You have to ask yourself a few things when you read this. after most everyone loses their manufacturing and IT jobs what will we all do for work. We all can't work for hot dog on a stick! Can we? I mean if thats what I have to look forward to then it's time to leave the country
You are absolutely right. Even though unemployment remains below five and a half percent, the whole nation is clearly going to Hell in a bucket. It is indeed time for you to leave. Take Alec Baldwin with you. He's been saying he's going to leave for a while now, so clearly he's just been waiting for a carpooling buddy.
Good luck in your new country. We will all really, really miss you back here in the states while we live in squalor and work at hot dog stands with no hope of ever having a better life. Really. We're sad to see you go, but understand that it's in your best interest.
Does anybody even buy palmtop computers anymore? For about ten minutes, every executive wanted one to replace their paper-based Franklin Daytimer, but now it seems that everybody uses their cell phones to do 90% of what they actually used their Palm computers for (address book & schedule reminders), and everybody just brings yellow legal pads to meetings when they want to pretend that they are taking notes and paying attention.
It's been about three years since I've seen anybody take notes on a palmtop in a meeting, and if somebody did they would probably be laughed at.
What normal people mean is competition between different companies. d20 has been very, very good for that.
What it seems you mean is a mindshare competition between various game systems. I would put it to you that such a competition never really existed. Yes, "Call of Cthulu" used a different game system than "Champions", which used a different system than "Paranioa", but nobody selected those games based on the system. They chose them based on content.
The only game systems to have gained any traction at all were GURPS and Rifts.
GURPS was a pretty good system, which could be applied to nearly any genre, but only as products licensed by Steve Jackson Games. You and I could not publish a GURPS based sourcebook if we wanted to. Steve Jackson Games published relatively good sourcebooks for a few genres, but really useless ones for others.
Rifts was really it's own multi-genre game in itself.
Both were already withering on the vine long before d20 made the scene.
The "d20" section at my local hobby store is perhaps slightly larger than the "D&D" section was back in the 2nd Edition days.
Also, take not that the introduction of d20 has done nothing to dampen the enthusiam of those who like "diceless" games like "Vampire: The Masquerade" and other books from White Wolf. Nor have they made a dent in the uber-geeky LARPing community.... especially as D&D itself wasn't a particularly huge success.
What?
Huh?
Name a pencil & paper RPG which out-sells D&D.
Find me a hobby store in which another RPG occupies more shelf space.
Ask 100 random folks on the street if they know what a Role Playing Game is, and of the fifteen or so who say "yes", see how many of them can name one besides D&D.
3rd Edition D&D, for all it's faults, rescued the traditional RPG from the total obscurity to which it once seemed utterly doomed thanks to the rise of card-trading games and computer-based fantasy games.
The use of the word "leverage" as a verb in a press release is something I consider a bit revealing. It sort of confirms that yet another game maker has evolved to become a Big Company.
Next they will be talking about partnering with strategic enterprises to form key synergies and maximize the potential of their core infrastructure.
Meanwhile, somewhere a couple geeks in a garage are burning a little venture capital (along with a loan from a rich uncle) to come up with something way cooler than these people ever would have conceived, let alone considered...... or so I would like to think.
I found CoH to be superior in most ways (interface, content, originality, creativity of quests, character design, etc.) over WoW.
That said, I dropped my CoH account and have completely switched to WoW. I did so for one reason and one reason only: Almost nobody I know is playing City of Heroes, while it seems that everybody and his kid brother are playing World of Warcraft. If I want to game with my friends and colleagues, it has to be in World of Warcraft.
This is entirely a result of Blizzard's huge reputation for making fun games. NCSoft is big in Asia, but virtually unkown here. The only people who will continue to favor CoH over other MMORPG's are those who feel a strong preference for the comic-book superhero genre over Tolkien-esque fantasy. Which is fine, but it does mean that CoH will become more of a niche community.
With MMORPG's, it's always "come for the gameplay, stay for the human interaction." There's nothing about any of these games to keep me playing them for more than a month or two, but hanging out online with people I know from distant locations while enjoying the game content has some appeal. They are not really games, they are chat rooms with fun diversions. Therefore the most popular one (with the circles I run in) wins my dollars. If everybody I knew moved to EQ2, so would I.
Dawkins' "The selfish gene" is really good. It'll change your view of the world.
