I'm pretty good at games, so when I read a review by a seasoned gamer, I can more or less relate to their concepts of challenging, frustrating, repetitive, etc.
Naruto could go down as one of the most ruined, but probably still successful, licenses ever if it comes to the US.
It has too much potential kid appeal, and is probably way too expensive of a license, to just dub and put on late night adult swim unedited with all the blood, bone injuries, perverted characters, etc.
I have a friend who does a ton of Excel, which is perhaps the epitome of either massively using the mouse or massively using the keyboard depending on your style...
According to him, one of the major financial institutions, upon hiring an excel monkey of any sort, will take their mouse away for 1 solid month before giving it back.
Whether the story is true or not, it inspired him to try absolutely everything with keyboard before reaching for the mouse and since then he's became way more productive and accurate.
When I was a Senior in High School, we had recently finished building the main networked computer lab. We were bringing teachers in and showing it off to see if they could use it, etc, for their classes.
One of the best programs we had was "Green Globs", an old XT/CGA math "game" that had various exercises like putting 2-D scatter points on a 2-D graph and you'd figure out a single equation that would pass through all the points. More advanced levels would make you only use certain functions, or would introduce boundries you couldn't pass through (so you couldn't just create a super tight sine wave, etc)
So -every- Math teacher in the school was in the lab trying this program out, and I was there basically running everything. It was utterly fascinating. Despite the fact they were all college graduates, most of them struggled like hell with things that many students in the school could easily do.
The main exceptions were the AP Calc and Geometry teachers, they actually formed a little clique and went totally nuts while the rest of them literally looked like dumbfounded Freshmen. One teacher in particular just sat and stared at the screen with glazed over eyes, it was freaking creepy.
There was something very surreal about the whole scene that imprinted itself very strongly into my mind. Particularly seeing the 2 only good teachers group up and make a particularly loud affair out of it in a way that seemed intentionally meant to mock the other teachers.
Side story.. Being almost as instrumental to the creation the first computer lab as the teacher that sponsored it and me exposed me to quite a few interesting things like that. I was basically treated like a faculty member by a decent portion of the staff and so was in on a lot of faculty meetings, had keys to various things, etc.
It totally floored me just how much smack they talk about each other! They are almost like high school students themselves. They cap on other teachers' bald spots, the way they walk, the way they dress, the things they say. They form exclusive lunch cliques that last for -years- in weird out of the way places in the school that most students don't know about. Other teachers are totally outcast and have no friendly relationships with other teachers. Hell, they even capped on students sometimes in private.
My favorite sports games have all been relatively unlicensed ones, with the exception of NBA Street which is a very loose use of the license and even largely revolves around non-licensed players.
With the other sports companies now focusing on their games instead of being true to the real thing or adhering to the various license standards, maybe we'll see more old school action oriented style sports games.
I think a valid question would be, is he even having all that much fun?
He might just be too sheltered. He might be too afraid to deal with reality. Playing video games constantly might just keep his mind off of it and helps him from feeling guilty and worthless, for now. There might be the occassional moments of fun in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of it was just a mind numbing drone.
Re:The acutal effect is likely a bit different.
on
Editors Get an Earful
·
· Score: 1
I've definitely noticed that, but I chalked it up to a very different meaning. I've read a lot of seriously negative reviews where the practical upshot is to not buy the game but it got a 7 or 6.5.
I think reviews tend to work more like grades in school. If your score is 50% of 100%, that's typically a fail, not the average. Below 60 is a total fail, 60-70 is below average, 70-80 is the average range, 80-90 is above average and 90+ is excellent.
It was actually a fairly reasonable letter until..
on
Editors Get an Earful
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
... he started threatening them with cut advertising.
I was actually kind of with the guy on the whole "Find audiences for a game instead of just assuming everybody is like you" concept of reviewing, at least if it's a mainstream site. But when he cut into the threats about biting the hand that feeds you, well, I completely lost touch. The last thing a reader wants from a review site is a bought reviewer.
