Worrying about meals and diapers and house cleaning and employment are something we all do on a daily basis. Most people can't jump into an Apache and go blow the fuck out of dozens of other people in a war ala Battlefield2.
Of course they would. All the plaintiffs would have to do is put some starlett out there to sing their closing arguments to the jury and they'll be sold.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to ber a grinch. I really just got the feeling from this that it's not that big of a deal. It's a little like "coke now has a vanilla flavor" being headline news. They aren't the first comic-ish animated web thing (Boondock Saints - I think that's it - has done the same thing as have many others to varying degrees of talent and success). The only difference here is that they're going from strip to animation. I just don't see it as Slashdot-worthy.
I don't always see things as "slashvertisement!" - but this felt close. Moreso than TheEscapist / Joel on Software / GirlGamers stuff that comes out three times a day on Slashdot. On the other hand, you can see me defending the MAKE xmas gift article a few spots down - so you can see I at least used some judgement to discern things.
That being said, I have never heard of CTRL-ALT-DELETE, but I will probably check it out. Which just goes to show that Slashvertising works.;)
Bah. Everybody knows the EFF is made up of a bunch of utopian electro-hippies that worship satan and eat our children. Especially that former musician guy that runs it. Any real god-fearing American also knows that EFF secretely means Evil Fornicating Freaks.
Which reminds me . . Christmas is coming up - time to send in another donation to EFF... They need all the dead babies and goats blood they can get!;)
Right, because there are scands of thirteen year old girls out there downloading UB40.
The fact is, this chick doesn't have a leg to stand on. YOU are the parent and YOU are the owner of the house and YOU are responsible for what goes on there. You can prevent your daughter's teenage boyfriend from raping your pre-teen daughter with a little bit of observation and responsible parenting. You can prevent your child from doing lines of coke off the coffee table. You can prevent your childrens' friends from running a meth lab from your basement. You can prevent your children and their friends from watching porn over cable television. You can prevent a bazillion things and you can most certainly prevent (and even if you cant, then at least be responsible for) people doing illegal things on your computer in your house.
If this were anything other than computers and music, we'd be tearing this chick a new asshole for terrible parenting, lack of responsibility and so on.
Okay - so it's not such a clear and observable difference between artist and attention whore. Andy Worhol being an attention whore, however, is an indisputible fact of which he himself would most feverishly agree.
No, I definitely agree. One night of sitting around in a virtual house making pizzas for hours on end with a bunch of giddy chicks over the internet is enough, thanks. How people can play for hours, days, months and years on end is beyond me.
The Sims is like a giant barbi house. Therein lies its demographic.
So this whole article is to mention that some random web comic I've never heard of is going animated. Amazing. What will they think of next. Soon you're going to tell me you can get music from the internets.
I don't mean to be a dick here, but how much was this slashvertisement? I want to get in on some of the action if it's affordable.
Buildings are not art unless they were DESIGNED ARTISTICALLY.
Is your local 7-11 art? Is your apartment complex art? Is your local bus shelter art? Is your local coffee shop art? Is your local federal building art? Not at all.
Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings are considered "art", because they were designed with an artistic intention.
Therein lies the drastic difference. There are many movies designed in the spirit and intention of art. Not some froo-froo art-house snob kind of art -- just art. But Dude Where's My Car was most clearly and obviously NOT written as art or in the spirit of art whatsoever.
A lot of things are called "art" in the wrong spirit of the word. When a lot of people describe a lot of things as "art", it comes across in the same way some ditzy bimbo and sleazy mob-funded porn producer come across when they describe films where guys are face-fucking chicks until they gag and then smacking them around and calling them names as "art". Just because you call what you do "art" doesn't make it so. There is no artistic spirit in such a thing as there is lacking in many things.
Music exists to entertain, too. Does that make whatever regional breed of white-pride-hate-metal there is "art"? Does it make Brittney Spears "art"? Of course not. Is an opera "art"? Surely. Most plays? Surely. A commercial for the Ford F-250? Uh... no.