"The Selfish Gene" and various prisoners dilemma games never really taught me anything about the world and/or human nature that I didn't already know.
What they did teach me was a great deal about the sort of person who would ask a classroom full of students to play such a game.
It was the first encounter with "big picture" elitism of my young life, and really gave me a lot of useful tools for recognizing and avoiding such people.
Wow. That comic was not very funny, and really poorly drawn. I looked at some of the others, and found that none of the ones I saw were funny either. People actually take time out of their day to read that?
Back on the topic of what you are talking about, shorthand in game chat never bothered me very much... with the one exception of people typing "plz" as a substitute for "please" when they are asking for something.
I mean, you are asking me to do you a favor, but you are unwilling to type six letters to ask politly... yet you will type three letters in the hope that your half-hearted effort at pretending you have manners will pursuade me to do something for you.
I don't know why that bugs me, but it does. If somebody walks up to my cleric and says, "heal me plz," I am actually less inclined to help them than somebody who simply says "I need healing."
On the other hand, even though I don't do it myself, somebody subbing "r u" for "are you" doesn't bother me in the least. I'm old school: Long before there was '1337 5p33k, there was Prince.
Not as good as some other game systems, such as GURPS, but a definite improvement over any method TSR has ever come up with for handling pencil&paper RPG mechanics.
And it has not killed off competition at all. Quite the opposite. Prior to the d20 license, a company or writer with a good idea for a game would need to design their own rules system from scratch (which usually resulted in terrible games), or else sell the concept to a company like Steve Jackson Games, who already had a universal system.
Now, games like "Call of Cthulu" and "Big Eyes, Small Mouth" can publish their games using slightly-modifed d20 systems, spending their time developping interesting content, instead of drawing up and play-testing combat tables.
Plus, since players who have used d20 for Dungeon and Dragons already know the system, there is no longer the "that game looks cool but I don't feel like learning a whole new system" effect which used to plague game publishers in the past.
So d20, while far from perfect, has actually been a bonanza for game makers.
Besides, the analogy clearly doesn't apply to World of Warcraft, because Blizzard surely has no intention of giving their game engine away to the competition.
Also, in a world where Linux sucked and Linus was a Red Hat employee, geeks would just use BSD.
(Actually, our world is one in which Linux only kinda sucks, Linus works for Transmeta, and reall geeks use BSD anyway. Flame on!!!)
The first mistake the reviewer made here was reading the book.
This is not a book to be read. It's a coffee table book about D&D. It's meant to be purchased as a semi-thoughtful gift by people who know nothing about the game, given to relatives who are into it.
Each copy will then (in theory) be "on display" in the giftee's living room. Of course, the typical D&D nerd has a coffee table completely covered in half-painted miniatures, stacks of Japanese manga, and empty pizza boxes, so it's hardly a showcase for fashionable hardcover literature... but it's the thought that counts.
Many of these books will sell, but precious few of them will every actually be read. Reviewing the content (or layout, for that matter) is completely missing the point.
We had a small PC gaming center in the Twin Cites back in the early days of LAN parties (right about when Quake was coming out.)
There are only two ways to make money doing something like this.
1. Make money on the "back end" somehow. Just like how movie theaters make all their Real Money selling popcorn, a gaming center needs to make money from something other than the $5-7 per hour that gamers are willing to pay. We kept the lights on for a while by leasing the space out as a computer training center during the day. A similar place that went up about a year after we shut down sells video cards and snack food. Neither model makes enough to let you quit your day job, or even recover your investment before the PCs become obsolete, but it's better than nothing, and running that business was a fun hobby for a couple years. In the end, we closed it down because none of us wanted to spend our free time working as a cashier at what was basically an arcade anymore, and hiring some kid to do it would have actually made it cost more money to be open than to be closed. We just floated along as long as we could off the daytime leasing money, and had our own private gaming center in the evenings (allowing the occational customer to join us on the nights we had it open.)
2. Go big. Make it huge and elaborate, and attract massive investment for the "next generation" of arcade. Don't put any of your own money into it, because it will fail, but you can probably get some venture capatalists with stars in their eyes to bankroll your playtime for a year or two, if you are skilled at selling such a concept.
Wired magazine ran a very interesting chart last week showing the levels of campaign contributions.
The candidates in the last election had a lower percentage of corporate gifts (or PACs or Unions) than any modern Presidential candidates.
