... the fact that Avatar has a pretty standard plot, but pretty much any plot, no matter how original, can be written up in a similarly snarky way, and seem stale and uninteresting.
Yeah, I was being sarcastic. But, that doesn't preclude me from being a jerk.;)
If you are being sarcastic, you should know that there is very little actual science in child rearing practices. The science involved is much like the science involved in fad diets, they latch onto a small correlation, and turn it into a huge theory, with no actual empirical data or theory to back it up.
'Tis true, but some of it is science and medicine, even if it's "bad" science or "bad" medicine. And of course, bad science and bad medicine are significant problems; I just find it funny when people think they know better than the doctor or the scientist whether or not their work is bad.
What the fuck, dude?... It's almost as if you feel personally insulted by what I wrote
I get personally insulted by human stupidity when wrapped in elitism (each in isolation I have much less trouble with). Other people have to live in this species too y'know.
Specifically, it's the direct accusation that hollywood does little except degrade art. Hollywood does no such thing. It just creates a not-so-artsy form of art: entertainment. And many people like it (hence it's being "mainstream").
It pains me now to have to provide the obligatory disclaimer, that I have seen but one or two movies (cinema or rented) in the past six to twelve months, especially since it has nothing to do with my argument, but it is true. I'm not a fan of hollywood. That doesn't mean their contributions to our culture aren't valuable.
My mud slinging wasn't vague.
OK then. Which studios are you referring to? Have you seen all or most of their movies? What specifically in them do you object to?
Your knee-jerk defense of Hollywood
Yeah. As opposed to your cookie-cutter, slashdot-groupthink-generated attack on hollywood.
There was nothing knee-jerk about it. I read your post, I thought about it, and I came to the conclusion that you jumped to the same conclusion that so many before you had jumped to.
Yeah. Fucking doctors and scientists brainwashing parents and kids. If they just thought for themselves, I'm sure they could figure out what's happening to their kids better than some overweight ivory tower intellectual with a piece of paper saying he's better than me, and that he gets to call me stupid in front of all my friends, and make that totally cute girl laugh at me. Jerk.
Sort of. Granted, an update of the SuperFootbal franchise is incredibly cheap, and makes for a relatively quick buck, but of course, the market for these games are not nearly strong enough to sustain a comapany; sooner or later they're going to have to branch out.
And the sports games are by far the easiest franchises to update; everything else usually requires some radically new element, be it a new setting (with new cutscenes, new voice acting, new levels/environments, etc) or new gameplay. Essentially, a company needs to spend big money to update some of their bigger franchises.
How about saving a million instead, or even just $200,000, for developers to work on pet projects. Who knows, it's possible that you may get a hit, or even a hit franchise. It seems like a reasonably sweet deal; $200,000 is chump change for them.
Allowing developers to have some creative freedom also has its advantages. It's an incentive to come to the company, to stay at the company, and to complete work on time.
Anyway, I think if handled well, it could be a boon to these companies.
Wow. I guess it only takes a few comic book movies to send you guys foaming at the mouth, huh?
What exactly do you find so offensive about hollywood? Is it because they produce so many mainstream movies? Or is it because you have some desperate wish for everybody to like what you like?
You know, if indie films (or books, music, video games, etc) are to be taken seriously, they need to promote themselves for their strengths, not just by some vague mud-slinging at Big Media.
Which is why original gameplay tends to come from small games without masses of fancy (read: expensive) CGI.
I'm not sure if it explains anything. If a small group of people can make a small game in a relatively small amount of time, with a small marketing/distribution budget, then why can't a big company do the same thing with a tiny fraction of their budget/workforce/time?
World of Goo wasn't that good. Sure I enjoyed it, a lot, but I enjoy many games as well.
For example, I just finished New Super Mario Bros Wii the other day, and I had a blast pretty much all the way through, especially during the multiplayer.
I also enjoyed GTA Vice City (I haven't tried 4 yet). A lot. That was pretty fun.
