Revenue from ticket sales may not be declining, but the actual number of tickets sold probably is--hence "ticket sales are on the decline."
Say you sell widgets at $2. Your first year, you sell 100 widgets. You raise your price to $3 the next year and sell 90. Revenue is up $70, but sales are down 10.
Given the amount of money we're talking about, though, I'd have to agree that whatever metric they're using, they're not hurting.
Here's an idea for a new source of revenue: spend less on movies. Change the way we measure star power ("the $20 million club"). It'll never happen, but it's a lot more attractive than the prospect of facing another price increase at the box office and more lousy $200 million movies.
Yeah, but that wasn't a microphone as such: it was there to detect whether there was thunder. The signal received was processed into an approximation of actual sound. Check out the Planetary Society's page on the acoustic sensor.
I'm talking more like a real mic, sending the actual sound. Even the sounds of the instruments moving and working would be neat.
I know that they'd rather use the weight for something with an actual scientific purpose, and I know that all it would transmit would be ssshhhsssshhhhhsssshhhh but it would be neat to hear what another planet sounds like. It wouldn't even have to record--just transmit a couple of minutes live.
The SPOJ project from Poland has a bunch of algorithmic problems to which you can submit answers which are verified automatically. For most of the problems, you can use pretty much any language, although some of the problems restrict you to one language.
Well...because I'm dumb, I guess. I say that honestly, too, not as a snarky reply. I guess I just assumed that because they called it "Virtual Earth" they were aiming for the same thing as GE.
And to betray even more ignorance...I, uh, didn't know about Google Maps.
You know, I wish I could take back that original post now, just because I hate being stupid. But whatever; I still do like Virtual Earth, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
Or rather, my wife will. She learned to type in the late 1970s on a manual typewriter, and she pounds the hell out of keyboards; she just never learned a lighter touch. It would be interesting to see how the OLEDs hold up to the punishment of several thousand words a day under her fingers.
Tablet PCs? I guess you could argue that the tablet is a commingling of the PC and the PDA and as such it's not really an innovation so much as an extension...but that might be locking the definition of "innovative" into too narrow a space.
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but the Tablet PC is really neat.
I'm Episcopalian myself; I probably erroneously conflated "evangelical" and "fundamentalist."
Anyway, I think we're kind of making the same point: Christians who play video games play video games regardless of what they're about. In a sense, it really doesn't make sense to even say "Christian gamer." It's like "Christian skateboarder" or something; religion doesn't really enter into it.
And you're right, well-done Christian-themed games would probably sell. I actually kind of liked my Noah's Ark/Zoo Tycoon idea. But...there's also no point: in your case, you've got Halo LAN parties, for crying out loud--who's going to give up Halo for "Ark Builder"?
Anyway, it seems to me that the people who are REALLY REALLY against it would try to ruin it for the rest of us, just because It's What They Do.
I'm assuming, as most of us seem to be (and as the interviewees do), that what they're really talking about is not a religious game, but a Christian game.
On the one hand, it is indeed easy: because so much of the Bible is inherently story-based, it's quite easy to come up with ideas for games. Noah alone provides a lot of gaming fodder, from a "Concentration"-type game where you pair up animals for saving on the Ark all the way to an Ark simulator where you have to lay out the pens for the animals and keep them fed, sort of like "Zoo Tycoon" in a very small space.
On the other hand, it is not at all easy. Designing a game that will appeal to Catholics and Protestants alike would have to be tricky. Also, and this is something that they touch on in TFA, you have the problem that evangelicals will condemn you to hell because a game by its nature will either glorify the individual over God, or will be outright blasphemy by making you play AS God. It's the same problem some Christians have with Christian rock: giving glory to the performer, rather than to God. Books and movies are okay for them because books and movies can directly praise God without too much emphasis on the writers and performers.
Then there's the whole issue of "thought equals deed" that a lot of fundamentalists and evangelicals espouse--the same idea that they use to condemn D&D and other paper-and-pen RPGs, the idea that if you conceive of it, you are just as morally responsible as if you have actually done it. It's philosophically bankrupt, and totally destroys any notion of free will, but there you have it.
