A number of people, Krismon included, have voiced some disappointment at the excitement of the show
...As he says himself just a few posts up from here. This year was just a lot of "same-old, same-old", with very little that was new or exciting. The haul of swag was the poorest yet, too.
Am I the only one who really misses the old ".org Pavillion" they had a couple of years ago? It was a great place to just hang out and get to know people, or hack on your laptop if that's what you wanted to do. Now all the.orgs have their own booths. While I suppose it's nice of LWCE to provide them, it just doesn't make for the same atmosphere.
Ironic? Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and although there was nothing particularly Christian about his mythology, the morality espoused by the characters on the side of good was drawn explicitly from Christian teachings.
Besides, the premise is wrong. There are very very few morally unambiguous characters in LoTR, and even the strongest "good guys" were subject to temptation to evil. Not a few of them succumbed to it. And not all the "bad guys" are irredemably evil, or even evil by nature. You really need to pay better attention to what Tolkien actually write.
I'd give The Hobbit a miss for now unless you enjoy children's writing. The style is much more "cute" than you'll find in Harry Potter, for instance. It wasn't even originally intended to occupy the same universe as The Silmarillion does and Lord of the Rings wound up in, and had to be re-edited to fit properly. So contrary to what some folks in this thread are saying, there's really nothing in it that casts much light on LoTR. You can get everything you need as far as the background it provides from LoTR's prologue.
After you're through with LoTR, you might want to try The Hobbit, but if you start with it there's a good chance it will put you off entirely. Then go for The Silmarillion -- but that's a different animal entirely. It has no coherent plot, being presented instead as an episodic series of loosely connected legends, and is written in a highly formal style. Although it's indispensible for people who really get into Tolkien's Middle-Earth, it's clearly not for everybody. You can follow up The Silmarillion with Unfinished Tales, which fills in some of the remaining gaps in the histories based on some of Tolkien's more complete fragments. Then, if you decide you're really a Tolkien wonk, go for the History of Middle Earth series, a scholarly assemblage of Tolkien's rough drafts and fragments edited by his son Christopher that traces the development of the entire legendarium from the earliest beginnings in 1914 or thereabouts to his death.
Note that [The Hobbit] was written as a children's book (unlike the others), and thus has a slightly twee style that some may find a bit off-putting.
Actually, it has a very twee style until the climactic battle scene, and I think most adults would find it off-putting. I certainly did. I've re-read LoTR many, many times over the years. I just don't have the stomach for The Hobbit.
There's nothing in The Hobbit you need to know about for Lord of the Rings that isn't in the prologue for the latter. The Hobbit can be skipped entirely unless LoTR piques your interest in it.
As I understand J.R.R. Tolkien is dead (as I remember).
Yes, he's been dead for almost 30 years now. Mind like a steel trap, you've got...
Who has the right to say who can get some and who don't?
International copyright law. Copyright on Tolkien's works is held by his estate on behalf of his literary heirs. Tolkien's children and grandchildren are benefitting from their forebear's creation, and who's to say they shouldn't?
The elves didn't ride to the rescue of Gondor because they didn't have the power. There just weren't very many of them left in Middle-Earth at the time, and they had plenty of trouble in their own lands.
The Eldar were indeed morally ambiguous, but for another reason. They wanted to turn Middle-Earth into a museum of their own glory days, and actually succeeded in those places where one of the Three resided (Rivendell, Lorien.) It is in resisting the flow of time resulting in a kind of stasis, or stagnation, that made them less wholly good than they might have been.
The indictment alleges that the programmer and the company conspired for "commercial advantage and private financial gain."
So this is now a crime? When will we see Microsoft hauled in on this charge then? Or Adobe? Or any for-profit entity for that matter?
By the way, the original subject of this post was "This is illegal?!!", but I had to change it because of the "postersubj compression filter". Note to CmdrTaco et al: Your dumbass lameness filters are broken. They don't stop trolls and ASCII art, and they annoy legitimate posters. Either fix them or get rid of them. Or at least put a meaningful error message in there. "Postersubj compression filter" doesn't yield much of a clue as to what's wrong unless one wants to slog through the morass of Slashcode to find out what triggered the message. And I don't.
Aside from Baldurs gate, and the Fallout series there hasnt been a good RPG since Ultima IV & V, or the SSI line of AD&D games.
Nonsense, especially if you like the mid-series Ultimas. Go to Spiderweb Software and download a game from the Exile series, or Avernum (basically the same as Exile but with a somewhat more up-to-date engine.) They're easily the equal to anything Garriot did, IM(never H)O.
