I will now summarize for those of you who cannot be arsed to RTFA:
"I assert that technological novelty is the sole driver of the gaming market. I cannot seem to see, from where I am standing, any new technologies on the horizon that meet my exacting requirements for 'novelty.' Therefore, WE WILL LIVE IN A GAMELESS FUTURE AHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
He also seems to be using some stratospherically high standard for "success," in that he calls the Xbox and the Gamecube failures.
He also equates "bad," with "anything I don't like."
Indeed, gaming, much like BSD and Apple, is dying.
I think I'm gonna cut out of work early and go play me some Windwaker.
(P.S. "An interesting and humorous read." Yeah, if you're 13 and like heavy-handed bathroom humor.)
The implication in the play is that the Hostess (Nell Quickly) died of what my mom calls "a social disease." There's no connection at all between her and the King of France. The social networking map is weak, at best. The Hostess is married to Pistol and was formerly engaged to Nym, so she should be closer to those two than to the Boy and Bardolph.
Sheesh. I didn't actually RTFA before commenting earlier, but I could draw a better social map of Henry V from memory with a whiteboard and some markers than the software did. I mean, there's a whole bunch of history there from Henry IV I and II that the program can't know about, and relationships that are not as simple as people talking to or mentioning each other.
Then again, don't listen to me. I kind of liked Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, with Claire Danes and Leonardo di Caprio.
Well, so did I. Since the pricipals basically only have to mope for the whole play, the casting of di Caprio and Danes was fine. And this version has the best rendition of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech ever.
The attraction of Shakespeare, at least for me, is not his plots, most of which he stole and filed off the serial numbers, but that the man was a master wordsmith. Diluting the poetry, wordplay, and give-and-take between characters (such as the taut exchanges between Kate and Petruccio) in an attempt to appeal to a modern audience is misguided.
To harp on the example of the Branagh Henry V, a modern audience may not understand every word that passes between Harry and Montjoy when the latter delivers the Dauphin's tennis balls (watch the play--that's not as much of a non-sequitur as it sounds!) but there is absolutely no mistaking the cold and controlled rage in Harry's eyes and voice as portrayed so masterfully by Branagh. A skilled actor will make up the comprehension gap without sacrificing the language.
So, in summary, "interpretations" can bite me...except Strange Brew and Scotland, PA.
Perhaps you should try it? Get yourself a couple of Shakespeare DVDs (the Brannah ones are quite good), sit back, and enjoy. Then once you know the basis of the story you'll find that the text is rather less opaque.
I completely agree with you, but if the grandparent is going to take your advice, he should probably google for "Branagh," so he'll actually find what he's looking for.;)
I recommend anyone trying to get into Shakespeare start with Branagh's Henry V. It's about beating up on the French (with maybe some minor themes about responsibility and coming of age, but who cares about that when there are swordfights to be had?) And it only clocks in at about 2:30, so you don't need to worry about the Iron Butt Challenge that is the Branagh Hamlet. The production values are high for a Shakespeare movie, so while it looks cheesy to the jaded eye, it's not so cheesy as to be distracting (unlike, say, the Olivier version).
And now, that's either "the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt," or my co-worker is pitching another fit. Damn. I hope I have time to follow this thread.
Don't most non-personal bloggers just circulate links and provide commentary on current events? Like, you know, newspapers? You don't see anyone accusing the Washington Post of plagiarizing from the New York Times when they both publish op-ed pieces on the same topic.
Maybe it's good manners to provide a linkback to the blog you got the link from originally, but omitting it is hardly plagiarism. (A word which the article never uses, incidentally. I'm not on the hate-michael bandwagon, but that blurb headline has some nasty spin.)
IIRC, August Derleth renewed a bunch of copyrights in the 70's as Arkham House Publishing, and these copyrights are still in force, though AH isn't really rabid about litigating against violators, and is very liberal about licensing.
From the Moon, you can drop Big Rocks on Earth. Having the gravitational high ground is a good thing if you're planning a war where space is a theater. True, you can essentially do the same from a station in orbit (they were called Thor shots in Shadowrun, I think), but that puts your platform within reach of Earth-based weaponry. Still, I wouldn't want to be the engineer in charge of designing a system for launching rocks off the Moon and getting them to hit the right place on Earth. Don't want to accidentally wipe out Kansas with a couple million kilojoules of kinetic energy.
