Have you never typed out words on a calculator by typing numbers and turning it upside down?
Yeah, somehow we always ended up with 5318008, ensued by juvenile snickering. At some point the word "boobies" stopped being funny, and we got over it.
proudly displayed my in-game hours (eagles scream!)
The last time I got 10.0 Eagles Scream on Steam I was on leave and my vacation plans got canceled. Two weeks of spending most of my time either playing TF2 or flying a spaceship around in the X3 sequel (or is that expansion) messing about with the scripting interface (which I must say is an abominable horror).
A friend of mine looked at my profile, pointed it out to me, and at that point I realized I had just wasted two weeks on gaming. It had been since my high school days since I had wasted that much time on videogames. For some reason it didn't quite bring the same satisfaction that it used to.
But I won't feel much sympathy when the cut-off peasants storm his gates holding pitchforks, hot pokers and rope.
Entertaining as the thought might be, both you and I know that this won't happen. The worst that will happen is another few cars getting lit up, which gives him another excuse to "get tough on crime".
It might be interesting to note that in the UK a similar proposal is rearing its ugly head, and ISPs are "opposing" it, although ulterior motives are more likely to be the true reason, as found in the bottom of the article:
He said that ISPs might be willing to consider a graduated response to tackling piracy if content providers were willing to pay distribution fees to ISPs.
The rough translation of that sentence reads as "It's not really our problem, unless you pay us to make it our problem."
I think the next couple of years are going to be interesting at the very least to see what our lawmakers are going to cook up to monitor our activities (if the whole ordeal doesn't get outsourced to the private sector), and more interesting will be the creative ways around those systems.
If you are like me and learned things like normalization and set operations from a rather dry text book, you may be quite entertained by the contents of this book.
I'm sorry, but SQL should be taught dry, no lube and no sedative. Anything else would be blasphemous or at least disturb the natural order of things.
In all seriousness though, if you need this medium to make databases interesting for the reader, you're probably pandering to the wrong crowd. Anyone who needs to learn SQL will probably get a less childish book. Teenagers (and certainly college students) will buy this for the few laughs they get out of it, and that's about all the novelty you'll get out of it.
I personally can't wait for the "Manga guide to Systems Administration" where princess Ruruna is faced with her arch nemesis The User. I hear in chapter 3 she opens up her box to replace defective parts. In chapter 15 she learns about security and discovers evil hackers have exploited her badly configured server. 2 chapters later it happens again but then she learns about a strange magic called firewalling.
Other guides I'd love to read:
Manga guide to Assembly: Princess Ruruna just can't get her code to run fast enough, so she takes a journey to the magical land of Registra and learns how to tighten those loops
Manga guide to Network Administration: Princess Ruruna has a hard time running around the office with a USB stick until she discovers switches and routers.
Manga guide to BOFH: Tired of it all, Princess Ruruna starts reading The Users email. When The User complains about the lack of diskspace, she decided to delete all his data.
Manga guide to LISP: Princess Ruruna inherits her fathers kingdom and parenthesis. Crazy adventures ensue
Manga guide to Recursive Programming: By far the most artistic book of them all, princess Ruruna decides to draw herself drawing a picture of herself drawing a picture of herself drawing a picture of herself drawing a picture of herself drawing a picture of herself drawing...
practising and playing tennis or golf for the majority of my day snip played chess every day for as long as possible snip live and breathe business snip be addicted to real drugs and write incredible novels
Now add to each of those examples "and neglected my responsibilities, friends and family". I play a lot of videogames, I'll openly admit that, but not at the expense of reality. Reality is that during weekdays I have to get up at 6:30 to go to work, because if I don't I'm not going to have a roof over my head for very long.
MMOs are great in that respect. You get to see the obsessive behavior of some players, especially the college student aged crowd. I've met this guy in WoW once who'd spend 8 hours a day on average playing the game (with up to 14 hours straight as his maximum). He'd run two characters at the same time sometimes simply grinding for materials. In Eve I met someone who spent about 10 hours a day just interacting with the market, lowering and raising prices with 0.01 ISK while actually doing something else on a second account.
Some of these kids will be playing their MMO in the middle of the exams, flunking out on their courses, yet they show intelligence enough to pass these tests if they would do to the work. I've had a coworker who actually skipped a day of work when the new WoW expansion came out, risking his income for such a silly thing.
