Independence War 1 and 2, however, really capitalized on Newtonian flight physics. IW2 got it completely right.
It's an incredible feeling, sliding along the skin of a capital ship while laying down a barrage of fire on its broadside, then blasting out sideways at a crazy angle.
There's even a conversion from Independence War to a Babylon 5 universe: see Buda 5.
The frosting side of my brain wants a Dungeon Keeper sequel that makes DK2 forgivable. But the shredded wheat side wants to rant about how there's no creativity in the games market anymore!
Then both sides agree to play Evil Genius. Everybody's happy.
A friend and I recently started up a 'cast on role playing games that has a conversational, freeform tone. I realized at once from listening to the raw recording that there was a *lot* of editing to do.
From 2.5 hours of general chatting, I pulled about 40 minutes of solid, usable material. And that was before I cleaned up all the "ummm"s and "errrr"s and "you know"s from the mix. Verbal static has just got to go.
When I catch a 'cast, tune in to a radio show, listen to a lecture, or whatever, no matter where on the indie/pro spectrum it lies, I'm really tuning in for the core of the content. I suspect most of you out there are the same way.
We can't pick our audience, but we can choose what goes into our 'cast. I don't expect big numbers for our modest production, but the people who do show up will get the tightest show we can give them. If nothing else, the agony will be brief.:)
Every time I turn on that radio in the car, I can barely stay tuned to one station for any amount of time. Generally I come in on the very end of a song I like, or I have to cycle through the same sets of commercial for the LOWEST PRICES OF THE YEAR--AGAIN!
I guess that's because I have no loyalty to any one station. I'm loyal to the content, not the provider, and the providers really suck.
'Casts can bring loyalty not only to the content but *also* to the provider, because they tend to be one and the same. Especially when the 'casts are about esoteric topics that would only get caught by a small number of folks in the grand scheme of things, but a large number on a personal scale. Show formats get a lot more experimental too, which I really appreciate.
Speaking of esoteric content, hey role playing gamers: *cough*-sig-*cough*.
There's also the distinguishing mark of what McCloud calls "closure." It's the ability, the necessity actually, of the human mind to connect the panels of a comic together narratively.
For example, in a comic ilike this episode of Order of the Stick, the humor lives in the last two panels. The reader creates the action of the dragon eating the party.
McCloud draws levels of closure distinguished by how granular the passage of time is as related to the narrative. Animation easily eliminates much of the instant-to-instant granularity of closure by expressly displaying it -- when a character moves from one end of the frame to the other, that action is generally animated as motion. The imagination of the audience is less engaged.
More avant garde animations might use fades, dissolves, or wipes, which make them more comic-like while reconstructing the influence of time on the medium....
Wow. That's what I get for all that fancy book-learnin', I guess.
Dr. Lee Smolin's book The Life of the Cosmos contains an excellent and accessable description of how galaxies form out of molecular clouds, what drives star births, and some of the more interesting consequences of those processes for the development of life. It's a fantastic read.
As an entreprenuer of small means and no portfolio (yet), this is very, very interesting to me. I would much rather approach the infrastructure decision now while I can build my business from scratch than have to revisit it later with systems already established.
Despite apparent evidence to the contrary, there's plenty of room in the marketplace for little guys like me to get in the game. OSS that gets the job done is a serious consideration; it might make the difference between showing a profit in my first year vs. reporting a net loss due to expensive capital investment.
A company offers two ways to buy the product. One way is to buy it using a traditional one-server/many-clients model, and the cost of the product includes the cost to distribute (which it always does anyway).
Another version of the product is distributed through bittorrent, the price of which *also* includes the price to distribute, but since t costs orders of magnitude less bandwidth to bittorrent as opposed to ftp to many clients, the cost of distribution is lower. Ergo, the product cost is lower.
I'm willing to bet that the savings to the costumer -- that's *you* -- are greater than the amount of upstream bandwidth that each individual "spends" in order to get the 'torrent.
Of course, that depends on the distributor being honest about how much bandwidth really got saved, and that the market can settle on a value for that.
I also have to ask, though: are you really using all your upstream, all the time? Do you keep track of every little cookie response your browser sends back to, say, Amazon.com? Do you expect compensation for that, too?
I got the same treatement from the US Animal Humane Society. I sent in $50 one year as a proxy donation for a friend as a gift. Two years later I was still recieving letters every week, flyers, and tiny packages with branded trinkets desktop calculators or caldenards with "DON'T FORGET TO DONATE KTNX" written on the first day of every month. All accompanied, of course, with pleas of "THESE P00R PUPP13S OMG PLZ HELP WITH UR $$$".
Sometimes they'd juxtapose the gift of a delightful teddy bear with a story of a puppy who was purposfully fed antifreeze, or of a kitten that was strung up by the neck until dead. Cheap tactics, you assholes.
That's where my $50 went: postage, cheap shit, and guilt trips. I love animals, but the Humane Society will never get another dime.
Trying to read that site is making my eyeballs bleed. Gamers they may be, but the super-hip graphics and layout (not to mention TEENY PRINT) are not apparently the work of a web designer who intends the site to be read on a regular basis. Nice prototype, but bad execution.