This is all coming out of full-on paranoia-mode thinking, of course. It's complicated, conspiratorial, and completely lacking in evidence. Rampant uninformed speculation is what the Comments section is all about, though.
I don't know that we used that exact action very often. It was kind of an epiphany sort of thing when it happened. I think we decided that 'flee' was probably the best use. That puts the commandee out of action for at least two rounds. And if the corridor he's fleeing down is one you haven't checked for traps yet... well, all the better.
We found that "Stop!" usually worked well enough for your friends with Celerity (extra actions) to close the distance and do painful things to the target. Vampire combat is more open to interpretation than D&D combat, though.
What exactly would a vampire do if you told him to masturbate? Probably try to suck your blood if he wasn't doing so already.
I don't think it ever got suggested for use on other vampires. Just on mortals...specifically, the police. It's much more likely to succeed (mortals have low Willpower) and less likely to make you an enemy for eternity. Besides, how do you explain that one? "Well, Captain, then I dropped my pants..."
My gaming group came up with that idea for use in Vampire with the first level of Dominate, which functions similarly to Command. No one ever actually tried to use it, though. Sheesh.
"PARANOIA II: Electric Boogaloo."...I'll just go activate my next clone.
Seriously, I like "PARANOIA: Rebooted," which was suggested by an AC in another post. Or "PARANOIA Prime," because I'm a math geek. In the end, however, I'll buy it no matter what you call it, because I'm an RPG geek, too. (And then I'll complain about the rules differing from WEG's quirktastic mechanics, because I'm a glutton for punishment.) Please do keep the updates frequent.
There's the fashion angle, but the frame makers also have a product that people truly need. What am I going to do, not wear glasses? I don't have a choice; I couldn't read the text box I'm typing in without them. It's a seller's market.
I don't need or want the very latest style, but I do want a pair of glasses that fits, provides a decent field of corrected vision, flatters my face, *and* is comfortable and durable. This runs me a couple hundred bucks, but glasses are something I wear all day every day and enable me to function...my myopia is such that I would qualify as blind if it were not correctable. The prices on non-designer frames are not unreasonable, given how seldom people replace them and how vital they are.
Think about it this way...if you had to put something directly over your eyes without which you couldn't carry out the most basic day-to-day activities, wouldn't you want it to to be high-quality and reasonably attractive?
I don't know if my reasoning applies to people with better vision, who can get by without glasses for most things but still need to wear them for driving and such, but I've never felt cheated by the cost of my frames (and they came with nifty magnetic sunglass lenses--stylin' and oh-so-practical).
I'd assumed it was a poke at Windows, but it felt too topical to me. Off-putting. Maybe it would work as a supplement, but not for the whole game. Besides, are you really sure you want to tie the game's reputation to Microsoft's?;)
Are you prevented from calling it just plain PARANOIA for copyright reasons? Or is it that you wanted to separate the new version from the old?
Asimov coined the term "Violence is the last refuse of the incompetent". They appeared in the Foundation trilogy and were IIRC spoken by the character Hari Seldon.
Not Hari Seldon. Salvor Hardin, Mayor of Terminus.
Likewise, nobody should have a car, unless, everybody gets a car, and Larry Ellison's car is no cooler or more expensive than your car?
And likewise, no city should establish a public park, unless everybody in the city can get to it with equal ease, and every other city also has an equally accessible public park, and your public park is no less pretty than the Mall, in Washington, D.C.?
And likewise, the government shouldn't send astronauts to the moon until everybody can afford a trip to the moon?
False analogy. Larry Ellison owning a Porsche or an F-16 does not give him any fundamental power or advantage over me. Someone, a corporation especially, collecting and referencing my financial or healthcare data does.
You'll never get the equality and the protection against bigotry that you hope for.
I know. I'm not going to let that stop me from trying.
And you'll never prevent the rich and powerful from adopting the new technology early, while it's still too expensive for the masses. And you'll never be able to turn back the clock. About the best you can hope for is to advance the state of the art, to level out the playing field as quickly as possible, and stop whining about how it's still getting easier for people to know more stuff about each other.
The problem is not wealthy early adopters. We're not talking about PDAs or flying cars. We're talking about information gathering capacity available only to corporate entities and governments. I'm not naive enough to expect perfect transparency, and I am cynical enough to demand some level of it. That's not a technological problem; it's a social one.
