I do hope people at the Olympic Commitee realize that their games are slowly shifting from sport to engineering?
The question is, once the Olympic Games, as well as a whole other lot of various sports - look at the Tour de France - become a dangerous arena where everything, legal or not, is done to upgrade the athletes to a victory which is the only, absolute goal since we've come to entertain a deeply sick fetishism for any kind of winner, no matter if it was in a fair competition and if he/she deserved it, once sports in general, and the Olympic Games in particular become the field of a elite crew of genetically engineered humans, what will then be the point for such games? Aren't sports from the Olympic perspective a way of celebrating and uniting humanity in competitions that are meant to be fair? If the athletes become better than normal human beings, not because of training but because of biological engineering, will humanity still identify itself to its champions who would have unnaturally bulky muscles, a blood that could carry insane amounts of oxygen and tightly-controlled metabolisms? How would these athletes be different from machines, engineered with a precise purpose - and discarded, left out to die afterwards (damn, look at what happened to Marco Pantani)...
Worshipping winners instead of reverring competition in itself is having us slide along a slippery and very dangerous slope, IMO. At least, if those victory-obsessed were tinkering with cybernetic bodies or something close - replaceable, tweakable at will... But no, they're playing with their own lives. All that for a victory which means nothing but insane amounts of money.
They can name that weasel how they want, it still seems like it's going to be a pleasure wearing a t-shirt with the copyright, corporate-funded weasel hung and quartered, sliced up into small parts, or (insert your own violent death / humiliating treatment of sexual nature, preferably involving a penguin and/or a gnu)
The more cute and antropomorphic corporate icons are, the more fun they become to represent in the most violent, gory and plain insane situations.
Only this time, if one manages to actually shock any kids with this kind of parody / bitter graphical revenge, it'll actually be useful and not Yet Another Childhood Innocence thrown away. * maniacal laughter *
What's interesting about this licence is that is has been written by institutions close from the french government - the CEA are strongly bound to it because they're the ones in charge, AFAIK, of both military and civilian nuclear technology, and the CNRS and INRIA are well-known national research institutes.
IANAL, but I'm quite sure such a licence is something that may potentially be taken seriously by courts, at least in France. If only because of its apparently complex french lawyerspeak... And because of its origins, probably way more serious from the perspective of a judiciary system than a licence written by a group of idealists in a country where laws aren't the same, and in a different language. As some more or less explicitly pointed here, licence translations aren't that good - I guess the potentially ambiguous nature and abusive lexical complexity of lawyerspeak aren't something that is easily translateable.
Now, there is something in the press release that may make some cringe. Here's a fairly literal translation of a snippet in this release :
This licence is the first of a family intended to develop itself along principles characterizing other very used licences At the end of this sentence is written a small superscript 2 that sends to a footnote whose meaning goes as follows :
Namely the LGPL (Lesser General Public Licence), QPL (Q Public Licence) and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licences. I'll let you ponder on whether BSD's a free licence...
These things are still used! These homebrew logic blocks aren't equipped with output devices beyond LEDs or small numerical displays, but they're incredibly useful when it comes to practicing what you're learning in a logic systems course.
The Logic Systems Laboratory of the SFIT/EPFL has a lab full of logidules. The Computer Science and Communication Systems students in their first year there are lucky enough to play with this geeky toy on a weekly basis...
I'm wondering how many generations of nerds have drooled over those blocks. Even if they're almost 30 years old, they're still incredibly addictive to use.
Of course, we should wait and see, with this project as well as with the rest, but sheer passion sometimes comes in the way...
Evangelion is a very special case in anime. Viewing it in its entirety is mildly disturbing for the majority of those who try. For some, it's good anime, but nothing exceptional.
But for some others, it's a blast. A complete shock. Those people, having seen the series (and worse, the movies), blast off for a complete trip far, far away from here, asking themselves about Life, the Universe and Everything more than any sane being should try. Yup, real world/inner universe disconnection. It can go very far, trust me, up to the point many fans dream about, when you actually feel like you're in the story...
