There's no question that the US economy is significantly dependent on China, but people often overlook the fact that China's economy is equally dependent on the US. So yes, Chinese national banks keep financing US debt by buying T-Bills and keep our currency propped up by holding enormous dollar reserves, so yes, they could pretty much hit the delete button on our economy whenever they'd like. On the other hand, by doing so they would also be wiping out their own savings... not to mention cripple the primary consumer of their export economy. And that's before we consider what the effects would be on the rest of the First World that China exports to.
It's more accurate to say that there's an immense economic interdependence between China and the US, and that a sort of economic Mutually Assured Destruction is at work. That's not to say that our irresponsible economic policy of the past few years has been a good thing, though: we've created a MAD scenario, yes, but China is the only one with a button.
In general I'm a Friedman-esque pro-globalization the-world-is-flat sort of person, as economic interaction does strongly disincentive armed conflict. The problem is not with trade or globalization, it's with an economic policy that's allowed national debt to spiral out of control to the point that we've become very vulnerable and fragile traders in the global market.
In the near future there will be an easy, hassle-free way to permanently preserve digital film.
Release it to a DRM-free peer to peer file-sharing network (ie, what's commonly known as piracy). Honestly. Back when I had access to a fast on-campus i2 filesharing network, I was always amazed at the breadth and depth of the files being shared. I was also impressed by the redundancy, as even obscure or classic movies could be found on a large number of peers. Furthermore, the speeds were so ridiculously fast - 10 Mbits/s - that I pretty much considered any peer that was connected to the network an extension of my hard drive. On one occasion I chose to download a file that I already had backed up on disc off the network instead of actually copying from the disc, as it was less of a hassle and about as fast. Marveling at how quickly my roommates and I could pull down high bitrate pr0n, I wondered at the possibilities of such a network distributed across the world, the individual personal storage of entertainment files of the individual peers being effectively part of the communal global network.
When the infrastructure exists to support i2-level speeds at the consumer level, the best way to preserve digital film files would be to release the film into public domain and distribute the file via peer-to-peer. Data loss is no longer an issue when your file is distributed to peers throughout the world. Natural disasters and other acts of God are similarly no longer an issue. In the event the Academy suffers data loss, they can just become another peer on the network.
But Wikipedia already has a verifiability requirement independent of the notability requirement. Wouldn't it be better off vigilantly enforcing the verifiability and ditching the whole subjective bureaucratic mess that is "notability" all together?
Why is activism directed at the most high-profile target wrong? One of the big activist-buzzphrases is "consciousness-raising," after all. If you believed that the chemicals in a certain class of consumer products is harmful to the environment, it makes perfect sense to go after the market leader and cultural icon in that class of consumer products. That Greenpeace has decided focus attention on Apple as the optimal strategy for achieving their political goals does not imply that they find similar manufacturing practices of other companies unobjectionable. It's simply that they make more political progress when they direct all their available resources to this particular subject.
One day when I was but a lad of 16, my girlfriend dumped me for a pickup-driving football player who beat me up in gym class. In the subsequent evening alone with my thoughts I wore out my The Cure vinyl by overplaying it, so that the hissing, scratching hiss of the record player formed perfect accompaniment for the wailing and lamentation of my punctured and bleeding heart. As the record starting to skip and I heard Robert Smith wail "-enever I'm al-" over and over, I realized two things:
1. I really #%^%$! hated The Cure.
2. I was going to slit my wrists that very night. It was going to be just like that scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, with Elliot Smith and everything. Elliot Smith is way better than the cure, like, he stuck a freaking knife in his chest, man. Oh wait, maybe I should do that instead...
But then, as I was surfing online for inventive ways to kill myself, I found the Anarchist's Cookbook. That book changed my life forever. Here was someone who was clearly more pathetic than me, and who had obviously failed chemistry to boot. I got a C in chem! If in my life I could say to myself "at least I wasn't that idiot who wrote the Anarchist's Cookbook," that was a life worth living. From that moment on, I renounced all satanic rock music, discovered Christ and placed my life with the Lord, and now I run a successful business as a reseller of fine artist Thomas Kinkade's work. All thanks to the Anarchist's Cookbook. Thank you Lord, for sending me the Anarchist's Cookbook in my time of need.
You struck me as a smart, if contrarian, individual, so I assumed that the implications of my arguments were obvious enough. But then again, I suppose not everyone has taking lots of Lit, so I'll clarify.
When it is said that "literature is specific to a time and place" it is not meant that all 20th century literature is set in the 20th century, which is why I found so risible your expectation that the mere assertion of contemporary historical and fantastic fiction refuted that statement. To take a example from popular fiction, the story of King Arthur has a different sensibility as depicted by postfeminist author Marion Zimmer Bradley than by postwar author TH White. Which can be further distinguished from Tennyson's Arthur, and from Malory's Arthur, and from French-court-troubador's Arthur, and from Welsh-bard's Arthur, and so on. (Not irrelevantly, my personal enjoyment of the various incarnations of this particular story diminishes as we progressively retreat through history, to the point in the distant past where the story becomes quite simply incomprehensible to me.) This is what is meant by "specific to a time and place," which is to say in my case, specific to comparatively affluent middle America, 2007, and all the cultural preoccupations and blindnesses that implies. This is also why I suggest that an Austen born and raised in England today would not write the same work as a historical Austen.
