I hear that. Starcraft lasted me from its release until all of my Starcraft-playing friends moved out of town. Warcraft 3 got played once.
Of course, part of that was the fact that Starcraft runs on dirt, and most of my friends that would have been up for War3 didn't have kit that could handle it.
Yeah, but if you want cable just for one specific channel (say, sci-fi), you have to get Basic and Extended or whatever - you wind up paying extra for a bunch of channels you'll never use.
And the $20/mo online game doesn't spam three minutes of ads at me every five minutes.
While the gameplay was more accessible - which I have no complaint with - the game itself seemed designed to piss me off. An extremely predictable story focusing on very unlikeable characters? An extremely predictable story focusing on very unlikeable characters that I'm forced to plod though and can't avoid? SIGN ME UP!
If I want a predictable story and unlikeable characters, I'll play one of the PlayStation Final Fantasies. If I want an RTS, there's a nice list of options, virtually none of which try to jam a story up my nose.
Game? Fine. Story? Could have been much better. Characters? My own extras are more interesting.
Word. I hated War3 - it slammed all of the most irritating elements of RPGs on top of an RTS and wound up being a severely unenjoyable experience as a result. I can't think of a Blizzard title I've enjoyed less.
Hopefully Starcraft 2 is Improved Starcraft. If their previous release pattern is anything to go by, it should be. Then Starcraft 3 will suck ass, then we'll have World Of Starcraft, which won't suck.
I admit, S5 of B5 isn't all that great - the Penn and Teller episode and the whole Martyrdumb plotline were meh at best. Both are a side effect of season 5's future being in doubt - which was why the shadow war and the war against earth both wrapped in season 4.
Legend Of The Rangers was total ass, but I'd like to chalk that one up to the Sci-Fi channel - the faults, in my opinion, are more to do with SFC-flavored casting than anything else.
Regardless, I intend to buy the new B5 as soon as it's available - good sales should mean more B5... great sales could hopefully mean a new series or more movies.
Even further, Hollywood is compelled to continue making sequels until they are so bad they stop making money. It is the only way to insure they have extracted all the money possible from a franchise.
Police Academy is probably the best example of that.
Though I consider the second and third Matrix movies and the Star Wars prequel trilogy to be pretty good examples as well.:P
After repeated viewings, I'm of the opinion that Cameron's what makes the franchise. We didn't need a third movie (what the hell was up with that, anyway?) - much like we didn't need a Highlander 2 (or 3, etc).
If they're good, that's one thing - but Terminator without Cameron is like, say... The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen without Allen Moore. Or Watchmen if it were written by Rob Liefeld.
The only upcoming "sequel" sci-fi I'm looking forward to is Babylon 5 : The Lost Tales. It's more B5, and most importantly, it's still under the control of Straczynski.
... and America is the Land Of FPS. Quake, Unreal, etceteras - I played through Metroid Prime : Hunters on my DS and it felt like a mix of Quake 4 and Quake 3 gameplay elements. Metroid Prime is really more of a Nintendo Quake than anything else - you could swap out the sprites and models and change the name of the game and I doubt anyone would notice.
From what I've seen, the Japanese market is all about the platformers (such as the real Metroid games, and Castlevania) and RPGS - and the Metroid Prime series is neither. I don't have any figures, but if the Japanese had as big a hardon for FPS as they did for RPGs, the X-Box would be doing gangbusters over there.
And if you're getting your Japanese culture from Megatokyo, you're getting an unbelievably skewed perspective.
Democracy gone wrong, or proof of the failings/flaws of a democracy? Apply Sturgeon's Law to a "majority rules" system and you're going to wind up with The All Dancing All Singing Crap Review - the Tyranny Of The Majority, etc.
I try to ignore Digg, and I try to avoid sites that opt into the Digg circlejerk - I have yet to find that little "digg it!" icon attached to anything of merit.:P
Of course, I'm not an eighteen year old hipster doofus trying to get laid through teh intarwebz. Which puts me way, way out of Digg's demographic.