(In the 'unexpected side effects' department, this anime may inflict such a shock that it may do strange things. On myself, it caused a psychological chain reaction over months, and threw me out of my standard teenage nerd depression)
Now imagine those people facing a potential defacing of their favorite-to-obsession anime title. Even worse, Hollywoodian defacing, implying americanization, which is something a lot of anime fans are afraid of...
I think you've figured out by now what could happen if they really screw up their adaptation.
Personally, as a former Eva no Otaku, I'd then demand immediate and painful termination.
Let they mess as they please with DBZ, but I won't easily accept the fact many, many people may one day remember Evangelion as a very bad movie. And my fellow otakus are not going to either...
Basically, in this anime series probably set in the near future the Net we know is called the 'Wired', and it is undergoing transition to IPv7 (no typo involved).
IPv7 seemingly uses traditional communication systems, as well as the Earth's background magnetic field to transmit data. And humans are able to parse the data transmitted through the mag field. That means, the Wired is plugged right into the sensorium of the entire human race. Confusion ensues, as reality and the 'net are being mixed up in everybody's minds, leading to... interesting situations.
This news reminds me of this anime, too... And what a coincidence, a well-known japanese telco is involved.
... when we are reminded of the end that awaits what we are living in ?
Think I am a weirdo, but I don't mind dying much, because I've gotten used to the idea. I don't mind seeing Man and Earth disappear in a bang, because I'm sure we're not isolated cases.
But the idea of the Universe stupidly fading out and getting dark bothers me up to no end. The Universe is so beautiful in its diversity, complexity and immensity that I cannot, and maybe never will, stand the single idea that it could become a large dead chunk of emptiness.
Of course these are just theories, and as some say, it's the truth until someone finds a better suiting idea. Whatever happens, I will not accept the idea that our Universe is a one-shot thingy, with a beginning, an end and a nice short period of a few billion years suitable for life as we know it. Even less the idea that we're seeing the beginning of the end, so to speak.
I want to believe it's eternal. I want to believe the end of the Universe, if there is any end or beginning for that matter, is a so-called big crunch leading into the creation of a new Universe. I want to believe there are some other Universes elsewhere, far from anything we'll ever reach.
Maybe now I can understand the pain that some Christians must stand while science denies a lot of things they thought were true. Like how we were created in the first place...
Even if they are playing MMORPGs or waiting for some flash to load, this is a victory over global dumbness. I won't discuss the merits of stupid flash animations - I still have to find any ^^;, but as for MMORPGS, they are interesting. TV is passive, but MMORPGS clearly require some cerebral activity - barring Diablo II. Besides, they're often creating parallel small societies (guilds, clans, etc) fueling subcultures and reflexions sometimes spreading out of the game and out in the real world - for now, I can only remember about really dumb things (the "All your base" thingy that was created by, erh, fans of Zero Wing and relayed by those Starsiege Tribers), but I'm sure that something will one day come out of all that.
Anyway, every hour spent online is way better than any hour spent on TV. Being online keeps your brain working, I doubt TV does that very often.
The only main drawback I can think about compared to TV are RSI, tendinitis and such. Mostly because it can harm virtually everyone, even the total slackers that manage to do nothing on the net (well, like me for example...)
... but it should continue until being dumb is classified as a major mental disorder. As a result we'll have a good portion of the human species classified and marked as "mentally unstable", and then maybe, when every ruler of this planet and the docs that are wacky enough to diagnose this to everyone have been put under a treatement strong enough to render them even dumber (mind-numbing drugs for those who are considered abnormal today, like neuroleptics, ARE really powerful) and harmless...... then maybe we'll stop seeing abnormality in everyone and start making interesting things.
Or am I dreaming again ?
- Hadriven
[it looks like a troll. smells like a troll. ah, whatever.]
I'm pretty sure that Infornography is another valid term for anything information-addiction related...
I'm still wondering what the makers of the anime Serial Experiments Lain were smoking/sniffing at the time they produced such a bizarre series.
But it must have been similar to the Spice Melange or something close, mostly because S.E. Lain often resembles a dark-in-some-aspects prediction of what is coming for us...
