I'm not sure it was the biggest, but it definitely should have been on the list. The original Deus Ex is one of my favorite games ever. I've played it through many, many times. I couldn't even finish the sequel once before moving on to something else. Gah.
I haven't played SA yet, but I preferred the silent guy to Tommy Vercetti. I don't know if it was Ray Liotta or the written lines for the character or what, but Vercetti got on my nerves pretty quickly.
I went to NIU also (in fact, I knew you for a while). It was possible to get through their CS program without doing an overabundance of mainframe stuff, and that's what I tried to do.
The mainframe classes I did take (465, Assembler and Cobol were it for me) were fun but not what I was looking to do at all. In retrospect, I wish that I had gone somewhere else, but I did have a couple of totally great teachers that I would have missed out on otherwise. Still, I wonder if their program is leaning less towards mainframes these days. While I was there, their mantra was Big Iron Will Never Die. Is lack of new student interest starting to change their thinking?
The only thing I've read by Gaiman is American Gods and I'm guessing it probably will be the only thing I'll be reading by him. The story is great, but the writing is atrocious. I was into the concept and the ideas, but man, his execution definitely leaves something to be desired. I kept trying to get into it, but his writing just pulled me right back out anytime I got close. Oh, well.
That's a pity, because ATP far surpasses VL and Idoru.
But it's the third part of the trilogy, right? I mean, I dunno, I don't remember those books all that well, but would it make any sense if I hadn't finished Idoru?
Don't get me wrong, I adore Gibson. I think the Sprawl Series was one of the best things ever put to paper. I've read Neuromancer at least ten times. I loved Burning Chrome. I love every article I've seen him write for Wired or whatever magazine he's travelling to Asia for this month. His interviews rock because the man is both highly intelligent and very interesting. I'm dying to see No Maps For These Territories.
Having gushed, though, I just don't like any of his recent novels. I read Virtual Light and didn't think it was that great. I couldn't finish Idoru. I didn't even bother with All Tomorrow's Parties.
I'm sure they're great books for those who like them, but for some reason, I just haven't been able to get into his more recent stuff.
I'm dying in the hopes that this new one matches up with his earlier work. Maybe that's wrong. Maybe I'm just living in the past. But I can still go back to any of that stuff--I just bought my third copy of Burning Chrome a month ago--and I walk away from reading a page or two, just thinking: Jesus Christ, this man oozes talent. He's got enough for him and two more writers. And I just haven't felt that way about his work in a while.
So, I really, really hope this is his best work in years.
Re:What about crashes?
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 2, Funny
There was just an article about the Predators on CNN the other day. It said half of them either crash or are shot down. And they cost $3 million each.
I say, give me the three million, pretend another one crashed.
QED (Quantumelectro Dynamics) by Richard Feynman is a great (if specialized) physics book for someone who doesn't know that much about physics. I found it to be interesting and quite educational. It also got me interested in finding out more about some of the topics discussed in the book and physics in general. I highly recommend it.
I read American Gods on the advice of a friend and I was kind of disappointed.
Personally, I thought the story was great and interesting, but that the writing was horrible. It's been a while since I've read it, unfortunately, but I recall thinking several times that it felt like it was written by a sixth-grader. I thought it distracted quite a bit from the actual story.
Apart from that qualm, though, it was an interesting read. Unfortunately, it hasn't convinced me to read anything else he's written and I can't see myself being compelled to in the future.
By your own argument, you *don't* have to rent these edited movies. You are welcome to walk down to the nearest blockbuster and rent your hearts content of any unedited movie on the racks. Don't like an edited version of a movie? Don't rent it.
Right, but then the director's name is now associated with something that is most likely garbage. I'd just like to think that artists shouldn't have to worry about someone else turning their art into something much worse but still resembling the original and keeping their name attached to it.
Riiight. If that was true, how come do cable networks randomly cut scenes and censor movies all the time?
Because some directors work for studios who have more than just a good movie in mind. Not all do. I can assure you that the movie directors didn't agree to those changes. The movie director has no more rights to a movie than an artist does to their music. The studio decides those things.
I agree. If a director makes a movie for a studio that is just interested in money, and later on the studio sells a chopped up version of it to someone, they got what they asked for.
