There's no suffering in the world, so if you just identify and sympathize with other people, you're going to be really happy.
Or is part of your plan ignoring those who actually need sympathy?
Duuuuh, how did that follow from what I said again?
Just for your background, I volunteer at a hospice every week. My dog is certified as a therapy dog (relatively easy to do), so sometimes she comes with me. Among the more meaningful and fulfilling experiences you could have. Also worked as a research assistant on a project interviewing terminally ill people. Yes, I was sympathetic. Ask me if that made me unhappy.
And the other plan, again, was not to ignore both the suffering and those who aren't suffering -- but to become famous so they all pay (envious?) attention to you?
Deep. Like I say, probably fame's the secret. That and the lawsuits.;-)
If he would have chosen to bask in his fame, and accept his fate, then he would be happy.
Of course, if he was really smart he would sue AND become famous and happy.
Let's hear it, ladies and gentlemen, for the American vision of happiness: fame and lawsuits!
(Hmm. I'd always thought happiness and fulfillment came partly from the ability to sort of, I don't know, identify and sympathize with other people. Maybe you just didn't get the memo. Sort of like those kids didn't...)
The "Left Behind" series -- execrably written stuff, I checked one out of the library to see for myself -- is essentially nothing more than the sentiment of that poster, stretched to several books' length. That nastiness is what makes the books popular. I kid you not. People are out there fantasizing about how nasty things will be for those who didn't kiss God's tuckus convincingly enough... And by God's tuckus, I mean the tuckuses of the worldly authorities who claimed to speak for God.
What terrifies me about this sort of thing isn't the purile level of argument, it's the vindictive pettiness. God's final plan for the world amounts to a big ol' spate of vengeance on people who didn't toe the line properly, for them. They congratulate themselves on knowing so. That pettiness seems to have become the great truth of their lives, and it has basically nothing to do with Jesus except so far as he's a sort of golden idol they worship.
I happened to be working a short-term temp job with a computer products company that sent junk faxes back when legislation originally stated you had to have specific permission to send someone such a fax.
That caused a little panic around that awful office. We had a little group meeting, in which we were told that we'd need to do a ton of "cold calls" to get permission to send people these unwanted faxes. Several recommended techniques for getting unknowing employees at the other end to sign off on that idea were provided to us.
I quit the next day, after maybe three days on the job. It was excruciating to consider how asinine the whole situation was -- on our end, on theirs, for everyone... the cost in worthless faxes that wouldn't sell anyone anything.
That was more than, oh, ten years ago now. The catalog junk mail industry has been straining at those restrictions since then, I guess. More than a little out-of-date, really, to be trying to sell hard drives over the fax... You'd think they'd be concentrating on their own Web presences long since, wouldn't you?
My kids have played a modest amount of Mario Kart and Animal Crossing using the DS's online service. It's free, yes. Quick and simple. The Animal Crossing: Wide World friend code system seems to keep things under a little control, from the POV of me the parent. We don't have a bunch of AC: WW campers visiting their town to loot all the fruit and chop down their trees, anyway. Just a handful of their friends.
Along with the downloadable library of past titles, the DS service sure seems to indicate that Nintendo "gets" online play now. Whether they really add anything new or just try to compete on X-Box Live's terms remains to be seen.
Personally I'm not that wowed by what's been done with sports titles. Franchise modes always suffer, and that's what the serious fan wants. Give me a real NBA draft against 20-some other players, so I'm picking players against thinking opposition, please.
Fact is, working people are getting squeezed in a huge way by economic circumstances. No, I do not think law school grads are the only people worthy of making the choice to have kids. Forgive my commie ass for thinking so.
Prate all you want about personal responsibility. What I'm saying is, any glorious "family values" rhetoric about M-rated games is complete hypocrisy when the economic policies of those same politicians crap on people with a family.
(And incidentally, my wife died in childbirth, shithead. Explains my being a single dad with twins. Now, go play your Grand Theft Auto and desist telling me to "grow up." It doesn't play well.)
The word will get around as to what retailers will sell them what games. 42% just means that there's a hole. And anything short of pure dictatorsh[i]p won't stop it.
You're right: kids aren't stupid -- and neither are parents, given half a chance.
There sure is some middle ground between "sell 'em what they want" and "card every buyer." I'm a single parent of 12-year-old twins. It isn't necessary for me to ensure that every possible retailer in my area follows the letter of the M-ratings law. My kids know they'd be spending serious money on a game that they'd expect to lose access to, with serious parental repercussions, if I ever caught them at it. That level of nuisance they don't want to deal with. So, they don't buy "Gun."
And yeah, I work a crazy shift to be home when they're home for the most part, so there's not a ton of unsupervised time.