Is Schindler's List art? Sure. Is Waterboy art? I sure as hell hope not.
Again, I think art is meaningful on multiple levels. Is that 50 cent song where he's talking about some chick sucking him off "candy shop(?)" art? Uh... not really. Is "Friends" art? Not really. See - they are forms of entertainment, but they lack any meaning. And without meaning, how is it art? The entire point of art is to evoke something.
MAKE isn't really just some guy's blog. I'm not a mind reader, so I can't say if it was submitted to Slashdot as a commercial or not - but almost everyone who submits their own articles/content are looking for the Slashdot affect to benefit them. So what?
Unlike a lot of other articles and places Slashdot frequently links to (girl gamers, escape something or other and penny arcade to name a few) -- MAKE actually is geek oriented. In addition, they aren't just "some guy's blog" but a magazine and a website about something a lot of geeks find interesting. They're also often featured on Attack of the Show (not exactly a point in their favor, of course) and Engadget, Gizmodo, Boingboing and so on.
I don't care much for MAKE and I'd never get a subscription (I don't subscribe to ANY magazine though), but they do have a unique site and some good content and I can think of a lot of worse things to find on Slashdot these days.
I wonder if they'd call me "addicted". I spend 50 hours per week on the net just from work. It's my job. Then I spend another 20 hours per week on the net from home - job related. Then I spend another 20 hours per week on the net / computer playing games to relax. Then I spend another bunch of hours "online" (does just using a computer count?) working on my site which has close to 40,000 members and deals with about half a million dollars in transactions per year - so requires a lot of my focus and attention.
So, if I spend 100+ hours online, does that make me addicted? After all, most of it is related to either business as my profession or business as my "hobby" side-someday-profession or to a small degree, recreation.
Somehow, I get the feeling that a lot of these people who write articles like this don't understand that there is more to do on the net than just chat with highschool kids on IM, post to myspace sites and download porn or gamble.
Interesting. I've been screwed by places on the internet (like TheStranger.co.uk, which took $358 for a pair of boots and then never delivered them, never game a date when they'd be delivered and never responded to emails) and contacted VISA and got my money back immediately.
They have a new policy where they make you cancel your current card and reissue one to you though. That's not a big deal. The last time I had to do this, I found charges to some company (I think it was a porn site?) in the Netherlands. I randomly guessed based on the name in my credit card statement what their domain might be and went there and all they had was a single page telling you that you subscribed to one of their services and gave you a place to contact with customer service questions. I'd never heard of them, used them or got a response from them.
I contacted VISA and they refunded my money again and reissued a new card to me.
Visit almost any place in Europe. Look at the buildings. Visit America. Look at the buildings. I might accept the argument that buildings in Europe have an artistic flavor to them. I would not accept the same of buildings in America. Buildings in America are "art" kind of the way a refrigerator box is "art".
Again - just because something is entertaining does not make it art and creativity in a profession does not make it an artistic profession.
I don't have to visit an Exchange shop. I make my living cleaning up after Exchange catastrophes when administrators and CTOs come to their senses and decide they want a real email solution and need to migrate from their Exchange server nightmares to something more appropriate.
Seriously - if I worked for a company whos IT department might try and force Exchagne on me - I'd quit. Period. Fortunately, we don't run MS operating systems or applications of any kind and actually aren't allowed to outside of certain constrained parameters, so I don't ever have to worry about that.
But hey, if you want a coffee maker that washes your car and makes toast too - go for it. I'd rather have separate tools that make really good coffee and really good toast than a half-assed everything.
So you wouldn't have a problem going to an arthouse and seeing a giant "this painting brought to you by Lowes Home Improvement" advertisement stamped on the corner of the painting?
And your assertion that my comment must not be correct based on "if you're right, then Brittney Spears and Nsync can't be commercialized and still be called art" pretty much supports my point. NO - Brittney Spears and Nsync are not art! They're entertainment! Again, not all entertainment (or even most) is art. And not all art is entertaining. Just singinging, painting, acting or sculpting or writing in itself is not art. Shakespear could be art. The guy who writes jingles for Midas mufflers is NOT.