- Hadriven
The fact this case looks like the principle behind Minority Report - arrest people BEFORE they commit crimes - is undeniable, however, there's something a bit more frightening. I didn't see nor read Minority Report, but correct me if I'm wrong, in that movie/novel, people are imprisoned because the Law is sure you're going to do some bad out there - and for the majority of cases they're right because that's what would have happened. (then there's the problem about a minority...)
But here, we aren't talking about predicted crimes. We're talking about POTENTIAL breakings of the law. Should the corporates have caught the guy actually selling the thing, they would effectively had reasons to sue him like hell, but as it seems, he hadn't even begun to do so.
I know, the same guy had already been having quite a lot of problems with that the previous years, but, hey, it seems to me you are free to do whatever pleases you as long as it doesn't breaks the law, right ? Here, the DoJ's anticipation got a bit too far. What's the problem with carrying around some-electronics-stuff-that-could-potentially-be-u sed-for-massive-copyright-infringement ?
There's a context, a record behind the man. But it once stood somewhere into the brains of at least SOME policemen/inspectors/lawyers/judges that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty. Where's the guilt here ? They could have permanently glued someone on his tail, tapped into any communication line the POTENTIAL "criminal" used, and caught him the moment he was "officially" - that means, to the eye of the public, and to the eye of the law - causing "financial harm" to the companies.
That's not what they did, it seems. Judging he was going to get dangerous again, they ensured he'd be punished before he could do any real harm. In some ways it resembles what happened to people who looked "suspect" to the authorities, a few days and weeks after some madman decided to scare the hell out of any proud American out there - and achieved his goal the best way possible. Remember 9/11, right ? Since then, as it seems, you can be arrested for the seemingly arbitrary reason of suspected terrorism.
In the case I'm talking about, it's (heavily) suspected copyright/rights infringement. In the first case, at best you save lives. Here, at best, you save money. Quite a proof that in the mind of way too much people out there, human lives and money have become quite the same in terms of value...
Simply put : the rights of those who've got the money, therefore the power, are enforced, and this, now is possible even before said rights are violated.
That's widening the subject to a wider debate, but I do not call that justice, knowing that your rights won't be as efficiently defended should you not have enough zeros on your accounts. I do not call that Justice.
Anyway, what's the most scary is that the US calls that vision of things justice. And are pretending it is fair. Come on...
Besides, you just can't demand $180M from a physical person. This is even beyond our good ol' friend Gates' reach. Not to mention the fact this amount was "evaluated". How ?
You know, it has been imagined before that a live-action Evangelion movie could be done, but it ended with the conclusion : let's hope it doesn't happens.
There are a few reasons about this.
1. FUNDS. How can an adaptation of a series that's full of heavy steel, gunfire, apocalyptic explosions, mind-boggling psychotrips be correctly done, out of the "cellulo-space" ? One of the reasons of why Anime earned such a success in Japan is that filmmakers there didn't have enough money to crank out movies without said movies seriously lacking... funds. Celluloid really IS cheaper for impossible scenes like some that are in Eva... And porting this to the silver screen should require some huge amounts of money. Where are they going to find the budget usually used for an announced blockbuster ? I hopa Gainax's not going to spend too much on that, I'd really get angry if they had to close before of the bankrupt following the release of that movie.
2. CHARACTERS. Ikari Shinji. Soryû Langley Asuka. Ayanami Rei. These surely sound European, heh ? What are they going do ? Rename all those people, thus moving the entire story in the US and getting American actors ? (yeah, "Washington-3", sure.) Or will they stick with Japanese actors ? How can you even reproduce de-japanized japanese people drawn on celluloid well enough ? I'll be curious to see who gets the role for Ayanami Rei. If it destroys my dream vision of an almost-perfect (barring an introverted-beyond-autism personality) human being...
3. STORYLINE. How will you ever be able to summarize that twisted series that is Evangelion into something that can be seen in 2-3 hours ? Or if you take the problem the other way, how will you take a part of the series without screwing the entire context/continuity/complexity ? And what about the complexity itself ? Will the scenario scaled-down for the non-depressed to understand ? I surely don't want to see an action film made out of THIS. Do you ?