Well over 70% John Kerry's funding came from single-donor contributions of $2000 or less. Most of the remaining funding came from corporations, and a little from PACs and Unions.
George W. Bush's funding? 92%
Granted, George Soros and a few other rich Democrats managed to slip in a lot of pro-Kerry money through 527s, but there were very few 527s which relied heavilly on corporation money.
The only pro-Bush 527 of note (the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) probably even came close to turning a small profit, thanks to the sale of their best-selling Kerry-bashing book.
In other words, candidates from both parties relied much more on passing the hat among ordinary citizens to fund their campaigns than on corporate money.
So the bottom line here: The notion that corporations like ADM (one of the largest corporate contributers to both parties) "own" our candidates, while very sexy and fashionable to believe, is a total myth.
In spite of all the Frontline documetaries "investigating" the golf tournaments and dinners that corporate donors get, the actual numbers show that both Kerry and Bush were both, contrary to conventional wisdom, grassroots candidates who raised most of their money via church meetings, mass mailings, and web sites.
When people get over their knee-jerk "anything that has anything to do with copyright must be t3h suck" reactions, they will hopefully realize that this "IP Czar" idea is a Good Thing.
IP law is currently enforced by the Justice Department. About three years ago, we were all forcefully made aware that the top levels of our federal enforcement agencies have more important things to do with their time. Shuffling these responsibilities off into a separate, relatively low-cost, department with it's own management frees up a lot of resources that are better used elsewhere.
For us Regular Joes, it probably only means that the annoying FBI warnings on our DVDs will now be replaced with an annoying IP Czar warning. You can all take off the tin foil hats.
Gawd... I am so sick of people trotting out "Maus" every time "great comics" are discussed. It was an over-rated piece of fluff which gained widespread recognition simply because it was one of the first comics marketed in bookstores, and was reviewed by people who probably never would have considered giving something like Watchmen or Sandman a chance.
Here's the Cliff's notes for you:
It's Yet Another story of Holocost survivors, except the big twist here is that the nazis are all drawn as cats and... get this, this is dynomite... the jews are all drawn as mice!!!
Congratulations. You now know everything you need to know about Maus. Go rent Shindler's List instead and you will save yourself some time, while still getting just as much out of the experience.
There are a lot of very creative stories (which had nothing to do with "super-hero" fantasies) told using drawings & text. Maus has never been a particularilly good example.
It sounds like picking up "The Watchmen" as a way to start/renew reading comics(1) may be a bad thing.(2) If it is indeed "the greatest" comicbook,(3) then anything else in the genre won't be as good(4) and you'll probably tire of the genre pretty fast, having sampled its best.(5)
(1)I did. (2)It was. (3)It is. (4)It wasn't. (5)I did.
The Watchmen is the only comic book story I've ever seen which had to be told in a comic book, because no other medium could do the work justice. It wasn't just a great story which was told through comics, it was a complete work of art which would not be nearly as compelling in any other form.
For example, the comic-within-the-comic that wove through the story. The panels of the kid's pirate comic were juxtaposed agaist the scenes on the street where he was reading it, describing the emotional context of both images as if it could have been the narration box for either scene. Even Terry Gilliam, who briefly considered making a Watchmen film, understood that you could never make something like that work in a motion picture.
The clippings of fictional periodicals which provided much of the depth of the world were also something which could only be done in a comic-book format.
Furthermore, the writers of some of those periodicals, as well as the writer of the pirate comic, were extremely important characters to the narrative, who we got to know almost exclusively through "their" writings. Genius!
The Watchmen will probably continue to stand alone as the most ground-breaking and important work in an art-form which is usually very crass and disposable.
The film however... Let's face it: It probably won't get made, and if it does it will probably suck.
I think it's a Red State vs Blue State kind of thing. NC is a Red State, so you'll see a lot of the players with the WMA Ready sticker on them, whereas NY is a Blue State so you'll see more iPod's.
More likely, it's a public transportation thing.
People who take trains, busses and ferry boats to work were the first ones to buy Walkman radios back in the day. This is pretty much the same trend. Having headphones means not having to talk to the weirdo sitting next to you on the bus. Having an iPod instead of a radio means you won't lose the signal when you go through a tunnel. For somebody who spends two hours a day in such an environment, $400 probably doesn't seem like a lot of money to spend on making the time more pleasant.
