A useless bit of trivia, but it's actually 51% chance for a boy, 49% for a girl, not 50/50.
It gets more complicated though, cause boy babies tend to be just a wee bit more sickly, so if you just look at 1-year olds (or 2-year olds?), you have more girls than boys. (This would be for the US, and was true in the 80s, anyway.)
You're basically right, but what's funny is that what you describe is what Tolkien actually *did*. After publishing LotR, he went back and got the prequel ready for publication--that being the Silmarillion. And I believe that he'd even started working on a sequel to LotR, due to public acclaim, before deciding that it just wouldn't work.
Of course, one big difference is that Tolkien had his prequel finished to a large extent before the Lord of the Rings was ever published, so that it fit seamlessly. Tolkien's attention to detail was amazing, though.
Now, I didn't RTFA, but I really hope that they don't make it like MERP (the Rolemaster based pnp rpg), where any player can just be a high-elf, or a half-elf, or a wizard, or an ent, or something else that's supposed to be rare as diamonds. Its a stupid world where the rare peoples outnumber the normal, common humans.
If you ran MERP correctly, you were supposed to use the random table to generate your race (it was based off of Roll-master, after all), which ensured that almost everyone *did* end up being a Man. (I want to say it was on the order of 75% chance of human, with most of those being "common Man".)
If you guys decided to play without randomized race, then that was your choice, not the game's design.
Liberals come from cities, Conservatives come from rural areas.
I think it is the lifestyle of where you live that governs the formation of the brain.
No, what usually happens here is more of a split between Taditional/Iconoclast. Rural areas are very Traditional (which has high correlation to conservative politics, but is not the same thing). People who grow up there, and who are Iconoclasts (again, correlates with liberal, but not quite the same), usually move to the big city.
This is no mystery, it's worked that way forever. Anyone from a rural town knows exactly how this works.
"Hazardous waste" is too strong a term, but you shouldn't be throwing batteries in the trash anyway, if you can help it. They do pollute. If your work wouldn't let you throw them away, there had to have been an alternate way to dispose of them.
We save them up and when we have a bagful, just take them to the nearest library, where they've got a collection center.
Because most states use the shape of their state on highway signs.
So, unless you're talking about high-schoolers who can't drive yet, I don't believe it.
(Oddly enough, here in Washington state, they use a profile of George Washington instead of the outline of Washington state on the signs, which I think is just plain *weird*.)
Well, you could also go the route of postulating a mechanism by which violent media would cause violent behavior. Do retrospective studies to see if that seems to hold true. If it does, then you could measure how that factor correlates with consumption of different kinds of media.
For example, the most common triggering event for violent situations is--a threat to ones "face," or perceived lack of respect. So, you could try and find out whether people who play lots of violent video games are more (or less) likely to perceive their status threatened than, say, people who watch violent movies, or who don't consume any violent media at all.
(I hadn't ever considered the question before, but now I'm actually interested in the answer. I could be convinced that people who play the types of games with a lot of online banter would have thicker skins and be less likely to be easily offended in person. I could also be convinced that they might be more likely to offend other people and trigger confrontations. Or that most people can separate online and offline enough that there's no difference.)
Course you can say that that still doesn't *prove* anything, but at that level, nothing can really be *proven*. We just get successively better predictive models.
Time for me to recommend a book "The Dark Side of Man" by Michael Ghiglieri (sp?). It's a study of why people (well, okay, males) engage in violent behaviour in the first place, from the point of view of a primatologist. (Second time mentioning it on Slashdot this week--but it's a very interesting book.)
Dragaera would make a great MMORPG setting. You've got a couple of different time periods they could choose from to set it in. Two different magic systems. The different Houses for factions, all of which already have built in ranking systems (which could be different for different houses if they wished.
Only problem I can see is that you'd end up with too many Jhereg, Dragons, and Easterners, and not nearly enough Teckla, but that's going to be a problem with any world. Not sure how popular Brust is still, though--ten years ago this would have been a no-brainer.
Zelazny is my favorite author. Lord of Light is my favorite novel of his. (Though I maintain that his natural length is novella.) But I'd have to say it's wrong for a MMORPG.
Part of the thing with the Attributes/Aspects is that they were so rare. Maybe if you set it earlier in the timeline, when there were fewer people and so more of them had powers, but it still seems clumsy to me. Plus, I don't think you could safely run a MMORPG where the subject matter was so closely tied to real-world religion. (Particularly given how badly Christianity fared in that world.) Can't you just imagine the hate tells?