So much for the standard picture of the intrepid space explorer! I doubt Doc Smith would have sold so many books if his main character in the Lensman series was named Kimball "Gums" Kinnison.
You're right, of course, but it's been my observation that this varies by place and possibly by economic class. My mother is a recently retired schoolteacher on the East Coast, and although she experienced trends towards a more disrespectful attitude it never really got very bad for her. On the other hand, a friend of hers moved to the SF Bay Area near where I live not long ago. Although the pay was comparable to what she was getting in the east, the cost of living was so much higher that it was as if she was getting a pay cut. And the rich spoiled brat kids she had to deal with were absolutely insufferable. I formerly didn't believe that anyone would acutally judge a person's worth by the size of their incomes and the cars they drove, but these rotten kids certainly did. She would up returning to the East Coast where she could get a little respect.
I'm a software engineer who is almost completely burned out. The only thing holding me back from considering a career shift to teaching is the miserable pay. I'd have to take a pay cut of at least 50%, and as the sole support of a family of four there's no way I can do that.
I don't agree with the article that teaching high school is a job for PhDs. You don't get one of those unless you've made an original contribution to the science. These people are qualified researchers, and their time ought to be spent on adding to our body of knowledge. For this they require spare time and facilities that high schools simply can't provide. But there's absolutely no reason why people with master's (or even bachelor's) degrees can't do the job of passing on the knowledge that's already been acquired. Nothing on the high school level is beyond their abilities.
They ain't there. That is, I no longer see the name of the user who posted the comment when the discussion is being displayed in index mode. Bug or feature? Or is there a prefs setting that controls this that I haven't found yet?
And I might have done, except so many people take this kind of thing seriously. Yours was not the most insane bit of local astronomy I've heard, and usually it's stated with all earnestness. Check this out, for instance.
Not really. The collision must have been catastrophic for the other body. If it was Mars-sized, then it would have been a little over 1/10 the mass of the Earth. That's big enough to throw a considerable amount of the Earth's material into orbit, but also small enough that it would have been completely pulverized itself. Whatever pieces did not coalesce along with the other material into the Moon or become absorbed by the Earth would have simply contributed to the Solar System's collection of asteroids.
The only time I recall hearing Sagan mentioning anything like this on Cosmos was when he was debunking the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky. That particular presentation did not culminate in the expelled body colliding with Earth, but rather settled down into orbit around the Sun to become the planet Venus. You must be confusing two different segments.
I get my information from interviews and published remarks by Schulz himself, who said that Peanuts was always drawn and inked by him personally. That he had a hand tremor was well-known, but even if you didn't know that you ought to have been able to tell from actually looking at the strips.
It is neither widely known nor accepted that anyone else "helped" with the art. The only area where Schulz accepted help was with the lettering, and that was done by his wife, I believe. Charles Schulz was no Jim Davis. Don't be an ignoramous.
If that's all Breathed was saying, he's simply wrong. Schulz was not above making the terms of his syndicate contract public, and said more than once in interviews that his contract forbade the syndicate from ever hiring anyone else to write or draw Peanuts. Period.
Breathed said not only that they could do this, but that they may as well have. This was the insult. Anyone who paid the least bit of attention to the last couple years of Peanuts should have noticed that Schulz was back near the top of his game. Mind you, I don't blame anyone for not reading the strip at that point; Schulz had indeed had quite a few dry years there. But such a person should not speak as if he knew what he was talking about.
I'll take biting sarcasm over stale 1950's nostalgia any day.
You're obviously too young to have appreciated Peanuts in its prime, and not quite smart enough to have appreciated it in its renaissance. It was never about "stale 1950's nostalgia". Perhaps the only nostalgic thing about it was the notion that kids still had the initiative to organize their own sports activities like they once did. Rent The Sandlot to get a clue as to how that worked and why it was such an ideal vehicle for humor centered on children.
But Peanuts really became iconic in the '60s and early '70s. That was the time when its message, such as it was, really jelled and began to resonate with a large public. Charlie Brown's alienation was something never before seen in a mainstream comic strip, and those times found in him a sympathetic character.
It's true that the '80s were the doldrums for Peanuts. It had become repetitious, dependent on a limited number of motifs and situations. The characters ossified and many of them dropped out of sight. I stopped reading it in those days and rarely gave it a glance until a couple of years ago. By then Schulz had got it back. Maybe that vacation he took in 1997 recharged his batteries, but the strip had recovered it's old energy. It became more daring, self-aware, surreal, and even a little biting.
Schulz was not above taking the occasional shot at other cartoonists either. Take this strip from September of 1999. Lucy and Linus's brother Rerun is sitting next to a nameless little girl in kindergarten. They're supposed to be drawing flowers.
