If the writers were strong enough, even Roanoke would be a good springboard for a game. A colony that's doing fine... Five years later, a resupply mission from the motherland arrives, to find the whole place simply deserted. No bodies, no blood, no signs of struggle, just -- nothing.
It seems to me that The Odyssey is begging to have an RPG made based on it. It'd be a little like Chrono Trigger/Cross + God of War. Awesome.
For that matter, The Iliad (or better yet, the whole Trojan cycle, filling in the gaps where necessary) would make a kick-ass multiplayer hack-n-slash, a bit like Gauntlet meets Dynasty warriors, with control points and a bunch of allied NPCs helping you out. Maybe the ability to call for divine intervention from whichever god happens to be on your side. Damn, that would kick ass.
Re:Miro is great, but....
on
Miro Turns 1.0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If it's VLC, then I'll bet it's an deinterlacing issue. By default it's disabled, and on medium-res videos, playing with other settings (right click->deinterlace, I think) can yield a better picture, sometimes even getting rid of odd artifacts that show up without it. "blend" seems to work the best for me, most of the time.
MPC may not have deinterlacing disabled by default.
Well, luckily we've still got one Battlestar that uses old tech and has its computer systems decoupled from the network, so when the Cylons attack us with their crippling viruses we'll still have that one warship.
I've learned TONS of things from games and other diversions on the PC.
Mavis Beacon (explicitly educational) taught me proper typing, but chatting with my friends on AIM and (especially) busy IRC channels taught me to type FAST.
Shadow President is the reason I can locate practically any country on a map faster than the vast majority of people.
A lot of stuff in my political science classes (and my own readings on philosophy in general) reminded me of ideas and people in Deus Ex.
Medieval: Total War taught me more about medieval political geography, politics, and technology (war-related tech, that is) than I was ever taught in any level of my education (yeah, I know more from reading, but no class ever taught me this stuff; we always skipped from talking about the Fertile Crescent to covering the Age of Exploration. Seriously.)
Rome: Total War and a couple of its mods (Rome: Total Realism and Europa Barbarorum, especially) have taught me a TON about the Hellenistic and Roman periods of history. Thanks to them, I know BOTH the Koine or Attic Greek AND Latin names for tons of Mediterranean cities (though I often don't know the modern name!)
Bushido Blade 1 & 2 and Shogun: Total War taught me the names of a bunch of different Japanese weapons.
I know a bit about the operation of a variety of firearms that I've never physically used, from paying close attention to the reload animations in dozens of games over the years (Counter-Strike and most WWII shooters are GREAT for this).
OK, so a lot of it's not *useful* information, but I did learn:)
It's a very, very good way to keep people off your machine at LAN parties. Then again, if they do use it, you can count on returning to your seat to find that someone hit the "use defaults" button in your settings, and you'll have to put your weird-ass controls back on.
Artist Keven Federline's hit song "Popozao" is a refreshing change from the literarily-ignorant tunes of his contemporaries, which thoroughly fail to speak to a modern world while retaining ties to the important sense of rich history that exists in the medium of verse--lyrical or otherwise. Federline's use of sound is plainly meant to be evocative of those of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo", and may be equally offensive if one fails to grasp the significance beyond the words themselves. The message of this tour-de-force is many-layered, and worthy of closer analysis.
It quickly becomes plain to the listener that the setting of the scene is a dance floor, painting for us a picture full of moving bodies and light that well-fits this song's rhythmic and sometimes chaotic flow. We have a narrator who appears, on the surface, to be calling to a fellow dancer of the opposite sex. Following a Lindsayesque bit of primal noise, we are greeted with the line, "Toy all your thing on me, baby." Now, through this request for openness ("all your thing") and the use of the second person possessive, it is clear that the narrator desires a dialog with the listener, inviting us to explore and speak to the verses that follow, and to release our inhibitions. The deep, drum-like rhythm of this line, repeated four times for emphasis, ties it to the preceding noises, letting us know that the narrator speaks to us from--or on behalf of--that primal chaos.
A bit of Portuguese follows, chanted with a tone that is both menacing and enticing, reminding the listener in a few well-chosen syllables of the emotional rollercoaster that is Lindsay's "The Congo". The next two verses are particularly interesting, and inform us that a literal, superficial reading of these verses is, indeed, incorrect. The first gives us the meaning of some of the previous Portuguese speech, which we are told means "bring your ass". We'll come back to that in a moment. Later in the same verse, we are told that the narrator wants to see our "kitty and a little bit of titty". All-in-all, this is an overtly and even offensively sexual bit of lyric.
