Discover magazine has a much more poetic article on the same subject-- and there's a picture! http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-05/features/ear th-without-people/
It really blows the other stuff on the topic away, IMO-- it's definitely the first article in Discover to actually bring tears to my eyes.
Children have always been expected to act like adults-- the fact that for the first eighteen to thirty years of their lives they *refuse* to act like adults is what makes them *children*. That's not a bad thing, of course. It's supremely arrogant to think we can make kids act like anything other than the wierd little midgets they are. We can make them *look* like adults, and we can force them to adhere to an adult schedule. We can even hold them to adult standards-- it makes no difference. Childhood is too essential a part of development-- it's biologically programmed, and it will not be controverted except by the most heinous of child abuse. For examples, see "the good ol' days"
http://images.google.com/images?q=victorian+childr en&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images
And those of you worried about criminals, child molesters, etc. -- stop watching TV news for a month or two. Remember, it's just another show. Look at the statistics if you want to make an informed decision about the safety of your child in this year 2006. Crime is down! Your kid will be fine outside unsupervised. He might be a little lonely, what with paranoiac parents keeping their youngsters in all day...
Just teach 'em to watch out for cars. Those things are a menace.
Say what you will, but I went to their site-- and they promised to make me a flockstar! All I've gotta do is use flock to do something cool, like post an entry to my blog ("dear blog, today I got up. Then I ate some cereal. Then I did ollies in front of the drug store with my friends.") or put pictures on flickr ("Tags: ollies, kickass, breakfast, bitchin'.")
Screw you guys. I'm gonna be a famous flockstar, and they're gonna put me on their blog. It's gonna be way rad. I bet they give me an honorary motorcycle or something.
Flockstar! Whoo.
These guys are gonna usher in a whole new era of serious, relevant, internet content!
I don't know. I don't think people will pay 500+ bucks to eat a PS3, even if it is a fine dining experience. Even the Wii will probably be too expensive to eat, at least casually. Maybe I'll take my family out to Best Buy once or twice a year to enjoy a nice, tasty, game console, but I think the majority of people will stick to eating older consoles, which will be much cheaper after the next gen ones come out.
Now, some of the particularly savory parts of the Wii might be tempting, if they can be bought for cheap. I tell you from experience that a PowerPC processor (when prepared with the proper sauce) can be delicious. The PS3's multicore, though, I'm somewhat skeptical of. I think that's just too much food in one package.
All this console talk is making me hungry. I could really go for a Z80 right about now.
Hmm... It looks like the idea of "paying volunteers" isn't ridiculous enough to make people see the sarcasm. Oh well, I knew I was walking on thin ice with this one.
Without money, the volunteers will have to work FOR FREE! Oh shits! LOLOLOL.
That kind of wrong-headed hippie talk is exactly what's wrong with open source! If Mac OS X goes open source, Linux loses market share. If Linux loses market share, it will make less money. Without money, how will they pay their volunteers? Hm?
"Just because you are self-aware, you cannot draw a conclusion of abilities of others to be self-aware. My GF's dog is self aware, and so are her cats."
Is your second sentence some kind of sarcasatic counterexample of how you can't draw a conclusion about the abilities of others to be self aware, or do you not realize that you're contradicting yourself? If you can't draw a conclusion about the abilities of others to be self-aware, how do you know your GF's dog is? That's at least as crazy as the poster saying that humans are the only self-aware species.
For my part, I think there's some chance dolphins are self-aware, which is why we need to watch them very, very, carefully to see if they're doing anything sneaky. I think Gorillas and co. can be brought into the fold as extremely dumb humans if we give them a chance, but dolphins are different. I just don't trust them.
While your "preach to the techies" approach is interesting, I'm wondering if you've got anything for the critical thinking buffs in the audience that don't go in for basing our lives and morals on stories that may or may not be true (and are anecdotal at best, anyway). I'm mean this with all sincerity. You can't convince everyone with bible stories, and assuming that you can is a little presumptuous. Let's stick to the natural, empirical, world that people of all faiths can agree on, ne?
