Gormongous

Ooh! I can answer this, courtesy of The Information by James Gleick, which I just finished reading last week. Maxwell's Demon illustrates the role of probability in enforcing the laws of thermodynamics. A hypothetical being, the titular demon, could operate a valve between two chambers to sort a gas into its hot and cold elements, with no energy being exerted on the gas itself. In short, strictly speaking, there's nothing keeping a bucketful of water from reassembling itself from the ocean it has been poured into. It's just improbable to the extreme, the likelihood of a flung piece of chalk writing a line of Shakespeare on the wall it hits, to paraphrase Alan Turing. That's what Maxwell's Demon represents, the improbability (but fundamental possibility) of certain outcomes in physics. Now I just need to read The Crying of Lot 49 to know the context it's used in.

The scary thing, he's saying that about Tokyo a year before the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack. Still, Ebert's right to call it an "unoriginal question". As if one could reform the makers of violent films by suggesting their actions have dire consequences...

Yeah, every time I stay in one, it's hard to convince myself that I can't smell the stench of shit and puke under that oppressive disinfectant hospitals all use.

I'm playing through the first Crysis right now, having passed over it when it came out so many years ago, and it along with Far Cry 3 have taught me to love the gunplay model for Far Cry 2 all over again, even though all three games are theoretically from the same lineage. Whether I'm calmly sniping a guy from a distance or frantically shredding him up close, Far Cry 2 impresses with the ease of its lethality. Crysis especially has embarrassing moments where both parties unload full clips at each other to no effect.

Great cast, guys. Good to hear Nick again and glad to see a little levity leaking in for this book, at least. Regarding the car symbolism, this might be an over-historicization, but cars had only been available since the turn of the century, almost as long as Fitzgerald had been alive. Nowadays, with the car a ubiquitous object for all, we of course think of the wheels coming off as an obvious metaphor. For a society that had only known the automobile for two decades and was still very fresh in the public consciousness, I wonder what the effect would have been.

Yeah, I kinda loved the music. I don't know what's wrong with me.

Back when we all used CRT monitors with variable refresh rates, I used to get really bad headaches from flicker on frequencies below 60 Hz, despite being told over and over that my eyes and brain couldn't perceive the difference. I really do believe that there could be an uncanny valley effect going on with 48 fps: it doesn't have the same distancing effect of traditional film framerates, but it's still readily distinguishable from real life.

My first instinct was to "like" this, because it is me. Too goddamn much internet...

Aww, I'm so glad it's the song from the original Django movies. Anyone seen any of those? The weirdest/best for me is probably Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! (rearrange punctuation to taste). It's no Keoma in terms of impenetrable eccentricity, but it's up there, for sure.

Cart Life worked best for me by making me paranoid that I was in a failure spiral and just unable to recognize it. It hit a bit too close to home, even then. I didn't play the story through, but I got the picture.

Be careful, many Dell PCs have a nonstandard case length and width that graphics cards won't fit in.

Many of us are passionate enough about strategy games to hold board game nights. We may even own a few games that are lucky enough to be played regularly. This is not the thread for those. Here we talk about the games that we love but will never convince anyone to play. Talk about your failure to convince friends or just spin a fantasy of the play session that will never be, whatever gets the vicarious juices flowing. I have two to start us off: 1) Britannia - this was the first hobbyist board game I bought, back in my early college years. I was just figuring out that my passion was for history, which the purchase of this helped spur. I had one awesome game that flamed out halfway through, during the Saxon invasion, and it has sat on a shelf ever since. I think the idea of different players controlling multiple factions as they move into and out of the British Isles may be the perfect way to alleviate snowballing and general "dudes on a map" ennui, while special mechanics and objectives for each faction give a great sense of acting out history without being deterministic. Sadly, the initial failure to finish has become notorious and my group is hooked on Dixit now, so unless I tempt three other people from my grad program it'll never happen. 2) Imperial 2030 - I actually was given this six months ago, so it's not quite a lost cause. Still, people look at it and see "future Risk", which is a definite disadvantage in a group that has already burned out on Risk: Legacy. Much like the advantages with Britannia, I found in a brief demo session with a couple friends that the stockholding mechanic allows for players who dislike confrontation to profit from the conflict of others while disincentivizing attempts to turn the tables or dogpile on the weakest. The little wooden battleships and tanks among the components aren't going to convince anyone of that assessment without a lot of pressure, though. But hey, it'll keep.

This isn't published in the States yet, I don't think, but Boys on the Run is nothing short of amazing. Not epic like some of the manga previously mentioned in this thread, but so very real on its own merits. I'm also reading Berserk, which is good seinen fun, but I'm beginning to suspect a George R.R. Martin scenario from the artist, Miura. It's almost unimaginable that he'll finish the massive story he's got planned before he kicks it.

Nausicaä and Akira stand out to me as two manga that belong as hardbound books on your shelf alongside other novels. Both are so beautiful and otherworldly, I can't imagine a more proper place.

You're being a little shrill, TP. I mean, it's okay for people to disagree. I think that provides better conversation than everyone agreeing on everything, even if it is more "negative" in tone.

My official position is that of guarded optimism, but I can't help feeling it's a mistake to adapt two works the same way just because they're written by the same author. The Hobbit is not an epic. Bolting on a bunch from Tolkien's appendices and practicing inclusive editing won't change that. It just feels like a misunderstanding of Tolkien's story, which is weird to say because I felt like Jackson knew exactly what was important to the Lord of the Rings movies and how to best showcase them.

Maybe not in the themes, but Fitzgerald has a clear and careful style of writing that I think will continue to be recognized as great until the English language changes sufficiently to obscure that, like it did with certain Victorian authors.

Yeah, the Halo 4 story seems bogged down by the two fallacies about what makes good game writing: tons of lore and shocking twists/reveals. If it were, say, a more economical story just about trying to stop the war with the Covenant from being reignited, it would probably read much better to audiences.

Yeah, I was impressed how well "The Dish" fit in with the regular podcast crew.

I own the Dune Encyclopedia, now out of print courtesy of the son Brian Herbert, and I think of it as one of the few good "lore" companions. It's written in-universe as a compiled encyclopedia presented to the God-Emperor, and every entry is basically a small short story that hints more than it gives away. Lore really shouldn't be about answering questions. For that matter, fiction is at its worst when answering questions.

Yeah, I guess I'm just irked that they got rid of the nice GUI for doing so. Port forwarding and everything! It really is like ten years never passed.

Can I ask what happened with Ageod and Paradox? It seems like just yesterday they were teaming up and everyone was talking about what a natural pairing they made. Was it just a matter of too much catalog overlap?

So I bought this, but I'm mostly interested in just playing with a couple friends against a bunch of bots. There doesn't seem to be any way to set up a private, self-hosted, custom server without entering a dozen console commands in the correct order and then hoping your friends can connect. Is there something I'm missing here? CS: Source wasn't exactly powerful in terms of game customization, but it's miles away from this.

I honestly have more of a problem with the police officer being a stern butch Latina named Vasquez. Maybe someone will ask her if she's ever been mistaken for a man.