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Blankets, by Craig Thompson
on
Reading Comics
·
· Score: 1
I think Blankets is a proper piece of fine graphical literature. It tells a compelling, detailed story, and (this is important) it justifies its medium. There's a whole lot of depth of emotion conveyed perfectly through the imagery that would be awkward at best to put in words.
Maus, as mentioned by earlier people, is deserving of its Pulitzer. It's the best tale of the holocaust I've ever encountered in any medium.
Also mentioned earlier, The Sandman is my favorite literary work of all time, and it's nothing short of modern mythology. It's difficult not to believe Gaiman's own unique characters have not always been there in mythology as he wrote them. The story is epic, and full of brilliant twists and turns, and it leaves you really thinking about it.
And if Gaiman's character "Death" were real, it would be a lot easier to accept dying when that time comes.
If you want to find an example of superheroes done right, I recommend Rising Stars highly. Watchmen came really close to bringing superheroes into the real world, but fell short. (though it's still fun, and Rorschach is my favorite "superhero" of all time) Rising Stars was the first to really succeed, IMO.
It's only a matter of time before solid state memory (or something effectively similar) becomes cheap enough and with great enough capacity to be a _true_ leap forward. Smaller, more durable, more portable video disks, _players with no moving parts_ (a boon to portable video) and so on. DVD didn't take off because of better picture quality/more storage space alone, it took off because it's cheaper, more reliable, more durable, and more portable than VHS, and it doesn't degrade like magnetic tape does.
If Obama gets it, Nader probably won't get much support anyway, but if Clinton gets it, he'll probably get enough support to hurt the DNP in the general election, and frankly, the DNP needs a massive smack upside the head. They need to learn to stop fielding candidates the people can't get behind. Gore was too robotic, Kerry was too wishywashy, and Clinton is too ambitious and unscrupulous. Maybe, just maybe, if Clinton runs and Nader "steals her votes" the party might just get a frigging clue.
Being glad that you waited until the format war was over: Priceless Indeed. That's why I'm sticking with DVD, because in all honesty, I think it's going to win the format war. The players, discs, movies, etc. are cheaper than Blu-Ray, and Blu-Ray adds nothing except more storage space and "better" DRM capabilities.
It's even remotely near the leap from VHS to DVD. DVD to Blu-Ray, you get slightly better picture quality and/or more content per disc. VHS to DVD, you went from costly (production-wise, comparatively) bulky magnetic tapes that were prone to degrading over time, getting messed up by magnets, getting eaten by players, and so on, to optical discs which are smaller, lighter, as portable as CDs, with a longer lifespan, and cheaper production costs, and in time DVD drives allowed you to use DVDs with your computer, too, without having to invest in anything more than a better optical drive. That's a _damn_ huge difference of technology.
Blu-Ray is still and likely always will be a niche product for technophiles who _must_ have the latest and greatest and biggest and best, and poor sods with disposable income who get suckered into buying into it.
"Virtually 100% of medical advances come from the US, and are 90% paid for by US medical costs."
You know, if you're going to pull statistics out of your ass, you can at least come up with something more believable.
I guess all these medical breakthroughs I hear about happening in places like Europe, Japan, India, etc. are because of the US medical system. Or my imagination. Go figure.
I'd have to say it's pretty much a tie between the NES and the PSX. Why? Because both essentially saved console gaming in their times. The NES pulled gaming out of a hell of utter lack of game production standards, and it introduced one of the greatest controller innovations ever: the D-Pad. The PSX was moderately priced and used CD-ROM media, which let its games be inexpensive and contain more content than cartridge-based games. This combined what would grow to be possibly the largest library of games ever, with many truly wonderful games (Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, etc.) that brought console gaming into the mainstream. And after the N64 introduced analog sticks on controllers, Sony trumped it with the best-designed controller ever, the Dual Shock. Ever since then, with the exception of the Wii, controllers have primarily tended to be some variation of the Dual Shock, and that's a good thing.