So instead of jerking off, just go to church REALLY REALLY HARD.
PRAISE JESUS! OHHH GOD!
I think there's enough misdirected sexual energy flying around. It's only an anecdotal observation, but has anyone else noticed that there's a direct coorelation between not having had an orgasm recently and thinking irrationally? Masturbation helps everybody keep a cool head in a sexually repressed society, think I.
Another unqualified observation: familiarity with porn leads to eventual disenfrancisement with the current (crazy) sexual norms. Once you realize that it's all just fat, hairy, guys jerking off onto vapid blonde airheads, you start to think about what you want in a relationship with a little more discretion. Look at porn! Look at porn until you're bored with it, and then move on! People have got to experience in an intuitive way that pornography does not depict the kind of relationship they want. If they have to jerk off a couple of thousand times to figure that out, well, who cares? There are some studies that show frequent orgasms are good for the health (certainly can't hurt), and we now know it's not going to make you go blind-- so have at it!
Pornography is mostly trite, boring, and insulting-- but the way to communicate that message is not to say "don't look at it! It'll corrupt you!" The correct way to communicate that message (if there's any, and that's debatable) I think, is to say "Pornography is stupid, see?" and then you give examples. With pictures and videos.
It's not a bug. Clearly you have an unrealistic picture of the post 9/11 world. You won't be able to rest until you've killed every possible "enemy" i.e. every NPC.
Oh, is thaaat the point of life? Fascinating! I guess that "life is what you make of it" stuff is a load of capitalist propaganda. Look, I'm not a big money-fan-guy-- I'm not dedicated in any meaningful way to the "money" thing. But it's probably possible to live a very fulfilling life in pursuit of money. In the end it's just another arbitrary goal. If having lots of money makes you happy, and allows you to live a fulfilling life, then hooray for you! If people are willing to watch your tasteless but incredibly expensive play and pay 60 bucks a pop for tickets, then hooray for them! It's hard even to make the argument that a life lived in pursuit of money is an inherently selfish and unproductive life-- if you have way too much money, you're likely to use it to help people (the hell else are you going to do with it?)
Anyway, you aren't "making a point about what life is really about" -- you're making a point about what life really *isn't* about, and apparently it only *isn't* about money if you don't want it to be (follow?)
Now, I personally prefer enriching my life by lookin' at somewhat culturally important stuff that's more or less tasteful-- so I don't think this play is for me. I think the books have been bastardized just about enough-- it's time to give Tolkien's world another coupla decades in the ol' wine cellar, I say. But if the good folks on Broadway think otherwise, well, let 'em put some work into it and see what comes out. Their views on the purpose of life will, I suppose, inform their play.
Insightful? I dunno, this comment reads to me as "AAAAAGGGGGGGGGHH!!"
You really *can* joke about anything. It's fine if you don't find it funny (obviously), but saying it's shameful and depressing that people joke lightheartedly about a serious issue is always big buzzkill. It's the conversational equivalent of walking up to a group of people and taking a big shit right in front of them. Thanks for the... input. You're leading the thread in exciting new goddamned directions. Cause, you know, this is secretly a thread about the horrors of prison rape, and jokes are the perfect context for inserting unadulterated activism.
I'm not saying people who are against prison rape are extremists or something (given the high rate of incarceration in this country, we should *all* be against prison rape, more out of personal interest than anything else), but busting out with a big ol' conversational turd like that is in worse taste than the original jokes.
I mean, thanks. Prison rape is actually bad. Wow. I'm gonna devote some serious fuckin' thought to that, because it's just such a provocative statement. This is the kind of thing I have to think about on surveys, too. "In your opinion, is getting involuntarily boned in the ass by a violent felon whilst in prison on a drug charge a good thing or a bad thing?" Uhh... Umm... Crap. Let me think about that. I'll get back to you... Right after I read Slashdot!