I don't need to imply that CocoRosie is somehow in the accepted musical canon of great works (though given my personal inclinations I certainly wouldn't object if they were placed there sometime in the future) when they're simply a demonstration of the broader point that mundane context affects how we appreciate art irrespective of whatever objective merit that art may have.
Invoking confirmation bias is mighty gutsy of you when you want to overturn the null hypothesis on the basis of two entertaining but hardly rigorous "experiments." Extraordinary claims and so forth.
My point is not that people decided not to pay the opportunity costs of appreciating good music, but that their circumstances prevented them from hearing good music in the first place. If the first time I heard CocoRosie (a group that I right now adore) was in a student center on my way to classes I wouldn't have liked it very much. But I first encountered CocoRosie at home, via torrent, so I had an opportunity to listen. I never like any of the music in the student center, because it's just in the way of my day - though in one notable instance I would later download, listen, realize it sounded familiar, and also realize that it wasn't that bad.
Oh, and for your benefit I'll pretend that you didn't try to argue that contemporary works set in the Elizabethan era is equivalent in style, diction, structure, and sentiment to Shakespeare or Marlowe's depictions of their own time.
No, he's pointing out that busy people in a subway station on their way somewhere failing to fall prostrate at the feet of Joshua Bell hardly establishes your point that Bell's aesthetic achievements are entirely social constructions. Because, you know, they're not exactly in circumstances conducive to aesthetic appreciation. Note that the commuters with a background in music - including a rocker with no classical background - and the ticket-booth guy both evinced a greater appreciation for Bell than the average respondent, though of course given the sample size, response bias, lack of any controls, etc. etc., I shouldn't pretend that the little Bell demonstration was anything close to an experiment. And neither should you.
As for Austen, I remember reading about that; what I found more outrageous about it was the fact that people purportedly in the industry (though to be fair, these were probably near-minimum wage readers skimming the work) failed to recognize Austen for what it was, not that the manuscripts were rejected. All art is specific to a time and place, and an author of Austen's talent living today would not write on the same subjects or in the same style. Literature in particular I don't find to be as "timeless" as some of my professors insist that it is, as language evolves so quickly. I'd take David Foster Wallace over Shakespeare any day; I don't need footnotes to contextualize Wallace's jokes (though I expect that my grandkids certainly will).
Avatars are about who you want to pretend to be. A scrawny geek will pick the butch male because he wants to pretend to be, and a guy will pick a female character because that is who he wants to pretend to be. Actually, I'm pretty sure scrawny geeks pick butch male warriors/barbarians/whatever because they broke hunters with the last patch, or they don't like micro-ing spell use for max DPS, or what have you.
The truth is a solid majority of the MMO audience does, in fact, approach the game largely mechanistically. Naturally there are also plenty of individuals who approach the game from a more RP-perspective, but these won't be the players saying "I chose a female toon because it looks nice." Don't conflate the two.
Denial denial denial. Let us not forget what the "MMO" in "MMORPG" stands for. Players are not the only ones who look at someone's avatar; it is what you present to each and every other person you interact with. Everybody around them will naturally associate the avatar with the player, since it is, after all, what avatars are for. The "It's not really me" argument is one made by guys who deny using other men's sexual desires to their advantage, or who deny far more complicated sexual issues. On a similar note, bespectacled lanky computer nerds who choose muscular hulking warrior-types as avatars - which are naturally associated with the player, after all - are clearly engaged in fraud, denial, and working out complicated identity issues.
What if Björk was half-indian and made songs with her half-sister that was double as weird? CocoRosie. Dear god yes. Something I wrote about one of their tracks a few years ago:
"By Your Side" is a richly textured little heartbreaker of a track with the Casady sisters' fragile bluesy vocals over an R & B beat while samples of everyday sounds and some simple piano chords are mixed in to create a melody. Obligatory attempt to classify their sound by referencing other musical groups: cross Cat Power with Portishead and you'll have something that approximates CocoRosie.
Let's get this out of the way - the track, and the album as a whole, frequently dips into oh-so-hip lo-fi scratchiness, dissonance, and atonality. Suffice to say that if you are the sort of person who finds Devendra Banhart ear-splitting - his early work, full of audible crackles and hisses, before he made it and could afford expensive recording sessions - you probably aren't going to get into CocoRosie. Those who find such aural idiosyncracies charming will lap it up.
