the lack of individual style between titles (i.e., they all look like they were drawn by the same artist)
Uhh... Just by grabbing three hugely popular series... "Cowboy Bebop", "Sailor Moon" and "FLCL" don't even look like they were all drawn by the same species, let alone the same artist.
I don't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion, unless you somehow think that seeing "Pokemon" and "Yu-Gi-Oh" has exposed you to the full range of Japanese anime styles.
and the terrible voice acting
Setting aside the FANTASTIC voice acting on Pixar/Ghibli projects like "Howl's Moving Castle", the terrible English voice acting in most TV anime is the fault of American companies. The original Japanese tracks typically feature the very best acting talent in Japan.
We already know that Americans have ideas and all foreigners are thieves, so obviously Occam's Razor dictates that the simplest explanation is to assume that all foreign ideas were stolen from America....
We don't need Occam's help when Tezuka himself said that the big-eye style of drawing faces he used was inspired by the Dwarves in "Snow White."
Look at his early work, then look at the Disney animation of the time. Even if he didn't acknowledge them, the influences would still be painfully obvious.
Oh, by the way, this might come as a total shock to you, but Kurosawa stole "Fist Full of Dollars" when he made "Yojimbo", and "King Lear" when he made "Ran." We returned the favor by stealing "The Seven Samurai" to make "The Magnificent Seven" and "Hidden Fortress" to make "Star Wars."
More to the point, I was all set to be really mad about what Sony is doing, until I realized that every last band who is releasing one of these rootkit CD sucks so badly that I would never let one of them near my CD player, let alone my computer.
As long as Sony continues to only release broken CD's for really, really shitty bands, I'm good.
I can't recall ever seeing any manga that looks like something I'd want framed and hanging on my wall, but there's tons of American comic art that'd look great up there. Anything by Alex Ross, for example.
I'm not sure if this link will withstand the slashdotting, but I'd suggest that stuff like this holds up with just about anything from Alex Ross.
Dilbert, the horoscopes, and the NYT crossword are vastly more important to newspaper circulation than actual news coverage.
People who subscribe to newspapers don't care if it's a perfect source of accurate information regarding world events. They just want something to thumb through over their Special K before going to work, or read on the shitter once they get to work.
The "big eyes" look that people seem to associate with Manga (even though it's not always used) is something that Osamu Tezuka stole from Disney's "Snow White."
When I see must American attempts to make things "look Japanese" (such as the Teen Titan series currently on cable), it looks more like a parody of the oddest quirks of japanese anime than anything else.
City of Heroes runs fine under WINE. Linux users can play that way.
I said users of differnt platforms, not different OS's. WINE requires an x86 platform to run. How would this info be of any use to current Mac and PC owning gamers who want to game together in an MMORPG?
Besides, we all know that most of the folks who call themselves "Linux users" are secretly dual-booting to Windows anyway.;P
Twenty bucks a month for more minutes than I'll ever use, and a phone for less than 1/3 of retail, bee-yotch.
If a better deal than that comes along in the next year and a half, I might almost feel bad about it.
"Oh noes! I'm locked in to this extremely inexpensive service contract! I can't migrate right away to a provider who's minimum service rate is more than double what I'm paying right now. O, the humanity!!!"
I actually didn't mind the simplistic gameplay, simply because the social aspects of the game were pretty good. The game lent itself to the enjoyment of simply "hanging out" with guild members and friends when between missions.
That said, I quit last CoH last year and I probably won't bother with this CoV.
There's no Mac version of either CoH or CoV, and probably never will be. That simple fact is keeping most of the crowds I run with on World of Warcraft for the forseeable future. WoW is currently the only noteworthy MMORPG where we can all game together, regardless of our chosen computer platform.
Or, you could just buy one on ebay without the discounts at actual retail price, and swap sim cards.
Well, setting aside the high likelyhood that any cell phone for sale on eBay is likely to be hotter than jalopeno pepper eyedrops...
You expect me to pay full retail price for a mobile phone??? Why don't I just give you the deed to my house and let you kick me in the nuts while I'm at it?
Game consoles are marketed to people who are children, or childlike.
If so, that's a rather unwise choice... at least if my experience tells me anything.
I have a lot of friends with children, at ages ranging from six months to 18 years... and not a single one of them has ever bought a PS2 or an X-Box for their child.
