These guys knew this and did it anyway hoping to either fly under the radar or get some attention before being shut down (which they have.)
Oh, the irony. If their project were anything less than first class mega-awesome, then those trailers wouldn't have been so popular, and they would have certainly remained under that damned radar. They're victims of their own skill.
For the record, I'm all in favor of this. Of course it's harder to create your own work than to update something else, as you'll have a large amount of story writing to do, new assets to create, a game system to invent, etc., but if they've got this level of engine done already, and have people capable of creating these kinds of character models, then they've already got a good first step.
SquareEnix could have offered to distribute it as a PC update of ChronoTrigger. They're releasing PC versions of Final Fantasy. Buy the project off of them and distribute it for-profit. It's a bit unorthodox maybe, but I think most fans would buy it. Square gets a low-cost, high-quality port of one of its most popular games, made by people who obviously love the franchise, and gets to sell it as a budget title ala Serious Sam, thew developers get paid for their work and get to hear the oohs and aahs of appreciative gamers, and the public gets to buy the game. The only loss I can think of is that players won't be able to play the game for *free*, but I don't see how SquareEnix can allow that.
Anyone can raise questions about anything. The people who raise questions about Moore strike me as flywheels. But then, everything about Fox News strikes me as flywheelish.
But the point is, raising a question is easy to do spuriously. Allegations are similarly useless without good information on who's doing the allegating and the specific facts of the matter. Of course, these facts tend to get in the way of the need to present a short and informative Slashdot story, so what do I know.
I agree, but you'll never convince a religious person.
I don't think anyone is a locked door, utterly unconvincable (including myself), but it is extremely difficult to convince many people regardless of the evidence. God himself could come down and say "Hey guys, you got it all wrong. Repubs are jerks, Kerry is where it's at," and they would discount the reality of the vision before changing their opinions. I know this because I actually posed a situation similar to that to a staunch christian friend not long ago, and that's the response he gave.
Interesting you say that. I do believe we have elements of greatness in our history, though by European terms it not be long. World War II, our role in that kicked ass. Computers exist largely because of us (with help, of course). We gave the world airplanes and the automobile. There is a strong streak of the petty in US national life too (anyone remember the Anti-Masonic Party?), but also surprising nobility.
Maybe we need to always remind ourselves of what we've done that's good to keep from dwelling on the bad? If that's the case, then the United States is a lot like me.
Others have covered it already. But the point should be reitereated--atheism is not a "third way", but atheists like to believe that they are the unbenighted keepers of the Truth, so I'm unsurprised by your statement.
I never said I was atheist, though I admit I strongly lean that way at the moment.
I *believe* that there's probably no gods, but I do not blindly swear up and down to you that there are not. In that way at least my opinion (which is what it is) is different from that of a religion.
And a lot of religious questions make scientists uncomfortable as well, such as "If natural selection is so great, why are we actively working to protect untenable genes with doctors and opthamologists and boob-jobs?" Science, regardless of the high opinion its practitioners have of themselves, do not have all the answers.
I didn't say natural selection was great. It seems to be one possible way to create an intelligent, self-aware species (though it could also just be a way to create one that has the self-perception of these traits) and that kicks ass, but in term of morality, it sucks. That's what we have civilization for, but I digress.
But it's not being taught, undistorted. If your "science" requires NewSpeak in order to make sense, I question its value.
Watch it pardner, dragging Orwell into this is dangerously close to flamin' words. NewSpeak indeed. In any case, I see no NewSpeak in the linked article, I request that you be more specific.
By undistorted, I meant honestly. I went to a Christian high school (long story), and I can say without equivication that they did not give a good scientific education. One memorable example was them passing off dinosaur bones as pre-Flood examples of ordinary lizards that had grown to tremendous proportions. I was a fairly ardent Christian at that point, but once I read that, I began to see the chinks in the armor.
The reason he's so amazed is because he doesn't much care for his own country, he can't imagine that there are people who do love their country.
