Well, see, now you're just asking for trouble. I'd place the adventures of Lemmy C. ahead of Solyaris, should push come to shove.
Thanks!
Responding to your parent poster, there are those of us who like cerebral films who find Solyaris flawed as a cerebral film - and the director himself was one of them. Again, Stalker is far better. Solyaris loses focus, it does get tedious (and I like good slow films - I like Tarkvosky, I liked Gattaca). It was made partially as a sort of cinematic space-race to show that the Soviet film industry could produce a 2001. Alphaville is an infintely better film - daring, innovative, funny, a little absurd, avant-garde yet still citing tradition film narrative techniques, ahead of its time, and the quirky plot was completely redeemed by the lack of affect of thein the last scene - great Verfremdungseffekt.
I think Cronenberg as an auteur is better than most of his works. Dead Ringers is his best movie - I like eXistenZ, but it wasn't half as clever as it liked to think it was. Actually, I've always thought Naked Lunch got a bum rap, and was a better film than a lot of people gave it credit for.
But, menso: 20% of the women also play for the other team. Trust me, the local geeks are cooler, and here, it's far cooler to be a geek, as long as you are a relatively cool, tolerant, well-rounded geek. And you don't wear Rush t-shirts.
I'm serious. You wear a Rush t-shirt, you may as well castrate yourself, because Your Little Elvis will be seeing no love. Same goes for khakis and polo shirts with tech company logos on them. ThinkGeek swag works fine.
I think it's a good but flawed film. Tarkovsky for his own part didn't like it - he made the movie to make the Powers That Be happy, but he wasn't fond of the film. Stalker is a better movie. However, the original story by Lem is a great novel, and I believe Soderbergh, with his sensitivity to the contradictions and conflicts in human relationships and the poignancy of regret, will do it justice.
Coincidentally, the book "Solaris" by Stansislas Lem is being made into a film (for the second time, first time around was by the brilliant, late Andrei Tarkovsky) by Steven Soderbergh. And that's what I thought this slashback was about, at first glance. Oops.
Gay geeks are also geeks I'd imagine could be a bit annoyed at the booth-babe syndrome, although less so. But yes, I was obviously talking to the straight male stereotypical "target audience" (a self-fulfilling prophecy at best) of the bikini-girls. I'm sure that the rampant homophobia - or, more accurately, the hysterical demonstration of disgust at the male form by previously picked-on straight men who are trying to prove, against the taunts of the schoolyard, that they *aren't* gay - of that set would come into play as they avoided any booth featuring an oiled, ripped Adonis.
The case I would have been referring to if I had been having a brain-fart would be if Steffi Graf had used an intellectual property claim against Microsoft in a civil court. That would have been a case of a private-sector use of litigation to cramp free speech, if it meant that ISP's have full liability for the uploads of their customers.
I've always considered that an insult to time. There's no concievable limit to the amount of money I can earn. Someone can take all my money, and I can earn more somehow. My time is irretrievable. I will die, and there's no way I will get more time after I'm dead. Money might be able to buy me a little more time in very specific circumstances, but time will get me more money without much ado.
Anyone who tells me that a situation will "eventually" get remedied "on its own, over time" has stopped talking to me and started talking to some imaginary, immortal being.
Not to flog the dead horse, but it's more evidence of ways in which the private sector is quite happy to cramp civil liberties for its own purposes, using civil law.
I am going to flame myself and note that this case demonstrates nothing of the kind. My bad, my bad.
Of all the cases I wanted Microsoft to lose, this is not one of them. ISP's cannot promise that their users will never upload a given photo, unless they get in the business of reviewing each and every upload. And that would be a monstrous slap in the face of free speech, as well as creating a huge workload for ISP's (and raising costs accordingly.)
Not to flog the dead horse, but it's more evidence of ways in which the private sector is quite happy to cramp civil liberties for its own purposes, using civil law.
You will get a lot closer to figuring out women when you start figuring out yourself, and realize that neither men nor women really want to be figured out. They want to be related to, respected, turned on, loved, left alone, supported, admired, and played with. Not figured out. I'm not attracted to women who make figuring me out a project, I'm hardly surprised to find out that converse is true.
Re:the end of gaming?
on
E3 Wrapup
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I'm a thirty-something professional who still avidly plays video games.
However, in order to really get maturity as a medium, the age of booth babes - meant to appeal to sex-deprived lonely geek-gamers - is going to have to come to an end. It's embarassing and sad to see game developers pander like that. I was at E3, and the whole phenomenon of watch 20 pasty-faced pudgy gamer fan-boys gape at bored second-rate models in metal bikinis (and I'm a big fan of metal bikinis, mind you) was just sad. I'm an adult. I have a fiance. I wanted to look at games, not at babes. (I don't think it an accident, however, that the strongest games usually aren't promoted by bikini-babes - perhaps an expanding association between poor games and cheesecake will address the matter.)
You don't understand JWZ's attitude towards Mozilla. He'd still rather it succeed than fail; he wants to run it on the kiosks at the DNA. He was frustrated with the mozilla project and left it, but that's a far cry from hoping it will fail. Of course, anything that has shades of gray more complex than a George Lucas movie is beyond the ken of many.
