What irked me was that in one interview with Lucas and a couple of other Hollywood heavyweights (I think Copola was there, as well as someone else extremely famous...it looked like an old homes get-together, seriously!), Lucas mentions that he didn't want to direct TPM. But then he said all his (ass-kissing, upsucking) friends told him he could do it, no, he/should/ do it, so he did.
Now maybe I'm reading way to much into this one offhand comment, but something about the way he said it made me think that Lucas knew he wasn't that good a director (eps 5&6 where the best SW, ep 4 was good because it was new, not because the directing was any good), and the only reason he did direct TPM was because his friends convinced him that he should do it anyway.
"Countries that harbor and support groups that engage in this kind of behavior are evil."
A lot of american citizens have contributed openly to the IRA when they bombed the hell out of civilian targets, yet the US gov'ment did nothing to stop them. Ergo the US is evil, right? Now I post this not to discuss the IRA or what the US should have done with that kind of situation, but just maybe there are shades of grey...
As for Joseph Jampbell's "The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces"...it makes for itersting reading, especially if you know that the Lucas connection was made up after the fact (ie after Star Wars was made) and that Campbell doesn't substantiate his 'research' very well or even at all.
"Love stories, detective stories, horror stories, etc. They have all been represented in the SF world. I often find the most amazing SF books to be the ones that build an entire environment but then center the story on the characters living inside that environment, not really ignoring it, but treating it like an environment instead of "hey look, it's a laser blaster!"."
Which means you love P.K. Dick. That practically describes his MO:)
Please do remember that short stories are the best material for adapting into movies. Full lenght novels loose too much in the adaptation.
Look at Jurasic Park; interesting book with some interestingb thoughts on chaos theory (which I have since learned where put way too simply and somewhat factually incorrect, but hey, it is a book)...but nearly everything which made it interesting and internally consistent was cut for the movie.
Now I'm not saying it can't be done, and done well at that, it's just a fact (or at least according to screenwritters) that a short story is better material in terms of lenght and the amount of concepts introduced.
Ah, shit...I am dumb! I read your quote wrong, so sorry for the dig. However, DU does not mean that it is not radioactive anymore, just that it can't be used for industrial purposes; DU still causes radiation poisoning when particles are inhaled...and particles are rife after DU-shells being fired and impacting on stuff.
That's a very intereting statement, especially when looked at in conjunction with the fact that hundreds of scientists, including 20 Nobel laureats, say that the current government is falsifying data and stacking the panels which come up with the data with political appointees.
This:
"Depleted uranium is just that "depleted" it cannot become "non-depleted" and its presence does not cause levels of "non-depleted" uranium in the population"
is just a bogus statement. It doesn't refute anything, and is actually selfnegating...and really tells me that you know shit about science, let alone the science behind nuclear physics. Shooting depleted uranium shells/does/ increase the levels of depleted uranium in the population...and that leads to radioactive poisoning due to the fact that the DU does not burn up entirely during use. And, not so oddly enough, Gulf War Syndrome looks suspiciously like low level radiation poisoning.
Well, Vinge does quite a bit of intelligent writing, and Gaiman is decent too, although personally I don't think his novels have the depth of his comics (Sandman...the only comic I know of to have won a literary prize meant for books:)), even though his novels have some very intersting ideas in them.
Thing is (and in no way am I trying to belittle their achievement; this is a true hack) these guys where only able to get MTA working thanks to the code stubs Rockstar left in the game when they abbandonned multiplayer due to it being too time intensive to get done on time.
Dude...it's the highest spec PalmOS device on the market, with more features/specs than the T3. So expect it to cost a bit...personally, with the 128mb version, I think it's a damn steal at that price.
"Black and White didn't really address any issue of good or evil, and didn't even try to get into the subtleties of being evil without being purely self-destructive for no good reason."
And let's zoom in on:
"the subtleties of being evil without being purely self-destructive for no good reason."
Seems like a damn good definition of evil to me! Evil always has a reason which doesn't stand up to logic.