Meanwhile, almost every 20-something or 30-something adult (or couple) I know has one or the other, if not both.
Conversation at parties often gravitates towards speculation about the upcoming PS3 and X-Box 360... and the question is never "which one should I get for my kids?"
Yes, but a device which does both functions all day long would probably only last about half a day (at best) per charge cycle, unless you used a battery which was bigger than an entire iPod nano... in which case you didn't really save a heck of a lot of space by combining the gadgets.
If the ROKR is failing, the only reason it's doing so is because the cell phone market is absolutely saturated.
DING DING DING DING!!!
Look at that! Somebody finally got to the crux of the issue.
I think the ROKR looks like a nifty phone, but there's no way I'm buying one because my current phone (also made by Motorola) required that I subscribe to two years of T-Mobile service in order to get it at a sensible price. That was only a few months ago.
To buy an ROKR, I would have to break that contract (paying an obscene early-exit fee), and sign up for Cingular (another good service provider, but considerably more expensive than my current plan.)
Ultimately, that would mean hundreds of dollars just to make this minor upgrade over my current Motorola phone (which I'm far from 100% happy with, by the way.) I'm far better off waiting another year and a half for my current service contract to expire and see what's out there at that time, or else just attaching a shuffle to my current phone with hot glue if I really need an all-in-one device so damn badly.
I'm sure I'm far from the only person out there in such a position.
Of a small rechargable battery, a good cell phone can give you about a week of stand-by time without recharging. Even if you use it a lot, you should only need to charge it about once every day or two while avoiding it every completely running the charge out.
If you let it run out, you could miss an important call, so this is important.
An MP3 Player's battery's life cycle is measured in hours of playback, and when it runs out, it's no big deal. You just need to hook it up to a charger for 1-4 hours sometime before the next time you want to listen to it.
Make the same device to both functions, and guess what your biggest problem is going to be.
A game system is supposed to be the center of attention all by itself.
Really? I would think most people would be far more interested in what the game console puts on their TV screen and plays through their stereo speakers than the console component all by itself. Otherwise, why connect it to anything?
How is a game console any different than a DVD Player in this regard?
To this day, I can't bring myself to understand all the hating on the X-Box and it's controller.
The X-Box itself is smaller than some VCR's I've owned over the years, and smaller than every PC I owned prior to the Mac mini. Yes, bigger than most consoles, but who gives a shit? It only weighs a few pounds and tucks nicely into just about any home entertainment shelving.
As for the controller... It was the first game console controller I ever used which felt like it was made for a grown-up's hands. To me, the various Nintendo and Sony controllers feel like I'm gaming using a little pocket calculator for the controlls. They seem to have been designed with factors like manufacturing cost and shipping size put ahead of ergonomics. The X-Box controller, by contrast, feels more like the full-size controlls that they used in video arcades (in the days before video arcades pretty much died off.) If I had my way, they'd make one that's even bigger, so you could play with your hands a good shoulder-width apart.
Do Gabe and Tycho just have tiny, frail hands and weak, girly arms?
Oh, and swerving back on topic... I agree that the new X-Box design sucks. Game consoles are media room components, and should stack (or at least shelve) like other media room components. The goofy "balance it on end" monolith design is t3h gay. Whoever came up with it should be punched in the crotch.
Silly Citizen, the plan was to make all of Bush's texas oil cronies richer than ever, from an artificial shortage....
Nice of Venzuela to disrupt their oil exports for Bush like that. Oh, and the people who called down hurricane Katrina need credit for their part in this, too. Not to mention all those Democrats who have limited our refinery capacity in key parts fo the country out of "environmental" concerns.
Looks like Bush the Younger has foreign governments, the Democrats, and even GOD HIMSELF working to make his oil buddies richer. Wow, talk about a well-connected politician!
Iraq has free elections and a Constitution, while I'm still paying damn near three bucks a gallon for gas.
If the "liberation" of Iraq was a sham for the sake of stealing oil, then the plan went horribly wrong, because they really have been liberated and we haven't managed to steal a single barrel.
1. It wasn't always one fee. For example, if you wanted to play PSO, you had to pay your broadband fee, the X-Box Live fee on top of that, and the MMO subscription fee on top of that. Screw that noise.