The thing is, there is ONLY a company "A" and a company "B". No need to drop prices when you can fix them instead.
Second, videogames haven't reached the "movie" production cost level yet. I could be wrong, but I don't think any videogame has cost over one hundred million dollars to make. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever will be the first.
If a movie costs $100m to make and you can see it for $6 or own it for $20 -- why should a game that costs $4m to make cost $60 to play/own? Maybe more people see a movie than buy a game - but I don't think that's necessarily true. Do you seriously think more people have seen Princess Diaries or GI Jane than own GTA or Madden?
Now, let's wait for the next batch of articles where coders and designers and industry mavens try to justify how their hack and slash videogames are "art", while defending the blatant Mountain Dew or US Navy recruitment or Mentos commercials in-game.
You hosers from the previous game/art article want to know the definition of art? I can give you *one* of them:
Hell, even RadioShack has these sort of strategies. I've seen moronic kids working at RadioShack flat out lying to customers just to get more sales (they work on commission). They'll sell you a crapload of accessories that you probably don't need and almost certainly aren't even compatible with what you just bought. They'll tell you that you need the most super uber killer thing to do what something a third the cost would have done. They'll lie through your teeth to convince you that the item they want to sell you does everything you need it to when it does nothing of the sort. Sometimes it's out of ignorance - most often it's because they just don't give a fuck and want that extra commission.
RadioShack is not alone here. There is a decided lack of scruples across the board in the business and perhaps the only thing unique to the original poster's situation with the camera shop is that most probably won't make idle threats to track you down and ruin your life. Short of that - everything else the poster mentioned is also attributable to the big boys.
How do I set up a meeting, viewing everyone's schedules at a glance, reserving an available room and projector, with mutt?
What the hell do any of those things have to do with email?!
I guess that's the one nice thing about working for a UNIX company. Or corporate calendar is a calendar app. Our corporate email is an email app. Our corporate browser is a browser app. Not really any need to combine them all, increasing the concurrent footprint and complexity posing additional stability risks.
I've been playing games on and off since I was in my late teens (so about a dozen years). I work in the software industry. I'm a twice published author. I've had paintins on exhibit nationally.
Yet, I still fail to see how a videogame (or software programming at all) is in any way more "art" than a commercial or a sit-com or a board game is. Not all entertainment is "art". In fact, one could easily argue that the two things are rarely related and just because something involves creativity doesn't make it art, either.
These games may involve ELMEMENTS of art - like Myst having beautiful backdrops. That, however, is an artistic component of an otherwise entertainment piece.
Now, one may refer to their profession as "an art", just like a good lawyer might be said to have "made an art out of the insanity defense" - but that's an entirely different thing.
The only people who really refer to such things as "art" are those doing it who feel they need to steal the "art" label and affix it to their profession to gain some sense of worth or respect or admiration.
My mom had the same experience. She placed a $800 camera order and was called that day to "confirm her address", at which point they proceeded to try and sell her a $150 warranty and other expensive accessories. Once she refused, they suddenly informed her the product was out of stock, but they later said they could get it to her by Friday if she paid for a $150 warranty.
What's unusual about that? You have to be the most ass backward consumer to fall for any of that and not just walk the other way immediately. And if you think the above is very unusual, you've probably never done any of the following before:
+ Shopped for a camera online in a non Amazon.com style place. + Shopped at Best-Buy + Shopped at Circuit-City + Shopped at Office Max + Shopped at Staples
Common sense would tell you to do the following:
+ Cancel the order. + Contact VISA (or Mastercard, etc) to prevent a charge or reverse any charges.
It's just part of doing business online. It's simple and credit card companies make it a fairly painless - one page long - process.
Slashdot Mirror
Worrying about meals and diapers and house cleaning and employment are something we all do on a daily basis. Most people can't jump into an Apache and go blow the fuck out of dozens of other people in a war ala Battlefield2.