Politicians love to showboat over problems like this one -- if M-rated games are even a problem -- with nanny state measures. You never hear them respond by observing that the economy has changed in the last 30-odd years so that parents aren't raising their own kids. A second income is hard to do without, as I would know. Parents are under tremendous pressure to spend time at work instead of watching over their kids, and put in spots where they have to make that hard choice. I'm no rose-tinted-glasses right-wing "family values" fool, but there's no escaping the way that economic situation has changed.
All the moaning we hear about absentee parents comes through that filter for me. It's a blaming-the-victim sort of thing.
In the place of a real conversation about all that, we get "family values" grandstanding over Janet Jackson's bodice. There's work still to be done on that, by the way, despite wonderfully successful letter writing campaigns. Better pour some state money into church groups to make sure we get back to good old "family values." That'll keep her shirt on. I don't care if my kids see some skin; please, just give the parents of those middle school bullies who were raised by day care some options...
I guess what bothers people is when others pray, and then someone recovers, and then they claim that was some sort of miracle from God because they prayed so hard. And then there are those who claim the reason someone did not recover was because people didn't pray hard enough, which does nothing other than make people feel guilty about something they had no control over.
Not too many people, even among "fundamentalists," are so wound up in their faith that they'd say the "You didn't pray enough" version out loud... we hope. The assertion is always there, though, implicit in the stories of those who were spared a death from cancer or whatever, when they attribute the results to prayer.
Another example that always makes me sick to my stomach is people who, after surviving an airline disaster or something like that, tell us "God must have had plans for me in order to spare me this way." You've just emerged from a disaster in which a whole bunch of people around you died horribly abruptly. What you're saying amounts to "God didn't have plans for those other people, I must be special." Imagine how that makes the families of those other people feel. I know, it's an emotional time, but think about what you're freaking saying. That's not about God, it's about self-absorption.
So as you say -- it's not just the right to consolation that's being asserted, here, is it? It's something a liiiiittle bit more aggressive than that. Like, say, the right to evangelize based on a tragedy, or on an illness.
And getting back to our study, the people funding this stuff are on both sides of the "faith" wall. There are plenty of folks wanting to show a double-blind study that proves prayer is effective, for reasons to do with asserting the earthly power of their God.
"Note: Officially, Israel has no state religion or established church. A few personal status laws, in particular regarding marriage and divorce, are governed by state-recognized Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze authorities. As the Jewish state, however, its de facto state religion is Judaism."
-- Wikipedia
But Jobs wasn't talking about the hardware when he showed up at Apple with his ThinkPad, he was talking about the OS he was running on it
Flip a coin. The hemhorraging of Apple's laptop market share when they couldn't get a PPC version out for years was dramatic; then when they did finally produce one with the new chip it was the PB5300, which I know from extensive experience was a complete lemon.
I've assumed the long delay in a G5 laptop was basically causing Jobs to have PTSD flashbacks to that previous failure to keep up the product line -- which seemed to me to have everything to do with Jobs's own return. Big influence on the recent chip change.
There are lots of classes of games for which graphics are important.
"Important" maybe, but almost never the difference maker for me. The only way they'll be that now is if a prospective HDTV looks sucky without the MS or Sony system. I am not likely to be spending two grand to buy an HDTV and a Microsoft product...
Take for example sports games which are very popular in the US. Graphics are critical for such games to reproduce the realism of a real sports event.
there isn't a whole lot of room to innovate in the gameplay department,
I play mostly sports games (my two 12-year-olds being the main game consumers in the household), and you are completely wrong at least for me. While it's nice that Shaq sweats realistically in the new 360 version, the fact that NBALive hasn't fixed game pacing (170 to 148! I win!) or the rebounding mechanics in countless revisions of the title matters far, far more than any graphics engine. The system for locking into a player over the course of a game matters more than another incremental improvement in image. By far.
Sports titles have added enormous franchise modes to their games over the last, oh, eight years or so, and the thoroughness of those modes is what gets me to buy a new copy sometimes. It's not the graphics, ever. For lots of people it's the updated rosters, pure and simple; if a game franchise made those ratings better or different and more complete, it'd be a big competitive edge.
Also consider the genre of first-person shooters
In which you again seem completely hemmed in by your past experience. Ever considered the implications of the whacky controller for those? Given how big the advantage of mouse play is for PC FPS players? Given how sucky traditional console controllers are for them? You think more lighting effects are going to make as big a difference as being able to swing a sword or whatever?
what would LOTR be without the sweeping views of the New Zealand countryside, or the huge, detailed shots of giant armies?
The idea that RPGs can't achieve an "epic" feel without the extra horsepower is silly. (And Peter Jackson would have done better to include less fields of screaming CGI orcs and a tighter script.) Check out the list of the best RPGs, or just the best games, of all time: graphics are not the edge for any of them, and in many cases they were comparatively primitive graphically even for the time. Ultima III, Ocarina of Time, the Civ series... Not a list about graphical horsepower. All "epic."