The next verse, however, reveals that this was merely a light-hearted play, as was foreshadowed with the laughter accompanying the songs introductory sounds. Federline deliberately breaks one's natural association of "kitty" with another synonym for "cat" which may also mean "vagina" with the lines "Girl, don't you worry about all the dough/because a cat is coming straight out of the know". With our earlier images shattered and replaced by the narrator himself, it is revealed that this pair of verses is really a statement on how we cheapen not only others, but ourselves by degrading sexuality in this way. This and other evidence in Federline's ouvre may indicate that he has a dislike for modern, sexually vulgar poetry, in the vein of Charles Bukowski. His overt references to Lindsay, who wrote in the very early 19th century, may even give us a glimpse into Federline's ideals. Further, the self-association of this deep-voiced male narrator with the feminine may have deeper implications.
(OK, I'll stop there. I was thinking about tying him in to the Beats and even Andy Kaufman [via their both having had amateur experiences with "professional" wrestling], but I think I've spent enough time on this already. I rest my case.)
This sounds like the kind of crap I might come up with were I to use my knowledge of lit-crit terminology and thinking to make up deliberately-stupid but syntactically- and factually-correct bunch of bullshit for my own amusement.
Want me to write something like this holding up K-Fed's song "PopoZão" as an intelligent bit of verse, in the vein of, say, Lindsay's "Congo"? I can. It won't be true, but it'll sound as good as this crap.
(don't get me wrong--I think that the Half-Life series has given us a damned-good balance of action and story, and is probably the best "pure" FPS series in existence. This article, however, is stupid.)
The wallpaper should not be the only source of brown in a theme that is intended to be brown, since the wallpaper is expected to be changed.
Wow, you just triggered me to realize what bothers me so much about the current default theme, which is something I'd thought about but hadn't quite pinned down:
It just looks OK with the default background, not great. But it looks like ASS with practically any other background one might choose.
Right click on desktop->create launcher->select "location", name it and browse to your home folder, hit OK
Does that not do it?
In trying methods for accomplishing this, I did discover that I can't right-click+drag in Ubuntu. Never noticed that before. Anyone know if that's a hard-coded Gnome thing, or whether I can change that behavior somehow?
Wow, that would explain why everything's an "sda" or "sdb" instead of "hda" and "hdb". I'd been wondering, but it didn't really affect me so I hadn't been motivated to check up on it.
You mean/preferences:p Anyway, that sounds like a horrible idea. Cleanup after users would get more messy and quotas too. But putting them under ~/.prefs/... might not be a bad idea. There is some merit there, but not an easy thing to change!
GREAT idea.
One of the biggest structural annoyances about the Linux filesystem layout is what happens when you get an "open file" dialog from an app that doesn't respect the hiding ".". You have to scroll past 20+ folders--which, of course, are all stuck at the top, since "." puts them first in the file listing--to find what you're looking for in your/home/user folder.
Either all of those programs that ignore the "." need to change--and there are a LOT that do this--or they need to make a ~/.preferences or ~/.settings folder and make sure it all goes in there, which, though not easier than changing those programs, is probably a better long-term design decision.
Both the OSX and Linux ways are good, IMO. OSX: every program and all its components are in a folder. Linux: this sort of program file goes here, this sort here, and you can mount these folders from various sources to achieve all kinds of neat administrative voodoo.
Either CAN be broken, but usually isn't. They're fairly consistent.
Windows? Let's see: how about we make a folder in "Program Files"... let's name it after our company, then make a sub-folder for each program from us! Yeah! Never mind that in three years we'll somehow manage to slightly change the company name we use on the folder by adding a dash or changing capitalization or something, and that "one folder for all our programs" goes out the window. Oh, and let's throw some DLLs in c:\windows\win32, AND write a bunch of stuff to the registry. Then, let's put a whole bunch of links in the START menu, with no regard for any categories already there (for god's sake, there's a GAMES folder in the XP start menu for a REASON, people!)
Completely inconsistent.
