I've seen several versions of the movie--including a well-done fan-made documentary that played the movie while cutting in just about every interesting alternate take, edit, and removed scene they could find--and I've never seen it done that way.
I read the novella version. It was excellent juvenile fic. Top notch. Belongs on the shelf with A Wrinkle in Time, etc.
Is the novel version that much better?
My candidates for sci fi books that deserve recognition from last century (and aren't already recognized outside of Sci Fi circles, like Vonnegut, Bradbury, and Atwood) are:
Dune A Canticle for Leibowitz (it's criminal that this isn't better-known)
I think you're the first person I've seen express a view so similar to my own on the series.
I like it up to and including God Emperor. The end of that book seems like the end to the overall arc to me. The two after just take away from that, IMO, and are 100% unnecessary (not to mention 100% crappy).
(Faramir in the second film put me off watching the third one entirely)
If you ever change your mind, do yourself a favor and go straight to the extended version. The theatrical cut was by far the worst of the three films, but the extended version brings it up to at least the level of the second one.
To this day I'm a little hazy about the dates of McCarthyism and the Korean and Vietnam wars. I can't even remember what order they happened.
That's easy:
M*A*S*H is set in the Korean war, but is a commentary on the Vietnam war. Therefore the Korean War occurred first.:)
Don't feel bad--my mental chronology of history was completely fucked up when I graduated high school, and I only fixed it by working a lot in my spare time my freshman year of college. No wonder, since they just taught the same few snippets over and over, without context and with huge (multi-century) gaps in between.
New York isn't alone; I can speak for Missouri up to 2003, and (at that time, at least) it was the same.
Hell, I think we only got that far once. Every other year that attempted to cover it got as far as the depression, then ran out of time
Question: do you East-coasters waste massive amounts of your elementary and middle school students' time by teaching Native Americans and the Westward Expansion seemingly every goddamn year until high school (and once or twice more there, for good measure), or is that a Midwest thing? I swear, "tepee", "long house", and "covered wagon" were multiple choice test answers at least once every year from 1st-8th grade. That and "fertile crescent". They (barely) covered that shit over and over while never teaching the last 600 or so years of Roman history nor much European history before the Age of Exploration.
I can't speak for everyone, but this is very true for me. Everything about my writing is stolen from authors I've read.
I wrote way above grade level throughout school, but that's mostly because I read way above grade level. A 3rd grader imitating even a mediocre novelist's sentence structure and vocabulary (Michael Crichton, in my case--I wouldn't start consistently reading good stuff until high school) is going to look damn good for their age.
The kindle is aimed at the premium, paperback, periodical, and bargain hunters.
Emphasis mine.
As one of said bargain hunters, I think I can speak for all of us when I say that Kindly prices are (generally) at least 2x what I'd consider to be any kind of a bargain for a phsical paperback--and the physical paperback I can re-sell should I ever need some of that money back.
Hell, their $5-8 prices for most older books is what I'd consider a normal price on a used or "bargain bin" hardcover--a real bargains would be under that, and, again, would still have about as much monetary value after you bought it as before.
My solution to reading while traveling is to take one book (or none) and then hit a bunch of used book stores at my destination.
Never know when you might find a whole shelf of out-of-print hardcovers by some author you like, or a great bargain on some well-printed multi-volume beauty.
Doesn't solve the "having to carry a heavy bag" problem, but it does cut it in half.:)
Hell, I don't know how people can pay new paperback prices. I buy everything used or off the bargain rack. Anything over $8 for the hardcover and I usually pass. I don't pay more than $3 or so for paperbacks. Plus if I want to I can re-sell those, and I feel zero guilt about pirating the e-book (same as ripping CDs that I bought used).
Prices these days are nuts. Seems like anything that's not genre-fic or of a cotton candy consistency are available only in a "trade" paperback and they want $11-18 dollars for it. Fucking ridiculous. Even mass markets are sometimes $8-9 cover. Used or bargain bin is all I can stomach--I'm still stuck in 90s pricing when $6 for a mass market was the high end.
Anything over $5 for a fiction e-book is going to be an automatic "no" for me, and I'm going to have to really want it to pay even that much.
Anyone who wanted just the ebook copy could buy the dead-tree, get the ebook, then sell the dead-tree and effectively get a discount while flooding the second hand market with like-new copies and driving down the price.
From what I've seen, that's even the case if the person "at fault" was pushed forward in to the car in front of them by someone else who rear-ended them.