Otherwise, the articles are hip and make for a decent read. There is obviously an editor involved, ensure some level of quality above blog. It'd be a great publication if I didn't need a zoom function and glare-reducing polorized lenses on my retina.
I met The One True Bruce at Page One last time he zipped through ABQ. Helluva nice guy, that Bruce. I, of course, was a jibbering dork. (Nice to see things haven't changed.)
This makes me wonder if there is a way to use that subtle, overly-real creepiness as a game device. For instance, there might be a Bladerunner-type scenario in which the Replicant is a little "too" perfect. The game engine might model the rest of the world in acceptably-flawed mode, but the Replicant would be turned up to 11 as a turn of the screws to the player's psyche.
free (adj.) Look up free at Dictionary.com
O.E. freo "free, exempt from, not in bondage," also "noble, joyful," from P.Gmc. *frijaz (cf. M.H.G. vri, Ger. frei, Du. vrij, Goth. freis "free"), from PIE *prijos "dear, beloved" (cf. Skt. priyah "own, dear, beloved," priyate "loves;" O.C.S. prijati "to help," prijatelji "friend;" Welsh rhydd "free"). The adv. is from O.E. freon, freogan "to free, love." The primary sense seems to have been "beloved, friend, to love;" which in some languages (notably Gmc. and Celtic) developed also a sense of "free," perhaps from the terms "beloved" or "friend" being applied to the free members of one's clan (as opposed to slaves, cf. L. liberi, meaning both "free" and "children"). Cf. Goth. frijon "to love;" O.E. freod "affection, friendship," friga "love," friðu "peace;" O.N. friðr, Ger. Friede "peace;" O.E. freo "wife;" O.N. Frigg "wife of Odin," lit. "beloved" or "loving;" M.L.G. vrien "to take to wife, Du. vrijen, Ger. freien "to woo." Sense of "given without cost" is 1585, from notion of "free of cost." Of nations, "not subject to foreign rule or to despotism," it is recorded from 1375. Freedman "manumitted slave" first recorded 1601. Colloquial freeloader first recorded 1930s; free fall is from 1919, originally of parachutists; free-hand is from 1862; free-thinker is from 1692. Freebie dates back to 1942 as freeby, perhaps as early as 1900. Free-for-all "mass brawl" (in which anyone may participate) first recorded 1881. Freebase (n. and v.) in ref. to cocaine first recorded 1980.
So do they get their houses back after the next election?
Didn't think so.
Governments get to exercise their powers 24/7/365. The citizens' referendum occurs far less often. What happens in the meantime is unrestrained and typically irreversable.
Slashdot Mirror
See the hopping moon penguin in a field test here!
Independence War 1 and 2, however, really capitalized on Newtonian flight physics. IW2 got it completely right.
It's an incredible feeling, sliding along the skin of a capital ship while laying down a barrage of fire on its broadside, then blasting out sideways at a crazy angle.
There's even a conversion from Independence War to a Babylon 5 universe: see Buda 5.
Don't know if this has anything to do with the site's popularity, but ThinkGeek is listed as a sponsor on http://www.pennyarcadeexpo.com/ . . .
If you don't like how even minor modifications can take months to implement from the latest CVS trunk, fix it yourself, you insensitive clod!
(In Soviet Russia, that one saw *you* coming.)
Then it downloads a Ubuntu liveCD, overwrites that MBR on the hard drive, and reboots the machine.
So what if nobody understands zOS any more on the big iron rigs? Just install Windows!
. . .
Why is everyone looking at me like that?
The frosting side of my brain wants a Dungeon Keeper sequel that makes DK2 forgivable. But the shredded wheat side wants to rant about how there's no creativity in the games market anymore!
Then both sides agree to play Evil Genius. Everybody's happy.
Hollywood isn't old school or traditional. (Unless maybe you mis-spelled "stuck in a rut.")
Hollywood is exclusive and self-infatuated. There's a big difference.
A friend and I recently started up a 'cast on role playing games that has a conversational, freeform tone. I realized at once from listening to the raw recording that there was a *lot* of editing to do.
:)
From 2.5 hours of general chatting, I pulled about 40 minutes of solid, usable material. And that was before I cleaned up all the "ummm"s and "errrr"s and "you know"s from the mix. Verbal static has just got to go.
When I catch a 'cast, tune in to a radio show, listen to a lecture, or whatever, no matter where on the indie/pro spectrum it lies, I'm really tuning in for the core of the content. I suspect most of you out there are the same way.
We can't pick our audience, but we can choose what goes into our 'cast. I don't expect big numbers for our modest production, but the people who do show up will get the tightest show we can give them. If nothing else, the agony will be brief.
Every time I turn on that radio in the car, I can barely stay tuned to one station for any amount of time. Generally I come in on the very end of a song I like, or I have to cycle through the same sets of commercial for the LOWEST PRICES OF THE YEAR--AGAIN!
I guess that's because I have no loyalty to any one station. I'm loyal to the content, not the provider, and the providers really suck.