People mostly drive to work in "Jesusland", so even when they listen to iPods during their commute, nobody else sees them.
Disclaimer: I live in the suburbs of a "light blue" state and drive to work. Nevertheless, I would rather go without the use of my legs than go without my iPod.
P.S. Not to nit-pick, but if you shade by percentage of victory in each district, and most states are actually solid purple. I think that people are making a little too much of "cultural differences" between the states.
If you like the iPod as an mp3 player, and have the money, then buy it. If you think the Zen is a better player, then buy that. Who cares how "cool" you look with either.
He's not tyring to look "cool." He's trying to go out of his way not to look "cool"... because that's way less self-centered than somebody who wants to be seen listening to their iPod.
I downloaded the open beta fully intending to play while it was free and not get into it when the full game comes out.
However, I was totally hooked and will be getting a copy as soon as i can.
Why do you think they do open betas? QA!?
It should be noted, however, that although the game is great fun, it doesnt have the quite "finished" feel, if for no other reason that there is a lot of imbalance between the classes.
Paladins and Shamans seem to be considerably better than most other classes: some classes, like druid are pretty poor (I speak as a druid, and I love the druid abilities, but we do suck.)
Admittedly, most of the "discussion" on the forums seem to be bitching about other classes being too powerful, and requests to have things nerfed, but there IS a class imbalance. Its not even like Blizzard are trying to keep things balanced, they seem to be taking a more "fix the alliance map, fix this class, fix that class" rather than gradually improving everything.
Welcome to the world of MMORPG's. This is always the case. If you don't believe me, visit the user boards for City of Heroes (where every class except the Blaster has people saying they love the class but consider it critically underpowered... and the Blasters whine about how easilly they get killed.)
Don't even get me started on the SQG Jedi.
Game balance is so close to impossible, it's best that you just never worry about it, and play the character type which you enjoy most. Who cares if the game comes easier to some people because the munchkin out on the "best" classes. Those are like people who keep Soul Calibur dialed down to the "Easy" setting, even after they've unlocked all the characters. Be proud that you are not like them.
Also, it takes forever to get anywhere. I nearly quit playing after my second day because i was so bored just walking from place to place; it can take 15 minutes, just walking, to get to certain areas. If you wanted to walk across the entire map, you could be talking about hours.
Also true of nearly every MMORPG. If it doesn't take forever to get anywhere, users complain that the world is too small. This often leads to game designers caving in to customer demand for widespread "teleporting" abilities of some sort or another. Maybe WoW will have this sort of thing hammered out by the time it becomes available in the EU.
That reminds me of a funny (somewhat apocraphal) space-flight puking story.
For one NASA flight, a frog was brought along on a mission for research testing, and as soon as they entered a zero-G environment, the frog not only puked, but actually inverted it's entire actual stomach outside of it's mouth, wiped the stomach walls clean with it's little front feet in a frenzied panic, and then shoved the stomache back down it's throat. After that, the it was fine.
There have been many times, particularilly after drinking tequila, in which I wished I was capable of doing that.
Unless the public gets all in an uproar about this, I don't see this as happening. It could potential interfere with the US military's superiority in this field, and what the Pentagon wants, it gets. They have far, far, FAR more money available in their PR budget than private entrepreneurs (either individually or collectively) ever will, and the result will most likely be determined accordingly.
Right, because we have a vast fleet of military spaceships, and it's not like anybody could ever put a commercial satelite into orbit from a French-owned island near the Equator. We are the only country in the world who goes into space, and we only do so for military reasons.
Oh wait, I just remembered... None of that is true.
If you choose to not vote, that is an indication that you are fine with whichever candidate is chosen by the majority of voters, so using your numbers Bush actually enjoys the support of ~252 Million Americans, vs. the ~48M who voted against him.
A state agriculture commissioner election do-over, not on Election Day, when there is no election for President or any other high office going on at the same time?
Don't worry. 17 people will show up, all relatives of one candidate or the other. I think they will find a way to get it done.
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You have to ask yourself a few things when you read this. after most everyone loses their manufacturing and IT jobs what will we all do for work. We all can't work for hot dog on a stick! Can we? I mean if thats what I have to look forward to then it's time to leave the country
You are absolutely right. Even though unemployment remains below five and a half percent, the whole nation is clearly going to Hell in a bucket. It is indeed time for you to leave. Take Alec Baldwin with you. He's been saying he's going to leave for a while now, so clearly he's just been waiting for a carpooling buddy.