I just downloaded a bunch of old Nintendo Power magazines for some nostalgic reading, and I was browsing one from after the N64 came out but before the Super Nintendo was retired.
Holy shit, the letter section was dominated by people complaining about some 2D game on the N64. "I didn't get an N64 to play 2D games!".
That may be part of why they stopped making the 2D games for a while--they weren't "next gen" enough for people
Well, what we need then is a central government agency with which authors can register that their copyright is still active, and all companies can just check against that. If they fail to do so, then their stuff is fair game. Don't want them having to do it all the time, so how about--oh, every 7 years or so.
It's not. It's also far more distracting than other choices.
He--I get why people want to phase this out, but at least it's a well understood convention.
They--This seems to be the popular choice for a 3rd person pronoun of indefinite gender. I'd rather we get a new word, but it works pretty well and is used very widely in informal speech and writing. I say we make it official.
She--Worst choice of the three by far. Every time I (and, I'm sure, most people who are used to the other two better options) read it used this way my mind automatically starts trying to figure out who in particular the author is talking about. Besides, it validates the use of "he" in this role and leaves us with two words doing the same job. It's the most confusing and broken solution of the three, easily.
Plus, in the first two games, you played a customized, unique(ish) character. Unless you were a hyper-obsessed power gamer with a shitload of free time or knew some sort of exploit, you probably weren't going to be able to specialize in more than 5 skills out of 20 or so, so you had to make decisions about how to develop your character and what sort of person they would be.
Fallout 3 imported too much of the Morrowind/Oblivion style of making the character godlike at everything by the end game. Hell, I think I'd damn near maxed out everything in F3 by the mid way point of the main story. That, what you mentioned, and the smallness of the world (where the hell is anything remotely as large and interesting as the New Reno/Vault City/NCR triangle, for instance?) were what ruined F3 as a Fallout game, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen several versions of the movie--including a well-done fan-made documentary that played the movie while cutting in just about every interesting alternate take, edit, and removed scene they could find--and I've never seen it done that way.
... are you talking about RedLetterMedia?
What were your thoughts on the thirty or so shots in Half-Blood Prince that went like:
*people looking happy*
*Malfoy walks by BROODING!!!!*
*cut to something completely different*
I read the novella version. It was excellent juvenile fic. Top notch. Belongs on the shelf with A Wrinkle in Time, etc.
Is the novel version that much better?
My candidates for sci fi books that deserve recognition from last century (and aren't already recognized outside of Sci Fi circles, like Vonnegut, Bradbury, and Atwood) are:
Dune
A Canticle for Leibowitz (it's criminal that this isn't better-known)
I think you're the first person I've seen express a view so similar to my own on the series.
I like it up to and including God Emperor. The end of that book seems like the end to the overall arc to me. The two after just take away from that, IMO, and are 100% unnecessary (not to mention 100% crappy).
If you ever change your mind, do yourself a favor and go straight to the extended version. The theatrical cut was by far the worst of the three films, but the extended version brings it up to at least the level of the second one.
It still has (huge) problems, but fewer of them.
If you need something very similar (though, sadly, with fewer plugins) in Linux and don't want to use Wine, I recommend Geany.
A few minutes worth of Javascript and the Greasemonkey extension to Firefox ought to be able to handle that for you.
That's easy:
M*A*S*H is set in the Korean war, but is a commentary on the Vietnam war. Therefore the Korean War occurred first. :)
Don't feel bad--my mental chronology of history was completely fucked up when I graduated high school, and I only fixed it by working a lot in my spare time my freshman year of college. No wonder, since they just taught the same few snippets over and over, without context and with huge (multi-century) gaps in between.
New York isn't alone; I can speak for Missouri up to 2003, and (at that time, at least) it was the same.
Hell, I think we only got that far once. Every other year that attempted to cover it got as far as the depression, then ran out of time
Question: do you East-coasters waste massive amounts of your elementary and middle school students' time by teaching Native Americans and the Westward Expansion seemingly every goddamn year until high school (and once or twice more there, for good measure), or is that a Midwest thing? I swear, "tepee", "long house", and "covered wagon" were multiple choice test answers at least once every year from 1st-8th grade. That and "fertile crescent". They (barely) covered that shit over and over while never teaching the last 600 or so years of Roman history nor much European history before the Age of Exploration.
I can't speak for everyone, but this is very true for me. Everything about my writing is stolen from authors I've read.
I wrote way above grade level throughout school, but that's mostly because I read way above grade level. A 3rd grader imitating even a mediocre novelist's sentence structure and vocabulary (Michael Crichton, in my case--I wouldn't start consistently reading good stuff until high school) is going to look damn good for their age.