The Mac Pro is less than 2 years old. The NVidia 8800 GT PC version works great in it under Windows, from what I've heard. Yet, Apple was either too lazy/incompetent or outright malicious to make the Mac version of that card compatible with older Mac Pros. I'm stuck with a choice between keeping my godawful NV 7300, or upgrading to a mid-range ATI cart, or an overpriced, extremely hardware-failure prone ATI X1900. "Weak" does not even begin to describe this situation.
Catan is okay, but it's extremely dicey, and it's very possible for your initial setup to screw you over for the rest of the game through no fault of your own, which is, IMO, even _worse_ than elimination, as you're stuck playing a game for the next 30+ minutes you know you have no chance of winning. I found it was fun the first time I played it, but it got progressively less and less fun each time I played it afterwards, until I eventually just gave my copy to someone else. (And to note, I won more often than not, I didn't get rid of it because I "sucked" at it.)
Personally, I'd be more inclined to recommend stuff like Santiago, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, or Reiner Knizia's "Samurai" to start someone off in board gaming, especially Santiago or Ticket to Ride, as they're pretty well designed to keep huge disparities from existing between player skill levels.
Bioshock is far more worthy of Game of the Year than Halo 3. Gripping story, stunning visuals, wonderful gameplay, and the permanent inability to look at the phrase "would you kindly?" in the same way ever again.:) Halo 3 is just Halo 1 and 2 with less of the detrimental stuff from the previous two. (Such as cut-and-paste level design.) It's a fun game, but hardly game-of-the-year material, unless you're only looking at sales.
Actually, the correct Latin is "vira" (it's one of those odd neuter words that look masculine at first glance) but as stated by another responder, the correct English is "viruses."
Wow. Pay attention to the rest of the world much? The vast majority of countries have cities with infrastructure, be they in North America, Europe, South America, or Africa. There are a hell of a lot of places in the world where the people are poor, but surviving, and have access to roads, electricity, and so on, where a bit more education could really, really help the people. Heck, there probably are more places like that in the world then there are places where most of the people live up to or beyond the standards of the American lower-middle class.
A license key is enough to discourage the casual pirate (custom encryption and multiple variables helps, such as name + password instead of just password) while, from my experience, not being enough to discourage regular users. Entering a key once and not worrying about it ever again is normal enough, and not bothersome. Going beyond that is asking for some glitch to cause legit customers to be calling you up to ask what the hell just caused their copy of your software to invalidate, or why they can't install it on their new computer, etc. Most importantly, it will also encourage people to crack your protection, thus making the pirate version more appealing to the end user.
I've played a couple of the Silent Hill games, and they were damn scary, more than any movie I've seen. But Bioshock even surpasses them. Stuff like fighting a Big Daddy, running through a door and waiting for it to come, then checking to find it right there ready to attack you, or running from one and getting boxed into a corner, frantically trying to get out and run to a safer distance can get pretty terrifying. And the most terrifying experience in any video game I've ever played was walking into a room which filled with steam. The steam cleared, and there was a splicer standing right in front of me, _staring_ at me. I reacted first and shot the hell out of it out of "OMG WTF!!!" reflexes, and now I wonder what would have happened if I'd waited just a little longer.
Welcome to the internet. It's part of the freedom that makes the internet so great, and you can't get rid of it without removing a lot of that freedom. And seriously... in the vast majority of cases, it's only as bad as you let it be. If you do anything controversial (or anything at all, really) you will get trolled from time to time. What separates the men from the boys and the ladies from the girls is whether you understand it's just some people having a little fun at your expense, and is no big deal, or whether you come on Slashdot and whine about it.
They're pretty renowned at this point for poor customer service, especially on the support end of things, and with the release of Parallels 3.0 they used misleading (some arguably outright false) advertising to sucker people into pre-ordering it because of its hardware 3D acceleration support. In reality, it barely supports DirectX 8.1, though I've heard it does Open GL okay. I will grant them this, though: they did eventually refund people their upgrade pre-orders, but this would render their licenses invalid, and I _think_ many or all of them couldn't revert to Parallels 2 (though I'm not positive on that, sorry) the whole thing was a general fiasco. Mind you, at least they did take some steps to make amends and all, so they're not _that_ bad, but still...