I think that ultimately, the reason that there aren't a lot of Christian video games is that there's no need. The target audience doesn't buy video games, and non-evangelicals who do buy video games would buy mainstream games that don't actually suck.
About a decade ago, I worked for a midwestern school district. We went around doing general IT work ("everything but pulling cable through the walls") in the schools. Every so often, we'd need to put in Ethernet hubs, and we'd need to hook them together with coax cable.
We all carried a small supply of those little T-connectors and terminators. I chained some together and clipped them to my jacket. It made a nice little dangly. The "fashion" caught on.
One day, my boss called me into her office at the end of the day, laughing. She told me I'd have to stop wearing the connectors on my jacket, because she'd gotten a complaint from the high school that I was walking around...wait for it...with a CRACK PIPE dangling from my chest.
I also thought of Alison Bechdel and Claire Bretecher, although Bretecher is sort of more of a panel or single-page cartoonist rather than a comic-book author, and Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For" is a strip, not a book. So maybe they don't count.
Julie Doucet and Ariel Schrag come to mind immediately. Ariel Schrag is really good at capturing the angsty "oh-my-god-i-suck" feeling that high school gives a person. Her comics are really rough, but the stories are engaging.
Phoebe Gloeckner, of course. Tough to read sometimes because of the difficult subject matter, but her art is fantastic.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
Julie Barr, although TBH I'm not a big fan of "Desert Peach."
It would seem like the conference organizers agree with you. If you look at the conference schedule, there are a bunch of papers directly targeting the general relation between superheroes and mythmaking. There are also some titles that look as if they address the very questions you raise, like "Theseus Versus Hannibal Lecter: Heroic Quests Into The Labyrinth In Modern Cinema," "Conquerer of Flood, Wielder of Fire: Noah the Hebrew Superhero,"and "Antiquities as Superheroes: (Re)Presenting the Utopian Past in the Athens Olympics."
In general, though, whether earlier myths, legends and stories have any bearing kind of depends on what exactly you're examining. If you're doing a scholarly study on the metaphysical implications of "Crisis on Infininte Earths," then Dumas and Swift probably aren't going to help you too much.
I never had a problem with ME, and I had a machine jammed full of some crazy hardware and software. I ran it for about five years and the only time it crashed IIRC was because I did something to make it crash. Overall, I was happy with ME.
But I think I'm the only person in the world for whom that is true:D
Seriously, I totally agree with you--when Generations is on TV, I watch right up to "My God, was anybody in here?" and then find something else. A huge problem with post-TOS Trek (including the first six films) is that they don't understand the concept of sacrifice--Kirk died doing what he loved. What a perfect way for him to go out, saving the Enterprise.
(They should never have brought back Spock, either.)
It's really too bad that we can't dig up proof, because I remember this as well. There's got to be someone out there with a collection of newspaper articles about the original movie that can provide some sort of citation.
These things are destined to fade into history, sadly enough. I had an argument recently with a group of people who were willing to swear up and down that Star Wars was always called "A New Hope," when it clearly was not--as anyone who actually saw the movie in 1977 could tell you.
One other thing. I've seen theories that say that this was rushed out because the new expansion pack is coming out soon and they're expecting an influx of new players when Episode 3 hits theaters. They didn't want to have new players ltearn the "old" combat system only to have it replaced two weeks later with the "new" combat system.
I have experienced nothing that would give the lie to that theory.
Slashdot Mirror
They weren't in it 12 years ago.
Actually, they were. A/UX dates back at least that far. Further, I think. I remember first hearing about it in '89 or so.
Revenue from ticket sales may not be declining, but the actual number of tickets sold probably is--hence "ticket sales are on the decline."
Say you sell widgets at $2. Your first year, you sell 100 widgets. You raise your price to $3 the next year and sell 90. Revenue is up $70, but sales are down 10.
Given the amount of money we're talking about, though, I'd have to agree that whatever metric they're using, they're not hurting.