Good luck in your new country. We will all really, really miss you back here in the states while we live in squalor and work at hot dog stands with no hope of ever having a better life. Really. We're sad to see you go, but understand that it's in your best interest.
Does anybody even buy palmtop computers anymore? For about ten minutes, every executive wanted one to replace their paper-based Franklin Daytimer, but now it seems that everybody uses their cell phones to do 90% of what they actually used their Palm computers for (address book & schedule reminders), and everybody just brings yellow legal pads to meetings when they want to pretend that they are taking notes and paying attention.
It's been about three years since I've seen anybody take notes on a palmtop in a meeting, and if somebody did they would probably be laughed at.
That depends on what you mean by "competition."
... especially as D&D itself wasn't a particularly huge success.
What normal people mean is competition between different companies. d20 has been very, very good for that.
What it seems you mean is a mindshare competition between various game systems. I would put it to you that such a competition never really existed. Yes, "Call of Cthulu" used a different game system than "Champions", which used a different system than "Paranioa", but nobody selected those games based on the system. They chose them based on content.
The only game systems to have gained any traction at all were GURPS and Rifts.
GURPS was a pretty good system, which could be applied to nearly any genre, but only as products licensed by Steve Jackson Games. You and I could not publish a GURPS based sourcebook if we wanted to. Steve Jackson Games published relatively good sourcebooks for a few genres, but really useless ones for others.
Rifts was really it's own multi-genre game in itself.
Both were already withering on the vine long before d20 made the scene.
The "d20" section at my local hobby store is perhaps slightly larger than the "D&D" section was back in the 2nd Edition days.
Also, take not that the introduction of d20 has done nothing to dampen the enthusiam of those who like "diceless" games like "Vampire: The Masquerade" and other books from White Wolf. Nor have they made a dent in the uber-geeky LARPing community.
What?
Huh?
Name a pencil & paper RPG which out-sells D&D.
Find me a hobby store in which another RPG occupies more shelf space.
Ask 100 random folks on the street if they know what a Role Playing Game is, and of the fifteen or so who say "yes", see how many of them can name one besides D&D.
3rd Edition D&D, for all it's faults, rescued the traditional RPG from the total obscurity to which it once seemed utterly doomed thanks to the rise of card-trading games and computer-based fantasy games.
The use of the word "leverage" as a verb in a press release is something I consider a bit revealing. It sort of confirms that yet another game maker has evolved to become a Big Company.
... or so I would like to think.
Next they will be talking about partnering with strategic enterprises to form key synergies and maximize the potential of their core infrastructure.
Meanwhile, somewhere a couple geeks in a garage are burning a little venture capital (along with a loan from a rich uncle) to come up with something way cooler than these people ever would have conceived, let alone considered...
I found CoH to be superior in most ways (interface, content, originality, creativity of quests, character design, etc.) over WoW.
That said, I dropped my CoH account and have completely switched to WoW. I did so for one reason and one reason only: Almost nobody I know is playing City of Heroes, while it seems that everybody and his kid brother are playing World of Warcraft. If I want to game with my friends and colleagues, it has to be in World of Warcraft.
This is entirely a result of Blizzard's huge reputation for making fun games. NCSoft is big in Asia, but virtually unkown here. The only people who will continue to favor CoH over other MMORPG's are those who feel a strong preference for the comic-book superhero genre over Tolkien-esque fantasy. Which is fine, but it does mean that CoH will become more of a niche community.
With MMORPG's, it's always "come for the gameplay, stay for the human interaction." There's nothing about any of these games to keep me playing them for more than a month or two, but hanging out online with people I know from distant locations while enjoying the game content has some appeal. They are not really games, they are chat rooms with fun diversions. Therefore the most popular one (with the circles I run in) wins my dollars. If everybody I knew moved to EQ2, so would I.
Dawkins' "The selfish gene" is really good. It'll change your view of the world.
"The Selfish Gene" and various prisoners dilemma games never really taught me anything about the world and/or human nature that I didn't already know.
What they did teach me was a great deal about the sort of person who would ask a classroom full of students to play such a game.
It was the first encounter with "big picture" elitism of my young life, and really gave me a lot of useful tools for recognizing and avoiding such people.