What is a country to inspire this strong emotion? Do you love the USA? Do love each and every morsel of it? Do you hug the folks at the DMV? How do you feel about traffic cops? How about the vaunted political system that, it seems, everyone in the nation hates either slightly more or less than one-half of, depending on party alignment?
Do you love the physical country, the actual land, or rather the people in it? The sacrifices our forefathers made to create it? If that were the case, do you love the oppression (or percieved oppression) inflicted upon it by Great Britian that spurred its formation? Do you love France for backing us in the Revolutionary War?
A country is an intellectual construct, the same way profession, station, and club memberships are, no more or less. This is not debatable; it is fact. If there indeed is a God, you can sure (or unsure) as hell bet He doesn't care a wit about whatever imaginary groupings we humans invent for ourselves. There are no stars-and-stripes in heaven.
The Anti-Patriotism Patriots always insinuate that American patriotism is half-ignorant jingoism. It never occurs to them that most of America really loves America. What a loony idea!
Maybe. Or maybe the United States, these days, isn't really all that different from other developed nations.
Other nations, even ones as "different" as Japan, they have stock markets and skyscrapers, personal freedoms and free presses, fishing holes and sparkling green hillsides (in Japan these latter are called "golf courses"). Need I mention that many of these places are like that because, directly or indirectly, of the example the United States set? Of course we got many of our own ideas from ancient Greece by way of Great Brittian, where they had been stewing for some time.
Yeah, there are bad, bad places. We have troops in one of them as we speak, though the jur
The premises of this argument are scientific ones: evolution and the scientific method.
True, true. But that's because logic itself is scientific.
The question that needs to be asked is: how falsifiable is the thing being taught? Who is the religious truth revealed to? How are we to know that the person who received it wasn't talking out his ass?
Ultimately religions boil down, at best, to appeals to common sense (which is in fact highly dependent on culture and upbringing), and at worst an appeal to emotion, or the doing of something without good justification. It is of course possible that a religion is true without proof, but considering the awful large number of competing, mutually exclusive ones out there, I get the strong feeling that people are just guessing. I'll continue to place my bets on none-of-the-above.
Regardless of the truth about religion, the call on whether it should be reflected in textbooks is a lot more clear-cut.
"A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."
Then atheism, for me, fails the test, because I'm not zealous about it (Really!), and there's nothing to devote myself to conscientiously.
Thus atheism should be discussed as a belief system that many have chosen. This should lead into a discussion of the rationalizations inherent in such a belief system. e.g. Did a man named Jesus exist? If he did, what social and political factors contributed to his success as a spiritual leader? If he didn't, how did such a legend arise?
These discussions are all over the place -- many of them, in fact, are discussed by believing practicers in liturgical studies.
As for how the legend arose, my friend, there are stories about ghost children hiding in the drapes of Three Men and a Baby, stories about young women cooking themselves in tanning beds, and stories about alligators living in sewers. Snopes.com is full of the-a juicy details. Legends need no excuse to exist, they just do, and many of the most popular are created by pranksters. The presence of a egend does not imply truth at all, just as ancedotal evidence is inadmissable in court.
Atheism is a religion: it's an unprovable belief that God does not exist.
Ah, but it could be argued that people believe in God because he cannot be proven to exist. Which leads to the possibility that God was thought up specifically because there was no way to prove or disprove him.
I say that instead of disproving God, that instead he must be proven, and that agnosticism should be the default cause. No, not even agnosticism, because that says God cannot be known.
But I don't think God and the massive amount of religious baggage that goes along with him (no less than three holy tomes, gigantic church organizations, Monroe Doctrines, etc.) can be considered something that should go without proof. If belief in God were a simple private matter between the individual created and creator it'd be different, but it's not.
So the question is, then: are beliefs and belief systems identical with religions?
I submit to you that they are not. Dictionary.com, at least, agrees with me, calling a religion a "Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe" as the lead definition. The closest thing there that could be used to refer to atheism is "A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion," which does not refer to atheism as I understand it.
I brought up the point because I used to be Christian myself, and heard many times the argument that atheism is "just another religion." I believed it then, but I do not now.