The first two are fine; even if I don't like the way they do things, I can always script around CONSISTENT stupidity. Inconsistent stupidity? Not so much.
Yeah, but it was just re-capping Ep.1 for people who either hadn't played it (probably no one, but they're covering their bases) or, more likely, people who HAD played it, but had forgotten parts of it.
Shit, the first place I go on a given article--when I'm not doing research for something important--is usually the trivia section.
It bugs me that someone's insisted on sticking those "Wikipedia discourages trivia sections" things above all of them. It makes me worry that some of the information that I value most is in danger of deletion.
And, as you say, the fact that every goddamned page has one should be an indication that Wikipedia's policy is in the wrong on this issue.
I wish that all the good CRPGs weren't moving to console bastardizations and MMO models.
Some of my favorite games ever are CRPGs... Morrowind, Fallout 1 & 2, Vampire: The Masquerade and Bloodlines, Darklands (old school as hell, but one of the best games ever; we need a remake with a less-clunky interface. I'd pay new-game prices for it), Planescape: Torment, etc.
My wife's a much bigger RPGer than I am, and any trip to the PC game section of a store will draw complaints from her about how every RPG with an interesting-looking box turns out to be yet another damned MMO on closer inspection.
If it's my choice of place and type of kiss, then it's gonna be something safe and clean on the inside, and a little peck. Steering wheel, maybe, or some unused part of a seat. No biggie, and one hell of a lot better than getting snake goo on my sneakers.
As for the snake: poisonous or not? Dead or alive?
See, if the car-kissing's gotta be with tongue and on the bug-covered grill, then I'd rather step on a snake, but NOT a live poisonous one.
So if all of the above options are my choice, then I'd go with the car-kissing. But there are plenty of scenarios where the snake-stepping would be preferable.
And I still have no idea what they're trying to determine with that question.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, that would make a great horror game.
How's that working out, if you don't mind my asking? And which country are you in?
Working overseas, and especially in Europe, is something that I'd be very interested in trying.
(oh, and to be on topic: I live in Kansas. I'd sell my right to vote for the duration of my time in this state for $1, for obvious reasons.)
Incidentally, Asimov wrote an excellent guide to Shakespeare. That and his guide to the Bible are both great.
It seems to me that The Odyssey is begging to have an RPG made based on it. It'd be a little like Chrono Trigger/Cross + God of War. Awesome.
For that matter, The Iliad (or better yet, the whole Trojan cycle, filling in the gaps where necessary) would make a kick-ass multiplayer hack-n-slash, a bit like Gauntlet meets Dynasty warriors, with control points and a bunch of allied NPCs helping you out. Maybe the ability to call for divine intervention from whichever god happens to be on your side. Damn, that would kick ass.
If it's VLC, then I'll bet it's an deinterlacing issue. By default it's disabled, and on medium-res videos, playing with other settings (right click->deinterlace, I think) can yield a better picture, sometimes even getting rid of odd artifacts that show up without it. "blend" seems to work the best for me, most of the time.
MPC may not have deinterlacing disabled by default.
Well, luckily we've still got one Battlestar that uses old tech and has its computer systems decoupled from the network, so when the Cylons attack us with their crippling viruses we'll still have that one warship.
It's called the Galactica.
My Gnome playthrough was much faster than my first one, AND I managed to get the "cache checker" and "pinata" achievements in the same game.
There are only a few parts where you have to carry it, as you can drop it any time you are somewhere that you'll be returning to.
The ONLY hard part was the car, and even that only had ~5 minutes of play that were really, REALLY hard.
I spotted it before I looked at the achievement and was like, "wtf?"
Sent the little guy in to space on my third playthrough (second one was for commentary).
I've learned TONS of things from games and other diversions on the PC.
:)
Mavis Beacon (explicitly educational) taught me proper typing, but chatting with my friends on AIM and (especially) busy IRC channels taught me to type FAST.
Shadow President is the reason I can locate practically any country on a map faster than the vast majority of people.
A lot of stuff in my political science classes (and my own readings on philosophy in general) reminded me of ideas and people in Deus Ex.
Medieval: Total War taught me more about medieval political geography, politics, and technology (war-related tech, that is) than I was ever taught in any level of my education (yeah, I know more from reading, but no class ever taught me this stuff; we always skipped from talking about the Fertile Crescent to covering the Age of Exploration. Seriously.)
