No problem! Feel free to use the idea if you'd like. Preventing you from using the exact word "realtor" shouldn't prevent you from portraying the occupation, right? I don't think even the scientologists could stop you from writing a story about a hack scifi writer named Elrond Lubbard who invented a fake religion called Lyingtology. Hearst failed with his lawsuit against Welles.
What are the consequences for you if you tell them to turn their complaint sideways and cram it up their collective ass? Can they seize your domain?
You could always have a humorous into to your story where you say "Because of a certain trade association specializing in the field of real estate, we cannot call this person by the title used in the real world. So this worthless fuck-spat of a human being, this shit stain on the underwear of humanity, this contemptible waste of flesh and space who couldn't even honorably serve as mulch without ruining the ground he's in will hereafter be referred to as the Reltor(c)." And register it yourself.
[quote]It's a mess. It's a mess because Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an accurate encyclopedia. Wikipedia is just the latest in the MUD/MMORPG line of games where a bunch of assholes grind time, gain "XP" (aka "edit count"), and once they get powerful enough and get the "admin" hat, spend most of their day griefing [wired.com] incoming players and claiming it's "thinning the herd", "fun", or "protecting the encyclopedia."[/quote]
That's exactly what the deletionists strike me as, griefers. And they get to claim oh, it's about not being dicks themselves but are simply upholding the law. *smirk*
I think that there should be something like a karma system and positive contributions (adding content) should add to it and deletes should remove from it while reverts are completely neutral up to a certain point.
The problem with any sort of human system is where it becomes meta-gaming, no longer about the established purpose of whatever you're involved in but politicking and epeen stroking. You see this fucking everywhere from churches to non-profit volunteer projects to work etc etc etc. Nevermind what we're trying to accomplish here, I'm really about empire-building. What kind of fucking empire are you building in an animal rescue non-profit? My empire. *smirk*
Netflix got a sweetheart deal on a lot of the content streaming. There's talk that the content providers want a far bigger cut the next go around.
Netflix created a market for them that they didn't even realize was possible and now they're bitching about not getting a big enough cut. I like that Amazon is funding their own studio. Create better content and to hell with the studios.
Why, whoever heard of such a thing? Maybe only the people who ever clicked on the Safari button and googled for "iphone porn."
For anyone whose formative years occurred before the internet or BBS era, I'm sure it must seem strange to think that the general reaction of young men to playboy would be "yawn, quaint." And then the question is whether the quaintness is in the nature of the content or in actually paying for it.
We can't use Lord of the Rings as an example because it' really one big film in three parts. But we can use Empire as an example. The first film told a proper story and Empire continued it. It was good drama. Same goes for Terminator 2. There was room in the universe to tell another story. But after two time travel stories, the only possible room left in that universe was to tell the story of the future war. No time travel. Just Judgement Day, John Connor putting his military together, the fight against the machines. Some people might say this is essentially a prequel since these events were already established as having happened beforehand but I think there's still room to tell an interesting story. There was certainly no need for another fucking time travel story like T3. T4 was almost the story they should have told but executed in the most ham-fisted, talentless fashion imaginable.
The Matrix, on the other hand, was a movie where a sequel was completely impossible. Neo had already won. The war was over but for the fussy details. There is simply no possible way that anyone could do a sequel of any good with that movie. You have one movie, it told the whole story. There's no room for any sort of sequel, period.
Something like Pirates, that could do with sequels. The original movie shouldn't have been any good in the first place, being based on an amusement park ride and a completely transparent excuse to make money. But it happened to be light, enjoyable fun, really fun. Kudos for them. So then they went at the sequels with a vengeance and hate-fucked every last bit of fun out of the whole thing. You could have had three nice, all ages adventure movies like Indiana Jones. Instead it was just limp, lifeless shit.
Could someone tell another good story within the aliens universe? Of course they can. The question is will they? Not likely. Every movie is put out there to make money but there's a difference between something greenlit in the hopes of making some money versus something that's now seen as a cash cow and, more importantly, something that is now a formula. They'll let you play around with first movies but once they think you have lightning in a bottle, they won't let you change a thing. Mass produce it and see if we can suck all the milk out of this teat. There will never be another good aliens movie or another good predator movie because the suits will never release enough control for it to be any good.