Lets focus on the lyrics, which is what is really arresting about the work anyway. I know I've just finished telling you that the Casady sisters aren't very good lyricists; they aren't. What's so compelling about the track lies more in what they're saying than how they're saying it: "All I wanted is to be your housewife... I'll wear your black eyes, bake you apple pies... and for a diamond ring, I'll do these kind of things..." Ok, so far it seems faintly American Beauty or Blue Velvet, the whole dark-pulsing-heart-lurking-behind-the-serene-facade-of-domesticity thing going on, with shades of the-monotony-of-suburbia thrown in: "I'll iron your clothes, I'll shine your shoes, I'll make your bed, and cook your food." The urbane sophisticates mocking the culture-deprived suburbanites.
But what exactly are we to make of a line like "And It's nearly midnight, and all I want in my life, is to be your housewife, is to die a housewife..." while the sound of birds can be heard chirping cheerfully in the background, evoking images of evenings spent in a lonely apartment watching the clock hands turn while dreaming of pleasant mornings in a house nestled cozily somewhere in, yes, suburbia? Then there's the refrain, "I'll always be by your side, even when you're down and out" which is looped throughout the track, in the background. Suddenly it seems possible that rather than tongue-in-cheek, the piece is actually sincere - that domesticity and all the attendant monotony and suppressed heart of darkness and veneer of civility is what the singer knowingly wants. That the lyrics are not self-conscious mockery, but tragic heartfelt pleas. The aforementioned dissonance complements this ambiguity nicely - delicate, shaky, occasionally breaking, and heartrendingly vulnerable.
So what exactly am I getting at?
What I'm getting at is that I'm having incredible difficulty "getting" the song - or, for that matter, the rest of the disc. Which is to say I have difficulty parsing out what exactly it "means." Can not "deconstruct." Like the pastiche of musical influences and textured samples at work in their music, thematically CocoRosie mixes disaffected irony and sincere sentiment into an uncomfortable but lovely stew. The idea is that maybe the two can co-exist simultaneously. That a woman might know that her marriage would be a trap out of feminazi nightmares but love someone enough to want to subsume her identity to him. It might just be that housewife, maker-of-beds, bearer-of-black-eyes and baker-of-pies is a price she's willing to pay. It might just be that this all is horrible and patriarchal and deserving of biting satire and so on, but poignant and moving and selfless and romantic at the same time.
You see, there is no substitute for parental presence. There never will be. If your boss wants to really protect her children, she needs to be there with them. Not out bossing you. Sorry, that is just reality. She can't have it both ways. None of us can. She will have to pick the one that is important, and let the other one go. Actually, for some people having your cake and eating it too presents no problem at all. Balancing work and kids? Piece of cake!
Of course, these people are usually men, and dump the domesticity on their wives. Funny how there seems to be less of a pushback when they do this...
Critical Theory: Halo's innovations
on
Halo 3 Has Gone Gold
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Another long-time PC gamer here, of FPS's and otherwise. I think we may look back upon Halo as being one of the most innovative shooters of this post-millennial decade. The reason is all about tempo, and specifically, the way Halo's "recharging shield" system dramatically alters the pace and experience of FPS games.
In a conventional FPS, the player character restores health lost through attrition by picking up some variant of "Medkit" liberally sprinkled throughout the level. Thus, the cycle of the typical FPS goes something like this: fight, fight, fight, pick up health, fight some more. This cycle is a relatively long one, in that there are generally substantial gaps between health restorations. This is necessary to maintain game challenge, and to prevent the whole "Medkit" conceit from becoming too self-evidently contrived. However, as a consequence, the "tempo" and "pace" of the game is dictated by this cycle of fight, lose health, find (or backtrack to) medkit. Because of this structure, the PC is also gifted with a substantial amount of health in order to sustain him from one cache of medkits to the next. Games are generally most exciting when the player is clinging to life, trying desperately to make it to the next medkit, but the very structure of the conventional FPS dictates that this can only occur so often per level, if at all. Indeed, many players simply choose to reload if they find themselves in perilous straights health-wise, knowing the next medkit is far off and rightly intuiting that the conventional FPS is not really designed to be played on a sliver of health.
In Halo and the health-recharging games that followed it, the cycle instead goes something like this: fight, recharge, fight, recharge, fight, recharge. The cycle is shorter, the recharges more frequent, and the amount of time the game allows the player to come close to death is thus much higher. Indeed, games with Halo-type systems its not uncommon to frequently take cover in the middle of a firefight to find some minor respite and desperately hoping to avoid any incoming fire in order to restore health. You may have noticed that it takes far less time to kill an exposed, inactive player in Halo than it does in, say, Quake 4. This is because the constant health restorations compensate for the increased risk. Thus in Halo-type games the risk of death can be more constantly exploited, and the tempo of a Halo game is much accelerated as the player constantly comes perilously close to death, and repeatedly takes a sigh of relief at restoring their health just in time.
