Oh, give me a fucking break. Every day, all day long, bullshit organizations like "Above the Influence" show stupid ass commercials on TV telling kids that their brain is going to melt if they were to even take one hit of a joint. In the mean time, yes, there ARE innocent people having their doors kicked in, and people getting killed in the process, because of this idiotic War on (Some) Drugs.
Just like anybody else, I can spend 10 seconds doing a Google search and come up with countless examples of senseless deaths and tragedies, all due to a war on a fucking plant. You think it doesn't happen? Well then you are a fucking TOOL who needs to do some research and wake up.
How much energy is wasted every year so that some rich cock who probably got his money by crushing those beneath him can have a shiny penis substitute in his garage, that might get driven once or twice? I don't care if you think you earned the right to defile the planet or not, you didn't.
LOL, the funny and ironic part about your stupid post is that according to someone in a third world country, YOU are the rich and wasteful fuck driving around in your shiny "penis" substitute (instead of a clapped out Yugo.) Got forbid you've got a 2nd car, a nice one that you keep put up to drive occasionally. Get off your fucking high horse.
I'd like to see your POS 240sx outperform an Enzo in ANY kind of race or condition. Geared too tall for top speed... LMAO. When you have a THOUSAND HORSEPOWER (and torque to match), gearing does NOT matter, it will still blow your ass away and look better doing it, too.
Hey asshole, did you ever stop to consider that maybe he just enjoys blasting around the lake in his bad ass boat? If you were lucky enough to have one you'd enjoy the hell out of driving it too. Seriously, what's with you douchebags who assume that someone has a small dick because he enjoys doing something that most real men enjoy, operating a powerful piece of machinery? If I had a bad ass boat with twin V8s I'd rock that shit all day long, and I guarantee not only is my dick bigger than yours, but I get laid a hell of a lot more often too.
I'm talking about passion as the role of leader and visionary, not the role of minion/slave. Minions and slaves don't become successes; creative visionaries do. A person who has lots of knowledge but no passion will never be anything other than a minion. A person overflowing with passion but having little knowledge can acquire the knowledge he needs to make his vision become a reality, because knowledge is a lot easier to acquire than passion.
Good point, and I think it's because the market is still relatively new. If you take a look at the games out there you'll see that a lot of them are boring, uninspiring crap. Just small, simple games that keep you busy. It doesn't take a whole lot of creativity to come up with something like that, which is to be expected since most people are not that creative. Even so, a person can make a living making those kinds of games, but you'll rarely ever be successful in the sense of making a bunch of money and selling many thousands of copies. On the PC, Doom was a killer app because it was entirely new type of game. (Wolf came first but Doom introduced multiplayer and other innovations.) Nowadays a lot of game ideas and genres are already thoroughly explored and done to death on the platforms that have come before. A lot of people are writing games for mobile phones with the mindset of "Hey, I should do a remake of game X.... BUT ON THE IPHONE!!" That really doesn't involve a whole lot of creativity at all. All the pieces are in place for someone to create that next killer app, and all that is needed is a good dose creativity and some luck. But true innovation is a rare thing, so you can't really predict when and where it will occur. I think the 'killer app' for mobile phones will come within the next 2 years though, because phones are getting powerful enough and easy enough to develop for and someone out there has got to be thinking "another tetris clone? surely I can come up with something better than that!"
Not to mention that mobile devices are ridiculously underpowered compared to PCs and consoles if you're looking at a mobile device as a gaming platform.
Which is exactly the reason why anyone with half a brain who wants to go into business creating games should be looking at this market. Cell phone games do NOT have to be (and really, can't be, at least not yet) massive, technically complex pieces of software. The cell phone gaming industry is where the computer game industry was in the early 90s; anyone with enough brains and talent can be the next John Carmack, since it only takes ONE person to write a good game for the platform in a reasonable length of time.
You are correct, but not for the reason you think. If you love doing something--and you are good at it--don't make it into a job, make it into a company. The reasons why jobs suck is because you have to do things the boss's way. If you run your own company and create your own games, you can do things your way.
And don't try to tell me that others (publishers, etc) will still try to dictate things. They might, however self publishing a game has never been easier, since the advent of the Internet, so if all else fails you can go that route. If you don't have marketing skills, at least learn to recognize good marketing, then hire someone who can do that. Compared to more "normal" occupations where you actually manufacture and sell a physical product, packaging, marketing, and selling a game is cakewalk. Programming is easy too since you can download everything you need (3d engines, multimedia libs, etc) off the net for free. The hardest part of the entire process is designing a good game. If you can do that, you can do anything.