As for your last statement: that's what mods do: they make an existing game better or they create an entirely new game. And they can exeed the original game on whiose engine they're based too. But just as anyone can theoretically write a book, but in reallity it hard work and not really anyone really can, so it is with mods. It's hard and complicated, and not anyone has the wherewithall to actually produce an endresult, let alone a decent endresult.
Deus Ex: great game, cool story...no Art. You experienced no emation (well, you know what I mean) during the game.
Max Payne: ditto, but the purest pulp, and I mean that in the absolute best way. Pulp can be great, but very few make for Art, in any artfrom, and to my mind, Max Payne, whilst cool, was not Art.
Homeworld: Art. Like Max Payne, it had the highest production values. Unlike Payne, it provoked real emotions. When you discovered your homeworld destroyed, with Adagio for strings playing (I always wondered about that, and the choice of that piece for the first 9/11 memorial thing)...that's the emotion Art has to provoke if it would be called Art.
OK, ok...slightly presumpotious, but it's the only example of Art in video games I know of so far...the rest has just been entertainment. Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Halflife, Starcraft, Syndicate, Populous, Bejeweled, Tetris, Monkey Island, Larry...good, but entertainment, not Art.
"but TFA makes him out to be some kind of visionary making truly revolutionary games"
It is true though; how many of his games have you played and really be able to say 'been there, done that', as you say earlier on in your comment. Populous (amazing concept, good gameplay), Syndicate (amazing concept, amazing gameplay, amazing everything), Dungeon Keeper (what?!? I'm the/evil/ guy?!? Cool!) and Black and White (trhe game sucks, but have you seen your monkey/cow do this yet? And look what I taught him then!) are all originals which other dev's have had to steal ideas from, either because they where the only ones which worked or because they where so good not nicking them would be dumb.
True, Black and White sucked...but even whilst sucking, there where some truly amazing things in it which other games haven't even come close to yet. Sadly, nowadays it seems (mind you, this is before I've seen the polish on Fable) Molyneux should be locked into a broomcloset of a solid dev-house which can take his ideas and fully polish them.
And which real tech-savy person didn't anticipate this?
Cell phone are the intermediate future, and VoIP (in the real sense, not in the sense that they're still connected at all to the copper wires, but just connected to the real internet) or just plain Data over IP ('cos what else is Voice?) is the future.
Especially with wireless becoming cheaper and cheaper; what's gonna evolve is a free system of comms (wifi mesh, whatever) run by hobbyists, where the only role the telecoms are going to play is maintaining the fibreoptics between continents, large companies and cities which aren't easily connected by wireless (in all it's forms).
What's really surprising is that the telco's didn't see this coming: I have a friend who worked for the largest (formerly only) telco in the netherlands, and hwen I told him about this, his response was..."but....but...that's illegal!?". He really didn't understand the power of public airwaves...and he was in strategic planning too!
The only danger of course is that the telco's will lobby gov'ment to restrict private access to public bands....
Plus, nuclear waste can be transmuted into nuclear waste that stops radiating in less than two hundred years. So all you have to do is transmutate the waste (not a trivial enterporise, but still) and house it in something for 100 to 150 years. End of problem.
Couple this with the new intrinsicaly safe nuclear reactors (these are reactors which, due to their design, have physical principles which mean they shut down themselves if anything goes wrong...no faulty electronics, we're talking simple mechanics here) and yeah, nuclear power is the only green power there is.
What bugs me most is that so-called 'action groups' like Greenpeace haven't a fucking clue. But then again, that's becuase they have hardly any PHD's working for them...and when they do, those phd's are for law, no (applied) physics, no chemistry...the only technical phd working for Greenpeace in the Netherlands came from fucking Aeronautics! A bloody plane builder! Greenpeace and it's ilk, whilst doing some good work, is ignorant becuase they're staffed like a goddamn PR firm.
