Frenetic Pony

Just watched it again, and I realized "You left my master to burn" and "You left me to burn!" are actually logically linked. The first guy that says that's boss is the second guy. So... it makes perfect sense. Also yeah Boromir has a shield. Apparently they aren't too popular. In the Extra-extended 5 hours editions there's like an hour of Aragorn just ribbing Boromir over it. "What'd you call it again, your invention. A uh, shed? Isn't that what the peasants store their tools and poo in?" Boromir "Ugh... shield, it's a shield ok? It's for, you know, protecting yourself. From swords and things?" Aragorn "More like pussy hider, you know, cause pussies hide behind it. Right guys?" *Legolas and Gimli begin laughing, soon even the hobbits join in as everyone points and laughs at Boromir.

Again though, no praise, from ANYONE. No one thinks this game is good. But there's this cognitive dissonance. "Well... maaaaybe." Like people want to think, physically need to think that somehow, some way it's going to be good. Show me one preview, one that's actually positive on the gameplay. I've yet to see any, checking Eurogamer and Polygon and RPS and Kotaku and... no one is impressed with this thing. Now ask yourself why you're suddenly defending it and interested in it? And look back at last year, at Battlefield 4 and Sim City and NBA 2k14 and... Marketers are getting to you man, they get to all of us. Shoving into our brains to spend $60 on a brand new title that's going to be crap because hey the graphics look pretty! or something. Well I want to lead a revolution against that. Time to stop paying for crap because it looks pretty, when you may not even be able to physically play the game you just bought after release because the devs felt more like releasing before christmas than releasing a working game. All I'm saying is, please wait for reviews. Reward good products rather than flashy advertising, we've had way too much of the latter for years now.

Try watching the above preview, they complain a lot but not even more than a few words about too much action. Mostly it's both way too linear and way too easy. Not too mention that the action itself is generally supposed be quite boring. This game has looked horrid in everything except visuals, in literally every manner you can imagine, in every preview I've seen of it. I don't think I've seen a single praisworthy assessment of it, the closest I've seen come is Polygon's latest which mostly praises that there weren't the game crashing bugs present the last time they played it. Please, please do not be suckered in by this awfulness in any way. They've gone through like 4 lead developers, and 5 years and don't have anything to show for it. Maybe if people stopped buying awful games as soon as they came out (cough, Sim City) then we'd get less awful games.

Really like the tone and visuals so far. Love how it looks, absolutely. But the tone is... it... ok I'm a huge fan of it. It reminds me of My Little Pony. Whimsical, more relatable than most stories yet with a fantastical setting, and a conflict that lacks and immediate urgency. Heck in Shay's story there little to no urgency at all. Unfortunately I'm only maybe an hour or forty minutes into Shay's story, and I already think I know what's going on. It feels too broadcast, though I hope I'm wrong. Vella's story on the other hand is really enjoyable, and I don't know where its going at all. Still don't like "Adventure game!" gameplay. I always get annoyed with solving riddles, if there's a puzzle give me clear cut rules, I'll take math and related over an adventure games more riddle like leaps of logic any day. But like Monkey Island 1 (I never beat 2) I think I'll enjoy this enough to get through it anyway. And for the most part the puzzles have at least some logic to them, and so mostly avoid the "rub two things together and hope they make fire" kind of solution. Though it still does happen ala

They didn't, at least the developers themselves didn't. Warner Bros owns both the Tolkien game licenses (books and movies) as well as Monolith. Some exec no doubt laid down the order for a new "Triple A LOTR" game at some point, and Monolith was chosen to pull it off. I'm actually glad they went with a more interesting concept of the game they actually wanted to do, rather than just the lazy route of "Skyrim in Middle Earth".

I thought they worked fantastically well in the movies, I'd consider LOTR and The Hobbit some of the best visual design in movies there's ever been. But yeah in games I think they lose something. E.G. here, all the facepaint (which isn't in the movies almost at all) brings in too much Insane Clown Possy.

The gameplay and ideas sound sorta awesome and really cool. It's too bad it doesn't feel very Tolkienish, because Tolkien nerds are already raging hard over that (Looking at you Zues, for shame). "Where's our copycat Skyrim set in Middle Earth" is a literal, and much starred, complaint I saw on Kotaku. Ugh, this is why you people are just customers and not actual game developers. I hope this does well despite all the nerd rage, because despite the fact that the LOTR movies are in my top 10 of all time and The Hobbit is tied for my favorite book ever, you know what I don't care! Gimme a cool, weird Assassin's Creed/Super power weilding/Open world RPG thing and I'll be excited about it. If they have to slap "LOTR" on it because their corporate overlords force them to, then so be it.

