It was Mandarin, except for one part when the engine breaks down and the ship broadcasts a warning that oxygen's low, check life support etc. That was Cantonese spoken fluently. I assume they just asked someone Chinese to say what they wanted "in Chinese" and that person just assumed Cantonese (which is fairly prevalent in North America).
The inconsistency bugged me a bit, but I was happy to actually understand what was being said for once (I only know a little Mandarin, and it was butchered so badly that the only one I could make out was mei-mei).
Interestingly enough, Jayne's actor seemed to speak Mandarin a bit better than everyone else. In the DVD extras he talks about it a bit, and I assume he practiced it more.
Firefly got less than a season. Just 11 episodes aired, even though they finished filming 14. Besides that they showed the episodes out of order and bounced it around the schedule. That shows a lot of dedication to running a show into the ground.
Hopefully some mods will see the parent post. Fox didn't make it easy to watch Firefly on TV even for diehard Whedon or sci-fi fans because they showed the episodes out of order and kept switching its timeslot.
In addition to this, I believe that the Nielsen system is broken. I believe that there are 5000 Nielsen households, and that these are supposed to roughly correlate to population distribution. But over and over we see shows that get cancelled even with large numbers of fans complaining, along with some shows that no one cares enough to complain about. Firefly fans did crazy stuff like take out full page ads thanking the studios and each advertiser for the show by name, and mailing stuff to sponsors and studio heads.
Maybe we need more geeks to try to be Nielsen viewers? How does a family become a Nielsen household? (I'm Canadian so I can't do it anyway, but I hate watching shows I like get cancelled.)
Besides this, many people have ideas that have already been thought of but weren't done because they just aren't feasible to do or don't add to the fun in any way.
I think the problem isn't a lack of programmers, but that the design isn't focussed enough that the programmers aren't wasting their time on stuff that makes no difference to the gameplay. Some of this is attributable to the publisher who wants some new feature to advertise (realtime wart-growing!), or some overly ambitious designer that wants things that add nothing to the gaming experience (did MGS 2 really have ice cubes you could watch melt? If so, then WHY?).
I really think that every designer should be made to play Super Mario 64 and Tetris. SM64 was huge, and Tetris was small, but both are very tightly focussed on the things that make the game FUN.
Seems like a good idea, but for geeks, how many of us can speak clearly to someone we're attracted to or fool ourselves into believing that the attractive person is interested in our work? If we could, we wouldn't post here so much.
Besides this, I suppose the other drawback to doing it this way is that you'll get a lot of geeks falling in love with you or your code. That's usually not a good thing.
This was a poor comparison simply because operating a car is relatively simple. The basic elements of driving are gas, brakes, reverse, left and right. That's it. These things are all done physically, and relatively intuitively, enough so that a person IDENTIFIES with their car (like you say HE almost hit ME, instead of his CAR almost hit my CAR). The more stuff you add (stickshift, radio, heat, air etc.) THEN some people might have problems with that. I'm sure there are a good number of people who can drive and drive safely, but can't set the time on their dash or work the radio.
Plus, skill with computers doesn't tend to be life or death.
Please, let's call it what it is...
on
Buzzword du Jour: DRM
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Digital Restrictions Management. Let's let the less technical people know what it really is.
One thing that you might not have accounted for is sponsorship. If your clan is sponsored, you're playing on better hardware and you don't have to spend time working to support yourself as much, you can spend more time practicing. Currently the most sponsored clans are the best all-male clans.
It think that it would be a good idea to try to get some all-female clans sponsorship first. And the winner of a tournament (such as an all-female one) will get more attention. Preferably, I'd prefer to see mixed male/female clans instead. If the clans makeup represented the overall gamer population though, it would end up having only one or two females per clan simply because there are much fewer female players.
I remember learning about how treating everyone equally is NOT the same as equality, mainly because it ignores various factors that give some groups an advantage.
In gaming I would say that one advantage is sponsorship. The top clans get sponsored, with free gear and maybe some money, which allows them to spend more time playing and on better hardware. The top clans are currently all male. If you were to put the female clans in and they all finished in the bottom half of the tourney, then some people would take that as women just aren't as good as men, and sponsors would be less likely to support them. Plus, the female clans wouldn't get much prize money and it would discourage other female clans. It's setting them up for failure.
Now, if they get their own tourney, there is a better chance for more prize money, and the top female clans and especially the winner are much more likely to get noticed and get sponsorship so that they can spend more time practicing and get free gear. All this aside, I don't see why they have to have all-female clans.
