"What Catamount's done is sugarcoat its game (quite literally) and turned it into Prohibition 3: Candy Wars â" a badly-reskinned version of the exact same game."
Fixed that for you. Seriously, the screenshot in the article is hideous.
All the 'serious gamers' bought one on launch date so they could play $FPS. That market is saturated. LBP is designed to appeal to the huge 'non-serious gamer' market that the Wii has sold to.
Yes, there is a percentage of good shows. This, too, stays constant; there are a hell of a lot of throwaway shows that appeal to a lowest common denominator.
I think the shopping channels may actually pay to be on your dial.
"very successful and well received demo versions" seems to translate to "widely-downloaded demo" rather than "demo that makes people rant and rave about how awesome this will be".
LittleBigPlanet was getting a lot of Sony's promotional efforts behind it. This article notes that Sony is hoping it'll be a console-selling game.
Mirror's Edge also had a lot of EA's promotion behind it.
I dunno how much puffery Conan was getting as I refuse to play MMORPGs; I only become aware of them when half my friends get sucked into them.
So... lots of people have heard of at least two of the titles this article discusses. Lots of people are curious about them because of all the articles praising them as revolutionary, important, etc. So lots of people downloaded the thing, and decided it was not for them.
Isn't that what a demo is for? Hell, I'm one of the people that downloaded the Mirror's Edge demo solely because of all the hype. I didn't even finish the demo level because I really just don't like first-person games. I also downloaded Space Giraffe and Braid, played the demos, paid my money, and told my friends about these awesome games I just bought.
Lots of people pick up books in the bookstore, flip through them and read a few pages, then put them back on the shelf unpurchased. I would bet that if we had any way of counting this, we would find that books with an aggressive press campaign have more people pick them up to flip through.
TV content stays the same quality; it's your taste that's changing. A five-year-old will love pretty much any trash you put in front of her; a fifty-year-old is either (a) still in love with the same stuff she saw when she was five, or (b) watching on a much more complicated level, and requires far more meaning and technical skill in their content.
The fashion changes, but the target demographic remains the same - gullible people who are easy to convince to spend money.
Born intergendered. A sex was surgically chosen before the baby was taken home. Said sex did not agree with how the child felt as they grew older. Gender started being changed.
(Usually, the initial assigned gender is 'female' because making a hole is easier.)
Web developers need to look at their sites on IE7 (and probably 6) so they can work around IE's many rendering and Javascript incompatibilities. Most clients aren't going to appreciate you delivering something that's broken for ~60% of all visitors.
Those shots of Amarok are beyond ugly. I don't think iTunes is all that great-looking - I mostly keep it hidden and control it via Quicksilver - but damn, Amarok looks like ass.
Songbird looks a little better but that's mostly because it's a half-assed knock-off of iTunes, visually.
I used to use Audion, but I switched to iTunes because everything supports talking to it. And now I've fallen in love with the way it completely insulates me from the file structure my music happens to be in.
Yeah, it ate a couple of days, it felt really familiar and on-rails, and then space was just one randomly-generated fetch-quest after another. I got bored with fetch quests and decided to try and fly up my arm of the galaxy to the center, and quickly found myself hemmed in by stars set further apart than my drive could go, at which point I gave up. Haven't touched it since.
The only moment I was really having anything that felt like "fun" was giggling at watching three or four of my creatures dance in synch when trying to be friendly in the creature stage. Everything else felt like make-work.
I'm a professional artist and animator, and my only screen is my several-year-old 15" G4 Powerbook. I'd like to have an external screen to hook it up to but I can't afford one right now. At the current day gig I have a big-ass tower Mac with two monitors, and honestly it makes my neck hurt.
There are tons of people whose pro machine is a laptop. Especially freelancers: you can throw it and the tablet in your bag and go out to the café when 'working at home' becomes 'slacking' too often.
I am not on Facebook. Nor MySpace. Nor any other "social networking" sites.