You can already see an awareness of the superiority of an accelerated game tempo reflected in the design of subsequent FPS games. Gears of War is possibly the most recognizable incarnation of a "recharging shield" health system, but on the PC side Rainbow Six: Vegas also employs a similar system. Both games have perfected this idea to generate an incredible sense of tension as exposure to sustained enemy fire for any length of time results in a swift demise. The player feels naked and very vulnerable even when simply walking through a exposed courtyard. The unforgivingly swift tempo of these games is far more successful in evoking dread and terror in the player than the repetitive haunted-house antics of, say, Doom 3. Sure, imps may jump out of nowhere at me in Doom 3, but I'm loaded up on armor and health so I know I'm in no real danger. I'd say that Gears and R6Vegas demonstrate a far more sophisticated grasp of the design potential of recharging-shield systems than Halo does, but it was Halo that first introduced this concept and its utility to gamers.
I'll leave it at that. Halo also took the somewhat daring step of strictly constraining the player's weapon loadout, but I'm more hesitant to give it credit for that as there were plenty of similarly constrained, tactically minded shooters that preceded it. I'm also going to add that I own no copies of Halo or the Xbox, in any incarnation, and I'm almost exclusively a PC gamer myself, so to the ex
Three years ago I helped my parents find a great deal on a Dell laptop for my sister, who was just heading off to college at NYU. I was rather pleased with myself too; we used one of those 50% off coupons I found and got a great-spec machine for the price.
When the family got together for the holidays I asked her how the computer was working out; she complained to me that all the cool kids had MacBooks and she was "embarrassed to be seen in public with the ugly Dell next to all the sleek Macs."
So I can honestly say the Apple's success here is unsurprising to me; the laptop market is one that is well-suited to Apple's core strengths. Though a desktop is largely perceived as an appliance - it's an utilitarian box that you use to do stuff with - a laptop has the additional function of being a status symbol and expression of personal taste. Your desktop stays at home, but you can carry your laptop around with you. An iMac may look great, but its usefulness as a signifier of taste is constrained by the simply fact that it stays in your room. Now that the laptop market has become so important, Apple is in a great position to capitalize on their previously under-exploited brand identity.
And this is before we even consider Apple's incredibly devious "buy a Macbook, get an iPod" promotion. If Mom and Dad offer to buy you a computer for college, are you going to choose the PC or the Mac that comes with a great MP3 player? Unless you're a gamer, you're going to opt for the latter (and even if you are a gamer, you may just decide to get your fix by playing networked games with the roommates on an 360 anyway),
Frankly if you characterize the students of the presumably non-rich, non-white school you are familiar with as criminals and "a bunch of retarded lowlifes" then it should not be surprising that those same students didn't like you very much.
The whole "no one likes me because I'm smart" meme evinced in parent's post is one of the more moronic ideas that purportedly smart people cling to. There are plenty of people who are bright, well-adjusted, and popular; there were certainly plenty of these characters at my schools. You weren't getting ostracized/teased/beat up in high school because you were smart, you were getting ostracized/teased/beat up because you were socially inept (and, from the sound of it, something of a jerk too.) It just goes to show that even very bright people are susceptible to ego-preserving self-deception.
It's unsurprising to see how reminiscent of Starcraft this is. Innovation has never been strength of Blizzard; historically, Blizzard games have never had revolutionary features. Starcraft itself was merely the purest, best manifestation of a RTS formula that was very well established by the mid-90s. Blizzard sticks to refining established gameplay concepts into a perfectly crafted and meticulously balanced gem. This is not intended either as a insult of Blizzard, merely an observation - the studio is obviously very, very good at what it does, and it is rightly rewarded for that by the market. Indeed, the games industry would be much poorer without Blizzard, as it had a hand in popularizing many otherwise overlooked innovations in games, but the fact is that they don't innovate and never have. (The Gauntlet-style RPG slasher was about dead prior to Diablo, and Warcraft 3's appropriation of the hero system from neglected games like Battlecry and Kohan seems to have made it a staple of the RTS genre, etc.)
The WGA recognizes that web delivery is the future of the content creation industry. No one is sure yet how increasing broadband access and a generation of entertainment consumers weaned on BitTorrent is going to affect the commercial arts, but you can bet that web delivery, either for-pay, sponsored, or free, is going to be a huge part of the new business model. WGA screwed up once a already by failing to forsee how the home video/DVD market was going to become the major revenue source for movie studios. (Aside: Some clueless pundits - usually conservatives railing against liberal Hollywood - have pointed to falling box office receipts as signs that the studios are somehow dying, but the studios are doing better than ever. They've simply changed their business model.) It's absolutely in their interests to come on strong on the the subject of webisodes.
It's against the TOS of EVE to sell in-game currency for cash. So, it's true that in order to realize the value of your currency, you have to break the TOS. Nevertheless, this does not negate the value of the in-game currency. Consider that the IRS can initiate action against drug dealers who fail to report illicit sales income on their income taxes. Simply because cashing in on a valuable item is illegal does not obviate the tax liability of that transaction.
As has been mentioned many times - ironically often by posters who fail to see how in-game currency could be taxable - a thing is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. The troubling distraction that your sale violates some nigh-unenforceable TOS is trivial.