Here's an idea for a new source of revenue: spend less on movies. Change the way we measure star power ("the $20 million club"). It'll never happen, but it's a lot more attractive than the prospect of facing another price increase at the box office and more lousy $200 million movies.
I got my HP-11C in 1987. I still use it.
Yeah, but that wasn't a microphone as such: it was there to detect whether there was thunder. The signal received was processed into an approximation of actual sound. Check out the Planetary Society's page on the acoustic sensor.
I'm talking more like a real mic, sending the actual sound. Even the sounds of the instruments moving and working would be neat.
I know that they'd rather use the weight for something with an actual scientific purpose, and I know that all it would transmit would be ssshhhsssshhhhhsssshhhh but it would be neat to hear what another planet sounds like. It wouldn't even have to record--just transmit a couple of minutes live.
Have you tried Escape Velocity: Nova from Ambrosia Software? It's a pretty worthy successor, and moddable to boot.
The SPOJ project from Poland has a bunch of algorithmic problems to which you can submit answers which are verified automatically. For most of the problems, you can use pretty much any language, although some of the problems restrict you to one language.
Well...because I'm dumb, I guess. I say that honestly, too, not as a snarky reply. I guess I just assumed that because they called it "Virtual Earth" they were aiming for the same thing as GE.
And to betray even more ignorance...I, uh, didn't know about Google Maps.
You know, I wish I could take back that original post now, just because I hate being stupid. But whatever; I still do like Virtual Earth, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
Probably. But it seemed a lot less cluttered that Google Earth's when I tried it. *shrug* YMMV, I guess. And I still like the Road Map view.
The interface is better; it's a lot cleaner. The Road Map view is awesome! Whoever designed this put a lot of thought into it.
Because it's browser-based, it works on the Mac, too. Not a big market in this day and age, but I'm happy.
Or rather, my wife will. She learned to type in the late 1970s on a manual typewriter, and she pounds the hell out of keyboards; she just never learned a lighter touch. It would be interesting to see how the OLEDs hold up to the punishment of several thousand words a day under her fingers.
You mean, of course, another live-action He-Man movie.
Maaaaan was it terrible.
Tablet PCs? I guess you could argue that the tablet is a commingling of the PC and the PDA and as such it's not really an innovation so much as an extension...but that might be locking the definition of "innovative" into too narrow a space.
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but the Tablet PC is really neat.
I'm Episcopalian myself; I probably erroneously conflated "evangelical" and "fundamentalist."
Anyway, I think we're kind of making the same point: Christians who play video games play video games regardless of what they're about. In a sense, it really doesn't make sense to even say "Christian gamer." It's like "Christian skateboarder" or something; religion doesn't really enter into it.
And you're right, well-done Christian-themed games would probably sell. I actually kind of liked my Noah's Ark/Zoo Tycoon idea. But...there's also no point: in your case, you've got Halo LAN parties, for crying out loud--who's going to give up Halo for "Ark Builder"?
Anyway, it seems to me that the people who are REALLY REALLY against it would try to ruin it for the rest of us, just because It's What They Do.
I'm assuming, as most of us seem to be (and as the interviewees do), that what they're really talking about is not a religious game, but a Christian game.
On the one hand, it is indeed easy: because so much of the Bible is inherently story-based, it's quite easy to come up with ideas for games. Noah alone provides a lot of gaming fodder, from a "Concentration"-type game where you pair up animals for saving on the Ark all the way to an Ark simulator where you have to lay out the pens for the animals and keep them fed, sort of like "Zoo Tycoon" in a very small space.
On the other hand, it is not at all easy. Designing a game that will appeal to Catholics and Protestants alike would have to be tricky. Also, and this is something that they touch on in TFA, you have the problem that evangelicals will condemn you to hell because a game by its nature will either glorify the individual over God, or will be outright blasphemy by making you play AS God. It's the same problem some Christians have with Christian rock: giving glory to the performer, rather than to God. Books and movies are okay for them because books and movies can directly praise God without too much emphasis on the writers and performers.