Jokes, no matter how offensive or distasteful, are *not* an opportunity for you to point out how offensive something is. Jokes are very frequently funny *because* they make us feel awkward or offended. Unless you think that the people making these jokes are secretly *for* prison rape, your comment is totally unwarranted and pretty solidly off-topic.
Yeah, it's tragic-- but I was referring to the good ol' days of Kunark and Velious.
Anyhow, WoW is successful because it's incredibly polished and easy to play. D&D online will probably not be too successful because it doesn't sound like it brings anything fantastically new to the market-- it's trying to to do what WoW does (from the sound of it), but it's not going to be as polished or well publicized.
And I still contend that WoW is missing some very important things. I haven't seen anywhere near the level of maturity, social cooperation, and entertaining drama that I saw back in EQ.
Let's talk about how sissified these new MMOs are compared to the first worthwhile 3d MMO, i.e. EQ. Specifically, let's talk about how these sissified MMOs are less immersive, less social, and less interesting than the grandfathers of the genre (UO,EQ). I'll be addressing EQ in the context of "classic" EQ, i.e. Kunark, Velious, and maybe Luclin.
We'll start with the death penalty. In EQ, when you die, you've just sacrificed somewhere between 10 minutes and 8 hours of your life. You have run back to your corpse to get back your things, and you have to do it *naked*. Sometimes this can take hours-- especially since the place you pop back up is determined by your "bind point", something that can only be set by casting classes and used in specific places. This, according to modern MMO players, sucks. I beg to differ. This kind of pain creates a real attachment to your character-- and to the people around you. To your character because his losses are yours. Your character loses his life, you lose a non negligible amount of time. To other people, because when you get *really* fucked, you need help from others to get your corpse back. Maybe it's not enjoyable by itself, but wheeling and dealing with a shady Necromancer, trying to get him to summon your corpse to a reasonable location at 3:00 AM is undoubtedly immersive experience.
Transportation as well, is a big thing that I loved in EQ and hated in most other MMOs. The goal of transportation isn't *really* to get you from point A to point B-- it's to give you an idea of how big the in game world really is. To that end. In EQ, a ship ride from one continent to another could take the better part of an hour (much of the travel space was populated by crazy content, too). In WoW, the trips are woefully abbreviated. Step on a ship and... Whoop! You're there.
For many people, the hardships of EQ may seem slightly insane-- but consider that in an easy game like WoW, you're getting something for nothing. Accomplishment without a challenge behind it is meaningless, and the feeling of accomplishment in a world populated by your peers is one of the big draws of MMOs. Hardship was *rampant* in EQ-- and you know what? It did kind of suck. It wasn't always enjoyable. But it made feats of daring all the more impressive and thrilling. The lows were lower, yes-- but the highs were much higher. In the end, WoW got my attention for maybe 5 months, as opposed to the 2 years and countless memories EQ gave me. I *know* WoW is more accessable. That's why so many damn people are playing it. But in my opinion, it isn't more *enjoyable*. The illusion of meaningful accomplishment is to central to the way I play MMOs, and WoW has never been able to make my accomplishments feel non-trivial (and please don't tell me about the PvP. I know it's the biggest draw WoW has, and there's some real potential there, but it's a completely different game when viewed from that angle, and I'm talking about PvE content).
To ward off the Off-Topic police, please note the D&D Online appears to be another of these easy, quick-to-beat, unsatisfying games. Most likely it won't be successful for these reasons.
Hoo boy, you're thinking hard. I can smell the wood burning!
Anyway, I only started using the internet directly a couple of weeks ago. I mean, what choice did I have? Since the telegraph shut down, I haven't been able to cable old Uncle Richie back east to check my e-mail for me, make Slashdot posts, etc. I decided it was time to get on the ol' innernet bandwagon.
It was inevitable, anyway-- Unc Rich hasn't been too happy about my insistence on up-to-the-minute RSS feeds. I tell him it's a necessity for the information age, but there's just no convincing him.