Well Fuck Brekon did work their for a while. But he's gone now.

Congrats on the pizza! Man that's awesome. Also the job I guess, but fast pizza just can't be beat man.

This regards the concept of market efficiency. People with a good want to charge as much as possible to sell it (wouldn't you?) and people buying want it for free (right?). Free of other distractions, such as assuming neither has a gun to the others head (either literal or proverbial), they'll meet in the middle. This should reach "pareto efficiency". Wherein neither party could gain more out of that deal without harming the other. Right away you can see where this is going, if you move from this, another party gaining more than they should, you move away from the maximum amount of "good" being done. Moving on to show why. Unfortunately affordable housing introduces a third factor, which is to say the government points the proverbial gun at the builders head, at some point at least on down the line of mayors and zoning and which builder want to do what, and says "build it". This has all kinds of effects, positive on those who get the housing initially, but negative on everyone else. Now the equation becomes unbalanced, someone, somewhere will get it. First, the housing developers wanted to build bigger, nicer houses. If they didn't after all then there wouldn't be a need to force "affordable housing". These bigger houses that would have gone on the land would have taken more people to build, being bigger and nicer. They would have needed better materials, benefiting the people selling those materials more, as better materials usually have better margins for the seller. But those houses aren't there, and now there are less nice houses for people that can afford them to choose from. Which means the developers can charge more than they would have for the remaining nicer houses, but not so much more that they'd make up for the amount they just lost by not building the nicer homes where the affordable ones went. The people buying these nice houses would also be charged more than they would have, leaving them less money to spend on other things. And there's a million knock on effects from there. E.G. Scenario 1: The nice homes are built, say for $250,000 apiece. This money goes to the construction workers, the materials, the zoning, the original land owner, the delivery of all these things to where they need to go, the electricity used, etc. Then sold for $275,000 apiece, the extra going to the realtor and company that "built" the homes and etc. Scenario 2: The affordable homes are built, say 2x times as many for the ease of math (condos verse houses, call them), but being not as nice they cost say, $120,000 apiece. Even at 2x more being builts, that's $10,000 less than per the original homes (2x 120,000 = 240,000). And, in this scenario, the housing may be charged less by government mandate. In scenario 1 the realtor and housing developer split $25,000 a house, maybe now there's no realtor that could have otherwise had a job, and the developer might get $5,000 a unit (and that's paying for the people that planned and co-ordinate the development and etc.) So what happened? Less money changes hands than it would have ordinarily. And money changing hands is where wealth and the whole economy actually comes from (obviously if people just hoarded all their money no one would do anything because no one would be paying for anything ). The world now has less "wealth" than it did, and through that less jobs than it did, and since domestic abuse is linked to poverty the government mandated to build affordable housing has now, indirectly and through a long chain of causality, probably caused more domestic abuse. Economics is weird and hard to decipher like that, or as Futurama put it "top vodoo economists". But it works well enough to the point where we can say affordable housing is probably actually bad on the whole. Here's the super long, 97 reference strong Wikipedia article on the matter that's probably weirdly edited and super dryly written as most wikipedia articles are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing but still backs up my claim.

No one that lives around here has ever been to Alcatraz, at least that's my hypothesis and has been true so far. I suspect no one that actually lives in New York has been to the Statue of Liberty. "It's funny you know, you live in the universe but you never do these things until someone comes around to visit."

Affordable housing also creates a deadweight loss in the economy by artificially lowering the price of housing, making what could have been more expensive housing cost less, giving less money to the developers, construction workers, and realtors that would have worked on that more expensive housing, thus creating less jobs that normal and probably causing more abuse which is linked to poverty as those hypothetical people now have less money to spend which would have created yet more jobs on down the line. Yay economics, yay the world being complicated! Or as SMBC put it:

By the way

But objectively those are there opinions, to them the game is objectively good or bad. Not much use I grant you when each person objectivity is subjective to their own self but there we are.

Nah, relative power isn't too hard. Upcoming SOCs like the Tegra k1 are already available for purchase for upcoming devices and already outclass a 360 or PS3 with a proximate 5 watt tdp, and that's at 28nm. A custom designed SOC on 20nm should be able to double the silicon involved (probably with lower clockspeed). Considering price for the CPU and GPU aren't going to be nearly as much of a factor as in a typical phone SOC it should be doable. Combined with a few gigs of lpDDR4 and 802.11ad, assuming the spec will be ready by then, out to a packed in HDMI adapter shouldn't be too hard. A hundred more or so than the usual phone, and you don't even have to have LTE or whatever for the lower end. Should help with battery life and price all considered. Of course Nintendo's hardware designers are, or at least for the Wii-U, idiots. They'd need to replace their entire staff, and actually have solid third party developer support with proper debuggers and a good online service and etc. So unless drastic changes behind the scenes have taken place its all of a pipe dream for Nintendo to pull something like that off. But someone could do it.