Moveable Type doesn't need/use PHP at all, unless you're one of those types who actually Knows PHP, in which case you can combine it with MT's internal tags and templates to produce some fairly useful functionality.
The only php bits I use are includes (which lets my entry lists update without rebuilding the entire entry database, and also makes it possible to change the look and feel of my whole danged site by changing only a couple of files), and a count function for page totals.
MT rocks. None of the other CMS I've looked at come even close to it in terms of the functionality I need - and the documentation is very, very good.
It's one thing to draw pr0n, it's another thing to megaphone its existance at people who aren't interested.:P You're comparing assholes and apples here. And I don't respond with "What are you, some kind of fuckin' faggot?!" when somebody ignores my gallery.... unlike the construction worker / hornball types (such as yourself) who take any response deemed inappropriate as a personal attack on all that is Right and Good.
I'm fine with the whole "gender equality" thing. Men suck. Women suck. They just happen to suck differently.
Case examples (which I've encountered on a monthly-to-weekly basis since around the time I hit that puberty thing: Men muttering (or bellowing) ZOMG WILL YOU LOOK AT THAT ASS?! or otherwise spluttering when some moderately pleasant whatever walks past. I'm a guy, and I find that shit disgusting. Stop it. Women getting pissy and grumpy and muttering (or bellowing) WELL I GUESS CHIVALRY IS DEAD, ISN'T IT?! when you don't hold the door for them, give up your place in line for them, or otherwise bend over backwards for them? You wanted equality, you got it. You can't have it both ways, lady.
Aside, I think anyone who wants to be in the kitchen belongs in the kitchen. A good friend of mine is a far better house-husband (a "mister mom" if you will) than his wife ever was - he's a far better cook, he's much better with the kids, and he likes doing it. And his wife happens to be a far better wal-mart manager than he ever would be. Marxism on a micro-scale.
A few thousand years on and society is still in the zits-and-rat turd mustache part of puberty. If we're still acting like this in a thousand years, then we definitely have a problem.
You would pull out the steaming mess that is Word 6 as your example.:P Might've helped to bring that up the first time.
Newer and older versions of office are less of an issue in that respect - but the fact is, it started on the Mac, and the application's refusal to save with a.tla by default seriously hindered interoperability.
Mac Office was - and IS - always ahead of the Windows version. Mac Office was - and is - feature-complete and (in my exprience) full compatible with its most recent Mac equivalent. For f*cks SAKE, it was released on the Mac FIRST. Before Windows ever shipped.
What killed the Mac in enterprise is interoperability. Mac Office only "sucked" in that respect because it followed MacOS developer guidelines - filetype and creator code in the resource fork, no.tla. So even IF a Mac user was smart enough to format a floppy for Windows (or worse, pony up the cash for a DAVE license), they still had to manually pin a.doc onto their Mac Office document for the windows version to read it. I've gone through Hand-hold The Cognitively Impaired User HELL on this point alone at least a dozen times before OS X hit. Combine that with the fact that you can buy/build a basic Data Entry Box that'll run Windows and Excel for half the price of a Mac that'll do the same thing (NOW - more like 4-8x the price back in the day), and you can see where this is going.
Office suite interoperability was hindered more by adherence to platform APIs than anything else - it wasn't until OS X that Apple said "f*ck it, let's ADAPT" and went to great lengths to make interoperating with Windows as much of a non-issue as possible.
The OMFGOFFICE "problem" (which is really one of user education - yourself emphatically included) aside, I'm tickled pink that TextEdit (the Mac equivalent of notepad) can read every.doc I've ever thrown at it.
IIRC everyone who paid real money for 10.0 got 10.1 at an upgrade price as a "We're sorry about that...." on account of 10.0 being BALLS in just about every possible department.