It seems very clear to me that the Revolution is destined to be another Gamecube
Again you think the future will be just like the past. The Gamecube was Nintendo's attempt to compete on the other guys' terms. The new one is quite different because of that (moneymaking) relative failure on their part.
in that case, Nintendo isn't really competing in the same sphere as Microsoft and Sony.
I think Nintendo has badly underestimated what HD brings to the market.
And as someone who's actually in a position to buy one of these systems for my 12-year-olds, I think Sony and MS have badly overestimated the share of the population that is desperate to shell out upwards of two grand to play video games which cost another $60+ a pop. The cost of the HDTV monitor becomes part of the cost of playing for their already shockingly priced systems. Otherwise I don't see the benefits of their gaudy specs, do I?
Let's see, I can pay $200-$300 for a console and then the bump for the individual games, and have something that's trying to be a little different and that's about game play, or I can pony up $2000 -- nearly an order of magnitude higher -- to get a wide screen LCD TV and the other console, on which I will see Shaq sweat but still not be able to realistically rebound with him after umpty-lumpty yearly updates to NBA Live. Which one do I want? The picture's pretty and all, I grant you. It won't do near as much to make things fun as the Rev controller if it works out...
I'm a big movie buff too -- Netflix subscriber, University Film Society goer, that kind of thing -- and the lure of an HDTV fell completely flat when I looked at what it would take to get working right. It's not just money, they're still a pain in the butt to fiddle around with. Sony and MS are asking me to bump things up another $500 notch in cost. To play games whose mechanics and basic M.O. haven't changed since, oh, Doom or so.
My money is literally going to Nintendo. It's an easy pick.
Diebold was an ATM manufacturer before they went into this voting machine business, so their model here feels like some sort of standard practice for the banking world to me.
But at this point, does anyone trust Diebold to conduct the people's business unilaterally? It's pretty obvious that we need some way to involve third parties in verifying voting systems and results -- without Diebold standing on the throats of the voting clerks involved, without extreme expense, and in general without this sort of "keep the door closed, the experts are making sure it's okay" tone.
Another example of Diebold not being well-suited for this business. They really, really, really don't understand the nature of the market they're in, as the leaked e-mails way back started to show us. Talk about your PR problems. They earned this bias and suspicion, from the moment those "Win Ohio for Bush" quotes came around.
Point #2 is well taken with respect to punishments for converts. However, it just has to be said:
Is there a country with such high levels of "pressure" where the state-sponsored religion isn't Islam?
Heard anything from Tom DeLay about "judges in black robes" lately? Here's a person, and a party, that believes Christianity is one of the foundational pieces of our society and government. After the Terry Schiavo thing, he played to his base by basically threatening... well, here's the quote:
"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior."
At a conference for conservative Christians this week, the theme of which was "America's War on Christians," Delay again laid into the "men in black robes" who "just don't get it."
So as you say, we're talking about "such high levels of pressure" -- and the difference is a question of degrees. I have Oklahoma relatives who are Southern Baptist; they have no scruples with each other when it comes to enforcing their religion, and are quite volatile when presented with even tacit objections to it. In Iran, they'd have been marching in a mob against those cartoons.
When Steve Jobs introduced the iTunes store, and earlier when he was selling recording execs on it, he was able to describe to them exactly what consumers did and didn't like about peer-to-peer networks and monthly subscription models.
He could say "They want to be able to get individual songs on demand without a monthly fee, and P2P gives them that -- sort of -- but we can make the experience much better because look at all the frustrating hunting around and poor copies, and look at the lack of previews, and so on..." His experience with the actual user experience was obvious to anyone who saw the keynote thing.
By contrast, here we have Ballmer patting himself on the back over not letting his kids use the competition's dominant product. He's using the word "brainwashed" about his own kids. Visionary leadership, I'm sure.
Look at the Mohamed drawings issue. The extremists didn't really care about depictions of Mohamed. What their problem with those depictions is, is the freedom of speech. They are afraid they'll no longer be able to brainwash free people into stupid theocratic thinking. They are afraid that they will no longer be able to engage humans into blowing themselves up in order to fulfill a focus group god'$ prophecies.
Leaders across the authoritarian states of the M.E. use "issues" like those drawings as a way to vent the frustration of their own people toward "the west." They manipulate whatever-it-is as a sort of social "wedge issue" to keep people angry at someone else. That's what the cartoons thing was about.