The fact that they are making an example of him seems to reinforce the view that an individual invading the privacy of a political figure is somehow worse than the reversed situation. Sounds like a very bad message to be sending, to me.
That's precisely the problem. I doubt I could get the cops to even talk to me if I said someone hacked my account. We have a case of a bad divorce and a guy reading his wife's email getting a felony conviction. I wonder just who her daddy is.
When justice is not applied equally and fairly, we have a serious problem. Someone steals my car, the cops aren't likely to ever catch him. Someone steals Palin's car, he's probably going to get 20 years in supermax.
I'm personally not a fan of the whole "app" thing. Feels like we are going backwards.
You had specialized viewers and clients for various data, then gradually the web became more mature and more and more data was simply put on a website. Now we are gradually going back to the specialized viewer mentality.
I'd like to think that the whole app thing is a short-term phenomenon that will die out.
Why the specialized apps versus web pages? I haven't taken a look at the traffic but I would suspect that it takes less bandwidth to populate the data in an app that's running natively on a handheld than it does to fill a web browser. You have to feed it not just the data but the design info on every page load. Reading message boards on an iphone is ok but highly interactive stuff like a facebook runs more smoothly with the app versus doing it in safari.
I look back at the early webmail examples and they were dreadful. The early hotmail was an exercise in tedium and I asked why anybody would want to use that over a nice, native mail client. Fast-forward to today and something like gmail is a breeze to use and offline mail applications seem archaic in comparison. As another comparison, my very first experience with electronic banking involved a proprietary application installed from floppies that required dialup access to the main bank. And this was right at the cusp of the internet becoming big-time. It was a tremendous pain in the ass to use and proper internet banking with nothing more than a mainstream browser was a whole new world of practicality and convenience.
I think there's plenty of room for apps that really need to be apps, things that are really programs. But stuff that should really just be a webpage should be done in web pages. I think it's just a matter of the technology maturing a little more. Early hotmail sucked, current gmail is great. In another five years we'll see people extolling the virtues of the next twist on html5 that will save us from the horror of the customized app store. And then someone will talk about the era of the thin-client finally being at hand.
Of course, there's also the school of thought that says the app store concept is a way of putting the toothpaste back in the tube, trying to lock things down so corporations can go back to making money hand over claw. We'll see.
A world where your choices have essentially no effect is just a rail shooter, with slightly greater or lesser twistiness in the rails. The "shooter" mechanic(whether it be literal shooting, RPG, or whatever) had better be compelling. If it is, great, you've got a game that is perfectly decent, if probably not the most emotionally involving of all time. If the mechanic sucks, you've just created another game to put on the pile of examples of why "rail shooter" is practically a four letter word in gaming circles...
On the other hand, there are some Really. Fucking. Annoying. ways to do "consequences"(many of them mirror life; but if I wanted that I wouldn't buy your damn game). The worst is probably "one true path(we just aren't telling)": this unwholesome bastard
The heart of the matter here is that you need to make sure that the consequences of actions for the player will be an example of good drama rather than bad play mechanics.
The example above about a game letting you destroy an object that will be required later and break the game or the bit in Homeworld about needing to know what you need to do before you do it, I call it mandatory prescience and it's a game-killer. If I have to think about how I'd play a video game rather than believing in the world's mechanics, that's a fail.
The GTA's have been pretty good about that sort of thing. The story events are doled out in sequence. You have your main quests and side quests. IV was a little annoying with the cell phone bit, having people call you up and demand activities when you might not have wanted to. You can turn off the stupid phone but you have to remember to do that each time you reload since the phone always defaults to on. I like that you could skip the whole dating thing since it really didn't add much to the game.
I think the thing that bothers me the most in RPG's is how you have no idea what kind of character you want to play and they force you to that decision right from the start. Is spellcasting fun or annoying in this game? Playing as a fighter is usually easier but will it be as satisfying? I'd much prefer for the game to not run with declared classes and let you simply accumulate skills by what you do. Are you using a sword more? You become a better swordsman. Are you using a bow more? Your stats improve there. Do you favor heavier armor or lighter armor? There it's not so much stats but your own encumbrance that will affect how you move. There's no way around having stats and fiddling with pencil and paper in a tabletop game but you shouldn't have to deal with this sort of thing in a computer RPG.