2. It wasn't terribly reliable, at least not at the homes where I saw it installed.
3. Many of the games didn't really offer enough value through the on-line experience to make it worth the money. Most of the best console games are, after all, designed to amuse 1-4 people in the same living room together. Being able to play DOAU against some kid in Florida is really not as much fun as being able to play against your younger brother on the other side of the couch.
4. In computer network games, you get to know your opponents and teammates a little bit though text chat. Since the X-Box has no keyboard, everybody is expected to chat with the headset mikes, but hearing eight people (including yourself) breathing in your ear for a whole game is annoying enough that most people just keep their microphones muted... which means nobody actually talks to each other, so PvP becomes just about as impersonal as playing off-line against the AI.
5. The real-world experience was really no better than with the old pick-up Quake games. I once watched my friend log in to a 4-on-4 Mechwarrior battle, only to see three players on one team immediately drop out as the game started, leaving the rest of the players with a stupidly one-sided 4-on-1 battle to play out. Almost the exact same thing happened on the next seven attempts to get a match going. Such frustrations are annoying when playing pick-up games on free servers, but to pay for the privilege of such crappy gameplay just flat-out sucks.
I wish it were that easy. You can similarly "just not use Windows", but that's not really a choice anymore either.
Really? I choose to not use Windows. I haven't had a Windows box in my home in over a year, other than friends using my WiFi connection on their PC laptops when visiting.
XBox 360 is the only console that has a remotely cohesive online strategy.
Who cared about a "cohesive online strategy" when it comes to consoles. I'm no PS2 fanboy, but I always thought X-Box Live was a stupid concept, stupidly executed... and nothing about the networking support of the 360 leads me to believe it's going to be any better.
Slashdot Mirror
So the question really is, is Manga about a comic coming from Japan, or is it about the particular style of comic?
And the answer is, it's a comic coming from Japan.
the lack of individual style between titles (i.e., they all look like they were drawn by the same artist)
Uhh... Just by grabbing three hugely popular series... "Cowboy Bebop", "Sailor Moon" and "FLCL" don't even look like they were all drawn by the same species, let alone the same artist.
I don't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion, unless you somehow think that seeing "Pokemon" and "Yu-Gi-Oh" has exposed you to the full range of Japanese anime styles.
and the terrible voice acting
Setting aside the FANTASTIC voice acting on Pixar/Ghibli projects like "Howl's Moving Castle", the terrible English voice acting in most TV anime is the fault of American companies. The original Japanese tracks typically feature the very best acting talent in Japan.
We already know that Americans have ideas and all foreigners are thieves, so obviously Occam's Razor dictates that the simplest explanation is to assume that all foreign ideas were stolen from America....
We don't need Occam's help when Tezuka himself said that the big-eye style of drawing faces he used was inspired by the Dwarves in "Snow White."
Look at his early work, then look at the Disney animation of the time. Even if he didn't acknowledge them, the influences would still be painfully obvious.
Oh, by the way, this might come as a total shock to you, but Kurosawa stole "Fist Full of Dollars" when he made "Yojimbo", and "King Lear" when he made "Ran." We returned the favor by stealing "The Seven Samurai" to make "The Magnificent Seven" and "Hidden Fortress" to make "Star Wars."
Pretty much all art is theft.
More to the point, I was all set to be really mad about what Sony is doing, until I realized that every last band who is releasing one of these rootkit CD sucks so badly that I would never let one of them near my CD player, let alone my computer.
As long as Sony continues to only release broken CD's for really, really shitty bands, I'm good.
I can't recall ever seeing any manga that looks like something I'd want framed and hanging on my wall, but there's tons of American comic art that'd look great up there. Anything by Alex Ross, for example.
I'm not sure if this link will withstand the slashdotting, but I'd suggest that stuff like this holds up with just about anything from Alex Ross.
I've got troubling news for you.
Dilbert, the horoscopes, and the NYT crossword are vastly more important to newspaper circulation than actual news coverage.
People who subscribe to newspapers don't care if it's a perfect source of accurate information regarding world events. They just want something to thumb through over their Special K before going to work, or read on the shitter once they get to work.
But what is the "Japanese style" of comics???
The "big eyes" look that people seem to associate with Manga (even though it's not always used) is something that Osamu Tezuka stole from Disney's "Snow White."
When I see must American attempts to make things "look Japanese" (such as the Teen Titan series currently on cable), it looks more like a parody of the oddest quirks of japanese anime than anything else.
