Agreed, at least overall. Saga has a handful of standout tracks that, in my opinion, outshine Noir or Hack/Sign, but her anime work is consistently amazing. I only omitted mentioning it since the thread was on VGM and not anime music.
God, those voice-overs were terrible. Fortunately, the music was more than enough to make up for them, though it did have the unfortunate tendency to leave me scrambling for the mute button when a dialogue sequence would come up, as I would previously have had the volume cranked up to enjoy the tunes.
I think I've played and/or replayed more 'Vania games for their BGM than for their gameplay. Which is saying quite a bit considering the solid platforming fun to be had in the 2D series installments.
I remember the craze over the game when it came out, but honestly I'm surprised the song is still that popular. Not that it's outright terrible or anything, but thinking back, I seem to remember it being relatively run-of-the-mill saccharine J-pop.
Again, not horrendous, but not really memorable either. There's much better game music out there. Look to Jeremy Soule, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Shoji Meguro, Yuki Kajiura, or Kurt Harland for examples. The article was spot-on in recommending Yamaoka's Silent Hill scores, though you do have to be just a little bit unhinged upstairs in order to enjoy SH1 as casual-listening material.
Offhand, I'd recommend Sakimoto's "Vagrant Story" score, Kajiura's "Xenosaga Episode 3," Meguro's "Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne" for those willing to let the ambience set in, or "Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner" if you want something more casually listenable, and any of Harland's work on the Legacy of Kain series.
Maybe not, but I am, and I damn near run screaming every time I hear anyone talking about signing up for it. I have Thunderbird set to aggressively trash anything with "facebook" or "Myspace" in the subject or sender fields, and a few unlucky souls (mostly people who knew me in high school) have already found out the hard way just how averse I am to "social networking."
I have a Blogger blog, I have E-mail, and I have my realtime chat protocols (Jabber and IRC by choice, AIM because I can't get anybody else to abandon that frelling broken shitpile of a protocol despite my best efforts). If people actually find it a challenge to "network" with me in spite of those 5 channels, none of which are exactly difficult to use (okay, maybe IRC), then as far as I'm concerned it's not my damn problem. And if they're so helpless that they can't even figure out how to use E-mail, I question exactly how much good a friendship with them would bring me. Not for any reason of stupidity, mind you, but just for the fact that you would have to be insanely lazy to not bother to learn how to comment on a blog or send an E-mail message.
And you know what? All my good friends, the ones I care about keeping, have no trouble at all keeping in touch with me via those established, long-standing, well-developed methods. Coworkers and professors all use E-mail, which just plain fucking works, and never once have I considered how much better life could be if only I had a Space or a Facebook account. Fuck 'em.
Now where the yotz did I put that frakking driver CD? I swear, if this FRELLING printer breaks down one more time, it's getting it right in the mivonks. Useless pile of dren, I knew we should have gone with the 4250.
Of course, it does have the downside of my coworkers looking at me like I'm insane, but then that really shouldn't come as news to anyone. If they haven't figured out that I'm magra-fahrbot by now, well, I can't be blamed.
In all fairness, he did say "This generation." I'd be interested to know how it stacks up overall against, say, the Dreamcast or GBA. Obviously not just in the graphics department, as while I love my DC, the 360 would mop the floor with it and the GBA is not a contender for obvious reasons, but both systems have had some fantastic and unique stuff to their credit.
On a semi-related note, my girlfriend was TAing a class in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago last fall and, when grading exams, came across an essay response stating that some evolutionary event or another (not sure what it was, guilty, but then I do InfoSec and not biology, so sue me) was "extremely unprecedented." I (obviously) wasn't in the class, but was with her and the other TAs while they were grading, and we all had a good laugh at that one.
House is good, but if you have the means (read: torrents), check out ReGenesis. It's somewhat along the lines of House, but replace MDs with Ph.Ds, individual cases with potential viral outbreaks and pandemics, and the oft-childish interplay between characters with much deeper and more complex relationships. The interaction between David (main character) and his Asperger's-afflicted biochemist Bob is a particular favorite of mine.
Also, the science is much more solid and the show's website actually has a section supporting or debunking the show's own scientific propositions on an episode-by-episode basis.
Oh, and David Sandström is what you get if House were allowed to say "fuck." Love that Canadian TV. And they've green-lighted season 4 to start next spring.
That is, for example, why I believe e-books will not be dominant for a long, long time -- there is a certain pleasure in being able to hold something you own in your hand rather than merely possessing it in the abstract.
