The way I learned to make it was a very simple two parts cornstarch to one part water. A few drops of green food coloring helps the whole green-slime effect immensely.
Upon injection, the Scorpion molecules each seek out tumor cells, whip tiny hooked protein chains at them, and shout "GET OVER HERE!" while violently yanking them out of the brain tissue.
Hah, awesome move! Speaking on behalf of fan art creators (as someone who once had to deal with badges featuring my own fan art being sold on ebay,) many thanks for sticking it to the bastard.
That's very true, not only for the bad marks on your paperwork and such, but because of the immediate threats that an arrested person faces.
Everything in your personal life shuts down for however long it takes to process you. Apart from the "one phone call," there's no way to let everyone who needs to know that you're alive and well instead of just missing. Dependents are a whole other issue in themselves. There could be everything from a pet that doesn't get fed to a grandmother who doesn't get reminded to take her pills to children who don't get picked up from school. The emotional stress your family goes through seeing you dragged off in handcuffs or simply not coming home when you should is really not measurable. And woe be to the single parent in this situation..
Aside from family obligations, there are the business ones. How important are you at your job? Are you the type of employee who can be covered for for a day or two? Will your employers react well to your excuse the next day? Never mind that if you're a sole proprietor of a struggling business, the whole thing could be pretty much destroyed by nobody opening the door for a day.
Basically, no matter how innocent you are, being arrested can screw with your life and any others involved in it on a major scale.
Ever since the original trilogy, George Lucas has always been quietly supportive of non-commercial fan-created Star Wars stuff, even before the Internet and its resulting explosion of SW fanfic and things. I seem to remember he even judged one or two fan film competitions. I think that stance is one of the wisest moves he's ever made as grand poobah of a cultural icon.
This certainly seems to have more potential than most, but just in case one or two people on the Internet don't already know this isn't entirely a new idea. People have actually been doing Star Wars fan films for quite some time.
Unfortunately, the only place you'll see this kind of writing these days are sources seen as fringe by the mainstream. You could either distill the.005% of blogs with so-called journalistic value, or you could follow things like Indymedia, or to a much lesser degree the bland-by-consensus Wikinews.
The only reason Hunter got published at all in his day was he sold media. Then as now, the elderly media corporations aren't taking any editorial interest in what they print beyond how many papers/ads/commercials it'd sell. In Hunter's day there was the old Rolling Stone magazine (not yet a totally hideous corporate parody of itself) which ate his work up as long as it sold well to its target audience of hippies, armchair revolutionaries, and other stoned people.
Unfortunately, the things that sell the most homogenized corporate papers and magazines these days usually mention "Brangelina" picking something out of their teeth or Britney Spears drop-kicking another baby while driving. Average Joe Sixpack doesn't want to be bothered with anything more than whether his favorite useless overpaid sports team won, who his favorite useless overpaid movie stars are getting it on with, and possibly a feel-good local piece about Granny Gums Magillicuddy who turns 103 years young this week and swears it's all thanks to a lifelong diet of yogurt and aquarium gravel.
This could well shift as more people turn to the customizable, user-publishable news sources on the Internet, but the old school are not going to leave quietly. One result of this is newspapers' web sites renaming their columnists' writings to "blogs" and setting up RSS feeds.
"Hardcore scifi nuts, the types who read Gibson or Heinlein or Asimov or Douglas Adams or whoever else, tend to want to use a brain more than they want to just shoot everyone."
I object to that generalisation. I love all those authors, and even harder stuff like Greg Egan. I also love playing FPS games which have exactly zero deep or interesting concepts in, but are exciting as a contest of skill. I'm not compelled to use my brain 100% of the time.
Good point, I should have appended "in RPGs" to that sentence. There are definitely times when I do just want to blow stuff up.
My own sites tend to have text boxes for reader comments and guestbooks and things, does this make them havens for sexual predators? Because it'd be terribly unfair if underage kids could somehow get a date through my web presence while I still can't.
As someone who runs pen-and-paper RPGs in fantasy and scifi environments, I've learned that for Scifi to work on the same playability and fun levels as a fantasy RPG, many tweaks need to be made.
There is the gun issue from TFA, but if done right it's not anywhere near as big an issue. For something immersive like an RPG, the game must be crafted with things like this in mind. In the "Dr Who," "Star Trek," "Star Wars," and general scifi RPGs I've done, the story has to be crafted in such a way as to make things interesting for the players without just being a shoot-em-up. There are scifi concepts galore, but they have to do far more than just "shoot bad guy X to get item Y." In these particular Universes, the "tank" type of character tends to be the absolute least interesting to play. Storyline, brain-requiring quests, and interesting puzzles make all the difference in something immersive.