Think Gay Marriage. Gay Marriage is something we should deal with, okay -- I'm for it, basically -- but is it among the biggest challenges for our society when compared to economic, environmental, foreign, and every other kind of policy in this country being run with only the enormous multinational business interests at the table and nobody from any other perspective having a voice? The monied interests behind the old Republican party discovered after the civil rights movement that they could patch together a coalition of fearful social conservatives and keep those fears yoked up to the party's economic interests. When the rank and file get upset, lo and behold, there will always be a distracting social "issue" to motivate them again. (Janet Jackson's bustier popped open -- OMG! OMG! Society is breaking down! Election cycle -- Oh No! Pass a bunch of anti-Gay-Marriage amendments, it's a crisis!)
It's all about preserving authority, not about the specific faiths involved. Authoritarian religion turns to demagoguery like this to release pressure.
Any more direct method that was at all effective couldn't help but be a dramatic improvement over eye patches for hours a day.
The Docs consulted prescribed the usual regimen of eye patches and so on for my daughter as a quite young child. I can say from experience that it's not easy to get a child of that age -- and treatment when young was strongly preferable -- to live with the patch. Even when she wasn't particularly annoyed by it, we were dealing with something on the level of brushing your teeth in a little kid. My parenting skills weren't up to the task, and our treatment was hit and miss.
Eventually my daughter's lazy eye has come around by itself, more or less. I'd much rather have been able to intervene with a more active measure, though.
the previous executive branch crew tried the same thing, but in an opposite manner, he was encouraged to overstate findings.
He also goes on to state that the Clinton administration didn't force its conclusions into his mouth as a scientist. He doesn't mention them ever preventing him from publishing as he saw fit, either.
Both administrations were looking for certain conclusions, okay. It shouldn't surprise anyone, after the wiretapping and the WMD justification and South Carolina 2000 and so on ad nauseum, that Bush's team is the one that got morally confused about ends and means.
This story is about the effect of absolutism on science. The larger story is about absolutism and Bush and his supporters.
More forced connections to the films just makes the narrative clumsy and self concious.
No kidding. Cue montage of "Enterprise" moments in which Scott Bakula spells out exactly what would be needed in the Prime Directive or whatever. Clumsy and self-conscious: check. (The only variation that was any good was Bakula positing that, someday, ships would be equipped with red uniforms that could naturally draw fire in a crisis situation, sparing crucial personnel. And that one didn't happen.)
Here's hoping that the new series is set during that time period, but somehow avoids the sin of Luke as the hero.
It's amazing how the games make this work, more or less, but the movies and this proposed series seem like crud. Granted, Kyle Katarn is eventually going to prevent the universe's being taken over by the Big Bad Guy du jour, but in the meantime Jedi Knight II was darn fun in that expanded universe way. They chose the right setting to have it work -- and by contrast, this series seems to have blundered from the starting line.
Between "You touched the right village, here's a bajillion settlers" (the Fountain of Youth?) and the effects of some of the founding father specials, I thought Colonization's play balance was badly out of whack. A piece of minor luck would change everything, and the order in which you went for the fathers got to feel like you didn't have any reason at all to choose Paul Revere...
The game had its strong points. I've never played a game that bogged down more dramatically in the late stages, though. Micromanagement -- oy. Every turn it was "I'll move my miner over to help make the tools or the guns, and then move him back in two turns when the ore's down a bit..."
Any "refinement" would necessarily involve some basic reworking along those lines.
I have no interest in either the cost or the catalogs for either the 360 or the prospective PS3. The Revolution interests me both for my kids and for myself, and is far easier on the pocketbook to contemplate.
The other two consoles are positing the existence of a much, much wider hardcore gamers' market than exists, and pricing themselves out of a significant share of that.
Nintendo is also, astonishingly, the only player that's projecting any sense of fricking fun with its products. It's amazing.
I agree that Nintendo is trying to pitch to a family audience the other two have been outcooling themselves away from. It's not necessarily that they wanted to be focused only on their core of support, though. The DS had launch titles and so on being pitched with the supposedly-edgy theme "Touching is okay," and seemed to be attempting to bring their demographic up the age chart a while.
It's not clear that it happened for them. In retrospect it looks like the DS has thrived because it was trying to do something a little different, unlike the competition -- but did it really crack that older demographic?
Personally I am the family market, with two 12-year-olds. I'm also the older market: I'm 38, and I've bought my share of games, though none for myself in the last year-plus.
The Revolution is where my money will go, no question, for the simple reason that it's going to be far less expensive to buy for my kids, it has a tiny sense of innocence to it which I think you kind of fricking want in a game, and it's going to be actually interesting to see new titles because of the funky controller.
So they got me in both senses. Even if I was just buying for myself, what would make me want a PS3 or XBox? The incremental changes in hardware specs are dullsville. Shaq sweats on screen, but the game mechanics still don't let him rebound with any realism at all. At that price, too, for my limited taste in games now, no way. (That's leaving alone the cost of real HD, which I'm not going to be picking up in the next year or two.)
Both MS and Sony have vastly overshot me, as a market. Nintendo hasn't, and they're trying to rediscover the fun in the whole thing. They win my cash.