Then there's the whole issue of "thought equals deed" that a lot of fundamentalists and evangelicals espouse--the same idea that they use to condemn D&D and other paper-and-pen RPGs, the idea that if you conceive of it, you are just as morally responsible as if you have actually done it. It's philosophically bankrupt, and totally destroys any notion of free will, but there you have it.
I think that ultimately, the reason that there aren't a lot of Christian video games is that there's no need. The target audience doesn't buy video games, and non-evangelicals who do buy video games would buy mainstream games that don't actually suck.
True story:
About a decade ago, I worked for a midwestern school district. We went around doing general IT work ("everything but pulling cable through the walls") in the schools. Every so often, we'd need to put in Ethernet hubs, and we'd need to hook them together with coax cable.
We all carried a small supply of those little T-connectors and terminators. I chained some together and clipped them to my jacket. It made a nice little dangly. The "fashion" caught on.
One day, my boss called me into her office at the end of the day, laughing. She told me I'd have to stop wearing the connectors on my jacket, because she'd gotten a complaint from the high school that I was walking around...wait for it...with a CRACK PIPE dangling from my chest.
Yeah, that annoyed me, too. It was worse in Parappa 2.
Not IBM, but Linux; according to the website, the SFX are "Linux-based."
Smells like free advertising to me, too.
I listed a bunch in a different reply.
I also thought of Alison Bechdel and Claire Bretecher, although Bretecher is sort of more of a panel or single-page cartoonist rather than a comic-book author, and Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For" is a strip, not a book. So maybe they don't count.
Julie Doucet and Ariel Schrag come to mind immediately. Ariel Schrag is really good at capturing the angsty "oh-my-god-i-suck" feeling that high school gives a person. Her comics are really rough, but the stories are engaging.
Phoebe Gloeckner, of course. Tough to read sometimes because of the difficult subject matter, but her art is fantastic.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
Julie Barr, although TBH I'm not a big fan of "Desert Peach."
That's what comes off the top of my head.
It would seem like the conference organizers agree with you. If you look at the conference schedule, there are a bunch of papers directly targeting the general relation between superheroes and mythmaking. There are also some titles that look as if they address the very questions you raise, like "Theseus Versus Hannibal Lecter: Heroic Quests Into The Labyrinth In Modern Cinema," "Conquerer of Flood, Wielder of Fire: Noah the Hebrew Superhero,"and "Antiquities as Superheroes: (Re)Presenting the Utopian Past in the Athens Olympics."
In general, though, whether earlier myths, legends and stories have any bearing kind of depends on what exactly you're examining. If you're doing a scholarly study on the metaphysical implications of "Crisis on Infininte Earths," then Dumas and Swift probably aren't going to help you too much.
I never had a problem with ME, and I had a machine jammed full of some crazy hardware and software. I ran it for about five years and the only time it crashed IIRC was because I did something to make it crash. Overall, I was happy with ME.
:D
But I think I'm the only person in the world for whom that is true
There's more movie after that?
Seriously, I totally agree with you--when Generations is on TV, I watch right up to "My God, was anybody in here?" and then find something else. A huge problem with post-TOS Trek (including the first six films) is that they don't understand the concept of sacrifice--Kirk died doing what he loved. What a perfect way for him to go out, saving the Enterprise.
(They should never have brought back Spock, either.)
It's really too bad that we can't dig up proof, because I remember this as well. There's got to be someone out there with a collection of newspaper articles about the original movie that can provide some sort of citation.
These things are destined to fade into history, sadly enough. I had an argument recently with a group of people who were willing to swear up and down that Star Wars was always called "A New Hope," when it clearly was not--as anyone who actually saw the movie in 1977 could tell you.
One other thing. I've seen theories that say that this was rushed out because the new expansion pack is coming out soon and they're expecting an influx of new players when Episode 3 hits theaters. They didn't want to have new players ltearn the "old" combat system only to have it replaced two weeks later with the "new" combat system.
I have experienced nothing that would give the lie to that theory.