But I am on Livejournal - which is where my social circles ended up gravitating to. Most of my friends from the past decade showed up there. We'll start RL conversations based on an LJ post.
Friendship requires channels to be conducted over. My friends chose LJ. Yours chose FB. Do you want to continue to be their friend? Then you kinda need to start hanging out on the same sites as them.
As other comments have pointed out, you're already giving out a ton of information on other sites. Share what you're comfortable with, detag photos you're not happy being listed in. And use it for fragments of conversations.
Keep your email where you want it - but if your entire social circle hangs out on site X, you kinda need to have a presence there.
From what I've read, the Housers are responsible for the huge emphasis on 'realism'. DMA's original 2D GTAs were set in a completely absurd world, with gangs like the Loonies or the Mad Scientists, and secrets like occasionally seeing a whole crowd of Elvis impersonators who'd give you a point bonus for getting them all.
When the Housers got involved, they pushed it towards the emphasis on glorifying the Mafia movies that all the gangbangers, and the wiggas following the gangbangers' cultural lead, were into.
It is the synthesis of Jones's vision of a free-roaming city and the Houser's vision of how cool Scarface that was the massive success of GTA3. You can argue back and forth about who 'created' it; it's certainly the Housers who managed to grab the notoriety for it by getting Jones and the rest of the programmers and artists to bend the game into their vision of the average underemployed white guy's fantasies. In fact, the last linked article quotes on this very subject:
"While neither writes game code, we believe that they are analogous to the director of a Hollywood film, instrumental in determining the final shape of the ultimate games released."
Jones is the vision behind GTA. The Housers are the vision behind GTA3. GTA3 builds on Jones' original work, to be sure, but it would be a totally different game if they hadn't been involved. Look at his gameography, play a few, play some of the other stuff DMA released pre-Rockstar (which presumably had to get his approval): I think you'll agree that GTA3 is, thematically, very different from all Jones' games before and since.
I am not saying this is a good thing - I vastly preferred the videogamey silliness of the original GTAs - but the Housers were a big part of creating the GTA3/4 brand.
The FPS convention that you're just a floating viewpoint with a gun attached has always bothered me; this is one of the reasons I lost interest in the genre after the novelty of Doom's first-person view wore off. Every time I'd look down and see nothing but a vague shadow, I'd completely lose suspension of disbelief.
Even in a game like Portal, where you can look at yourself whenever you like, the player model still only exists when you see it from outside. Look down and you're just a shadow.
Judging from most of the indy game success stories I read, the people you need to sell it to are (a) yourself and (b) the 2-4 friends with the proper skillset to help you pull it off.
Having enough money saved up to cut back on your day job, or quit it for a while, helps too. Or having a spouse who's willing to shoulder the financial burden of the household while you build this thing.
On the other hand I've been using a tiny little Wacom Graphire instead of a mouse for almost a decade. I do all my art on it and all my mousing around. It's very comfy for me. I'd previously gotten ahold of a foot-square tablet and found it to be totally awkward - I couldn't find anywhere to PUT it except in my lap, and then I had to sit way too far away from the screen. The little tablet sits at the right side of my keyboard, where most people put their mouse pads.
Hooray! Now C programmers can join the fun of writing sluggish applications that eat up huge amounts of CPU even when they're doing nothing!
Deceptive headline, too, as this is just about compiling C to the bytecode that the Flash player interprets. Or even worse, now that I RTFA: "The LLVM instructions are converted into opcodes for a custom Virtual Machine that runs in ActionScript, a variant of ECMAScript and sibling of JavaScript." So your C is compiled to bytecode, that is interpreted by an interpreter that is, itself, a stream of the Flash player's bytecode.
Moore's Law notwithstanding, this is a pretty insane use of processor cycles, guaranteed to make your program run a couple orders of magnitude slower than it would if you actually compiled it, or rewrote it in Actionscript!