Of course I'm not the audience for that letter, I wonder how much their bottom line was actually affected. So the real question becomes.. how much does that sponsorship affect reviews? Is it possible to quantify it? If you compare reviews for games on sites that have ads for those games to reviews on sites that don't, can you find a coorelation that cross cuts many games? Common sense says that such a coorelation is so likely as to be obvious.
If that's is the case, that really doesn't set up the writer of this letter for ridicule. He's behaving accordingly to the climate. Who's more unscrupulous? Those that accept a bribe or those that offer it?
Twisty street layout means never having to draw that far out. Gothic spooky look is built in. Ancient underground vaults make sense with centuries of history. Since most gamers statistically don't live in small european towns, artistic license can be taken.
And, given the fact that it's Capcom, maybe they have plans for some kind of mega crossover game where all the characters meet?..... yea thats the ticket.
After years and years of way too much gaming, I can only think of a few instances where for a split second my mind gimped out like that..
Too much mario kart made me think I should hop and drift through curves on the freeway to get a mini turbo.
Too much Planetside with too little sleep made me trip out and I thought I saw a cloaker moving out of the corner of my eye a few times.
I think burnout 3 was the most disturbing of all though, as it had me thinking for just a split second that a head on collision would be cool.
Too much tetris had the theme play as an auditory hallucination once when I opened the freezer, not in my head, but literally in my ears. I read some explanation somewhere that anytime you listen to a sound way too much, your brain might eventually reprogram to think of it as the 'null sound' and next time you hear a droning natural 'null sound' like the freezer compressor your brain inserts the new 'null sound'? Anybody know anything about that?
I never once had anything from grand theft auto and I've played them all a ton.. I consider that game to be a personality test basically, I don't get anything out of randomly killing people in that game, I think that as a run and gun shooter it has pretty terrible gameplay, it's the driving, exploration and storyline that make it a good game for me, the random crime aspect is more of a novelty then anything.
On the flipside of alterated reality....
Anytime I play a game for more then 4 hours in one day, I'm almost guaranteed to have dreams all night about it, in all kinds of indirect mixed-reality ways, and sometimes will even wake up somewhat mentally exhausted from having dealt with all those game type challenges all night long.
I think that if I play a very difficult game and put it down after having my ass handed to me then go to sleep soon after, I don't remember having any dreams about it, but I'll often wake up the next day and utterly obliterate whatever it was that was giving me trouble.
I get the same effect when programming, which has kind of led me to never just sit there toiling away on something difficult, but to take lots of little breaks and not even think about the thing giving me trouble until something from my subconcious surfaces with a clue.
I suppose from a practical perspective that's how you'd use star power, but when I think of the word shill I guess I'm picturing somebody who is -totally- lying. I see Splinter Cell as being a good enough of a game that I can imagine it being a person's favorite game, I mean, it was my favorite game while I was playing it, otherwise I'd have been playing a different game instead most of the time.
When I think shill, I'm picturing the guy who is in coherts with the shell game guy on the street, basically a total dupe. I picture Krusty the Clown eating a Krusty burger for an ad and then spitting it out after the camera turns off. Just to me anyways, the word shill is such an extreme categorization that it should be reserved for instances of total deceit.
I really don't see how you can so easily disregard the possibility that genes, or at least in someway, gender, has something to do with liking video games.
My mom used to believe that all behavior was nurture, and not nature, until she became a preschool teacher. 10 years of 3 and 4 year old boys turning absolutely everything into a gun and girls turning everything into a doll house kinda wears down those lofty notions. Even if it is still is nurture based on some really complex societal stuff, the practical upshot remains, an obvious behavior difference tied to gender.
I admit this is a totally subjective observation, but boys seem more drawn to clear cut competition with well defined winners and losers whereas while girls can be very competitive, it tends to be much more subtle and indirect. To me that's the most obvious reason video games seem so much more likely to appeal to men. "YOU LOSE" "YOU WIN" It just seems to be attached to an emotional hair trigger in the male pysche. Games that purposely defy that rigid convention are more likely to appeal to women in my opinion, The Sims being a fairly obvious example.