Sci fi writer? Pfft! Next you'll tell me we don't have advanced humanoid robots with positronic brains, and that U.S. Robotics is just a shitty winmodem manufacturer!
I wanna get this on the record so everybody knows I said it:P
The Nintendo Revolution (whatever they decide to call it on release) will kick a *lot* of ass. If you look at what they've been doing for the last 20 years, you see a pattern. There's an ideal they're going for in terms of interaction and entertainment. That Power Glove piece of shit, the Virtual Boy, this business with the two screen/touchscreen on the DS, the way the Advance plugged into the Gamecube for some games-- all of these peripherals failed, yes. But have you noticed they're getting better? The Virtual Boy was better than the power glove, the Advance's connectivity was better than the Virtual Boy:P and the DS is the best thing yet.
The Revolution is the culmination of all this crap. The technology Nintendo has been lusting after all these years is finally ready for market, and they've been thinking about it for TWO DECADES. This big, ridiculous console war between the PS3 and 360 is just the cover Nintendo needs to sneak in a cheap, fun, and brilliant console that will shift everything around in crazy ways. While the other two asshats are battling over competing DRM schemes/media formats Nintendo is quietly making a GAMING SYSTEM that will be FUN to play GAMES on. They're gonna have fun stuff coming out the yin-yang. I don't know where I get this from, I can just *see* it. It's *there*, dammit.
It's so fucking revolutionary it just might work.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a rabid Nintendo fanboy, despite the contents of this post. I've always been more of a PC guy, but I see somethere here I think is going to be damn interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
As usual, MS is five years behind the curve-- 'epic' went out of style around 2007 (around here, anyhow). Rad idea, though!
Discover magazine has a much more poetic article on the same subject-- and there's a picture!r th-without-people/
http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-05/features/ea
It really blows the other stuff on the topic away, IMO-- it's definitely the first article in Discover to actually bring tears to my eyes.
Children have always been expected to act like adults-- the fact that for the first eighteen to thirty years of their lives they *refuse* to act like adults is what makes them *children*. That's not a bad thing, of course. It's supremely arrogant to think we can make kids act like anything other than the wierd little midgets they are. We can make them *look* like adults, and we can force them to adhere to an adult schedule. We can even hold them to adult standards-- it makes no difference. Childhood is too essential a part of development-- it's biologically programmed, and it will not be controverted except by the most heinous of child abuse. For examples, see "the good ol' days" http://images.google.com/images?q=victorian+childr en&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images
And those of you worried about criminals, child molesters, etc. -- stop watching TV news for a month or two. Remember, it's just another show. Look at the statistics if you want to make an informed decision about the safety of your child in this year 2006. Crime is down! Your kid will be fine outside unsupervised. He might be a little lonely, what with paranoiac parents keeping their youngsters in all day...
Just teach 'em to watch out for cars. Those things are a menace.
*Chromatic* dragons are bad, *metallic* dragons are good, isn't it? Or has my trusty Monster Manual decieved me?
Say what you will, but I went to their site-- and they promised to make me a flockstar! All I've gotta do is use flock to do something cool, like post an entry to my blog ("dear blog, today I got up. Then I ate some cereal. Then I did ollies in front of the drug store with my friends.") or put pictures on flickr ("Tags: ollies, kickass, breakfast, bitchin'.")
Screw you guys. I'm gonna be a famous flockstar, and they're gonna put me on their blog. It's gonna be way rad. I bet they give me an honorary motorcycle or something.
Flockstar! Whoo.
These guys are gonna usher in a whole new era of serious, relevant, internet content!
I don't know. I don't think people will pay 500+ bucks to eat a PS3, even if it is a fine dining experience. Even the Wii will probably be too expensive to eat, at least casually. Maybe I'll take my family out to Best Buy once or twice a year to enjoy a nice, tasty, game console, but I think the majority of people will stick to eating older consoles, which will be much cheaper after the next gen ones come out.