I'm not going to say that people should apply themselves to more useful causes, because it's their free time, and gaming doesn't really hurt anyone. What I do think is that some people have a lack of priorities, or the lack of a mental trigger when a videogame is slowly becoming the driving force in their lives. I wouldn't call it an addiction because many of these people at some point snap out of it and are capable of simply picking up their regular life again (with a few adjustments), often without the drama that a real addiction like a drug addiction is bound to cause.
An additional factor to take note of is that with an MMO, "addicted" players are more likely to come into contact with other players that have the same behavioral pattern. This reinforces the idea that what they're doing is perfectly normal. Forming groups like guilds or corporations or whatever social game mechanic the designers thought of, these players will frown upon people who do not dedicate themselves enough to the game and to the guild/corp/whatever. Peer pressure should not be underestimated.
Finally, adolescents and the college age group more often than not have an indifferent attitude. Add to indifference a dash of lazyness and geekyness and you'll get a very good recipe for an MMO player.
Yeah, those WW2 games are offensive too. That's why there are so many of them that hardly anyone complains about. Let's all stop playing FPSs set in a warzone, and make it all happen in a magic land with evil ponies that shoot lasers from their mouth.
If they think this is offensive, wait until someone makes a game where you get to eat babies.
You know, at some point in time I wrote a tfidf weighted naive bayesian classifier for classifying documents into categories in python. Simply to amuse myself I fed it tons of RSS feeds (including those from 4chan). For some reason I think that this post would automatically be classified in the same category as the 4chan rss feeds.
I think I've got to contact these fools in Virginia to tell them I have a tool that will automatically recognize anonymous on the internet. If the report concludes that they're terrorists, they might be dumb enough to buy my python scripts.
So if we close our eyes when we flip the switch it all still works?
Well, maybe. Technically because you haven't seen it or work or not work it's both working and not-working at the same time. So, the trick is to keep your eyes closed at all times, and you'll be able to visit strange new worlds, boldly going where no man has gone before. When you open your eyes, you'll find yourself doing that, or simply daydreaming at the office instead of writing that documentation you promised so long ago.
I imagine that a more feasible technique would be applying buttered toast to a cats back and harnessing the power from that to travel the stars. Sadly, my experiments in that area have all resulted in failure, often with the cat scratching me. I have to admit that my neighbours refer to me as "that weirdo from nextdoors" ever since they saw me and I yelled in an ominous voice: "Stand back, I'm doing SCIENCE!" while holding a cat and a piece of buttered toast.
The method of slowly pushing the commoners down and the rulers up doesn't stop with a reasonable and gradual struggle to make the situation more balanced. It stops when the commoners revolt, the powerful raise their armies against them and discover that those armies are too heavily outnumbered.
Except that in this case people aren't upset enough to start revolting, and distracted by all the comforts of modern society. The few angry nerds are making big talk on the internet, but the common Joe flips the channel on his TV and probably doesn't even know about the problem.
Remember that it takes a lack of food and a lack of distractions to create a revolt. "Then let them eat cake" is something few politician will utter today. If anything, the past couple of years in politics have more than once proven that nobody gives a shit about their liberties.
That reminds me of a company I used to work for. A woman there, usually very kind and agreeable, was fed up with one of her contacts feeding her a lot of excuses why he wasn't able to make a deadline for the 3rd time. She thought she forwarded a nice e-mail to her manager containing some very choice words expressing her opinion that matter.
Oh how quickly that send button was smashed without carefully verifying who was in the To field, only to discover that instead of forward she had pressed reply to all. When the deed was done and the mailserver had delivered her incredibly inflammatory experiment in vocabulary she stood at my desk nearly in tears asking me if I could stop her mail from reaching its destination.
Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.
Surprisingly though, that person never missed a deadline again.
I think it's disingenuous to sum up the entire show in the second to last paragraph in that frame. While being accurate to the second season (also the weakest of all of them), the show is a little more than just that.
I'll admit that I exaggerated and generalized the show, but it's a feeling I got in many of the episodes and it's something that's stuck with me and really sucked out what I enjoyed about the show.
And sadly, this disinterest in cliffhangers and thinking has carried over to other shows I enjoy as well. Or perhaps I have become more critical of television as a whole.
As an off-topic side note, I have that same feeling. I've been dropping a lot of TV shows lately because either the plot was going nowhere, or lost all of its credibility (take this lightly for a genre like science fiction), but there's only two or three shows that I still really follow attentively instead of "the background noise" while I'm doing something else.