Information may or may not want to be free. That's not the point, and I'm not going to get into it here.
The point is: until such time as all information is completely, 100%, easily-available-to-all free, as long as there is a gradient, information is power. And history has proven that you want to be very careful to whom you hand power.
I wouldn't care if the details of my life were collated and indexed if: -There were controls in place to catch and prosecute those who abused the data (eg. identity theft). -There were transparency and equality in the system...I could see the President's data just as well as he could see mine. -I could be assured that I would not be discriminated against or targeted if I were not "normal." Say, gay. Or a Slashdot poster.
I saw him speak at MIT with Neil Gaiman and Peter David a few years back. Gaiman was delightful, and David didn't make much of an impression on me one way or the other, but Ellison had me squirming in my seat. The man is rude and self-centered, and once each speaker's alloted time was up, he monopolized the stage and shouted down questions from the audience he didn't agree with. He cut David off in the middle of an anecdote because they were running over and "I want to read my story!" Which he did. All of it. Long past the time the program was scheduled to end. Gaiman and David left to go sign autographs, and I left to go sit in the lobby.
Maybe if he rescued crippled orphans from war zones for a living, I'd put up with that kind of behavior, but the guy's just a writer.
Slashdot Mirror
I will now summarize for those of you who cannot be arsed to RTFA:
"I assert that technological novelty is the sole driver of the gaming market. I cannot seem to see, from where I am standing, any new technologies on the horizon that meet my exacting requirements for 'novelty.' Therefore, WE WILL LIVE IN A GAMELESS FUTURE AHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
He also seems to be using some stratospherically high standard for "success," in that he calls the Xbox and the Gamecube failures.
He also equates "bad," with "anything I don't like."
Indeed, gaming, much like BSD and Apple, is dying.
I think I'm gonna cut out of work early and go play me some Windwaker.
(P.S. "An interesting and humorous read." Yeah, if you're 13 and like heavy-handed bathroom humor.)
-Carolyn
The implication in the play is that the Hostess (Nell Quickly) died of what my mom calls "a social disease." There's no connection at all between her and the King of France. The social networking map is weak, at best. The Hostess is married to Pistol and was formerly engaged to Nym, so she should be closer to those two than to the Boy and Bardolph.
Sheesh. I didn't actually RTFA before commenting earlier, but I could draw a better social map of Henry V from memory with a whiteboard and some markers than the software did. I mean, there's a whole bunch of history there from Henry IV I and II that the program can't know about, and relationships that are not as simple as people talking to or mentioning each other.
-Carolyn
Fair enough. But I wouldn't subject anybody to Ten Things I Hate About You. ;)
-Carolyn
Then again, don't listen to me. I kind of liked Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, with Claire Danes and Leonardo di Caprio.
Well, so did I. Since the pricipals basically only have to mope for the whole play, the casting of di Caprio and Danes was fine. And this version has the best rendition of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech ever.
Beware the 1960's German TV version of Hamlet . I only know about it because it was a MST3k movie
-Carolyn
The attraction of Shakespeare, at least for me, is not his plots, most of which he stole and filed off the serial numbers, but that the man was a master wordsmith. Diluting the poetry, wordplay, and give-and-take between characters (such as the taut exchanges between Kate and Petruccio) in an attempt to appeal to a modern audience is misguided.
To harp on the example of the Branagh Henry V, a modern audience may not understand every word that passes between Harry and Montjoy when the latter delivers the Dauphin's tennis balls (watch the play--that's not as much of a non-sequitur as it sounds!) but there is absolutely no mistaking the cold and controlled rage in Harry's eyes and voice as portrayed so masterfully by Branagh. A skilled actor will make up the comprehension gap without sacrificing the language.
So, in summary, "interpretations" can bite me...except Strange Brew and Scotland, PA.
-Carolyn
*thinks*
Macbeth: "Will you go out with me?"
L. Macbeth: "Yeah, when the great Birnam Woods come to Dunsinane, you loser."
Macduff: "Ooh, snap!"
*laugh track*
Macbeth (mutters): "Jeez. No man of woman born can lay that chick."
*laugh track*
I shudder.
-Carolyn
Every day, I curse Shakespeare's bones for inventing the romantic comedy and the sitcom.