Now, some of the particularly savory parts of the Wii might be tempting, if they can be bought for cheap. I tell you from experience that a PowerPC processor (when prepared with the proper sauce) can be delicious. The PS3's multicore, though, I'm somewhat skeptical of. I think that's just too much food in one package.
All this console talk is making me hungry. I could really go for a Z80 right about now.
Link's bow, goddammit!
Hmm... It looks like the idea of "paying volunteers" isn't ridiculous enough to make people see the sarcasm. Oh well, I knew I was walking on thin ice with this one.
Without money, the volunteers will have to work FOR FREE! Oh shits! LOLOLOL.
Better?
That kind of wrong-headed hippie talk is exactly what's wrong with open source! If Mac OS X goes open source, Linux loses market share. If Linux loses market share, it will make less money. Without money, how will they pay their volunteers? Hm?
Hahahaha. You said doo doo!
I'm confused...
"Just because you are self-aware, you cannot draw a conclusion of abilities of others to be self-aware. My GF's dog is self aware, and so are her cats."
Is your second sentence some kind of sarcasatic counterexample of how you can't draw a conclusion about the abilities of others to be self aware, or do you not realize that you're contradicting yourself? If you can't draw a conclusion about the abilities of others to be self-aware, how do you know your GF's dog is? That's at least as crazy as the poster saying that humans are the only self-aware species.
For my part, I think there's some chance dolphins are self-aware, which is why we need to watch them very, very, carefully to see if they're doing anything sneaky. I think Gorillas and co. can be brought into the fold as extremely dumb humans if we give them a chance, but dolphins are different. I just don't trust them.
To the slashdotted site (copied from my submission to the blog comments page)
A fib 404 message in the public domain:
This
Page
Is not.
404
You'll find nothing here
You'd better just click "back"-- move on.
While your "preach to the techies" approach is interesting, I'm wondering if you've got anything for the critical thinking buffs in the audience that don't go in for basing our lives and morals on stories that may or may not be true (and are anecdotal at best, anyway). I'm mean this with all sincerity. You can't convince everyone with bible stories, and assuming that you can is a little presumptuous. Let's stick to the natural, empirical, world that people of all faiths can agree on, ne?
I daresay *all* of our vocabulary is based on historical precedence.
So instead of jerking off, just go to church REALLY REALLY HARD.
PRAISE JESUS! OHHH GOD!
I think there's enough misdirected sexual energy flying around. It's only an anecdotal observation, but has anyone else noticed that there's a direct coorelation between not having had an orgasm recently and thinking irrationally? Masturbation helps everybody keep a cool head in a sexually repressed society, think I.
Another unqualified observation: familiarity with porn leads to eventual disenfrancisement with the current (crazy) sexual norms. Once you realize that it's all just fat, hairy, guys jerking off onto vapid blonde airheads, you start to think about what you want in a relationship with a little more discretion. Look at porn! Look at porn until you're bored with it, and then move on! People have got to experience in an intuitive way that pornography does not depict the kind of relationship they want. If they have to jerk off a couple of thousand times to figure that out, well, who cares? There are some studies that show frequent orgasms are good for the health (certainly can't hurt), and we now know it's not going to make you go blind-- so have at it!
Pornography is mostly trite, boring, and insulting-- but the way to communicate that message is not to say "don't look at it! It'll corrupt you!" The correct way to communicate that message (if there's any, and that's debatable) I think, is to say "Pornography is stupid, see?" and then you give examples. With pictures and videos.
It's not a bug. Clearly you have an unrealistic picture of the post 9/11 world. You won't be able to rest until you've killed every possible "enemy" i.e. every NPC.