Tron and Blade Runner were worth the trips
on
The Story of Tron
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· Score: 3, Insightful
[Tron] was 22nd in the top grossing films of 1982. Blade Runner was 27th that year.
Man, I hadn't remembered that those came out the same year. I biked maybe five miles to see Tron at the local theater that was showing it, at least a few times. I remember locking the chain around the bike rack and walking from the summer heat into that run down theater with its thinning carpet and whiff of warmed popcorn. That movie made frisbee extra fun that year. Later on the Intellivision games, with the Recognizer "bosses"...
"Blade Runner" we were too young for, it being an R, so my older brother took us to that for my birthday. That means it was late June. What the heck was anyone doing releasing that movie as a summer blockbuster? The theater was basically empty except for us.
Neither one of them got the box office that its studio was expecting. As investments, though? I'm not that keen on either one as a work of high art, but the ripple effect they had was really something, culturally.
Statistically speaking, that's exactly what has happened in the past with various degrees of success (Beta, Memory Sticks, Mini-discs, UMD, etc.)
Without speaking to the "statistics," it sure does seem like whenever you go with Sony you have to swallow hard about the more expensive format of whatever it turns out to be. Just about the only exception in my life is my cheaper, kids' camcorder -- which happens to be the one case I've considered where they went with the same digital tape, and compression, everyone else uses, for the model I would up choosing anyway. (There was another I preferred, but it would have been locked into a different compression method that screwed me.)
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Or is part of your plan ignoring those who actually need sympathy?
Duuuuh, how did that follow from what I said again?
Just for your background, I volunteer at a hospice every week. My dog is certified as a therapy dog (relatively easy to do), so sometimes she comes with me. Among the more meaningful and fulfilling experiences you could have. Also worked as a research assistant on a project interviewing terminally ill people. Yes, I was sympathetic. Ask me if that made me unhappy.
And the other plan, again, was not to ignore both the suffering and those who aren't suffering -- but to become famous so they all pay (envious?) attention to you?
Deep. Like I say, probably fame's the secret. That and the lawsuits. ;-)
Of course, if he was really smart he would sue AND become famous and happy.
Let's hear it, ladies and gentlemen, for the American vision of happiness: fame and lawsuits!
(Hmm. I'd always thought happiness and fulfillment came partly from the ability to sort of, I don't know, identify and sympathize with other people. Maybe you just didn't get the memo. Sort of like those kids didn't...)
What terrifies me about this sort of thing isn't the purile level of argument, it's the vindictive pettiness. God's final plan for the world amounts to a big ol' spate of vengeance on people who didn't toe the line properly, for them. They congratulate themselves on knowing so. That pettiness seems to have become the great truth of their lives, and it has basically nothing to do with Jesus except so far as he's a sort of golden idol they worship.
That caused a little panic around that awful office. We had a little group meeting, in which we were told that we'd need to do a ton of "cold calls" to get permission to send people these unwanted faxes. Several recommended techniques for getting unknowing employees at the other end to sign off on that idea were provided to us.
I quit the next day, after maybe three days on the job. It was excruciating to consider how asinine the whole situation was -- on our end, on theirs, for everyone... the cost in worthless faxes that wouldn't sell anyone anything.
That was more than, oh, ten years ago now. The catalog junk mail industry has been straining at those restrictions since then, I guess. More than a little out-of-date, really, to be trying to sell hard drives over the fax... You'd think they'd be concentrating on their own Web presences long since, wouldn't you?
Along with the downloadable library of past titles, the DS service sure seems to indicate that Nintendo "gets" online play now. Whether they really add anything new or just try to compete on X-Box Live's terms remains to be seen.
Personally I'm not that wowed by what's been done with sports titles. Franchise modes always suffer, and that's what the serious fan wants. Give me a real NBA draft against 20-some other players, so I'm picking players against thinking opposition, please.
Same advice back. Get some therapy, "brother."
Fact is, working people are getting squeezed in a huge way by economic circumstances. No, I do not think law school grads are the only people worthy of making the choice to have kids. Forgive my commie ass for thinking so.
Prate all you want about personal responsibility. What I'm saying is, any glorious "family values" rhetoric about M-rated games is complete hypocrisy when the economic policies of those same politicians crap on people with a family.
(And incidentally, my wife died in childbirth, shithead. Explains my being a single dad with twins. Now, go play your Grand Theft Auto and desist telling me to "grow up." It doesn't play well.)
You're right: kids aren't stupid -- and neither are parents, given half a chance.
There sure is some middle ground between "sell 'em what they want" and "card every buyer." I'm a single parent of 12-year-old twins. It isn't necessary for me to ensure that every possible retailer in my area follows the letter of the M-ratings law. My kids know they'd be spending serious money on a game that they'd expect to lose access to, with serious parental repercussions, if I ever caught them at it. That level of nuisance they don't want to deal with. So, they don't buy "Gun."