In any case, I really think the best stories can't be cold computer-generated grind quests, they need to be crafted around the players talents and shortcomings.
To be fair, my love of truly immersive interactive RPGs is part of why the whole MMO deal never did it for me. A game world full of people going "lol" and "a/s/l" and "omg nd heal pls" really kicks the crap out of suspension of disbelief.
I digress, but I do believe that immersion and feeling like part of an imaginary world is doubly important to scifi fans in such an environment. Hardcore scifi nuts, the types who read Gibson or Heinlein or Asimov or Douglas Adams or whoever else, tend to want to use a brain more than they want to just shoot everyone. It just takes a lot more effort on the part of the game creators to get it right. Think of the best scifi games you ever played. What was interesting about them which you don't see in modern MMOs?
Take the Hitchhiker's game from Infocom, for instance.. I've played very few games that I've ever felt more immersed in. I was totally Arthur Dent for most of my time in front of that monochrome screen. (Except for the parts where I wasn't..) And how many times in that game does the player shoot or kill anyone?
From reading the mirrored post above it just seems terse and upset, but not really cryptic. Cryptic is stuff like "beware of the dwarf" and "under a big 'W.'"
My parents knew I could handle certain violent movies at that age, so apparently his parents feel the same of him. That's as it should be, with parents informed about the content who know their own child making educated choices.
That said, imagine the uproar had Halo been M-rated for boobs instead of violence! Gasp! Shock! Horror!
I'd laugh at how huge a waste of life this is, were I not actually guilty of calling a Nintendo "game counselor" once during my childhood. Still, this would have been my dream job at that age, and a friend of mine in 8th grade actually made a few dollars selling VHS videos of him beating whatever NES game in his collection the customer wanted to see. Screw selling lemonade or delivering newspapers...
No joke. As an American, this good news makes me want to hug someone foreign now. Of course, being American, it'd be a violent, sweaty, obnoxious hug that smells vaguely of burgers.
They're in the same place far too many parents are these days.. off looking for something external to blame for their children's problems rather than their own percieved or real failures at parenthood.
It's far kinder to the fragile ego of a modern parent to say their kid is "addicted to games," "has been corrupted by violent media and boobs on TV," or "has a chemical imbalance that requires pumping them full of Ritalin" rather than "I wasn't there when I should have been."
Even the parents who aren't too caught up with trying to find somebody to blame and/or sue to painfully admit to the latter, though, pale even further at the thought of their kids needing to simply learn from life in order to make informed choices in future.
If you want to split hairs, the tubes aren't doing the carrying, the wire is. You could say the Internet is a series of wires, and sound like less of a total loon than Ted Stevens.
Of course, you could express a desire to replace your toes with grapes and eat nothing but mittens from now on, and sound like less of a total loon than Ted Stevens. But my point is that his entire analogy of trucks and tubes and "an Internet" being sent to his office being slowed down by your Netflix discs being squeezed through the tubes for you getting in the way, was entirely screwed.
The thing is, game mags are good for their format. The good ones have the right mix of articles, previews, interviews, and other content, while maintaining that somwhat exclusive magazine-readership "feel" to it. You get to know the personalities of the writers, and of the zine as a whole.
I somehow recently clicked my way into getting a free supscription to EGM. Don't ask me how, it was some weird website deal where I filled in a survey with fake info, and as a reward get a magazine addressed to an obvious joke name in my mailbox every month. I wouldn't pay for it these days, but it's good for what it is, and maintains an honored position in my house next to the Charmin, where I can read just the right amount of it at a time for a few minutes a day.
G4, however, tries to take that same amount of info, and stretch it out into a month of nonstop programming. There just isn't enough going on with enough network-friendly demo-gasmic mass appeal to keep something as unidirectional as TV interesting and profitable to the uninterested suits whose money runs the thing. Even the game mags have loaded their websites with bonus content, forums, downloadables, and stuff to involve their readers beyond the one-way "here's what we have to tell you this month, please take no notice of the Internet and its many superior, more focused, specialized news sources tailorable to your own interests" format.
The people behind G4 need to understand that they're not in an MTV situation, where they can flash any old crap at their target audience and expect it to get greedily eaten up. ("My proposal, Mr. Oldguy, is to make the rap kids want to wear hideous sparkly things in their teeth, and make the men want fur coats." "Excellent idea, Mr. Whiteguy! Get Puffy Combs' people on the phone, we'll make this happen by Friday.") Their target audience isn't dominated by empty-headed kids patiently awaiting instructions, they're into interactive-feeling content that doesn't talk down to them or zoom straight past the particular subsets of things they individually like.