VMWare Fusion beta 4 (free open beta, currently) is pretty much on par with Parallels 3.0 (each is a bit better/worse than the other in some areas) and the official release is pre-orderable for half-price, and the full price is the same as Parallels'. From my experience, VMWare has been a much more trustworthy, reliable company, with much happier customers in general, and as such, I'd think it more kosher for them to be the VM lauded so highly, rather than the one included as an afterthought.:P
Actually, I've thought about this quite a bit, and I wouldn't think it would cannibalize into Apple's hardware sales. What Apple sells in mid-to-high range desktops and laptops are generally priced _extremely_ competitively (especially laptops; Mac laptops aren't so prevalent because of OS X, they're prevalent because you can't beat them for cost, reliability, and support) and expanding out into OS X on PCs not made by them would increase their software profits a whole lot (they are a software company, too. Consider the sales of iLife, iWork, etc. that could result from this) while not denting their hardware profits much.
The real hurdle (and why I imagine they've not done it yet) is hardware support. There's just way too damned much PC hardware out there, and they don't want to deal with the nightmare of running tech support for people running their OS on machines like that. That said, I _could_ realistically see Apple making deals with various other hardware manufacturers to ensure their machines are OS X compliant, and have a little official sticker or whatever like Windows does. Gradually expand into the PC market, more and more new PCs coming with OS X, while not supporting legacy hardware. It'd be a bit tricky, but if anyone could pull it off, it'd be Apple.
(This is not to say I think they _will_ do this, just that they _could_.)
Overall global warming could disrupt the oceanic currents, and actually make it _colder_ in Iceland and Europe. The reason Europe is temperate is because of oceanic currents bringing warm water to its shores. If those were to change too much, the climate in Europe could become like the climate in northern Canada.
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Slashdot logo - made you move back into your mother's basement.
I think Blankets is a proper piece of fine graphical literature. It tells a compelling, detailed story, and (this is important) it justifies its medium. There's a whole lot of depth of emotion conveyed perfectly through the imagery that would be awkward at best to put in words.
Maus, as mentioned by earlier people, is deserving of its Pulitzer. It's the best tale of the holocaust I've ever encountered in any medium.
Also mentioned earlier, The Sandman is my favorite literary work of all time, and it's nothing short of modern mythology. It's difficult not to believe Gaiman's own unique characters have not always been there in mythology as he wrote them. The story is epic, and full of brilliant twists and turns, and it leaves you really thinking about it.
And if Gaiman's character "Death" were real, it would be a lot easier to accept dying when that time comes.
If you want to find an example of superheroes done right, I recommend Rising Stars highly. Watchmen came really close to bringing superheroes into the real world, but fell short. (though it's still fun, and Rorschach is my favorite "superhero" of all time) Rising Stars was the first to really succeed, IMO.
It's only a matter of time before solid state memory (or something effectively similar) becomes cheap enough and with great enough capacity to be a _true_ leap forward. Smaller, more durable, more portable video disks, _players with no moving parts_ (a boon to portable video) and so on. DVD didn't take off because of better picture quality/more storage space alone, it took off because it's cheaper, more reliable, more durable, and more portable than VHS, and it doesn't degrade like magnetic tape does.
Sorry, I probably should have qualified my statements with "in the eyes of the public."
If Obama gets it, Nader probably won't get much support anyway, but if Clinton gets it, he'll probably get enough support to hurt the DNP in the general election, and frankly, the DNP needs a massive smack upside the head. They need to learn to stop fielding candidates the people can't get behind. Gore was too robotic, Kerry was too wishywashy, and Clinton is too ambitious and unscrupulous. Maybe, just maybe, if Clinton runs and Nader "steals her votes" the party might just get a frigging clue.