Now that you mention it though, I think Lord of Light would make a really good turn-based strategy game--kind of a cross between Alpha Centauri and Dominions.
I think a better Zelazny world would be the one in Jack of Shadows. It's got a generic-ish fantasy setup which allows for a wide variety of characters and powers, but with a cool twist (the light side/dark side split), reincarnation (with a set respawn point, even), and you could even probably do something cool with the required service you have to do on the satellites. And I think its Zelazny's 2nd most popular book, after the Amber stuff, so it's got more of a fanbase. Much better for a MMORPG, I would think.
I also think the Dilvish the Damned/Changing Land world would work perfectly well, but to be honest, I don't remember anything that would particularly distinguish it from a generic world.
On the same subject from a different angle, I would *highly* recommend "The Dark Side of Man" by Michael Ghiglieri. It's looking specifically at male aggression and violence (with a bit on female aggression and violence of course, for contrast).
His background is that after serving in Vietnam, he used the GI Bill to go back to school and became a primatologist. He worked in Africa with Jane Goodall, specifically to help figure out why chimpanzees conducted organized wars of aggression. Once he started there, he got interested in the whole question of what the root causes of violence in humans are.
It's not a PC book at all, as he's interested in describing and explaining the behavior without any reference to how people *ought* to be behaving, or using explanations that involve politics or religion. And it's fairly dark. (I mean, the chapters are titled Murder, Rape, War, and Genocide, after all.) But, for me anyway, it was one of those "light-bulb goes on" books--the world makes a lot more sense.
You're overlooking the whole point. If Metroid or Legend of Zelda was in the public domain, then *anyone* could stuff Metroid + an emulator onto a gba cart and sell it.
While I happily agree that copyright terms are way too long right now, any copyright length that would have Zelda & Metroid in the public domain would be way too short. It's not fair to the author to go under about 25 years, and I'd argue that somewhere from 30 - 40 years is the sweet spot.
Unless you wanted to carve out a shorter length just for software, which is defensible, but I can't ever see happening.
Movie reviewers appear to operate on the principle that if a movie is popular, it is also automatically crap, whereas if it is "arty" (i.e. boring and nobody except a self-selected elite would watch it) it gets an excellent rating.
To be fair, what usually happens is that the reviewer have seen *so* many movies, that the ones that just follow a formula are dead boring to them, unless they are absolutely exceptional. The artsy ones often have something unusual about them that at least keeps the reviewer interested.
It's the curse of the expert, and it hits all of us in our chosen field, eventually. (Well, if we actually pay attention and learn stuff, anyway.) The really good critics can filter enough of the personal perspective out to be useful to the rest of us.
As the GamerDad article points out, you should read some reviews by a person to get a feel for what they like. To get 'accurate' reviews {accurate for you}, find someone who has similar opinions to you.
Actually, the most important thing to figure out is just what the person's taste is. The most accurate guage for judging whether we will like a movie or not is one of my wife's co-workers. If he likes a movie, we will dislike it. If he hates it, we will love it. Over about 25 films, this metric is perfect so far.
Just make sure you start with the actual *Pilot* (called Serenity, I think, though that's also the name of the upcoming movie), and not the episode that aired first. (The Train Job) It will make a lot more sense that way.
I have to say that the Firefly pilot is probably the best Pilot episode of any TV show I have ever seen. (Not that that is particularly difficult--most pilots suck.) Too bad it was the last episode aired, after they'd already decided to cancel the series.
Now I know what many of you may be thinking: Just because I had a negative experience with Paranoia doesn't make it a bad system. I'll point out that I've had a particularly long string of bad experiences with Paranoia, even with GMs who, in other systems, do quite well.
The thing is, the ability to GM a game of Paranoia well has no correlation to the ability to GM in any other system.
Back in college our gaming group was co-founded by someone who loved to GM, but was absolutely horrid at it. We all avoided his games whenever possible. And then he roped some of us into a game of Paranioa, and it was amazing how fun it was.
In Paranoia, it's OK for the GM to be harsh, unrealistic, and arbitrary, as long as he can keep the "cartoon logic" going, and is funny about it. It's definitely a different set of skills.
Not a very big Dr. Whoi fan if you can't even spell "dalek" correctly.
Classic hyper-correction. What do you want to bet that the poster speaks a dialect that drops the R's after vowels. Such speakers tend to stick random "silent R's" in words, because they can't figure out the rhyme or reason behind which words have R's in them and which words don't.
Be careful though, you've gotta parse the wording.