I went up to a test reactor once, and stood on top of the reactor (basically a large rectangular water tank with the rod-assembly in it) and marveled at the beauty of the blue Cherenkov radiation. Then they turned off the lights, and you could see the entire tank lit up with this eery blue light not even the best computer games have shaders for yet.
It's frightening to think of what that man saw, when the contained reaction was so awe inspiring.
The problem is that this is an entirely artificial save. It doesn't structurally change the fact that we're fucking up the environment. We're still doing all the bad things as said in the blurb...once we turn the power off, the reefs will still die.
Interestingly, this is the kind of situation which chaos theory deals with; find the strange attractor for the situation (by plotting 'position over time' over 'position over time+1' over 'position over time+2' for the 3d fractal) and you can pretty decently establish in what range the next position/time of the objects will be.
So basically you use iterative methods (or just plain historic records) to plot the strange attractor, then use that for future position.
Now I will say that I have no clue if this would work, or if this method is used...I'm now in my second year of applied physics, and have been dabling in chaos theory for my end of year project...but it does seem like it could work (under the maxim 'same equations, same problem').
Further more (and I do say this as a european, who also thinks 'the right to be armed' is dangerousnonsense which gets a lot of people killed), you don't need special ammo; a plane will not violently decompress when punctured with anything so small as a bullet; you need to make a hole at least as large as a window for a plane to even notice the extra drag and loose enough internal air so the pilot has to get the plane to a lower altitude.
I think maybe that's where the trouble starts; a country's constitution should protect all people in that country, not just people who have citizenship. Once you start making that kind of distinction, it's just all too easy too broaden/tighten the definition of who the constitution does or doesn't apply to.
Personally, I'd think a very good case can be made that now, for all intents and purposes, copyright/is/ already perpetual.
Current copyright is the author's life +70 years. The average lifespan is slightly longer than 70 years or so. That means that if an author writes something when he is born, and he is born on the same day I am, that I will pobably not, in my lifetime, be able to use his 'stuff'. Which pretty much makes his copyright perpetual to me. In this case, who cares about the rest of humanity? The copyright expiration date is of no use whatsoever to me.
Now, I do beleive that if someone is creative enough to make something I (or anyone else) finds interesting, (s)he should be renumerated for that effort throughout his/her life. But the descendants didn't do anything, so why should they continually reap the benefits? Furthermore, if copyright is left at 'lifetime of author', I have a chance of using it...more than that, it's very likely I will, seeing as most interesting stuff you'd want to use is made by people older than you are (the stuff you saw in your childhood is mostly what you would want to use anyway!), and those people will very probably die in your lifetime, meaning that you/can/ use their 'stuff'.
So anything else than 'autors lifetime' means I can't use their 'stuff', meaning that for all intents and purposes, their copyright/is/ perpetual.
Well, you have to admit that it does make for a great cpu to do 3d work with. Large L3=good for thta kind of thing, expecially if you can't afford a four processor xeon box or something similar.
Now this is what I want someone to do: hook this up a bluetooth module and a gsm/sim card unit and encase it in a little box with a battery large enough (and it doesn't mean mega amperage, 'cos there's no screen!) to last a week or two.
Why, you wonder? Well, so I can throw out my cell phone and replace it with a matchbox I just need to carry around my person/in my jacket pocket and use my shiny new Tungsten T3 as a cell phone!
And this is for those of you who say "wait for a smartphone or get a treo"; I don't need a smartphone, I want a PDA which I can call with (kinda like the XDA thing, but then that runs windows, which I don't want). And a treo? Come on...I can't really read and work with spreadsheets on that tiny screen, much less a book (which I do frequently).
And as a final thought: yeah, maybe in five years time I'll get a pda with a large (roll out OLED) screen which can also make calls...but I'd buy a little matchstickbox sized linux/bluetooth/gsm/sim-unit NOW.
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What irked me was that in one interview with Lucas and a couple of other Hollywood heavyweights (I think Copola was there, as well as someone else extremely famous...it looked like an old homes get-together, seriously!), Lucas mentions that he didn't want to direct TPM. But then he said all his (ass-kissing, upsucking) friends told him he could do it, no, he /should/ do it, so he did.