I'd say that it seems like writers for TV shows aren't really trying anymore, but that would be discrediting some writers who actually do a really good job. I've just grown tired of the overused mechanics in storytelling. The cliffhangers are perhaps the worst, but on that list is also the "plot twist within a plot twist", and the worst thing that can happen is when the writers start rewriting a show's history (I don't mean a retcon, just characters contradicting themselves).
Another thing I really have a problem with is the fact that so few writers (and BSG is guilty of this one) have a general idea of what direction they're going to take from start to end. A few years ago I met someone who draws comic books, as a hobby that got out of hand and now supplements his income. We got into a conversation about it, and I asked him how exactly he creates them. I was amazed at how much preparation he did before he drew the first panel for a book. He would draw up a list of the major plot elements, detail them, draw lists of major characters, details them, give them backgrounds and motivations (even if they aren't revealed to the reader). If he was playing around with ideas he'd set up a timeline. I can't really explain it the way he did, but he did an incredible amount of work for "just a comic", more along the lines what I'd expect from a novelist. And only when he had everything planned, tossed and turned in his sleep for a couple of weeks, only then he'd start picking up a pencil for anything else than character sketches.
All in all, the biggest problem I have is that JJ Abrams has become too big for himself. He loves referencing all his work in other works, which makes him come across as a major douche.
The only shows I've watched from JJ Abrams are Lost and Alias. I quickly gave up on Alias since it seemed like it was going nowhere. I'm curious to see what he's going to do to Star Trek though. I'd be really surprised if he manages to do something else than beat a dead horse on that one, but in all honesty I'm not expecting much of it. If the Star Trek movie is going to be as bad as I expect it to be, I'm pretty sure his name will burn in the inevitable flamewars on the internet for a very long time. If he manages to revive trek, kudos to him.
Lost is 10 times the show that BSG is. I might not have said that before this finale, but I have no doubt about it now. At least it has not cheated the audience.
Comparing apples to oranges, etc etc. I don't know how you define "cheating" on the audience, but to summarize lost by season:
Plane crashes on an island with a monster, and there are other people who steal children and kill who gets in their way. Oh, and there's a metal door to obsess about.
Survivors open a hatch, press a magic button that saves the world, then stop pressing making the island glow and the hatch implode. The world doesn't end, but did you see that glow?
The others live on another island, and like having their prisoners chop rocks for no good reason while the doctor gets to perform surgery.
Hurray, some of the survivors (or at least the ones you care about) are saved from the island, and some mercenaries are using big guns on everything that moves.
The island travels through time while John Locke resurrects from the dead and enjoys a mango.
The show generally takes an entire season of cliffhangers to go through the motions of creating mysteries, not solving them, add some flashbacks (or forward, depending on what season you're in) to create some forced drama. You still don't know WHAT that monster is, why everyone who already was there before the survivors ended up there in the first place, and yet they still keep shoving more layers of mystery on top of it keeping people on the internet occupied with watching the show frame by frame for some clue as to what the hell they're watching.
The thing that annoys me most about Lost is the fact that on top of it all, nearly every episode needs to end in a cliffhanger. It took 3 episodes of cliffhangers for you to find out what was inside that hatch. Nearly every episode has absolutely nothing happening but a bunch of people running from point A in the jungle to point B on the beach back and forth again, and just when after 50 minutes of this with the occasional flashback, you're about to find out something someone goes "Here, have some more mysteries" and the episode ends. Cliffhangers are a great mechanic, but too much of them and they lose their effect. I can hardly imagine anyone after 5 seasons of this still sits at the edge of their seats without feeling cheated in some way.
When the Lost finale hits, the BSG finale will seem like "well thought out" and "carefully planned".
I think most people who complain about the finale not meeting their expectations are the people whose expectations included a cereberal explanation for everything that happened on the show.
I think that the final conclusion was a bit far-fetched. I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a space-faring civilization on the run for a minute. After having your family, friends and what-not being nuked, spending several years on the run from a robot-race out to kill you while the number of people around you dwindles. Then when finally you've dealt a definitive blow to the enemy, and by pure coincidence (or the work of "God", whatever) happen to find a planet that you can settle on you're going to give up technology?