20% of *revenue* means 20% of sales. But I would assume that their costs are much better for licensing the engine than for selling the games, so it's probably way more than 20% of their *profits*.
Similar to how Sears gets most of its revenue from selling stuff, but most of its profit from interest on their charge cards.
This belongs in the list of games that is still fun to play, *and* in the list of games that scaled well. It worked fine on old hardware, but looks much better on the new stuff.
Yet another ditto to this. IMO opinion, SMAC is the high point of the Civilization series.
And to add something new to the thread, for Mac players, there is a never-quite-finalized OS X version of the game floating out there that Brad Oliver (he who did the Mac port) put together. I think I tracked it down over at Macgamer.com, but a little googling and you can find it in about 5 minutes. There are only two bugs I've found with it (or that anyone else mentioned). One is that the movies associated with Wonders will cause me to crash, if not turned off. (Not everyone has this problem.) The other is that Saving crashes the game. Not as bad as it sounds, autosave still works and you can reliably restore from those.
If you like M Night Shyamalan's other films, you'll like this one too, even with the "surprises" blown. This one's much more about character than plot, anyway. (The actress who plays Ivy is *amazing*.)
Besides, that guy got all the details wrong. Might not help much, but at least you can spot his inaccuracies.
Slashdot Mirror
It gets more complicated though, cause boy babies tend to be just a wee bit more sickly, so if you just look at 1-year olds (or 2-year olds?), you have more girls than boys. (This would be for the US, and was true in the 80s, anyway.)
Of course, one big difference is that Tolkien had his prequel finished to a large extent before the Lord of the Rings was ever published, so that it fit seamlessly. Tolkien's attention to detail was amazing, though.
There's a shorter list of available games, and they are usually just the high-quality ones.
Course, it takes them a lot longer to get down to my acceptable price ($20 - 30).
If you ran MERP correctly, you were supposed to use the random table to generate your race (it was based off of Roll-master, after all), which ensured that almost everyone *did* end up being a Man. (I want to say it was on the order of 75% chance of human, with most of those being "common Man".)
If you guys decided to play without randomized race, then that was your choice, not the game's design.
I think it is the lifestyle of where you live that governs the formation of the brain.
No, what usually happens here is more of a split between Taditional/Iconoclast. Rural areas are very Traditional (which has high correlation to conservative politics, but is not the same thing). People who grow up there, and who are Iconoclasts (again, correlates with liberal, but not quite the same), usually move to the big city.
This is no mystery, it's worked that way forever. Anyone from a rural town knows exactly how this works.
Actually, it was *both*.
The liberals pushed for de-institutionalizing them.
And the conservatives de-funded the new programs that were supposed to support them in the community.
It's always the combined left-wing/right-wing conspiracies that do the most damage.
We save them up and when we have a bagful, just take them to the nearest library, where they've got a collection center.
I'm not in CA, btw, but I am on the left coast.
Because most states use the shape of their state on highway signs.
So, unless you're talking about high-schoolers who can't drive yet, I don't believe it.
(Oddly enough, here in Washington state, they use a profile of George Washington instead of the outline of Washington state on the signs, which I think is just plain *weird*.)
For example, the most common triggering event for violent situations is--a threat to ones "face," or perceived lack of respect. So, you could try and find out whether people who play lots of violent video games are more (or less) likely to perceive their status threatened than, say, people who watch violent movies, or who don't consume any violent media at all.
(I hadn't ever considered the question before, but now I'm actually interested in the answer. I could be convinced that people who play the types of games with a lot of online banter would have thicker skins and be less likely to be easily offended in person. I could also be convinced that they might be more likely to offend other people and trigger confrontations. Or that most people can separate online and offline enough that there's no difference.)
Course you can say that that still doesn't *prove* anything, but at that level, nothing can really be *proven*. We just get successively better predictive models.
Time for me to recommend a book "The Dark Side of Man" by Michael Ghiglieri (sp?). It's a study of why people (well, okay, males) engage in violent behaviour in the first place, from the point of view of a primatologist. (Second time mentioning it on Slashdot this week--but it's a very interesting book.)
Only problem I can see is that you'd end up with too many Jhereg, Dragons, and Easterners, and not nearly enough Teckla, but that's going to be a problem with any world. Not sure how popular Brust is still, though--ten years ago this would have been a no-brainer.