4. WAY OF THINKING. There are things Japanese can stand that Americans can't, and the other way. What would be done about those things ? I mean, there are some in the storyline that are understood (and appreciated ?) by us nerds, but for the others... Remember the beginning of EoE, you'll get an idea of what I mean.
I spent too much weeks staring at the ceiling after having seen Eva to let it become a botched adaptation. Really.
- SYSTEM SHOCK 2. Yes, I was among the ones who knew and tried that complex, dark, buy awesome piece of gameplay. Once you've crawled through the corridors of the Von Braun for enough time, you never forget the fear you experienced, up there in a cramped version of Hell itself. Especially the feeling of imminent - and violent - death that never ever leaves your mind, should you be wielding a wrench or a grenade launcher. Neither shall you forget the unmistakable face and voice of SHODAN. She still beats any game villain that was, is, or will be, hands down. I didn't play the first System Shock much, mostly because that one actually scared me enough to keep me from playing. Were the pixels or the things represented by pixels the most scary ? Can't tell...
- DEUS EX. A great, great one. Loved everything in it. The 3d engine, the game physics, the weapons, the levels, the music, and last but not least, the storyline that drags you around a world on the brink of revolution, with you as a significant actor. One of the first games that made me think beyond "should I use a rocket or grenade launcher ?", decide and that showed me the consequences. The ending made me wonder for a lot of time afterwards. This spawned some interesting discussions in the forums I was reading then...
- QUAKE I & II. The first for the multiplayer, the second for the single player. Just plain great. Quake is not a game, it's a phenomenon.
- HALF-LIFE. Enough said about the game that still survives today, thanks to its mods and its awesome single and multiplayer game. One game reviewer said once, in a french games magazine : "The only game that shall ever surpass Half-Life will be Half-Life 2". I took it as being optimistic back then, but less than a year before the release of the sequel, one can be amazed at how that may be true...
- HOMEWORLD. That one still's in my heart. It was, and still is, among the best of the best. Incredible for its game engine and graphics at the time, but also and mostly for its story, and the way to tell it. How many games at the time had successfully used cinematographic techniques the way Homeworld did ? That was a game ahead of everything at the time. I can still watch the introduction sequence - the mothership's launch - or the ending credits, and literally get the creeps out of it.
- UNREAL. I got obsessed by that game ever since I saw it. This was more than a shooter, that was a virtual Sci-Fi trip, an almost-real walk through a colorful, beautiful but quite badly populated planet. Incredible from the beginning to the end, except for the very very end itself, maybe...
- WING COMMANDER : PRIVATEER. One of the first games I ever got addicted to. I played almost one year non-stop after I got the CD version, and I'm afraid no game will ever recreate the unique sensations that one gave me. Speeding through the Gemini sector, haulin' goods in an overarmed Centurion to keep those crazy pirates away... Ah, the good old times. When a 2-button joystick was enough. ^^ Elite III was excellent, too, but a bit too... elite.
- STARCRAFT. C'mon, you know why.
- FALLOUT. One of the rare RPGs that got me hooked. No need to explain why, except maybe : non-linearity.
Besides from all that, I didn't dream much of all these things, except some weird ones about seeing all blurred walls, because I hadn't cranked up the textures resolution up enough (that's what happens when you play Deus Ex too much on an old machine and are forced to use low-res ones...), or plainly using Unreal Tournament's (1999) game menu to save my dream before waking up. Don't know whether I loaded my save afterwards though...
Otherwise, I lost my social life as a lot of you must have, I lost part of my sanity in the process, and I caught some tendinitis on both hands playing GTA 3 and Day Of Defeat. Tendinitis I don't know what to do with, almost seven months after, and still hurting, in fact...
Maybe ThinkGeek could do some T-Shirts with "I LEFT MY TENDONS ON MY KEYBOARD". I'll buy...
Slashdot Mirror
I do hope people at the Olympic Commitee realize that their games are slowly shifting from sport to engineering?