Wow. That comic was not very funny, and really poorly drawn. I looked at some of the others, and found that none of the ones I saw were funny either. People actually take time out of their day to read that?
Back on the topic of what you are talking about, shorthand in game chat never bothered me very much... with the one exception of people typing "plz" as a substitute for "please" when they are asking for something.
I mean, you are asking me to do you a favor, but you are unwilling to type six letters to ask politly... yet you will type three letters in the hope that your half-hearted effort at pretending you have manners will pursuade me to do something for you.
I don't know why that bugs me, but it does. If somebody walks up to my cleric and says, "heal me plz," I am actually less inclined to help them than somebody who simply says "I need healing."
On the other hand, even though I don't do it myself, somebody subbing "r u" for "are you" doesn't bother me in the least. I'm old school: Long before there was '1337 5p33k, there was Prince.
d20 is actually quite nice.
Not as good as some other game systems, such as GURPS, but a definite improvement over any method TSR has ever come up with for handling pencil&paper RPG mechanics.
And it has not killed off competition at all. Quite the opposite. Prior to the d20 license, a company or writer with a good idea for a game would need to design their own rules system from scratch (which usually resulted in terrible games), or else sell the concept to a company like Steve Jackson Games, who already had a universal system.
Now, games like "Call of Cthulu" and "Big Eyes, Small Mouth" can publish their games using slightly-modifed d20 systems, spending their time developping interesting content, instead of drawing up and play-testing combat tables.
Plus, since players who have used d20 for Dungeon and Dragons already know the system, there is no longer the "that game looks cool but I don't feel like learning a whole new system" effect which used to plague game publishers in the past.
So d20, while far from perfect, has actually been a bonanza for game makers.
Besides, the analogy clearly doesn't apply to World of Warcraft, because Blizzard surely has no intention of giving their game engine away to the competition.
Also, in a world where Linux sucked and Linus was a Red Hat employee, geeks would just use BSD.
(Actually, our world is one in which Linux only kinda sucks, Linus works for Transmeta, and reall geeks use BSD anyway. Flame on!!!)
As an iPod owner, I would consider one of these books a less-welcome gift than the ubiquidous stale fruitcake.
Why would anybody want these books???
The first mistake the reviewer made here was reading the book.
This is not a book to be read. It's a coffee table book about D&D. It's meant to be purchased as a semi-thoughtful gift by people who know nothing about the game, given to relatives who are into it.
Each copy will then (in theory) be "on display" in the giftee's living room. Of course, the typical D&D nerd has a coffee table completely covered in half-painted miniatures, stacks of Japanese manga, and empty pizza boxes, so it's hardly a showcase for fashionable hardcover literature... but it's the thought that counts.
Many of these books will sell, but precious few of them will every actually be read. Reviewing the content (or layout, for that matter) is completely missing the point.
Congratulations. You are officailly Too Hip For the Room.
We had a small PC gaming center in the Twin Cites back in the early days of LAN parties (right about when Quake was coming out.)
There are only two ways to make money doing something like this.
1. Make money on the "back end" somehow. Just like how movie theaters make all their Real Money selling popcorn, a gaming center needs to make money from something other than the $5-7 per hour that gamers are willing to pay. We kept the lights on for a while by leasing the space out as a computer training center during the day. A similar place that went up about a year after we shut down sells video cards and snack food. Neither model makes enough to let you quit your day job, or even recover your investment before the PCs become obsolete, but it's better than nothing, and running that business was a fun hobby for a couple years.
In the end, we closed it down because none of us wanted to spend our free time working as a cashier at what was basically an arcade anymore, and hiring some kid to do it would have actually made it cost more money to be open than to be closed. We just floated along as long as we could off the daytime leasing money, and had our own private gaming center in the evenings (allowing the occational customer to join us on the nights we had it open.)
2. Go big. Make it huge and elaborate, and attract massive investment for the "next generation" of arcade. Don't put any of your own money into it, because it will fail, but you can probably get some venture capatalists with stars in their eyes to bankroll your playtime for a year or two, if you are skilled at selling such a concept.
Sounds like these guys are going for option 2.
Wired magazine ran a very interesting chart last week showing the levels of campaign contributions.
The candidates in the last election had a lower percentage of corporate gifts (or PACs or Unions) than any modern Presidential candidates.