Once there is substantial enough income being generated through these games, the IRS _will_ start requiring that it be declared as "hobby income". Note that it will probably track your income by transactions, ie whenever you "cash out" of the game. Even the IRS would be hard-pressed to go after you for every GP you picked off a mob in-game but never converted into money.
Re:Don't forget LucasArts
on
Five That Fell
·
· Score: 1
Yea, "putting all your eggs in one basket" turns out to be a pretty good strategy when your basket is $#@*%@ STAR WARS. Stupid Star Wars fans are an easily pleased and apparently boundless demographic that makes investing development funds in anything else a pretty silly idea business-wise. Philistines.
(I currently have 4 different Star Wars games installed on my computer.)
Frankly, the current business model does not seem sensible or even just to me. I live in a large apartment with 6 other tech-savvy college students. Needless to say we consume a lot of bandwidth. We pay the same amount for internet as my parents, who only have broadband because it makes Yahoo mail load faster. (Indeed, individually we pay less, as the bill is split between the seven of us.)
I suspect the concept of "tiers" is what upsets people, rather than the underlying idea that people should be billed for internet usage consistent with their degree of use. I think a metered system would be more acceptable to the public. "Tiers" raises the possibility that the internet, or certain parts of it, could be "blocked," a notion which is anathema - and rightly so. If internet use were metered, your access would never be constrained - you'd just pay for it at the end of the month.
Dell's target market is precisely those users who aren't savvy enough to figure out these things on their own. HOCP is upfront with the fact that if you're competent you can tune the Dell into a decent machine - but anyone that technically adept probably wouldn't need to get a Dell box anyhow. It's a pity HOCP is a "hardcore" site and not a more mainstream outlet where the sort of customres that these Dell boxes are built for can read the problems with the box.
The original product attempted to deliver a innovative high-concept MMO in a IP that was fundamentally mass-market and accessible. I can't speak for the implementation of the "new" SWG - which from all accounts is hideous - but the overall strategic decision makes sense from a business perspective. Gamers who enjoyed the game for its ambitious design and aren't as interested in living out their SW wish-fulfillment fantasies get shafted, of course, but what can you do? The mainstream is a homogenizing force.
The primary cause of my use of OO is that when I set up a new computer, I can't be bothered to dig through my binder of CDs to find the MSOffice discs.
Seriously. To me, OO is the Office-equivalent-that-I-need-not-find-the-damn-CD -for. It's got a nice feature set and a pretty swanky interface, but I would consider the two suites equal, as OO does become a bit of a hassle when I've got multiple apps open.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no question that the US economy is significantly dependent on China, but people often overlook the fact that China's economy is equally dependent on the US. So yes, Chinese national banks keep financing US debt by buying T-Bills and keep our currency propped up by holding enormous dollar reserves, so yes, they could pretty much hit the delete button on our economy whenever they'd like. On the other hand, by doing so they would also be wiping out their own savings... not to mention cripple the primary consumer of their export economy. And that's before we consider what the effects would be on the rest of the First World that China exports to. It's more accurate to say that there's an immense economic interdependence between China and the US, and that a sort of economic Mutually Assured Destruction is at work. That's not to say that our irresponsible economic policy of the past few years has been a good thing, though: we've created a MAD scenario, yes, but China is the only one with a button. In general I'm a Friedman-esque pro-globalization the-world-is-flat sort of person, as economic interaction does strongly disincentive armed conflict. The problem is not with trade or globalization, it's with an economic policy that's allowed national debt to spiral out of control to the point that we've become very vulnerable and fragile traders in the global market.
In the near future there will be an easy, hassle-free way to permanently preserve digital film.
Release it to a DRM-free peer to peer file-sharing network (ie, what's commonly known as piracy). Honestly. Back when I had access to a fast on-campus i2 filesharing network, I was always amazed at the breadth and depth of the files being shared. I was also impressed by the redundancy, as even obscure or classic movies could be found on a large number of peers. Furthermore, the speeds were so ridiculously fast - 10 Mbits/s - that I pretty much considered any peer that was connected to the network an extension of my hard drive. On one occasion I chose to download a file that I already had backed up on disc off the network instead of actually copying from the disc, as it was less of a hassle and about as fast. Marveling at how quickly my roommates and I could pull down high bitrate pr0n, I wondered at the possibilities of such a network distributed across the world, the individual personal storage of entertainment files of the individual peers being effectively part of the communal global network.
When the infrastructure exists to support i2-level speeds at the consumer level, the best way to preserve digital film files would be to release the film into public domain and distribute the file via peer-to-peer. Data loss is no longer an issue when your file is distributed to peers throughout the world. Natural disasters and other acts of God are similarly no longer an issue. In the event the Academy suffers data loss, they can just become another peer on the network.
But Wikipedia already has a verifiability requirement independent of the notability requirement. Wouldn't it be better off vigilantly enforcing the verifiability and ditching the whole subjective bureaucratic mess that is "notability" all together?