The surface of the painting can tell you a lot about how a piece was made: you can look at the shapes of the strokes, the trails left by the brush's bristles, and tell something about how the artist's hand moved. You can learn technique from this. I have looked at original art and been able to see things i could never see in a reproduction, and taken something back to my own artwork.
Would you rather pick up technique from Michaelangelo's marks - or from someone who did a copy of them? The copyist may be miming the original's technique, but he's not going to show the same thought processes on the canvas, as he has a finished piece to work from. You'll never be able to look at layered paint and get an idea of where the original artist had to struggle.
Looking at a copy, even a good one, is like looking at source code with all the comments stripped out and all the variable names obscured.
Plus, of course, issues of scarcity: there is only one of these. It is thus very rare, and potentially worth a hell of a lot if it's been deemed Fine Art.
- the first one just hung; I ctrl-c'd it after a while. - the second one worked. - the third one died, with the execution error: ARDAgent got an error: AppleEvent timed out. (-1712) error others are reporting.
(overloaded old 1.25Ghz G4, running 10.4.11 (latest version of Tiger unless they released an update in the past week).
I'm guessing that the osascript command is only willing to wait so long - and my machine's speed and load is such that it's right on the cusp of that time.
Renaming it seemed to work for the moment, though I'm sure it also breaks legit use of Remote Desktop:
$ sudo mv/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/notARDAgent.app Password: XYZZY $ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'18:19: syntax error: No user interaction allowed. (-1713) $ osascript -e 'tell app "wsiofth" to do shell script "whoami"' 17:18: syntax error: No user interaction allowed. (-1713)
Presumably saying "Hey, dude, can you throttle the hell out of your P2P? I'm getting no net whatsoever." is not an option.
If so, yeah, you could try looking into the alternate firmwares for the router; they let you throttle stuff based on ports. You'll have to look at the serial number to know for sure if you can stick that in, or spend like $80 or whatever for the WRTGL, which has enough firmware space to do fun things.
I know you're using it as a random example of 'cool SF that I'd love to see on the big screen' rather than a specific one, but I think the screen rights to Neuromancer are still in some weird development limbo. I know they were when Johnny Mnemonic came out - that's why Molly wasn't in that movie.
Also, geeze, I shudder to imagine how long a Cryptonomicon movie would be. It'd have to be cut down to just one of the three plot threads, and just a sketch of that; a typical movie really has about a novella's worth of plot in it.
Realistically... the amount of money that gets poured into a Hollywood flick means that there's a ton of conservatism going around; people only want to invest in "proven properties" - something totally new may be a big success, but it's more likely to be a flop. Especially once the long chain of executives starts putting their thumbs in.
Used book stores, man. If you live in a city then there's a bunch of them around; one of them will have a good SF section. Go browse. If you browse a couple stores and find nothing, then ask - the people running the store might well say "Oh, SF? Yeah, we don't really carry much of that, we kinda specialize in art books - we direct everyone looking for that to McFoozle's over on Main and Foobar."
Also specialty stores. Here in Boston, for instance, there's a nice SF bookstore called Pandemonium that carries a good mix of new and used.
Sometimes you'll browse the used stuff and find that book you've been wanting for years. A rare treasure! For only four bucks! And the day is instantly better. And if you don't want to wait for that, you can always ask the bookstore to do the hunting for you - most non-chain bookstores are networked nowadays, so you could go chat with the bookseller and say "Hey, can you hunt me up a copy of Dan Simmons' Illium?" and they'll poke at their computer and say "No problem, I can get that by next week for twelve bucks." You can even find rare stuff this way; I had a copy of the collected Ralph Steadman Alice/Looking Glass/Snark that came to me due to this kind of inter-store swapping, for instance - for about a third of what most of the sellers that had it were listing it for.
Slashdot Mirror
"What Catamount's done is sugarcoat its game (quite literally) and turned it into Prohibition 3: Candy Wars â" a badly-reskinned version of the exact same game."
Fixed that for you. Seriously, the screenshot in the article is hideous.