And yeah, I work a crazy shift to be home when they're home for the most part, so there's not a ton of unsupervised time.
Politicians love to showboat over problems like this one -- if M-rated games are even a problem -- with nanny state measures. You never hear them respond by observing that the economy has changed in the last 30-odd years so that parents aren't raising their own kids. A second income is hard to do without, as I would know. Parents are under tremendous pressure to spend time at work instead of watching over their kids, and put in spots where they have to make that hard choice. I'm no rose-tinted-glasses right-wing "family values" fool, but there's no escaping the way that economic situation has changed.
All the moaning we hear about absentee parents comes through that filter for me. It's a blaming-the-victim sort of thing.
In the place of a real conversation about all that, we get "family values" grandstanding over Janet Jackson's bodice. There's work still to be done on that, by the way, despite wonderfully successful letter writing campaigns. Better pour some state money into church groups to make sure we get back to good old "family values." That'll keep her shirt on. I don't care if my kids see some skin; please, just give the parents of those middle school bullies who were raised by day care some options...
Not too many people, even among "fundamentalists," are so wound up in their faith that they'd say the "You didn't pray enough" version out loud... we hope. The assertion is always there, though, implicit in the stories of those who were spared a death from cancer or whatever, when they attribute the results to prayer.
Another example that always makes me sick to my stomach is people who, after surviving an airline disaster or something like that, tell us "God must have had plans for me in order to spare me this way." You've just emerged from a disaster in which a whole bunch of people around you died horribly abruptly. What you're saying amounts to "God didn't have plans for those other people, I must be special." Imagine how that makes the families of those other people feel. I know, it's an emotional time, but think about what you're freaking saying. That's not about God, it's about self-absorption.
So as you say -- it's not just the right to consolation that's being asserted, here, is it? It's something a liiiiittle bit more aggressive than that. Like, say, the right to evangelize based on a tragedy, or on an illness.
And getting back to our study, the people funding this stuff are on both sides of the "faith" wall. There are plenty of folks wanting to show a double-blind study that proves prayer is effective, for reasons to do with asserting the earthly power of their God.
Meaning no offense, but your critical judgment has just fallen about six rungs in my estimation.
Those Ice Age movies... ugh. Even on cable as background noise while ironing, they're painfully "zany" without being funny at all.
"Note: Officially, Israel has no state religion or established church. A few personal status laws, in particular regarding marriage and divorce, are governed by state-recognized Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze authorities. As the Jewish state, however, its de facto state religion is Judaism."
-- Wikipedia
Flip a coin. The hemhorraging of Apple's laptop market share when they couldn't get a PPC version out for years was dramatic; then when they did finally produce one with the new chip it was the PB5300, which I know from extensive experience was a complete lemon.
I've assumed the long delay in a G5 laptop was basically causing Jobs to have PTSD flashbacks to that previous failure to keep up the product line -- which seemed to me to have everything to do with Jobs's own return. Big influence on the recent chip change.
"Important" maybe, but almost never the difference maker for me. The only way they'll be that now is if a prospective HDTV looks sucky without the MS or Sony system. I am not likely to be spending two grand to buy an HDTV and a Microsoft product...
Take for example sports games which are very popular in the US. Graphics are critical for such games to reproduce the realism of a real sports event.
there isn't a whole lot of room to innovate in the gameplay department,
I play mostly sports games (my two 12-year-olds being the main game consumers in the household), and you are completely wrong at least for me. While it's nice that Shaq sweats realistically in the new 360 version, the fact that NBALive hasn't fixed game pacing (170 to 148! I win!) or the rebounding mechanics in countless revisions of the title matters far, far more than any graphics engine. The system for locking into a player over the course of a game matters more than another incremental improvement in image. By far.
Sports titles have added enormous franchise modes to their games over the last, oh, eight years or so, and the thoroughness of those modes is what gets me to buy a new copy sometimes. It's not the graphics, ever. For lots of people it's the updated rosters, pure and simple; if a game franchise made those ratings better or different and more complete, it'd be a big competitive edge.
Also consider the genre of first-person shooters
In which you again seem completely hemmed in by your past experience. Ever considered the implications of the whacky controller for those? Given how big the advantage of mouse play is for PC FPS players? Given how sucky traditional console controllers are for them? You think more lighting effects are going to make as big a difference as being able to swing a sword or whatever?
what would LOTR be without the sweeping views of the New Zealand countryside, or the huge, detailed shots of giant armies?
The idea that RPGs can't achieve an "epic" feel without the extra horsepower is silly. (And Peter Jackson would have done better to include less fields of screaming CGI orcs and a tighter script.) Check out the list of the best RPGs, or just the best games, of all time: graphics are not the edge for any of them, and in many cases they were comparatively primitive graphically even for the time. Ultima III, Ocarina of Time, the Civ series... Not a list about graphical horsepower. All "epic."