Why is activism directed at the most high-profile target wrong? One of the big activist-buzzphrases is "consciousness-raising," after all. If you believed that the chemicals in a certain class of consumer products is harmful to the environment, it makes perfect sense to go after the market leader and cultural icon in that class of consumer products. That Greenpeace has decided focus attention on Apple as the optimal strategy for achieving their political goals does not imply that they find similar manufacturing practices of other companies unobjectionable. It's simply that they make more political progress when they direct all their available resources to this particular subject.
One day when I was but a lad of 16, my girlfriend dumped me for a pickup-driving football player who beat me up in gym class. In the subsequent evening alone with my thoughts I wore out my The Cure vinyl by overplaying it, so that the hissing, scratching hiss of the record player formed perfect accompaniment for the wailing and lamentation of my punctured and bleeding heart. As the record starting to skip and I heard Robert Smith wail "-enever I'm al-" over and over, I realized two things:
1. I really #%^%$! hated The Cure.
2. I was going to slit my wrists that very night. It was going to be just like that scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, with Elliot Smith and everything. Elliot Smith is way better than the cure, like, he stuck a freaking knife in his chest, man. Oh wait, maybe I should do that instead...
But then, as I was surfing online for inventive ways to kill myself, I found the Anarchist's Cookbook. That book changed my life forever. Here was someone who was clearly more pathetic than me, and who had obviously failed chemistry to boot. I got a C in chem! If in my life I could say to myself "at least I wasn't that idiot who wrote the Anarchist's Cookbook," that was a life worth living. From that moment on, I renounced all satanic rock music, discovered Christ and placed my life with the Lord, and now I run a successful business as a reseller of fine artist Thomas Kinkade's work. All thanks to the Anarchist's Cookbook. Thank you Lord, for sending me the Anarchist's Cookbook in my time of need.
You struck me as a smart, if contrarian, individual, so I assumed that the implications of my arguments were obvious enough. But then again, I suppose not everyone has taking lots of Lit, so I'll clarify. When it is said that "literature is specific to a time and place" it is not meant that all 20th century literature is set in the 20th century, which is why I found so risible your expectation that the mere assertion of contemporary historical and fantastic fiction refuted that statement. To take a example from popular fiction, the story of King Arthur has a different sensibility as depicted by postfeminist author Marion Zimmer Bradley than by postwar author TH White. Which can be further distinguished from Tennyson's Arthur, and from Malory's Arthur, and from French-court-troubador's Arthur, and from Welsh-bard's Arthur, and so on. (Not irrelevantly, my personal enjoyment of the various incarnations of this particular story diminishes as we progressively retreat through history, to the point in the distant past where the story becomes quite simply incomprehensible to me.) This is what is meant by "specific to a time and place," which is to say in my case, specific to comparatively affluent middle America, 2007, and all the cultural preoccupations and blindnesses that implies. This is also why I suggest that an Austen born and raised in England today would not write the same work as a historical Austen. I don't need to imply that CocoRosie is somehow in the accepted musical canon of great works (though given my personal inclinations I certainly wouldn't object if they were placed there sometime in the future) when they're simply a demonstration of the broader point that mundane context affects how we appreciate art irrespective of whatever objective merit that art may have. Invoking confirmation bias is mighty gutsy of you when you want to overturn the null hypothesis on the basis of two entertaining but hardly rigorous "experiments." Extraordinary claims and so forth.
My point is not that people decided not to pay the opportunity costs of appreciating good music, but that their circumstances prevented them from hearing good music in the first place. If the first time I heard CocoRosie (a group that I right now adore) was in a student center on my way to classes I wouldn't have liked it very much. But I first encountered CocoRosie at home, via torrent, so I had an opportunity to listen. I never like any of the music in the student center, because it's just in the way of my day - though in one notable instance I would later download, listen, realize it sounded familiar, and also realize that it wasn't that bad.
Oh, and for your benefit I'll pretend that you didn't try to argue that contemporary works set in the Elizabethan era is equivalent in style, diction, structure, and sentiment to Shakespeare or Marlowe's depictions of their own time.
No, he's pointing out that busy people in a subway station on their way somewhere failing to fall prostrate at the feet of Joshua Bell hardly establishes your point that Bell's aesthetic achievements are entirely social constructions. Because, you know, they're not exactly in circumstances conducive to aesthetic appreciation. Note that the commuters with a background in music - including a rocker with no classical background - and the ticket-booth guy both evinced a greater appreciation for Bell than the average respondent, though of course given the sample size, response bias, lack of any controls, etc. etc., I shouldn't pretend that the little Bell demonstration was anything close to an experiment. And neither should you.
As for Austen, I remember reading about that; what I found more outrageous about it was the fact that people purportedly in the industry (though to be fair, these were probably near-minimum wage readers skimming the work) failed to recognize Austen for what it was, not that the manuscripts were rejected. All art is specific to a time and place, and an author of Austen's talent living today would not write on the same subjects or in the same style. Literature in particular I don't find to be as "timeless" as some of my professors insist that it is, as language evolves so quickly. I'd take David Foster Wallace over Shakespeare any day; I don't need footnotes to contextualize Wallace's jokes (though I expect that my grandkids certainly will).