Now maybe I'm reading way to much into this one offhand comment, but something about the way he said it made me think that Lucas knew he wasn't that good a director (eps 5&6 where the best SW, ep 4 was good because it was new, not because the directing was any good), and the only reason he did direct TPM was because his friends convinced him that he should do it anyway.
"Countries that harbor and support groups that engage in this kind of behavior are evil."
...it makes for itersting reading, especially if you know that the Lucas connection was made up after the fact (ie after Star Wars was made) and that Campbell doesn't substantiate his 'research' very well or even at all.
A lot of american citizens have contributed openly to the IRA when they bombed the hell out of civilian targets, yet the US gov'ment did nothing to stop them. Ergo the US is evil, right?
Now I post this not to discuss the IRA or what the US should have done with that kind of situation, but just maybe there are shades of grey...
As for Joseph Jampbell's "The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces"
"Love stories, detective stories, horror stories, etc. They have all been represented in the SF world. I often find the most amazing SF books to be the ones that build an entire environment but then center the story on the characters living inside that environment, not really ignoring it, but treating it like an environment instead of "hey look, it's a laser blaster!"."
:)
Which means you love P.K. Dick. That practically describes his MO
Please do remember that short stories are the best material for adapting into movies. Full lenght novels loose too much in the adaptation.
Look at Jurasic Park; interesting book with some interestingb thoughts on chaos theory (which I have since learned where put way too simply and somewhat factually incorrect, but hey, it is a book)...but nearly everything which made it interesting and internally consistent was cut for the movie.
Now I'm not saying it can't be done, and done well at that, it's just a fact (or at least according to screenwritters) that a short story is better material in terms of lenght and the amount of concepts introduced.
Ah, shit...I am dumb! I read your quote wrong, so sorry for the dig.
However, DU does not mean that it is not radioactive anymore, just that it can't be used for industrial purposes; DU still causes radiation poisoning when particles are inhaled...and particles are rife after DU-shells being fired and impacting on stuff.
That's a very intereting statement, especially when looked at in conjunction with the fact that hundreds of scientists, including 20 Nobel laureats, say that the current government is falsifying data and stacking the panels which come up with the data with political appointees.
/does/ increase the levels of depleted uranium in the population...and that leads to radioactive poisoning due to the fact that the DU does not burn up entirely during use. And, not so oddly enough, Gulf War Syndrome looks suspiciously like low level radiation poisoning.
This:
"Depleted uranium is just that "depleted" it cannot become "non-depleted" and its presence does not cause levels of "non-depleted" uranium in the population"
is just a bogus statement. It doesn't refute anything, and is actually selfnegating...and really tells me that you know shit about science, let alone the science behind nuclear physics. Shooting depleted uranium shells
Well, Vinge does quite a bit of intelligent writing, and Gaiman is decent too, although personally I don't think his novels have the depth of his comics (Sandman...the only comic I know of to have won a literary prize meant for books :)), even though his novels have some very intersting ideas in them.
A better bet would probably be the Dunbgeon Siege engine...seamless world! Either that, or the GTA:SA engine :)
Thing is (and in no way am I trying to belittle their achievement; this is a true hack) these guys where only able to get MTA working thanks to the code stubs Rockstar left in the game when they abbandonned multiplayer due to it being too time intensive to get done on time.
Dude...it's the highest spec PalmOS device on the market, with more features/specs than the T3. So expect it to cost a bit...personally, with the 128mb version, I think it's a damn steal at that price.
Hmmm...where to start:
First off, let's have a look at this:
"Black and White didn't really address any issue of good or evil, and didn't even try to get into the subtleties of being evil without being purely self-destructive for no good reason."
And let's zoom in on:
"the subtleties of being evil without being purely self-destructive for no good reason."
Seems like a damn good definition of evil to me! Evil always has a reason which doesn't stand up to logic.
