Well Mr AC, I've read the 1,000 word "summary" version of it, yes. I've also skim-read some of the 10,000 word version. If you think I'm going to sit down with a notepad and refute each criticism point by point, then no, I'm not. That really would take the joy out if it all.
I do get it, actually. The language is in there - there are plenty of guide entries and pieces of dialogue that show this. It's just the reviewer thought it more important to point out what isn't there, which as I've said, is a fruitless endeavour.
Is it fruitless? Or bootless? I can never remember which. I think it's fruitless.
Well, people do like to see their heroes battling the passage of time, the juxtaposition of the modern with the historic and traditional, and setting right great wrongs that have occurred in the past, along with...oh come on, you can finish this joke yourselves...
In order to go through the more substantial plot criticisms, that would involve me reading all of the 10,000 word review which, having read the short review, is not something I'm not inclined to do, to be honest. Life's too short. 10,000 words? The first hitchhiker book was only about 50,000 words, iirc.
Seeing the film for the second time, I was looking out for problems with the plot, but nothing really jumped out at me. The plot doesn't strike me as nonsense, at least no more the original plot of Hitchhiker did. A couple of things made me make a mental note, but these always seemed to be resolved later on in a way that was satisfactory. Where some things or events are left unsaid, you can fill in the blanks with something reasonable yourself without too much effort. I don't always expect a film to painstakingly explain everything that happens. If they'd done that, I really would have said that the film had been dumbed down.
My extremely peripheral involvement with the film really just meant that I was even more anxious about whether I would like the finished product or not. Seeing the film for the first time was really a great relief, as I realised that they hadn't screwed it up, not by a long way.
And as for my point that a bunch of people invited to a pre-screening (in one case largely consisting of distributors, critics, reviewers etc) laughed a lot seems like a valid point to me. My point is that, as Tycho would say, humans liked this film, and I'm pretty sure that's the species that will generally go to see this film.
As I said: Look at these people. They probably think they're having a good time!
(Disclaimer: I've been a hitchhiker fan for longer than I care to remember, and was lucky enough to work with Douglas for a few years at The Digital Village, and have been peripherally involved with some of the publicity material for the film, so you can deduce whatever bias you like from that.)
Today I saw the movie for the second time, and once again I find myself coming to the conclusion that I must have been shown a different movie to the one that MJ Simpson saw. Having twice been in a cinema full of people who were laughing all the way through at the movie (and these are British people, for crying out loud!), and then reading that the movie is "staggeringly unfunny" leaves me somewhat confused. Partly because I heard all those people laughing myself with my own ears, but mainly because I loved the film.
For any hitchhiker fan, there will be moments in the film that you feel are not what you expected, or that bits were left out that you wish weren't. This is inevitable, no matter how good the movie was. This is just a fact of life when adapting a book - you're never going to capture everyone's imaginings and commit them to film. It's just part of the compromise you go through when you adapt a verbal medium to a visual medium. Neither are you going to 'get everything in'.
For me, the clearest indication of this is Simpson's laundry list of stuff that isn't in the film, that presumably he feels should be. Suffice it to say that if all that stuff was in the film, I don't think it would be a film I would want to watch. Pointing out that the description of the Vogon ships hanging in the air "in exactly the same way that bricks don't" is not in the film shows a stunning lack of understanding of what makes a good film. I can find a lot of descriptive prose in the books that didn't make it into the film - and you can probably guess why.
I mean, how was that going to work? Was Arthur going to say something like "See that spaceship Ford? Have you noticed the way it hangs in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't?" I'm sure that would have been the beginnings of a cracking screenplay.
The simple fact is, which most people seem not to grasp, is that, yes, you could have put, e.g. the full conversation between Arthur and Mr Prosser into the movie, and it might only have taken an extra 30 seconds, but in, say, a 90 minute movie, you only have a limited number of 30 second chunks. If you remained faithful to every piece of dialogue in the source material, you'd over-run by at least an hour. At least.
Also included in that list is a load of stuff from the 2nd book, when the film makers have repeatedly stated that this film is based on the first book only (and not on all the books as some posters seem to believe). I mean, if it was based on all the books, how much stuff would they have to have left out then?
I've seen moans that the Guide entry on towels is not in the movie, how could it be left out, etc. conveniently forgetting that this entry didn't even appear in the first radio series. Also, if you think towels don't feature in the movie, think again.