Of course at the time, everyone and their monkey thought 10.0 -> 10.1 was the same thing as 9.0 -> 9.1, and were blubbering bloody murder about being forced to pay for a "point release." Since then, the proles have gotten it into their heads that "10" is the OS, not a release number.
I don't care if it's $3.50 with coupon - I'm not paying for an Apple OS until they make Finder suck less.
From what I vaguely remember of my artskool audio class, Sound at wavelengths of 5hz and below are more than capable of disrupting human thought. 10hz being the South Park "brown sound," which will disrupt the bowels (see also Transmetropolitan, etc).
Makes as much sense as any other explanation - since they got the love triangle out of their systems, the quality of episodes has gotten a heck of a lot better. I've really enjoyed the last few, personally.
Marvel never, ever actually kills a character. They just can't; it goes completely against their Franchise-And-Flog mentality, and it's the main reason I stopped reading Marvel titles in the late 90s. If you're going to kill my favorite characters, have the decency to leave them dead, dammit.
As for Starbuck... the media (and many fans) stopped giving a shit about Galactica when the writers gave up on serious, interesting bits (genocide, fleet issues, politics, etc) to dwell on the goddamned Starbuck/Apollo/Anders love triangle. I'd like to think that if they hadn't decided to wallow in that tepid garbage for so many episodes, the show would still be on Friday nights and Sci-Fi would have ordered a full s4 instead of 13 eps.
That's my theory, anyway. But I'm bitter about it.
If anything, Starbuck got sucked up by the modern version of the Ship of Lights, which means she'll probably be back at some point.
Or worse, the modern version of Doctor Zee will be sent in as a replacement.
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I hear that. Starcraft lasted me from its release until all of my Starcraft-playing friends moved out of town. Warcraft 3 got played once.
Of course, part of that was the fact that Starcraft runs on dirt, and most of my friends that would have been up for War3 didn't have kit that could handle it.
Yeah, but if you want cable just for one specific channel (say, sci-fi), you have to get Basic and Extended or whatever - you wind up paying extra for a bunch of channels you'll never use.
And the $20/mo online game doesn't spam three minutes of ads at me every five minutes.
I don't know if I'd go that far - people spend more per month on cable, and it's far less interactive.
Of course, I can't think of a game I'd want to pay a monthly fee to play, so it's kind of a moot observation.
While the gameplay was more accessible - which I have no complaint with - the game itself seemed designed to piss me off. An extremely predictable story focusing on very unlikeable characters? An extremely predictable story focusing on very unlikeable characters that I'm forced to plod though and can't avoid? SIGN ME UP!
If I want a predictable story and unlikeable characters, I'll play one of the PlayStation Final Fantasies. If I want an RTS, there's a nice list of options, virtually none of which try to jam a story up my nose.
Game? Fine. Story? Could have been much better. Characters? My own extras are more interesting.
Word. I hated War3 - it slammed all of the most irritating elements of RPGs on top of an RTS and wound up being a severely unenjoyable experience as a result. I can't think of a Blizzard title I've enjoyed less.
Hopefully Starcraft 2 is Improved Starcraft. If their previous release pattern is anything to go by, it should be. Then Starcraft 3 will suck ass, then we'll have World Of Starcraft, which won't suck.
Gay men buy condoms (and/or other sex products. Fat people buy food. Lazy people pay for cable or satellite service*.
Buy, buy, buy.
Notice a pattern here?
* I don't know a single lazy bastard who's so lazy they sit and stare at a wall. It's always the damned teevee.
I'm not.
:P
Well, I was. Until 1999.
I admit, S5 of B5 isn't all that great - the Penn and Teller episode and the whole Martyrdumb plotline were meh at best. Both are a side effect of season 5's future being in doubt - which was why the shadow war and the war against earth both wrapped in season 4.
Legend Of The Rangers was total ass, but I'd like to chalk that one up to the Sci-Fi channel - the faults, in my opinion, are more to do with SFC-flavored casting than anything else.
