ditko intended. J. Jonah Jameson is totally Gail Wynand.
He's talking about Gamecube games, the Revolution is supposed to be fully backward compatible with the Gamecube. I. E. you can put a Gamecube disk in a revolution and it will work.
This is not a big deal (certainly not as big as PS2 playing PS1 gaems) but it is a minor selling point.
This reminds me of an episode of Superboy where Lex Luthor decides to use a sonic weapon against Superman, and he says, "So, I said to myself, I wonder how he turns off his super-hearing. And then I though, well, maybe he can't..."
This reminds me of a caption in The Dark Book (I think that was the name) a sort of encyclopedia of supervillians, "Nobody likes Captain Nazi" under a picture of Captain Nazi.
Basically, Superman versus Wildstorm's Comics The Authority. They could've made that into a movie, except it would be impossible to do Superman's origins and also The Elites' origins in one movie... Of course, they have to do Superman's origins again, right...
He also said that the army's soldier to killbot programming machine was made by Nintendo. He's not really that different than Thompson, really, just slightly quieter.
"Attorney Jack Thompson is someone whom I believe has his heart in the right place actually," Halpin said. "I think it's clear to all involved that he earnestly believes his perspective shall be the one to prevail and he is willing to put all of himself - personally and professionally - into that fight...a position which I don't see countered on the 'pro' side of the debate. That said, we take issue with his opinion that our members have not done enough to stem the sale of Mature-rated games to minors, and in that regard, we appear to be adversarial."
This is extremely sad, and really makes me wonder if this guy has studied Jack Thompson at all. No one who actually knows anything about him would think that his heart is in the right place. There are actually probably some credible people on the anti- side of this debate, who I will oppose to my death, but Jack Thompson is not one of them.
Heck, I consider David Grossman to be another dishonest huckster, but he's like a pillar of honesty compared to Thompson. (Remember him? He used to have Thompson's part in this debate. I miss those days.)
Just read the man's (Jack's) words, he come across as a dishonest, bigoted grandstander whose primary concern is stroking his own massive Ego. I don't get why this guy is treating him like someone who is taking a reasonable, morally responsible position here.
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If you want to see a live action movie with some of the spirit of the Aeon Flux shorts, I suggest you see Run Lola Run (unfortunately a Sony product.. caveat emptor)
Of course, the VCDs my friends buy usually come from the Thai black market.. (and occaisionally have significant, silly-sounding mistakes in the lyrics).
Hey, such things are essential for Karaoke night, and some of the sushi bars and korean restaurants in the area probably make money from karaoke too... I wonder if they'll figure out a way to charge karaoke singers, too. In that case, I hope a defense can be that the accent makes the song utterly incomprehensible so you can't prove they were actually singing it...
Ancient spirits of evil, transform this decaying form, to MUMM-RA, THE EVERLIVING! mulrhahaha!
Yeah, he was kind of preachy.
Don't forget this one... oh but that's too scary for him....
(I'd like to put the Baron Munchausen reference in here too:
Horatio Jackson: Ah, the officer who risked his life by singlehandedly destroying *six* enemy cannon and rescuing ten of our men help captive by The Turk.
Heroic Officer: Yes, sir.
Horatio Jackson: The officer about whom we've heard so much.
Heroic Officer: I suppose so, sir.
Horatio Jackson: Always taking risks far beyond the call of duty.
Heroic Officer: I only did my best, sir.
Horatio Jackson: Have him executed at once. This sort of behavior is demoralizing for the ordinary soldiers and citizens who are trying to lead normal, simple, unexceptional lives. I think things are difficult enough without these emotional people rocking the boat.)
Hard as it is to believe though, there are some people working on college campuses who take such strange ideas quite seriously. I know from personal experience.
1. Video games are evil.
2. Evil video game companies (which is reduntant as creating video games is the equivalent of selling poisoned milk to school children according to the article) are spending money to encourage colleges to create courses teaching people how to add poison to milk for schoolchildren.