As for the movie that I actually watched - as I said, I loved it. The acting was great - far from finding Arthur to be 'an annoying little prat', I thought Martin Freeman's portrayal was very funny and accurate. Even when Martin changes the 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays' line, it still sounds natural - so natural that I didn't even notice the change until the second screening. Sam Rockwell's performance as the unceasingly presidential Zaphod is a joy to watch. The Vogons and their unflinching bureaucracy is captured perfectly via some new jokes and situations that I'm certainly not going to spoil here - I recommend seeing the movie yourself.
The design and aesthetics of the Heart of Gold are nothing short of fantastic, in the face of which the natural fan's reaction to observe that the HOG doesn
Too bad for them. Offer a better product, and it'll sell.
I can't tell if you're deliberately misunderstanding or not. It doesn't matter how good their music store is, if iPod users can't play the music on their iPods, they're not going to buy the music. I'm assuming the music will be DRM'd, because, as you say, the RIAA won't let you sell it otherwise.
The RIAA will not let people sell unencoded MP3s or AACs, both of which are industry standard formats that play on the iPod. If you want to sell un-DRM'd music for the iPod, and you can pull it off, you'll make huge piles of money. But you can't do it if you want to sell music the RIAA controls. That's how we got there. Is everyone forgetting the iPod plays a lot more than just FairPlay AAC?
Again, you're not even answering the same question. "The RIAA won't let you sell un DRM'd music" is not, repeat not, the same statement as "The RIAA won't let Apple open up FairPlay so anyone can sell DRM'd music", which was my point.
You can censure Apple because the RIAA won't let people sell music that plays on an iPod.
Did you mean "You can't censure..."?
As for Real/Napster, how about anyone else who wants to run a music store that sells DRM'd music to play on as many audio devices as possible? Strawman arguments are not that convincing. Boo! Real suck! Therefore no-one should be allowed to use Fairplay to sell DRM music for iPods!
And where did we go from "We don't know exactly what's going on between Apple and the RIAA. It's very hard to say." to "the RIAA won't let people sell music that plays on an iPod", which seemed to happen in the course of your post?
How do you embed links in/. posts without getting the stupid trailing domain in brackets?
You can't. It's an attempt by Rob (I assume) to thwart people inserting links that claim to, for example, support or refute a point in the discussion, when it's really just a link to goatse.cx or something else that you really don't want to see. Just makes it slightly harder to fool people.
Being from the UK, where you just get a passport as a matter of course when travelling to other countries, so this whole thing seems weird, I'm having trouble following some of the arguments.
In particular:
This isn't because Americans are stupid, its because the US and Canada do not have a culture of "papers please!" We think of passports as something you need to enter another country, not something you need to get back home.
How does that work? If you think of a passport as something you need to enter another country, then if you need to get into the US, then you are by definition coming from another country, so you would have taken your passport when entering that other country in the first place...so you'll still have your passport when you return to try to get into the US, right? Or are people leaving the US with their passports, and leaving their passports abroad when they come back?
As that's not likely:-), I assume it's really because American people don't generally think of Canada as 'another country' like they do with other countries? I mean, it's similar, has a land border, they (mostly) speak the same language, etc.
Cause only by ruling the people could you force them to wear a helmet.
Or, for instance, requiring them to have a license for a concealed firearm?
Or not allowing them to smoke in or near public buildings?
Or look at the provisions being made for 'Homeland Security' or whatever it's called now.
Being 'ruled' is a red herring. The governments of the UK, US and Australia are all (usually) democratically elected, and they make the laws.
BTW, when you go to court in the UK or in Australia you are prosecuted by the crown. You and I both know that is just a figure head, but what exactly does the figure head stand for?
The problem with the UK is that you are ruled. You're subject to the whim of the crown. Since the first parliament was convened in Australia we've introduced laws that have freed us from that rule.
This crops every now and then, and often in comparisons between US and UK as well. I'm starting to think that people outside the UK think that the monarchy actually rule. They don't. You know the Queen is just a figurehead, right? More of an ambassador than anything else, usually. She approves (signs) all laws (iirc), but if she decided not to approve a law she disagrees with...well, it's just not done or expected. There was a certain amount of unpleasantness a few hundred years ago that established this system.
So in reality - we are ruled in the UK, but by our government. Imagine that. Just like Australia, and just like the US. And a lot of other countries.
When people use phrases like 'whim of the crown', it makes me think they imagine the Queen sitting in Buckingham Palace, saying to Prince Philip "One thinks that one will make a law to stop people using their mobile phones in their car, that will be a laugh. Also, let's have the police pull that guy out there in the street in for questioning and beat him up. Yay me!"
Because, that really doesn't happen. If you tell most people in the UK that they are ruled by the Queen in any material way, they'll either laugh at you, or wonder where you get such funny ideas.
i still dont understand why Rockstar didnt implement some kind of multiplayer mode in Vice City.