Well, not really, but I blame him for every horrible chick flick and episode of Friends my roommates have cajoled me into sitting through.
-Carolyn
I'm female. ;)
-Carolyn
It might not always work. I was Romeo in the balcony scene. Fuckin' embarrassing as a high school freshman. ;)
-Carolyn
Perhaps you should try it? Get yourself a couple of Shakespeare DVDs (the Brannah ones are quite good), sit back, and enjoy. Then once you know the basis of the story you'll find that the text is rather less opaque.
;)
I completely agree with you, but if the grandparent is going to take your advice, he should probably google for "Branagh," so he'll actually find what he's looking for.
I recommend anyone trying to get into Shakespeare start with Branagh's Henry V. It's about beating up on the French (with maybe some minor themes about responsibility and coming of age, but who cares about that when there are swordfights to be had?) And it only clocks in at about 2:30, so you don't need to worry about the Iron Butt Challenge that is the Branagh Hamlet. The production values are high for a Shakespeare movie, so while it looks cheesy to the jaded eye, it's not so cheesy as to be distracting (unlike, say, the Olivier version).
And now, that's either "the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt," or my co-worker is pitching another fit. Damn. I hope I have time to follow this thread.
-Carolyn
Don't most non-personal bloggers just circulate links and provide commentary on current events? Like, you know, newspapers? You don't see anyone accusing the Washington Post of plagiarizing from the New York Times when they both publish op-ed pieces on the same topic.
Maybe it's good manners to provide a linkback to the blog you got the link from originally, but omitting it is hardly plagiarism. (A word which the article never uses, incidentally. I'm not on the hate-michael bandwagon, but that blurb headline has some nasty spin.)
-Carolyn
IIRC, August Derleth renewed a bunch of copyrights in the 70's as Arkham House Publishing, and these copyrights are still in force, though AH isn't really rabid about litigating against violators, and is very liberal about licensing.
-Carolyn
From the Moon, you can drop Big Rocks on Earth. Having the gravitational high ground is a good thing if you're planning a war where space is a theater. True, you can essentially do the same from a station in orbit (they were called Thor shots in Shadowrun, I think), but that puts your platform within reach of Earth-based weaponry. Still, I wouldn't want to be the engineer in charge of designing a system for launching rocks off the Moon and getting them to hit the right place on Earth. Don't want to accidentally wipe out Kansas with a couple million kilojoules of kinetic energy.
This is all coming out of full-on paranoia-mode thinking, of course. It's complicated, conspiratorial, and completely lacking in evidence. Rampant uninformed speculation is what the Comments section is all about, though.
-Carolyn
I don't know that we used that exact action very often. It was kind of an epiphany sort of thing when it happened. I think we decided that 'flee' was probably the best use. That puts the commandee out of action for at least two rounds. And if the corridor he's fleeing down is one you haven't checked for traps yet... well, all the better.
We found that "Stop!" usually worked well enough for your friends with Celerity (extra actions) to close the distance and do painful things to the target. Vampire combat is more open to interpretation than D&D combat, though.
What exactly would a vampire do if you told him to masturbate? Probably try to suck your blood if he wasn't doing so already.
I don't think it ever got suggested for use on other vampires. Just on mortals...specifically, the police. It's much more likely to succeed (mortals have low Willpower) and less likely to make you an enemy for eternity. Besides, how do you explain that one? "Well, Captain, then I dropped my pants..."
-Carolyn
My gaming group came up with that idea for use in Vampire with the first level of Dominate, which functions similarly to Command. No one ever actually tried to use it, though. Sheesh.
I like your sig, however.
-Carolyn
All the best AAA Megacorps have 'em.
-Carolyn
I tried to see how far away from the frames I could hold the sunglasses and still get them to "jump" into place. They make a very satisfying click.
I also test various office supplies to see if they're ferromagnetic.
-Carolyn
"PARANOIA II: Electric Boogaloo." ...I'll just go activate my next clone.
Seriously, I like "PARANOIA: Rebooted," which was suggested by an AC in another post. Or "PARANOIA Prime," because I'm a math geek. In the end, however, I'll buy it no matter what you call it, because I'm an RPG geek, too. (And then I'll complain about the rules differing from WEG's quirktastic mechanics, because I'm a glutton for punishment.) Please do keep the updates frequent.