Oh, is thaaat the point of life? Fascinating! I guess that "life is what you make of it" stuff is a load of capitalist propaganda. Look, I'm not a big money-fan-guy-- I'm not dedicated in any meaningful way to the "money" thing. But it's probably possible to live a very fulfilling life in pursuit of money. In the end it's just another arbitrary goal. If having lots of money makes you happy, and allows you to live a fulfilling life, then hooray for you! If people are willing to watch your tasteless but incredibly expensive play and pay 60 bucks a pop for tickets, then hooray for them! It's hard even to make the argument that a life lived in pursuit of money is an inherently selfish and unproductive life-- if you have way too much money, you're likely to use it to help people (the hell else are you going to do with it?)
Anyway, you aren't "making a point about what life is really about" -- you're making a point about what life really *isn't* about, and apparently it only *isn't* about money if you don't want it to be (follow?)
Now, I personally prefer enriching my life by lookin' at somewhat culturally important stuff that's more or less tasteful-- so I don't think this play is for me. I think the books have been bastardized just about enough-- it's time to give Tolkien's world another coupla decades in the ol' wine cellar, I say. But if the good folks on Broadway think otherwise, well, let 'em put some work into it and see what comes out. Their views on the purpose of life will, I suppose, inform their play.
Insightful? I dunno, this comment reads to me as "AAAAAGGGGGGGGGHH!!"
You really *can* joke about anything. It's fine if you don't find it funny (obviously), but saying it's shameful and depressing that people joke lightheartedly about a serious issue is always big buzzkill. It's the conversational equivalent of walking up to a group of people and taking a big shit right in front of them. Thanks for the... input. You're leading the thread in exciting new goddamned directions. Cause, you know, this is secretly a thread about the horrors of prison rape, and jokes are the perfect context for inserting unadulterated activism.
I'm not saying people who are against prison rape are extremists or something (given the high rate of incarceration in this country, we should *all* be against prison rape, more out of personal interest than anything else), but busting out with a big ol' conversational turd like that is in worse taste than the original jokes.
I mean, thanks. Prison rape is actually bad. Wow. I'm gonna devote some serious fuckin' thought to that, because it's just such a provocative statement. This is the kind of thing I have to think about on surveys, too. "In your opinion, is getting involuntarily boned in the ass by a violent felon whilst in prison on a drug charge a good thing or a bad thing?" Uhh... Umm... Crap. Let me think about that. I'll get back to you... Right after I read Slashdot!
Jokes, no matter how offensive or distasteful, are *not* an opportunity for you to point out how offensive something is. Jokes are very frequently funny *because* they make us feel awkward or offended. Unless you think that the people making these jokes are secretly *for* prison rape, your comment is totally unwarranted and pretty solidly off-topic.
Yeah, it's tragic-- but I was referring to the good ol' days of Kunark and Velious.
Anyhow, WoW is successful because it's incredibly polished and easy to play. D&D online will probably not be too successful because it doesn't sound like it brings anything fantastically new to the market-- it's trying to to do what WoW does (from the sound of it), but it's not going to be as polished or well publicized.
And I still contend that WoW is missing some very important things. I haven't seen anywhere near the level of maturity, social cooperation, and entertaining drama that I saw back in EQ.
Let's talk about how sissified these new MMOs are compared to the first worthwhile 3d MMO, i.e. EQ. Specifically, let's talk about how these sissified MMOs are less immersive, less social, and less interesting than the grandfathers of the genre (UO,EQ). I'll be addressing EQ in the context of "classic" EQ, i.e. Kunark, Velious, and maybe Luclin.
We'll start with the death penalty. In EQ, when you die, you've just sacrificed somewhere between 10 minutes and 8 hours of your life. You have run back to your corpse to get back your things, and you have to do it *naked*. Sometimes this can take hours-- especially since the place you pop back up is determined by your "bind point", something that can only be set by casting classes and used in specific places. This, according to modern MMO players, sucks. I beg to differ. This kind of pain creates a real attachment to your character-- and to the people around you. To your character because his losses are yours. Your character loses his life, you lose a non negligible amount of time. To other people, because when you get *really* fucked, you need help from others to get your corpse back. Maybe it's not enjoyable by itself, but wheeling and dealing with a shady Necromancer, trying to get him to summon your corpse to a reasonable location at 3:00 AM is undoubtedly immersive experience.