Possibly because they realise (like a lot of people who develop games) that adding multiplayer isn't just a case of adding some network and client/server code (and testing it, of course).
Your game should be fun - as some people have pointed out, the mechanics of GTA mean it's not that fun in multiplayer - too many things people can do to be annoying, etc. Maybe they tried it out (the reason some of the code is in there, I guess) but found that it just wasn't fun without changing the gameplay mechanics of the game in some serious ways.
GTA probably(!) cost a lot to develop, and they didn't want to add on the cost of properly implementing multiplayer, changing game mechanics, and testing it all (it would be expensive to test).
Half-Life 2 is also a shitty text editor. But that's not what it was designed to do.
Oh good Lord, can you guys just quit it with the crap strawman arguments?
Eclipse is not a text editor. It's an IDE.
But it contains a text editor, surely?
Also, IDE = Integrated Development Environment. In other words, I shouldn't have to leave the IDE to do something simple like edit a text file while I'm developing. Maybe that's just me.
It's probably pertinent to note the Eclipse is the only IDE I've ever used that wouldn't let me load any old text file I liked.
Previous versions did not, I repeat, did not have this ability, and it was really, really annoying.
Indeed - I thought I'd made it obvious enough that it wasn't possible on the version I tried (and that googling confirmed this), but I guess I didn't make it obvious enough for drchrisharris.
I see your point, but you seem to be mistaking Eclipse for a general-purpose text editor.
Well, I was mistaking it for a programmer's editor actually - silly old me.
The idea that you can have an editor which allows you to code Java, etc but won't let you edit a simple text file is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
Most programmers I know will use the same text editor for everything they do, whether it's coding or creating/editing a simple config file, searching a log file for text, etc. After all, Use a Single Editor Well.
Forcing a programmer to use a different editor just because they're looking at something outside a rigidly defined project is just dumb.
You wouldn't use OpenOffice's word processor to write code, would you?
No, but frankly I don't see the relevance. Editing a simple text file is a subset of editing a source code file, not a completely different activity.
I tried Eclipse a while back - the first thing I do with any programming editor is of course to load a text file and try editing it.
So I try to open a random xml file on my hard disk, and, er...wait, hang on, you can't do that. You can only load a file if it's in your project (or view or solution or whatever word it is that Eclipse uses).
I researched a bit, and found some other people ranting about this, but the official line was you should add such files to your project if you want to edit them, it's the right thing to do, blah blah blah.
Call me stupid, but that kind of language lawyer prescriptive idiocy is what I try to avoid, so I went straight back to my bloated monolithic IDE that nevertheless let me load whatever the hell file I want.
I'm downloading the latest version now to see if it will let me execute a technological marvel such as loading a file I want to edit...we'll see.
(Although the last time I tried Eclipse it took me fecking ages to get a JVM set up that would even allow it to start up - "run anywhere", indeed...)
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Well Mr AC, I've read the 1,000 word "summary" version of it, yes. I've also skim-read some of the 10,000 word version. If you think I'm going to sit down with a notepad and refute each criticism point by point, then no, I'm not. That really would take the joy out if it all.
I do get it, actually. The language is in there - there are plenty of guide entries and pieces of dialogue that show this. It's just the reviewer thought it more important to point out what isn't there, which as I've said, is a fruitless endeavour.
Is it fruitless? Or bootless? I can never remember which. I think it's fruitless.
Well, people do like to see their heroes battling the passage of time, the juxtaposition of the modern with the historic and traditional, and setting right great wrongs that have occurred in the past, along with...oh come on, you can finish this joke yourselves...
Seeing the film for the second time, I was looking out for problems with the plot, but nothing really jumped out at me. The plot doesn't strike me as nonsense, at least no more the original plot of Hitchhiker did. A couple of things made me make a mental note, but these always seemed to be resolved later on in a way that was satisfactory. Where some things or events are left unsaid, you can fill in the blanks with something reasonable yourself without too much effort. I don't always expect a film to painstakingly explain everything that happens. If they'd done that, I really would have said that the film had been dumbed down.
My extremely peripheral involvement with the film really just meant that I was even more anxious about whether I would like the finished product or not. Seeing the film for the first time was really a great relief, as I realised that they hadn't screwed it up, not by a long way.
And as for my point that a bunch of people invited to a pre-screening (in one case largely consisting of distributors, critics, reviewers etc) laughed a lot seems like a valid point to me. My point is that, as Tycho would say, humans liked this film, and I'm pretty sure that's the species that will generally go to see this film.