All the 'serious gamers' bought one on launch date so they could play $FPS. That market is saturated. LBP is designed to appeal to the huge 'non-serious gamer' market that the Wii has sold to.
Yes, there is a percentage of good shows. This, too, stays constant; there are a hell of a lot of throwaway shows that appeal to a lowest common denominator.
I think the shopping channels may actually pay to be on your dial.
"very successful and well received demo versions" seems to translate to "widely-downloaded demo" rather than "demo that makes people rant and rave about how awesome this will be".
LittleBigPlanet was getting a lot of Sony's promotional efforts behind it. This article notes that Sony is hoping it'll be a console-selling game.
Mirror's Edge also had a lot of EA's promotion behind it.
I dunno how much puffery Conan was getting as I refuse to play MMORPGs; I only become aware of them when half my friends get sucked into them.
So... lots of people have heard of at least two of the titles this article discusses. Lots of people are curious about them because of all the articles praising them as revolutionary, important, etc. So lots of people downloaded the thing, and decided it was not for them.
Isn't that what a demo is for? Hell, I'm one of the people that downloaded the Mirror's Edge demo solely because of all the hype. I didn't even finish the demo level because I really just don't like first-person games. I also downloaded Space Giraffe and Braid, played the demos, paid my money, and told my friends about these awesome games I just bought.
Lots of people pick up books in the bookstore, flip through them and read a few pages, then put them back on the shelf unpurchased. I would bet that if we had any way of counting this, we would find that books with an aggressive press campaign have more people pick them up to flip through.
TV content stays the same quality; it's your taste that's changing. A five-year-old will love pretty much any trash you put in front of her; a fifty-year-old is either (a) still in love with the same stuff she saw when she was five, or (b) watching on a much more complicated level, and requires far more meaning and technical skill in their content.
The fashion changes, but the target demographic remains the same - gullible people who are easy to convince to spend money.
One possible scenario is this:
Born intergendered.
A sex was surgically chosen before the baby was taken home.
Said sex did not agree with how the child felt as they grew older.
Gender started being changed.
(Usually, the initial assigned gender is 'female' because making a hole is easier.)
Web developers need to look at their sites on IE7 (and probably 6) so they can work around IE's many rendering and Javascript incompatibilities. Most clients aren't going to appreciate you delivering something that's broken for ~60% of all visitors.
Those shots of Amarok are beyond ugly. I don't think iTunes is all that great-looking - I mostly keep it hidden and control it via Quicksilver - but damn, Amarok looks like ass.
Songbird looks a little better but that's mostly because it's a half-assed knock-off of iTunes, visually.
I used to use Audion, but I switched to iTunes because everything supports talking to it. And now I've fallen in love with the way it completely insulates me from the file structure my music happens to be in.
Man, I think iTunes is kinda ugly - but I just keep it out of sight and mostly interact with it via Quicksilver.
Yeah, it ate a couple of days, it felt really familiar and on-rails, and then space was just one randomly-generated fetch-quest after another. I got bored with fetch quests and decided to try and fly up my arm of the galaxy to the center, and quickly found myself hemmed in by stars set further apart than my drive could go, at which point I gave up. Haven't touched it since.
The only moment I was really having anything that felt like "fun" was giggling at watching three or four of my creatures dance in synch when trying to be friendly in the creature stage. Everything else felt like make-work.
I'm a professional artist and animator, and my only screen is my several-year-old 15" G4 Powerbook. I'd like to have an external screen to hook it up to but I can't afford one right now. At the current day gig I have a big-ass tower Mac with two monitors, and honestly it makes my neck hurt.
There are tons of people whose pro machine is a laptop. Especially freelancers: you can throw it and the tablet in your bag and go out to the café when 'working at home' becomes 'slacking' too often.
I am not on Facebook. Nor MySpace. Nor any other "social networking" sites.
But I am on Livejournal - which is where my social circles ended up gravitating to. Most of my friends from the past decade showed up there. We'll start RL conversations based on an LJ post.