Firstly, religion: we must make sure that in our quest to discourage endorsement of a particular religion, we do not discourage religion outright. That is, we must ensure that we accept all religions equally, favoring none.
But your statement itself contains a hidden discouragement: against atheism, which is not a religion. It's like asking whether you want grape, strawberry ot pina collada flavoring in your cynide slushie. Pick your poison.
A lot of important science raises serious questions that make people of many religions uncomfortable. But it should still be taught, undistorted. It should be taught specifically for the reason that it challenges religious belief: after all, that which is challenged and survives becomes stronger in the process, and if it does not survive, then arguably it *should* be destroyed.
Politically based literature, I believe is essential. It is absolutely necessary to create a populace that understands issues on both sides and is able to logically analyze those issues and "pick a side" so to speak. Most of our nations most dividing issues (abortion, being the most notable one that comes to mind) have sane, reasonable arguments on both sides of the fence.
I also take issue with this, though my point is more subtle here.
The person who picks how the sides are represented can determine the outcome. Rare has been the textbook I've seen that has gone out of its way to show that an issue is truly complex and difficult to decide. (This happens in favor of both sides.) Furthermore, presenting two sides of an argument equally implies to the reader that the answer lies between, when it fact the real answer could be beyond the extremes presented, or even outside of the duality presented. Many arguments have more than two sides.
Patriotism itself is not inherently a bad thing and can pull people in a nation together.
I had a German friend who went to school here, in the U.S., for a while, and the thing he said that struck him about the United States was how everyone is so determined to be patrotic here. American flags everywhere (even pre-9/11), and people conspicuously saying what a great country it is, and pledges of alliegience in schools. European nations don't fly apart at the seams, but neither do they, these days, have this kind of pervasive, cultural nationalism. We don't need these things to be brought together as a nation.
That's the evil word for patriotism of course, the negative version: nationalism. That's a thing that I'm not at all comfortable with having tought in our schools. It wasn't the everywhere-stars-and-stripes that brought the U.S. together after 9/11, that was just a result of a deeper sense of fellow feeling that emerged in response to adversity. What brought us together had nothing to do with our nation, but everything to do with our humanity.
What, besides predict sure things? It doesn't take a genius to see that Acclaim's fortunes have tanked lately. How long before someone predicts Interplay will go bankrupt?
I may have to turn in my geek card to say this but... look, Penny Arcade may be funny -- sometimes -- but it's not *that* great.
1. Mister Sinus is in the wrong, period. It's perfectly okay to make fun of movies in the Mystery Science style, but it's not okay to rip off their name. Maybe it would be if this were parody, but the thing being parodied is not MST, it's the movies, so that defense will probably collapse. To the guy who said Mister Sinus, in terms of quality, "kicks MST to the curb," I have to respond: I seriously doubt it.
2. The Mystery Science style has been seen in a non-MST DVD before. Take a look at the director's commentary on Ghostbusters some day. Rather slick, if jittery.
3. Best Brains has implied that copying episodes is okay, with "Keep circulating the tapes" in the credits of earlier episodes. Kevin Murphy, voice of Tom Servo and author of A Year At The Movies (which is GREAT, by the way) has condoned internet episode distribution in an interview (but it should be said that he is no longer a Best Brains employee, and wasn't one when he said it). But most fans, and distribution systems such as the DAP, refuse to trade episodes that can currently be purchsed. There are almost ten times as many episodes that aren't available as are, and some of the best ones (like the Gamera series and the other Japanese movies brought to the US by Sandy Frank Enterprises) will probably never be made available for official purchase because of rights issues surrounding the movie.
But there is one really cool thing about all this: MST3K still has the cultural mindshare, among geeks at least, to make the front page on Slashdot! Cause for some celebration, perhaps.
Yep, I've got 17mb, and I'm looking at some right now. They appear at the right side of the page under the "New Window" and "Print" links. First is a heading that says "Sponsored Links" with some items, and below that there's another heading that says "Related Links." At the bottom there's a link that says "About these pages" that leads to the Gmail help center.