The Bay Area has cooler geeky guys, and a better gender balance, than other geekzones. Most every geek I know here has no problem finding dates - and every 3rd geek I know is a woman.
The whole "can't find any girl" complaint, amusingly enough, on this thread reminds me of the "booth babes" bullshit about E3 - gee, by advertising products using gimmicks designed to attract sexually-frustrated late-adolescent boys, are you surprised that you aren't attracting women? Would you feel welcome at an expo in which all the products were advertised using buff male Chippendale models? No, you'd get the feeling that you weren't really welcome.
At the core of gaming is pleasure, and visual pleasure is one component of the game. I will agree with the observation that 3D is not the end-all and be-all of either game-design or even compelling visual aesthetics, and can in fact interfere with it, for the same reasons that abstract expressionism or cubism would probably be ill-served by photo-realistic technique. A lot of primitive, by today's standards, video games are still visually compelling - like Tempest, Pac-Man and even the original Space-War.
But the graphics in FreeCiv are just bad. No blame - it's an engine, ultimately, and he calls for real designers to sign up and make it pretty. I'm sure that it can and will be improved. But let's not pretend that the deficiency isn't there.
Something that would be cool - and Gonzalo Frasca's thesis on ludology.org makes reference to it - would be including the favela/barrio model of development in SimCities. The idea of zone development occuring on a grid is pretty much an American one. In Brazil and Mexico and Peru, the urban planning challenge is to bring services into unplanned communities - to bring water, electricity, roads, police, schools and the like to communities that began as shantytowns but grew into rebar and concrete neighborhoods. These types of cities are the future of the urban experience for people in many countries - Lagos, Nigeria may become one of the largest cities of the world, and mostly with this sort of improvised, informal development.
But people *won't* pay it. A lot of them anyway. If they would, people wouldn't go out of their way, spend hours finding and downloading mp3s over their modem, versus going to the store and getting reference quality, guaranteed. That's the issue. Drop the price of the CD, and a lot of the people that don't feel like paying so much and spend their time downloading MP3s will decide that their time is worth more than the money.
Take the number of people willing to spend 16 dollars on a CD. Multiply that by the number of CDs they will buy. Multiply that number by 16. Add the cost of being a copyright bully. Let that number equal X. Take the number of people willing to buy a CD for 5 dollars. Multiply that by the number of CD's they will buy. Multiply that by 5. Let that number equal Y.
If X is greater than Y, the status quo sticks around. And I bet it is.
Portions of continents don't contribute anything except raw materials. People contribute. What counts as a contribution to you? Literature (Chinua Achebe)? Music (Fela Kati)? If you mean technology and only technology, then what you are saying is the very uninspired and uninteresting observation that many other parts of the world have more research labs than Sub-Saharan Africa does. I'd call that a big DUH, and still say, "so what?"
As far as my professor went, he happened to be a professor who worked in syntax and morphology across a wide range of language, particularly English - assuming that his work was on African languages, when you'd never assume a white linguist kept his work to his own native language, is pretty fucked up.
Where do you have your degree from, anyway? The bottom of a Cracker Jack box?
I'll ignore the hamfisted, blockheaded admixture of arrogance, ignorance, and crudity that informs your post - the idea of thinking of a continent in such ridiculous terms as you postulate - and answer the question in two very simple ways:
First, Africa is mankind, at least a goodly part of it. So, it benefits mankind by continuing to exist. The fact that you measure its value only by the things it gives to the rest of humanity is like valueing your neighbors only to the extent that they work on your yard.
Second, I will name one thing right off the top of my head: my old linguistics professor, Sam Machombo. He was a very good linguistics professor. Like hundreds of thousands of intelligent, generous, hard-working Africans, he contributed just by being who he was and doing a good job of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks!
Responding to your parent poster, there are those of us who like cerebral films who find Solyaris flawed as a cerebral film - and the director himself was one of them. Again, Stalker is far better. Solyaris loses focus, it does get tedious (and I like good slow films - I like Tarkvosky, I liked Gattaca). It was made partially as a sort of cinematic space-race to show that the Soviet film industry could produce a 2001. Alphaville is an infintely better film - daring, innovative, funny, a little absurd, avant-garde yet still citing tradition film narrative techniques, ahead of its time, and the quirky plot was completely redeemed by the lack of affect of thein the last scene - great Verfremdungseffekt.
I think Cronenberg as an auteur is better than most of his works. Dead Ringers is his best movie - I like eXistenZ, but it wasn't half as clever as it liked to think it was. Actually, I've always thought Naked Lunch got a bum rap, and was a better film than a lot of people gave it credit for.
I'm serious. You wear a Rush t-shirt, you may as well castrate yourself, because Your Little Elvis will be seeing no love. Same goes for khakis and polo shirts with tech company logos on them. ThinkGeek swag works fine.
I think it's a good but flawed film. Tarkovsky for his own part didn't like it - he made the movie to make the Powers That Be happy, but he wasn't fond of the film. Stalker is a better movie. However, the original story by Lem is a great novel, and I believe Soderbergh, with his sensitivity to the contradictions and conflicts in human relationships and the poignancy of regret, will do it justice.