Let's see... Hm... There was EA's Boom Blox for Wii. I really enjoyed that, and the gameplay felt pretty fresh, as much so as world of goo.
Also for Wii, I'm currently enjoying Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer. The tactical point-and-click gameplay feels really good, and makes the actual fun part of virtual soccer, the movement puzzle, as accessible and natural as possible.
So yeah, I think big budgets don't exclude fun. The worst they can do is extend the possibilities (even though they often don't from a gameplay perspective).
In fact, with budgets like this, innovation is dangerous. Better stick to what's been proven to sell.
Yes. Those evil big software companies never mix innovation with big budgets. Yet again, we rely on the indie developers to pour $18-28 million on average into innovative and original games.
-1 even stupider moderators. I didn't even know you could pack so much/. groupthink, and so many straw men and fallacies into four lines. Allow me respond in kind:
Ya I know. We can create anything we want out of pure artistic passion.
Since the creation of copyright, there hasn't been a single piece of art that would have been created without copyright. It is unfortunate that we discovered these laws, because otherwise, we would be living in a utopia of art, where works just grow on trees, and artists slave away for no money with a smile on their faces and a spring in their step.
And the quality is so much better out of copyright. Every year, we will have only artworks that will rank among the best few artworks of the previous 500 years.
These laws not only stop us from feeling morally superior while stuffing our little harddrives with the sweat of other people's brows, but they also lower the quality of artistic output... somehow. I'm still trying to think of a reasonable argument why.
I swear, every time I read a copyright discussion on slashdot, I feel my respect for the human race slide just a little.
I read that into it as well, but I think that it's not so much the article or summary, rather just a sensitivity to the vast quantities of anti-green propaganda already out there.
The unintended consequences of the green technology were also identified as a 'contributing factor' in the death of an Illinois woman
This was the sentence in particular that raised red flags, but I can't think of a rational in context reason for why. The fact is that green technology has unintended consequences, and this is probably the most tactful way of putting it. The summary writer could have quite easily replaced "unintended" with "negative", without losing much NPOV.
I think it's important not to dismiss these articles as propaganda, even when they are slightly biased.
Clearly someone in the states didn't believe that selling copyrights was unconstitutional, because in case you haven't heard, it's been fairly standard practice for years now.;-)
Is there even a clause in copyright law about transferring copyrights? It might just be a contract clause (relying on implicitly accepted properties of property) that was successfully tested in court, and not actually codified explicitly in the copyright acts.
Also, I'd like to point out that I'm from a country unencumbered by such facets of the US constitution, and I'd feel pretty pissed off if copyright law (or any other law) in every other country was dictated by your rules.
Why? Why can't someone act on someone else's behalf? I mean, if we can sign away power of attorney, why can't we sign away renewal privileges to other people?
And how does it apply to artists who sell their copyrights? What if they sell to a company? Who is burdened with the responsibility of personally renewing copyrights?
Also they could require the work to actually be available for purchase during the previous year, or else you can not renew it. This would stop the Disney-ish practice of copyright holders removing their their copyrighted works from the market to generate a artificial demand later on for their product.
In what way is the demand artificial? By starving themselves of sales over a period of years, all they do is allow the demand to accumulate. If a product has generally weak demand, it can be a way of minimising the (significant) overhead of catering for a weak market. By showing a little patience, they can make use of the natural demand for the product over a much shorter time frame.
Then again Simon Cowell wants to "X-Factor" politics... This mentality scares the crap out of me!
Look, regardless of the producer behind it, regardless of the actual content of the show, anything that puts debate on prime time TV is a win in my books. Score two for debating relevant contemporary issues, but we'll have to wait and see on that count.
I switched back from adblock (not from firefox). I felt too guilty. It seemed that the least I could do while using someone's page is allow their ads on screen (even if I don't look at them).
That is precisely the problem -- we've never really had a viable option to test that.
We've had the free market. Subscription-based models haven't traditionally done as well as ad-based models. People are happier being annoyed by ads than they are making a bunch of monthly payments to all the sites they use.