It took opening multiple messages to find ads, however. They don't appear on all, or even many, messages. There may be a random component, the content of the message may be an influence, and you may be less likely to get ads you've seen before.
It has nothing to do with adsense: you have to open messages to receive ads, and notifiers don't do that.
I think it's probably to block other people who aren't yet on our radar, such as spammers automating logins for the purposes of evil, or someone trying to create a shell program around Gmail that blocks ads.
Actually, wouldn't that be the very best time to watch a train wreck? I'd be surprised if there wasn't a coyote at the wheel and a giant ACME on the side of the locomotive.
Except that the Olympics is doing more than just plastering corporate symbols all over the place. They're forbidding other corporate symbols from even existing in their venue.
Am I the only one who thinks this all smacks of old days when the human race was banding together in small groups in the woods, bearing painted banners and sigils, killing each other?
Deleting arbitrary configurations of color and shape from the tract of land you control smacks to me of inquisitions and supersition more than anything else. Sure, it's for a different purpose... but it's not really that different, when you think hard enough about it.
And don't even get me started on how the IOC seems to care less about national flags than corporate logos. That's a rich source of humor that someone other than myself can mine.
Contrary to your statement, many Olympic events do require expensive locales. See, there are rules here, and rules are what make sports what they are - without them, a sport is just a couple of guys hitting a ball back and forth. You can't just swim in any swimming pool, you can't play soccer in a baseball stadium, you can't have a rowing competition in the middle of the ocean. These things all have to be regulation size and with regulated conditions, not to mention enough seats to ensure that people who want to can actually watch.
But let us not forget how the Olympics got to this state.
Why are the Olympics huge? Because there's always been money to pay for it. How has there been money to pay for it? Because the Olympics are huge. Each increase drives the other, the size of the games and the need for increased sponsorship going hand-in-hand.
Do you need an Olympic regulation pool to have a swim meet? Who wrote those regulations? You could probably just swim back and forth across a smaller pool more times.
The thing I'm trying to get across here is, sports are arbitrary. Why is a baseball diamond that size? Why is it not a pentagon? Pinch hitters, my oh my. Football, why that many yards? Why that far for a 3-point shot? 100m dash, and not 110? A marathon at only 1,500 meters? The Olympics could very well be reduced in size.
In fact, I'd wager that most of the expense of the Olympics comes not from the competition, but from the stadium seating around it, the huge sums in broadcast equipment, building new facilities for all of this instead of holding it in the same place every four years, and let's not forget about the likes of logo police, who need salaries and people to monitor the stands and field for verbotten symbols.
It should be obvious that I, myself, do have a problem with all the advertising shenanigans going on here. But I also have a problem with sports stars becoming walking billboards, and how our entire culture is getting slowly wrapped around the fingers of Coca-Cola and McDonalds.
But worst of all, I hate how the word "terrorism" is getting warped into whatever stupid, self-serving thing the people using it want it to mean. Where is the terror in "advertising terrorism?" People are not in danger of losing their lives to the Pepsi logo! Gah!
My god! I thought of that very program when I saw the election game at Wal-Mart! It was in the very first issue of Compute's! Gazette I ever bought, unfortunately getting burned with the trash during the great father-sponsored Closet Clean-Out of the early 90's.
I rarely had the patience to type in those programs, so I have to admit I never played the game. I remember from the screen shots that it made excellent use of the C64's built-in, general-purpose graphics set. I'm definitely going to check that game out.
On another level: Does this program's mention on Slashdot mean that old magazine programs are getting more respect now? If that's the case, I am so ready. Fifteen minutes of fame starting.... now!
Slashdot Mirror
These guys knew this and did it anyway hoping to either fly under the radar or get some attention before being shut down (which they have.)
Oh, the irony. If their project were anything less than first class mega-awesome, then those trailers wouldn't have been so popular, and they would have certainly remained under that damned radar. They're victims of their own skill.
Dude, if one weren't legally allowed to do something like this, we wouldn't HAVE a games industry....