Friendship requires channels to be conducted over. My friends chose LJ. Yours chose FB. Do you want to continue to be their friend? Then you kinda need to start hanging out on the same sites as them.
As other comments have pointed out, you're already giving out a ton of information on other sites. Share what you're comfortable with, detag photos you're not happy being listed in. And use it for fragments of conversations.
Keep your email where you want it - but if your entire social circle hangs out on site X, you kinda need to have a presence there.
From what I've read, the Housers are responsible for the huge emphasis on 'realism'. DMA's original 2D GTAs were set in a completely absurd world, with gangs like the Loonies or the Mad Scientists, and secrets like occasionally seeing a whole crowd of Elvis impersonators who'd give you a point bonus for getting them all.
When the Housers got involved, they pushed it towards the emphasis on glorifying the Mafia movies that all the gangbangers, and the wiggas following the gangbangers' cultural lead, were into.
It is the synthesis of Jones's vision of a free-roaming city and the Houser's vision of how cool Scarface that was the massive success of GTA3. You can argue back and forth about who 'created' it; it's certainly the Housers who managed to grab the notoriety for it by getting Jones and the rest of the programmers and artists to bend the game into their vision of the average underemployed white guy's fantasies. In fact, the last linked article quotes on this very subject:
"While neither writes game code, we believe that they are analogous to the director of a Hollywood film, instrumental in determining the final shape of the ultimate games released."
Jones is the vision behind GTA. The Housers are the vision behind GTA3. GTA3 builds on Jones' original work, to be sure, but it would be a totally different game if they hadn't been involved. Look at his gameography, play a few, play some of the other stuff DMA released pre-Rockstar (which presumably had to get his approval): I think you'll agree that GTA3 is, thematically, very different from all Jones' games before and since.
I am not saying this is a good thing - I vastly preferred the videogamey silliness of the original GTAs - but the Housers were a big part of creating the GTA3/4 brand.
They've surrounded the tasty nugget of Mac-compatible Webkit code with a thick layer of Windows-only user-interface and thread-maintenance code.
The FPS convention that you're just a floating viewpoint with a gun attached has always bothered me; this is one of the reasons I lost interest in the genre after the novelty of Doom's first-person view wore off. Every time I'd look down and see nothing but a vague shadow, I'd completely lose suspension of disbelief.
Even in a game like Portal, where you can look at yourself whenever you like, the player model still only exists when you see it from outside. Look down and you're just a shadow.
It always makes me feel like I'm Rimmer.
I mostly see things pop up on Vimeo when people don't want to post them on Youtube for quality reasons.
Judging from most of the indy game success stories I read, the people you need to sell it to are (a) yourself and (b) the 2-4 friends with the proper skillset to help you pull it off.
Having enough money saved up to cut back on your day job, or quit it for a while, helps too. Or having a spouse who's willing to shoulder the financial burden of the household while you build this thing.
Three means you always have a tiebreaker opinion available, for one thing.
On the other hand I've been using a tiny little Wacom Graphire instead of a mouse for almost a decade. I do all my art on it and all my mousing around. It's very comfy for me. I'd previously gotten ahold of a foot-square tablet and found it to be totally awkward - I couldn't find anywhere to PUT it except in my lap, and then I had to sit way too far away from the screen. The little tablet sits at the right side of my keyboard, where most people put their mouse pads.
Hooray! Now C programmers can join the fun of writing sluggish applications that eat up huge amounts of CPU even when they're doing nothing!
Deceptive headline, too, as this is just about compiling C to the bytecode that the Flash player interprets. Or even worse, now that I RTFA: "The LLVM instructions are converted into opcodes for a custom Virtual Machine that runs in ActionScript, a variant of ECMAScript and sibling of JavaScript." So your C is compiled to bytecode, that is interpreted by an interpreter that is, itself, a stream of the Flash player's bytecode.