Some purists might start screaming about multi-class whoring and how I'm ruining the idea of the game. Nonsense. If you consider that running through the main quest will take you x hours and you build skills at given rate, you balance the rate of improvement so that a warrior or spell user will be fairly strong by the endgame. Someone splitting the difference will have spell and fighting skills but won't be as accomplished as a specialist.
The point is to make the damn thing fun and let people play how they like. I have no problem with someone continuing to play with the same character after the main quest is done, in sandbox mode, and maxing all the stats. That's fun for them. And they're not playing against anyone else. That, to me, is the only point where whoring is a real problem. You get some twink who wants to run with a character who can kick Sauron's ass and everyone else has to play hobbits.
I don't like how short these product generations are. Yes, I understand that perfect is the enemy of good and trying to shove everything into the product to make it the best can make it unaffordable. The conventional wisdom now is that Sony did screw up by trying to push the Blueray in the PS3 too early. It made the whole thing too expensive and ceded the high ground to Microsoft with the 360.
But I do have to wonder about a new pad coming a year later, as everyone and his brother claimed it would back when the first one launched. This new one is going to make the last one look like shit, right? Only a fucking barbarian would be stuck using such old kit. Rah rah. But seriously, what more can they stick in to make the thing better? Three years between refresh ok, I can see there will be some changes. But one year? It's just more marketing bullshit.
I'm not complaining as someone who doesn't see a place for gadgets. I like them. I'm a fan. But I don't like the wasteful, destructive, consumerist crap that goes along with it. Should we really be trading out gadgets every year? Should we naturally assume that any product should be EOL'd after three years? Should we really feel good about this endless stream of expensive trinkets that will go from awesomest thing ever to landfill in 18 months?
I've never been satisfied with any of the other batmobiles. The Tumbler from the reboot is a very cool vehicle but it doesn't say "batman" to me, just generically awesome.
The Character assassination plot on Assange was a major success. He's been in jail not so long, and the story is slowly going cold. Nobody is discussing it so eagerly anymore. Also, Julian's public image went down. Regardless of whether what The Guardian is saying is true or not, 30 days ago virtually nobody on/. would have bought the Guardian's story. Or we would've at least questioned it, not taking it as fact.
It is entirely possible for Assange to be both a) a champion of truth and a wonderful threat to the establishment and b) a douche. There are many examples of people throughout history who are important, who have made contributions, who you nevertheless would never want to have a beer with. Wagner, great music but nasty jew-hating. Henry Ford, could run an assembly line like nobody's business but again with the jew-hating. Harlan Ellison is a great writer but makes Sheldon Cooper appear warm and down-to-earth. OJ Simpson was a great football player and a very affable television personality but also happened to murder some people. FDR did great things for this country but was supposed to be a cold bastard of a person, no real warmth.
I'm skeptical regarding media stories about Assange the man because he is the subject of a massive disinformation and character assassination campaign. But even if he does turn out to be douchy or an asshole, that's irrelevant with regards to his organization's mission. It doesn't matter if he's serving his own vanity while also doing the right thing -- the problem is if he's compromising his mission in order to service his own self-interest. If he's just trying to monetize the leaks, trying to cash out, that's a bad thing. But to play the advocate here, just look at the media circus around the leaks. He's managed to get some attention here. Yeah, he's making a spectacle but that's what it takes to get the media and public to pay attention. Being respectable and leaking things in a predictable way is the most likely way to be ignored. So by maintaining the drama and suspense, each new release keeps the story alive. Just dumping all the cables at once would see the important things ignored. Why do you think the powers that be love the Friday news dumps? Get the story out right before the weekend and it might be dead before Monday rolls around and people are paying attention again.
So the justification for Assange being pissed about this is that a leak from inside Wikileaks is harmful to sustaining the notoriety campaign that's keeping the story alive. If he doesn't manage the leaks right, he falls off the frontpage just like all the other major stories ignored by our vapid media.
What's killing the budget (indeed, where most of the money is spent) are the social programs; specifically, medicare and medicaid. They're projected to grow so quickly [cbo.gov] that even if you stopped all military spending, dropped it to zero , all the money that saved would be eaten up by growth in medicare and medicaid within 20-25 years. In other words, in 20-25 years we would have no military, no military spending, and our budgetary problems would be the same as they are now.
Republican talking points. Next you'll blame the budgetary shortfalls of the states on those gosh darned richie rich public servants and their caddy pensions.