Why not just have the best players you can get? Aren't there any clans that would take on a female if she was good enough to be a starter or at least an alternate? Aren't there any females that don't mind being the only girl (or two) on a clan? Let's face it, it's hard for anyone of ANY gender to be good enough for the top clans (which are all currently all-male). The proportion of guys who are good enough is very low compared to the total number of male players, and there are fewer female players. It's an accomplishment for anyone to get on these clans, and a female doing it would attract a lot of mostly positive attention. That said, would an all-girl clan be willing to take on guys if it would take them to the top? Or would it be seen as women needing men to make it? I'd love to see a clan that STARTED as mixed male/female get to the top so there wouldn't be any doubt.
As a side note on the how men do better at things in which physical strength shouldn't be a barrier (snooker, darts, etc.), I notice that men tend much more to extremes than women do. We get much more fanatical about things (sports, cars etc.) and focus on whatever we're good at more (sometimes to the exclusion of all else). Of course, this isn't always a good thing, but does anyone else think that men tend to extremes more than women? Is this why at least *a* man (one individual) tends to be the top of the field? Can men simply get more obsessive than women can?
If I recall he was found as an infant, not a newborn, so he was born in space, not US soil.
The idea is that he wasn't conscious before the pod opened. He had never been outside of the gestation pod. They simply stuck his gestation pod into the escape pod (or mini-ship or whatever) and so even though he was pretty big by the time he got out (it is quite a distance from Krypton to Earth after all), he wasn't officially "birthed" until the pod opened on US soil. As I said, that's the DC comics line. It was said in response to a letter in Wizard saying that Clark Kent couldn't run for President because he wasn't born in the US. DC said he was.
Did you read the article I quoted?
Yes I did (it was pretty short), I believe the professor is wrong. The DC comics line has been that it's Superman guzzling yellow solar radiation. Even muscles trained in high gravity wouldn't allow someone to have nearly as much strength (or any of his other powers) as Supes has. Plus there used to be other forms of Kryptonite, some of which would strip him only of his powers, which reduced him to normal human strength, which wouldn't be possible if any of his extra strength was due to high grav.
60GXPs are under warranty for 3 years (or at least mine was). You can go to a Hitachi site and get an RMA number, but they want you to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops to get a replacement for their own damn flawed product. I just gave up, let my RMA expire and I'm never going to buy IBM or Hitachi ever again.
At least I started hearing about the failures and backed up most of my data shortly before it died.
I'm surprised that no one's mentioned Initial D. It combines a number of things to be successful.
1) It is a driving game and thus has the steering wheel, seat, pedals and gear shift. You can have these at home, but it's expensive and doesn't feel as right.
2) It lets you save on thin magnetic cards that you can keep in your wallet. I've got about 10 of them with different cars.
3)Appeals to the ego. If you spend more money, you can upgrade the car on your card and raise your racing and battle level, which is based on how well you do against actual opponents. Get a high battle level and your car gets a glowing "aura" before battles.
Essentially, a certain level of customization and the sense that you "own" the card means that you carry around a constant reminder of the game. Plus, it doesn't hurt that there is a good learning curve in Inital D that allows people to think they'll be as good as the very best players (who are themselves always finding ways to improve their best times).
Clark Kent is also an illegal alien having not been born on Earth, and obviously any papers saying so must have been forged or are false. So Clark Kent aka Superman is breaking Civil Law by claiming to be a US Citizen.
To deal with this, use your own statement above from above:
Kal-El was a test tube baby and sent to Earth in the ship inside of a pod.
I believe that the official DC Comics line (from an issue of Wizard magazine long ago) is that Superman was still GESTATING while inside the pod (it would take quite a while for the pod to get to earth right?), and that he was officially "birthed" when the pod opened on American soil. So they can still say he's an all-american superhero (blah, blah, blah).
On a couple of your other points, Superman's strength and all his other powers are supposed to be due to his cells absorbing our sun's yellow solar radiation, and not I believe due to any sort of gravity effect.
Re:Trash in space
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The anime is okay, but the manga is MUCH better than the anime for realism. It's set in the near future and is much more plausible with more actual science and understanding of what really living in space entails. It has almost singlehandedly (along with the Firefly DVDs) got me longing again for true space travel.
The manga PLANETES is a love letter to space travel. If you love space give the manga a shot.
Re:I thought I would do this...
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But it would do nothing for the broadcaster...