Girl: I thought you didn't paint flowers.
Rerun: These are space flowers from Jupiter. They're attacking Minneapolis, but Tarzan comes to the rescue.
Girl: I didn't know Tarzan was ever in Minneapolis.
Rerun: He used to ice skate there in the winter.
Girl: I think you're slowly going mad...
Rerun: I may have to hire someone to do my lettering...
Note: mere sarcasm isn't always funny. That was the problem with Outland IMO. When it wasn't simply infantile it was sarcastic without being witty. Then it died, and few mourned.
Even Sparky Schulz never owned the Peanuts characters. Technically, they could have fired him and hired college kids to do the strip. Maybe they did, for those last 20 years. Good ol' Sparky. He was our Elvis, in his prime.
What an insulting remark. Breathed himself should have had the talent Schulz carried around in his little finger, even in his driest years -- which were not his last. I recently picked up a collection of all the comics from Peanuts' last year and was pleasantly surprised to see that Schulz was back in top form. Yeah, his lines were made a little shaky by that hand tremor he suffered from that never quite went away. But he always wrote and drew that strip himself, and took not a single break from its beginning in 1950 until a 5 week vacation in 1997. (But hey, the man had just turned 75, so he deserved a vacation.)
I'll not deny that starting, oh, about the time Bloom County was just beginning it looked as if Schulz had settled down into a kind of routine cuteness that lacked much of his old originality. But by his last years, he was rockin' again. Old characters we hadn't seen in years reappeared and the humor really started to click again. As I was reading that last year's worth of strips I found myself laughing out loud more than once. Which is something I can't say about the strips Breathed produced his last year on the job.
It was also well-known that Schulz always insisted that the strip was written and drawn by no one but himself. Breathed, the man was your better. Have more respect.
Most pundits describe Bill Watterson as "reclusive" when they have occasion to mention him at all. What they really mean is that he values his privacy in much the same way as any other person in the world who just wants to do his job and go home to his quiet life at the end of the day. As a corollary, he has absolutely no use for the sort of pundit who would describe him as "reclusive".
He's still alive, still healthy, and looks a lot like Calvin's dad.
Surely Thief, by the defunct Looking Glass Studios, was worth a mention in the single-player experience. It's extremely tightly-driven by the story and extraordinarily immersive -- a phenomenon due much more to its amazing sound engine than to its mediocre renderer. Not only is it beside the point to kill the enemies, but depending on the difficulty setting you're actually not allowed to in most cases. Which is just as well because Garrett, the viewpoint character, is not very handy with a sword and can't afford all that much ammunition for his bow. Thief has no multiplayer capability at all, so the fan mission builders not only have to be adept at design but must be skilled storytellers too. For all that, there have been fan missions built that rival the quality of those in the original story. If you haven't played this game yet, you must check it out -- an its sequel too.
I don't believe you. I don't see anywhere near enough skin, on models or anyone else. (Except myself, but that ceased to be interesting a couple of decades ago.)
I may be utterly wrong, but it was my knowledge that the entire series of Star Wars films was based on books which could not be fit into a single film.
You're utterly wrong. The Star Wars films are based soley on scripts and story treatments written by George Lucas. Any Star Wars books you find were licensed after the fact.
And yet, strangely, we believe him. We feel it. Same for all the other cheesy dialogue, which fits the archetypes that you berate above so well that we can suspend our disbelief.
Which was pretty much my point. The line seems le mot juste right at that moment. It's only when you stop to think about it that you realize why it seems so. It was exactly this moment in the film that made me realize Lucas had made a simulacrum of a great film and not an actual one.
Re: Hollywood blockbusters. No, I haven't seen any lately except for "The Mummy II". Which I could also poke numerous holes in, especially in terms of historical accuracy, but why bother? Unlike Star Wars, The Mummy doesn't have legions of drooling fanboys that want to make it into much more than the fun bit of schlock it ever was. The fact is, the prevailing opinion among geeks is that Star Wars is much more than a thing "only as good as it needed to be, but made with flair and gusto." Does The Mummy rate its own category on Slashdot? This is exactly why I felt the need to write the original post in the first place, although I do wish I hadn't written it so hastily. There were a few points I could have expressed better.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who really misses the old ".org Pavillion" they had a couple of years ago? It was a great place to just hang out and get to know people, or hack on your laptop if that's what you wanted to do. Now all the .orgs have their own booths. While I suppose it's nice of LWCE to provide them, it just doesn't make for the same atmosphere.
