According to antennaweb.org PBS is broadcasting their signal from the same location as the major networks. Free plug for them as a great resource for figuring out antenna positioning.
Also in Portland (I-5 and Lombard), I had little success getting most signals until I bought one of the bowtie style units. And that's on a TV with an internal DTV receiver.
The selection isn't random - it's restricted to mostly Sony-owned/distributed material. Until they get other studios involved the pickings won't be good.
"I don't know what the prices are at the Sony Video Store - but if they are any substantial fraction of the cost of the physical media, then you should just buy the disc instead."
Season one of Afro Samurai = $9.95 ($1.99 * 5 episodes) on the PS store. A week after downloading it I saw the DVD at Best Buy for $14.99 ($20 on Blu-ray) and kicked myself for not doing better research.
Most of the MMO players I know fit your description as well. Highly social types in fact. The problem is they tend to follow this pattern:
1. Start playing MMO game X.
2. Attempt to recruit friends to the game.
3. Stop socializing with anyone not playing the game.
To the outside observer, this is no different than watching a good friend disappear to a drug habit or religious cult. Suddenly they've discovered a big, new group of people to socialize with and it's totally awesome! Then the game starts dictating their calendar, placing everybody else at a lower priority. By that point getting them to quit becomes impossible because "these people are my friends" and "it's harmless social fun" and all the other excuses you hear from addicts.
Your use of the word "enabler" is fitting - it is a massive multiperson enabler that leads to massive multivictim co-dependency.
How many games can you actually change the outcome of? Using Romeo and Juliet as an example only shows that he doesn't understand how games work - that if the play were made a game he thinks it would have a different ending or multiple possible endings.
I've played through GTA:San Andreas several times and the narrative always starts with CJ coming home and ends with Tenpenny driving off an overpass. What happens in between has some flexibility, sure. But there is no way to damage the narrative.
I agree - Ebert has chosen to focus on the activity portion of games and ignore the environment completely. Making a game involves everything required to make a film PLUS the gameplay. You could take 2001: A Space Odyssey, break it down into cutscenes, and add interactive tasks (spacecraft flight, etc.) in between. Would it cease to be high art?
In addition to only getting half a conversation...
People speak much more loudly into their phones than they do to someone standing next to them. With a lot of phones it is the only way to be heard on the other end of the line.
And cell phone calls are non-stop talk. One or the other person is always actively talking. It has been my experience that the person on the cell does most of the talking as well since they have nothing else to do, with the other end usually at home or the office or otherwise preoccupied with something in addition to talking on the phone.
It all adds up to people talking too loudly plus filling dead air plus dominating the conversation. Highly annoying.
"So: Elite 360 + Wireless + HD-DVD = $780.
PS3, with built-in wireless and built-in Blu-ray: $600. Way to destroy your price advantage, Microsoft!
Obviously I'm not the target audience for this product, but I can't for the life of me figure out who is."
Unless the hardware prices on the current generation of machines drops dramatically there aren't going to be nearly as many multiple current gen console owners as there have been. That means getting your game into the hands of as many buyers as possible will require non-exclusivity.
Joel (spoken): Well, guys, looks like its time to pack it all in again. Crow: Yeah! We are the stuff dreams are made of. Tom: Oh, that's beautiful, Crow. Shakespeare? Crow: No. Burma Shave. Joel: You know guys It always hurts to close it all up, strike the set, wipe off the grease paint, napkin up the blood and entrails and move on to another town Crow: I smell a song. (Music swells) Joel (singing): Tell me where does all the magic go When the curtain falls to end the show Do the clowns always cry When they pack up the paper sky? When the champagne is being poured And the lock is on the old stage door Will there still be a clown in the sky for me?