A very good point here. If shows like Firefly had never made it onto TV (and then gotten cancelled) in the first place, how many people would have heard of it? It wouldn't have sold nearly as many unless there was a way for people to see some of it for free. hm.... Now where are those official bittorrent links?
As a side note, that $40 you paid for the Firefly set (worth every penny for me too), did NOT all go to the studio that put it out. They get maybe half that, which changes the economics of it obviously.
Simple fact is, we're probably moving towards paying to watch good stuff created like HBO. Maybe we need a subscription channel for geeks?
You think you've got it bad? When a guy goes up to the urinal next to me, I hope that I'm gonna be pissing longer than he is because my bladder is just that much bigger and I CAN TAKE IT...
Yes, truly I am a sad, pathetic little man with incredible bladder control.
Not just that, but also the way the whole thing seems to be saying that you have to be patient and wait for the results (fair enough, but the spams always say FAST) and if you still don't get any it's your fault for not being diligent enough with the "exercises" or you didn't do them right.
Plus, he won't go into detail about the "exercises" because there are "too many". How did he get them all straight then? Written instructions, I would assume. So why not a scan of one of the pages? Or just a description of ONE exercise as an example? Whole thing reeks of BS.
I'm told its attributed to the VP of Capcom's Marketing Department circa 1989.
I'm pretty sure this is BS. It's funny, but if you check through google, you'll see that this "quote" is attributed to several different people, for example Kristian Wilson, CEO of Nintendo (not sure if there ever was a Kristian Wilson) and Steven Poole. And not all of the quotes call them "magic pills" or refer to the music as electronic (some just say repetitive music).
I seem to recall that this was debunked in one of the urban legend pages, and this was posted in a Slashdot discussion as well. I'd be grateful if someone could find that for us, please. Frankly, it's probably just a clever quote someone on the net came up with, because it is simply too perfect a quote, which also can not be found in any (dead tree) written source.
Slashdot Mirror
It was Mandarin, except for one part when the engine breaks down and the ship broadcasts a warning that oxygen's low, check life support etc. That was Cantonese spoken fluently. I assume they just asked someone Chinese to say what they wanted "in Chinese" and that person just assumed Cantonese (which is fairly prevalent in North America).
The inconsistency bugged me a bit, but I was happy to actually understand what was being said for once (I only know a little Mandarin, and it was butchered so badly that the only one I could make out was mei-mei).
Interestingly enough, Jayne's actor seemed to speak Mandarin a bit better than everyone else. In the DVD extras he talks about it a bit, and I assume he practiced it more.
Memory. It isn't that hard to remember because it's short and it fits the show perfectly. Great little song.
Firefly got less than a season. Just 11 episodes aired, even though they finished filming 14. Besides that they showed the episodes out of order and bounced it around the schedule. That shows a lot of dedication to running a show into the ground.
Hopefully some mods will see the parent post. Fox didn't make it easy to watch Firefly on TV even for diehard Whedon or sci-fi fans because they showed the episodes out of order and kept switching its timeslot.
In addition to this, I believe that the Nielsen system is broken. I believe that there are 5000 Nielsen households, and that these are supposed to roughly correlate to population distribution. But over and over we see shows that get cancelled even with large numbers of fans complaining, along with some shows that no one cares enough to complain about. Firefly fans did crazy stuff like take out full page ads thanking the studios and each advertiser for the show by name, and mailing stuff to sponsors and studio heads.
Maybe we need more geeks to try to be Nielsen viewers? How does a family become a Nielsen household? (I'm Canadian so I can't do it anyway, but I hate watching shows I like get cancelled.)
Full opening theme lyrics:
Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I can not stand.
I don't care, I'm still free;
You can't take the sky from me.
Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't coming back.
Burn the land and boil the sea;
You can't take the sky from me.
There's no place I can be,
Since I've found Serenity.
But you can't take the sky from me.
The first season of In Living Color is already out on DVD: See here.
Besides this, many people have ideas that have already been thought of but weren't done because they just aren't feasible to do or don't add to the fun in any way.
I think the problem isn't a lack of programmers, but that the design isn't focussed enough that the programmers aren't wasting their time on stuff that makes no difference to the gameplay. Some of this is attributable to the publisher who wants some new feature to advertise (realtime wart-growing!), or some overly ambitious designer that wants things that add nothing to the gaming experience (did MGS 2 really have ice cubes you could watch melt? If so, then WHY?).
I really think that every designer should be made to play Super Mario 64 and Tetris. SM64 was huge, and Tetris was small, but both are very tightly focussed on the things that make the game FUN.