On the one hand I'm sad for Nintendo employees that their company is clearly mismanaged. On the other I'm happy for myself and my prediction that Nintendo was about to stab itself in the liver with the Wii-U, a prediction made publicly on a Gamasutra blog several weeks before the Wii-U even came out. If I could give my past self a high five I would. Now if they can just make a new portable, except with ultra modern high end components, you'd end up with a portable machine significantly more powerful than a 360/PS3. Add into the box a wireless HDMI stick to output the thing to your tv, and you get a portable triple A console. I'd estimate with a 20nm process, and DDR4 and etc. you could probably go 3-4x the respective CPU and GPU power, and sell it for $300-350. Kick ass! They're probably not smart enough to do so, but it's still a really cool concept.

Sure, but who cares about the second functionality? We've had the DS and 3DS and now the Wii U for almost a decade now, a decade! How many games have come out that make use of it, honestly? If there were great ideas for it someone would have done it, it's not like game developers are sitting there, with great ideas for two screens at once, but then not making them because they just don't feel like it; or are avoiding thinking about great ideas for two screens because they don't feel like it. It's just not that useful. If it had been people would regularly have 2 monitors instead of 1. Hey two screens! If two screen had been a neat idea it would have been copied to death already. The Xbone and PS4 and etc. would all have touchscreens in the center of their controllers and the Wii-U would be king of the world rather than slowly killing Nintendo. Just think about it, the video game industry is an incredibly competitive multi billion dollar industry full of really smart people, if two screens was so great wouldn't others have noticed by now, after almost a decade since its introduction?

Agreed, two screens is dumb, it was dumb on the DS and it's still dumb today. I can not move my eyes independently of each other to look in two different directions at once. Even if I could it would probably be unpleasant. Now, if there was a center touchpad with programmable buttons, that raised those buttons up via inflating a plastic substrate, that would be cool.

It's a different kind of exploitation, in a similar vein to what The Walking Dead season 1 and Game of Thrones pull. It's not traditional exploitation, but it goes far, FAR beyond getting the message across to the point of just browbeating you repeatedly with the gimmick it's found that gets an emotional response out of you. You already know that he's being treated horribly, and what his responses are too it. As long as you understand that the message is gotten through in the story. But then the scenes are repeated ad nauseum and gratuitously long, with McQueen behind the camera just shouting how much he wants to get into the audiences head with it. This is why I called it guilt trip porn. It's just as much exploitation as a Grindhouse film, but while those are for kicks, this is the same thing but for making you feel bad for a person, without actually advancing the story or characters anywhere. If several of the more brutal scenes were cut short and/or cut out, would the story have changed any? Not one bit from what I can see of it. But they aren't, you're just made to stare it to really dig in the horror of it all. Take a better done example, all Saving Private Ryan really needed was it's opening scene for being gratuitous, that was enough to get the horror of war across. They didn't need to go back to another scene like that, and didn't. But 12 Years a Slave has multiple, and extensive shots of such, even when the audience already understands it. It just reminds of The Walking Dead (game) or Game of Thrones killing off yet another character you like, just because it can and doesn't know what else to do. Or a book I quit, the Assassin's Apprentice. The entire first half is just the main character getting fucked up, time after time after time. it's gratuitous and worse monotonous at the same time.