"Am I the only one who thinks there is at least a bit of Milli Vanilli or Backstreet Boys to this group? Do they have anything to do with girls in gaming,... "
You are implying that they aren't really playing their own games are you not? Because Milli Vanilli and the Backstreet Boys lipsync their performances? What other analogy could there be there? Heck, that doesn't even matter, if you question whether or not they have anything to do with girls in gaming, you are directly saying they aren't gamers at all.
Your new, more valid, point of there being no unattractive females in the group is -entirely- seperate from your original point that these girls are probably not real gamers. This is the debate equivalent of a bait and switch with a bonus serving of two personal attacks.
Some people think Scary Movie 2 is the greatest movie of all time. You realize that calling a game your favorite is -entirely- subjective right? No top 100 list neccesarily has anything to do with that.
Having said that, I agree that it's pretty obvious that particular choice would seem rather heavily affected by their status as being sponsored by Ubisoft. But at least Splinter Cell is indeed actually a very good game, the true total shill would have promoted their most underperforming game. Heck, who's to say that the cause and effect relationship isn't actually in reverse? Wouldn't being a preexisting Ubisoft fangirl make her more likely to end up becoming sponsored by them?
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
And since I said 'probably' and not 'definitely', that concept doesn't really apply. It's not really the kind of thing that you prove one way or another, it's really more of a perpsective I was just sharing based on personal experience.
In fact, just because you -think- you would have been happy there as a fulltime employee doesn't mean you can prove you would have been, therefore, your example doesn't really disprove anything. You just assume your experience as an intern would extend to full time employment, is there some kind of provable theory that shows that to be true?
It's yet another unprovable thought. Disregarding it as 'incorrect' based on your own personal presumption as to what could have been is somewhat of a busted strategy in my opinion.
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
Umm. Sorry to hear that, but I did say 'probably', so one example doesn't really disprove my 'theory.'
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Any time a place of employment has a filter you disagree with, it works both ways. If you don't like their filters, you probably also wouldn't like working there, saving you from a most likely bad employment experience.
A few things that are seriously uncool about Steam thus far:
Mandatory patches that actually made the game stutter worse for quite a few people with no possibility of reverting.
The ability to lose value. Half Life 2 Silver comes with the back catalog of Steam games right? Well I bought that into my existing steam account, what that means is that my old original Half Life CD key was basically absorbed into nothingness. If I wanted to play LAN Half Life games, I'd have to buy another copy of Half Life now even though I 've bought 2 copies.
"Scanning" I have no idea what this was but it basically used my full upstream bandwidth for several hours out of nowhere. No explanation what it was doing at all.
Since direct to consumer game publishing has existed for a long time, it doesn't really bring anything good or new to the table.
If every game developer followed in their footsteps, how many little icons do you think the average gamer is going to end up with in their taskbar? Spinning CPU cycles, downloading things in the background, randomly consuming bandwidth while they are trying to play a game from a different developer.... Something that has already happened to me.
The one, and nearly only thing, I miss about living in the midwest are those absolutely magic moments in fresh snow... Although I only actually went sleigh riding once, and caroling a few times... those memories are so deeply etched in my mind, I somewhat feel that raising children without similar experiences is a kind of crime.
Changing topics suddenly, has anybody else felt that something about the bitter cold makes people friendlier? Many of my memories of people being unexpectedly friendly and myself performing totally random acts of kindness are tied to frigid cold conditions. I really feel there is some kind of deep rooted response to helping others through a cold winter that is a strong part of the human pysche.
There are already people that go absolutely nuts with their digital cameras and are taking pictures near constantly.
I don't know what's worse. Having to constantly be in photo mode around them or enduring having to look at various fairly mundane photos every single time you see them. It's worse then the cliche of vacation slides.
My prediction (or rather hope) is that this will be a self defeating trend, as the technology makes this behavior more accessible for a larger group of people, it will be progressively lampooned and ridiculed.
The alternative to me is disturbing.
It becomes normal for everybody to have some mega phone with mega pixel camera and powerful flash, if anything interesting ever happens and you -don't- record it, people will think your lying since it would have been so easy to do so. Conversational storytelling dies because it's normal to just show them and they go "ok, heh heh, wow, uhmm.. (pregnant silence).. any new clips on RealTV's vidsite?"