Seems like a good idea, but for geeks, how many of us can speak clearly to someone we're attracted to or fool ourselves into believing that the attractive person is interested in our work? If we could, we wouldn't post here so much.
Besides this, I suppose the other drawback to doing it this way is that you'll get a lot of geeks falling in love with you or your code. That's usually not a good thing.
This was a poor comparison simply because operating a car is relatively simple. The basic elements of driving are gas, brakes, reverse, left and right. That's it. These things are all done physically, and relatively intuitively, enough so that a person IDENTIFIES with their car (like you say HE almost hit ME, instead of his CAR almost hit my CAR). The more stuff you add (stickshift, radio, heat, air etc.) THEN some people might have problems with that. I'm sure there are a good number of people who can drive and drive safely, but can't set the time on their dash or work the radio.
Plus, skill with computers doesn't tend to be life or death.
Digital Restrictions Management. Let's let the less technical people know what it really is.
One thing that you might not have accounted for is sponsorship. If your clan is sponsored, you're playing on better hardware and you don't have to spend time working to support yourself as much, you can spend more time practicing. Currently the most sponsored clans are the best all-male clans.
It think that it would be a good idea to try to get some all-female clans sponsorship first. And the winner of a tournament (such as an all-female one) will get more attention. Preferably, I'd prefer to see mixed male/female clans instead. If the clans makeup represented the overall gamer population though, it would end up having only one or two females per clan simply because there are much fewer female players.
I remember learning about how treating everyone equally is NOT the same as equality, mainly because it ignores various factors that give some groups an advantage.
In gaming I would say that one advantage is sponsorship. The top clans get sponsored, with free gear and maybe some money, which allows them to spend more time playing and on better hardware. The top clans are currently all male. If you were to put the female clans in and they all finished in the bottom half of the tourney, then some people would take that as women just aren't as good as men, and sponsors would be less likely to support them. Plus, the female clans wouldn't get much prize money and it would discourage other female clans. It's setting them up for failure.
Now, if they get their own tourney, there is a better chance for more prize money, and the top female clans and especially the winner are much more likely to get noticed and get sponsorship so that they can spend more time practicing and get free gear. All this aside, I don't see why they have to have all-female clans.
Why not just have the best players you can get? Aren't there any clans that would take on a female if she was good enough to be a starter or at least an alternate? Aren't there any females that don't mind being the only girl (or two) on a clan? Let's face it, it's hard for anyone of ANY gender to be good enough for the top clans (which are all currently all-male). The proportion of guys who are good enough is very low compared to the total number of male players, and there are fewer female players. It's an accomplishment for anyone to get on these clans, and a female doing it would attract a lot of mostly positive attention. That said, would an all-girl clan be willing to take on guys if it would take them to the top? Or would it be seen as women needing men to make it? I'd love to see a clan that STARTED as mixed male/female get to the top so there wouldn't be any doubt.
As a side note on the how men do better at things in which physical strength shouldn't be a barrier (snooker, darts, etc.), I notice that men tend much more to extremes than women do. We get much more fanatical about things (sports, cars etc.) and focus on whatever we're good at more (sometimes to the exclusion of all else). Of course, this isn't always a good thing, but does anyone else think that men tend to extremes more than women? Is this why at least *a* man (one individual) tends to be the top of the field? Can men simply get more obsessive than women can?
If I recall he was found as an infant, not a newborn, so he was born in space, not US soil.
The idea is that he wasn't conscious before the pod opened. He had never been outside of the gestation pod. They simply stuck his gestation pod into the escape pod (or mini-ship or whatever) and so even though he was pretty big by the time he got out (it is quite a distance from Krypton to Earth after all), he wasn't officially "birthed" until the pod opened on US soil. As I said, that's the DC comics line. It was said in response to a letter in Wizard saying that Clark Kent couldn't run for President because he wasn't born in the US. DC said he was.
Did you read the article I quoted?
Yes I did (it was pretty short), I believe the professor is wrong. The DC comics line has been that it's Superman guzzling yellow solar radiation. Even muscles trained in high gravity wouldn't allow someone to have nearly as much strength (or any of his other powers) as Supes has. Plus there used to be other forms of Kryptonite, some of which would strip him only of his powers, which reduced him to normal human strength, which wouldn't be possible if any of his extra strength was due to high grav.
60GXPs are under warranty for 3 years (or at least mine was). You can go to a Hitachi site and get an RMA number, but they want you to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops to get a replacement for their own damn flawed product. I just gave up, let my RMA expire and I'm never going to buy IBM or Hitachi ever again.