Emphasis mine.
As one of said bargain hunters, I think I can speak for all of us when I say that Kindly prices are (generally) at least 2x what I'd consider to be any kind of a bargain for a phsical paperback--and the physical paperback I can re-sell should I ever need some of that money back.
Hell, their $5-8 prices for most older books is what I'd consider a normal price on a used or "bargain bin" hardcover--a real bargains would be under that, and, again, would still have about as much monetary value after you bought it as before.
My solution to reading while traveling is to take one book (or none) and then hit a bunch of used book stores at my destination.
Never know when you might find a whole shelf of out-of-print hardcovers by some author you like, or a great bargain on some well-printed multi-volume beauty.
Doesn't solve the "having to carry a heavy bag" problem, but it does cut it in half. :)
Hell, I don't know how people can pay new paperback prices. I buy everything used or off the bargain rack. Anything over $8 for the hardcover and I usually pass. I don't pay more than $3 or so for paperbacks. Plus if I want to I can re-sell those, and I feel zero guilt about pirating the e-book (same as ripping CDs that I bought used).
Prices these days are nuts. Seems like anything that's not genre-fic or of a cotton candy consistency are available only in a "trade" paperback and they want $11-18 dollars for it. Fucking ridiculous. Even mass markets are sometimes $8-9 cover. Used or bargain bin is all I can stomach--I'm still stuck in 90s pricing when $6 for a mass market was the high end.
Anything over $5 for a fiction e-book is going to be an automatic "no" for me, and I'm going to have to really want it to pay even that much.
Anyone who wanted just the ebook copy could buy the dead-tree, get the ebook, then sell the dead-tree and effectively get a discount while flooding the second hand market with like-new copies and driving down the price.
From what I've seen, that's even the case if the person "at fault" was pushed forward in to the car in front of them by someone else who rear-ended them.
I could never quite figure out whether that was a very girlish pudgy little boy or a very manish pudgy little girl.
I also love that they made the claw-on-cotton sounds more like a claw-on-burlap when he does the "cutting" on him/her.
I just downloaded a bunch of old Nintendo Power magazines for some nostalgic reading, and I was browsing one from after the N64 came out but before the Super Nintendo was retired.
Holy shit, the letter section was dominated by people complaining about some 2D game on the N64. "I didn't get an N64 to play 2D games!".
That may be part of why they stopped making the 2D games for a while--they weren't "next gen" enough for people
Well, what we need then is a central government agency with which authors can register that their copyright is still active, and all companies can just check against that. If they fail to do so, then their stuff is fair game. Don't want them having to do it all the time, so how about--oh, every 7 years or so.
Gee, this is sounding familiar....
Holy shit... they can do that? That would be awesome. Instant 7% salary increase (14% if they pass along their portion).
Um, no.
Capital gains is only 15%, IIRC. Odds are good they'll pay a lower tax rate than the average middle class household, probably by quite a lot.
It's not. It's also far more distracting than other choices.
He--I get why people want to phase this out, but at least it's a well understood convention.
They--This seems to be the popular choice for a 3rd person pronoun of indefinite gender. I'd rather we get a new word, but it works pretty well and is used very widely in informal speech and writing. I say we make it official.
She--Worst choice of the three by far. Every time I (and, I'm sure, most people who are used to the other two better options) read it used this way my mind automatically starts trying to figure out who in particular the author is talking about. Besides, it validates the use of "he" in this role and leaves us with two words doing the same job. It's the most confusing and broken solution of the three, easily.
Bioshock barely has any RPG elements compared to the game for which it was supposed to be the "spiritual successor"--System Shock 2.
Plus, in the first two games, you played a customized, unique(ish) character. Unless you were a hyper-obsessed power gamer with a shitload of free time or knew some sort of exploit, you probably weren't going to be able to specialize in more than 5 skills out of 20 or so, so you had to make decisions about how to develop your character and what sort of person they would be.
Fallout 3 imported too much of the Morrowind/Oblivion style of making the character godlike at everything by the end game. Hell, I think I'd damn near maxed out everything in F3 by the mid way point of the main story. That, what you mentioned, and the smallness of the world (where the hell is anything remotely as large and interesting as the New Reno/Vault City/NCR triangle, for instance?) were what ruined F3 as a Fallout game, IMO.
Except it's not at all scary. And the story's not as good. And the gameplay is weak for a modern game.
Aside from that, though, you're right.