Coincidentally, the book "Solaris" by Stansislas Lem is being made into a film (for the second time, first time around was by the brilliant, late Andrei Tarkovsky) by Steven Soderbergh. And that's what I thought this slashback was about, at first glance. Oops.
No, the best pick up line at the party will be "wanna see my Pop-Up?"
Gay geeks are also geeks I'd imagine could be a bit annoyed at the booth-babe syndrome, although less so. But yes, I was obviously talking to the straight male stereotypical "target audience" (a self-fulfilling prophecy at best) of the bikini-girls. I'm sure that the rampant homophobia - or, more accurately, the hysterical demonstration of disgust at the male form by previously picked-on straight men who are trying to prove, against the taunts of the schoolyard, that they *aren't* gay - of that set would come into play as they avoided any booth featuring an oiled, ripped Adonis.
The case I would have been referring to if I had been having a brain-fart would be if Steffi Graf had used an intellectual property claim against Microsoft in a civil court. That would have been a case of a private-sector use of litigation to cramp free speech, if it meant that ISP's have full liability for the uploads of their customers.
I don't know, man. There's a hell of a lot of birds out there.
Anyone who tells me that a situation will "eventually" get remedied "on its own, over time" has stopped talking to me and started talking to some imaginary, immortal being.
Um, they didn't use her likeness. One of their customers used her likeness. That's a big, big, big difference.
I am going to flame myself and note that this case demonstrates nothing of the kind. My bad, my bad.
Not to flog the dead horse, but it's more evidence of ways in which the private sector is quite happy to cramp civil liberties for its own purposes, using civil law.
You will get a lot closer to figuring out women when you start figuring out yourself, and realize that neither men nor women really want to be figured out. They want to be related to, respected, turned on, loved, left alone, supported, admired, and played with. Not figured out. I'm not attracted to women who make figuring me out a project, I'm hardly surprised to find out that converse is true.
However, in order to really get maturity as a medium, the age of booth babes - meant to appeal to sex-deprived lonely geek-gamers - is going to have to come to an end. It's embarassing and sad to see game developers pander like that. I was at E3, and the whole phenomenon of watch 20 pasty-faced pudgy gamer fan-boys gape at bored second-rate models in metal bikinis (and I'm a big fan of metal bikinis, mind you) was just sad. I'm an adult. I have a fiance. I wanted to look at games, not at babes. (I don't think it an accident, however, that the strongest games usually aren't promoted by bikini-babes - perhaps an expanding association between poor games and cheesecake will address the matter.)
You don't understand JWZ's attitude towards Mozilla. He'd still rather it succeed than fail; he wants to run it on the kiosks at the DNA. He was frustrated with the mozilla project and left it, but that's a far cry from hoping it will fail. Of course, anything that has shades of gray more complex than a George Lucas movie is beyond the ken of many.
The whole "can't find any girl" complaint, amusingly enough, on this thread reminds me of the "booth babes" bullshit about E3 - gee, by advertising products using gimmicks designed to attract sexually-frustrated late-adolescent boys, are you surprised that you aren't attracting women? Would you feel welcome at an expo in which all the products were advertised using buff male Chippendale models? No, you'd get the feeling that you weren't really welcome.
But the graphics in FreeCiv are just bad. No blame - it's an engine, ultimately, and he calls for real designers to sign up and make it pretty. I'm sure that it can and will be improved. But let's not pretend that the deficiency isn't there.
"Unsupported?" What does "supported" mean for a GPL, free to download game? There's a help desk for it?
Something that would be cool - and Gonzalo Frasca's thesis on ludology.org makes reference to it - would be including the favela/barrio model of development in SimCities. The idea of zone development occuring on a grid is pretty much an American one. In Brazil and Mexico and Peru, the urban planning challenge is to bring services into unplanned communities - to bring water, electricity, roads, police, schools and the like to communities that began as shantytowns but grew into rebar and concrete neighborhoods. These types of cities are the future of the urban experience for people in many countries - Lagos, Nigeria may become one of the largest cities of the world, and mostly with this sort of improvised, informal development.
If X is greater than Y, the status quo sticks around. And I bet it is.
At least one of you would have to be. I'd put my money on Natalie.
Which is why Strom Thurmond qualifies.
They don't have spelling bees in Japan. Or in Latin America, for that matter. Ever wonder why?
As far as my professor went, he happened to be a professor who worked in syntax and morphology across a wide range of language, particularly English - assuming that his work was on African languages, when you'd never assume a white linguist kept his work to his own native language, is pretty fucked up.
Where do you have your degree from, anyway? The bottom of a Cracker Jack box?
First, Africa is mankind, at least a goodly part of it. So, it benefits mankind by continuing to exist. The fact that you measure its value only by the things it gives to the rest of humanity is like valueing your neighbors only to the extent that they work on your yard.
Second, I will name one thing right off the top of my head: my old linguistics professor, Sam Machombo. He was a very good linguistics professor. Like hundreds of thousands of intelligent, generous, hard-working Africans, he contributed just by being who he was and doing a good job of it.