In other news, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud announced that oil other petroleum products were excellent sources of clean energy, with no need to search for alternative fuel and energy sources for the next 10 years.
Also, very sadly, there are certain advances in medicine that *might* not have happened as early as they did without the holocaust and Hitler's experiments on live humans. I don't think that we can safely say that they were worth it, however--and that is the crux of the problem.
Can you please back that up with something more than a statement? Not to sound harsh, but to a skeptic like me, that first statement sounds specious at best.
If you could post a couple of examples, that would be great. Then I'll have some nifty little nuggets of information to spout off at happy hour next week!:^)
I know most people say that watching something or doing it virtually will not cause it to happen in real life. I tend to agree.
Most kids will never shoot an AWP into a crowd. But how many of them will call women "bitches" and "hos"? Kids may never do battle with the legions of hell, but how many will think of shooting a gun as "cool"?
A good quote (badly paraphrased) is: Thoughts lead to actions. Actions lead to habits. Habits build your character.
I used to not put a whole lot of weight into the rating of games. Until I got married last summer and was suddenly tasked with making parental judgements for 2 young stepsons, 8 and 10. We played mostly Gamecube games, but eventually my wife and I bought them a PS2 and started with Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, etc. Then it became Ratchet and Clank, Jak II (both rated 'T', both slightly violent). Then came the phone calls from the teachers. Both kids were talking back, pushing other kids, throwing things on the playground, etc. We took away all but Mario Party and saw results almost overnight. It was then that I became a believer that video games CAN change the way children behave. I can only imagine what changes take place when kids play 'M'-rated games from the time they are 13 and younger.
And before you respond to say, "It's just your kids that have a problem", we have talked with other parents at school and in the neighborhood and they all have seen the same thing. The more the kids play games with violence (even cartoon violence), the worse their behavior.
Note: I am COMPLETELY against censorship. If you want to shoot cops, rape prostitutes and mow down aliens with rocket launchers in a video game, be my guest. But any tools that the government can provide that help us raise respectable children are welcome by me, and I'm sure many, many other American parents.
There is simply no justification for 'public schools' these days: they exist to keep teachers and bureaucrats in cushy, well-paid jobs, not to teach anyone anything (other than to turn up on time and do what they're told, like good little corporate drones whose jobs will be outsourced at the first opportunity to cheaper corporate drones abroad).
Sorry, I need to smack you down on this one. Do you even KNOW a single person that is a teacher? Have you seen what public school teachers get paid, especially starting out? My sister got a finance degree from Texas A&M 2 years ago and she makes more than my mother who has been teaching 1st Grade for over 30 years. "Cushy, well-paid jobs" my ass. You go teach elementary school for a single day, then move on to Junior High, then High School. I promise you that it is no walk in the park, and at the end of the day your pay is shit compared to the hours you had to work.
Typical day for my mom who teaches in Plano ISD, a rather demanding school district in the Dallas, Texas suburbs:
Get to work around 7
Get classroom ready for the day, if necessary
Kids start coming in around 7:30 (~25 per classroom, 4 classrooms)
7:55 - Start teaching
11:30 - kids eat lunch. Mom gets about 20 minutes to scarf down her food.
Recess is somewhere in there.
Class gets out around 2:45 or 3:00
Help tutor those kids that are behind (for free, I might add)
Deal with any parents that have concerns or need to talk.
Dad brings mom dinner around 5:00, helps her cart out her work to do that night. (She destroyed her left arm about 13 years ago trying to decorate her room for the kids. She fell while hanging stuff on the ceiling)
Go home, maybe watch the news. Sometimes talk to more parents on the phone.
Start grading papers, helping with lesson plans, work on stuff for the next day.
Go to bed around midnight.
Granted, my mother is an INSANELY dedicated teacher. She puts in a lot more time than your average teacher, but she does it because she refuses to let her kids get a lesser education because she puts in less than 110% effort. I have gone to a couple of PTA banquets where they honor the teachers, and I have parents come up to me and tell me how wonderful my mother is and how they wish their kids could still have her outside of 1st Grade. That's her reward. No stock options. No Christmas bonus. No extra time off. Nothing. Sure, teachers get a couple of months off in the summer, but my mom usually tutors or does something else to keep busy. She's completely dedicated to her work.