The question is, once the Olympic Games, as well as a whole other lot of various sports - look at the Tour de France - become a dangerous arena where everything, legal or not, is done to upgrade the athletes to a victory which is the only, absolute goal since we've come to entertain a deeply sick fetishism for any kind of winner, no matter if it was in a fair competition and if he/she deserved it, once sports in general, and the Olympic Games in particular become the field of a elite crew of genetically engineered humans, what will then be the point for such games? Aren't sports from the Olympic perspective a way of celebrating and uniting humanity in competitions that are meant to be fair?
If the athletes become better than normal human beings, not because of training but because of biological engineering, will humanity still identify itself to its champions who would have unnaturally bulky muscles, a blood that could carry insane amounts of oxygen and tightly-controlled metabolisms?
How would these athletes be different from machines, engineered with a precise purpose - and discarded, left out to die afterwards (damn, look at what happened to Marco Pantani)...
Worshipping winners instead of reverring competition in itself is having us slide along a slippery and very dangerous slope, IMO.
- HadrivenAt least, if those victory-obsessed were tinkering with cybernetic bodies or something close - replaceable, tweakable at will... But no, they're playing with their own lives. All that for a victory which means nothing but insane amounts of money.
They can name that weasel how they want, it still seems like it's going to be a pleasure wearing a t-shirt with the copyright, corporate-funded weasel hung and quartered, sliced up into small parts, or (insert your own violent death / humiliating treatment of sexual nature, preferably involving a penguin and/or a gnu)
The more cute and antropomorphic corporate icons are, the more fun they become to represent in the most violent, gory and plain insane situations.
Only this time, if one manages to actually shock any kids with this kind of parody / bitter graphical revenge, it'll actually be useful and not Yet Another Childhood Innocence thrown away. * maniacal laughter *
- Hadriven
What's interesting about this licence is that is has been written by institutions close from the french government - the CEA are strongly bound to it because they're the ones in charge, AFAIK, of both military and civilian nuclear technology, and the CNRS and INRIA are well-known national research institutes.
IANAL, but I'm quite sure such a licence is something that may potentially be taken seriously by courts, at least in France. If only because of its apparently complex french lawyerspeak... And because of its origins, probably way more serious from the perspective of a judiciary system than a licence written by a group of idealists in a country where laws aren't the same, and in a different language. As some more or less explicitly pointed here, licence translations aren't that good - I guess the potentially ambiguous nature and abusive lexical complexity of lawyerspeak aren't something that is easily translateable.
Now, there is something in the press release that may make some cringe. Here's a fairly literal translation of a snippet in this release :
This licence is the first of a family intended to develop itself along principles characterizing other very used licences
At the end of this sentence is written a small superscript 2 that sends to a footnote whose meaning goes as follows :
Namely the LGPL (Lesser General Public Licence), QPL (Q Public Licence) and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licences.
I'll let you ponder on whether BSD's a free licence...
- Hadriven
These things are still used! These homebrew logic blocks aren't equipped with output devices beyond LEDs or small numerical displays, but they're incredibly useful when it comes to practicing what you're learning in a logic systems course.
The Logic Systems Laboratory of the SFIT/EPFL has a lab full of logidules. The Computer Science and Communication Systems students in their first year there are lucky enough to play with this geeky toy on a weekly basis...
I'm wondering how many generations of nerds have drooled over those blocks. Even if they're almost 30 years old, they're still incredibly addictive to use.
- Hadriven
Of course, we should wait and see, with this project as well as with the rest, but sheer passion sometimes comes in the way...
Evangelion is a very special case in anime. Viewing it in its entirety is mildly disturbing for the majority of those who try. For some, it's good anime, but nothing exceptional.
But for some others, it's a blast. A complete shock. Those people, having seen the series (and worse, the movies), blast off for a complete trip far, far away from here, asking themselves about Life, the Universe and Everything more than any sane being should try. Yup, real world/inner universe disconnection. It can go very far, trust me, up to the point many fans dream about, when you actually feel like you're in the story...