Regardless, I intend to buy the new B5 as soon as it's available - good sales should mean more B5... great sales could hopefully mean a new series or more movies.
Police Academy is probably the best example of that.
Though I consider the second and third Matrix movies and the Star Wars prequel trilogy to be pretty good examples as well.
Because trilogies make more money, duh.
Hollywood only cares about quality product to the extent that they need the occasional quality product in order to keep the cash pouring in.
.... in POO.
After repeated viewings, I'm of the opinion that Cameron's what makes the franchise. We didn't need a third movie (what the hell was up with that, anyway?) - much like we didn't need a Highlander 2 (or 3, etc).
If they're good, that's one thing - but Terminator without Cameron is like, say... The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen without Allen Moore. Or Watchmen if it were written by Rob Liefeld.
The only upcoming "sequel" sci-fi I'm looking forward to is Babylon 5 : The Lost Tales. It's more B5, and most importantly, it's still under the control of Straczynski.
I trust in creators, not franchises.
... and America is the Land Of FPS. Quake, Unreal, etceteras - I played through Metroid Prime : Hunters on my DS and it felt like a mix of Quake 4 and Quake 3 gameplay elements. Metroid Prime is really more of a Nintendo Quake than anything else - you could swap out the sprites and models and change the name of the game and I doubt anyone would notice.
From what I've seen, the Japanese market is all about the platformers (such as the real Metroid games, and Castlevania) and RPGS - and the Metroid Prime series is neither. I don't have any figures, but if the Japanese had as big a hardon for FPS as they did for RPGs, the X-Box would be doing gangbusters over there.
And if you're getting your Japanese culture from Megatokyo, you're getting an unbelievably skewed perspective.
Democracy gone wrong, or proof of the failings/flaws of a democracy? Apply Sturgeon's Law to a "majority rules" system and you're going to wind up with The All Dancing All Singing Crap Review - the Tyranny Of The Majority, etc.
:P
I try to ignore Digg, and I try to avoid sites that opt into the Digg circlejerk - I have yet to find that little "digg it!" icon attached to anything of merit.
Of course, I'm not an eighteen year old hipster doofus trying to get laid through teh intarwebz. Which puts me way, way out of Digg's demographic.
Yes, but they don't have trees in spaaaaace. Which is where something like this can likely do quite a bit of good.
Moveable Type doesn't need/use PHP at all, unless you're one of those types who actually Knows PHP, in which case you can combine it with MT's internal tags and templates to produce some fairly useful functionality.
The only php bits I use are includes (which lets my entry lists update without rebuilding the entire entry database, and also makes it possible to change the look and feel of my whole danged site by changing only a couple of files), and a count function for page totals.
MT rocks. None of the other CMS I've looked at come even close to it in terms of the functionality I need - and the documentation is very, very good.
Don't be a shit.
:P You're comparing assholes and apples here. And I don't respond with "What are you, some kind of fuckin' faggot?!" when somebody ignores my gallery.... unlike the construction worker / hornball types (such as yourself) who take any response deemed inappropriate as a personal attack on all that is Right and Good.
It's one thing to draw pr0n, it's another thing to megaphone its existance at people who aren't interested.
I'm fine with the whole "gender equality" thing. Men suck. Women suck. They just happen to suck differently.
Case examples (which I've encountered on a monthly-to-weekly basis since around the time I hit that puberty thing: Men muttering (or bellowing) ZOMG WILL YOU LOOK AT THAT ASS?! or otherwise spluttering when some moderately pleasant whatever walks past. I'm a guy, and I find that shit disgusting. Stop it. Women getting pissy and grumpy and muttering (or bellowing) WELL I GUESS CHIVALRY IS DEAD, ISN'T IT?! when you don't hold the door for them, give up your place in line for them, or otherwise bend over backwards for them? You wanted equality, you got it. You can't have it both ways, lady.