Of course they would. All the plaintiffs would have to do is put some starlett out there to sing their closing arguments to the jury and they'll be sold.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to ber a grinch. I really just got the feeling from this that it's not that big of a deal. It's a little like "coke now has a vanilla flavor" being headline news. They aren't the first comic-ish animated web thing (Boondock Saints - I think that's it - has done the same thing as have many others to varying degrees of talent and success). The only difference here is that they're going from strip to animation. I just don't see it as Slashdot-worthy.
;)
I don't always see things as "slashvertisement!" - but this felt close. Moreso than TheEscapist / Joel on Software / GirlGamers stuff that comes out three times a day on Slashdot. On the other hand, you can see me defending the MAKE xmas gift article a few spots down - so you can see I at least used some judgement to discern things.
That being said, I have never heard of CTRL-ALT-DELETE, but I will probably check it out. Which just goes to show that Slashvertising works.
Bah. Everybody knows the EFF is made up of a bunch of utopian electro-hippies that worship satan and eat our children. Especially that former musician guy that runs it. Any real god-fearing American also knows that EFF secretely means Evil Fornicating Freaks.
;)
Which reminds me . . Christmas is coming up - time to send in another donation to EFF... They need all the dead babies and goats blood they can get!
I congratulate you on being the first person I've ever seen who compared illegally downloading music to rape
You must be new here.
Right, because there are scands of thirteen year old girls out there downloading UB40.
The fact is, this chick doesn't have a leg to stand on. YOU are the parent and YOU are the owner of the house and YOU are responsible for what goes on there. You can prevent your daughter's teenage boyfriend from raping your pre-teen daughter with a little bit of observation and responsible parenting. You can prevent your child from doing lines of coke off the coffee table. You can prevent your childrens' friends from running a meth lab from your basement. You can prevent your children and their friends from watching porn over cable television. You can prevent a bazillion things and you can most certainly prevent (and even if you cant, then at least be responsible for) people doing illegal things on your computer in your house.
If this were anything other than computers and music, we'd be tearing this chick a new asshole for terrible parenting, lack of responsibility and so on.
Okay - so it's not such a clear and observable difference between artist and attention whore. Andy Worhol being an attention whore, however, is an indisputible fact of which he himself would most feverishly agree.
Sure they would. Just not on a female mother of five. If she were a male, they definitely would screw him over.
No, I definitely agree. One night of sitting around in a virtual house making pizzas for hours on end with a bunch of giddy chicks over the internet is enough, thanks. How people can play for hours, days, months and years on end is beyond me.
The Sims is like a giant barbi house. Therein lies its demographic.
So this whole article is to mention that some random web comic I've never heard of is going animated. Amazing. What will they think of next. Soon you're going to tell me you can get music from the internets.
I don't mean to be a dick here, but how much was this slashvertisement? I want to get in on some of the action if it's affordable.
You're really proving my point, though.
Buildings are not art unless they were DESIGNED ARTISTICALLY.
Is your local 7-11 art? Is your apartment complex art? Is your local bus shelter art? Is your local coffee shop art? Is your local federal building art? Not at all.
Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings are considered "art", because they were designed with an artistic intention.
Therein lies the drastic difference. There are many movies designed in the spirit and intention of art. Not some froo-froo art-house snob kind of art -- just art. But Dude Where's My Car was most clearly and obviously NOT written as art or in the spirit of art whatsoever.
A lot of things are called "art" in the wrong spirit of the word. When a lot of people describe a lot of things as "art", it comes across in the same way some ditzy bimbo and sleazy mob-funded porn producer come across when they describe films where guys are face-fucking chicks until they gag and then smacking them around and calling them names as "art". Just because you call what you do "art" doesn't make it so. There is no artistic spirit in such a thing as there is lacking in many things.
Music exists to entertain, too. Does that make whatever regional breed of white-pride-hate-metal there is "art"? Does it make Brittney Spears "art"? Of course not. Is an opera "art"? Surely. Most plays? Surely. A commercial for the Ford F-250? Uh... no.