Oh yeah, all of this for around $50-60K a year. She'll get more if she decides to lead Invent America, Olympics of the Mind or other extra-cirricular activities. She gets a small bonus each month for being team leader. I'm a software engineer and I have always had demanding jobs, but there's no way I could do what she does. The reason : my heart is not in it like her's. And that's what it takes to be a great teacher.
I'm not here to debate the justification for public schools, other than to say 'something is better than nothing', but to stand there and insinuate that teachers have it easy deserves a cock-punch to the person who says it, even if it is a virtual one.
a long, long way from the PacMan & Centipede adaptations
Wow, the Pac Man with the plastic chompers that were supposed to eat the white marbles! If you bothered to properly chomp your Pac Man then half of the marbles vibrated off the board. A piece of crap that shipped simply to cash in on the name.
I had totally forgotten about owning that as a child. Thanks for the memory jog!
There was an article in Game Developer a while back talking about the business of Everquest. They run over 1,900 servers (this is EQ I, only), employ hundreds of people and (not sure if this was mentioned) probably consume huge bandwidth pipes. Think of some of the costs:
probably at least 50 employees to run and maintain the game. Average $50,000/year for each, you're looking at $2.5 million.
cost of bandwidth. I would imagine that the bill is $5000+ per month. I suppose a DS3 or 2 would work. Anyone care to theorize?
Cost of keeping the servers running at 99% or more. Think of the bill for the datacenter, rack space, electricity, etc.
Cost of running the billing system. Maybe that could be counted in the 50 employees, maybe not
Cost of marketing -- that's still factored in because you want new purchases
You still want to make a good profit after all of that. Now, all of what I mentioned could still be way lower than their monthly intake; maybe someone with more reliable cost figures could elaborate.
What ever happened to the idea that man-made diamonds could be the future of computing? I know there was a Wired article a while back regarding this (yeah, I know that Wired can be the tabloid of the tech industry) saying that cheaply made diamonds could push processor speeds way faster due to better heat dissipation. Is this idea still way off or is it more the pipe dream of a huxter wishing to get rich?
If you like to talk to transistors
If big cache can make you smile
If you like to waltz with capacitors
Up and down the homebrew electronics aisle...(of Fry's)
Have we got a processor showdown for you.
Maybe now we can see AMD marching around the Intel headquarters while Intel hurls slushies at the competition.
Or maybe I need to put a new CD in my car's player. But hey, my 3 year old isn't ready for Snoop Doog yet.
Well, for games to get away from the Nostromo motif, they need to get off of other planets and out of space bases. It's not like alien bases are designed by Willy Wonka and his Oompa Loompas; they have no choice but to look bland because that's what a space ship/space base would look like.
Actually, a lot of today's toys ARE the toys from our youth. My kids asked for a lot of stuff that I asked for at their age. Zoids, Rubik's Cubes, Transformers, GI Joe, etc. are all under our tree for the next generation. Robots, too. About 20 years ago my parents got me a Verbot (I wanted an Omnibot, goddammit); my older son is getting a Robosapien. Toys may change some, but the idea (and sometimes even brand) stays the same.
My only gripe with the toys these days is that they are cheap plastic renditions of what we had. Hell, you practically had to be up on your tetanus shots before playing with those metal Transformers and Zoids.
Movie tie-ins were the same back then as well, just different stuff. Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Gremilins, ET -- we had the same stuff just under the guise of a different movie. Just why, WHY, WHY, did they have to make a Spiderman glove that shoots web fluid. I can see my cats covered in this stuff within an hour of it coming out of the box Saturday morning...
It really has been a nice trip down memory lane this year. 20 years ago I had a HUGE Christmas becuase my father got a bonus at his job and my parents knew they would never, ever have money like that again. I got my first Atari (5200 -- with Pac Man! Anyone remember how IMPOSSIBLE it was to find that back then?), my first boombox, my first TV, my first robot, my first Zoids and Transformers. Equally, I received a nice overtime paycheck this year and was able to get some extra stuff for my sons, mirroring what I got when I was 10 (they are 8 and 10). I suppose I'm buying some of the toys more out of MY desire to play with them than anything else!:^)
I wonder if I can hack the Robosapien to use Bluetooth so I can control it from my laptop...