Sure it is. Passion is what leads to knowledge. Which is easier: learning calculus when you hate it, or when you love it? I know a hell of a lot about a hell of a lot of things. I didn't always, but I have always been passionate about learning. Now I can do anything I want to do. So can the OP, if he is passionate and ambitious enough.
So take that into account beforehand and design your game with the constraint that it must be implementable on your own personal resources.
Exactly. I don't understand why everyone here, including the OP, is assuming that the way to become a game designer is to "get a degree and get a job." John Carmack didn't do anything like what people are suggesting, and he (along with others) created some of the most innovative and best selling games in the industry. OP, if you really want to design/program games, then just do it! Some people want to build their nuclear reactors, but unfortunately for them that costs money that most don't have. Designing and programming games can be done on a shoe string budget by anyone who has talent. I mean really, what are the costs? If you already have a decently fast computer with a decent graphics card, you don't have to spend a dime. All the tools you could possibly need are free, or can be had for free off bittorrent until you get successful enough that you can afford to pay for them.
But if you don't have talent, then don't bother, because you'll just end up as another underpaid drone, or worse, unemployed and broke.
Yeah, your job isn't at risk in a recession - because you've probably already lost it because the contract went elsewhere. Military contractor jobs are about as unstable as they come, contrary to popular myth.
I am a government contractor (VSAT technician working in the middle east) and this is not really true. Once a company gains a contract, it's got that contract for at least a year or two, and there is no chance in losing it. Yes, it is possible that the government could decide to pick a new company to renew the contract with once it expires, leaving you out of the job, but it's not really a big deal because now the new company will be hiring and you could easily go work there. If you want job security, government jobs are the way to go.
But anyone pursuing these jobs should keep in mind that a lot of the more sensitive ones (probably including such jobs as were suggested by the OP) require government security clearances. It costs a hell of a lot of money to get one and you can't just go out and buy it either; either you get one from being in the military (or other government service) or a company sponsors you to get you one. Many are not willing to do this since there are often an abundance of ex-military personnel who already have clearances, so it can be tough finding that first government contract job that will sponsor you. It depends on the field though; I would imagine there are not a lot of ex-military programmers out there. And once you've got that clearance, you're pretty much set for life if you play your cards right.
It would "lose" the network while everyone would be running just fine and the only way to fix it was reboot. I thought that crap died with Win9X.
Hah, you got that right. Seen that myself. I remember one time when me and my friend went to a local coffee shop to use the net. He was on his fairly new Vista laptop and I was on my Dell Ubuntu machine. I logged onto the access point and surfed the internet for a good 30 minutes before his network connection finally decided to start working. (Magically, not due to anything he did.) I used to go in there pretty regular and I saw a number of people who couldn't get their Dells (with the same network card as mine) running XP to work with that access point, but Ubuntu never gave me a problem.
You gotta love Linux. Sometimes you have to go to the command line to get things done, but the damn thing just works. I like having a system that works predictably. I might have to edit a system file on the command line every once in a while, but at least when I get it working I know it will continue to work forever. That's one reason why Vista pisses me off so much, because it's so damn unpredictable and buggy. Sometimes it just quits working or gives you an error and there's nothing you can do about it.
I know you're joking, but things were different back then. Sure Win95 was buggy, but it was a leap forward in OS design over DOS or Windows 3.1. (Of course OS/2 was better, but I never knew anyone who used it.) People used to have to reboot their computers with DOS too when a program crashed so it wasn't such a new thing. Nowadays it's different. If I have a fully patched copy of XP, or better yet Linux that "Just Works", you're damn right I'm going to bitch when a supposedly modern, advanced OS is a resource hogging, crashing, buggy POS.
I have experienced the same problem as well. This is just one example of dozens of maddening things that makes me want to throw a computer across the room after 10 minutes of trying to use Vista.
Exercise IS fun. It's just not fun at first because you're a pathetic weakling with no muscles to speak of, who's body is not used to doing any work. After a week the soreness is gone, and after a month or two it becomes a routine like anything else, if not something you really enjoy.
Recently, his doctor put him on a 4500 calorie diet. As in, he had to eat over twice what he was previously eating. The whole point of that was to get his body to be less efficient with calories, because his metabolism wasn't letting him lose weight even though he ate less than me (at half his weight). That seems counter-intuitive. One might even say "magical" if it works, and apparently it has helped quite a lot.