As for your last statement: that's what mods do: they make an existing game better or they create an entirely new game. And they can exeed the original game on whiose engine they're based too. But just as anyone can theoretically write a book, but in reallity it hard work and not really anyone really can, so it is with mods. It's hard and complicated, and not anyone has the wherewithall to actually produce an endresult, let alone a decent endresult.
Deus Ex: great game, cool story...no Art. You experienced no emation (well, you know what I mean) during the game.
Max Payne: ditto, but the purest pulp, and I mean that in the absolute best way. Pulp can be great, but very few make for Art, in any artfrom, and to my mind, Max Payne, whilst cool, was not Art.
Homeworld: Art. Like Max Payne, it had the highest production values. Unlike Payne, it provoked real emotions. When you discovered your homeworld destroyed, with Adagio for strings playing (I always wondered about that, and the choice of that piece for the first 9/11 memorial thing)...that's the emotion Art has to provoke if it would be called Art.
OK, ok...slightly presumpotious, but it's the only example of Art in video games I know of so far...the rest has just been entertainment. Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Halflife, Starcraft, Syndicate, Populous, Bejeweled, Tetris, Monkey Island, Larry...good, but entertainment, not Art.
"but TFA makes him out to be some kind of visionary making truly revolutionary games"
/evil/ guy?!? Cool!) and Black and White (trhe game sucks, but have you seen your monkey/cow do this yet? And look what I taught him then!) are all originals which other dev's have had to steal ideas from, either because they where the only ones which worked or because they where so good not nicking them would be dumb.
It is true though; how many of his games have you played and really be able to say 'been there, done that', as you say earlier on in your comment. Populous (amazing concept, good gameplay), Syndicate (amazing concept, amazing gameplay, amazing everything), Dungeon Keeper (what?!? I'm the
True, Black and White sucked...but even whilst sucking, there where some truly amazing things in it which other games haven't even come close to yet. Sadly, nowadays it seems (mind you, this is before I've seen the polish on Fable) Molyneux should be locked into a broomcloset of a solid dev-house which can take his ideas and fully polish them.
Thanks for the link! Dunnit make for pretty pictures? :)
:)
As for the spelling...hey, it's a phonetic of cyrilic, so whatever way you spell it in modern alphanumerics is correct
And which real tech-savy person didn't anticipate this?
Cell phone are the intermediate future, and VoIP (in the real sense, not in the sense that they're still connected at all to the copper wires, but just connected to the real internet) or just plain Data over IP ('cos what else is Voice?) is the future.
Especially with wireless becoming cheaper and cheaper; what's gonna evolve is a free system of comms (wifi mesh, whatever) run by hobbyists, where the only role the telecoms are going to play is maintaining the fibreoptics between continents, large companies and cities which aren't easily connected by wireless (in all it's forms).
What's really surprising is that the telco's didn't see this coming: I have a friend who worked for the largest (formerly only) telco in the netherlands, and hwen I told him about this, his response was..."but....but...that's illegal!?". He really didn't understand the power of public airwaves...and he was in strategic planning too!
The only danger of course is that the telco's will lobby gov'ment to restrict private access to public bands....
Plus, nuclear waste can be transmuted into nuclear waste that stops radiating in less than two hundred years. So all you have to do is transmutate the waste (not a trivial enterporise, but still) and house it in something for 100 to 150 years. End of problem.
:)
Couple this with the new intrinsicaly safe nuclear reactors (these are reactors which, due to their design, have physical principles which mean they shut down themselves if anything goes wrong...no faulty electronics, we're talking simple mechanics here) and yeah, nuclear power is the only green power there is.
What bugs me most is that so-called 'action groups' like Greenpeace haven't a fucking clue. But then again, that's becuase they have hardly any PHD's working for them...and when they do, those phd's are for law, no (applied) physics, no chemistry...the only technical phd working for Greenpeace in the Netherlands came from fucking Aeronautics! A bloody plane builder! Greenpeace and it's ilk, whilst doing some good work, is ignorant becuase they're staffed like a goddamn PR firm.