Maybe so, but would you pay for a search engine, for a news site, for web comics, for blogs, for youtube, for all those sites from which you look up random pieces of information?
Let's face it: the web is better with a free option.
Slashdot Mirror
... the fact that Avatar has a pretty standard plot, but pretty much any plot, no matter how original, can be written up in a similarly snarky way, and seem stale and uninteresting.
Yeah, I was being sarcastic. But, that doesn't preclude me from being a jerk. ;)
'Tis true, but some of it is science and medicine, even if it's "bad" science or "bad" medicine. And of course, bad science and bad medicine are significant problems; I just find it funny when people think they know better than the doctor or the scientist whether or not their work is bad.
I get personally insulted by human stupidity when wrapped in elitism (each in isolation I have much less trouble with). Other people have to live in this species too y'know.
Specifically, it's the direct accusation that hollywood does little except degrade art. Hollywood does no such thing. It just creates a not-so-artsy form of art: entertainment. And many people like it (hence it's being "mainstream").
It pains me now to have to provide the obligatory disclaimer, that I have seen but one or two movies (cinema or rented) in the past six to twelve months, especially since it has nothing to do with my argument, but it is true. I'm not a fan of hollywood. That doesn't mean their contributions to our culture aren't valuable.
OK then. Which studios are you referring to? Have you seen all or most of their movies? What specifically in them do you object to?
Yeah. As opposed to your cookie-cutter, slashdot-groupthink-generated attack on hollywood.
There was nothing knee-jerk about it. I read your post, I thought about it, and I came to the conclusion that you jumped to the same conclusion that so many before you had jumped to.
Don't stop! I can picture it now...
Yeah. Fucking doctors and scientists brainwashing parents and kids. If they just thought for themselves, I'm sure they could figure out what's happening to their kids better than some overweight ivory tower intellectual with a piece of paper saying he's better than me, and that he gets to call me stupid in front of all my friends, and make that totally cute girl laugh at me. Jerk.
Sort of. Granted, an update of the SuperFootbal franchise is incredibly cheap, and makes for a relatively quick buck, but of course, the market for these games are not nearly strong enough to sustain a comapany; sooner or later they're going to have to branch out.
And the sports games are by far the easiest franchises to update; everything else usually requires some radically new element, be it a new setting (with new cutscenes, new voice acting, new levels/environments, etc) or new gameplay. Essentially, a company needs to spend big money to update some of their bigger franchises.
How about saving a million instead, or even just $200,000, for developers to work on pet projects. Who knows, it's possible that you may get a hit, or even a hit franchise. It seems like a reasonably sweet deal; $200,000 is chump change for them.
Allowing developers to have some creative freedom also has its advantages. It's an incentive to come to the company, to stay at the company, and to complete work on time.
Anyway, I think if handled well, it could be a boon to these companies.
Wow. I guess it only takes a few comic book movies to send you guys foaming at the mouth, huh?
What exactly do you find so offensive about hollywood? Is it because they produce so many mainstream movies? Or is it because you have some desperate wish for everybody to like what you like?
You know, if indie films (or books, music, video games, etc) are to be taken seriously, they need to promote themselves for their strengths, not just by some vague mud-slinging at Big Media.
I'm not sure if it explains anything. If a small group of people can make a small game in a relatively small amount of time, with a small marketing/distribution budget, then why can't a big company do the same thing with a tiny fraction of their budget/workforce/time?
World of Goo wasn't that good. Sure I enjoyed it, a lot, but I enjoy many games as well.
For example, I just finished New Super Mario Bros Wii the other day, and I had a blast pretty much all the way through, especially during the multiplayer.
I also enjoyed GTA Vice City (I haven't tried 4 yet). A lot. That was pretty fun.
Let's see... Hm... There was EA's Boom Blox for Wii. I really enjoyed that, and the gameplay felt pretty fresh, as much so as world of goo.