Ideally the test would include the question "Does anybody want to ever hear the phrase 'elephantine vocabulary'?"
Sorry, just messing with you, but it just vaguely reminds me of something one of my all time favorite teachers taught me. Not about the phrase itself, but the claim to having a large vocabularly.
We had an ongoing assignment where we had to write penpal letters my senior year in high school to random freshmen, about anything at all. I filled my letters full of 64 dollar words and was rather proud of myself for being over the head of whoever the other person was.
My teacher would simply grade the return paper "Building a wall," which I ignored at first.
Eventually I bit and asked, what do you mean? "What do you get out of people not understanding you?" It changed my entire perspective on what it meant to write.
A large vocabulary is definitely a good thing, but it has to be used with prudence.
Given the fact that I'm a college drop out, I'm probably not the best person to be advocating liberal arts requirements. But either way, looking back, what english courses I did take probably have stuck to me more then anything else, particularly anything CS related.
Every interview I've been in, the ability to communicate clearly and pleasantly really has been the single most important factor. From working experience, people that can't articulate well without being vague are one of the biggest sources of mistakes and frustration. The only job interview I was turned down on was because I wasn't talkative enough, so perhaps that's skewed my perspective some.
To me the main failure of college wasn't unneccesary curriculum, it was that my own personal studies into my major were way more educational. I can count on my fingers the number of times I actually learned something I hadn't already studied. I suppose that makes my situation quite a bit different, don't Heald and Devry offer to some extent what you are looking for?
My ideal situation looking back would have been able to gain all the computer science prereq credits, all the way up to a graduate program for the most part, with personal study and my own resources. At the time I wouldn't have tried to set something like that up because I figured that the computer classes being so insanely easy was a good thing.
I'm not sure if I'll ever get back to college, the reason I dropped out was because of a fairly nice job offer in the early stages of the dotcom boom. Had I not dropped out, I'd most likely have graduated right into the trailing end of the boom, a less then ideal prospect.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty good at games, so when I read a review by a seasoned gamer, I can more or less relate to their concepts of challenging, frustrating, repetitive, etc.
Naruto could go down as one of the most ruined, but probably still successful, licenses ever if it comes to the US.
It has too much potential kid appeal, and is probably way too expensive of a license, to just dub and put on late night adult swim unedited with all the blood, bone injuries, perverted characters, etc.
I have a friend who does a ton of Excel, which is perhaps the epitome of either massively using the mouse or massively using the keyboard depending on your style...
According to him, one of the major financial institutions, upon hiring an excel monkey of any sort, will take their mouse away for 1 solid month before giving it back.
Whether the story is true or not, it inspired him to try absolutely everything with keyboard before reaching for the mouse and since then he's became way more productive and accurate.
When I was a Senior in High School, we had recently finished building the main networked computer lab. We were bringing teachers in and showing it off to see if they could use it, etc, for their classes.
One of the best programs we had was "Green Globs", an old XT/CGA math "game" that had various exercises like putting 2-D scatter points on a 2-D graph and you'd figure out a single equation that would pass through all the points. More advanced levels would make you only use certain functions, or would introduce boundries you couldn't pass through (so you couldn't just create a super tight sine wave, etc)
So -every- Math teacher in the school was in the lab trying this program out, and I was there basically running everything. It was utterly fascinating. Despite the fact they were all college graduates, most of them struggled like hell with things that many students in the school could easily do.
The main exceptions were the AP Calc and Geometry teachers, they actually formed a little clique and went totally nuts while the rest of them literally looked like dumbfounded Freshmen. One teacher in particular just sat and stared at the screen with glazed over eyes, it was freaking creepy.
There was something very surreal about the whole scene that imprinted itself very strongly into my mind. Particularly seeing the 2 only good teachers group up and make a particularly loud affair out of it in a way that seemed intentionally meant to mock the other teachers.
Side story.. Being almost as instrumental to the creation the first computer lab as the teacher that sponsored it and me exposed me to quite a few interesting things like that. I was basically treated like a faculty member by a decent portion of the staff and so was in on a lot of faculty meetings, had keys to various things, etc.