We certainly wouldn't have Shockwave or Flash gaming, most of which make it a point to rip off at least one pre-existing arcade, PC or Nintendo game.
For the record, I'm all in favor of this. Of course it's harder to create your own work than to update something else, as you'll have a large amount of story writing to do, new assets to create, a game system to invent, etc., but if they've got this level of engine done already, and have people capable of creating these kinds of character models, then they've already got a good first step.
Actually, there is one way.
SquareEnix could have offered to distribute it as a PC update of ChronoTrigger. They're releasing PC versions of Final Fantasy. Buy the project off of them and distribute it for-profit. It's a bit unorthodox maybe, but I think most fans would buy it. Square gets a low-cost, high-quality port of one of its most popular games, made by people who obviously love the franchise, and gets to sell it as a budget title ala Serious Sam, thew developers get paid for their work and get to hear the oohs and aahs of appreciative gamers, and the public gets to buy the game. The only loss I can think of is that players won't be able to play the game for *free*, but I don't see how SquareEnix can allow that.
Anyone can raise questions about anything. The people who raise questions about Moore strike me as flywheels. But then, everything about Fox News strikes me as flywheelish.
But the point is, raising a question is easy to do spuriously. Allegations are similarly useless without good information on who's doing the allegating and the specific facts of the matter. Of course, these facts tend to get in the way of the need to present a short and informative Slashdot story, so what do I know.
I agree, but you'll never convince a religious person.
I don't think anyone is a locked door, utterly unconvincable (including myself), but it is extremely difficult to convince many people regardless of the evidence. God himself could come down and say "Hey guys, you got it all wrong. Repubs are jerks, Kerry is where it's at," and they would discount the reality of the vision before changing their opinions. I know this because I actually posed a situation similar to that to a staunch christian friend not long ago, and that's the response he gave.
Well, my friend was pretty adamant. Maybe it's just Germany? I remember him being more inclusive than that. Maybe it's a matter of scale?
Interesting you say that. I do believe we have elements of greatness in our history, though by European terms it not be long. World War II, our role in that kicked ass. Computers exist largely because of us (with help, of course). We gave the world airplanes and the automobile. There is a strong streak of the petty in US national life too (anyone remember the Anti-Masonic Party?), but also surprising nobility.
Maybe we need to always remind ourselves of what we've done that's good to keep from dwelling on the bad? If that's the case, then the United States is a lot like me.
Is that an epiphany I just had? Yoinks.
Others have covered it already. But the point should be reitereated--atheism is not a "third way", but atheists like to believe that they are the unbenighted keepers of the Truth, so I'm unsurprised by your statement.
I never said I was atheist, though I admit I strongly lean that way at the moment.
I *believe* that there's probably no gods, but I do not blindly swear up and down to you that there are not. In that way at least my opinion (which is what it is) is different from that of a religion.
And a lot of religious questions make scientists uncomfortable as well, such as "If natural selection is so great, why are we actively working to protect untenable genes with doctors and opthamologists and boob-jobs?" Science, regardless of the high opinion its practitioners have of themselves, do not have all the answers.
I didn't say natural selection was great. It seems to be one possible way to create an intelligent, self-aware species (though it could also just be a way to create one that has the self-perception of these traits) and that kicks ass, but in term of morality, it sucks. That's what we have civilization for, but I digress.
But it's not being taught, undistorted. If your "science" requires NewSpeak in order to make sense, I question its value.
Watch it pardner, dragging Orwell into this is dangerously close to flamin' words. NewSpeak indeed. In any case, I see no NewSpeak in the linked article, I request that you be more specific.
By undistorted, I meant honestly. I went to a Christian high school (long story), and I can say without equivication that they did not give a good scientific education. One memorable example was them passing off dinosaur bones as pre-Flood examples of ordinary lizards that had grown to tremendous proportions. I was a fairly ardent Christian at that point, but once I read that, I began to see the chinks in the armor.
The reason he's so amazed is because he doesn't much care for his own country, he can't imagine that there are people who do love their country.