It seems very clear to me that the Revolution is destined to be another Gamecube
Again you think the future will be just like the past. The Gamecube was Nintendo's attempt to compete on the other guys' terms. The new one is quite different because of that (moneymaking) relative failure on their part.
in that case, Nintendo isn't really competing in the same sphere as Microsoft and Sony.
We agree!
And as someone who's actually in a position to buy one of these systems for my 12-year-olds, I think Sony and MS have badly overestimated the share of the population that is desperate to shell out upwards of two grand to play video games which cost another $60+ a pop. The cost of the HDTV monitor becomes part of the cost of playing for their already shockingly priced systems. Otherwise I don't see the benefits of their gaudy specs, do I?
Let's see, I can pay $200-$300 for a console and then the bump for the individual games, and have something that's trying to be a little different and that's about game play, or I can pony up $2000 -- nearly an order of magnitude higher -- to get a wide screen LCD TV and the other console, on which I will see Shaq sweat but still not be able to realistically rebound with him after umpty-lumpty yearly updates to NBA Live. Which one do I want? The picture's pretty and all, I grant you. It won't do near as much to make things fun as the Rev controller if it works out...
I'm a big movie buff too -- Netflix subscriber, University Film Society goer, that kind of thing -- and the lure of an HDTV fell completely flat when I looked at what it would take to get working right. It's not just money, they're still a pain in the butt to fiddle around with. Sony and MS are asking me to bump things up another $500 notch in cost. To play games whose mechanics and basic M.O. haven't changed since, oh, Doom or so.
My money is literally going to Nintendo. It's an easy pick.
But at this point, does anyone trust Diebold to conduct the people's business unilaterally? It's pretty obvious that we need some way to involve third parties in verifying voting systems and results -- without Diebold standing on the throats of the voting clerks involved, without extreme expense, and in general without this sort of "keep the door closed, the experts are making sure it's okay" tone.
Another example of Diebold not being well-suited for this business. They really, really, really don't understand the nature of the market they're in, as the leaked e-mails way back started to show us. Talk about your PR problems. They earned this bias and suspicion, from the moment those "Win Ohio for Bush" quotes came around.
Is there a country with such high levels of "pressure" where the state-sponsored religion isn't Islam?
Heard anything from Tom DeLay about "judges in black robes" lately? Here's a person, and a party, that believes Christianity is one of the foundational pieces of our society and government. After the Terry Schiavo thing, he played to his base by basically threatening... well, here's the quote:
At a conference for conservative Christians this week, the theme of which was "America's War on Christians," Delay again laid into the "men in black robes" who "just don't get it."
So as you say, we're talking about "such high levels of pressure" -- and the difference is a question of degrees. I have Oklahoma relatives who are Southern Baptist; they have no scruples with each other when it comes to enforcing their religion, and are quite volatile when presented with even tacit objections to it. In Iran, they'd have been marching in a mob against those cartoons.
He could say "They want to be able to get individual songs on demand without a monthly fee, and P2P gives them that -- sort of -- but we can make the experience much better because look at all the frustrating hunting around and poor copies, and look at the lack of previews, and so on..." His experience with the actual user experience was obvious to anyone who saw the keynote thing.
By contrast, here we have Ballmer patting himself on the back over not letting his kids use the competition's dominant product. He's using the word "brainwashed" about his own kids. Visionary leadership, I'm sure.
Leaders across the authoritarian states of the M.E. use "issues" like those drawings as a way to vent the frustration of their own people toward "the west." They manipulate whatever-it-is as a sort of social "wedge issue" to keep people angry at someone else. That's what the cartoons thing was about.
Think Gay Marriage. Gay Marriage is something we should deal with, okay -- I'm for it, basically -- but is it among the biggest challenges for our society when compared to economic, environmental, foreign, and every other kind of policy in this country being run with only the enormous multinational business interests at the table and nobody from any other perspective having a voice? The monied interests behind the old Republican party discovered after the civil rights movement that they could patch together a coalition of fearful social conservatives and keep those fears yoked up to the party's economic interests. When the rank and file get upset, lo and behold, there will always be a distracting social "issue" to motivate them again. (Janet Jackson's bustier popped open -- OMG! OMG! Society is breaking down! Election cycle -- Oh No! Pass a bunch of anti-Gay-Marriage amendments, it's a crisis!)
It's all about preserving authority, not about the specific faiths involved. Authoritarian religion turns to demagoguery like this to release pressure.
Any more direct method that was at all effective couldn't help but be a dramatic improvement over eye patches for hours a day.