Rome: Total War and a couple of its mods (Rome: Total Realism and Europa Barbarorum, especially) have taught me a TON about the Hellenistic and Roman periods of history. Thanks to them, I know BOTH the Koine or Attic Greek AND Latin names for tons of Mediterranean cities (though I often don't know the modern name!)
Bushido Blade 1 & 2 and Shogun: Total War taught me the names of a bunch of different Japanese weapons.
I know a bit about the operation of a variety of firearms that I've never physically used, from paying close attention to the reload animations in dozens of games over the years (Counter-Strike and most WWII shooters are GREAT for this).
OK, so a lot of it's not *useful* information, but I did learn
I've got a friend who uses a setup like this.
It's a very, very good way to keep people off your machine at LAN parties. Then again, if they do use it, you can count on returning to your seat to find that someone hit the "use defaults" button in your settings, and you'll have to put your weird-ass controls back on.
Hahaha, you're not alone!
(sometimes, I shake my head no, but she doesn't seem to care.)
Artist Keven Federline's hit song "Popozao" is a refreshing change from the literarily-ignorant tunes of his contemporaries, which thoroughly fail to speak to a modern world while retaining ties to the important sense of rich history that exists in the medium of verse--lyrical or otherwise. Federline's use of sound is plainly meant to be evocative of those of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo", and may be equally offensive if one fails to grasp the significance beyond the words themselves. The message of this tour-de-force is many-layered, and worthy of closer analysis.
It quickly becomes plain to the listener that the setting of the scene is a dance floor, painting for us a picture full of moving bodies and light that well-fits this song's rhythmic and sometimes chaotic flow. We have a narrator who appears, on the surface, to be calling to a fellow dancer of the opposite sex. Following a Lindsayesque bit of primal noise, we are greeted with the line, "Toy all your thing on me, baby." Now, through this request for openness ("all your thing") and the use of the second person possessive, it is clear that the narrator desires a dialog with the listener, inviting us to explore and speak to the verses that follow, and to release our inhibitions. The deep, drum-like rhythm of this line, repeated four times for emphasis, ties it to the preceding noises, letting us know that the narrator speaks to us from--or on behalf of--that primal chaos.
A bit of Portuguese follows, chanted with a tone that is both menacing and enticing, reminding the listener in a few well-chosen syllables of the emotional rollercoaster that is Lindsay's "The Congo". The next two verses are particularly interesting, and inform us that a literal, superficial reading of these verses is, indeed, incorrect. The first gives us the meaning of some of the previous Portuguese speech, which we are told means "bring your ass". We'll come back to that in a moment. Later in the same verse, we are told that the narrator wants to see our "kitty and a little bit of titty". All-in-all, this is an overtly and even offensively sexual bit of lyric.
The next verse, however, reveals that this was merely a light-hearted play, as was foreshadowed with the laughter accompanying the songs introductory sounds. Federline deliberately breaks one's natural association of "kitty" with another synonym for "cat" which may also mean "vagina" with the lines "Girl, don't you worry about all the dough/because a cat is coming straight out of the know". With our earlier images shattered and replaced by the narrator himself, it is revealed that this pair of verses is really a statement on how we cheapen not only others, but ourselves by degrading sexuality in this way. This and other evidence in Federline's ouvre may indicate that he has a dislike for modern, sexually vulgar poetry, in the vein of Charles Bukowski. His overt references to Lindsay, who wrote in the very early 19th century, may even give us a glimpse into Federline's ideals. Further, the self-association of this deep-voiced male narrator with the feminine may have deeper implications.
(OK, I'll stop there. I was thinking about tying him in to the Beats and even Andy Kaufman [via their both having had amateur experiences with "professional" wrestling], but I think I've spent enough time on this already. I rest my case.)
This sounds like the kind of crap I might come up with were I to use my knowledge of lit-crit terminology and thinking to make up deliberately-stupid but syntactically- and factually-correct bunch of bullshit for my own amusement.
Want me to write something like this holding up K-Fed's song "PopoZão" as an intelligent bit of verse, in the vein of, say, Lindsay's "Congo"? I can. It won't be true, but it'll sound as good as this crap.
(don't get me wrong--I think that the Half-Life series has given us a damned-good balance of action and story, and is probably the best "pure" FPS series in existence. This article, however, is stupid.)