Just because others did it: Top 5 movies of last year 5. American Hustle: Slick and fun and funny and engaging and... a bit too slick and smooth for real life. It's another scam movie that feels too slick for its own good, too commercialized, too conscientiously holding back to appeal to a broader audience. It could have been messier and wilder and more messed up, and maybe should have been. I'm still gonna watch it again though. 4. Iron Man 3: God damn it but Shane Black is funny. "Dad's leave, it happens, don't be a pussy about it." I hope the billion+ gross gets him any gig he wants, I'd love another rated R movie from him. 3. Gravity: Finally, a good video game movie. Because damn it but this could have been a video game practically shot for shot, yet it worked as a movie too. Just plain fun as a ride. 2. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. Oh my god this is funny. "Stop reading my mind!" Will Smith showing up in the entire god damned fight scene. Anything with Brick in it. "Brick you're not dead!" "Brick... no, no you're Brick. Brick you aren't dead because you are Brick!" It doesn't always work, but when it does it's one of the funniest comedies in years, or over a decade even. 1. The Wolf of Wallstreet. "Benny Hana? Benny fucking Hana?" If there's a movie that's going to be remembered for a long, long time from last year then Gravity might be one of them. Or maybe not. But The Wolf of Wallstreet definitely will be. It is an absolute, non step mess of debauchery and amusement and amazement. Where American Hustle pulls its punches as slickly as possible wherever possible this movie bites and kicks and shakes it for everything it can get. These are bad people, every one of them, and The Wolf of Wallstreet is going to send you along for the ride with all of them, in every gross and funny and ridiculous detail it can cram in. Honorable Mention: 12 Years a Slave: This is an award bait exploitation flick if there ever was one. "Slavery was terrible, and were going to spend over an hour of gratuitous shots reminding you of that. Don't you feel guilty about what happened to a bunch of people you were never involved with that lived a hundred+ years ago?" Maybe if it had gone in more for the actual story rather than guilt tripping torture porn I'd have enjoyed it more. But it didn't.

I feel like I feel, except when I don't.

Yep, they loved it. And like I said, it's only that rosy if you're pretty successful. Like if you're an A list guy that's your thing, seven figures upfront for each greenlit screenplay and seven figures (or more) for royalties if it's a success, and that's for working in a coffee shop or a five star hotel room anywhere in the world. Not that all your screenplays are going to make it necessarily. And those that do you'll probably have to deal with a director and/or producer wanting his stupid idea to be re-written in or this or that, or blah blah blah. And there are certainly, for each A lister like Bob Orci or (now) Aaron Sorkin, there's a dozen or more B guys grunting out contract re-writes for Jerry Bruckheimer or etc. Or even C guys working TV. Those A guys are a rare breed. But it's still a nice dream to have. Thanks!

Complete opposite. I thought the "game" portions of Brothers was a completely unnecessary distraction. I thought the story was lite and boring and can be summed up as A pair of brothers with a sick father go to get a magical mcguffin to cure him, one of them dies in doing so but the other makes it through and cures the father. And that's it, that's all she wrote. What characterization, if any, of any of the characters is so sparse and fleeting that I didn't care about either brother. Oh, ones a joker that's afraid of the water and the other is responsible. That's literally all you get. You don't even know if the dad is worth saving, or what their life was like, or... anything else. There's maybe some vague idea of environmental storytelling that's so perfunctory you can read anything into it that you want. "Oh it's mysterious!" is basically the same as it's not filled out at all. Gone Home at least had a story with actual characterization and progression. Since both are basically story games frankly I like the one where there was more to that story.

It's a YES! YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS YES YES YES YES YES YES! WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! For the past year, over a year, I've been trying to get people to look at my screenplay. It's awesome, I'm obsessed with movies, I've seen more than two new movies a months every year for years now, I've seen just about every movie on IMDB's top 250, yes all of them. And more than then some. I've been told by professional authors and other movie lovers that my script would make a great movie. And then I went to try to get people in Hollywood to look at it. I sent out letters, I sent out emails, I telephoned. Again and again and again. Every week I would read about how to sell my script, every week I would re-write how I was selling it, week after week. The most I ever achieved was a bit of unique wording in my curt and blank faced rejection. Finally, a few weeks ago, I just though "hey, I can't find any examples of successful query letters, but maybe I can find a synopsis (the main pitch of the query letter/email) that's been written by a pro." So lo and behold I found a synopsis, perfect style and length, written by Universal on IMDB about Fast Five. I copied the form, the grammar, etc. I waited a while to send it out, I mean it was Christmas/New Years right? So finally, this last week I did. Yes, send me the script to.... YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! I've tried harder on this than anything in my life, being a successful write in Hollywood is one of the best jobs in the world, you get paid more per hour to do less than any pro sports player out there, and you can do it from anywhere. Maybe, definitely, I'm still a ways away from that. But the first, actual, tangible step towards that in forever is just AWWWWWWWWWWWESOME! :tup: :tup:

Oh certainly give to charity, maybe. Or invest in a new robotics company, that may have a chance to actually be more helpful to people overall, but not if it folds of course, so there's your risk. I was just mentioning for the whole "basic income" idea. It's radical, it's new, it's not in the mainstream. It would probably take longer to pass than just having advanced AI. I'm not knocking a smart charity if that's what you want, just the timeline from going to Rodi's basic income for all compared to "well robots solved it all for us anyway."