'Casts can bring loyalty not only to the content but *also* to the provider, because they tend to be one and the same. Especially when the 'casts are about esoteric topics that would only get caught by a small number of folks in the grand scheme of things, but a large number on a personal scale. Show formats get a lot more experimental too, which I really appreciate.
Speaking of esoteric content, hey role playing gamers: *cough*-sig-*cough*.
There's also the distinguishing mark of what McCloud calls "closure." It's the ability, the necessity actually, of the human mind to connect the panels of a comic together narratively.
...
For example, in a comic ilike this episode of Order of the Stick, the humor lives in the last two panels. The reader creates the action of the dragon eating the party.
McCloud draws levels of closure distinguished by how granular the passage of time is as related to the narrative. Animation easily eliminates much of the instant-to-instant granularity of closure by expressly displaying it -- when a character moves from one end of the frame to the other, that action is generally animated as motion. The imagination of the audience is less engaged.
More avant garde animations might use fades, dissolves, or wipes, which make them more comic-like while reconstructing the influence of time on the medium.
Wow. That's what I get for all that fancy book-learnin', I guess.
I'm so happy they're bringing it back! Thanks to the fans!
So which animal's going to morph to form the head? No spoilers though, please!
Dr. Lee Smolin's book The Life of the Cosmos contains an excellent and accessable description of how galaxies form out of molecular clouds, what drives star births, and some of the more interesting consequences of those processes for the development of life. It's a fantastic read.
I'm listening.
As an entreprenuer of small means and no portfolio (yet), this is very, very interesting to me. I would much rather approach the infrastructure decision now while I can build my business from scratch than have to revisit it later with systems already established.
Despite apparent evidence to the contrary, there's plenty of room in the marketplace for little guys like me to get in the game. OSS that gets the job done is a serious consideration; it might make the difference between showing a profit in my first year vs. reporting a net loss due to expensive capital investment.
Okay, so what if this kind of situation comes up:
A company offers two ways to buy the product. One way is to buy it using a traditional one-server/many-clients model, and the cost of the product includes the cost to distribute (which it always does anyway).
Another version of the product is distributed through bittorrent, the price of which *also* includes the price to distribute, but since t costs orders of magnitude less bandwidth to bittorrent as opposed to ftp to many clients, the cost of distribution is lower. Ergo, the product cost is lower.
I'm willing to bet that the savings to the costumer -- that's *you* -- are greater than the amount of upstream bandwidth that each individual "spends" in order to get the 'torrent.
Of course, that depends on the distributor being honest about how much bandwidth really got saved, and that the market can settle on a value for that.
I also have to ask, though: are you really using all your upstream, all the time? Do you keep track of every little cookie response your browser sends back to, say, Amazon.com? Do you expect compensation for that, too?
I don't see why your plan isn't working already! It's got all the buzzwords, after all...
I got the same treatement from the US Animal Humane Society. I sent in $50 one year as a proxy donation for a friend as a gift. Two years later I was still recieving letters every week, flyers, and tiny packages with branded trinkets desktop calculators or caldenards with "DON'T FORGET TO DONATE KTNX" written on the first day of every month. All accompanied, of course, with pleas of "THESE P00R PUPP13S OMG PLZ HELP WITH UR $$$".
Sometimes they'd juxtapose the gift of a delightful teddy bear with a story of a puppy who was purposfully fed antifreeze, or of a kitten that was strung up by the neck until dead. Cheap tactics, you assholes.
That's where my $50 went: postage, cheap shit, and guilt trips. I love animals, but the Humane Society will never get another dime.
You mean "passant," don't you?
Trying to read that site is making my eyeballs bleed. Gamers they may be, but the super-hip graphics and layout (not to mention TEENY PRINT) are not apparently the work of a web designer who intends the site to be read on a regular basis. Nice prototype, but bad execution.
Otherwise, the articles are hip and make for a decent read. There is obviously an editor involved, ensure some level of quality above blog. It'd be a great publication if I didn't need a zoom function and glare-reducing polorized lenses on my retina.
Lots of good points there. Good show.
I met The One True Bruce at Page One last time he zipped through ABQ. Helluva nice guy, that Bruce. I, of course, was a jibbering dork. (Nice to see things haven't changed.)
This makes me wonder if there is a way to use that subtle, overly-real creepiness as a game device. For instance, there might be a Bladerunner-type scenario in which the Replicant is a little "too" perfect. The game engine might model the rest of the world in acceptably-flawed mode, but the Replicant would be turned up to 11 as a turn of the screws to the player's psyche.
From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
My emphasis in the middle, there.
According to this report by Cisco to Congress (warning: pdf), we're going to run out of addresses for real somewhere between 2015 and 2025.
Can we start investing our IP numbers in the stock market instead?
So do they get their houses back after the next election?
Didn't think so.
Governments get to exercise their powers 24/7/365. The citizens' referendum occurs far less often. What happens in the meantime is unrestrained and typically irreversable.
Spoken like an Opera user, you insensitive clod!
F1R3F0X 4EV4R LOLOLOLZY