Tom (sobbing): Oh Joel! Joel (speaking): Don't, worry buddy. There'll be other experiments. Tom (sobbing): You really think so, mister ? Joel: Yeah! Take a verse. It'll cheer you up (Music swells, again) Tom (through his tears): Okay! (as Anthony Newley) When the harlequin is on the bed And the whisky haze surrouds your head William Holden's coming over and he's got a fifth of... Joel (speaking, annoyed): Tom! If you don't stop doing your Anthony Newley, I'll throw you against the wall! Crow: He'll do it, too! Joel (singing): Will there still be a clown in the sky? Tom: Help us out, Crow! All (singing): Still be a clown in the sky? Tom (speaking): Take it home, Joel Joel (singing): Tell me where is that clown in the sky, for... me? (Tom starts to sob again) I love you Tom Servo! Tom (sobbing): I love you Joel! Joel (to Crow): I love you Crow! Crow (angrily): You're not my real father! Crow (to Cambot): What do you think? Dr. F (Making an O.K. sing like singer in movie): It stinks!
So please stop comparing the two. Leave a bunch of two-year-olds unsupervised and a fight will break out. It is also guaranteed that none of them will have sex.
Violence is a survivial instinct that every animal has from birth. Taking it off of the television will not change that. The only thing it would change is the amount of "monkey see, monkey do" instances that are being presented as evidence to back this bill. But by that logic we should also not broadcast depictions of people doing ________ (say, driving cars) as it encourages children to emulate the behavior with disastrous results.
Admittedly passing this law would prevent some incidences of violence. It would also take away the lessons these shows teach, primarily that violence for self/family/community defense is okay while violence for personal gain is not.
7) The amount of time spent repeating the signup form over and over to find an available Yahoo handle is getting ridiculous. And the more of these type of forced signups they do, the worse it will become.
Been through the process twice recently - once for some Pepsi contest and later again to get Messenger. Using Messenger legitimately requires signing up and that handle will be used for some time. The Pepsi one I stopped using when the contest ended, thus creating a junk account and robbing another user of the handle pepsidoodoo@yahoo.com (the sixth or seventh but first available handle I could find).
Call me a whiner if you will. But you can't deny that proposing and failing to acquire a handle repeatedly - one handle at a time - is not going to make for happy customers.
Old Skool bonus: I quit using Yahoo! when they took over my Rocketmail account and pulled this same stunt.
Micropayments = Bad.
If that kind of system goes into place, my web surfing stops cold.
Why?
Because it's too easily abused. Pop-up windows for one. Click to a page and suddenly ten windows pop up, each with its own micropayment. The user will get screwed by this and even more involved scams.
The cable TV system is a better approach. Pay for content, but pay one bulk rate for a wide selection of sites (channels). Instead of 50-500 TV channels, one micropayment network could have a stable of 1000-5000 sites all under the same fixed payment umbrella.
Who knows? I will always churn out my half-assed attempts at web entertainment for no pay - I haven't seen a penny yet.
Do it for the love, baby.
No matter how advanced the games get, an arcade is still one of the top spots to hang after hours away from the 'rents. Half the kids in any arcade aren't even playing, they're watching, cheering, smoking crack, what have you. Anything to get out of the house.
I'll spare you the flame, but most of the games you list were coded in an era when available memory wouldn't support "plot" games. As soon as MUDs came about, there were suddenly games that were nothing but plot.
Shooters and plot games are both just extensions of meatspace games anyways. Your personal electronic games preference will probably mirror the game choices you made before computers were available - sports vs. chess, if you will. Both have been around in some form for centuries, each having its own crowd.
Cheats have grown to be an integral part of every game. Think of your favorite games, and I'll bet half of them have built-in cheats involved somehow. Most of the time these cheats aren't allowed in regulated gameplay, but can add to the experience. For example, in Worms2 you'll rarely if ever pull the Concrete Donkey out of a crate, but the cheat gives you a chance to play around with it. The noclip function on games like Q2 lets you fart around in places you'd never reach and allows insight into map design theory. So even on well-designed games, cheats are nice to have.
I dig Bloom County as much as the next guy, but if my life's work inspired hundreds of thinly-disguised and humorless net comic strips I would stay out of the public eye too.