We're talking a space-faring civilization that's giving up toilet paper here. Not just toilet paper, hot showers, medicine, security, and in the end what the entire show was about : survival of the human race (the spacefaring kind, not the "oh look what just crawled down from the trees" kind). It just seems very unplausible that of a population of 30.000-something people everyone simply quietly goes "Oh, well, we won't miss toilet paper anyway" and go live the life of the survivalist hunter-gatherer.
Moore has said from the beginning that certain supernatural aspects wouldn't be explained.
Ah yes, the man who said "Screw plot, let's make it about the characters" and decided after a night of drinking "Let's make some of the characters the final cylons". Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting show, and I've enjoyed it for the most part, but it has plotholes coming out of the wazoo. Simply pointing at the heavens while shouting the words "Angels" and "God" doesn't explain things. The man picked 4 of the cylons based on "What would shock our viewers most?" instead of "How can we wrap this thing without compromising the story".
It's kind of like when you're reading a book where 900 pages deal with "the grand plan", and the last 100 pages the writer has a nervous breakdown and concludes with "and they lived happily ever after".
Go watch Lost or something.
No thanks. Last I heard the island was time-traveling, and Locke was well on his way to becoming the second coming of our lord and savior by resurrecting after he died, only without the nailing to the cross and stabbing with a spear (I would've watched that for sheer entertainment value only).
Congratulations. You have just handed the government the ability to monitor and control the movements of everyone, everywhere. Now aren't you proud of yourself?
The IEMI in your cell phone, combined with your sim number makes for a well enough tracking device. You might want to apply a few extra layers to that tinfoil hat, the old 5mm ones stopped working about 10 years ago.
* Each time a player connects to a server, it loses 15 points
* For each minute the player stays on the server, it earns 1 point (up to a max of 45 points per player)
Subverting the rating system using the steam client only:
Connect to server
Immediately disconnect from server
Repeat until bored
And yes, it's possible to do that on a lot of servers.
Bring us the writers of In the Pale Moonlight. It's the only episode of DS9 I ever intentionally watched twice.
Some people may find it a bit boring, but it was in my opinion the best Star Trek episode ever made. It was in stark contrast with the rest of the usual Star Trek setting, and presented a moral dilemma to the character of Sisko. In the end, he concluded that he'd have to live with making the wrong choice for the right reasons.
Yeah, I'll take that over any episode of the usual quality of the later series.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you never typed out words on a calculator by typing numbers and turning it upside down?
Yeah, somehow we always ended up with 5318008, ensued by juvenile snickering. At some point the word "boobies" stopped being funny, and we got over it.
proudly displayed my in-game hours (eagles scream!)
The last time I got 10.0 Eagles Scream on Steam I was on leave and my vacation plans got canceled. Two weeks of spending most of my time either playing TF2 or flying a spaceship around in the X3 sequel (or is that expansion) messing about with the scripting interface (which I must say is an abominable horror).
A friend of mine looked at my profile, pointed it out to me, and at that point I realized I had just wasted two weeks on gaming. It had been since my high school days since I had wasted that much time on videogames. For some reason it didn't quite bring the same satisfaction that it used to.
But I won't feel much sympathy when the cut-off peasants storm his gates holding pitchforks, hot pokers and rope.
Entertaining as the thought might be, both you and I know that this won't happen. The worst that will happen is another few cars getting lit up, which gives him another excuse to "get tough on crime".
It might be interesting to note that in the UK a similar proposal is rearing its ugly head, and ISPs are "opposing" it, although ulterior motives are more likely to be the true reason, as found in the bottom of the article:
He said that ISPs might be willing to consider a graduated response to tackling piracy if content providers were willing to pay distribution fees to ISPs.
The rough translation of that sentence reads as "It's not really our problem, unless you pay us to make it our problem."
I think the next couple of years are going to be interesting at the very least to see what our lawmakers are going to cook up to monitor our activities (if the whole ordeal doesn't get outsourced to the private sector), and more interesting will be the creative ways around those systems.
I think we may have the first case of Firefox extension fanboism on our hands here, folks.
Nope, just someone with too much time to waste to try and troll slashdot.
I think she learned how to use ulimit after that, and to make sure she included a reduction step...
Gee, thanks for spoiling the ending.
If you are like me and learned things like normalization and set operations from a rather dry text book, you may be quite entertained by the contents of this book.
I'm sorry, but SQL should be taught dry, no lube and no sedative. Anything else would be blasphemous or at least disturb the natural order of things.