In this case, the motive is money. In any case, most Hollywood movies (with VERY few exceptions) are not art, but are much rather entertainment devices, designed primarily for making money.
Oh, they're just doing this with big-time "Hollywood" movies? Gosh, someone should have told me. I didn't see that in the article.
My point being: if they let CleanFlicks do it with one movie, they have to let them do it with all movies, even the ones that are not primarily designed for making money, the ones that are not created by big studios with unnecessary violence. This week, it's Spider-Man, next week it's 8 1/2. And in any case, people have the ultimate right of deciding what to watch. If that wasn't true, we wouldn't have fast forward buttons on our VCRs and mute buttons on our TVs.
I couldn't agree more. Which is why I think people who argue that they should have the right to edit and re-distribute art as they see fit is ridiculous. If you don't like it, don't rent it. Change the channel. Don't listen to it.
Drop that stupid "movie directors know best" attitude.
I would, but for any decent movie, they do. I could care less about what happens to X-Men 2, but the same rights have to apply to it as to something worthwhile. The only thing they do is direct the movie. The people who provide the money for the movie are the ones who determine what the movie will be like and what scenes will be included. If they don't like a scene, and the director does, too bad for the director. If they want more bad language, and the director doesn't, too bad for the director. The DGA doesn't mention that, does it?
Because it's not always true. I appreciate your cynicism, but there are good movies out there that deserve protection, even if most don't.
The thing is, some of us don't want our (in my case still hypothetical) children hearing every curse word, seeing every head blown off, and seeing every sex scene in every movie.
And some directors don't want things they've created to be completely distorted by someone else without their knowledge and/or permission. I know that if I made a movie, I wouldn't want some yokel with an editing board to just go to town and start selling his new version.
In many cases, those things simply aren't necessary and are thrown in for the sheer gratuity of it, and to give it more credibility as an "R" movie versus a "PG-13." "Ooh, they got an R, they must be really pushing boundaries, therefore this is a better movie."
Why things are said or done in movies doesn't really matter, although I agree that they're gratuitous.
I don't want my kids to get the idea that using the F-word every other sentence is a normal thing. I know that they'll run into it at some point, and I'll explain it to them as much as they are able to handle, but the more they hear it, the more likely they are to use it.
The other option, of course, is to not rent or watch any movies that have things in them you disagree with.
Luckily, I don't think this CleanFlicks place has much of a case. From imdb.com:
In a statement, the Directors Guild of America said Thursday: "Perhaps they are unaware that the United States Constitution directed Congress to pass laws to ensure that the creators of original works had the 'exclusive right' to their work and prohibited their unauthorized exploitation by others for financial gain."
I would have been much happier had Morimoto's win in New York gotten him Flay's own show. "Hot off the Grill with Masaharu Morimoto" sounds like pretty cool programming, don't you think?
Considering how annoying Bobby Flay is, yes, that sounds like pretty cool programming to me.
I live in Philadelphia, where Morimoto runs his own restaurant. I haven't gone yet but definitely want to. Sigh.
Once upon a time on your website, you did a very small review of Tony Bourdain's book on Typhoid Mary and mentioned that Tony "writes better than he cooks." What was that? Is there some sort of rivalry brewing? A bad dinner at Les Halles? I'd love to hear the background story.
No, Joe Utah is picking up a copy of a video, bringing it to a store that offers an editing service, and keeping his edited copy. Nobody is selling edited movies- they are offering an service to edit the videos that people bring in.
Is that really what's going on here? I mean, at least part of the article makes it sound like pre-edited tapes are being either sold or rented:
Pleasant Grove-based CleanFlicks operates 80 stores in 18 states that offer hundreds of sanitized titles. And last month, to the dismay of film directors, Albertson's, the nation's second-largest grocery chain, began offering "E-rated" -- "E" for edited -- videos in 46 Utah stores.
The difference would be that the studios own the movies and allow this to go on, whereas with this, Joe Utah is picking up a copy at his local video store, editing it and then selling it without anyone's permission.
I mean, the studios were involved with colorization, right? They gave that their blessing (as horrible as it is).
That's called rewriting history - read his original statement. Only later does he claim it was about "shipping an end-user version soon." That extra bullshit only makes me dislike the arrogant shit even more.