Is Schindler's List art? Sure. Is Waterboy art? I sure as hell hope not.
Again, I think art is meaningful on multiple levels. Is that 50 cent song where he's talking about some chick sucking him off "candy shop(?)" art? Uh... not really. Is "Friends" art? Not really. See - they are forms of entertainment, but they lack any meaning. And without meaning, how is it art? The entire point of art is to evoke something.
MAKE isn't really just some guy's blog. I'm not a mind reader, so I can't say if it was submitted to Slashdot as a commercial or not - but almost everyone who submits their own articles/content are looking for the Slashdot affect to benefit them. So what?
Unlike a lot of other articles and places Slashdot frequently links to (girl gamers, escape something or other and penny arcade to name a few) -- MAKE actually is geek oriented. In addition, they aren't just "some guy's blog" but a magazine and a website about something a lot of geeks find interesting. They're also often featured on Attack of the Show (not exactly a point in their favor, of course) and Engadget, Gizmodo, Boingboing and so on.
I don't care much for MAKE and I'd never get a subscription (I don't subscribe to ANY magazine though), but they do have a unique site and some good content and I can think of a lot of worse things to find on Slashdot these days.
I wonder if they'd call me "addicted". I spend 50 hours per week on the net just from work. It's my job. Then I spend another 20 hours per week on the net from home - job related. Then I spend another 20 hours per week on the net / computer playing games to relax. Then I spend another bunch of hours "online" (does just using a computer count?) working on my site which has close to 40,000 members and deals with about half a million dollars in transactions per year - so requires a lot of my focus and attention.
So, if I spend 100+ hours online, does that make me addicted? After all, most of it is related to either business as my profession or business as my "hobby" side-someday-profession or to a small degree, recreation.
Somehow, I get the feeling that a lot of these people who write articles like this don't understand that there is more to do on the net than just chat with highschool kids on IM, post to myspace sites and download porn or gamble.
Interesting. I've been screwed by places on the internet (like TheStranger.co.uk, which took $358 for a pair of boots and then never delivered them, never game a date when they'd be delivered and never responded to emails) and contacted VISA and got my money back immediately.
They have a new policy where they make you cancel your current card and reissue one to you though. That's not a big deal. The last time I had to do this, I found charges to some company (I think it was a porn site?) in the Netherlands. I randomly guessed based on the name in my credit card statement what their domain might be and went there and all they had was a single page telling you that you subscribed to one of their services and gave you a place to contact with customer service questions. I'd never heard of them, used them or got a response from them.
I contacted VISA and they refunded my money again and reissued a new card to me.
I've never had any problems.
Buildings are art
Spoken like someone who doesn't live in America.
Visit almost any place in Europe. Look at the buildings. Visit America. Look at the buildings. I might accept the argument that buildings in Europe have an artistic flavor to them. I would not accept the same of buildings in America. Buildings in America are "art" kind of the way a refrigerator box is "art".
Again - just because something is entertaining does not make it art and creativity in a profession does not make it an artistic profession.
I don't have to visit an Exchange shop. I make my living cleaning up after Exchange catastrophes when administrators and CTOs come to their senses and decide they want a real email solution and need to migrate from their Exchange server nightmares to something more appropriate.
Seriously - if I worked for a company whos IT department might try and force Exchagne on me - I'd quit. Period. Fortunately, we don't run MS operating systems or applications of any kind and actually aren't allowed to outside of certain constrained parameters, so I don't ever have to worry about that.
But hey, if you want a coffee maker that washes your car and makes toast too - go for it. I'd rather have separate tools that make really good coffee and really good toast than a half-assed everything.
So you wouldn't have a problem going to an arthouse and seeing a giant "this painting brought to you by Lowes Home Improvement" advertisement stamped on the corner of the painting?
And your assertion that my comment must not be correct based on "if you're right, then Brittney Spears and Nsync can't be commercialized and still be called art" pretty much supports my point. NO - Brittney Spears and Nsync are not art! They're entertainment! Again, not all entertainment (or even most) is art. And not all art is entertaining. Just singinging, painting, acting or sculpting or writing in itself is not art. Shakespear could be art. The guy who writes jingles for Midas mufflers is NOT.