Hate to nitpick...He didn't say the percentage was getting larger, just that the pile was getting larger. 90% of 10,000 is larger than 90% of 9,000 so indeed, Sturgeon's Law applies here.
How did Bungie whore themselves out? Because they got acquired by the company who makes the main platform they target with their games? Because they let a major corporation handle their business end so they could concentrate on making better games? Because they now have access to a wealth of QA and development resources that would potentially be unavailable to them?
They sell millions of copies of their games, a fact that has more to do with the quality of the finished product than the company that owns them. How exactly have they "whored out" by positioning themselves to sell even more copies of an even more stellar game (ie, Halo 2 >> Halo)? I just hate it when people make blanket statements like this.
When I worked in the game industry I met a few of the guys from Ensemble Studios. I asked them how their partnership with Microsoft helped the development of a finished product. Access to great in-house development talent, use of state-of-the-art QA labs (particularly when testing multiplayer; the stuff they could simulate was amazing), help from proven, and top-talent project management were just some of the reasons given. Sometimes being in cahoots with a big corporation isn't a bad thing, you know.
If you want to call a company a whore, look at the people that make bargain bin crap. Or the *Hunter series -- that, to me, is the definition of game industry whoring.
Do you ever recognize the people that win Oscars for Best Art Direction? Best Cinematography? Best Set Direction? Best Original Score? Best Documentary?
Sure, some of us might recognize a name or two, but the vast majority of viewers know few names outside of the Best Act* categories. Does that mean that those relatively unknowns don't get honored in a formal and prestigious ceremony in front of their peers? Of course not, so why should the interactive entertainment industry be any different?
I don't have the time this morning to dig through the WoW forums, but one of the lead developers mentioned during the Beta that if you find yourself at a point in the game where you can't solo, let Blizzard know. In their opinion, soloing and grouping should yield the same results, and the game is considered broken if you can't solo effectively.
I thought this remake already came out several years ago. I think it was about The Fresh Prince flying airplanes, The Fly was a cable installer and Commander Data was a fat doctor dissecting aliens.
Maybe this time around it will be a Windows virus that infects the alien computers. That would be a more realistic storyline.
The sad thing is that paying overtime won't cut into EA's profits, it will cut into customers' wallets. The next game will be $59.99 new instead of $49.99, and this trend might push across the board. I hope and pray that you are right, that EA will take the hit internally, but I think they will try to push the extra cost onto consumers instead. At that point it is up to us to tell EA, via our purchasing power, that we won't shell out that much for every game they create.
My wife tends to watch shows like this, and we've noticed the same thing. Networks tend to run shows a minute or so off, and since shows now start immediately (with the opening credits rolling several minutes into the show) it can be aggravating. To combat this, we do one of the following:
1. Watch the opposing show on the station in a different time zone. We get channels from other broadcast cities, and since we're in Dallas it is easy to catch a show on the L.A. channels an hour or two later. We can also record the later show if nothing else is on that we want to watch.
2. Usenet. Most, if not all, of the popular shows are available in DivX (or similar) format the next morning. I simply cue up the shows and burn a couple to a CD or DVD, then play back on our Philips DVP642. That way if there's a night that's slow for TV shows, we can just catch up on what we missed the other night.
Option 1 is more preferable from the network execs' standpoint. Option 2 is more preferable from our standpoint since we get to keep the shows and watch them at our convenience, even if that means on my laptop while dinner is cooking, etc.
At somepoint, the networks need to realize that WE WANT OUR PROGRAMMING OUR WAY. We don't always mind commercials, we don't mind in-show advertising (I don't personally, YMMV), but we mind you playing games with us and hindering our ability to watch a simple show on the television.
Note: We only have one PVR in the house. The equipment fee to "rent" one from Dish is not overly expensive, but we (read: I) prefer to spend the money on Usenet and blank CDs.
unless you expect World of Warcraft to solve your problems with the opposite sex you're not likely to be disappointed
I dunno -- my wife has been appearing late at night in my office begging me to come to bed, usually dressed in something rather scandalous. So, indeed, World of Warcraft satisfies more than just my gaming addiction!
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In other news, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud announced that oil other petroleum products were excellent sources of clean energy, with no need to search for alternative fuel and energy sources for the next 10 years.