Okay, from his original resignation from AOL and Mozilla:
But despite all this, in the last year, we did not accomplish the goals that I wanted to accomplish. We did not take the Mozilla project and turn it into a network-collaborative project in which Netscape was but one of many contributors; and we did not ship end-user software. For me, shipping is the thing.
Perhaps my goals were unreasonable; perhaps it should have been obvious to me when we set out on this project that it would take much longer than a year to reach these goals, if we ever did. But, it wasn't obvious to me then, or now. These are the goals I was aiming for, and they have not yet been met.
Yep, JWZ threw a hissyfit and declared the whole thing dead. AOL had bought it and would drive it into the ground. Has he posted a retraction yet, or is he the typical arrogant full-of-shit geek?
Sounds to me like he had his own reasons for leaving the project and stands by them:
I even manage to studiously ignore the messages I see every time mozilla.org announces a new alpha release: invariably some twinkie will pop up out of nowhere and claim that the fact that mozilla.org is asymptotically closer to maybe someday actually releasing an end-user product means that somehow I've been proven wrong about something. They usually say something about ``this ought to teach jwz a lesson!'' I just don't get that. My point was not that mozilla.org would never be able to finish the product: my point was that they were already a year late, and showed every indication of being even later. Which they have been: it's now more than two years later, and they still haven't finished it. Even if they had finished it six months ago, my reasons for leaving would still have been valid: that mozilla.org did not manage to ship an end-user product in any kind of reasonable timeframe, and that I was tired of waiting. I had certain goals, and I didn't see those goals being met.
To clarify a bit: I responded to this comment [slashdot.org], which was the infamous London Underground article. In hindsight, I should have made some indication that I was not replying to the article itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure it was the biggest, but it definitely should have been on the list. The original Deus Ex is one of my favorite games ever. I've played it through many, many times. I couldn't even finish the sequel once before moving on to something else. Gah.
I haven't played SA yet, but I preferred the silent guy to Tommy Vercetti. I don't know if it was Ray Liotta or the written lines for the character or what, but Vercetti got on my nerves pretty quickly.
University professors say the gadgets have helped the students think more critically about their Gothic Imagination course.
That's a lot of Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy songs.
I went to NIU also (in fact, I knew you for a while). It was possible to get through their CS program without doing an overabundance of mainframe stuff, and that's what I tried to do.
The mainframe classes I did take (465, Assembler and Cobol were it for me) were fun but not what I was looking to do at all. In retrospect, I wish that I had gone somewhere else, but I did have a couple of totally great teachers that I would have missed out on otherwise. Still, I wonder if their program is leaning less towards mainframes these days. While I was there, their mantra was Big Iron Will Never Die. Is lack of new student interest starting to change their thinking?
The only thing I've read by Gaiman is American Gods and I'm guessing it probably will be the only thing I'll be reading by him. The story is great, but the writing is atrocious. I was into the concept and the ideas, but man, his execution definitely leaves something to be desired. I kept trying to get into it, but his writing just pulled me right back out anytime I got close. Oh, well.
That's a pity, because ATP far surpasses VL and Idoru.
But it's the third part of the trilogy, right? I mean, I dunno, I don't remember those books all that well, but would it make any sense if I hadn't finished Idoru?
I hope it is his best work in years.
Don't get me wrong, I adore Gibson. I think the Sprawl Series was one of the best things ever put to paper. I've read Neuromancer at least ten times. I loved Burning Chrome. I love every article I've seen him write for Wired or whatever magazine he's travelling to Asia for this month. His interviews rock because the man is both highly intelligent and very interesting. I'm dying to see No Maps For These Territories.
Having gushed, though, I just don't like any of his recent novels. I read Virtual Light and didn't think it was that great. I couldn't finish Idoru. I didn't even bother with All Tomorrow's Parties.
I'm sure they're great books for those who like them, but for some reason, I just haven't been able to get into his more recent stuff.
I'm dying in the hopes that this new one matches up with his earlier work. Maybe that's wrong. Maybe I'm just living in the past. But I can still go back to any of that stuff--I just bought my third copy of Burning Chrome a month ago--and I walk away from reading a page or two, just thinking: Jesus Christ, this man oozes talent. He's got enough for him and two more writers. And I just haven't felt that way about his work in a while.