Oops: sorry for the rant
I went up to a test reactor once, and stood on top of the reactor (basically a large rectangular water tank with the rod-assembly in it) and marveled at the beauty of the blue Cherenkov radiation. Then they turned off the lights, and you could see the entire tank lit up with this eery blue light not even the best computer games have shaders for yet.
It's frightening to think of what that man saw, when the contained reaction was so awe inspiring.
The problem is that this is an entirely artificial save. It doesn't structurally change the fact that we're fucking up the environment. We're still doing all the bad things as said in the blurb...once we turn the power off, the reefs will still die.
Interestingly, this is the kind of situation which chaos theory deals with; find the strange attractor for the situation (by plotting 'position over time' over 'position over time+1' over 'position over time+2' for the 3d fractal) and you can pretty decently establish in what range the next position/time of the objects will be.
So basically you use iterative methods (or just plain historic records) to plot the strange attractor, then use that for future position.
Now I will say that I have no clue if this would work, or if this method is used...I'm now in my second year of applied physics, and have been dabling in chaos theory for my end of year project...but it does seem like it could work (under the maxim 'same equations, same problem').
Which isn't a legit criticism, because by your logic, you wouldn't be allowed to recieve your share of a dead parents will.
Further more (and I do say this as a european, who also thinks 'the right to be armed' is dangerousnonsense which gets a lot of people killed), you don't need special ammo; a plane will not violently decompress when punctured with anything so small as a bullet; you need to make a hole at least as large as a window for a plane to even notice the extra drag and loose enough internal air so the pilot has to get the plane to a lower altitude.
I think maybe that's where the trouble starts; a country's constitution should protect all people in that country, not just people who have citizenship. Once you start making that kind of distinction, it's just all too easy too broaden/tighten the definition of who the constitution does or doesn't apply to.
Personally, I'd think a very good case can be made that now, for all intents and purposes, copyright /is/ already perpetual.
/can/ use their 'stuff'.
/is/ perpetual.
Current copyright is the author's life +70 years. The average lifespan is slightly longer than 70 years or so. That means that if an author writes something when he is born, and he is born on the same day I am, that I will pobably not, in my lifetime, be able to use his 'stuff'. Which pretty much makes his copyright perpetual to me. In this case, who cares about the rest of humanity? The copyright expiration date is of no use whatsoever to me.
Now, I do beleive that if someone is creative enough to make something I (or anyone else) finds interesting, (s)he should be renumerated for that effort throughout his/her life. But the descendants didn't do anything, so why should they continually reap the benefits?
Furthermore, if copyright is left at 'lifetime of author', I have a chance of using it...more than that, it's very likely I will, seeing as most interesting stuff you'd want to use is made by people older than you are (the stuff you saw in your childhood is mostly what you would want to use anyway!), and those people will very probably die in your lifetime, meaning that you
So anything else than 'autors lifetime' means I can't use their 'stuff', meaning that for all intents and purposes, their copyright
Well, you have to admit that it does make for a great cpu to do 3d work with. Large L3=good for thta kind of thing, expecially if you can't afford a four processor xeon box or something similar.
Now this is what I want someone to do: hook this up a bluetooth module and a gsm/sim card unit and encase it in a little box with a battery large enough (and it doesn't mean mega amperage, 'cos there's no screen!) to last a week or two.
Why, you wonder? Well, so I can throw out my cell phone and replace it with a matchbox I just need to carry around my person/in my jacket pocket and use my shiny new Tungsten T3 as a cell phone!
And this is for those of you who say "wait for a smartphone or get a treo"; I don't need a smartphone, I want a PDA which I can call with (kinda like the XDA thing, but then that runs windows, which I don't want). And a treo? Come on...I can't really read and work with spreadsheets on that tiny screen, much less a book (which I do frequently).
And as a final thought: yeah, maybe in five years time I'll get a pda with a large (roll out OLED) screen which can also make calls...but I'd buy a little matchstickbox sized linux/bluetooth/gsm/sim-unit NOW.