Also for Wii, I'm currently enjoying Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer. The tactical point-and-click gameplay feels really good, and makes the actual fun part of virtual soccer, the movement puzzle, as accessible and natural as possible.
So yeah, I think big budgets don't exclude fun. The worst they can do is extend the possibilities (even though they often don't from a gameplay perspective).
Yes. Those evil big software companies never mix innovation with big budgets. Yet again, we rely on the indie developers to pour $18-28 million on average into innovative and original games.
It seemed plausible when I read it...
-1 even stupider moderators. I didn't even know you could pack so much /. groupthink, and so many straw men and fallacies into four lines. Allow me respond in kind:
Ya I know. We can create anything we want out of pure artistic passion.
Since the creation of copyright, there hasn't been a single piece of art that would have been created without copyright. It is unfortunate that we discovered these laws, because otherwise, we would be living in a utopia of art, where works just grow on trees, and artists slave away for no money with a smile on their faces and a spring in their step.
And the quality is so much better out of copyright. Every year, we will have only artworks that will rank among the best few artworks of the previous 500 years.
These laws not only stop us from feeling morally superior while stuffing our little harddrives with the sweat of other people's brows, but they also lower the quality of artistic output... somehow. I'm still trying to think of a reasonable argument why.
I swear, every time I read a copyright discussion on slashdot, I feel my respect for the human race slide just a little.
I read that into it as well, but I think that it's not so much the article or summary, rather just a sensitivity to the vast quantities of anti-green propaganda already out there.
This was the sentence in particular that raised red flags, but I can't think of a rational in context reason for why. The fact is that green technology has unintended consequences, and this is probably the most tactful way of putting it. The summary writer could have quite easily replaced "unintended" with "negative", without losing much NPOV.
I think it's important not to dismiss these articles as propaganda, even when they are slightly biased.
Ah. Good for you!
Clearly someone in the states didn't believe that selling copyrights was unconstitutional, because in case you haven't heard, it's been fairly standard practice for years now. ;-)
Is there even a clause in copyright law about transferring copyrights? It might just be a contract clause (relying on implicitly accepted properties of property) that was successfully tested in court, and not actually codified explicitly in the copyright acts.
Also, I'd like to point out that I'm from a country unencumbered by such facets of the US constitution, and I'd feel pretty pissed off if copyright law (or any other law) in every other country was dictated by your rules.
Why? Why can't someone act on someone else's behalf? I mean, if we can sign away power of attorney, why can't we sign away renewal privileges to other people?
And how does it apply to artists who sell their copyrights? What if they sell to a company? Who is burdened with the responsibility of personally renewing copyrights?
In what way is the demand artificial? By starving themselves of sales over a period of years, all they do is allow the demand to accumulate. If a product has generally weak demand, it can be a way of minimising the (significant) overhead of catering for a weak market. By showing a little patience, they can make use of the natural demand for the product over a much shorter time frame.
No, but I would avoid any device that would silently and automatically block TV ads as well.
Why do you think they listen to the radio 25000 times a day? Because they like it!
Look, regardless of the producer behind it, regardless of the actual content of the show, anything that puts debate on prime time TV is a win in my books. Score two for debating relevant contemporary issues, but we'll have to wait and see on that count.
Now, if only we can transfer this enthusiasm to politics...
Well, of course, early Christians would have faced a choice of whether to profit from bible sales, or to increase distribution by allowing sharing.
How? Does Christianity somehow rely on the distribution of other people's works without their consent?
I think he meant "rocket-propelled grenade".
I switched back from adblock (not from firefox). I felt too guilty. It seemed that the least I could do while using someone's page is allow their ads on screen (even if I don't look at them).
We've had the free market. Subscription-based models haven't traditionally done as well as ad-based models. People are happier being annoyed by ads than they are making a bunch of monthly payments to all the sites they use.
Maybe so, but would you pay for a search engine, for a news site, for web comics, for blogs, for youtube, for all those sites from which you look up random pieces of information?
Let's face it: the web is better with a free option.