The thing is, there is ONLY a company "A" and a company "B". No need to drop prices when you can fix them instead.
Second, videogames haven't reached the "movie" production cost level yet. I could be wrong, but I don't think any videogame has cost over one hundred million dollars to make. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever will be the first.
If a movie costs $100m to make and you can see it for $6 or own it for $20 -- why should a game that costs $4m to make cost $60 to play/own? Maybe more people see a movie than buy a game - but I don't think that's necessarily true. Do you seriously think more people have seen Princess Diaries or GI Jane than own GTA or Madden?
Yeah, but Andy Warhol wasn't an artist. There is a clear observable difference between "artist" and "attention whore".
Now, let's wait for the next batch of articles where coders and designers and industry mavens try to justify how their hack and slash videogames are "art", while defending the blatant Mountain Dew or US Navy recruitment or Mentos commercials in-game.
You hosers from the previous game/art article want to know the definition of art? I can give you *one* of them:
Picaso never embedded a Wendy's ad in a painting.
Hell, even RadioShack has these sort of strategies. I've seen moronic kids working at RadioShack flat out lying to customers just to get more sales (they work on commission). They'll sell you a crapload of accessories that you probably don't need and almost certainly aren't even compatible with what you just bought. They'll tell you that you need the most super uber killer thing to do what something a third the cost would have done. They'll lie through your teeth to convince you that the item they want to sell you does everything you need it to when it does nothing of the sort. Sometimes it's out of ignorance - most often it's because they just don't give a fuck and want that extra commission.
RadioShack is not alone here. There is a decided lack of scruples across the board in the business and perhaps the only thing unique to the original poster's situation with the camera shop is that most probably won't make idle threats to track you down and ruin your life. Short of that - everything else the poster mentioned is also attributable to the big boys.
How do I set up a meeting, viewing everyone's schedules at a glance, reserving an available room and projector, with mutt?
What the hell do any of those things have to do with email?!
I guess that's the one nice thing about working for a UNIX company. Or corporate calendar is a calendar app. Our corporate email is an email app. Our corporate browser is a browser app. Not really any need to combine them all, increasing the concurrent footprint and complexity posing additional stability risks.
I've been playing games on and off since I was in my late teens (so about a dozen years). I work in the software industry. I'm a twice published author. I've had paintins on exhibit nationally.
Yet, I still fail to see how a videogame (or software programming at all) is in any way more "art" than a commercial or a sit-com or a board game is. Not all entertainment is "art". In fact, one could easily argue that the two things are rarely related and just because something involves creativity doesn't make it art, either.
These games may involve ELMEMENTS of art - like Myst having beautiful backdrops. That, however, is an artistic component of an otherwise entertainment piece.
Now, one may refer to their profession as "an art", just like a good lawyer might be said to have "made an art out of the insanity defense" - but that's an entirely different thing.
The only people who really refer to such things as "art" are those doing it who feel they need to steal the "art" label and affix it to their profession to gain some sense of worth or respect or admiration.
My mom had the same experience. She placed a $800 camera order and was called that day to "confirm her address", at which point they proceeded to try and sell her a $150 warranty and other expensive accessories. Once she refused, they suddenly informed her the product was out of stock, but they later said they could get it to her by Friday if she paid for a $150 warranty.
What's unusual about that? You have to be the most ass backward consumer to fall for any of that and not just walk the other way immediately. And if you think the above is very unusual, you've probably never done any of the following before:
+ Shopped for a camera online in a non Amazon.com style place.
+ Shopped at Best-Buy
+ Shopped at Circuit-City
+ Shopped at Office Max
+ Shopped at Staples
Common sense would tell you to do the following:
+ Cancel the order.
+ Contact VISA (or Mastercard, etc) to prevent a charge or reverse any charges.
It's just part of doing business online. It's simple and credit card companies make it a fairly painless - one page long - process.