In all seriousness though, if you need this medium to make databases interesting for the reader, you're probably pandering to the wrong crowd. Anyone who needs to learn SQL will probably get a less childish book. Teenagers (and certainly college students) will buy this for the few laughs they get out of it, and that's about all the novelty you'll get out of it.
I personally can't wait for the "Manga guide to Systems Administration" where princess Ruruna is faced with her arch nemesis The User. I hear in chapter 3 she opens up her box to replace defective parts. In chapter 15 she learns about security and discovers evil hackers have exploited her badly configured server. 2 chapters later it happens again but then she learns about a strange magic called firewalling.
Other guides I'd love to read:
practising and playing tennis or golf for the majority of my day snip played chess every day for as long as possible snip live and breathe business snip be addicted to real drugs and write incredible novels
Now add to each of those examples "and neglected my responsibilities, friends and family". I play a lot of videogames, I'll openly admit that, but not at the expense of reality. Reality is that during weekdays I have to get up at 6:30 to go to work, because if I don't I'm not going to have a roof over my head for very long.
MMOs are great in that respect. You get to see the obsessive behavior of some players, especially the college student aged crowd. I've met this guy in WoW once who'd spend 8 hours a day on average playing the game (with up to 14 hours straight as his maximum). He'd run two characters at the same time sometimes simply grinding for materials. In Eve I met someone who spent about 10 hours a day just interacting with the market, lowering and raising prices with 0.01 ISK while actually doing something else on a second account.
Some of these kids will be playing their MMO in the middle of the exams, flunking out on their courses, yet they show intelligence enough to pass these tests if they would do to the work. I've had a coworker who actually skipped a day of work when the new WoW expansion came out, risking his income for such a silly thing.
I'm not going to say that people should apply themselves to more useful causes, because it's their free time, and gaming doesn't really hurt anyone. What I do think is that some people have a lack of priorities, or the lack of a mental trigger when a videogame is slowly becoming the driving force in their lives. I wouldn't call it an addiction because many of these people at some point snap out of it and are capable of simply picking up their regular life again (with a few adjustments), often without the drama that a real addiction like a drug addiction is bound to cause.
An additional factor to take note of is that with an MMO, "addicted" players are more likely to come into contact with other players that have the same behavioral pattern. This reinforces the idea that what they're doing is perfectly normal. Forming groups like guilds or corporations or whatever social game mechanic the designers thought of, these players will frown upon people who do not dedicate themselves enough to the game and to the guild/corp/whatever. Peer pressure should not be underestimated.
Finally, adolescents and the college age group more often than not have an indifferent attitude. Add to indifference a dash of lazyness and geekyness and you'll get a very good recipe for an MMO player.
Where you get to eat babies? It sounds as if you're looking forward to it.
To quote a bad movie: "Babies, the other white meat"
Yeah, those WW2 games are offensive too. That's why there are so many of them that hardly anyone complains about. Let's all stop playing FPSs set in a warzone, and make it all happen in a magic land with evil ponies that shoot lasers from their mouth.
If they think this is offensive, wait until someone makes a game where you get to eat babies.
Lulz
Guy Fawkes masks
cats of unusual length
Rick Astley
over 9000
You know, at some point in time I wrote a tfidf weighted naive bayesian classifier for classifying documents into categories in python. Simply to amuse myself I fed it tons of RSS feeds (including those from 4chan). For some reason I think that this post would automatically be classified in the same category as the 4chan rss feeds.
I think I've got to contact these fools in Virginia to tell them I have a tool that will automatically recognize anonymous on the internet. If the report concludes that they're terrorists, they might be dumb enough to buy my python scripts.
"Stand back, I'm going to try SCIENCE!" while holding a cat and a piece of buttered toast.
There, fixed that for you!
That certainly explains their reaction.
It'll continue until there's another blood drenched coup d'etat
Grabbing power in the euro parliament by force. What would you achieve doing that? Bore people to death?
Also, this is France, not the EU.
So if we close our eyes when we flip the switch it all still works?
Well, maybe. Technically because you haven't seen it or work or not work it's both working and not-working at the same time. So, the trick is to keep your eyes closed at all times, and you'll be able to visit strange new worlds, boldly going where no man has gone before. When you open your eyes, you'll find yourself doing that, or simply daydreaming at the office instead of writing that documentation you promised so long ago.