Part of the thing with the Attributes/Aspects is that they were so rare. Maybe if you set it earlier in the timeline, when there were fewer people and so more of them had powers, but it still seems clumsy to me. Plus, I don't think you could safely run a MMORPG where the subject matter was so closely tied to real-world religion. (Particularly given how badly Christianity fared in that world.) Can't you just imagine the hate tells?
Now that you mention it though, I think Lord of Light would make a really good turn-based strategy game--kind of a cross between Alpha Centauri and Dominions.
I think a better Zelazny world would be the one in Jack of Shadows. It's got a generic-ish fantasy setup which allows for a wide variety of characters and powers, but with a cool twist (the light side/dark side split), reincarnation (with a set respawn point, even), and you could even probably do something cool with the required service you have to do on the satellites. And I think its Zelazny's 2nd most popular book, after the Amber stuff, so it's got more of a fanbase. Much better for a MMORPG, I would think.
I also think the Dilvish the Damned/Changing Land world would work perfectly well, but to be honest, I don't remember anything that would particularly distinguish it from a generic world.
His background is that after serving in Vietnam, he used the GI Bill to go back to school and became a primatologist. He worked in Africa with Jane Goodall, specifically to help figure out why chimpanzees conducted organized wars of aggression. Once he started there, he got interested in the whole question of what the root causes of violence in humans are.
It's not a PC book at all, as he's interested in describing and explaining the behavior without any reference to how people *ought* to be behaving, or using explanations that involve politics or religion. And it's fairly dark. (I mean, the chapters are titled Murder, Rape, War, and Genocide, after all.) But, for me anyway, it was one of those "light-bulb goes on" books--the world makes a lot more sense.
While I happily agree that copyright terms are way too long right now, any copyright length that would have Zelda & Metroid in the public domain would be way too short. It's not fair to the author to go under about 25 years, and I'd argue that somewhere from 30 - 40 years is the sweet spot.
Unless you wanted to carve out a shorter length just for software, which is defensible, but I can't ever see happening.
To be fair, what usually happens is that the reviewer have seen *so* many movies, that the ones that just follow a formula are dead boring to them, unless they are absolutely exceptional. The artsy ones often have something unusual about them that at least keeps the reviewer interested.
It's the curse of the expert, and it hits all of us in our chosen field, eventually. (Well, if we actually pay attention and learn stuff, anyway.) The really good critics can filter enough of the personal perspective out to be useful to the rest of us.
Actually, the most important thing to figure out is just what the person's taste is. The most accurate guage for judging whether we will like a movie or not is one of my wife's co-workers. If he likes a movie, we will dislike it. If he hates it, we will love it. Over about 25 films, this metric is perfect so far.
I have to say that the Firefly pilot is probably the best Pilot episode of any TV show I have ever seen. (Not that that is particularly difficult--most pilots suck.) Too bad it was the last episode aired, after they'd already decided to cancel the series.
The thing is, the ability to GM a game of Paranoia well has no correlation to the ability to GM in any other system.
Back in college our gaming group was co-founded by someone who loved to GM, but was absolutely horrid at it. We all avoided his games whenever possible. And then he roped some of us into a game of Paranioa, and it was amazing how fun it was.
In Paranoia, it's OK for the GM to be harsh, unrealistic, and arbitrary, as long as he can keep the "cartoon logic" going, and is funny about it. It's definitely a different set of skills.
Classic hyper-correction. What do you want to bet that the poster speaks a dialect that drops the R's after vowels. Such speakers tend to stick random "silent R's" in words, because they can't figure out the rhyme or reason behind which words have R's in them and which words don't.
20% of *revenue* means 20% of sales. But I would assume that their costs are much better for licensing the engine than for selling the games, so it's probably way more than 20% of their *profits*.
Similar to how Sears gets most of its revenue from selling stuff, but most of its profit from interest on their charge cards.
Which is the only FPS that was ever interesting enough for me to finish.
And to add something new to the thread, for Mac players, there is a never-quite-finalized OS X version of the game floating out there that Brad Oliver (he who did the Mac port) put together. I think I tracked it down over at Macgamer.com, but a little googling and you can find it in about 5 minutes. There are only two bugs I've found with it (or that anyone else mentioned). One is that the movies associated with Wonders will cause me to crash, if not turned off. (Not everyone has this problem.) The other is that Saving crashes the game. Not as bad as it sounds, autosave still works and you can reliably restore from those.
Might not be your style (they're not mine), but they are definitely Gameboy-first games, with the Gamecube offerings being very secondary.
They sold a few copies of those games, too.
Besides, that guy got all the details wrong. Might not help much, but at least you can spot his inaccuracies.