The Docs consulted prescribed the usual regimen of eye patches and so on for my daughter as a quite young child. I can say from experience that it's not easy to get a child of that age -- and treatment when young was strongly preferable -- to live with the patch. Even when she wasn't particularly annoyed by it, we were dealing with something on the level of brushing your teeth in a little kid. My parenting skills weren't up to the task, and our treatment was hit and miss.
Eventually my daughter's lazy eye has come around by itself, more or less. I'd much rather have been able to intervene with a more active measure, though.
He also goes on to state that the Clinton administration didn't force its conclusions into his mouth as a scientist. He doesn't mention them ever preventing him from publishing as he saw fit, either.
Both administrations were looking for certain conclusions, okay. It shouldn't surprise anyone, after the wiretapping and the WMD justification and South Carolina 2000 and so on ad nauseum, that Bush's team is the one that got morally confused about ends and means.
This story is about the effect of absolutism on science. The larger story is about absolutism and Bush and his supporters.
No kidding. Cue montage of "Enterprise" moments in which Scott Bakula spells out exactly what would be needed in the Prime Directive or whatever. Clumsy and self-conscious: check. (The only variation that was any good was Bakula positing that, someday, ships would be equipped with red uniforms that could naturally draw fire in a crisis situation, sparing crucial personnel. And that one didn't happen.)
Here's hoping that the new series is set during that time period, but somehow avoids the sin of Luke as the hero.
It's amazing how the games make this work, more or less, but the movies and this proposed series seem like crud. Granted, Kyle Katarn is eventually going to prevent the universe's being taken over by the Big Bad Guy du jour, but in the meantime Jedi Knight II was darn fun in that expanded universe way. They chose the right setting to have it work -- and by contrast, this series seems to have blundered from the starting line.
Between "You touched the right village, here's a bajillion settlers" (the Fountain of Youth?) and the effects of some of the founding father specials, I thought Colonization's play balance was badly out of whack. A piece of minor luck would change everything, and the order in which you went for the fathers got to feel like you didn't have any reason at all to choose Paul Revere...
The game had its strong points. I've never played a game that bogged down more dramatically in the late stages, though. Micromanagement -- oy. Every turn it was "I'll move my miner over to help make the tools or the guns, and then move him back in two turns when the ore's down a bit..."
Any "refinement" would necessarily involve some basic reworking along those lines.
I have no interest in either the cost or the catalogs for either the 360 or the prospective PS3. The Revolution interests me both for my kids and for myself, and is far easier on the pocketbook to contemplate.
The other two consoles are positing the existence of a much, much wider hardcore gamers' market than exists, and pricing themselves out of a significant share of that.
Nintendo is also, astonishingly, the only player that's projecting any sense of fricking fun with its products. It's amazing.
It's not clear that it happened for them. In retrospect it looks like the DS has thrived because it was trying to do something a little different, unlike the competition -- but did it really crack that older demographic?
Personally I am the family market, with two 12-year-olds. I'm also the older market: I'm 38, and I've bought my share of games, though none for myself in the last year-plus.
The Revolution is where my money will go, no question, for the simple reason that it's going to be far less expensive to buy for my kids, it has a tiny sense of innocence to it which I think you kind of fricking want in a game, and it's going to be actually interesting to see new titles because of the funky controller.
So they got me in both senses. Even if I was just buying for myself, what would make me want a PS3 or XBox? The incremental changes in hardware specs are dullsville. Shaq sweats on screen, but the game mechanics still don't let him rebound with any realism at all. At that price, too, for my limited taste in games now, no way. (That's leaving alone the cost of real HD, which I'm not going to be picking up in the next year or two.)
Both MS and Sony have vastly overshot me, as a market. Nintendo hasn't, and they're trying to rediscover the fun in the whole thing. They win my cash.
Man, I hadn't remembered that those came out the same year. I biked maybe five miles to see Tron at the local theater that was showing it, at least a few times. I remember locking the chain around the bike rack and walking from the summer heat into that run down theater with its thinning carpet and whiff of warmed popcorn. That movie made frisbee extra fun that year. Later on the Intellivision games, with the Recognizer "bosses"...
"Blade Runner" we were too young for, it being an R, so my older brother took us to that for my birthday. That means it was late June. What the heck was anyone doing releasing that movie as a summer blockbuster? The theater was basically empty except for us.
Neither one of them got the box office that its studio was expecting. As investments, though? I'm not that keen on either one as a work of high art, but the ripple effect they had was really something, culturally.
Without speaking to the "statistics," it sure does seem like whenever you go with Sony you have to swallow hard about the more expensive format of whatever it turns out to be. Just about the only exception in my life is my cheaper, kids' camcorder -- which happens to be the one case I've considered where they went with the same digital tape, and compression, everyone else uses, for the model I would up choosing anyway. (There was another I preferred, but it would have been locked into a different compression method that screwed me.)