I think you misunderstand what's happening here. When you starve yourself, your body starts burning off lean mass. It doesn't touch the fat unless it absolutely has to (i.e. it's already burned off your muscle and now there's no other choice to keep you alive.) On the other hand, when you are eating small meals regularly throughout the day and are eating close to your calorie requirements, your body exits the "panic" mode and starts burning off some fat.
The thing is, how much fat you burn is related to your metabolism. If you don't have much muscle, because you're a geek who sits behind a desk and has tried starving himself to lose weight, then your metabolism isn't going to be that high and you're not going to lose very much fat. It takes a proper diet, plenty of sleep, a good exercise routine, and a lot of time to really lose that fat.
Weight training alone will not make a fat person skinny.
Yes, it most certainly will, but you're right in that just doing one month of piss poor weight training (then giving up) won't make a fat person skinny. A good weight training routine combined with good diet and sleep will most certainly do wonders to get rid of fat, and make the person look better as well.
It sounds like you are doing well for yourself, but I would suggest that you do NOT cut back your carb intake. You are working the hell out of your body by weight lifting and doing all those aerobics, so you definitely need a lot of carbs for energy. If you feel fine, have enough energy, and aren't gaining fat (probably not since you are seeing results), then your carb intake is just fine. You may even try increasing carbs some and see if that helps out any.
Yes, aerobic exercises do burn slightly more calories than lifting weights, WHILE you are doing the exercise, but this does not take into account the massive calories needed to rebuild those muscles (while you are asleep), nor does it account for the increase in metabolism that occurs from having increased muscle mass. In the long run weight lifting is FAR superior to aerobics for weight loss, and he'll look and feel a hell of a lot better too.
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How is pegr's comment racist in any way?
Mod parent down.
So how much original thought did it take for you to come up with your ad hominem attack on Mr. Thoreau?
It's like people who go 45 MPH in the left lane on a 55 MPH road. Yeah, that's definitely what the laws say you can do,
Just being pedantic, but it actually is illegal in most states to do that. It's just not enforced. But your point is well taken.
No shit? It was a joke, dumb ass
Oh, give me a fucking break. Every day, all day long, bullshit organizations like "Above the Influence" show stupid ass commercials on TV telling kids that their brain is going to melt if they were to even take one hit of a joint. In the mean time, yes, there ARE innocent people having their doors kicked in, and people getting killed in the process, because of this idiotic War on (Some) Drugs.
Just like anybody else, I can spend 10 seconds doing a Google search and come up with countless examples of senseless deaths and tragedies, all due to a war on a fucking plant. You think it doesn't happen? Well then you are a fucking TOOL who needs to do some research and wake up.
Check this out for an example:
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/156/policeshootings.shtml
These apply to situations from not overeating to not idling your vehicle. Just because "you can" does not mean "you should".
And the corollary to this is just because some opinionated douchebag on Slashdot doesn't approve doesn't mean you shouldn't.
How much energy is wasted every year so that some rich cock who probably got his money by crushing those beneath him can have a shiny penis substitute in his garage, that might get driven once or twice? I don't care if you think you earned the right to defile the planet or not, you didn't.
LOL, the funny and ironic part about your stupid post is that according to someone in a third world country, YOU are the rich and wasteful fuck driving around in your shiny "penis" substitute (instead of a clapped out Yugo.) Got forbid you've got a 2nd car, a nice one that you keep put up to drive occasionally. Get off your fucking high horse.
I'd like to see your POS 240sx outperform an Enzo in ANY kind of race or condition. Geared too tall for top speed... LMAO. When you have a THOUSAND HORSEPOWER (and torque to match), gearing does NOT matter, it will still blow your ass away and look better doing it, too.
Hey asshole, did you ever stop to consider that maybe he just enjoys blasting around the lake in his bad ass boat? If you were lucky enough to have one you'd enjoy the hell out of driving it too. Seriously, what's with you douchebags who assume that someone has a small dick because he enjoys doing something that most real men enjoy, operating a powerful piece of machinery? If I had a bad ass boat with twin V8s I'd rock that shit all day long, and I guarantee not only is my dick bigger than yours, but I get laid a hell of a lot more often too.
I'm talking about passion as the role of leader and visionary, not the role of minion/slave. Minions and slaves don't become successes; creative visionaries do. A person who has lots of knowledge but no passion will never be anything other than a minion. A person overflowing with passion but having little knowledge can acquire the knowledge he needs to make his vision become a reality, because knowledge is a lot easier to acquire than passion.