I know what the one thing is!
"Yes, love."
"Whatever you say, love" can be substituted.
Also, very sadly, there are certain advances in medicine that *might* not have happened as early as they did without the holocaust and Hitler's experiments on live humans. I don't think that we can safely say that they were worth it, however--and that is the crux of the problem.
:^)
Can you please back that up with something more than a statement? Not to sound harsh, but to a skeptic like me, that first statement sounds specious at best.
If you could post a couple of examples, that would be great. Then I'll have some nifty little nuggets of information to spout off at happy hour next week!
I know most people say that watching something or doing it virtually will not cause it to happen in real life. I tend to agree. Most kids will never shoot an AWP into a crowd. But how many of them will call women "bitches" and "hos"? Kids may never do battle with the legions of hell, but how many will think of shooting a gun as "cool"? A good quote (badly paraphrased) is: Thoughts lead to actions. Actions lead to habits. Habits build your character.
I used to not put a whole lot of weight into the rating of games. Until I got married last summer and was suddenly tasked with making parental judgements for 2 young stepsons, 8 and 10. We played mostly Gamecube games, but eventually my wife and I bought them a PS2 and started with Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, etc. Then it became Ratchet and Clank, Jak II (both rated 'T', both slightly violent). Then came the phone calls from the teachers. Both kids were talking back, pushing other kids, throwing things on the playground, etc. We took away all but Mario Party and saw results almost overnight. It was then that I became a believer that video games CAN change the way children behave. I can only imagine what changes take place when kids play 'M'-rated games from the time they are 13 and younger.
And before you respond to say, "It's just your kids that have a problem", we have talked with other parents at school and in the neighborhood and they all have seen the same thing. The more the kids play games with violence (even cartoon violence), the worse their behavior.
Note: I am COMPLETELY against censorship. If you want to shoot cops, rape prostitutes and mow down aliens with rocket launchers in a video game, be my guest. But any tools that the government can provide that help us raise respectable children are welcome by me, and I'm sure many, many other American parents.
Anyone remember the Voyager message?
h tml
For those, like me, that didn't really know what all was on the golden record...
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.
Sorry, I need to smack you down on this one. Do you even KNOW a single person that is a teacher? Have you seen what public school teachers get paid, especially starting out? My sister got a finance degree from Texas A&M 2 years ago and she makes more than my mother who has been teaching 1st Grade for over 30 years. "Cushy, well-paid jobs" my ass. You go teach elementary school for a single day, then move on to Junior High, then High School. I promise you that it is no walk in the park, and at the end of the day your pay is shit compared to the hours you had to work.
Typical day for my mom who teaches in Plano ISD, a rather demanding school district in the Dallas, Texas suburbs
- Get to work around 7
- Get classroom ready for the day, if necessary
- Kids start coming in around 7:30 (~25 per classroom, 4 classrooms)
- 7:55 - Start teaching
- 11:30 - kids eat lunch. Mom gets about 20 minutes to scarf down her food.
- Recess is somewhere in there.
- Class gets out around 2:45 or 3:00
- Help tutor those kids that are behind (for free, I might add)
- Deal with any parents that have concerns or need to talk.
- Dad brings mom dinner around 5:00, helps her cart out her work to do that night. (She destroyed her left arm about 13 years ago trying to decorate her room for the kids. She fell while hanging stuff on the ceiling)
- Go home, maybe watch the news. Sometimes talk to more parents on the phone.
- Start grading papers, helping with lesson plans, work on stuff for the next day.
- Go to bed around midnight.
Granted, my mother is an INSANELY dedicated teacher. She puts in a lot more time than your average teacher, but she does it because she refuses to let her kids get a lesser education because she puts in less than 110% effort. I have gone to a couple of PTA banquets where they honor the teachers, and I have parents come up to me and tell me how wonderful my mother is and how they wish their kids could still have her outside of 1st Grade. That's her reward. No stock options. No Christmas bonus. No extra time off. Nothing. Sure, teachers get a couple of months off in the summer, but my mom usually tutors or does something else to keep busy. She's completely dedicated to her work.Oh yeah, all of this for around $50-60K a year. She'll get more if she decides to lead Invent America, Olympics of the Mind or other extra-cirricular activities. She gets a small bonus each month for being team leader. I'm a software engineer and I have always had demanding jobs, but there's no way I could do what she does. The reason : my heart is not in it like her's. And that's what it takes to be a great teacher.