I imagine that a more feasible technique would be applying buttered toast to a cats back and harnessing the power from that to travel the stars. Sadly, my experiments in that area have all resulted in failure, often with the cat scratching me. I have to admit that my neighbours refer to me as "that weirdo from nextdoors" ever since they saw me and I yelled in an ominous voice: "Stand back, I'm doing SCIENCE!" while holding a cat and a piece of buttered toast.
Or is it *both* Impossible and not Impossible?
Only when you're not observing and you don't hear it meowing
The method of slowly pushing the commoners down and the rulers up doesn't stop with a reasonable and gradual struggle to make the situation more balanced. It stops when the commoners revolt, the powerful raise their armies against them and discover that those armies are too heavily outnumbered.
Except that in this case people aren't upset enough to start revolting, and distracted by all the comforts of modern society. The few angry nerds are making big talk on the internet, but the common Joe flips the channel on his TV and probably doesn't even know about the problem.
Remember that it takes a lack of food and a lack of distractions to create a revolt. "Then let them eat cake" is something few politician will utter today. If anything, the past couple of years in politics have more than once proven that nobody gives a shit about their liberties.
Virtual Pirate Network, ijaaaaaaarrrr
Oh come on, everyone was thinking it.
FYI the 2 minute delays was the "slow down cowboy" period for posting a successive message.
For some reason "Slow down cowboy" were the exact words in my mind when I read the part of your initial message going:
I want you to tweak my nipples with a grapefruit spoon.
That reminds me of a company I used to work for. A woman there, usually very kind and agreeable, was fed up with one of her contacts feeding her a lot of excuses why he wasn't able to make a deadline for the 3rd time. She thought she forwarded a nice e-mail to her manager containing some very choice words expressing her opinion that matter.
Oh how quickly that send button was smashed without carefully verifying who was in the To field, only to discover that instead of forward she had pressed reply to all. When the deed was done and the mailserver had delivered her incredibly inflammatory experiment in vocabulary she stood at my desk nearly in tears asking me if I could stop her mail from reaching its destination.
Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.
Surprisingly though, that person never missed a deadline again.
I think it's disingenuous to sum up the entire show in the second to last paragraph in that frame. While being accurate to the second season (also the weakest of all of them), the show is a little more than just that.
I'll admit that I exaggerated and generalized the show, but it's a feeling I got in many of the episodes and it's something that's stuck with me and really sucked out what I enjoyed about the show.
And sadly, this disinterest in cliffhangers and thinking has carried over to other shows I enjoy as well. Or perhaps I have become more critical of television as a whole.
As an off-topic side note, I have that same feeling. I've been dropping a lot of TV shows lately because either the plot was going nowhere, or lost all of its credibility (take this lightly for a genre like science fiction), but there's only two or three shows that I still really follow attentively instead of "the background noise" while I'm doing something else.
I'd say that it seems like writers for TV shows aren't really trying anymore, but that would be discrediting some writers who actually do a really good job. I've just grown tired of the overused mechanics in storytelling. The cliffhangers are perhaps the worst, but on that list is also the "plot twist within a plot twist", and the worst thing that can happen is when the writers start rewriting a show's history (I don't mean a retcon, just characters contradicting themselves).
Another thing I really have a problem with is the fact that so few writers (and BSG is guilty of this one) have a general idea of what direction they're going to take from start to end. A few years ago I met someone who draws comic books, as a hobby that got out of hand and now supplements his income. We got into a conversation about it, and I asked him how exactly he creates them. I was amazed at how much preparation he did before he drew the first panel for a book. He would draw up a list of the major plot elements, detail them, draw lists of major characters, details them, give them backgrounds and motivations (even if they aren't revealed to the reader). If he was playing around with ideas he'd set up a timeline. I can't really explain it the way he did, but he did an incredible amount of work for "just a comic", more along the lines what I'd expect from a novelist. And only when he had everything planned, tossed and turned in his sleep for a couple of weeks, only then he'd start picking up a pencil for anything else than character sketches.
All in all, the biggest problem I have is that JJ Abrams has become too big for himself. He loves referencing all his work in other works, which makes him come across as a major douche.
The only shows I've watched from JJ Abrams are Lost and Alias. I quickly gave up on Alias since it seemed like it was going nowhere. I'm curious to see what he's going to do to Star Trek though. I'd be really surprised if he manages to do something else than beat a dead horse on that one, but in all honesty I'm not expecting much of it. If the Star Trek movie is going to be as bad as I expect it to be, I'm pretty sure his name will burn in the inevitable flamewars on the internet for a very long time. If he manages to revive trek, kudos to him.