But then, I'm almost 50, so I have that "old fart" point of view...
It's not an old-fart point of view. I'm only 23 and you couldn't pay me enough to trade away the collection of paper books that I've built over the years for some intangible abomination to which my "digital rights" can be jerked out from under me at a moment's notice.
Ditto for CDs, DVDs, games, etc. They all look nice sitting on a shelf, and I've taken time out before to organize my books such that my bookshelf looks aesthetically appealing at first glance. Maybe that's a little OCD on my part, but nobody ever gives a damn how neatly their E-books are arranged in their/home/ebooks directory.
Now, I make no claims in favor of or in opposition to you actually being an old fart...;-P
And the torrent can't simply be hosted in more places than one?
Re:DRM technology which hasn't been cracked (also)
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 1
What about taking a bitstream copy of the dongle with some kind of low-level drive-imaging software? I mean, dongle protection works in theory the way you've described it, but it seems to me like it just becomes the same race all over again: copying the dongle.
What kind of blank media did you use? Normally recordable DVDs have inaccessible CSS key sectors so that the CSS key cannot be duplicated along with the rest of the content.
Also, what DVD was it that you copied? Maybe it was released unencrypted (though I can't really see that happening.)
Until enough people start blanket-encrypting everything. Then everyone's shunted to the lowest priority, which means everyone's on the same priority level, and boom - de-facto Net Neutrality. "Lowest level" means nothing if the higher levels aren't actually being used for anything. Problem solved, from our perspective.
I know it's overly optimistic to expect everyone to encrypt everything, but even then, a substantial majority should be enough, and that can be attained through creating easy-to-use crypto software or other Internet communication applications that encrypt transmissions by default.
Or just cancel old, bad laws, new laws be damned. It's not like they HAVE to replace every shitty restriction imposed on the public with another, perhaps slightly less shitty, restriction.
Two words, my friend: Ergo Proxy. Think Blade Runner meets Ghost in the Shell with a dash of Lain and the visual style of Witch Hunter Robin. Freakin' excellent series, available in HD, and a great soundtrack too.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, at least overall. Saga has a handful of standout tracks that, in my opinion, outshine Noir or Hack/Sign, but her anime work is consistently amazing. I only omitted mentioning it since the thread was on VGM and not anime music.
*shudder*
God, those voice-overs were terrible. Fortunately, the music was more than enough to make up for them, though it did have the unfortunate tendency to leave me scrambling for the mute button when a dialogue sequence would come up, as I would previously have had the volume cranked up to enjoy the tunes. I think I've played and/or replayed more 'Vania games for their BGM than for their gameplay. Which is saying quite a bit considering the solid platforming fun to be had in the 2D series installments.
I remember the craze over the game when it came out, but honestly I'm surprised the song is still that popular. Not that it's outright terrible or anything, but thinking back, I seem to remember it being relatively run-of-the-mill saccharine J-pop.
Again, not horrendous, but not really memorable either. There's much better game music out there. Look to Jeremy Soule, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Shoji Meguro, Yuki Kajiura, or Kurt Harland for examples. The article was spot-on in recommending Yamaoka's Silent Hill scores, though you do have to be just a little bit unhinged upstairs in order to enjoy SH1 as casual-listening material.
Offhand, I'd recommend Sakimoto's "Vagrant Story" score, Kajiura's "Xenosaga Episode 3," Meguro's "Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne" for those willing to let the ambience set in, or "Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner" if you want something more casually listenable, and any of Harland's work on the Legacy of Kain series.
Maybe not, but I am, and I damn near run screaming every time I hear anyone talking about signing up for it. I have Thunderbird set to aggressively trash anything with "facebook" or "Myspace" in the subject or sender fields, and a few unlucky souls (mostly people who knew me in high school) have already found out the hard way just how averse I am to "social networking."
I have a Blogger blog, I have E-mail, and I have my realtime chat protocols (Jabber and IRC by choice, AIM because I can't get anybody else to abandon that frelling broken shitpile of a protocol despite my best efforts). If people actually find it a challenge to "network" with me in spite of those 5 channels, none of which are exactly difficult to use (okay, maybe IRC), then as far as I'm concerned it's not my damn problem. And if they're so helpless that they can't even figure out how to use E-mail, I question exactly how much good a friendship with them would bring me. Not for any reason of stupidity, mind you, but just for the fact that you would have to be insanely lazy to not bother to learn how to comment on a blog or send an E-mail message.