Could you imagine a universe, where successive Pacman clones are more expensive, so the last one will cost 150 million dollars? Thats the MMORPG business for you. Cloning a formula that seems to work, in a very expensive way, for a public that is progressively more bored of the formula.
Well, that's the real problem. Storylines were added to provide some context to the play mechanic itself. Doom2 was the last storyless shooter I enjoyed. I didn't find another shooter that sparked my interest until Half-Life and it was that addition of story that sucked me in. I'd compare it to what happened with movies -- people used to be satisfied watching kinescopes of simple activities and were amazed by a train coming out of a tunnel on the big screen. After the novelty wore off they started having to supply storylines to give those moving pictures meaning. The exception to that rule, of course, are the casual games, the ones that are basically where coin-op arcade games were at in the early 80's. Something like Angry Birds has as rudimentary a storyline as Donkey Kong but the play mechanics keep people coming back. But something huge and complex like an RPG, it had better have a good storyline to provide context to everything or I'm completely bored. Dragon Age bored the snot out of me. I know I'm the minority opinion here.
The thing is, there's only so much storyline in even a poorly done single player RPG. You play, you grind, you reach the end, you move on to the next game. The insidious thing with MMORPG's is they have you play the same bits over and over and over and over. Which might be fine if those sections were fun games in and of themselves but that's just it, they're not fun. That's why people pay gold farmers so they can get new gear and go back to the fun stuff.
Honestly, I don't see where people find the time for this sort of thing. People enjoy MMORPG's, there's even successful web comedies about that sort of thing. http://www.watchtheguild.com/ But I'll tell you what, it's depressing. I just find it like watching a show all about alcoholics drinking themselves to death. There are really people who live like this.
Oh, that's small potatoes. What we'd do is take all the computers in the lab and write music for them. These were IBM model 25's, monitor and disk drives in the same box. So we'd turn the screen contrast and brightness down to nothing to make them look like they're off while the countdown timer is running in the background. Fifteen minutes into the next class, the computers in the back row start playing the William Tell Overture in unison. We lost our nice things right after that.
I think the people that saw the original Tron at the time remember it as a much better movie than it really was. You're spot on when you say the original Tron heavily relied on special effects at the expense of story. While we all decry that sort of thing as laziness and lack of imagination these days, when we think back to that original movie we think of how cool it looked to us at the time, and gloss over the bad parts (like the plot and the pacing). The only imagination required to appreciate the new Tron is the imagination it takes to believe your nostalgic view of the original is an accurate measure of the quality of the film.
I've never understood why they don't just pay someone to write a good script when they make a movie. I can understand that there would sometimes be process failures when the best efforts of everyone involved yields a shitty product. I can understand when a studio comes out and says "Yeah, we're going to make a McDonalds film, loaded with titty and splosions and shit that tastes good but aren't good for you." Transformers is a formula that works. But if you're actually trying to make a good movie, why not start from a good script? I'm not going to make a steakhouse-quality dinner using stew beef, I need to drop some coin on good ingredients.
You'd think that the script would be the cheapest part of the whole movie. There are tons of starving writers out there with absolutely brilliant ideas. Why are they ignored? It just doesn't make any sense.
well to be honest if it wasn't for what he did the site would of been ignored like cryptome. in which case just getting the leaked documents would of done nothing if the site they were leaked too was ignored and derided as fake if actually brought up as cryptome often is. he became both the figurehead and the pr man for wikileaks not only approaching normal newspapers with the information to give them good story's but saying to other people who know of wrong doing and don't know where to leak the information, you can give it to me.
It almost makes me wonder if this might not be the exact sort of thing you need to do to get the news out. The media's covering him for the "sexy" angle, dirt and sleaze is sexy. PETA gets people to go naked for fur but that just doesn't seem to generate enough controversy. Maybe PETA should hire the Old Spice guy to sexually assault women wearing fur. That'll get the message out.
Slashdot Mirror
No problem! Feel free to use the idea if you'd like. Preventing you from using the exact word "realtor" shouldn't prevent you from portraying the occupation, right? I don't think even the scientologists could stop you from writing a story about a hack scifi writer named Elrond Lubbard who invented a fake religion called Lyingtology. Hearst failed with his lawsuit against Welles.
What are the consequences for you if you tell them to turn their complaint sideways and cram it up their collective ass? Can they seize your domain?