Slashdot Mirror
The way I learned to make it was a very simple two parts cornstarch to one part water. A few drops of green food coloring helps the whole green-slime effect immensely.
Upon injection, the Scorpion molecules each seek out tumor cells, whip tiny hooked protein chains at them, and shout "GET OVER HERE!" while violently yanking them out of the brain tissue.
Hah, awesome move! Speaking on behalf of fan art creators (as someone who once had to deal with badges featuring my own fan art being sold on ebay,) many thanks for sticking it to the bastard.
That's very true, not only for the bad marks on your paperwork and such, but because of the immediate threats that an arrested person faces.
Everything in your personal life shuts down for however long it takes to process you. Apart from the "one phone call," there's no way to let everyone who needs to know that you're alive and well instead of just missing. Dependents are a whole other issue in themselves. There could be everything from a pet that doesn't get fed to a grandmother who doesn't get reminded to take her pills to children who don't get picked up from school. The emotional stress your family goes through seeing you dragged off in handcuffs or simply not coming home when you should is really not measurable. And woe be to the single parent in this situation..
Aside from family obligations, there are the business ones. How important are you at your job? Are you the type of employee who can be covered for for a day or two? Will your employers react well to your excuse the next day? Never mind that if you're a sole proprietor of a struggling business, the whole thing could be pretty much destroyed by nobody opening the door for a day.
Basically, no matter how innocent you are, being arrested can screw with your life and any others involved in it on a major scale.
Ever since the original trilogy, George Lucas has always been quietly supportive of non-commercial fan-created Star Wars stuff, even before the Internet and its resulting explosion of SW fanfic and things. I seem to remember he even judged one or two fan film competitions. I think that stance is one of the wisest moves he's ever made as grand poobah of a cultural icon.
This certainly seems to have more potential than most, but just in case one or two people on the Internet don't already know this isn't entirely a new idea. People have actually been doing Star Wars fan films for quite some time.
Dear Myspace Tom,
No, you are not my "friend."
You're not even in my "extended network."
Get bent, you creepy mutant.
Sincerely,
Random Myspace User.
Unfortunately, the only place you'll see this kind of writing these days are sources seen as fringe by the mainstream. You could either distill the .005% of blogs with so-called journalistic value, or you could follow things like Indymedia, or to a much lesser degree the bland-by-consensus Wikinews.
The only reason Hunter got published at all in his day was he sold media. Then as now, the elderly media corporations aren't taking any editorial interest in what they print beyond how many papers/ads/commercials it'd sell. In Hunter's day there was the old Rolling Stone magazine (not yet a totally hideous corporate parody of itself) which ate his work up as long as it sold well to its target audience of hippies, armchair revolutionaries, and other stoned people.
Unfortunately, the things that sell the most homogenized corporate papers and magazines these days usually mention "Brangelina" picking something out of their teeth or Britney Spears drop-kicking another baby while driving. Average Joe Sixpack doesn't want to be bothered with anything more than whether his favorite useless overpaid sports team won, who his favorite useless overpaid movie stars are getting it on with, and possibly a feel-good local piece about Granny Gums Magillicuddy who turns 103 years young this week and swears it's all thanks to a lifelong diet of yogurt and aquarium gravel.
This could well shift as more people turn to the customizable, user-publishable news sources on the Internet, but the old school are not going to leave quietly. One result of this is newspapers' web sites renaming their columnists' writings to "blogs" and setting up RSS feeds.
Don't you know? You can get in trouble for putting prawn on the Internet!
Well, if it's a choice between that or four years of Dick jokes..
My own sites tend to have text boxes for reader comments and guestbooks and things, does this make them havens for sexual predators? Because it'd be terribly unfair if underage kids could somehow get a date through my web presence while I still can't.
As someone who runs pen-and-paper RPGs in fantasy and scifi environments, I've learned that for Scifi to work on the same playability and fun levels as a fantasy RPG, many tweaks need to be made.
There is the gun issue from TFA, but if done right it's not anywhere near as big an issue. For something immersive like an RPG, the game must be crafted with things like this in mind. In the "Dr Who," "Star Trek," "Star Wars," and general scifi RPGs I've done, the story has to be crafted in such a way as to make things interesting for the players without just being a shoot-em-up. There are scifi concepts galore, but they have to do far more than just "shoot bad guy X to get item Y." In these particular Universes, the "tank" type of character tends to be the absolute least interesting to play. Storyline, brain-requiring quests, and interesting puzzles make all the difference in something immersive.
In any case, I really think the best stories can't be cold computer-generated grind quests, they need to be crafted around the players talents and shortcomings.