And you know what? All my good friends, the ones I care about keeping, have no trouble at all keeping in touch with me via those established, long-standing, well-developed methods. Coworkers and professors all use E-mail, which just plain fucking works, and never once have I considered how much better life could be if only I had a Space or a Facebook account. Fuck 'em.
Now where the yotz did I put that frakking driver CD? I swear, if this FRELLING printer breaks down one more time, it's getting it right in the mivonks. Useless pile of dren, I knew we should have gone with the 4250.
Of course, it does have the downside of my coworkers looking at me like I'm insane, but then that really shouldn't come as news to anyone. If they haven't figured out that I'm magra-fahrbot by now, well, I can't be blamed.
In all fairness, he did say "This generation." I'd be interested to know how it stacks up overall against, say, the Dreamcast or GBA. Obviously not just in the graphics department, as while I love my DC, the 360 would mop the floor with it and the GBA is not a contender for obvious reasons, but both systems have had some fantastic and unique stuff to their credit.
Cthulhu fh'tagn.
Cthulhu fh'tagn.
On a semi-related note, my girlfriend was TAing a class in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago last fall and, when grading exams, came across an essay response stating that some evolutionary event or another (not sure what it was, guilty, but then I do InfoSec and not biology, so sue me) was "extremely unprecedented." I (obviously) wasn't in the class, but was with her and the other TAs while they were grading, and we all had a good laugh at that one.
House is good, but if you have the means (read: torrents), check out ReGenesis. It's somewhat along the lines of House, but replace MDs with Ph.Ds, individual cases with potential viral outbreaks and pandemics, and the oft-childish interplay between characters with much deeper and more complex relationships. The interaction between David (main character) and his Asperger's-afflicted biochemist Bob is a particular favorite of mine.
Also, the science is much more solid and the show's website actually has a section supporting or debunking the show's own scientific propositions on an episode-by-episode basis.
Oh, and David Sandström is what you get if House were allowed to say "fuck." Love that Canadian TV. And they've green-lighted season 4 to start next spring.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/10/17
It's not an old-fart point of view. I'm only 23 and you couldn't pay me enough to trade away the collection of paper books that I've built over the years for some intangible abomination to which my "digital rights" can be jerked out from under me at a moment's notice.
Ditto for CDs, DVDs, games, etc. They all look nice sitting on a shelf, and I've taken time out before to organize my books such that my bookshelf looks aesthetically appealing at first glance. Maybe that's a little OCD on my part, but nobody ever gives a damn how neatly their E-books are arranged in their /home/ebooks directory.
Now, I make no claims in favor of or in opposition to you actually being an old fart... ;-P
And the torrent can't simply be hosted in more places than one?
What about taking a bitstream copy of the dongle with some kind of low-level drive-imaging software? I mean, dongle protection works in theory the way you've described it, but it seems to me like it just becomes the same race all over again: copying the dongle.
Yeah, but copyright law these days is like a Yugo with antilock brakes and a sunroof.
What kind of blank media did you use? Normally recordable DVDs have inaccessible CSS key sectors so that the CSS key cannot be duplicated along with the rest of the content. Also, what DVD was it that you copied? Maybe it was released unencrypted (though I can't really see that happening.)
Anything anything? No way. I mean, I'm sure there must be some limits to the possibilities at Zombo.com.
And they're taking preorders...when?
Until enough people start blanket-encrypting everything. Then everyone's shunted to the lowest priority, which means everyone's on the same priority level, and boom - de-facto Net Neutrality. "Lowest level" means nothing if the higher levels aren't actually being used for anything. Problem solved, from our perspective.
I know it's overly optimistic to expect everyone to encrypt everything, but even then, a substantial majority should be enough, and that can be attained through creating easy-to-use crypto software or other Internet communication applications that encrypt transmissions by default.
Or just cancel old, bad laws, new laws be damned. It's not like they HAVE to replace every shitty restriction imposed on the public with another, perhaps slightly less shitty, restriction.
You've been misled. There is no "+1 Peaceful-and-Calm" mod. Just informative. ...So far, at least.
No thank you so very, very little. Now my head isn't completely not exploding.
Two words, my friend: Ergo Proxy. Think Blade Runner meets Ghost in the Shell with a dash of Lain and the visual style of Witch Hunter Robin. Freakin' excellent series, available in HD, and a great soundtrack too.
You know, they'd never have known if you didn't just say you had to change them.
Take me, for example: I don't let anyone know that my root password is...ohhhhhhhhhhohohohohohoho, that was close. I don't think so.
Is too. It's a perfectly cromulent meme.