It totally floored me just how much smack they talk about each other! They are almost like high school students themselves. They cap on other teachers' bald spots, the way they walk, the way they dress, the things they say. They form exclusive lunch cliques that last for -years- in weird out of the way places in the school that most students don't know about. Other teachers are totally outcast and have no friendly relationships with other teachers. Hell, they even capped on students sometimes in private.
My favorite sports games have all been relatively unlicensed ones, with the exception of NBA Street which is a very loose use of the license and even largely revolves around non-licensed players.
With the other sports companies now focusing on their games instead of being true to the real thing or adhering to the various license standards, maybe we'll see more old school action oriented style sports games.
I think a valid question would be, is he even having all that much fun?
He might just be too sheltered. He might be too afraid to deal with reality. Playing video games constantly might just keep his mind off of it and helps him from feeling guilty and worthless, for now. There might be the occassional moments of fun in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of it was just a mind numbing drone.
I've definitely noticed that, but I chalked it up to a very different meaning. I've read a lot of seriously negative reviews where the practical upshot is to not buy the game but it got a 7 or 6.5.
I think reviews tend to work more like grades in school. If your score is 50% of 100%, that's typically a fail, not the average. Below 60 is a total fail, 60-70 is below average, 70-80 is the average range, 80-90 is above average and 90+ is excellent.
... he started threatening them with cut advertising.
I was actually kind of with the guy on the whole "Find audiences for a game instead of just assuming everybody is like you" concept of reviewing, at least if it's a mainstream site. But when he cut into the threats about biting the hand that feeds you, well, I completely lost touch. The last thing a reader wants from a review site is a bought reviewer.
Of course I'm not the audience for that letter, I wonder how much their bottom line was actually affected. So the real question becomes.. how much does that sponsorship affect reviews? Is it possible to quantify it? If you compare reviews for games on sites that have ads for those games to reviews on sites that don't, can you find a coorelation that cross cuts many games? Common sense says that such a coorelation is so likely as to be obvious.
If that's is the case, that really doesn't set up the writer of this letter for ridicule. He's behaving accordingly to the climate. Who's more unscrupulous? Those that accept a bribe or those that offer it?
Well, it's a setting with a lot of advantages:
Twisty street layout means never having to draw that far out.
Gothic spooky look is built in.
Ancient underground vaults make sense with centuries of history.
Since most gamers statistically don't live in small european towns, artistic license can be taken.
And, given the fact that it's Capcom, maybe they have plans for some kind of mega crossover game where all the characters meet?..... yea thats the ticket.
After years and years of way too much gaming, I can only think of a few instances where for a split second my mind gimped out like that..
Too much mario kart made me think I should hop and drift through curves on the freeway to get a mini turbo.
Too much Planetside with too little sleep made me trip out and I thought I saw a cloaker moving out of the corner of my eye a few times.
I think burnout 3 was the most disturbing of all though, as it had me thinking for just a split second that a head on collision would be cool.
Too much tetris had the theme play as an auditory hallucination once when I opened the freezer, not in my head, but literally in my ears. I read some explanation somewhere that anytime you listen to a sound way too much, your brain might eventually reprogram to think of it as the 'null sound' and next time you hear a droning natural 'null sound' like the freezer compressor your brain inserts the new 'null sound'? Anybody know anything about that?
I never once had anything from grand theft auto and I've played them all a ton.. I consider that game to be a personality test basically, I don't get anything out of randomly killing people in that game, I think that as a run and gun shooter it has pretty terrible gameplay, it's the driving, exploration and storyline that make it a good game for me, the random crime aspect is more of a novelty then anything.
On the flipside of alterated reality....
Anytime I play a game for more then 4 hours in one day, I'm almost guaranteed to have dreams all night about it, in all kinds of indirect mixed-reality ways, and sometimes will even wake up somewhat mentally exhausted from having dealt with all those game type challenges all night long.
I think that if I play a very difficult game and put it down after having my ass handed to me then go to sleep soon after, I don't remember having any dreams about it, but I'll often wake up the next day and utterly obliterate whatever it was that was giving me trouble.