What is a country to inspire this strong emotion? Do you love the USA? Do love each and every morsel of it? Do you hug the folks at the DMV? How do you feel about traffic cops? How about the vaunted political system that, it seems, everyone in the nation hates either slightly more or less than one-half of, depending on party alignment?
Do you love the physical country, the actual land, or rather the people in it? The sacrifices our forefathers made to create it? If that were the case, do you love the oppression (or percieved oppression) inflicted upon it by Great Britian that spurred its formation? Do you love France for backing us in the Revolutionary War?
A country is an intellectual construct, the same way profession, station, and club memberships are, no more or less. This is not debatable; it is fact. If there indeed is a God, you can sure (or unsure) as hell bet He doesn't care a wit about whatever imaginary groupings we humans invent for ourselves. There are no stars-and-stripes in heaven.
The Anti-Patriotism Patriots always insinuate that American patriotism is half-ignorant jingoism. It never occurs to them that most of America really loves America. What a loony idea!
Maybe. Or maybe the United States, these days, isn't really all that different from other developed nations.
Other nations, even ones as "different" as Japan, they have stock markets and skyscrapers, personal freedoms and free presses, fishing holes and sparkling green hillsides (in Japan these latter are called "golf courses"). Need I mention that many of these places are like that because, directly or indirectly, of the example the United States set? Of course we got many of our own ideas from ancient Greece by way of Great Brittian, where they had been stewing for some time.
Yeah, there are bad, bad places. We have troops in one of them as we speak, though the jur
The premises of this argument are scientific ones: evolution and the scientific method.
True, true. But that's because logic itself is scientific.
The question that needs to be asked is: how falsifiable is the thing being taught? Who is the religious truth revealed to? How are we to know that the person who received it wasn't talking out his ass?
Ultimately religions boil down, at best, to appeals to common sense (which is in fact highly dependent on culture and upbringing), and at worst an appeal to emotion, or the doing of something without good justification. It is of course possible that a religion is true without proof, but considering the awful large number of competing, mutually exclusive ones out there, I get the strong feeling that people are just guessing. I'll continue to place my bets on none-of-the-above.
Regardless of the truth about religion, the call on whether it should be reflected in textbooks is a lot more clear-cut.
"A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."
Then atheism, for me, fails the test, because I'm not zealous about it (Really!), and there's nothing to devote myself to conscientiously.
Thus atheism should be discussed as a belief system that many have chosen. This should lead into a discussion of the rationalizations inherent in such a belief system. e.g. Did a man named Jesus exist? If he did, what social and political factors contributed to his success as a spiritual leader? If he didn't, how did such a legend arise?
These discussions are all over the place -- many of them, in fact, are discussed by believing practicers in liturgical studies.
As for how the legend arose, my friend, there are stories about ghost children hiding in the drapes of Three Men and a Baby, stories about young women cooking themselves in tanning beds, and stories about alligators living in sewers. Snopes.com is full of the-a juicy details. Legends need no excuse to exist, they just do, and many of the most popular are created by pranksters. The presence of a egend does not imply truth at all, just as ancedotal evidence is inadmissable in court.
Atheism is a religion: it's an unprovable belief that God does not exist.
Ah, but it could be argued that people believe in God because he cannot be proven to exist. Which leads to the possibility that God was thought up specifically because there was no way to prove or disprove him.
I say that instead of disproving God, that instead he must be proven, and that agnosticism should be the default cause. No, not even agnosticism, because that says God cannot be known.
But I don't think God and the massive amount of religious baggage that goes along with him (no less than three holy tomes, gigantic church organizations, Monroe Doctrines, etc.) can be considered something that should go without proof. If belief in God were a simple private matter between the individual created and creator it'd be different, but it's not.
So the question is, then: are beliefs and belief systems identical with religions?
I submit to you that they are not. Dictionary.com, at least, agrees with me, calling a religion a "Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe" as the lead definition. The closest thing there that could be used to refer to atheism is "A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion," which does not refer to atheism as I understand it.