(In the 'unexpected side effects' department, this anime may inflict such a shock that it may do strange things. On myself, it caused a psychological chain reaction over months, and threw me out of my standard teenage nerd depression)
Now imagine those people facing a potential defacing of their favorite-to-obsession anime title. Even worse, Hollywoodian defacing, implying americanization, which is something a lot of anime fans are afraid of...
I think you've figured out by now what could happen if they really screw up their adaptation.
Personally, as a former Eva no Otaku, I'd then demand immediate and painful termination.
Let they mess as they please with DBZ, but I won't easily accept the fact many, many people may one day remember Evangelion as a very bad movie.
And my fellow otakus are not going to either...
- Hadriven
(slight but not that-important spoilers ahead)
Basically, in this anime series probably set in the near future the Net we know is called the 'Wired', and it is undergoing transition to IPv7 (no typo involved).
IPv7 seemingly uses traditional communication systems, as well as the Earth's background magnetic field to transmit data. And humans are able to parse the data transmitted through the mag field. That means, the Wired is plugged right into the sensorium of the entire human race. Confusion ensues, as reality and the 'net are being mixed up in everybody's minds, leading to... interesting situations.
This news reminds me of this anime, too... And what a coincidence, a well-known japanese telco is involved.
- Hadriven
... when we are reminded of the end that awaits what we are living in ?
Think I am a weirdo, but I don't mind dying much, because I've gotten used to the idea. I don't mind seeing Man and Earth disappear in a bang, because I'm sure we're not isolated cases.
But the idea of the Universe stupidly fading out and getting dark bothers me up to no end. The Universe is so beautiful in its diversity, complexity and immensity that I cannot, and maybe never will, stand the single idea that it could become a large dead chunk of emptiness.
Of course these are just theories, and as some say, it's the truth until someone finds a better suiting idea. Whatever happens, I will not accept the idea that our Universe is a one-shot thingy, with a beginning, an end and a nice short period of a few billion years suitable for life as we know it. Even less the idea that we're seeing the beginning of the end, so to speak.
I want to believe it's eternal. I want to believe the end of the Universe, if there is any end or beginning for that matter, is a so-called big crunch leading into the creation of a new Universe. I want to believe there are some other Universes elsewhere, far from anything we'll ever reach.
Maybe now I can understand the pain that some Christians must stand while science denies a lot of things they thought were true. Like how we were created in the first place...
- Hadriven
Even if they are playing MMORPGs or waiting for some flash to load, this is a victory over global dumbness. I won't discuss the merits of stupid flash animations - I still have to find any ^^;, but as for MMORPGS, they are interesting. TV is passive, but MMORPGS clearly require some cerebral activity - barring Diablo II. Besides, they're often creating parallel small societies (guilds, clans, etc) fueling subcultures and reflexions sometimes spreading out of the game and out in the real world - for now, I can only remember about really dumb things (the "All your base" thingy that was created by, erh, fans of Zero Wing and relayed by those Starsiege Tribers), but I'm sure that something will one day come out of all that.
Anyway, every hour spent online is way better than any hour spent on TV. Being online keeps your brain working, I doubt TV does that very often.
The only main drawback I can think about compared to TV are RSI, tendinitis and such. Mostly because it can harm virtually everyone, even the total slackers that manage to do nothing on the net (well, like me for example...)
- Hadriven
... but it should continue until being dumb is classified as a major mental disorder. As a result we'll have a good portion of the human species classified and marked as "mentally unstable", and then maybe, when every ruler of this planet and the docs that are wacky enough to diagnose this to everyone have been put under a treatement strong enough to render them even dumber (mind-numbing drugs for those who are considered abnormal today, like neuroleptics, ARE really powerful) and harmless... ... then maybe we'll stop seeing abnormality in everyone and start making interesting things.
Or am I dreaming again ?
- Hadriven
[it looks like a troll. smells like a troll. ah, whatever.]
I'm still wondering what the makers of the anime Serial Experiments Lain were smoking/sniffing at the time they produced such a bizarre series.