Aside, I think anyone who wants to be in the kitchen belongs in the kitchen. A good friend of mine is a far better house-husband (a "mister mom" if you will) than his wife ever was - he's a far better cook, he's much better with the kids, and he likes doing it. And his wife happens to be a far better wal-mart manager than he ever would be. Marxism on a micro-scale.
A few thousand years on and society is still in the zits-and-rat turd mustache part of puberty. If we're still acting like this in a thousand years, then we definitely have a problem.
You would pull out the steaming mess that is Word 6 as your example. :P Might've helped to bring that up the first time.
.tla by default seriously hindered interoperability.
Newer and older versions of office are less of an issue in that respect - but the fact is, it started on the Mac, and the application's refusal to save with a
Mac Office was - and IS - always ahead of the Windows version. Mac Office was - and is - feature-complete and (in my exprience) full compatible with its most recent Mac equivalent. For f*cks SAKE, it was released on the Mac FIRST. Before Windows ever shipped.
.tla. So even IF a Mac user was smart enough to format a floppy for Windows (or worse, pony up the cash for a DAVE license), they still had to manually pin a .doc onto their Mac Office document for the windows version to read it. I've gone through Hand-hold The Cognitively Impaired User HELL on this point alone at least a dozen times before OS X hit. Combine that with the fact that you can buy/build a basic Data Entry Box that'll run Windows and Excel for half the price of a Mac that'll do the same thing (NOW - more like 4-8x the price back in the day), and you can see where this is going.
.doc I've ever thrown at it.
What killed the Mac in enterprise is interoperability. Mac Office only "sucked" in that respect because it followed MacOS developer guidelines - filetype and creator code in the resource fork, no
Office suite interoperability was hindered more by adherence to platform APIs than anything else - it wasn't until OS X that Apple said "f*ck it, let's ADAPT" and went to great lengths to make interoperating with Windows as much of a non-issue as possible.
The OMFGOFFICE "problem" (which is really one of user education - yourself emphatically included) aside, I'm tickled pink that TextEdit (the Mac equivalent of notepad) can read every
IIRC everyone who paid real money for 10.0 got 10.1 at an upgrade price as a "We're sorry about that...." on account of 10.0 being BALLS in just about every possible department.
Of course at the time, everyone and their monkey thought 10.0 -> 10.1 was the same thing as 9.0 -> 9.1, and were blubbering bloody murder about being forced to pay for a "point release." Since then, the proles have gotten it into their heads that "10" is the OS, not a release number.
I don't care if it's $3.50 with coupon - I'm not paying for an Apple OS until they make Finder suck less.
The religion numbers alone are a solid proof of Sturgeon's Law (loosely pararphrased as "90% of everything is crap").
Americans are idiots?
Where's the surprise?!
Virtual Boy, hands down.
From what I vaguely remember of my artskool audio class, Sound at wavelengths of 5hz and below are more than capable of disrupting human thought. 10hz being the South Park "brown sound," which will disrupt the bowels (see also Transmetropolitan, etc).
Makes as much sense as any other explanation - since they got the love triangle out of their systems, the quality of episodes has gotten a heck of a lot better. I've really enjoyed the last few, personally.
Marvel never, ever actually kills a character. They just can't; it goes completely against their Franchise-And-Flog mentality, and it's the main reason I stopped reading Marvel titles in the late 90s. If you're going to kill my favorite characters, have the decency to leave them dead, dammit.
As for Starbuck... the media (and many fans) stopped giving a shit about Galactica when the writers gave up on serious, interesting bits (genocide, fleet issues, politics, etc) to dwell on the goddamned Starbuck/Apollo/Anders love triangle. I'd like to think that if they hadn't decided to wallow in that tepid garbage for so many episodes, the show would still be on Friday nights and Sci-Fi would have ordered a full s4 instead of 13 eps.
That's my theory, anyway. But I'm bitter about it.
If anything, Starbuck got sucked up by the modern version of the Ship of Lights, which means she'll probably be back at some point.
Or worse, the modern version of Doctor Zee will be sent in as a replacement.