I brought up the point because I used to be Christian myself, and heard many times the argument that atheism is "just another religion." I believed it then, but I do not now.
Firstly, religion: we must make sure that in our quest to discourage endorsement of a particular religion, we do not discourage religion outright. That is, we must ensure that we accept all religions equally, favoring none.
But your statement itself contains a hidden discouragement: against atheism, which is not a religion. It's like asking whether you want grape, strawberry ot pina collada flavoring in your cynide slushie. Pick your poison.
A lot of important science raises serious questions that make people of many religions uncomfortable. But it should still be taught, undistorted. It should be taught specifically for the reason that it challenges religious belief: after all, that which is challenged and survives becomes stronger in the process, and if it does not survive, then arguably it *should* be destroyed.
Politically based literature, I believe is essential. It is absolutely necessary to create a populace that understands issues on both sides and is able to logically analyze those issues and "pick a side" so to speak. Most of our nations most dividing issues (abortion, being the most notable one that comes to mind) have sane, reasonable arguments on both sides of the fence.
I also take issue with this, though my point is more subtle here.
The person who picks how the sides are represented can determine the outcome. Rare has been the textbook I've seen that has gone out of its way to show that an issue is truly complex and difficult to decide. (This happens in favor of both sides.) Furthermore, presenting two sides of an argument equally implies to the reader that the answer lies between, when it fact the real answer could be beyond the extremes presented, or even outside of the duality presented. Many arguments have more than two sides.
Patriotism itself is not inherently a bad thing and can pull people in a nation together.
I had a German friend who went to school here, in the U.S., for a while, and the thing he said that struck him about the United States was how everyone is so determined to be patrotic here. American flags everywhere (even pre-9/11), and people conspicuously saying what a great country it is, and pledges of alliegience in schools. European nations don't fly apart at the seams, but neither do they, these days, have this kind of pervasive, cultural nationalism. We don't need these things to be brought together as a nation.
That's the evil word for patriotism of course, the negative version: nationalism. That's a thing that I'm not at all comfortable with having tought in our schools. It wasn't the everywhere-stars-and-stripes that brought the U.S. together after 9/11, that was just a result of a deeper sense of fellow feeling that emerged in response to adversity. What brought us together had nothing to do with our nation, but everything to do with our humanity.
What, besides predict sure things? It doesn't take a genius to see that Acclaim's fortunes have tanked lately. How long before someone predicts Interplay will go bankrupt?
I may have to turn in my geek card to say this but... look, Penny Arcade may be funny -- sometimes -- but it's not *that* great.
1. Mister Sinus is in the wrong, period. It's perfectly okay to make fun of movies in the Mystery Science style, but it's not okay to rip off their name. Maybe it would be if this were parody, but the thing being parodied is not MST, it's the movies, so that defense will probably collapse. To the guy who said Mister Sinus, in terms of quality, "kicks MST to the curb," I have to respond: I seriously doubt it.
2. The Mystery Science style has been seen in a non-MST DVD before. Take a look at the director's commentary on Ghostbusters some day. Rather slick, if jittery.
3. Best Brains has implied that copying episodes is okay, with "Keep circulating the tapes" in the credits of earlier episodes. Kevin Murphy, voice of Tom Servo and author of A Year At The Movies (which is GREAT, by the way) has condoned internet episode distribution in an interview (but it should be said that he is no longer a Best Brains employee, and wasn't one when he said it). But most fans, and distribution systems such as the DAP, refuse to trade episodes that can currently be purchsed. There are almost ten times as many episodes that aren't available as are, and some of the best ones (like the Gamera series and the other Japanese movies brought to the US by Sandy Frank Enterprises) will probably never be made available for official purchase because of rights issues surrounding the movie.
But there is one really cool thing about all this: MST3K still has the cultural mindshare, among geeks at least, to make the front page on Slashdot! Cause for some celebration, perhaps.
You could always play... Thy Dungeonman!