At least I started hearing about the failures and backed up most of my data shortly before it died.
I'm surprised that no one's mentioned Initial D. It combines a number of things to be successful.
1) It is a driving game and thus has the steering wheel, seat, pedals and gear shift. You can have these at home, but it's expensive and doesn't feel as right.
2) It lets you save on thin magnetic cards that you can keep in your wallet. I've got about 10 of them with different cars.
3)Appeals to the ego. If you spend more money, you can upgrade the car on your card and raise your racing and battle level, which is based on how well you do against actual opponents. Get a high battle level and your car gets a glowing "aura" before battles.
Essentially, a certain level of customization and the sense that you "own" the card means that you carry around a constant reminder of the game. Plus, it doesn't hurt that there is a good learning curve in Inital D that allows people to think they'll be as good as the very best players (who are themselves always finding ways to improve their best times).
Clark Kent is also an illegal alien having not been born on Earth, and obviously any papers saying so must have been forged or are false. So Clark Kent aka Superman is breaking Civil Law by claiming to be a US Citizen.
To deal with this, use your own statement above from above:
Kal-El was a test tube baby and sent to Earth in the ship inside of a pod.
I believe that the official DC Comics line (from an issue of Wizard magazine long ago) is that Superman was still GESTATING while inside the pod (it would take quite a while for the pod to get to earth right?), and that he was officially "birthed" when the pod opened on American soil. So they can still say he's an all-american superhero (blah, blah, blah).
On a couple of your other points, Superman's strength and all his other powers are supposed to be due to his cells absorbing our sun's yellow solar radiation, and not I believe due to any sort of gravity effect.
The anime is okay, but the manga is MUCH better than the anime for realism. It's set in the near future and is much more plausible with more actual science and understanding of what really living in space entails. It has almost singlehandedly (along with the Firefly DVDs) got me longing again for true space travel.
The manga PLANETES is a love letter to space travel. If you love space give the manga a shot.
But it would do nothing for the broadcaster...
A very good point here. If shows like Firefly had never made it onto TV (and then gotten cancelled) in the first place, how many people would have heard of it? It wouldn't have sold nearly as many unless there was a way for people to see some of it for free. hm.... Now where are those official bittorrent links?
As a side note, that $40 you paid for the Firefly set (worth every penny for me too), did NOT all go to the studio that put it out. They get maybe half that, which changes the economics of it obviously.
Simple fact is, we're probably moving towards paying to watch good stuff created like HBO. Maybe we need a subscription channel for geeks?
You think you've got it bad? When a guy goes up to the urinal next to me, I hope that I'm gonna be pissing longer than he is because my bladder is just that much bigger and I CAN TAKE IT...
Yes, truly I am a sad, pathetic little man with incredible bladder control.
Not just that, but also the way the whole thing seems to be saying that you have to be patient and wait for the results (fair enough, but the spams always say FAST) and if you still don't get any it's your fault for not being diligent enough with the "exercises" or you didn't do them right.
Plus, he won't go into detail about the "exercises" because there are "too many". How did he get them all straight then? Written instructions, I would assume. So why not a scan of one of the pages? Or just a description of ONE exercise as an example? Whole thing reeks of BS.
You still have to be convicted by a jury of your peers. Who's not gonna consider it justifiable homicide?
I'm told its attributed to the VP of Capcom's Marketing Department circa 1989.
I'm pretty sure this is BS. It's funny, but if you check through google, you'll see that this "quote" is attributed to several different people, for example Kristian Wilson, CEO of Nintendo (not sure if there ever was a Kristian Wilson) and Steven Poole. And not all of the quotes call them "magic pills" or refer to the music as electronic (some just say repetitive music).
I seem to recall that this was debunked in one of the urban legend pages, and this was posted in a Slashdot discussion as well. I'd be grateful if someone could find that for us, please. Frankly, it's probably just a clever quote someone on the net came up with, because it is simply too perfect a quote, which also can not be found in any (dead tree) written source.
Apparently, MP3 players could end up costing anywhere from $19 to $100 more under the new rules.
Actually, the maximum for MP3 players is an extra $25 (for over 10 GBs of storage). See here: MP3 players hit with copyright levy
I don't really think Slashdot users are infinite... we don't get laid enough to propagate indefinitely.
I was thinking of going with Bee-Tex, myself. It sounds pretty much like just saying the letters, without the ee sound after the T.
Plus, who wants to hear geeks talking about buttocks? *shudders*