More to the point: ...which are both created by American writer/illustrators...
I'm sorry. I thought the headline said "Manga" was being added to the newspapers.
Illustrated stories by Americans are called "comics."
And no, it doesn't matter if they are not joke-based. Ever hear of "Prince Valliant", "Sally Forth" or "Spider Man"? This is just more of the same.
City of Heroes runs fine under WINE. Linux users can play that way.
;P
I said users of differnt platforms, not different OS's. WINE requires an x86 platform to run. How would this info be of any use to current Mac and PC owning gamers who want to game together in an MMORPG?
Besides, we all know that most of the folks who call themselves "Linux users" are secretly dual-booting to Windows anyway.
Why the fuck do you guys put up with that shit?
Twenty bucks a month for more minutes than I'll ever use, and a phone for less than 1/3 of retail, bee-yotch.
If a better deal than that comes along in the next year and a half, I might almost feel bad about it.
"Oh noes! I'm locked in to this extremely inexpensive service contract! I can't migrate right away to a provider who's minimum service rate is more than double what I'm paying right now. O, the humanity!!!"
I actually didn't mind the simplistic gameplay, simply because the social aspects of the game were pretty good. The game lent itself to the enjoyment of simply "hanging out" with guild members and friends when between missions.
That said, I quit last CoH last year and I probably won't bother with this CoV.
There's no Mac version of either CoH or CoV, and probably never will be. That simple fact is keeping most of the crowds I run with on World of Warcraft for the forseeable future. WoW is currently the only noteworthy MMORPG where we can all game together, regardless of our chosen computer platform.
Blizzard gets it, Cryptic doesn't.
Or, you could just buy one on ebay without the discounts at actual retail price, and swap sim cards.
Well, setting aside the high likelyhood that any cell phone for sale on eBay is likely to be hotter than jalopeno pepper eyedrops...
You expect me to pay full retail price for a mobile phone??? Why don't I just give you the deed to my house and let you kick me in the nuts while I'm at it?
Game consoles are marketed to people who are children, or childlike.
If so, that's a rather unwise choice... at least if my experience tells me anything.
I have a lot of friends with children, at ages ranging from six months to 18 years... and not a single one of them has ever bought a PS2 or an X-Box for their child.
Meanwhile, almost every 20-something or 30-something adult (or couple) I know has one or the other, if not both.
Conversation at parties often gravitates towards speculation about the upcoming PS3 and X-Box 360... and the question is never "which one should I get for my kids?"
Yes, but a device which does both functions all day long would probably only last about half a day (at best) per charge cycle, unless you used a battery which was bigger than an entire iPod nano... in which case you didn't really save a heck of a lot of space by combining the gadgets.
If the ROKR is failing, the only reason it's doing so is because the cell phone market is absolutely saturated.
DING DING DING DING!!!
Look at that! Somebody finally got to the crux of the issue.
I think the ROKR looks like a nifty phone, but there's no way I'm buying one because my current phone (also made by Motorola) required that I subscribe to two years of T-Mobile service in order to get it at a sensible price. That was only a few months ago.
To buy an ROKR, I would have to break that contract (paying an obscene early-exit fee), and sign up for Cingular (another good service provider, but considerably more expensive than my current plan.)
Ultimately, that would mean hundreds of dollars just to make this minor upgrade over my current Motorola phone (which I'm far from 100% happy with, by the way.) I'm far better off waiting another year and a half for my current service contract to expire and see what's out there at that time, or else just attaching a shuffle to my current phone with hot glue if I really need an all-in-one device so damn badly.
I'm sure I'm far from the only person out there in such a position.
Not to mention the battery issue.
Of a small rechargable battery, a good cell phone can give you about a week of stand-by time without recharging. Even if you use it a lot, you should only need to charge it about once every day or two while avoiding it every completely running the charge out.
If you let it run out, you could miss an important call, so this is important.
An MP3 Player's battery's life cycle is measured in hours of playback, and when it runs out, it's no big deal. You just need to hook it up to a charger for 1-4 hours sometime before the next time you want to listen to it.
Make the same device to both functions, and guess what your biggest problem is going to be.
I've often thought of modding my GC right into my computer.
That's funny. I could probably fit my computer into a GC.
You know, they filmed the final episode for that show a few days ago.
That's okay. They filmed the last really good episode several years ago.