-Carolyn
There's the fashion angle, but the frame makers also have a product that people truly need. What am I going to do, not wear glasses? I don't have a choice; I couldn't read the text box I'm typing in without them. It's a seller's market.
I don't need or want the very latest style, but I do want a pair of glasses that fits, provides a decent field of corrected vision, flatters my face, *and* is comfortable and durable. This runs me a couple hundred bucks, but glasses are something I wear all day every day and enable me to function...my myopia is such that I would qualify as blind if it were not correctable. The prices on non-designer frames are not unreasonable, given how seldom people replace them and how vital they are.
Think about it this way...if you had to put something directly over your eyes without which you couldn't carry out the most basic day-to-day activities, wouldn't you want it to to be high-quality and reasonably attractive?
I don't know if my reasoning applies to people with better vision, who can get by without glasses for most things but still need to wear them for driving and such, but I've never felt cheated by the cost of my frames (and they came with nifty magnetic sunglass lenses--stylin' and oh-so-practical).
-Carolyn
I'd assumed it was a poke at Windows, but it felt too topical to me. Off-putting. Maybe it would work as a supplement, but not for the whole game. Besides, are you really sure you want to tie the game's reputation to Microsoft's? ;)
Are you prevented from calling it just plain PARANOIA for copyright reasons? Or is it that you wanted to separate the new version from the old?
-Carolyn
Player: Are you using the d20 rules system?
The Computer: No. PARANOIA is fun. D20 games are not fun. The Computer says so.
And we all know Friend Computer is always right.
I was also wondering, what does the "XP" stand for? Though...with my clearance, I probably shouldn't even ask.
-Car-O-LYN
Asimov coined the term "Violence is the last refuse of the incompetent". They appeared in the Foundation trilogy and were IIRC spoken by the character Hari Seldon.
Not Hari Seldon. Salvor Hardin, Mayor of Terminus.
-Carolyn
Likewise, nobody should have a car, unless, everybody gets a car, and Larry Ellison's car is no cooler or more expensive than your car?
And likewise, no city should establish a public park, unless everybody in the city can get to it with equal ease, and every other city also has an equally accessible public park, and your public park is no less pretty than the Mall, in Washington, D.C.?
And likewise, the government shouldn't send astronauts to the moon until everybody can afford a trip to the moon?
False analogy. Larry Ellison owning a Porsche or an F-16 does not give him any fundamental power or advantage over me. Someone, a corporation especially, collecting and referencing my financial or healthcare data does.
You'll never get the equality and the protection against bigotry that you hope for.
I know. I'm not going to let that stop me from trying.
And you'll never prevent the rich and powerful from adopting the new technology early, while it's still too expensive for the masses. And you'll never be able to turn back the clock. About the best you can hope for is to advance the state of the art, to level out the playing field as quickly as possible, and stop whining about how it's still getting easier for people to know more stuff about each other.
The problem is not wealthy early adopters. We're not talking about PDAs or flying cars. We're talking about information gathering capacity available only to corporate entities and governments. I'm not naive enough to expect perfect transparency, and I am cynical enough to demand some level of it. That's not a technological problem; it's a social one.
-Carolyn
Information may or may not want to be free. That's not the point, and I'm not going to get into it here.
The point is: until such time as all information is completely, 100%, easily-available-to-all free, as long as there is a gradient, information is power. And history has proven that you want to be very careful to whom you hand power.
I wouldn't care if the details of my life were collated and indexed if:
-There were controls in place to catch and prosecute those who abused the data (eg. identity theft).
-There were transparency and equality in the system...I could see the President's data just as well as he could see mine.
-I could be assured that I would not be discriminated against or targeted if I were not "normal." Say, gay. Or a Slashdot poster.
-Carolyn
I saw him speak at MIT with Neil Gaiman and Peter David a few years back. Gaiman was delightful, and David didn't make much of an impression on me one way or the other, but Ellison had me squirming in my seat. The man is rude and self-centered, and once each speaker's alloted time was up, he monopolized the stage and shouted down questions from the audience he didn't agree with. He cut David off in the middle of an anecdote because they were running over and "I want to read my story!" Which he did. All of it. Long past the time the program was scheduled to end. Gaiman and David left to go sign autographs, and I left to go sit in the lobby.
Maybe if he rescued crippled orphans from war zones for a living, I'd put up with that kind of behavior, but the guy's just a writer.
-Carolyn