Lost is 10 times the show that BSG is. I might not have said that before this finale, but I have no doubt about it now. At least it has not cheated the audience.
Comparing apples to oranges, etc etc. I don't know how you define "cheating" on the audience, but to summarize lost by season:
The show generally takes an entire season of cliffhangers to go through the motions of creating mysteries, not solving them, add some flashbacks (or forward, depending on what season you're in) to create some forced drama. You still don't know WHAT that monster is, why everyone who already was there before the survivors ended up there in the first place, and yet they still keep shoving more layers of mystery on top of it keeping people on the internet occupied with watching the show frame by frame for some clue as to what the hell they're watching.
The thing that annoys me most about Lost is the fact that on top of it all, nearly every episode needs to end in a cliffhanger. It took 3 episodes of cliffhangers for you to find out what was inside that hatch. Nearly every episode has absolutely nothing happening but a bunch of people running from point A in the jungle to point B on the beach back and forth again, and just when after 50 minutes of this with the occasional flashback, you're about to find out something someone goes "Here, have some more mysteries" and the episode ends. Cliffhangers are a great mechanic, but too much of them and they lose their effect. I can hardly imagine anyone after 5 seasons of this still sits at the edge of their seats without feeling cheated in some way.
When the Lost finale hits, the BSG finale will seem like "well thought out" and "carefully planned".
I think most people who complain about the finale not meeting their expectations are the people whose expectations included a cereberal explanation for everything that happened on the show.
I think that the final conclusion was a bit far-fetched. I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a space-faring civilization on the run for a minute. After having your family, friends and what-not being nuked, spending several years on the run from a robot-race out to kill you while the number of people around you dwindles. Then when finally you've dealt a definitive blow to the enemy, and by pure coincidence (or the work of "God", whatever) happen to find a planet that you can settle on you're going to give up technology?
We're talking a space-faring civilization that's giving up toilet paper here. Not just toilet paper, hot showers, medicine, security, and in the end what the entire show was about : survival of the human race (the spacefaring kind, not the "oh look what just crawled down from the trees" kind). It just seems very unplausible that of a population of 30.000-something people everyone simply quietly goes "Oh, well, we won't miss toilet paper anyway" and go live the life of the survivalist hunter-gatherer.
Moore has said from the beginning that certain supernatural aspects wouldn't be explained.
Ah yes, the man who said "Screw plot, let's make it about the characters" and decided after a night of drinking "Let's make some of the characters the final cylons". Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting show, and I've enjoyed it for the most part, but it has plotholes coming out of the wazoo. Simply pointing at the heavens while shouting the words "Angels" and "God" doesn't explain things. The man picked 4 of the cylons based on "What would shock our viewers most?" instead of "How can we wrap this thing without compromising the story".
It's kind of like when you're reading a book where 900 pages deal with "the grand plan", and the last 100 pages the writer has a nervous breakdown and concludes with "and they lived happily ever after".
Go watch Lost or something.
No thanks. Last I heard the island was time-traveling, and Locke was well on his way to becoming the second coming of our lord and savior by resurrecting after he died, only without the nailing to the cross and stabbing with a spear (I would've watched that for sheer entertainment value only).
Congratulations. You have just handed the government the ability to monitor and control the movements of everyone, everywhere. Now aren't you proud of yourself?
The IEMI in your cell phone, combined with your sim number makes for a well enough tracking device. You might want to apply a few extra layers to that tinfoil hat, the old 5mm ones stopped working about 10 years ago.
* Each time a player connects to a server, it loses 15 points * For each minute the player stays on the server, it earns 1 point (up to a max of 45 points per player)
Subverting the rating system using the steam client only:
And yes, it's possible to do that on a lot of servers.
Mammography
It figures someone on slashdot would spend 150K for a computer that allows you to look at breasts.
Bring us the writers of In the Pale Moonlight. It's the only episode of DS9 I ever intentionally watched twice.
Some people may find it a bit boring, but it was in my opinion the best Star Trek episode ever made. It was in stark contrast with the rest of the usual Star Trek setting, and presented a moral dilemma to the character of Sisko. In the end, he concluded that he'd have to live with making the wrong choice for the right reasons.
Yeah, I'll take that over any episode of the usual quality of the later series.