Transportation as well, is a big thing that I loved in EQ and hated in most other MMOs. The goal of transportation isn't *really* to get you from point A to point B-- it's to give you an idea of how big the in game world really is. To that end. In EQ, a ship ride from one continent to another could take the better part of an hour (much of the travel space was populated by crazy content, too). In WoW, the trips are woefully abbreviated. Step on a ship and... Whoop! You're there.
For many people, the hardships of EQ may seem slightly insane-- but consider that in an easy game like WoW, you're getting something for nothing. Accomplishment without a challenge behind it is meaningless, and the feeling of accomplishment in a world populated by your peers is one of the big draws of MMOs. Hardship was *rampant* in EQ-- and you know what? It did kind of suck. It wasn't always enjoyable. But it made feats of daring all the more impressive and thrilling. The lows were lower, yes-- but the highs were much higher. In the end, WoW got my attention for maybe 5 months, as opposed to the 2 years and countless memories EQ gave me. I *know* WoW is more accessable. That's why so many damn people are playing it. But in my opinion, it isn't more *enjoyable*. The illusion of meaningful accomplishment is to central to the way I play MMOs, and WoW has never been able to make my accomplishments feel non-trivial (and please don't tell me about the PvP. I know it's the biggest draw WoW has, and there's some real potential there, but it's a completely different game when viewed from that angle, and I'm talking about PvE content).
To ward off the Off-Topic police, please note the D&D Online appears to be another of these easy, quick-to-beat, unsatisfying games. Most likely it won't be successful for these reasons.
You volunteering?
Hoo boy, you're thinking hard. I can smell the wood burning!
Anyway, I only started using the internet directly a couple of weeks ago. I mean, what choice did I have? Since the telegraph shut down, I haven't been able to cable old Uncle Richie back east to check my e-mail for me, make Slashdot posts, etc. I decided it was time to get on the ol' innernet bandwagon.
It was inevitable, anyway-- Unc Rich hasn't been too happy about my insistence on up-to-the-minute RSS feeds. I tell him it's a necessity for the information age, but there's just no convincing him.
Sci fi writer? Pfft! Next you'll tell me we don't have advanced humanoid robots with positronic brains, and that U.S. Robotics is just a shitty winmodem manufacturer!
Err... I implied the DS failed back there. Clearly not the case. Consider it a grammatical error. Everything else is true, though!
I wanna get this on the record so everybody knows I said it :P
:P and the DS is the best thing yet.
The Nintendo Revolution (whatever they decide to call it on release) will kick a *lot* of ass. If you look at what they've been doing for the last 20 years, you see a pattern. There's an ideal they're going for in terms of interaction and entertainment. That Power Glove piece of shit, the Virtual Boy, this business with the two screen/touchscreen on the DS, the way the Advance plugged into the Gamecube for some games-- all of these peripherals failed, yes. But have you noticed they're getting better? The Virtual Boy was better than the power glove, the Advance's connectivity was better than the Virtual Boy
The Revolution is the culmination of all this crap. The technology Nintendo has been lusting after all these years is finally ready for market, and they've been thinking about it for TWO DECADES. This big, ridiculous console war between the PS3 and 360 is just the cover Nintendo needs to sneak in a cheap, fun, and brilliant console that will shift everything around in crazy ways. While the other two asshats are battling over competing DRM schemes/media formats Nintendo is quietly making a GAMING SYSTEM that will be FUN to play GAMES on. They're gonna have fun stuff coming out the yin-yang. I don't know where I get this from, I can just *see* it. It's *there*, dammit.
It's so fucking revolutionary it just might work.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a rabid Nintendo fanboy, despite the contents of this post. I've always been more of a PC guy, but I see somethere here I think is going to be damn interesting.