Good point, and I think it's because the market is still relatively new. If you take a look at the games out there you'll see that a lot of them are boring, uninspiring crap. Just small, simple games that keep you busy. It doesn't take a whole lot of creativity to come up with something like that, which is to be expected since most people are not that creative. Even so, a person can make a living making those kinds of games, but you'll rarely ever be successful in the sense of making a bunch of money and selling many thousands of copies. On the PC, Doom was a killer app because it was entirely new type of game. (Wolf came first but Doom introduced multiplayer and other innovations.) Nowadays a lot of game ideas and genres are already thoroughly explored and done to death on the platforms that have come before. A lot of people are writing games for mobile phones with the mindset of "Hey, I should do a remake of game X.... BUT ON THE IPHONE!!" That really doesn't involve a whole lot of creativity at all. All the pieces are in place for someone to create that next killer app, and all that is needed is a good dose creativity and some luck. But true innovation is a rare thing, so you can't really predict when and where it will occur. I think the 'killer app' for mobile phones will come within the next 2 years though, because phones are getting powerful enough and easy enough to develop for and someone out there has got to be thinking "another tetris clone? surely I can come up with something better than that!"
You mean he provides the core object system used in GNOME?
No--he IS the core object system used in GNOME. Glib became self-aware at 2:14am EDT August 29, 2008. God help us all....
Peggle, Bejeweled, and that one, that World of something.
Not to mention Solitaire and Minesweeper.
Not to mention that mobile devices are ridiculously underpowered compared to PCs and consoles if you're looking at a mobile device as a gaming platform.
Which is exactly the reason why anyone with half a brain who wants to go into business creating games should be looking at this market. Cell phone games do NOT have to be (and really, can't be, at least not yet) massive, technically complex pieces of software. The cell phone gaming industry is where the computer game industry was in the early 90s; anyone with enough brains and talent can be the next John Carmack, since it only takes ONE person to write a good game for the platform in a reasonable length of time.
You are correct, but not for the reason you think. If you love doing something--and you are good at it--don't make it into a job, make it into a company. The reasons why jobs suck is because you have to do things the boss's way. If you run your own company and create your own games, you can do things your way.
And don't try to tell me that others (publishers, etc) will still try to dictate things. They might, however self publishing a game has never been easier, since the advent of the Internet, so if all else fails you can go that route. If you don't have marketing skills, at least learn to recognize good marketing, then hire someone who can do that. Compared to more "normal" occupations where you actually manufacture and sell a physical product, packaging, marketing, and selling a game is cakewalk. Programming is easy too since you can download everything you need (3d engines, multimedia libs, etc) off the net for free. The hardest part of the entire process is designing a good game. If you can do that, you can do anything.
Passion is no substitute for knowledge.
Sure it is. Passion is what leads to knowledge. Which is easier: learning calculus when you hate it, or when you love it? I know a hell of a lot about a hell of a lot of things. I didn't always, but I have always been passionate about learning. Now I can do anything I want to do. So can the OP, if he is passionate and ambitious enough.
So take that into account beforehand and design your game with the constraint that it must be implementable on your own personal resources.
Exactly. I don't understand why everyone here, including the OP, is assuming that the way to become a game designer is to "get a degree and get a job." John Carmack didn't do anything like what people are suggesting, and he (along with others) created some of the most innovative and best selling games in the industry. OP, if you really want to design/program games, then just do it! Some people want to build their nuclear reactors, but unfortunately for them that costs money that most don't have. Designing and programming games can be done on a shoe string budget by anyone who has talent. I mean really, what are the costs? If you already have a decently fast computer with a decent graphics card, you don't have to spend a dime. All the tools you could possibly need are free, or can be had for free off bittorrent until you get successful enough that you can afford to pay for them.
But if you don't have talent, then don't bother, because you'll just end up as another underpaid drone, or worse, unemployed and broke.
Yeah, your job isn't at risk in a recession - because you've probably already lost it because the contract went elsewhere. Military contractor jobs are about as unstable as they come, contrary to popular myth.
I am a government contractor (VSAT technician working in the middle east) and this is not really true. Once a company gains a contract, it's got that contract for at least a year or two, and there is no chance in losing it. Yes, it is possible that the government could decide to pick a new company to renew the contract with once it expires, leaving you out of the job, but it's not really a big deal because now the new company will be hiring and you could easily go work there. If you want job security, government jobs are the way to go.