So, I really, really hope this is his best work in years.
There was just an article about the Predators on CNN the other day. It said half of them either crash or are shot down. And they cost $3 million each.
I say, give me the three million, pretend another one crashed.
QED (Quantumelectro Dynamics) by Richard Feynman is a great (if specialized) physics book for someone who doesn't know that much about physics. I found it to be interesting and quite educational. It also got me interested in finding out more about some of the topics discussed in the book and physics in general. I highly recommend it.
I read American Gods on the advice of a friend and I was kind of disappointed.
Personally, I thought the story was great and interesting, but that the writing was horrible. It's been a while since I've read it, unfortunately, but I recall thinking several times that it felt like it was written by a sixth-grader. I thought it distracted quite a bit from the actual story.
Apart from that qualm, though, it was an interesting read. Unfortunately, it hasn't convinced me to read anything else he's written and I can't see myself being compelled to in the future.
By your own argument, you *don't* have to rent these edited movies. You are welcome to walk down to the nearest blockbuster and rent your hearts content of any unedited movie on the racks. Don't like an edited version of a movie? Don't rent it.
Right, but then the director's name is now associated with something that is most likely garbage. I'd just like to think that artists shouldn't have to worry about someone else turning their art into something much worse but still resembling the original and keeping their name attached to it.
And some people couldn't care less what the directors want.
I hope they have good lawyers.
Riiight. If that was true, how come do cable networks randomly cut scenes and censor movies all the time?
Because some directors work for studios who have more than just a good movie in mind. Not all do.
I can assure you that the movie directors didn't agree to those changes. The movie director has no more rights to a movie than an artist does to their music. The studio decides those things.
I agree. If a director makes a movie for a studio that is just interested in money, and later on the studio sells a chopped up version of it to someone, they got what they asked for.
In this case, the motive is money. In any case, most Hollywood movies (with VERY few exceptions) are not art, but are much rather entertainment devices, designed primarily for making money.
Oh, they're just doing this with big-time "Hollywood" movies? Gosh, someone should have told me. I didn't see that in the article.
My point being: if they let CleanFlicks do it with one movie, they have to let them do it with all movies, even the ones that are not primarily designed for making money, the ones that are not created by big studios with unnecessary violence. This week, it's Spider-Man, next week it's 8 1/2.
And in any case, people have the ultimate right of deciding what to watch. If that wasn't true, we wouldn't have fast forward buttons on our VCRs and mute buttons on our TVs.
I couldn't agree more. Which is why I think people who argue that they should have the right to edit and re-distribute art as they see fit is ridiculous. If you don't like it, don't rent it. Change the channel. Don't listen to it.
Drop that stupid "movie directors know best" attitude.
I would, but for any decent movie, they do. I could care less about what happens to X-Men 2, but the same rights have to apply to it as to something worthwhile.
The only thing they do is direct the movie. The people who provide the money for the movie are the ones who determine what the movie will be like and what scenes will be included. If they don't like a scene, and the director does, too bad for the director. If they want more bad language, and the director doesn't, too bad for the director. The DGA doesn't mention that, does it?
Because it's not always true. I appreciate your cynicism, but there are good movies out there that deserve protection, even if most don't.
The thing is, some of us don't want our (in my case still hypothetical) children hearing every curse word, seeing every head blown off, and seeing every sex scene in every movie.
And some directors don't want things they've created to be completely distorted by someone else without their knowledge and/or permission. I know that if I made a movie, I wouldn't want some yokel with an editing board to just go to town and start selling his new version.
In many cases, those things simply aren't necessary and are thrown in for the sheer gratuity of it, and to give it more credibility as an "R" movie versus a "PG-13." "Ooh, they got an R, they must be really pushing boundaries, therefore this is a better movie."
Why things are said or done in movies doesn't really matter, although I agree that they're gratuitous.
I don't want my kids to get the idea that using the F-word every other sentence is a normal thing. I know that they'll run into it at some point, and I'll explain it to them as much as they are able to handle, but the more they hear it, the more likely they are to use it.
The other option, of course, is to not rent or watch any movies that have things in them you disagree with.