You could always have a humorous into to your story where you say "Because of a certain trade association specializing in the field of real estate, we cannot call this person by the title used in the real world. So this worthless fuck-spat of a human being, this shit stain on the underwear of humanity, this contemptible waste of flesh and space who couldn't even honorably serve as mulch without ruining the ground he's in will hereafter be referred to as the Reltor(c)." And register it yourself.
[quote]It's a mess. It's a mess because Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an accurate encyclopedia. Wikipedia is just the latest in the MUD/MMORPG line of games where a bunch of assholes grind time, gain "XP" (aka "edit count"), and once they get powerful enough and get the "admin" hat, spend most of their day griefing [wired.com] incoming players and claiming it's "thinning the herd", "fun", or "protecting the encyclopedia."[/quote]
That's exactly what the deletionists strike me as, griefers. And they get to claim oh, it's about not being dicks themselves but are simply upholding the law. *smirk*
I think that there should be something like a karma system and positive contributions (adding content) should add to it and deletes should remove from it while reverts are completely neutral up to a certain point.
The problem with any sort of human system is where it becomes meta-gaming, no longer about the established purpose of whatever you're involved in but politicking and epeen stroking. You see this fucking everywhere from churches to non-profit volunteer projects to work etc etc etc. Nevermind what we're trying to accomplish here, I'm really about empire-building. What kind of fucking empire are you building in an animal rescue non-profit? My empire. *smirk*
Netflix got a sweetheart deal on a lot of the content streaming. There's talk that the content providers want a far bigger cut the next go around.
Netflix created a market for them that they didn't even realize was possible and now they're bitching about not getting a big enough cut. I like that Amazon is funding their own studio. Create better content and to hell with the studios.
Why, whoever heard of such a thing? Maybe only the people who ever clicked on the Safari button and googled for "iphone porn."
For anyone whose formative years occurred before the internet or BBS era, I'm sure it must seem strange to think that the general reaction of young men to playboy would be "yawn, quaint." And then the question is whether the quaintness is in the nature of the content or in actually paying for it.
I call it "miscorrection."
There's no compelling story to tell.
We can't use Lord of the Rings as an example because it' really one big film in three parts. But we can use Empire as an example. The first film told a proper story and Empire continued it. It was good drama. Same goes for Terminator 2. There was room in the universe to tell another story. But after two time travel stories, the only possible room left in that universe was to tell the story of the future war. No time travel. Just Judgement Day, John Connor putting his military together, the fight against the machines. Some people might say this is essentially a prequel since these events were already established as having happened beforehand but I think there's still room to tell an interesting story. There was certainly no need for another fucking time travel story like T3. T4 was almost the story they should have told but executed in the most ham-fisted, talentless fashion imaginable.
The Matrix, on the other hand, was a movie where a sequel was completely impossible. Neo had already won. The war was over but for the fussy details. There is simply no possible way that anyone could do a sequel of any good with that movie. You have one movie, it told the whole story. There's no room for any sort of sequel, period.
Something like Pirates, that could do with sequels. The original movie shouldn't have been any good in the first place, being based on an amusement park ride and a completely transparent excuse to make money. But it happened to be light, enjoyable fun, really fun. Kudos for them. So then they went at the sequels with a vengeance and hate-fucked every last bit of fun out of the whole thing. You could have had three nice, all ages adventure movies like Indiana Jones. Instead it was just limp, lifeless shit.
Could someone tell another good story within the aliens universe? Of course they can. The question is will they? Not likely. Every movie is put out there to make money but there's a difference between something greenlit in the hopes of making some money versus something that's now seen as a cash cow and, more importantly, something that is now a formula. They'll let you play around with first movies but once they think you have lightning in a bottle, they won't let you change a thing. Mass produce it and see if we can suck all the milk out of this teat. There will never be another good aliens movie or another good predator movie because the suits will never release enough control for it to be any good.
The fact that they are making an example of him seems to reinforce the view that an individual invading the privacy of a political figure is somehow worse than the reversed situation. Sounds like a very bad message to be sending, to me.
That's precisely the problem. I doubt I could get the cops to even talk to me if I said someone hacked my account. We have a case of a bad divorce and a guy reading his wife's email getting a felony conviction. I wonder just who her daddy is.