I'm not here to debate the justification for public schools, other than to say 'something is better than nothing', but to stand there and insinuate that teachers have it easy deserves a cock-punch to the person who says it, even if it is a virtual one.
a long, long way from the PacMan & Centipede adaptations
Wow, the Pac Man with the plastic chompers that were supposed to eat the white marbles! If you bothered to properly chomp your Pac Man then half of the marbles vibrated off the board. A piece of crap that shipped simply to cash in on the name.
I had totally forgotten about owning that as a child. Thanks for the memory jog!
- probably at least 50 employees to run and maintain the game. Average $50,000/year for each, you're looking at $2.5 million.
- cost of bandwidth. I would imagine that the bill is $5000+ per month. I suppose a DS3 or 2 would work. Anyone care to theorize?
- Cost of keeping the servers running at 99% or more. Think of the bill for the datacenter, rack space, electricity, etc.
- Cost of running the billing system. Maybe that could be counted in the 50 employees, maybe not
- Cost of marketing -- that's still factored in because you want new purchases
You still want to make a good profit after all of that. Now, all of what I mentioned could still be way lower than their monthly intake; maybe someone with more reliable cost figures could elaborate.What ever happened to the idea that man-made diamonds could be the future of computing? I know there was a Wired article a while back regarding this (yeah, I know that Wired can be the tabloid of the tech industry) saying that cheaply made diamonds could push processor speeds way faster due to better heat dissipation. Is this idea still way off or is it more the pipe dream of a huxter wishing to get rich?
If you like to talk to transistors
If big cache can make you smile
If you like to waltz with capacitors
Up and down the homebrew electronics aisle...(of Fry's)
Have we got a processor showdown for you.
Maybe now we can see AMD marching around the Intel headquarters while Intel hurls slushies at the competition.
Or maybe I need to put a new CD in my car's player. But hey, my 3 year old isn't ready for Snoop Doog yet.
This link shows that Apple filed for a trademark in 2004. So maybe iWork is what we're getting?
Well, for games to get away from the Nostromo motif, they need to get off of other planets and out of space bases. It's not like alien bases are designed by Willy Wonka and his Oompa Loompas; they have no choice but to look bland because that's what a space ship/space base would look like.
Thanks, Eccles -- I stand corrected! :^)
Actually, a lot of today's toys ARE the toys from our youth. My kids asked for a lot of stuff that I asked for at their age. Zoids, Rubik's Cubes, Transformers, GI Joe, etc. are all under our tree for the next generation. Robots, too. About 20 years ago my parents got me a Verbot (I wanted an Omnibot, goddammit); my older son is getting a Robosapien. Toys may change some, but the idea (and sometimes even brand) stays the same.
:^)
My only gripe with the toys these days is that they are cheap plastic renditions of what we had. Hell, you practically had to be up on your tetanus shots before playing with those metal Transformers and Zoids.
Movie tie-ins were the same back then as well, just different stuff. Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Gremilins, ET -- we had the same stuff just under the guise of a different movie. Just why, WHY, WHY, did they have to make a Spiderman glove that shoots web fluid. I can see my cats covered in this stuff within an hour of it coming out of the box Saturday morning...
It really has been a nice trip down memory lane this year. 20 years ago I had a HUGE Christmas becuase my father got a bonus at his job and my parents knew they would never, ever have money like that again. I got my first Atari (5200 -- with Pac Man! Anyone remember how IMPOSSIBLE it was to find that back then?), my first boombox, my first TV, my first robot, my first Zoids and Transformers. Equally, I received a nice overtime paycheck this year and was able to get some extra stuff for my sons, mirroring what I got when I was 10 (they are 8 and 10). I suppose I'm buying some of the toys more out of MY desire to play with them than anything else!
I wonder if I can hack the Robosapien to use Bluetooth so I can control it from my laptop...
Hate to nitpick...He didn't say the percentage was getting larger, just that the pile was getting larger. 90% of 10,000 is larger than 90% of 9,000 so indeed, Sturgeon's Law applies here.