It's even remotely near the leap from VHS to DVD. DVD to Blu-Ray, you get slightly better picture quality and/or more content per disc. VHS to DVD, you went from costly (production-wise, comparatively) bulky magnetic tapes that were prone to degrading over time, getting messed up by magnets, getting eaten by players, and so on, to optical discs which are smaller, lighter, as portable as CDs, with a longer lifespan, and cheaper production costs, and in time DVD drives allowed you to use DVDs with your computer, too, without having to invest in anything more than a better optical drive. That's a _damn_ huge difference of technology.
Blu-Ray is still and likely always will be a niche product for technophiles who _must_ have the latest and greatest and biggest and best, and poor sods with disposable income who get suckered into buying into it.
"Virtually 100% of medical advances come from the US, and are 90% paid for by US medical costs."
You know, if you're going to pull statistics out of your ass, you can at least come up with something more believable.
I guess all these medical breakthroughs I hear about happening in places like Europe, Japan, India, etc. are because of the US medical system. Or my imagination. Go figure.
I'd have to say it's pretty much a tie between the NES and the PSX. Why? Because both essentially saved console gaming in their times. The NES pulled gaming out of a hell of utter lack of game production standards, and it introduced one of the greatest controller innovations ever: the D-Pad. The PSX was moderately priced and used CD-ROM media, which let its games be inexpensive and contain more content than cartridge-based games. This combined what would grow to be possibly the largest library of games ever, with many truly wonderful games (Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, etc.) that brought console gaming into the mainstream. And after the N64 introduced analog sticks on controllers, Sony trumped it with the best-designed controller ever, the Dual Shock. Ever since then, with the exception of the Wii, controllers have primarily tended to be some variation of the Dual Shock, and that's a good thing.
The Mac Pro is less than 2 years old. The NVidia 8800 GT PC version works great in it under Windows, from what I've heard. Yet, Apple was either too lazy/incompetent or outright malicious to make the Mac version of that card compatible with older Mac Pros. I'm stuck with a choice between keeping my godawful NV 7300, or upgrading to a mid-range ATI cart, or an overpriced, extremely hardware-failure prone ATI X1900. "Weak" does not even begin to describe this situation.
So, is this "Oliver Rist" a new pseudonym of John Dvorak's, or did PC Magazine manage to find someone else just as whiny?
Catan is okay, but it's extremely dicey, and it's very possible for your initial setup to screw you over for the rest of the game through no fault of your own, which is, IMO, even _worse_ than elimination, as you're stuck playing a game for the next 30+ minutes you know you have no chance of winning. I found it was fun the first time I played it, but it got progressively less and less fun each time I played it afterwards, until I eventually just gave my copy to someone else. (And to note, I won more often than not, I didn't get rid of it because I "sucked" at it.)
Personally, I'd be more inclined to recommend stuff like Santiago, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, or Reiner Knizia's "Samurai" to start someone off in board gaming, especially Santiago or Ticket to Ride, as they're pretty well designed to keep huge disparities from existing between player skill levels.
Uh... it's not _that_ uncommon. When I went to give my extra copies away, several people didn't have them and wanted them.
Bioshock is far more worthy of Game of the Year than Halo 3. Gripping story, stunning visuals, wonderful gameplay, and the permanent inability to look at the phrase "would you kindly?" in the same way ever again. :) Halo 3 is just Halo 1 and 2 with less of the detrimental stuff from the previous two. (Such as cut-and-paste level design.) It's a fun game, but hardly game-of-the-year material, unless you're only looking at sales.
Actually, the correct Latin is "vira" (it's one of those odd neuter words that look masculine at first glance) but as stated by another responder, the correct English is "viruses."
Wow. Pay attention to the rest of the world much? The vast majority of countries have cities with infrastructure, be they in North America, Europe, South America, or Africa. There are a hell of a lot of places in the world where the people are poor, but surviving, and have access to roads, electricity, and so on, where a bit more education could really, really help the people. Heck, there probably are more places like that in the world then there are places where most of the people live up to or beyond the standards of the American lower-middle class.
EBGames is Gamestop. As are Babbages and Funcoland. Gamestop owns all the big chain game stores.