3. All video games are evil and violent, including such games as Nintendo's Mario.
4. In conclusion, video games are evil and video game design courses have no place on a college campus or even existing at all.
How worrying is this? Well, academia has a lot of strange people working in it sometimes as professors. (When I was at school, one of my tenured professors would proudly boast that he was a card carrying communist. This was in the 80's when Reagan was in the White House and communism wasn't popular. Incidentally, I liked him, he had a good sense of humor but he was dead serious about the communism.) On the other hand, I have found some great articles from people in academia defending video games either directly or simply because they are disgusted by the lack of intellectual rigor of some famous opponents of video games.
I've never heard of this University, so here's the Wikipedia Article it doesn't sound particularly out there.
Obviously he has never heard of Metroid but I imagine his spin on that would be to take the most negative and sleazy interpretation.
Maybe he's after some of the great riches realized by Lt. Col. David Grossman or the likely more modest earnings of Jack Thompson. I expect more and more people like this will come out of the woodwork and start bashing games. Maybe we'll see public burnings like with D&D.
Saw 2 Website
Well, it isn't asking me for my age, interesting. I can view the trailers, the animated comic, etcetera....
Now, I'll go to the Website of Dawn of War a RTS I'm fond of:
Dawn of War Website
Hmm, look, the first thing it asks me for it my age. Of course, if I were 12, I'd just make up an age to get in, but it looks like it is trying to get me to identify my age, that's the main thing.
So, the Website for a movie about a psychotic serial killer with the tagline "Oh yes, there will be blood..." no age restrion. The Website for Dawn of War slightly humorous RTS about the Warhammer 40K universe, you have to know how to select an old enough age on a drop down box.
Which would I rather have my 10 year old accessing? No contest, Dawn of War, she might get nightmares from Saw 2. Not that I think either is going to turn her into a violent serial killer.
The only thing I can think of to differentiate yourself from the majors right now is to stock imports and the means to play them. In this way you will have things that the big chains mostly don't have. When I was contracting in Virginia I loved to drive out to this one non-chain store that carried imports. Ideas can be had from NCS and Lik Sang. Get a few Messiah NEX systems, and some old NES games for them to appeal to the nostalgic market.
There was one rap group that used a Beats of Rage mod to advertise themselves, though I have no idea how that worked out for them.
The biggest problem though is getting people actually to the store. If you could get people to come once a week, for some kind of competitive game night, they might buy or at least come back.
I thought this article about Animenation was interesting:
Right hobby, right time
Of course, they built their online business first and the retail store came later.
The Supreme Court let this stand, so the First Amendment doesn't apply to comic books anymore and I'd imagine by extension to any medium that is seen as "for kids." The video games rating system might offer protection but I'd still think twice about it.
However, I already pointed to this in a previous comment on yet another article on the coming ban on 'M' rated games. (I really don't know how long it will take, but I believe it is coming so be prepared for it.)
So, in the interest in presenting new research on the subject of this impressive charlatan, I present this, The Dave Grossman Debate. The author tends to use emotional rhetoric too much but is understandably upset by the implications of Grossman's writing, which is that police officers and military personel are being turned into homicidal zombie killbots by the new 'murder simulators' that also happen to be the basis of the evil videogames that are poisoning our children:
Even though the rhetoric is a little emotional for my taste (I prefer the dryer sarcastic wit of the other article) this article is dense with statistical and historical information debunking Grossman.Of course, none of this is going to matter to the believers.
Now, this was a fairly successful play, of course the author is one of the most polemical in history, but let's pretend that another author created the play so we can leave Objectivism out of it. Is the fact that the author includes in her play an interactive element enough to dismiss the play as "not art?"
If not, where does this put Ebert's criticism of games?
How much is the PS3 going to cost?
KK: Oh, it'll be expensive.
Well, how expensive?
KK: Well we aren't going to say yet, but trust me, it'll be expensive.
Can you give us a ballpark?