Luckily, I don't think this CleanFlicks place has much of a case. From imdb.com:
In a statement, the Directors Guild of America said Thursday: "Perhaps they are unaware that the United States Constitution directed Congress to pass laws to ensure that the creators of original works had the 'exclusive right' to their work and prohibited their unauthorized exploitation by others for financial gain."
I would have been much happier had Morimoto's win in New York gotten him Flay's own show. "Hot off the Grill with Masaharu Morimoto" sounds like pretty cool programming, don't you think?
Considering how annoying Bobby Flay is, yes, that sounds like pretty cool programming to me.
I live in Philadelphia, where Morimoto runs his own restaurant. I haven't gone yet but definitely want to. Sigh.
Once upon a time on your website, you did a very small review of Tony Bourdain's book on Typhoid Mary and mentioned that Tony "writes better than he cooks." What was that? Is there some sort of rivalry brewing? A bad dinner at Les Halles? I'd love to hear the background story.
In the Good Eats episode "Scrap Iron Chef," Mr. Brown went up against Chef Midwestern/Chef Prairie and lost due to biased judges.
Not an answer to your question, of course, but one of the many reasons I love Good Eats.
No, Joe Utah is picking up a copy of a video, bringing it to a store that offers an editing service, and keeping his edited copy. Nobody is selling edited movies- they are offering an service to edit the videos that people bring in.
Is that really what's going on here? I mean, at least part of the article makes it sound like pre-edited tapes are being either sold or rented:
Pleasant Grove-based CleanFlicks operates 80 stores in 18 states that offer hundreds of sanitized titles. And last month, to the dismay of film directors, Albertson's, the nation's second-largest grocery chain, began offering "E-rated" -- "E" for edited -- videos in 46 Utah stores.
The difference would be that the studios own the movies and allow this to go on, whereas with this, Joe Utah is picking up a copy at his local video store, editing it and then selling it without anyone's permission.
I mean, the studios were involved with colorization, right? They gave that their blessing (as horrible as it is).
How do you find time to follow all of your interests?
Instead of saying Gnu/Hurd, how about Gnurd?
(rimshot)
That's called rewriting history - read his original statement. Only later does he claim it was about "shipping an end-user version soon." That extra bullshit only makes me dislike the arrogant shit even more.
Okay, from his original resignation from AOL and Mozilla:
But despite all this, in the last year, we did not accomplish the goals that I wanted to accomplish. We did not take the Mozilla project and turn it into a network-collaborative project in which Netscape was but one of many contributors; and we did not ship end-user software. For me, shipping is the thing.
Perhaps my goals were unreasonable; perhaps it should have been obvious to me when we set out on this project that it would take much longer than a year to reach these goals, if we ever did. But, it wasn't obvious to me then, or now. These are the goals I was aiming for, and they have not yet been met.
And so I'm giving up.
Not sure where else I should be looking.
Yep, JWZ threw a hissyfit and declared the whole thing dead. AOL had bought it and would drive it into the ground. Has he posted a retraction yet, or is he the typical arrogant full-of-shit geek?
Sounds to me like he had his own reasons for leaving the project and stands by them:
I even manage to studiously ignore the messages I see every time mozilla.org announces a new alpha release: invariably some twinkie will pop up out of nowhere and claim that the fact that mozilla.org is asymptotically closer to maybe someday actually releasing an end-user product means that somehow I've been proven wrong about something. They usually say something about ``this ought to teach jwz a lesson!'' I just don't get that. My point was not that mozilla.org would never be able to finish the product: my point was that they were already a year late, and showed every indication of being even later. Which they have been: it's now more than two years later, and they still haven't finished it. Even if they had finished it six months ago, my reasons for leaving would still have been valid: that mozilla.org did not manage to ship an end-user product in any kind of reasonable timeframe, and that I was tired of waiting. I had certain goals, and I didn't see those goals being met.
But Spider-Man was on 1,500 more screens than Episode II because Lucas wanted to only show Episode II in theaters equipped with digital sound.
Anyone have the per-screen averages?
To clarify a bit:
I responded to this comment [slashdot.org], which was the infamous London Underground article. In hindsight, I should have made some indication that I was not replying to the article itself.
Oops.
Sorry.