A license key is enough to discourage the casual pirate (custom encryption and multiple variables helps, such as name + password instead of just password) while, from my experience, not being enough to discourage regular users. Entering a key once and not worrying about it ever again is normal enough, and not bothersome. Going beyond that is asking for some glitch to cause legit customers to be calling you up to ask what the hell just caused their copy of your software to invalidate, or why they can't install it on their new computer, etc. Most importantly, it will also encourage people to crack your protection, thus making the pirate version more appealing to the end user.
I've played a couple of the Silent Hill games, and they were damn scary, more than any movie I've seen. But Bioshock even surpasses them. Stuff like fighting a Big Daddy, running through a door and waiting for it to come, then checking to find it right there ready to attack you, or running from one and getting boxed into a corner, frantically trying to get out and run to a safer distance can get pretty terrifying. And the most terrifying experience in any video game I've ever played was walking into a room which filled with steam. The steam cleared, and there was a splicer standing right in front of me, _staring_ at me. I reacted first and shot the hell out of it out of "OMG WTF!!!" reflexes, and now I wonder what would have happened if I'd waited just a little longer.
You mean developers are actually using DirectX 10?
Hey! Daikatana did actually come out eventually.
I used to think like that, once.
Then I grew up.
Welcome to the internet. It's part of the freedom that makes the internet so great, and you can't get rid of it without removing a lot of that freedom. And seriously... in the vast majority of cases, it's only as bad as you let it be. If you do anything controversial (or anything at all, really) you will get trolled from time to time. What separates the men from the boys and the ladies from the girls is whether you understand it's just some people having a little fun at your expense, and is no big deal, or whether you come on Slashdot and whine about it.
They're pretty renowned at this point for poor customer service, especially on the support end of things, and with the release of Parallels 3.0 they used misleading (some arguably outright false) advertising to sucker people into pre-ordering it because of its hardware 3D acceleration support. In reality, it barely supports DirectX 8.1, though I've heard it does Open GL okay. I will grant them this, though: they did eventually refund people their upgrade pre-orders, but this would render their licenses invalid, and I _think_ many or all of them couldn't revert to Parallels 2 (though I'm not positive on that, sorry) the whole thing was a general fiasco. Mind you, at least they did take some steps to make amends and all, so they're not _that_ bad, but still...
:P
VMWare Fusion beta 4 (free open beta, currently) is pretty much on par with Parallels 3.0 (each is a bit better/worse than the other in some areas) and the official release is pre-orderable for half-price, and the full price is the same as Parallels'. From my experience, VMWare has been a much more trustworthy, reliable company, with much happier customers in general, and as such, I'd think it more kosher for them to be the VM lauded so highly, rather than the one included as an afterthought.
Actually, I've thought about this quite a bit, and I wouldn't think it would cannibalize into Apple's hardware sales. What Apple sells in mid-to-high range desktops and laptops are generally priced _extremely_ competitively (especially laptops; Mac laptops aren't so prevalent because of OS X, they're prevalent because you can't beat them for cost, reliability, and support) and expanding out into OS X on PCs not made by them would increase their software profits a whole lot (they are a software company, too. Consider the sales of iLife, iWork, etc. that could result from this) while not denting their hardware profits much.
The real hurdle (and why I imagine they've not done it yet) is hardware support. There's just way too damned much PC hardware out there, and they don't want to deal with the nightmare of running tech support for people running their OS on machines like that. That said, I _could_ realistically see Apple making deals with various other hardware manufacturers to ensure their machines are OS X compliant, and have a little official sticker or whatever like Windows does. Gradually expand into the PC market, more and more new PCs coming with OS X, while not supporting legacy hardware. It'd be a bit tricky, but if anyone could pull it off, it'd be Apple.
(This is not to say I think they _will_ do this, just that they _could_.)
"You said it! They stink on ice!"
Overall global warming could disrupt the oceanic currents, and actually make it _colder_ in Iceland and Europe. The reason Europe is temperate is because of oceanic currents bringing warm water to its shores. If those were to change too much, the climate in Europe could become like the climate in northern Canada.