Moore's Law notwithstanding, this is a pretty insane use of processor cycles, guaranteed to make your program run a couple orders of magnitude slower than it would if you actually compiled it, or rewrote it in Actionscript!
The surface of the painting can tell you a lot about how a piece was made: you can look at the shapes of the strokes, the trails left by the brush's bristles, and tell something about how the artist's hand moved. You can learn technique from this. I have looked at original art and been able to see things i could never see in a reproduction, and taken something back to my own artwork.
Would you rather pick up technique from Michaelangelo's marks - or from someone who did a copy of them? The copyist may be miming the original's technique, but he's not going to show the same thought processes on the canvas, as he has a finished piece to work from. You'll never be able to look at layered paint and get an idea of where the original artist had to struggle.
Looking at a copy, even a good one, is like looking at source code with all the comments stripped out and all the variable names obscured.
Plus, of course, issues of scarcity: there is only one of these. It is thus very rare, and potentially worth a hell of a lot if it's been deemed Fine Art.
Out of three tries:
/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/notARDAgent.app
- the first one just hung; I ctrl-c'd it after a while.
- the second one worked.
- the third one died, with the execution error: ARDAgent got an error: AppleEvent timed out. (-1712) error others are reporting.
(overloaded old 1.25Ghz G4, running 10.4.11 (latest version of Tiger unless they released an update in the past week).
I'm guessing that the osascript command is only willing to wait so long - and my machine's speed and load is such that it's right on the cusp of that time.
Renaming it seemed to work for the moment, though I'm sure it also breaks legit use of Remote Desktop:
$ sudo mv
Password: XYZZY
$ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'18:19: syntax error: No user interaction allowed. (-1713)
$ osascript -e 'tell app "wsiofth" to do shell script "whoami"'
17:18: syntax error: No user interaction allowed. (-1713)
Presumably saying "Hey, dude, can you throttle the hell out of your P2P? I'm getting no net whatsoever." is not an option.
If so, yeah, you could try looking into the alternate firmwares for the router; they let you throttle stuff based on ports. You'll have to look at the serial number to know for sure if you can stick that in, or spend like $80 or whatever for the WRTGL, which has enough firmware space to do fun things.
I know you're using it as a random example of 'cool SF that I'd love to see on the big screen' rather than a specific one, but I think the screen rights to Neuromancer are still in some weird development limbo. I know they were when Johnny Mnemonic came out - that's why Molly wasn't in that movie.
Also, geeze, I shudder to imagine how long a Cryptonomicon movie would be. It'd have to be cut down to just one of the three plot threads, and just a sketch of that; a typical movie really has about a novella's worth of plot in it.
Realistically... the amount of money that gets poured into a Hollywood flick means that there's a ton of conservatism going around; people only want to invest in "proven properties" - something totally new may be a big success, but it's more likely to be a flop. Especially once the long chain of executives starts putting their thumbs in.
Used book stores, man. If you live in a city then there's a bunch of them around; one of them will have a good SF section. Go browse. If you browse a couple stores and find nothing, then ask - the people running the store might well say "Oh, SF? Yeah, we don't really carry much of that, we kinda specialize in art books - we direct everyone looking for that to McFoozle's over on Main and Foobar."
Also specialty stores. Here in Boston, for instance, there's a nice SF bookstore called Pandemonium that carries a good mix of new and used.
Sometimes you'll browse the used stuff and find that book you've been wanting for years. A rare treasure! For only four bucks! And the day is instantly better. And if you don't want to wait for that, you can always ask the bookstore to do the hunting for you - most non-chain bookstores are networked nowadays, so you could go chat with the bookseller and say "Hey, can you hunt me up a copy of Dan Simmons' Illium?" and they'll poke at their computer and say "No problem, I can get that by next week for twelve bucks." You can even find rare stuff this way; I had a copy of the collected Ralph Steadman Alice/Looking Glass/Snark that came to me due to this kind of inter-store swapping, for instance - for about a third of what most of the sellers that had it were listing it for.