To be fair, my love of truly immersive interactive RPGs is part of why the whole MMO deal never did it for me. A game world full of people going "lol" and "a/s/l" and "omg nd heal pls" really kicks the crap out of suspension of disbelief.
I digress, but I do believe that immersion and feeling like part of an imaginary world is doubly important to scifi fans in such an environment. Hardcore scifi nuts, the types who read Gibson or Heinlein or Asimov or Douglas Adams or whoever else, tend to want to use a brain more than they want to just shoot everyone. It just takes a lot more effort on the part of the game creators to get it right. Think of the best scifi games you ever played. What was interesting about them which you don't see in modern MMOs?
Take the Hitchhiker's game from Infocom, for instance.. I've played very few games that I've ever felt more immersed in. I was totally Arthur Dent for most of my time in front of that monochrome screen. (Except for the parts where I wasn't..) And how many times in that game does the player shoot or kill anyone?
For those unfamiliar with Deng Xiaoping, he's pretty much the guy who rolls tanks over student protesters. But don't try learning that from MSN in China..
From reading the mirrored post above it just seems terse and upset, but not really cryptic. Cryptic is stuff like "beware of the dwarf" and "under a big 'W.'"
My parents knew I could handle certain violent movies at that age, so apparently his parents feel the same of him. That's as it should be, with parents informed about the content who know their own child making educated choices.
That said, imagine the uproar had Halo been M-rated for boobs instead of violence! Gasp! Shock! Horror!
I'd laugh at how huge a waste of life this is, were I not actually guilty of calling a Nintendo "game counselor" once during my childhood. Still, this would have been my dream job at that age, and a friend of mine in 8th grade actually made a few dollars selling VHS videos of him beating whatever NES game in his collection the customer wanted to see. Screw selling lemonade or delivering newspapers...
Because you really aren't getting the most out of your personal media player until you have to buy a whole other personal media player for it.
Very well said. I wish I had mod points or hugs for you.
No joke. As an American, this good news makes me want to hug someone foreign now. Of course, being American, it'd be a violent, sweaty, obnoxious hug that smells vaguely of burgers.
They're in the same place far too many parents are these days.. off looking for something external to blame for their children's problems rather than their own percieved or real failures at parenthood.
It's far kinder to the fragile ego of a modern parent to say their kid is "addicted to games," "has been corrupted by violent media and boobs on TV," or "has a chemical imbalance that requires pumping them full of Ritalin" rather than "I wasn't there when I should have been."
Even the parents who aren't too caught up with trying to find somebody to blame and/or sue to painfully admit to the latter, though, pale even further at the thought of their kids needing to simply learn from life in order to make informed choices in future.
If you want to split hairs, the tubes aren't doing the carrying, the wire is. You could say the Internet is a series of wires, and sound like less of a total loon than Ted Stevens.
Of course, you could express a desire to replace your toes with grapes and eat nothing but mittens from now on, and sound like less of a total loon than Ted Stevens. But my point is that his entire analogy of trucks and tubes and "an Internet" being sent to his office being slowed down by your Netflix discs being squeezed through the tubes for you getting in the way, was entirely screwed.
The thing is, game mags are good for their format. The good ones have the right mix of articles, previews, interviews, and other content, while maintaining that somwhat exclusive magazine-readership "feel" to it. You get to know the personalities of the writers, and of the zine as a whole.
I somehow recently clicked my way into getting a free supscription to EGM. Don't ask me how, it was some weird website deal where I filled in a survey with fake info, and as a reward get a magazine addressed to an obvious joke name in my mailbox every month. I wouldn't pay for it these days, but it's good for what it is, and maintains an honored position in my house next to the Charmin, where I can read just the right amount of it at a time for a few minutes a day.
G4, however, tries to take that same amount of info, and stretch it out into a month of nonstop programming. There just isn't enough going on with enough network-friendly demo-gasmic mass appeal to keep something as unidirectional as TV interesting and profitable to the uninterested suits whose money runs the thing. Even the game mags have loaded their websites with bonus content, forums, downloadables, and stuff to involve their readers beyond the one-way "here's what we have to tell you this month, please take no notice of the Internet and its many superior, more focused, specialized news sources tailorable to your own interests" format.
The people behind G4 need to understand that they're not in an MTV situation, where they can flash any old crap at their target audience and expect it to get greedily eaten up. ("My proposal, Mr. Oldguy, is to make the rap kids want to wear hideous sparkly things in their teeth, and make the men want fur coats." "Excellent idea, Mr. Whiteguy! Get Puffy Combs' people on the phone, we'll make this happen by Friday.") Their target audience isn't dominated by empty-headed kids patiently awaiting instructions, they're into interactive-feeling content that doesn't talk down to them or zoom straight past the particular subsets of things they individually like.