As I said: Look at these people. They probably think they're having a good time!
(Disclaimer: I've been a hitchhiker fan for longer than I care to remember, and was lucky enough to work with Douglas for a few years at The Digital Village, and have been peripherally involved with some of the publicity material for the film, so you can deduce whatever bias you like from that.)
Today I saw the movie for the second time, and once again I find myself coming to the conclusion that I must have been shown a different movie to the one that MJ Simpson saw. Having twice been in a cinema full of people who were laughing all the way through at the movie (and these are British people, for crying out loud!), and then reading that the movie is "staggeringly unfunny" leaves me somewhat confused. Partly because I heard all those people laughing myself with my own ears, but mainly because I loved the film.
For any hitchhiker fan, there will be moments in the film that you feel are not what you expected, or that bits were left out that you wish weren't. This is inevitable, no matter how good the movie was. This is just a fact of life when adapting a book - you're never going to capture everyone's imaginings and commit them to film. It's just part of the compromise you go through when you adapt a verbal medium to a visual medium. Neither are you going to 'get everything in'.
For me, the clearest indication of this is Simpson's laundry list of stuff that isn't in the film, that presumably he feels should be. Suffice it to say that if all that stuff was in the film, I don't think it would be a film I would want to watch. Pointing out that the description of the Vogon ships hanging in the air "in exactly the same way that bricks don't" is not in the film shows a stunning lack of understanding of what makes a good film. I can find a lot of descriptive prose in the books that didn't make it into the film - and you can probably guess why.
I mean, how was that going to work? Was Arthur going to say something like "See that spaceship Ford? Have you noticed the way it hangs in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't?" I'm sure that would have been the beginnings of a cracking screenplay.
The simple fact is, which most people seem not to grasp, is that, yes, you could have put, e.g. the full conversation between Arthur and Mr Prosser into the movie, and it might only have taken an extra 30 seconds, but in, say, a 90 minute movie, you only have a limited number of 30 second chunks. If you remained faithful to every piece of dialogue in the source material, you'd over-run by at least an hour. At least.
Also included in that list is a load of stuff from the 2nd book, when the film makers have repeatedly stated that this film is based on the first book only (and not on all the books as some posters seem to believe). I mean, if it was based on all the books, how much stuff would they have to have left out then?
I've seen moans that the Guide entry on towels is not in the movie, how could it be left out, etc. conveniently forgetting that this entry didn't even appear in the first radio series. Also, if you think towels don't feature in the movie, think again.
As for the movie that I actually watched - as I said, I loved it. The acting was great - far from finding Arthur to be 'an annoying little prat', I thought Martin Freeman's portrayal was very funny and accurate. Even when Martin changes the 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays' line, it still sounds natural - so natural that I didn't even notice the change until the second screening. Sam Rockwell's performance as the unceasingly presidential Zaphod is a joy to watch. The Vogons and their unflinching bureaucracy is captured perfectly via some new jokes and situations that I'm certainly not going to spoil here - I recommend seeing the movie yourself.
The design and aesthetics of the Heart of Gold are nothing short of fantastic, in the face of which the natural fan's reaction to observe that the HOG doesn
You must have seen a different film to me. Ford has his towel and is using it all the way through the film.
I can't tell if you're deliberately misunderstanding or not. It doesn't matter how good their music store is, if iPod users can't play the music on their iPods, they're not going to buy the music. I'm assuming the music will be DRM'd, because, as you say, the RIAA won't let you sell it otherwise.
Again, you're not even answering the same question. "The RIAA won't let you sell un DRM'd music" is not, repeat not, the same statement as "The RIAA won't let Apple open up FairPlay so anyone can sell DRM'd music", which was my point.
Did you mean "You can't censure..."?
As for Real/Napster, how about anyone else who wants to run a music store that sells DRM'd music to play on as many audio devices as possible? Strawman arguments are not that convincing. Boo! Real suck! Therefore no-one should be allowed to use Fairplay to sell DRM music for iPods!
And where did we go from "We don't know exactly what's going on between Apple and the RIAA. It's very hard to say." to "the RIAA won't let people sell music that plays on an iPod", which seemed to happen in the course of your post?
So why don't they just make it an open standard and let anyone use it for running a music store?
The singular of anecdotes is not datum.
See, for most Mac users, clicking things is like Guru level 4 type stuff.
-runs away
You can't. It's an attempt by Rob (I assume) to thwart people inserting links that claim to, for example, support or refute a point in the discussion, when it's really just a link to goatse.cx or something else that you really don't want to see. Just makes it slightly harder to fool people.