But anyone pursuing these jobs should keep in mind that a lot of the more sensitive ones (probably including such jobs as were suggested by the OP) require government security clearances. It costs a hell of a lot of money to get one and you can't just go out and buy it either; either you get one from being in the military (or other government service) or a company sponsors you to get you one. Many are not willing to do this since there are often an abundance of ex-military personnel who already have clearances, so it can be tough finding that first government contract job that will sponsor you. It depends on the field though; I would imagine there are not a lot of ex-military programmers out there. And once you've got that clearance, you're pretty much set for life if you play your cards right.
It would "lose" the network while everyone would be running just fine and the only way to fix it was reboot. I thought that crap died with Win9X.
Hah, you got that right. Seen that myself. I remember one time when me and my friend went to a local coffee shop to use the net. He was on his fairly new Vista laptop and I was on my Dell Ubuntu machine. I logged onto the access point and surfed the internet for a good 30 minutes before his network connection finally decided to start working. (Magically, not due to anything he did.) I used to go in there pretty regular and I saw a number of people who couldn't get their Dells (with the same network card as mine) running XP to work with that access point, but Ubuntu never gave me a problem.
You gotta love Linux. Sometimes you have to go to the command line to get things done, but the damn thing just works. I like having a system that works predictably. I might have to edit a system file on the command line every once in a while, but at least when I get it working I know it will continue to work forever. That's one reason why Vista pisses me off so much, because it's so damn unpredictable and buggy. Sometimes it just quits working or gives you an error and there's nothing you can do about it.
I know you're joking, but things were different back then. Sure Win95 was buggy, but it was a leap forward in OS design over DOS or Windows 3.1. (Of course OS/2 was better, but I never knew anyone who used it.) People used to have to reboot their computers with DOS too when a program crashed so it wasn't such a new thing. Nowadays it's different. If I have a fully patched copy of XP, or better yet Linux that "Just Works", you're damn right I'm going to bitch when a supposedly modern, advanced OS is a resource hogging, crashing, buggy POS.
I have experienced the same problem as well. This is just one example of dozens of maddening things that makes me want to throw a computer across the room after 10 minutes of trying to use Vista.
Exercise IS fun. It's just not fun at first because you're a pathetic weakling with no muscles to speak of, who's body is not used to doing any work. After a week the soreness is gone, and after a month or two it becomes a routine like anything else, if not something you really enjoy.
Recently, his doctor put him on a 4500 calorie diet. As in, he had to eat over twice what he was previously eating. The whole point of that was to get his body to be less efficient with calories, because his metabolism wasn't letting him lose weight even though he ate less than me (at half his weight). That seems counter-intuitive. One might even say "magical" if it works, and apparently it has helped quite a lot.
I think you misunderstand what's happening here. When you starve yourself, your body starts burning off lean mass. It doesn't touch the fat unless it absolutely has to (i.e. it's already burned off your muscle and now there's no other choice to keep you alive.) On the other hand, when you are eating small meals regularly throughout the day and are eating close to your calorie requirements, your body exits the "panic" mode and starts burning off some fat.
The thing is, how much fat you burn is related to your metabolism. If you don't have much muscle, because you're a geek who sits behind a desk and has tried starving himself to lose weight, then your metabolism isn't going to be that high and you're not going to lose very much fat. It takes a proper diet, plenty of sleep, a good exercise routine, and a lot of time to really lose that fat.
Weight training alone will not make a fat person skinny.
Yes, it most certainly will, but you're right in that just doing one month of piss poor weight training (then giving up) won't make a fat person skinny. A good weight training routine combined with good diet and sleep will most certainly do wonders to get rid of fat, and make the person look better as well.
It sounds like you are doing well for yourself, but I would suggest that you do NOT cut back your carb intake. You are working the hell out of your body by weight lifting and doing all those aerobics, so you definitely need a lot of carbs for energy. If you feel fine, have enough energy, and aren't gaining fat (probably not since you are seeing results), then your carb intake is just fine. You may even try increasing carbs some and see if that helps out any.
Yes, aerobic exercises do burn slightly more calories than lifting weights, WHILE you are doing the exercise, but this does not take into account the massive calories needed to rebuild those muscles (while you are asleep), nor does it account for the increase in metabolism that occurs from having increased muscle mass. In the long run weight lifting is FAR superior to aerobics for weight loss, and he'll look and feel a hell of a lot better too.