Besides, the premise is wrong. There are very very few morally unambiguous characters in LoTR, and even the strongest "good guys" were subject to temptation to evil. Not a few of them succumbed to it. And not all the "bad guys" are irredemably evil, or even evil by nature. You really need to pay better attention to what Tolkien actually write.
After you're through with LoTR, you might want to try The Hobbit, but if you start with it there's a good chance it will put you off entirely. Then go for The Silmarillion -- but that's a different animal entirely. It has no coherent plot, being presented instead as an episodic series of loosely connected legends, and is written in a highly formal style. Although it's indispensible for people who really get into Tolkien's Middle-Earth, it's clearly not for everybody. You can follow up The Silmarillion with Unfinished Tales, which fills in some of the remaining gaps in the histories based on some of Tolkien's more complete fragments. Then, if you decide you're really a Tolkien wonk, go for the History of Middle Earth series, a scholarly assemblage of Tolkien's rough drafts and fragments edited by his son Christopher that traces the development of the entire legendarium from the earliest beginnings in 1914 or thereabouts to his death.
Actually, it has a very twee style until the climactic battle scene, and I think most adults would find it off-putting. I certainly did. I've re-read LoTR many, many times over the years. I just don't have the stomach for The Hobbit.
There's nothing in The Hobbit you need to know about for Lord of the Rings that isn't in the prologue for the latter. The Hobbit can be skipped entirely unless LoTR piques your interest in it.
Yes, he's been dead for almost 30 years now. Mind like a steel trap, you've got...
Who has the right to say who can get some and who don't?
International copyright law. Copyright on Tolkien's works is held by his estate on behalf of his literary heirs. Tolkien's children and grandchildren are benefitting from their forebear's creation, and who's to say they shouldn't?
The Eldar were indeed morally ambiguous, but for another reason. They wanted to turn Middle-Earth into a museum of their own glory days, and actually succeeded in those places where one of the Three resided (Rivendell, Lorien.) It is in resisting the flow of time resulting in a kind of stasis, or stagnation, that made them less wholly good than they might have been.
The indictment alleges that the programmer and the company conspired for "commercial advantage and private financial gain."
So this is now a crime? When will we see Microsoft hauled in on this charge then? Or Adobe? Or any for-profit entity for that matter?
By the way, the original subject of this post was "This is illegal?!!", but I had to change it because of the "postersubj compression filter". Note to CmdrTaco et al: Your dumbass lameness filters are broken. They don't stop trolls and ASCII art, and they annoy legitimate posters. Either fix them or get rid of them. Or at least put a meaningful error message in there. "Postersubj compression filter" doesn't yield much of a clue as to what's wrong unless one wants to slog through the morass of Slashcode to find out what triggered the message. And I don't.
Nonsense, especially if you like the mid-series Ultimas. Go to Spiderweb Software and download a game from the Exile series, or Avernum (basically the same as Exile but with a somewhat more up-to-date engine.) They're easily the equal to anything Garriot did, IM(never H)O.
So much for the standard picture of the intrepid space explorer! I doubt Doc Smith would have sold so many books if his main character in the Lensman series was named Kimball "Gums" Kinnison.
You're right, of course, but it's been my observation that this varies by place and possibly by economic class. My mother is a recently retired schoolteacher on the East Coast, and although she experienced trends towards a more disrespectful attitude it never really got very bad for her. On the other hand, a friend of hers moved to the SF Bay Area near where I live not long ago. Although the pay was comparable to what she was getting in the east, the cost of living was so much higher that it was as if she was getting a pay cut. And the rich spoiled brat kids she had to deal with were absolutely insufferable. I formerly didn't believe that anyone would acutally judge a person's worth by the size of their incomes and the cars they drove, but these rotten kids certainly did. She would up returning to the East Coast where she could get a little respect.
I don't agree with the article that teaching high school is a job for PhDs. You don't get one of those unless you've made an original contribution to the science. These people are qualified researchers, and their time ought to be spent on adding to our body of knowledge. For this they require spare time and facilities that high schools simply can't provide. But there's absolutely no reason why people with master's (or even bachelor's) degrees can't do the job of passing on the knowledge that's already been acquired. Nothing on the high school level is beyond their abilities.
They ain't there. That is, I no longer see the name of the user who posted the comment when the discussion is being displayed in index mode. Bug or feature? Or is there a prefs setting that controls this that I haven't found yet?
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------
------
It is neither widely known nor accepted that anyone else "helped" with the art. The only area where Schulz accepted help was with the lettering, and that was done by his wife, I believe. Charles Schulz was no Jim Davis. Don't be an ignoramous.
------
- If that's all Breathed was saying, he's simply wrong. Schulz was not above making the terms of his syndicate contract public, and said more than once in interviews that his contract forbade the syndicate from ever hiring anyone else to write or draw Peanuts. Period.