The newer episodes were never very funny.
A game system is supposed to be the center of attention all by itself.
Really? I would think most people would be far more interested in what the game console puts on their TV screen and plays through their stereo speakers than the console component all by itself. Otherwise, why connect it to anything?
How is a game console any different than a DVD Player in this regard?
To this day, I can't bring myself to understand all the hating on the X-Box and it's controller.
The X-Box itself is smaller than some VCR's I've owned over the years, and smaller than every PC I owned prior to the Mac mini. Yes, bigger than most consoles, but who gives a shit? It only weighs a few pounds and tucks nicely into just about any home entertainment shelving.
As for the controller... It was the first game console controller I ever used which felt like it was made for a grown-up's hands. To me, the various Nintendo and Sony controllers feel like I'm gaming using a little pocket calculator for the controlls. They seem to have been designed with factors like manufacturing cost and shipping size put ahead of ergonomics. The X-Box controller, by contrast, feels more like the full-size controlls that they used in video arcades (in the days before video arcades pretty much died off.) If I had my way, they'd make one that's even bigger, so you could play with your hands a good shoulder-width apart.
Do Gabe and Tycho just have tiny, frail hands and weak, girly arms?
Oh, and swerving back on topic... I agree that the new X-Box design sucks. Game consoles are media room components, and should stack (or at least shelve) like other media room components. The goofy "balance it on end" monolith design is t3h gay. Whoever came up with it should be punched in the crotch.
Silly Citizen, the plan was to make all of Bush's texas oil cronies richer than ever,
from an artificial shortage....
Nice of Venzuela to disrupt their oil exports for Bush like that.
Oh, and the people who called down hurricane Katrina need credit for their part in this, too.
Not to mention all those Democrats who have limited our refinery capacity in key parts fo the country out of "environmental" concerns.
Looks like Bush the Younger has foreign governments, the Democrats, and even GOD HIMSELF working to make his oil buddies richer. Wow, talk about a well-connected politician!
That's assuming that you knew it was coming up and scheduled a recording in advance.
If only there were some kind of "guide" to give people advanced notice of upcoming TV episodes...
... when it comes to the subject of oil.
some steal software, others "liberate" countries.
Iraq has free elections and a Constitution, while I'm still paying damn near three bucks a gallon for gas.
If the "liberation" of Iraq was a sham for the sake of stealing oil, then the plan went horribly wrong, because they really have been liberated and we haven't managed to steal a single barrel.
What made Live stupid?
Several things.
1. It wasn't always one fee. For example, if you wanted to play PSO, you had to pay your broadband fee, the X-Box Live fee on top of that, and the MMO subscription fee on top of that. Screw that noise.
2. It wasn't terribly reliable, at least not at the homes where I saw it installed.
3. Many of the games didn't really offer enough value through the on-line experience to make it worth the money. Most of the best console games are, after all, designed to amuse 1-4 people in the same living room together. Being able to play DOAU against some kid in Florida is really not as much fun as being able to play against your younger brother on the other side of the couch.
4. In computer network games, you get to know your opponents and teammates a little bit though text chat. Since the X-Box has no keyboard, everybody is expected to chat with the headset mikes, but hearing eight people (including yourself) breathing in your ear for a whole game is annoying enough that most people just keep their microphones muted... which means nobody actually talks to each other, so PvP becomes just about as impersonal as playing off-line against the AI.
5. The real-world experience was really no better than with the old pick-up Quake games. I once watched my friend log in to a 4-on-4 Mechwarrior battle, only to see three players on one team immediately drop out as the game started, leaving the rest of the players with a stupidly one-sided 4-on-1 battle to play out. Almost the exact same thing happened on the next seven attempts to get a match going. Such frustrations are annoying when playing pick-up games on free servers, but to pay for the privilege of such crappy gameplay just flat-out sucks.
I wish it were that easy. You can similarly "just not use Windows", but that's not really a choice anymore either.
Really? I choose to not use Windows. I haven't had a Windows box in my home in over a year, other than friends using my WiFi connection on their PC laptops when visiting.
XBox 360 is the only console that has a remotely cohesive online strategy.
Who cared about a "cohesive online strategy" when it comes to consoles. I'm no PS2 fanboy, but I always thought X-Box Live was a stupid concept, stupidly executed... and nothing about the networking support of the 360 leads me to believe it's going to be any better.