Wow, you just triggered me to realize what bothers me so much about the current default theme, which is something I'd thought about but hadn't quite pinned down:
It just looks OK with the default background, not great. But it looks like ASS with practically any other background one might choose.
Right click on desktop->create launcher->select "location", name it and browse to your home folder, hit OK
Does that not do it?
In trying methods for accomplishing this, I did discover that I can't right-click+drag in Ubuntu. Never noticed that before. Anyone know if that's a hard-coded Gnome thing, or whether I can change that behavior somehow?
Wow, that would explain why everything's an "sda" or "sdb" instead of "hda" and "hdb". I'd been wondering, but it didn't really affect me so I hadn't been motivated to check up on it.
Any idea why they did that?
GREAT idea.
One of the biggest structural annoyances about the Linux filesystem layout is what happens when you get an "open file" dialog from an app that doesn't respect the hiding ".". You have to scroll past 20+ folders--which, of course, are all stuck at the top, since "." puts them first in the file listing--to find what you're looking for in your
Either all of those programs that ignore the "." need to change--and there are a LOT that do this--or they need to make a ~/.preferences or ~/.settings folder and make sure it all goes in there, which, though not easier than changing those programs, is probably a better long-term design decision.
Both the OSX and Linux ways are good, IMO. OSX: every program and all its components are in a folder. Linux: this sort of program file goes here, this sort here, and you can mount these folders from various sources to achieve all kinds of neat administrative voodoo.
Either CAN be broken, but usually isn't. They're fairly consistent.
Windows? Let's see: how about we make a folder in "Program Files"... let's name it after our company, then make a sub-folder for each program from us! Yeah! Never mind that in three years we'll somehow manage to slightly change the company name we use on the folder by adding a dash or changing capitalization or something, and that "one folder for all our programs" goes out the window. Oh, and let's throw some DLLs in c:\windows\win32, AND write a bunch of stuff to the registry. Then, let's put a whole bunch of links in the START menu, with no regard for any categories already there (for god's sake, there's a GAMES folder in the XP start menu for a REASON, people!)
Completely inconsistent.
The first two are fine; even if I don't like the way they do things, I can always script around CONSISTENT stupidity. Inconsistent stupidity? Not so much.
Yeah, but it was just re-capping Ep.1 for people who either hadn't played it (probably no one, but they're covering their bases) or, more likely, people who HAD played it, but had forgotten parts of it.
Shit, the first place I go on a given article--when I'm not doing research for something important--is usually the trivia section.
It bugs me that someone's insisted on sticking those "Wikipedia discourages trivia sections" things above all of them. It makes me worry that some of the information that I value most is in danger of deletion.
And, as you say, the fact that every goddamned page has one should be an indication that Wikipedia's policy is in the wrong on this issue.
No, in the second one, one of the three raptors has an injured leg and is limited to 10m/s. Otherwise, the problem would be much simpler.
Haha, thanks, part of the reason that I posted was in the hopes that people would recommend some :)
Broken Hourglass looks especially interesting. I'll have to keep an eye on these.
I wish that all the good CRPGs weren't moving to console bastardizations and MMO models.
Some of my favorite games ever are CRPGs... Morrowind, Fallout 1 & 2, Vampire: The Masquerade and Bloodlines, Darklands (old school as hell, but one of the best games ever; we need a remake with a less-clunky interface. I'd pay new-game prices for it), Planescape: Torment, etc.
My wife's a much bigger RPGer than I am, and any trip to the PC game section of a store will draw complaints from her about how every RPG with an interesting-looking box turns out to be yet another damned MMO on closer inspection.
From one of the other two comics I read aside from xkcd:
dino baby
Which part of the car? Open or closed mouth?
If it's my choice of place and type of kiss, then it's gonna be something safe and clean on the inside, and a little peck. Steering wheel, maybe, or some unused part of a seat. No biggie, and one hell of a lot better than getting snake goo on my sneakers.
As for the snake: poisonous or not? Dead or alive?
See, if the car-kissing's gotta be with tongue and on the bug-covered grill, then I'd rather step on a snake, but NOT a live poisonous one.
So if all of the above options are my choice, then I'd go with the car-kissing. But there are plenty of scenarios where the snake-stepping would be preferable.
And I still have no idea what they're trying to determine with that question.