But it must have been similar to the Spice Melange or something close, mostly because S.E. Lain often resembles a dark-in-some-aspects prediction of what is coming for us... - Hadriven
The fact this case looks like the principle behind Minority Report - arrest people BEFORE they commit crimes - is undeniable, however, there's something a bit more frightening. I didn't see nor read Minority Report, but correct me if I'm wrong, in that movie/novel, people are imprisoned because the Law is sure you're going to do some bad out there - and for the majority of cases they're right because that's what would have happened. (then there's the problem about a minority...)
u sed-for-massive-copyright-infringement ?
But here, we aren't talking about predicted crimes. We're talking about POTENTIAL breakings of the law.
Should the corporates have caught the guy actually selling the thing, they would effectively had reasons to sue him like hell, but as it seems, he hadn't even begun to do so.
I know, the same guy had already been having quite a lot of problems with that the previous years, but, hey, it seems to me you are free to do whatever pleases you as long as it doesn't breaks the law, right ? Here, the DoJ's anticipation got a bit too far. What's the problem with carrying around some-electronics-stuff-that-could-potentially-be-
There's a context, a record behind the man. But it once stood somewhere into the brains of at least SOME policemen/inspectors/lawyers/judges that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty. Where's the guilt here ? They could have permanently glued someone on his tail, tapped into any communication line the POTENTIAL "criminal" used, and caught him the moment he was "officially" - that means, to the eye of the public, and to the eye of the law - causing "financial harm" to the companies.
That's not what they did, it seems. Judging he was going to get dangerous again, they ensured he'd be punished before he could do any real harm.
In some ways it resembles what happened to people who looked "suspect" to the authorities, a few days and weeks after some madman decided to scare the hell out of any proud American out there - and achieved his goal the best way possible. Remember 9/11, right ? Since then, as it seems, you can be arrested for the seemingly arbitrary reason of suspected terrorism.
In the case I'm talking about, it's (heavily) suspected copyright/rights infringement. In the first case, at best you save lives. Here, at best, you save money. Quite a proof that in the mind of way too much people out there, human lives and money have become quite the same in terms of value...
Simply put : the rights of those who've got the money, therefore the power, are enforced, and this, now is possible even before said rights are violated.
That's widening the subject to a wider debate, but I do not call that justice, knowing that your rights won't be as efficiently defended should you not have enough zeros on your accounts. I do not call that Justice.
Anyway, what's the most scary is that the US calls that vision of things justice. And are pretending it is fair. Come on...
Besides, you just can't demand $180M from a physical person. This is even beyond our good ol' friend Gates' reach. Not to mention the fact this amount was "evaluated". How ?
- Hadriven
You know, it has been imagined before that a live-action Evangelion movie could be done, but it ended with the conclusion : let's hope it doesn't happens.
There are a few reasons about this.
1. FUNDS. How can an adaptation of a series that's full of heavy steel, gunfire, apocalyptic explosions, mind-boggling psychotrips be correctly done, out of the "cellulo-space" ?
One of the reasons of why Anime earned such a success in Japan is that filmmakers there didn't have enough money to crank out movies without said movies seriously lacking... funds. Celluloid really IS cheaper for impossible scenes like some that are in Eva... And porting this to the silver screen should require some huge amounts of money. Where are they going to find the budget usually used for an announced blockbuster ? I hopa Gainax's not going to spend too much on that, I'd really get angry if they had to close before of the bankrupt following the release of that movie.
2. CHARACTERS. Ikari Shinji. Soryû Langley Asuka. Ayanami Rei. These surely sound European, heh ? What are they going do ? Rename all those people, thus moving the entire story in the US and getting American actors ? (yeah, "Washington-3", sure.)
Or will they stick with Japanese actors ? How can you even reproduce de-japanized japanese people drawn on celluloid well enough ? I'll be curious to see who gets the role for Ayanami Rei. If it destroys my dream vision of an almost-perfect (barring an introverted-beyond-autism personality) human being...
3. STORYLINE. How will you ever be able to summarize that twisted series that is Evangelion into something that can be seen in 2-3 hours ? Or if you take the problem the other way, how will you take a part of the series without screwing the entire context/continuity/complexity ?