When justice is not applied equally and fairly, we have a serious problem. Someone steals my car, the cops aren't likely to ever catch him. Someone steals Palin's car, he's probably going to get 20 years in supermax.
I'm personally not a fan of the whole "app" thing. Feels like we are going backwards.
You had specialized viewers and clients for various data, then gradually the web became more mature and more and more data was simply put on a website. Now we are gradually going back to the specialized viewer mentality.
I'd like to think that the whole app thing is a short-term phenomenon that will die out.
Why the specialized apps versus web pages? I haven't taken a look at the traffic but I would suspect that it takes less bandwidth to populate the data in an app that's running natively on a handheld than it does to fill a web browser. You have to feed it not just the data but the design info on every page load. Reading message boards on an iphone is ok but highly interactive stuff like a facebook runs more smoothly with the app versus doing it in safari.
I look back at the early webmail examples and they were dreadful. The early hotmail was an exercise in tedium and I asked why anybody would want to use that over a nice, native mail client. Fast-forward to today and something like gmail is a breeze to use and offline mail applications seem archaic in comparison. As another comparison, my very first experience with electronic banking involved a proprietary application installed from floppies that required dialup access to the main bank. And this was right at the cusp of the internet becoming big-time. It was a tremendous pain in the ass to use and proper internet banking with nothing more than a mainstream browser was a whole new world of practicality and convenience.
I think there's plenty of room for apps that really need to be apps, things that are really programs. But stuff that should really just be a webpage should be done in web pages. I think it's just a matter of the technology maturing a little more. Early hotmail sucked, current gmail is great. In another five years we'll see people extolling the virtues of the next twist on html5 that will save us from the horror of the customized app store. And then someone will talk about the era of the thin-client finally being at hand.
Of course, there's also the school of thought that says the app store concept is a way of putting the toothpaste back in the tube, trying to lock things down so corporations can go back to making money hand over claw. We'll see.
A world where your choices have essentially no effect is just a rail shooter, with slightly greater or lesser twistiness in the rails. The "shooter" mechanic(whether it be literal shooting, RPG, or whatever) had better be compelling. If it is, great, you've got a game that is perfectly decent, if probably not the most emotionally involving of all time. If the mechanic sucks, you've just created another game to put on the pile of examples of why "rail shooter" is practically a four letter word in gaming circles...
On the other hand, there are some Really. Fucking. Annoying. ways to do "consequences"(many of them mirror life; but if I wanted that I wouldn't buy your damn game). The worst is probably "one true path(we just aren't telling)": this unwholesome bastard
The heart of the matter here is that you need to make sure that the consequences of actions for the player will be an example of good drama rather than bad play mechanics.
The example above about a game letting you destroy an object that will be required later and break the game or the bit in Homeworld about needing to know what you need to do before you do it, I call it mandatory prescience and it's a game-killer. If I have to think about how I'd play a video game rather than believing in the world's mechanics, that's a fail.
The GTA's have been pretty good about that sort of thing. The story events are doled out in sequence. You have your main quests and side quests. IV was a little annoying with the cell phone bit, having people call you up and demand activities when you might not have wanted to. You can turn off the stupid phone but you have to remember to do that each time you reload since the phone always defaults to on. I like that you could skip the whole dating thing since it really didn't add much to the game.
I think the thing that bothers me the most in RPG's is how you have no idea what kind of character you want to play and they force you to that decision right from the start. Is spellcasting fun or annoying in this game? Playing as a fighter is usually easier but will it be as satisfying? I'd much prefer for the game to not run with declared classes and let you simply accumulate skills by what you do. Are you using a sword more? You become a better swordsman. Are you using a bow more? Your stats improve there. Do you favor heavier armor or lighter armor? There it's not so much stats but your own encumbrance that will affect how you move. There's no way around having stats and fiddling with pencil and paper in a tabletop game but you shouldn't have to deal with this sort of thing in a computer RPG.
Some purists might start screaming about multi-class whoring and how I'm ruining the idea of the game. Nonsense. If you consider that running through the main quest will take you x hours and you build skills at given rate, you balance the rate of improvement so that a warrior or spell user will be fairly strong by the endgame. Someone splitting the difference will have spell and fighting skills but won't be as accomplished as a specialist.