"Weiler said the current plans would spend about $450 million a year, but the sample return mission may cost as much as $1 billion."
Can anybody else think of better, more necessary things to do with those billions of TAX dollars? I'm personally voting against anybody who runs for office promoting the Mars agenda. When I stop to think that the equivalent of the taxes for my entire state and more are being shot into space for no practical gain I just want to shit.
You want samples? Dispatch a nuke that was already slated for disarmament (it's paid for!) and catch the bits that come flying back. NASA has already proven the can hit the target nice and hard, so this idea requires a minimum of new planning. Cheap, easy, and effective.
"Gore and Bush are well trained double-speakers that will spew what they think the American people want to hear."
How else would a person get elected? Politics is the art of getting people to think they are getting what they want all the time. Which is impossible, and that's where the obfuscating talk comes into play.
Most Americans have an aversion to "too much information". Good luck getting the majority of voters to sit down and read through a questionnaire of this length answered by the top candidates. Given only the answers provided by these two candidates I see reasons to both vote for and against them. The more that is known about a candidate the less electable they become. No candidate giving their own true personal opinion on all issues will ever be placed in office.
Above all, the office of the President is little more than a public relations figurehead. He's our biggest national celebrity. Meet and greet the press, put a good spin on whatever Congress and the Supreme Court are doing. Sure he has veto power, but anything truly crucial will pass with a veto-proof margin.
Forget the presidential campaign and make the effort to learn more about your local, state, and national congresspeople - they hold the true power.
Slashdot Mirror
According to antennaweb.org PBS is broadcasting their signal from the same location as the major networks. Free plug for them as a great resource for figuring out antenna positioning.
Also in Portland (I-5 and Lombard), I had little success getting most signals until I bought one of the bowtie style units. And that's on a TV with an internal DTV receiver.
From the FAQ:
"Are there any categories excluded from these payment requirements?
Vehicles (Motors), capital equipment (Business & Industrial), Mature Audiences and Real Estate will be excluded from the new payment requirements."
You can still pay for the necessities by check!
The selection isn't random - it's restricted to mostly Sony-owned/distributed material. Until they get other studios involved the pickings won't be good.
"I don't know what the prices are at the Sony Video Store - but if they are any substantial fraction of the cost of the physical media, then you should just buy the disc instead."
Season one of Afro Samurai = $9.95 ($1.99 * 5 episodes) on the PS store. A week after downloading it I saw the DVD at Best Buy for $14.99 ($20 on Blu-ray) and kicked myself for not doing better research.
Hush-a-boom
Most of the MMO players I know fit your description as well. Highly social types in fact. The problem is they tend to follow this pattern:
1. Start playing MMO game X.
2. Attempt to recruit friends to the game.
3. Stop socializing with anyone not playing the game.
To the outside observer, this is no different than watching a good friend disappear to a drug habit or religious cult. Suddenly they've discovered a big, new group of people to socialize with and it's totally awesome! Then the game starts dictating their calendar, placing everybody else at a lower priority. By that point getting them to quit becomes impossible because "these people are my friends" and "it's harmless social fun" and all the other excuses you hear from addicts.
Your use of the word "enabler" is fitting - it is a massive multiperson enabler that leads to massive multivictim co-dependency.
Most teenagers aren't as experienced at recognizing these sort of things as the hot air that they are.
And how many of those who said they would stop would simply change to another P2P client until the warnings cease?
"If you change it, you become the artist."
How many games can you actually change the outcome of? Using Romeo and Juliet as an example only shows that he doesn't understand how games work - that if the play were made a game he thinks it would have a different ending or multiple possible endings.
I've played through GTA:San Andreas several times and the narrative always starts with CJ coming home and ends with Tenpenny driving off an overpass. What happens in between has some flexibility, sure. But there is no way to damage the narrative.