Another long-time PC gamer here, of FPS's and otherwise. I think we may look back upon Halo as being one of the most innovative shooters of this post-millennial decade. The reason is all about tempo, and specifically, the way Halo's "recharging shield" system dramatically alters the pace and experience of FPS games.
In a conventional FPS, the player character restores health lost through attrition by picking up some variant of "Medkit" liberally sprinkled throughout the level. Thus, the cycle of the typical FPS goes something like this: fight, fight, fight, pick up health, fight some more. This cycle is a relatively long one, in that there are generally substantial gaps between health restorations. This is necessary to maintain game challenge, and to prevent the whole "Medkit" conceit from becoming too self-evidently contrived. However, as a consequence, the "tempo" and "pace" of the game is dictated by this cycle of fight, lose health, find (or backtrack to) medkit. Because of this structure, the PC is also gifted with a substantial amount of health in order to sustain him from one cache of medkits to the next. Games are generally most exciting when the player is clinging to life, trying desperately to make it to the next medkit, but the very structure of the conventional FPS dictates that this can only occur so often per level, if at all. Indeed, many players simply choose to reload if they find themselves in perilous straights health-wise, knowing the next medkit is far off and rightly intuiting that the conventional FPS is not really designed to be played on a sliver of health.
In Halo and the health-recharging games that followed it, the cycle instead goes something like this: fight, recharge, fight, recharge, fight, recharge. The cycle is shorter, the recharges more frequent, and the amount of time the game allows the player to come close to death is thus much higher. Indeed, games with Halo-type systems its not uncommon to frequently take cover in the middle of a firefight to find some minor respite and desperately hoping to avoid any incoming fire in order to restore health. You may have noticed that it takes far less time to kill an exposed, inactive player in Halo than it does in, say, Quake 4. This is because the constant health restorations compensate for the increased risk. Thus in Halo-type games the risk of death can be more constantly exploited, and the tempo of a Halo game is much accelerated as the player constantly comes perilously close to death, and repeatedly takes a sigh of relief at restoring their health just in time.
You can already see an awareness of the superiority of an accelerated game tempo reflected in the design of subsequent FPS games. Gears of War is possibly the most recognizable incarnation of a "recharging shield" health system, but on the PC side Rainbow Six: Vegas also employs a similar system. Both games have perfected this idea to generate an incredible sense of tension as exposure to sustained enemy fire for any length of time results in a swift demise. The player feels naked and very vulnerable even when simply walking through a exposed courtyard. The unforgivingly swift tempo of these games is far more successful in evoking dread and terror in the player than the repetitive haunted-house antics of, say, Doom 3. Sure, imps may jump out of nowhere at me in Doom 3, but I'm loaded up on armor and health so I know I'm in no real danger. I'd say that Gears and R6Vegas demonstrate a far more sophisticated grasp of the design potential of recharging-shield systems than Halo does, but it was Halo that first introduced this concept and its utility to gamers.
I'll leave it at that. Halo also took the somewhat daring step of strictly constraining the player's weapon loadout, but I'm more hesitant to give it credit for that as there were plenty of similarly constrained, tactically minded shooters that preceded it. I'm also going to add that I own no copies of Halo or the Xbox, in any incarnation, and I'm almost exclusively a PC gamer myself, so to the ex
Three years ago I helped my parents find a great deal on a Dell laptop for my sister, who was just heading off to college at NYU. I was rather pleased with myself too; we used one of those 50% off coupons I found and got a great-spec machine for the price.
When the family got together for the holidays I asked her how the computer was working out; she complained to me that all the cool kids had MacBooks and she was "embarrassed to be seen in public with the ugly Dell next to all the sleek Macs."
So I can honestly say the Apple's success here is unsurprising to me; the laptop market is one that is well-suited to Apple's core strengths. Though a desktop is largely perceived as an appliance - it's an utilitarian box that you use to do stuff with - a laptop has the additional function of being a status symbol and expression of personal taste. Your desktop stays at home, but you can carry your laptop around with you. An iMac may look great, but its usefulness as a signifier of taste is constrained by the simply fact that it stays in your room. Now that the laptop market has become so important, Apple is in a great position to capitalize on their previously under-exploited brand identity.
And this is before we even consider Apple's incredibly devious "buy a Macbook, get an iPod" promotion. If Mom and Dad offer to buy you a computer for college, are you going to choose the PC or the Mac that comes with a great MP3 player? Unless you're a gamer, you're going to opt for the latter (and even if you are a gamer, you may just decide to get your fix by playing networked games with the roommates on an 360 anyway),
Frankly if you characterize the students of the presumably non-rich, non-white school you are familiar with as criminals and "a bunch of retarded lowlifes" then it should not be surprising that those same students didn't like you very much.