The point is to make the damn thing fun and let people play how they like. I have no problem with someone continuing to play with the same character after the main quest is done, in sandbox mode, and maxing all the stats. That's fun for them. And they're not playing against anyone else. That, to me, is the only point where whoring is a real problem. You get some twink who wants to run with a character who can kick Sauron's ass and everyone else has to play hobbits.
A facepalm is the only suitable response to this. I don't even think a double facepalm quite conveys the necessary sense of palm meeting face.
I don't like how short these product generations are. Yes, I understand that perfect is the enemy of good and trying to shove everything into the product to make it the best can make it unaffordable. The conventional wisdom now is that Sony did screw up by trying to push the Blueray in the PS3 too early. It made the whole thing too expensive and ceded the high ground to Microsoft with the 360.
But I do have to wonder about a new pad coming a year later, as everyone and his brother claimed it would back when the first one launched. This new one is going to make the last one look like shit, right? Only a fucking barbarian would be stuck using such old kit. Rah rah. But seriously, what more can they stick in to make the thing better? Three years between refresh ok, I can see there will be some changes. But one year? It's just more marketing bullshit.
I'm not complaining as someone who doesn't see a place for gadgets. I like them. I'm a fan. But I don't like the wasteful, destructive, consumerist crap that goes along with it. Should we really be trading out gadgets every year? Should we naturally assume that any product should be EOL'd after three years? Should we really feel good about this endless stream of expensive trinkets that will go from awesomest thing ever to landfill in 18 months?
I've never been satisfied with any of the other batmobiles. The Tumbler from the reboot is a very cool vehicle but it doesn't say "batman" to me, just generically awesome.
I need to watch the Redletter Media review of Sith this weekend. I hear it's great. Whenever I feel the urge to pop in Star Wars, I do these instead.
Do you see what's going on here?
The Character assassination plot on Assange was a major success. He's been in jail not so long, and the story is slowly going cold. Nobody is discussing it so eagerly anymore. Also, Julian's public image went down. Regardless of whether what The Guardian is saying is true or not, 30 days ago virtually nobody on /. would have bought the Guardian's story. Or we would've at least questioned it, not taking it as fact.
It is entirely possible for Assange to be both a) a champion of truth and a wonderful threat to the establishment and b) a douche. There are many examples of people throughout history who are important, who have made contributions, who you nevertheless would never want to have a beer with. Wagner, great music but nasty jew-hating. Henry Ford, could run an assembly line like nobody's business but again with the jew-hating. Harlan Ellison is a great writer but makes Sheldon Cooper appear warm and down-to-earth. OJ Simpson was a great football player and a very affable television personality but also happened to murder some people. FDR did great things for this country but was supposed to be a cold bastard of a person, no real warmth.
I'm skeptical regarding media stories about Assange the man because he is the subject of a massive disinformation and character assassination campaign. But even if he does turn out to be douchy or an asshole, that's irrelevant with regards to his organization's mission. It doesn't matter if he's serving his own vanity while also doing the right thing -- the problem is if he's compromising his mission in order to service his own self-interest. If he's just trying to monetize the leaks, trying to cash out, that's a bad thing. But to play the advocate here, just look at the media circus around the leaks. He's managed to get some attention here. Yeah, he's making a spectacle but that's what it takes to get the media and public to pay attention. Being respectable and leaking things in a predictable way is the most likely way to be ignored. So by maintaining the drama and suspense, each new release keeps the story alive. Just dumping all the cables at once would see the important things ignored. Why do you think the powers that be love the Friday news dumps? Get the story out right before the weekend and it might be dead before Monday rolls around and people are paying attention again.
So the justification for Assange being pissed about this is that a leak from inside Wikileaks is harmful to sustaining the notoriety campaign that's keeping the story alive. If he doesn't manage the leaks right, he falls off the frontpage just like all the other major stories ignored by our vapid media.
Big media: quit saying "XYZ is dead" every time you're starved for attention.
Are breathless claims that some ubiquitous technology is dead dead? We spread a short article over twenty pages for you to find out!
They should have seen that coming.
What's killing the budget (indeed, where most of the money is spent) are the social programs; specifically, medicare and medicaid. They're projected to grow so quickly [cbo.gov] that even if you stopped all military spending, dropped it to zero , all the money that saved would be eaten up by growth in medicare and medicaid within 20-25 years. In other words, in 20-25 years we would have no military, no military spending, and our budgetary problems would be the same as they are now.