Well over 70% John Kerry's funding came from single-donor contributions of $2000 or less. Most of the remaining funding came from corporations, and a little from PACs and Unions.
George W. Bush's funding? 92%
Granted, George Soros and a few other rich Democrats managed to slip in a lot of pro-Kerry money through 527s, but there were very few 527s which relied heavilly on corporation money.
The only pro-Bush 527 of note (the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) probably even came close to turning a small profit, thanks to the sale of their best-selling Kerry-bashing book.
In other words, candidates from both parties relied much more on passing the hat among ordinary citizens to fund their campaigns than on corporate money.
So the bottom line here: The notion that corporations like ADM (one of the largest corporate contributers to both parties) "own" our candidates, while very sexy and fashionable to believe, is a total myth.
In spite of all the Frontline documetaries "investigating" the golf tournaments and dinners that corporate donors get, the actual numbers show that both Kerry and Bush were both, contrary to conventional wisdom, grassroots candidates who raised most of their money via church meetings, mass mailings, and web sites.
When people get over their knee-jerk "anything that has anything to do with copyright must be t3h suck" reactions, they will hopefully realize that this "IP Czar" idea is a Good Thing.
IP law is currently enforced by the Justice Department. About three years ago, we were all forcefully made aware that the top levels of our federal enforcement agencies have more important things to do with their time. Shuffling these responsibilities off into a separate, relatively low-cost, department with it's own management frees up a lot of resources that are better used elsewhere.
For us Regular Joes, it probably only means that the annoying FBI warnings on our DVDs will now be replaced with an annoying IP Czar warning. You can all take off the tin foil hats.
Gawd... I am so sick of people trotting out "Maus" every time "great comics" are discussed. It was an over-rated piece of fluff which gained widespread recognition simply because it was one of the first comics marketed in bookstores, and was reviewed by people who probably never would have considered giving something like Watchmen or Sandman a chance.
Here's the Cliff's notes for you:
It's Yet Another story of Holocost survivors, except the big twist here is that the nazis are all drawn as cats and... get this, this is dynomite... the jews are all drawn as mice!!!
Congratulations. You now know everything you need to know about Maus. Go rent Shindler's List instead and you will save yourself some time, while still getting just as much out of the experience.
There are a lot of very creative stories (which had nothing to do with "super-hero" fantasies) told using drawings & text. Maus has never been a particularilly good example.
It sounds like picking up "The Watchmen" as a way to start/renew reading comics(1) may be a bad thing.(2) If it is indeed "the greatest" comicbook,(3) then anything else in the genre won't be as good(4) and you'll probably tire of the genre pretty fast, having sampled its best.(5)
(1)I did.
(2)It was.
(3)It is.
(4)It wasn't.
(5)I did.
The Watchmen is the only comic book story I've ever seen which had to be told in a comic book, because no other medium could do the work justice. It wasn't just a great story which was told through comics, it was a complete work of art which would not be nearly as compelling in any other form.
For example, the comic-within-the-comic that wove through the story. The panels of the kid's pirate comic were juxtaposed agaist the scenes on the street where he was reading it, describing the emotional context of both images as if it could have been the narration box for either scene. Even Terry Gilliam, who briefly considered making a Watchmen film, understood that you could never make something like that work in a motion picture.
The clippings of fictional periodicals which provided much of the depth of the world were also something which could only be done in a comic-book format.
Furthermore, the writers of some of those periodicals, as well as the writer of the pirate comic, were extremely important characters to the narrative, who we got to know almost exclusively through "their" writings. Genius!
The Watchmen will probably continue to stand alone as the most ground-breaking and important work in an art-form which is usually very crass and disposable.
The film however... Let's face it: It probably won't get made, and if it does it will probably suck.
I think it's a Red State vs Blue State kind of thing. NC is a Red State, so you'll see a lot of the players with the WMA Ready sticker on them, whereas NY is a Blue State so you'll see more iPod's.
More likely, it's a public transportation thing.
People who take trains, busses and ferry boats to work were the first ones to buy Walkman radios back in the day. This is pretty much the same trend. Having headphones means not having to talk to the weirdo sitting next to you on the bus. Having an iPod instead of a radio means you won't lose the signal when you go through a tunnel. For somebody who spends two hours a day in such an environment, $400 probably doesn't seem like a lot of money to spend on making the time more pleasant.