I agree - Ebert has chosen to focus on the activity portion of games and ignore the environment completely. Making a game involves everything required to make a film PLUS the gameplay. You could take 2001: A Space Odyssey, break it down into cutscenes, and add interactive tasks (spacecraft flight, etc.) in between. Would it cease to be high art?
"But wait, there's more! It's not found in any store!"
Imagine the Manhunt 2 infomercials running at three in the morning between Girls Gone Wild and Time Life Music. "It slices! It dices!"
In addition to only getting half a conversation...
People speak much more loudly into their phones than they do to someone standing next to them. With a lot of phones it is the only way to be heard on the other end of the line.
And cell phone calls are non-stop talk. One or the other person is always actively talking. It has been my experience that the person on the cell does most of the talking as well since they have nothing else to do, with the other end usually at home or the office or otherwise preoccupied with something in addition to talking on the phone.
It all adds up to people talking too loudly plus filling dead air plus dominating the conversation. Highly annoying.
"So: Elite 360 + Wireless + HD-DVD = $780. PS3, with built-in wireless and built-in Blu-ray: $600. Way to destroy your price advantage, Microsoft! Obviously I'm not the target audience for this product, but I can't for the life of me figure out who is."
People who are bad at math?
Unless the hardware prices on the current generation of machines drops dramatically there aren't going to be nearly as many multiple current gen console owners as there have been. That means getting your game into the hands of as many buyers as possible will require non-exclusivity.
Joel (spoken): Well, guys, looks like its time to pack it all in again.
Crow: Yeah! We are the stuff dreams are made of.
Tom: Oh, that's beautiful, Crow. Shakespeare?
Crow: No. Burma Shave.
Joel: You know guys It always hurts to close it all up, strike the set, wipe off the grease paint, napkin up the blood and entrails and move on to another town
Crow: I smell a song. (Music swells)
Joel (singing):
Tell me where does all the magic go
When the curtain falls to end the show
Do the clowns always cry
When they pack up the paper sky?
When the champagne is being poured
And the lock is on the old stage door
Will there still be a clown in the sky for me?
Tom (sobbing): Oh Joel!
Joel (speaking): Don't, worry buddy. There'll be other experiments.
Tom (sobbing): You really think so, mister ?
Joel: Yeah! Take a verse. It'll cheer you up (Music swells, again)
Tom (through his tears): Okay! (as Anthony Newley)
When the harlequin is on the bed
And the whisky haze surrouds your head
William Holden's coming over and he's got a fifth of...
Joel (speaking, annoyed): Tom! If you don't stop doing your Anthony Newley, I'll throw you against the wall!
Crow: He'll do it, too!
Joel (singing): Will there still be a clown in the sky?
Tom: Help us out, Crow!
All (singing): Still be a clown in the sky?
Tom (speaking): Take it home, Joel
Joel (singing): Tell me where is that clown in the sky, for... me? (Tom starts to sob again) I love you Tom Servo!
Tom (sobbing): I love you Joel!
Joel (to Crow): I love you Crow!
Crow (angrily): You're not my real father!
Crow (to Cambot): What do you think?
Dr. F (Making an O.K. sing like singer in movie): It stinks!
So please stop comparing the two. Leave a bunch of two-year-olds unsupervised and a fight will break out. It is also guaranteed that none of them will have sex.
Violence is a survivial instinct that every animal has from birth. Taking it off of the television will not change that. The only thing it would change is the amount of "monkey see, monkey do" instances that are being presented as evidence to back this bill. But by that logic we should also not broadcast depictions of people doing ________ (say, driving cars) as it encourages children to emulate the behavior with disastrous results.
Admittedly passing this law would prevent some incidences of violence. It would also take away the lessons these shows teach, primarily that violence for self/family/community defense is okay while violence for personal gain is not.
Hawking: I call it a Hawking Hole.
Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
Hawking: Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
7) The amount of time spent repeating the signup form over and over to find an available Yahoo handle is getting ridiculous. And the more of these type of forced signups they do, the worse it will become.