How did Bungie whore themselves out? Because they got acquired by the company who makes the main platform they target with their games? Because they let a major corporation handle their business end so they could concentrate on making better games? Because they now have access to a wealth of QA and development resources that would potentially be unavailable to them?
They sell millions of copies of their games, a fact that has more to do with the quality of the finished product than the company that owns them. How exactly have they "whored out" by positioning themselves to sell even more copies of an even more stellar game (ie, Halo 2 >> Halo)? I just hate it when people make blanket statements like this.
When I worked in the game industry I met a few of the guys from Ensemble Studios. I asked them how their partnership with Microsoft helped the development of a finished product. Access to great in-house development talent, use of state-of-the-art QA labs (particularly when testing multiplayer; the stuff they could simulate was amazing), help from proven, and top-talent project management were just some of the reasons given. Sometimes being in cahoots with a big corporation isn't a bad thing, you know.
If you want to call a company a whore, look at the people that make bargain bin crap. Or the *Hunter series -- that, to me, is the definition of game industry whoring.
Do you ever recognize the people that win Oscars for Best Art Direction? Best Cinematography? Best Set Direction? Best Original Score? Best Documentary?
Sure, some of us might recognize a name or two, but the vast majority of viewers know few names outside of the Best Act* categories. Does that mean that those relatively unknowns don't get honored in a formal and prestigious ceremony in front of their peers? Of course not, so why should the interactive entertainment industry be any different?
I don't have the time this morning to dig through the WoW forums, but one of the lead developers mentioned during the Beta that if you find yourself at a point in the game where you can't solo, let Blizzard know. In their opinion, soloing and grouping should yield the same results, and the game is considered broken if you can't solo effectively.
I thought this remake already came out several years ago. I think it was about The Fresh Prince flying airplanes, The Fly was a cable installer and Commander Data was a fat doctor dissecting aliens.
Maybe this time around it will be a Windows virus that infects the alien computers. That would be a more realistic storyline.
If Apple files a Cease & Desist order, then maybe there's some truth to it. I doubt they would waste that time for a simple fanboi dream.
You mean you don't like to punch the kangaroo for a chance to win a free iPod? That's so much more fun that looking at a stupid text ad!
The sad thing is that paying overtime won't cut into EA's profits, it will cut into customers' wallets. The next game will be $59.99 new instead of $49.99, and this trend might push across the board. I hope and pray that you are right, that EA will take the hit internally, but I think they will try to push the extra cost onto consumers instead. At that point it is up to us to tell EA, via our purchasing power, that we won't shell out that much for every game they create.
Actually, I go to that much trouble so my WIFE doesn't miss any TV. Because unless she's tempting me away from World of Warcraft, her watching TV is guaranteed time for gaming!
My wife tends to watch shows like this, and we've noticed the same thing. Networks tend to run shows a minute or so off, and since shows now start immediately (with the opening credits rolling several minutes into the show) it can be aggravating. To combat this, we do one of the following :
1. Watch the opposing show on the station in a different time zone. We get channels from other broadcast cities, and since we're in Dallas it is easy to catch a show on the L.A. channels an hour or two later. We can also record the later show if nothing else is on that we want to watch.
2. Usenet. Most, if not all, of the popular shows are available in DivX (or similar) format the next morning. I simply cue up the shows and burn a couple to a CD or DVD, then play back on our Philips DVP642. That way if there's a night that's slow for TV shows, we can just catch up on what we missed the other night.
Option 1 is more preferable from the network execs' standpoint. Option 2 is more preferable from our standpoint since we get to keep the shows and watch them at our convenience, even if that means on my laptop while dinner is cooking, etc.
At somepoint, the networks need to realize that WE WANT OUR PROGRAMMING OUR WAY. We don't always mind commercials, we don't mind in-show advertising (I don't personally, YMMV), but we mind you playing games with us and hindering our ability to watch a simple show on the television.
Note: We only have one PVR in the house. The equipment fee to "rent" one from Dish is not overly expensive, but we (read: I) prefer to spend the money on Usenet and blank CDs.
unless you expect World of Warcraft to solve your problems with the opposite sex you're not likely to be disappointed
I dunno -- my wife has been appearing late at night in my office begging me to come to bed, usually dressed in something rather scandalous. So, indeed, World of Warcraft satisfies more than just my gaming addiction!