I get the same effect when programming, which has kind of led me to never just sit there toiling away on something difficult, but to take lots of little breaks and not even think about the thing giving me trouble until something from my subconcious surfaces with a clue.
Allow oppressed people to anonymously distribute large incriminating videos of their corrupt government?
In a better world it would be odd, but in this one, it actually makes sense to have more respect for a porn model then for the president.
I suppose from a practical perspective that's how you'd use star power, but when I think of the word shill I guess I'm picturing somebody who is -totally- lying. I see Splinter Cell as being a good enough of a game that I can imagine it being a person's favorite game, I mean, it was my favorite game while I was playing it, otherwise I'd have been playing a different game instead most of the time.
When I think shill, I'm picturing the guy who is in coherts with the shell game guy on the street, basically a total dupe. I picture Krusty the Clown eating a Krusty burger for an ad and then spitting it out after the camera turns off. Just to me anyways, the word shill is such an extreme categorization that it should be reserved for instances of total deceit.
I really don't see how you can so easily disregard the possibility that genes, or at least in someway, gender, has something to do with liking video games.
My mom used to believe that all behavior was nurture, and not nature, until she became a preschool teacher. 10 years of 3 and 4 year old boys turning absolutely everything into a gun and girls turning everything into a doll house kinda wears down those lofty notions. Even if it is still is nurture based on some really complex societal stuff, the practical upshot remains, an obvious behavior difference tied to gender.
I admit this is a totally subjective observation, but boys seem more drawn to clear cut competition with well defined winners and losers whereas while girls can be very competitive, it tends to be much more subtle and indirect. To me that's the most obvious reason video games seem so much more likely to appeal to men. "YOU LOSE" "YOU WIN" It just seems to be attached to an emotional hair trigger in the male pysche. Games that purposely defy that rigid convention are more likely to appeal to women in my opinion, The Sims being a fairly obvious example.
No, I think he read it quite correctly.
... "
"Am I the only one who thinks there is at least a bit of Milli Vanilli or Backstreet Boys to this group? Do they have anything to do with girls in gaming,
You are implying that they aren't really playing their own games are you not? Because Milli Vanilli and the Backstreet Boys lipsync their performances? What other analogy could there be there? Heck, that doesn't even matter, if you question whether or not they have anything to do with girls in gaming, you are directly saying they aren't gamers at all.
Your new, more valid, point of there being no unattractive females in the group is -entirely- seperate from your original point that these girls are probably not real gamers. This is the debate equivalent of a bait and switch with a bonus serving of two personal attacks.
Some people think Scary Movie 2 is the greatest movie of all time. You realize that calling a game your favorite is -entirely- subjective right? No top 100 list neccesarily has anything to do with that.
Having said that, I agree that it's pretty obvious that particular choice would seem rather heavily affected by their status as being sponsored by Ubisoft. But at least Splinter Cell is indeed actually a very good game, the true total shill would have promoted their most underperforming game. Heck, who's to say that the cause and effect relationship isn't actually in reverse? Wouldn't being a preexisting Ubisoft fangirl make her more likely to end up becoming sponsored by them?
And since I said 'probably' and not 'definitely', that concept doesn't really apply. It's not really the kind of thing that you prove one way or another, it's really more of a perpsective I was just sharing based on personal experience.
In fact, just because you -think- you would have been happy there as a fulltime employee doesn't mean you can prove you would have been, therefore, your example doesn't really disprove anything. You just assume your experience as an intern would extend to full time employment, is there some kind of provable theory that shows that to be true?
It's yet another unprovable thought. Disregarding it as 'incorrect' based on your own personal presumption as to what could have been is somewhat of a busted strategy in my opinion.
Umm. Sorry to hear that, but I did say 'probably', so one example doesn't really disprove my 'theory.'
Any time a place of employment has a filter you disagree with, it works both ways. If you don't like their filters, you probably also wouldn't like working there, saving you from a most likely bad employment experience.
A few things that are seriously uncool about Steam thus far:
Mandatory patches that actually made the game stutter worse for quite a few people with no possibility of reverting.