Been through the process twice recently - once for some Pepsi contest and later again to get Messenger. Using Messenger legitimately requires signing up and that handle will be used for some time. The Pepsi one I stopped using when the contest ended, thus creating a junk account and robbing another user of the handle pepsidoodoo@yahoo.com (the sixth or seventh but first available handle I could find).
Call me a whiner if you will. But you can't deny that proposing and failing to acquire a handle repeatedly - one handle at a time - is not going to make for happy customers.
Old Skool bonus: I quit using Yahoo! when they took over my Rocketmail account and pulled this same stunt.
Micropayments = Bad. If that kind of system goes into place, my web surfing stops cold. Why? Because it's too easily abused. Pop-up windows for one. Click to a page and suddenly ten windows pop up, each with its own micropayment. The user will get screwed by this and even more involved scams. The cable TV system is a better approach. Pay for content, but pay one bulk rate for a wide selection of sites (channels). Instead of 50-500 TV channels, one micropayment network could have a stable of 1000-5000 sites all under the same fixed payment umbrella. Who knows? I will always churn out my half-assed attempts at web entertainment for no pay - I haven't seen a penny yet. Do it for the love, baby.
No matter how advanced the games get, an arcade is still one of the top spots to hang after hours away from the 'rents. Half the kids in any arcade aren't even playing, they're watching, cheering, smoking crack, what have you. Anything to get out of the house.
I'll spare you the flame, but most of the games you list were coded in an era when available memory wouldn't support "plot" games. As soon as MUDs came about, there were suddenly games that were nothing but plot. Shooters and plot games are both just extensions of meatspace games anyways. Your personal electronic games preference will probably mirror the game choices you made before computers were available - sports vs. chess, if you will. Both have been around in some form for centuries, each having its own crowd.
Cheats have grown to be an integral part of every game. Think of your favorite games, and I'll bet half of them have built-in cheats involved somehow. Most of the time these cheats aren't allowed in regulated gameplay, but can add to the experience. For example, in Worms2 you'll rarely if ever pull the Concrete Donkey out of a crate, but the cheat gives you a chance to play around with it. The noclip function on games like Q2 lets you fart around in places you'd never reach and allows insight into map design theory. So even on well-designed games, cheats are nice to have.
And Binkley is a carrot.
I dig Bloom County as much as the next guy, but if my life's work inspired hundreds of thinly-disguised and humorless net comic strips I would stay out of the public eye too.
"Weiler said the current plans would spend about $450 million a year, but the sample return mission may cost as much as $1 billion."
Can anybody else think of better, more necessary things to do with those billions of TAX dollars? I'm personally voting against anybody who runs for office promoting the Mars agenda. When I stop to think that the equivalent of the taxes for my entire state and more are being shot into space for no practical gain I just want to shit.
You want samples? Dispatch a nuke that was already slated for disarmament (it's paid for!) and catch the bits that come flying back. NASA has already proven the can hit the target nice and hard, so this idea requires a minimum of new planning. Cheap, easy, and effective.
"Gore and Bush are well trained double-speakers that will spew what they think the American people want to hear."
How else would a person get elected? Politics is the art of getting people to think they are getting what they want all the time. Which is impossible, and that's where the obfuscating talk comes into play.
Most Americans have an aversion to "too much information". Good luck getting the majority of voters to sit down and read through a questionnaire of this length answered by the top candidates. Given only the answers provided by these two candidates I see reasons to both vote for and against them. The more that is known about a candidate the less electable they become. No candidate giving their own true personal opinion on all issues will ever be placed in office.
Above all, the office of the President is little more than a public relations figurehead. He's our biggest national celebrity. Meet and greet the press, put a good spin on whatever Congress and the Supreme Court are doing. Sure he has veto power, but anything truly crucial will pass with a veto-proof margin.
Forget the presidential campaign and make the effort to learn more about your local, state, and national congresspeople - they hold the true power.