KK: [Thinks]Well, you probably can't afford one... maybe if you get a second job. It'll be worth it for the PS3...
Well, like $400? $500? More?
KK: You don't want to know.
etc...
This isn't loony Jack Thompson here, these are the people who are actually behind the current legislation. Why are they upset?
Well, here's what I believe happened. In the original crisis, the one that created the rating system, the two games that drove the rating system were Night Trap a pretty mild probably PG-rated vaguely interactive B-Horror movie and Mortal Kombat a game where poorly animated cartoon characters killed each other in humorously gruesome ways. (I can't give more info on how bad Night Trap actually is because even though I was one of 5 people in the US with a SegaCD, I didn't buy it. I'm going by the footage they showed during the hearings to damn it. Oh, and someone will probably argue that the characters in Mortal Kombat aren't cartoon characters. Well, then when Monty Python made cartoons using cutouts of photographs, those weren't cartoons either.) Huge amounts of hyperbole about these video games came out of Washington, and the games industry basically allowed Washington to get away with it (indeed the game industry itself was divided, with Nintendo being one of the causes of the crises trying to harm their competitor, SEGA. Nintendo sent the video tape to their friends in Congress that precipitated the whole thing.)
Well, those two games became the top of the ratings, the M-Rated games, but they were milder than what kids could see in an episode of Beavis and Butthead or indeed The Simpson's (really there is some gruesome stuff on The Simpson's remember the fog that turns people inside out?).
So, the games industry came out with a rating system, and I guess they figured they didn't need to try to license the movie rating system, so they created their own. While the system was roughly analogous to the movie rating system, the truth was that at least on the top end, an R-Rated movie could be much more graphic than an M-Rated game. Oh, and the wonderful full-motion video thing that people tried to foist on the game playing public collapsed, so you ended up with years of poorly animated cartoony games especially when polygons became big. (Really, go back and look at some of those old 3-D Playstation games. They didn't exactly have realistic imagery, did they?) Oh and no nudity or real profanity in the games at all.
So, people got used to defacto censorship in video games. Nothing really worse than Mortal Kombat was allowed. Really the 90's were a kind of golden age for the pro-videogame censorship people.
Well, this would go neatly together with Spiderman being based on The Fountainhead as objectivist creator Steve Ditko intended. J. Jonah Jameson is totally Gail Wynand.
A plan so secret, it hasn't made it into any history books?
Or is there some other reason for bringing up this irrelevant fact?
I can play too, "Ignoring the fact that Truman and Stalin were initially allies is also interesting."
Oh, at least one
o/~ The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one... o/~
And...
o/~ Uuuulaaa o/~
This is not a big deal (certainly not as big as PS2 playing PS1 gaems) but it is a minor selling point.
This reminds me of an episode of Superboy where Lex Luthor decides to use a sonic weapon against Superman, and he says, "So, I said to myself, I wonder how he turns off his super-hearing. And then I though, well, maybe he can't..."
This reminds me of a caption in The Dark Book (I think that was the name) a sort of encyclopedia of supervillians, "Nobody likes Captain Nazi" under a picture of Captain Nazi.
Casting the Gauntlet: Action Comics and The Authority
Basically, Superman versus Wildstorm's Comics The Authority. They could've made that into a movie, except it would be impossible to do Superman's origins and also The Elites' origins in one movie... Of course, they have to do Superman's origins again, right...
He also said that the army's soldier to killbot programming machine was made by Nintendo. He's not really that different than Thompson, really, just slightly quieter.
Where was that in the article?
Heck, I consider David Grossman to be another dishonest huckster, but he's like a pillar of honesty compared to Thompson. (Remember him? He used to have Thompson's part in this debate. I miss those days.)
Just read the man's (Jack's) words, he come across as a dishonest, bigoted grandstander whose primary concern is stroking his own massive Ego. I don't get why this guy is treating him like someone who is taking a reasonable, morally responsible position here.
Don't forget, he's also a sort of a role model for The Laughing Man (Class A Super Hacker) in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.