The ability to lose value. Half Life 2 Silver comes with the back catalog of Steam games right? Well I bought that into my existing steam account, what that means is that my old original Half Life CD key was basically absorbed into nothingness. If I wanted to play LAN Half Life games, I'd have to buy another copy of Half Life now even though I 've bought 2 copies.
"Scanning" I have no idea what this was but it basically used my full upstream bandwidth for several hours out of nowhere. No explanation what it was doing at all.
Since direct to consumer game publishing has existed for a long time, it doesn't really bring anything good or new to the table.
If every game developer followed in their footsteps, how many little icons do you think the average gamer is going to end up with in their taskbar? Spinning CPU cycles, downloading things in the background, randomly consuming bandwidth while they are trying to play a game from a different developer.... Something that has already happened to me.
^$^@#%!@#%^
The one, and nearly only thing, I miss about living in the midwest are those absolutely magic moments in fresh snow... Although I only actually went sleigh riding once, and caroling a few times... those memories are so deeply etched in my mind, I somewhat feel that raising children without similar experiences is a kind of crime.
Changing topics suddenly, has anybody else felt that something about the bitter cold makes people friendlier? Many of my memories of people being unexpectedly friendly and myself performing totally random acts of kindness are tied to frigid cold conditions. I really feel there is some kind of deep rooted response to helping others through a cold winter that is a strong part of the human pysche.
There are already people that go absolutely nuts with their digital cameras and are taking pictures near constantly.
I don't know what's worse. Having to constantly be in photo mode around them or enduring having to look at various fairly mundane photos every single time you see them. It's worse then the cliche of vacation slides.
My prediction (or rather hope) is that this will be a self defeating trend, as the technology makes this behavior more accessible for a larger group of people, it will be progressively lampooned and ridiculed.
The alternative to me is disturbing.
It becomes normal for everybody to have some mega phone with mega pixel camera and powerful flash, if anything interesting ever happens and you -don't- record it, people will think your lying since it would have been so easy to do so. Conversational storytelling dies because it's normal to just show them and they go "ok, heh heh, wow, uhmm.. (pregnant silence).. any new clips on RealTV's vidsite?"
It's fairly obvious those blogs aren't directly published by the troops but go through some kind of third party.
Ideally the test would include the question "Does anybody want to ever hear the phrase 'elephantine vocabulary'?"
Sorry, just messing with you, but it just vaguely reminds me of something one of my all time favorite teachers taught me. Not about the phrase itself, but the claim to having a large vocabularly.
We had an ongoing assignment where we had to write penpal letters my senior year in high school to random freshmen, about anything at all. I filled my letters full of 64 dollar words and was rather proud of myself for being over the head of whoever the other person was.
My teacher would simply grade the return paper "Building a wall," which I ignored at first.
Eventually I bit and asked, what do you mean? "What do you get out of people not understanding you?" It changed my entire perspective on what it meant to write.
A large vocabulary is definitely a good thing, but it has to be used with prudence.
Given the fact that I'm a college drop out, I'm probably not the best person to be advocating liberal arts requirements. But either way, looking back, what english courses I did take probably have stuck to me more then anything else, particularly anything CS related.
Every interview I've been in, the ability to communicate clearly and pleasantly really has been the single most important factor. From working experience, people that can't articulate well without being vague are one of the biggest sources of mistakes and frustration. The only job interview I was turned down on was because I wasn't talkative enough, so perhaps that's skewed my perspective some.
To me the main failure of college wasn't unneccesary curriculum, it was that my own personal studies into my major were way more educational. I can count on my fingers the number of times I actually learned something I hadn't already studied. I suppose that makes my situation quite a bit different, don't Heald and Devry offer to some extent what you are looking for?
My ideal situation looking back would have been able to gain all the computer science prereq credits, all the way up to a graduate program for the most part, with personal study and my own resources. At the time I wouldn't have tried to set something like that up because I figured that the computer classes being so insanely easy was a good thing.
I'm not sure if I'll ever get back to college, the reason I dropped out was because of a fairly nice job offer in the early stages of the dotcom boom. Had I not dropped out, I'd most likely have graduated right into the trailing end of the boom, a less then ideal prospect.