The whole "no one likes me because I'm smart" meme evinced in parent's post is one of the more moronic ideas that purportedly smart people cling to. There are plenty of people who are bright, well-adjusted, and popular; there were certainly plenty of these characters at my schools. You weren't getting ostracized/teased/beat up in high school because you were smart, you were getting ostracized/teased/beat up because you were socially inept (and, from the sound of it, something of a jerk too.) It just goes to show that even very bright people are susceptible to ego-preserving self-deception.
It's unsurprising to see how reminiscent of Starcraft this is. Innovation has never been strength of Blizzard; historically, Blizzard games have never had revolutionary features. Starcraft itself was merely the purest, best manifestation of a RTS formula that was very well established by the mid-90s. Blizzard sticks to refining established gameplay concepts into a perfectly crafted and meticulously balanced gem. This is not intended either as a insult of Blizzard, merely an observation - the studio is obviously very, very good at what it does, and it is rightly rewarded for that by the market. Indeed, the games industry would be much poorer without Blizzard, as it had a hand in popularizing many otherwise overlooked innovations in games, but the fact is that they don't innovate and never have. (The Gauntlet-style RPG slasher was about dead prior to Diablo, and Warcraft 3's appropriation of the hero system from neglected games like Battlecry and Kohan seems to have made it a staple of the RTS genre, etc.)
The WGA recognizes that web delivery is the future of the content creation industry. No one is sure yet how increasing broadband access and a generation of entertainment consumers weaned on BitTorrent is going to affect the commercial arts, but you can bet that web delivery, either for-pay, sponsored, or free, is going to be a huge part of the new business model. WGA screwed up once a already by failing to forsee how the home video/DVD market was going to become the major revenue source for movie studios. (Aside: Some clueless pundits - usually conservatives railing against liberal Hollywood - have pointed to falling box office receipts as signs that the studios are somehow dying, but the studios are doing better than ever. They've simply changed their business model.) It's absolutely in their interests to come on strong on the the subject of webisodes.
MS can abuse gamers as much as they want because gamers are the very definition of a captured demographic.
It's against the TOS of EVE to sell in-game currency for cash. So, it's true that in order to realize the value of your currency, you have to break the TOS. Nevertheless, this does not negate the value of the in-game currency. Consider that the IRS can initiate action against drug dealers who fail to report illicit sales income on their income taxes. Simply because cashing in on a valuable item is illegal does not obviate the tax liability of that transaction. As has been mentioned many times - ironically often by posters who fail to see how in-game currency could be taxable - a thing is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. The troubling distraction that your sale violates some nigh-unenforceable TOS is trivial. Once there is substantial enough income being generated through these games, the IRS _will_ start requiring that it be declared as "hobby income". Note that it will probably track your income by transactions, ie whenever you "cash out" of the game. Even the IRS would be hard-pressed to go after you for every GP you picked off a mob in-game but never converted into money.
Yea, "putting all your eggs in one basket" turns out to be a pretty good strategy when your basket is $#@*%@ STAR WARS. Stupid Star Wars fans are an easily pleased and apparently boundless demographic that makes investing development funds in anything else a pretty silly idea business-wise. Philistines.
(I currently have 4 different Star Wars games installed on my computer.)
Frankly, the current business model does not seem sensible or even just to me. I live in a large apartment with 6 other tech-savvy college students. Needless to say we consume a lot of bandwidth. We pay the same amount for internet as my parents, who only have broadband because it makes Yahoo mail load faster. (Indeed, individually we pay less, as the bill is split between the seven of us.) I suspect the concept of "tiers" is what upsets people, rather than the underlying idea that people should be billed for internet usage consistent with their degree of use. I think a metered system would be more acceptable to the public. "Tiers" raises the possibility that the internet, or certain parts of it, could be "blocked," a notion which is anathema - and rightly so. If internet use were metered, your access would never be constrained - you'd just pay for it at the end of the month.
Dell's target market is precisely those users who aren't savvy enough to figure out these things on their own. HOCP is upfront with the fact that if you're competent you can tune the Dell into a decent machine - but anyone that technically adept probably wouldn't need to get a Dell box anyhow. It's a pity HOCP is a "hardcore" site and not a more mainstream outlet where the sort of customres that these Dell boxes are built for can read the problems with the box.
The original product attempted to deliver a innovative high-concept MMO in a IP that was fundamentally mass-market and accessible. I can't speak for the implementation of the "new" SWG - which from all accounts is hideous - but the overall strategic decision makes sense from a business perspective. Gamers who enjoyed the game for its ambitious design and aren't as interested in living out their SW wish-fulfillment fantasies get shafted, of course, but what can you do? The mainstream is a homogenizing force.
The primary cause of my use of OO is that when I set up a new computer, I can't be bothered to dig through my binder of CDs to find the MSOffice discs. Seriously. To me, OO is the Office-equivalent-that-I-need-not-find-the-damn-CD -for. It's got a nice feature set and a pretty swanky interface, but I would consider the two suites equal, as OO does become a bit of a hassle when I've got multiple apps open.