People mostly drive to work in "Jesusland", so even when they listen to iPods during their commute, nobody else sees them.
Disclaimer: I live in the suburbs of a "light blue" state and drive to work. Nevertheless, I would rather go without the use of my legs than go without my iPod.
P.S. Not to nit-pick, but if you shade by percentage of victory in each district, and most states are actually solid purple. I think that people are making a little too much of "cultural differences" between the states.
If you like the iPod as an mp3 player, and have the money, then buy it. If you think the Zen is a better player, then buy that. Who cares how "cool" you look with either.
He's not tyring to look "cool." He's trying to go out of his way not to look "cool"... because that's way less self-centered than somebody who wants to be seen listening to their iPod.
I downloaded the open beta fully intending to play while it was free and not get into it when the full game comes out.
However, I was totally hooked and will be getting a copy as soon as i can.
Why do you think they do open betas? QA!?
It should be noted, however, that although the game is great fun, it doesnt have the quite "finished" feel, if for no other reason that there is a lot of imbalance between the classes.
Paladins and Shamans seem to be considerably better than most other classes: some classes, like druid are pretty poor (I speak as a druid, and I love the druid abilities, but we do suck.)
Admittedly, most of the "discussion" on the forums seem to be bitching about other classes being too powerful, and requests to have things nerfed, but there IS a class imbalance. Its not even like Blizzard are trying to keep things balanced, they seem to be taking a more "fix the alliance map, fix this class, fix that class" rather than gradually improving everything.
Welcome to the world of MMORPG's. This is always the case. If you don't believe me, visit the user boards for City of Heroes (where every class except the Blaster has people saying they love the class but consider it critically underpowered... and the Blasters whine about how easilly they get killed.)
Don't even get me started on the SQG Jedi.
Game balance is so close to impossible, it's best that you just never worry about it, and play the character type which you enjoy most. Who cares if the game comes easier to some people because the munchkin out on the "best" classes. Those are like people who keep Soul Calibur dialed down to the "Easy" setting, even after they've unlocked all the characters. Be proud that you are not like them.
Also, it takes forever to get anywhere. I nearly quit playing after my second day because i was so bored just walking from place to place; it can take 15 minutes, just walking, to get to certain areas. If you wanted to walk across the entire map, you could be talking about hours.
Also true of nearly every MMORPG. If it doesn't take forever to get anywhere, users complain that the world is too small. This often leads to game designers caving in to customer demand for widespread "teleporting" abilities of some sort or another. Maybe WoW will have this sort of thing hammered out by the time it becomes available in the EU.
That reminds me of a funny (somewhat apocraphal) space-flight puking story.
For one NASA flight, a frog was brought along on a mission for research testing, and as soon as they entered a zero-G environment, the frog not only puked, but actually inverted it's entire actual stomach outside of it's mouth, wiped the stomach walls clean with it's little front feet in a frenzied panic, and then shoved the stomache back down it's throat. After that, the it was fine.
There have been many times, particularilly after drinking tequila, in which I wished I was capable of doing that.
Unless the public gets all in an uproar about this, I don't see this as happening. It could potential interfere with the US military's superiority in this field, and what the Pentagon wants, it gets. They have far, far, FAR more money available in their PR budget than private entrepreneurs (either individually or collectively) ever will, and the result will most likely be determined accordingly.
Right, because we have a vast fleet of military spaceships, and it's not like anybody could ever put a commercial satelite into orbit from a French-owned island near the Equator. We are the only country in the world who goes into space, and we only do so for military reasons.
Oh wait, I just remembered... None of that is true.
If I'm President Vicente Fox, I've got dollar signs in my eyes right now.
Take a trip to Mazetlan, see the beautiful sights, enjoy some tequilla, and then fly into outer space as the highlight of your vacation!
If you choose to not vote, that is an indication that you are fine with whichever candidate is chosen by the majority of voters, so using your numbers Bush actually enjoys the support of ~252 Million Americans, vs. the ~48M who voted against him.
A state agriculture commissioner election do-over, not on Election Day, when there is no election for President or any other high office going on at the same time?
Don't worry. 17 people will show up, all relatives of one candidate or the other. I think they will find a way to get it done.
Never mind the thinly-veiled hatespeach against lawyers and social security!
Done!
I'm no Randian, but I certainly never mind hatespeach [sic] against lawyers and social security.