- Breathed said not only that they could do this, but that they may as well have. This was the insult. Anyone who paid the least bit of attention to the last couple years of Peanuts should have noticed that Schulz was back near the top of his game. Mind you, I don't blame anyone for not reading the strip at that point; Schulz had indeed had quite a few dry years there. But such a person should not speak as if he knew what he was talking about.
------You're obviously too young to have appreciated Peanuts in its prime, and not quite smart enough to have appreciated it in its renaissance. It was never about "stale 1950's nostalgia". Perhaps the only nostalgic thing about it was the notion that kids still had the initiative to organize their own sports activities like they once did. Rent The Sandlot to get a clue as to how that worked and why it was such an ideal vehicle for humor centered on children.
But Peanuts really became iconic in the '60s and early '70s. That was the time when its message, such as it was, really jelled and began to resonate with a large public. Charlie Brown's alienation was something never before seen in a mainstream comic strip, and those times found in him a sympathetic character.
It's true that the '80s were the doldrums for Peanuts. It had become repetitious, dependent on a limited number of motifs and situations. The characters ossified and many of them dropped out of sight. I stopped reading it in those days and rarely gave it a glance until a couple of years ago. By then Schulz had got it back. Maybe that vacation he took in 1997 recharged his batteries, but the strip had recovered it's old energy. It became more daring, self-aware, surreal, and even a little biting.
Schulz was not above taking the occasional shot at other cartoonists either. Take this strip from September of 1999. Lucy and Linus's brother Rerun is sitting next to a nameless little girl in kindergarten. They're supposed to be drawing flowers.
Note: mere sarcasm isn't always funny. That was the problem with Outland IMO. When it wasn't simply infantile it was sarcastic without being witty. Then it died, and few mourned.------
I'll not deny that starting, oh, about the time Bloom County was just beginning it looked as if Schulz had settled down into a kind of routine cuteness that lacked much of his old originality. But by his last years, he was rockin' again. Old characters we hadn't seen in years reappeared and the humor really started to click again. As I was reading that last year's worth of strips I found myself laughing out loud more than once. Which is something I can't say about the strips Breathed produced his last year on the job.
It was also well-known that Schulz always insisted that the strip was written and drawn by no one but himself. Breathed, the man was your better. Have more respect.
------
Most pundits describe Bill Watterson as "reclusive" when they have occasion to mention him at all. What they really mean is that he values his privacy in much the same way as any other person in the world who just wants to do his job and go home to his quiet life at the end of the day. As a corollary, he has absolutely no use for the sort of pundit who would describe him as "reclusive".
He's still alive, still healthy, and looks a lot like Calvin's dad.
----
Surely Thief, by the defunct Looking Glass Studios, was worth a mention in the single-player experience. It's extremely tightly-driven by the story and extraordinarily immersive -- a phenomenon due much more to its amazing sound engine than to its mediocre renderer. Not only is it beside the point to kill the enemies, but depending on the difficulty setting you're actually not allowed to in most cases. Which is just as well because Garrett, the viewpoint character, is not very handy with a sword and can't afford all that much ammunition for his bow. Thief has no multiplayer capability at all, so the fan mission builders not only have to be adept at design but must be skilled storytellers too. For all that, there have been fan missions built that rival the quality of those in the original story. If you haven't played this game yet, you must check it out -- an its sequel too.
I don't believe you. I don't see anywhere near enough skin, on models or anyone else. (Except myself, but that ceased to be interesting a couple of decades ago.)
You're utterly wrong. The Star Wars films are based soley on scripts and story treatments written by George Lucas. Any Star Wars books you find were licensed after the fact.
Which was pretty much my point. The line seems le mot juste right at that moment. It's only when you stop to think about it that you realize why it seems so. It was exactly this moment in the film that made me realize Lucas had made a simulacrum of a great film and not an actual one.
Re: Hollywood blockbusters. No, I haven't seen any lately except for "The Mummy II". Which I could also poke numerous holes in, especially in terms of historical accuracy, but why bother? Unlike Star Wars, The Mummy doesn't have legions of drooling fanboys that want to make it into much more than the fun bit of schlock it ever was. The fact is, the prevailing opinion among geeks is that Star Wars is much more than a thing "only as good as it needed to be, but made with flair and gusto." Does The Mummy rate its own category on Slashdot? This is exactly why I felt the need to write the original post in the first place, although I do wish I hadn't written it so hastily. There were a few points I could have expressed better.
Yes, I was thinking of Peter Cushing. I was thinking about horror film actors and got them confused.