And what about the complexity itself ? Will the scenario scaled-down for the non-depressed to understand ? I surely don't want to see an action film made out of THIS. Do you ?
4. WAY OF THINKING. There are things Japanese can stand that Americans can't, and the other way. What would be done about those things ? I mean, there are some in the storyline that are understood (and appreciated ?) by us nerds, but for the others... Remember the beginning of EoE, you'll get an idea of what I mean.
I spent too much weeks staring at the ceiling after having seen Eva to let it become a botched adaptation. Really.
- Hadriven
- SYSTEM SHOCK 2. Yes, I was among the ones who knew and tried that complex, dark, buy awesome piece of gameplay. Once you've crawled through the corridors of the Von Braun for enough time, you never forget the fear you experienced, up there in a cramped version of Hell itself. Especially the feeling of imminent - and violent - death that never ever leaves your mind, should you be wielding a wrench or a grenade launcher.
Neither shall you forget the unmistakable face and voice of SHODAN. She still beats any game villain that was, is, or will be, hands down.
I didn't play the first System Shock much, mostly because that one actually scared me enough to keep me from playing. Were the pixels or the things represented by pixels the most scary ? Can't tell...
- DEUS EX. A great, great one. Loved everything in it. The 3d engine, the game physics, the weapons, the levels, the music, and last but not least, the storyline that drags you around a world on the brink of revolution, with you as a significant actor. One of the first games that made me think beyond "should I use a rocket or grenade launcher ?", decide and that showed me the consequences.
The ending made me wonder for a lot of time afterwards. This spawned some interesting discussions in the forums I was reading then...
- QUAKE I & II. The first for the multiplayer, the second for the single player. Just plain great. Quake is not a game, it's a phenomenon.
- HALF-LIFE. Enough said about the game that still survives today, thanks to its mods and its awesome single and multiplayer game. One game reviewer said once, in a french games magazine : "The only game that shall ever surpass Half-Life will be Half-Life 2". I took it as being optimistic back then, but less than a year before the release of the sequel, one can be amazed at how that may be true...
- HOMEWORLD. That one still's in my heart. It was, and still is, among the best of the best. Incredible for its game engine and graphics at the time, but also and mostly for its story, and the way to tell it. How many games at the time had successfully used cinematographic techniques the way Homeworld did ? That was a game ahead of everything at the time. I can still watch the introduction sequence - the mothership's launch - or the ending credits, and literally get the creeps out of it.
- UNREAL. I got obsessed by that game ever since I saw it. This was more than a shooter, that was a virtual Sci-Fi trip, an almost-real walk through a colorful, beautiful but quite badly populated planet. Incredible from the beginning to the end, except for the very very end itself, maybe...
- WING COMMANDER : PRIVATEER. One of the first games I ever got addicted to. I played almost one year non-stop after I got the CD version, and I'm afraid no game will ever recreate the unique sensations that one gave me. Speeding through the Gemini sector, haulin' goods in an overarmed Centurion to keep those crazy pirates away... Ah, the good old times. When a 2-button joystick was enough. ^^ Elite III was excellent, too, but a bit too... elite.
- STARCRAFT. C'mon, you know why.
- FALLOUT. One of the rare RPGs that got me hooked. No need to explain why, except maybe : non-linearity.
Besides from all that, I didn't dream much of all these things, except some weird ones about seeing all blurred walls, because I hadn't cranked up the textures resolution up enough (that's what happens when you play Deus Ex too much on an old machine and are forced to use low-res ones...), or plainly using Unreal Tournament's (1999) game menu to save my dream before waking up. Don't know whether I loaded my save afterwards though...
Otherwise, I lost my social life as a lot of you must have, I lost part of my sanity in the process, and I caught some tendinitis on both hands playing GTA 3 and Day Of Defeat. Tendinitis I don't know what to do with, almost seven months after, and still hurting, in fact...
Maybe ThinkGeek could do some T-Shirts with "I LEFT MY TENDONS ON MY KEYBOARD". I'll buy...
- Hadriven