Heh. At first glance, I read that as:
:-)
In particular:
How does that work? If you think of a passport as something you need to enter another country, then if you need to get into the US, then you are by definition coming from another country, so you would have taken your passport when entering that other country in the first place...so you'll still have your passport when you return to try to get into the US, right? Or are people leaving the US with their passports, and leaving their passports abroad when they come back?
As that's not likely :-), I assume it's really because American people don't generally think of Canada as 'another country' like they do with other countries? I mean, it's similar, has a land border, they (mostly) speak the same language, etc.
Or am I missing some other cultural effect?
Or, for instance, requiring them to have a license for a concealed firearm?
Or not allowing them to smoke in or near public buildings?
Or look at the provisions being made for 'Homeland Security' or whatever it's called now.
Being 'ruled' is a red herring. The governments of the UK, US and Australia are all (usually) democratically elected, and they make the laws.
The government?
This crops every now and then, and often in comparisons between US and UK as well. I'm starting to think that people outside the UK think that the monarchy actually rule. They don't. You know the Queen is just a figurehead, right? More of an ambassador than anything else, usually. She approves (signs) all laws (iirc), but if she decided not to approve a law she disagrees with...well, it's just not done or expected. There was a certain amount of unpleasantness a few hundred years ago that established this system.
So in reality - we are ruled in the UK, but by our government. Imagine that. Just like Australia, and just like the US. And a lot of other countries.
When people use phrases like 'whim of the crown', it makes me think they imagine the Queen sitting in Buckingham Palace, saying to Prince Philip "One thinks that one will make a law to stop people using their mobile phones in their car, that will be a laugh. Also, let's have the police pull that guy out there in the street in for questioning and beat him up. Yay me!"
Because, that really doesn't happen. If you tell most people in the UK that they are ruled by the Queen in any material way, they'll either laugh at you, or wonder where you get such funny ideas.
Ah, but do we respect them? :-)
Possibly because they realise (like a lot of people who develop games) that adding multiplayer isn't just a case of adding some network and client/server code (and testing it, of course).
Your game should be fun - as some people have pointed out, the mechanics of GTA mean it's not that fun in multiplayer - too many things people can do to be annoying, etc. Maybe they tried it out (the reason some of the code is in there, I guess) but found that it just wasn't fun without changing the gameplay mechanics of the game in some serious ways.
GTA probably(!) cost a lot to develop, and they didn't want to add on the cost of properly implementing multiplayer, changing game mechanics, and testing it all (it would be expensive to test).
It can now, yes.
Oh good Lord, can you guys just quit it with the crap strawman arguments?
But it contains a text editor, surely?
Also, IDE = Integrated Development Environment. In other words, I shouldn't have to leave the IDE to do something simple like edit a text file while I'm developing. Maybe that's just me.
It's probably pertinent to note the Eclipse is the only IDE I've ever used that wouldn't let me load any old text file I liked.
Indeed - I thought I'd made it obvious enough that it wasn't possible on the version I tried (and that googling confirmed this), but I guess I didn't make it obvious enough for drchrisharris.
Well, I was mistaking it for a programmer's editor actually - silly old me.
The idea that you can have an editor which allows you to code Java, etc but won't let you edit a simple text file is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
Most programmers I know will use the same text editor for everything they do, whether it's coding or creating/editing a simple config file, searching a log file for text, etc. After all, Use a Single Editor Well.
Forcing a programmer to use a different editor just because they're looking at something outside a rigidly defined project is just dumb.
No, but frankly I don't see the relevance. Editing a simple text file is a subset of editing a source code file, not a completely different activity.
I tried Eclipse a while back - the first thing I do with any programming editor is of course to load a text file and try editing it.
So I try to open a random xml file on my hard disk, and, er...wait, hang on, you can't do that. You can only load a file if it's in your project (or view or solution or whatever word it is that Eclipse uses).
I researched a bit, and found some other people ranting about this, but the official line was you should add such files to your project if you want to edit them, it's the right thing to do, blah blah blah.
Call me stupid, but that kind of language lawyer prescriptive idiocy is what I try to avoid, so I went straight back to my bloated monolithic IDE that nevertheless let me load whatever the hell file I want.
I'm downloading the latest version now to see if it will let me execute a technological marvel such as loading a file I want to edit...we'll see.
(Although the last time I tried Eclipse it took me fecking ages to get a JVM set up that would even allow it to start up - "run anywhere", indeed...)
Of course, if you were writing an article summary for /., then using the MEP abbreviation without explanation would be just fine, wouldn't it?
:-)
I mean, how long does it take to look this stuff up anyway?