Republican talking points. Next you'll blame the budgetary shortfalls of the states on those gosh darned richie rich public servants and their caddy pensions.
Could you imagine a universe, where successive Pacman clones are more expensive, so the last one will cost 150 million dollars?
Thats the MMORPG business for you. Cloning a formula that seems to work, in a very expensive way, for a public that is progressively more bored of the formula.
Well, that's the real problem. Storylines were added to provide some context to the play mechanic itself. Doom2 was the last storyless shooter I enjoyed. I didn't find another shooter that sparked my interest until Half-Life and it was that addition of story that sucked me in. I'd compare it to what happened with movies -- people used to be satisfied watching kinescopes of simple activities and were amazed by a train coming out of a tunnel on the big screen. After the novelty wore off they started having to supply storylines to give those moving pictures meaning. The exception to that rule, of course, are the casual games, the ones that are basically where coin-op arcade games were at in the early 80's. Something like Angry Birds has as rudimentary a storyline as Donkey Kong but the play mechanics keep people coming back. But something huge and complex like an RPG, it had better have a good storyline to provide context to everything or I'm completely bored. Dragon Age bored the snot out of me. I know I'm the minority opinion here.
The thing is, there's only so much storyline in even a poorly done single player RPG. You play, you grind, you reach the end, you move on to the next game. The insidious thing with MMORPG's is they have you play the same bits over and over and over and over. Which might be fine if those sections were fun games in and of themselves but that's just it, they're not fun. That's why people pay gold farmers so they can get new gear and go back to the fun stuff.
Honestly, I don't see where people find the time for this sort of thing. People enjoy MMORPG's, there's even successful web comedies about that sort of thing. http://www.watchtheguild.com/ But I'll tell you what, it's depressing. I just find it like watching a show all about alcoholics drinking themselves to death. There are really people who live like this.
10 print "hello"
20 goto 10
This is why we can't have nice things.
Oh, that's small potatoes. What we'd do is take all the computers in the lab and write music for them. These were IBM model 25's, monitor and disk drives in the same box. So we'd turn the screen contrast and brightness down to nothing to make them look like they're off while the countdown timer is running in the background. Fifteen minutes into the next class, the computers in the back row start playing the William Tell Overture in unison. We lost our nice things right after that.
I think the people that saw the original Tron at the time remember it as a much better movie than it really was. You're spot on when you say the original Tron heavily relied on special effects at the expense of story. While we all decry that sort of thing as laziness and lack of imagination these days, when we think back to that original movie we think of how cool it looked to us at the time, and gloss over the bad parts (like the plot and the pacing). The only imagination required to appreciate the new Tron is the imagination it takes to believe your nostalgic view of the original is an accurate measure of the quality of the film.
I've never understood why they don't just pay someone to write a good script when they make a movie. I can understand that there would sometimes be process failures when the best efforts of everyone involved yields a shitty product. I can understand when a studio comes out and says "Yeah, we're going to make a McDonalds film, loaded with titty and splosions and shit that tastes good but aren't good for you." Transformers is a formula that works. But if you're actually trying to make a good movie, why not start from a good script? I'm not going to make a steakhouse-quality dinner using stew beef, I need to drop some coin on good ingredients.
You'd think that the script would be the cheapest part of the whole movie. There are tons of starving writers out there with absolutely brilliant ideas. Why are they ignored? It just doesn't make any sense.
well to be honest if it wasn't for what he did the site would of been ignored like cryptome. in which case just getting the leaked documents would of done nothing if the site they were leaked too was ignored and derided as fake if actually brought up as cryptome often is. he became both the figurehead and the pr man for wikileaks not only approaching normal newspapers with the information to give them good story's but saying to other people who know of wrong doing and don't know where to leak the information, you can give it to me.
It almost makes me wonder if this might not be the exact sort of thing you need to do to get the news out. The media's covering him for the "sexy" angle, dirt and sleaze is sexy. PETA gets people to go naked for fur but that just doesn't seem to generate enough controversy. Maybe PETA should hire the Old Spice guy to sexually assault women wearing fur. That'll get the message out.
If the nearest town with electricity is 3 hours away, how are they powering the towers? Why would they even have towers around there?
nt
About the same as Atari making a comeback, if by comeback you mean it's a meaningless label slapped onto random games by Ubisoft.