Yep, I've got 17mb, and I'm looking at some right now. They appear at the right side of the page under the "New Window" and "Print" links. First is a heading that says "Sponsored Links" with some items, and below that there's another heading that says "Related Links." At the bottom there's a link that says "About these pages" that leads to the Gmail help center.
It took opening multiple messages to find ads, however. They don't appear on all, or even many, messages. There may be a random component, the content of the message may be an influence, and you may be less likely to get ads you've seen before.
It does too have ads, they're just not common. You don't always get an ad when you view a message, just sometimes.
My guess:
It has nothing to do with adsense: you have to open messages to receive ads, and notifiers don't do that.
I think it's probably to block other people who aren't yet on our radar, such as spammers automating logins for the purposes of evil, or someone trying to create a shell program around Gmail that blocks ads.
Actually, wouldn't that be the very best time to watch a train wreck? I'd be surprised if there wasn't a coyote at the wheel and a giant ACME on the side of the locomotive.
Except that the Olympics is doing more than just plastering corporate symbols all over the place. They're forbidding other corporate symbols from even existing in their venue.
Am I the only one who thinks this all smacks of old days when the human race was banding together in small groups in the woods, bearing painted banners and sigils, killing each other?
Deleting arbitrary configurations of color and shape from the tract of land you control smacks to me of inquisitions and supersition more than anything else. Sure, it's for a different purpose... but it's not really that different, when you think hard enough about it.
And don't even get me started on how the IOC seems to care less about national flags than corporate logos. That's a rich source of humor that someone other than myself can mine.
Of course, which is why Matt agreed to be interviewed by Moore in Bowling for Columbine.
Hey, wait a minute!
Contrary to your statement, many Olympic events do require expensive locales. See, there are rules here, and rules are what make sports what they are - without them, a sport is just a couple of guys hitting a ball back and forth. You can't just swim in any swimming pool, you can't play soccer in a baseball stadium, you can't have a rowing competition in the middle of the ocean. These things all have to be regulation size and with regulated conditions, not to mention enough seats to ensure that people who want to can actually watch.
But let us not forget how the Olympics got to this state.
Why are the Olympics huge? Because there's always been money to pay for it. How has there been money to pay for it? Because the Olympics are huge. Each increase drives the other, the size of the games and the need for increased sponsorship going hand-in-hand.
Do you need an Olympic regulation pool to have a swim meet? Who wrote those regulations? You could probably just swim back and forth across a smaller pool more times.
The thing I'm trying to get across here is, sports are arbitrary. Why is a baseball diamond that size? Why is it not a pentagon? Pinch hitters, my oh my. Football, why that many yards? Why that far for a 3-point shot? 100m dash, and not 110? A marathon at only 1,500 meters? The Olympics could very well be reduced in size.
In fact, I'd wager that most of the expense of the Olympics comes not from the competition, but from the stadium seating around it, the huge sums in broadcast equipment, building new facilities for all of this instead of holding it in the same place every four years, and let's not forget about the likes of logo police, who need salaries and people to monitor the stands and field for verbotten symbols.
It should be obvious that I, myself, do have a problem with all the advertising shenanigans going on here. But I also have a problem with sports stars becoming walking billboards, and how our entire culture is getting slowly wrapped around the fingers of Coca-Cola and McDonalds.
But worst of all, I hate how the word "terrorism" is getting warped into whatever stupid, self-serving thing the people using it want it to mean. Where is the terror in "advertising terrorism?" People are not in danger of losing their lives to the Pepsi logo! Gah!
My god! I thought of that very program when I saw the election game at Wal-Mart! It was in the very first issue of Compute's! Gazette I ever bought, unfortunately getting burned with the trash during the great father-sponsored Closet Clean-Out of the early 90's.
I rarely had the patience to type in those programs, so I have to admit I never played the game. I remember from the screen shots that it made excellent use of the C64's built-in, general-purpose graphics set. I'm definitely going to check that game out.
On another level: Does this program's mention on Slashdot mean that old magazine programs are getting more respect now? If that's the case, I am so ready. Fifteen minutes of fame starting.... now!