vimes

So - just being curious here since I've got no intention of doing the following - would you allow a 4/5 people indie game dev team to move in and work fulltime from the workshop; instead of them having to rent some kind of office ?

It's really strange, I've got vivid memories of when 9/11 happened; but not a lot about the evolution of infos in the few months that followed. I was getting a haircut a few days before leaving my hometown and parents' house to live on my own in Grenoble, where I'd be studying Computer Science. I remember going out and noticing a few middle age women, picking through the windows of the 4th or 5th floor, and talking anxiously to their neighbor on the other side, in a very thick southern accent. I remember a guy asking from street level what it was all about, and they said their was a huge attack on New York. I also remember my first thought was : "Please, let it not be WWIII, after 3 years of boring studies, I'm just about to start doing something I expect to love and have a fresh start just like in movies" When I learned about Ben Laden's death, my first reaction was to think that it sucked that we live in world with no strong narrative causality. If it had, then Bin Laden would have been captured, brought to justice, sent to prison (preferably), his organization dismantled and in the process, we would have understood why terrorism happens and how to act to prevent it from ever happening. Instead, we get a sucky conclusion with no closure : we get a strike team with no tazer that could only shoot the guy dead, with no body to retrieve and silly conspiracy theories growing. Ben Laden's organization remains standing (probably with the same amount of money in the bank), its members being reinforced in the hatred of their enemy and, instead of focusing on the fact than the most terrifying part of the story is that Bin Laden, despited being an educated individual with money, still resorted to those terrible means, people have already started to turn him into a James Bond villain.

Back in 2007, Georgia Tech entered a partnership with Sony and IBM to create a cluster of Cell based machines; I talk to a guy in charge of the program and they kind of wanted to keep on extending it by using PS3 : same architecture with slightly less reliable components for a fraction of the price. That could have been possible because the PS3 could run Linux and thus could enter the cluster nearly seamlessly. I'm pretty sure their plan backfired around 2009 when Linux support was discontinued. Well, if you buy a book, despite being the book owner, you are not allowed to copy it, print it, sell it or even translate it... so ownership doesn't translate into yielding all rights to the customer. I'm pretty sure that if you get an accident in a car customized with parts not supported by the manufacturers, you can say goodbye to your insurance or guarantee. And if the parts are supported, it means they comply with a standard that the constructor uses to ensure their product integrity if it's modified. Standardization also means that third party products go through some quality (and process) check; producing those parts could even mean paying a a fee to appear under the standard umbrella - I know this is true for Bluetooth, I'm not sure about others. Car manufacturer might not loudly forbid weird use of your car, but they usually do not support it in anyway. If they had the same ways to check than Sony did, they would probably enforced it better. What I mean is that it is in Sony's right to define the boundaries of use of their product - it's not a essential product, so if you don't agree with those boundaries, you can still NOT buy it. It's completely normal for them to condemn illegal use of their technology and try to suppress those (in some case it's not very smart, but it's not wrong) What I find shitty and somewhat un-rightful is to remove support for a feature that was the sole reason a small but significant and legit amount of consumers (e.g. schools) bought a PS3 for.

Wow, that's a pretty awesome project! How many regulars do you have?

Maybe inspired by this? 0qWDPauV_p4

I heard this post in Alan Cumming's voice in Reefer Madness. 8P_qjLhtA74

Ah, well ... depending on how high your tolerance to shonen character and storyline stereotypes is, watching the first 16 episodes could makes sense. Mine is very low (I hate character screaming the name of whatever stuff they are doing) and starting the series in media res at episode 17 was a blessing : I went back to the earlier episode after going all the way to the end, and it turns out it was more interesting to guess what were the dynamic of the cast before the change of story arc (and lots of stuff are referenced) ; than to find out what they really were (i.e. big fat sterotypical shonen relationship). My opinion is that TTGL is worth seeing for some of the animation and from a meta perspective, to witness a genre being push to its limit in a decadent, don't-give-a-fuck kind of way ... the characters, writing, storyline or even universe are really nothing special at all.

I think FLCL and TTGL are very different kinds of anime : they both feature full limited animation and completely accept their own silliness, but FLCL is deeper, more complex and has a better and more interestingly structure as well direction (mise-en-scène, never know the proper world in english) than TTGL, which is basically a race for making the manliest, most ridiculous, most over the top giant robot anime ever. But then again, FLCL is my favorite anime and one my favorite movie thingy ever.... So perfect on all aspect. One thing that makes TTGL more interesting for those who haven't watched it yet, is to start at episode 17, ignoring the first half of the storyline; the void of explanation is making it much more interesting IMO. edit: two many 'and's

Just finished an evening of cooking : in 3 hours, I prepared an oversized pasta salad as well as from (left to right, top bottom) 6 small melty core chocolate cakes, 1 prune pie, 1 onion quiche, 1 ouiche lorraine and 1 normandy-style apple pie. I had to fight the erratic electric oven everystep of the way, and the result doesn't look perfect, but they look picturesque (or rustic) and I'm confident about the taste. If all goes to shit though, I'll pull out the foie gras and everything should be alright.

:tup::tup::tup: Thanks for sharing that Ossk!

About the ending

I watched History of Violence last night, and . Maybe the way Cronenberg has been directing his movies after Spider is not for me: I found both Eastern Promises and this movie very simplistic and shallow ; with every emotion being overplayed by the lighting, music, camera work, etc... and Howard Shore's orchestral score in this one is killing any sense of subtlety or minimalism the story seems to need. It's not a bad score, but it didn't feel like the right one for the movie. The thing that makes me uncomfortable is the acting : I found that every actor was mis/overacting and that was already the case Eastern Promises too (with the exception of Mortensen and Mueller-Stahl). The thing though is that both these movies involve some major characters taking on roles in their daily-lives; so maybe the fact that they are off most of the time is part of the design (there are a few scene in History of Violence in which Tom do seem more honest that others) ... I had a similar issue with this kind of approach to 'acting' characters in Chabrol's movies, but it seemed OK for some people. So, yeah, maybe I'm not getting it.

That makes me very curious.

I just finished the single-player and I like it quite a lot, but I'm surprised of how different it feels from Portal 1 : it's a much more story driven and story centric experience than the original which, from memory, was mainly driven by gameplay and puzzles... gladOS and the aperture universe just there to 'color' the experience. Portal 2 campaign feels a lot like the Half-Life Episodes, with gameplay sometimes taking the backseat for quite a while to leave room for lengthy set pieces, exposures to background stories or characters interaction. Those are expertly crafted (the writing and voice acting are brilliant, and the environment animation are stellar - still doesn't kick ID's though), but I'm a bit disappointed that it didn't investigate yet another type of narration. I don't know why, but it feels like the game is trying too hard to build a canon, complete, full and coherent universe; when, well, maybe part of the charm of the first one was that it wasn't trying to be encyclopedic about everything. I'm ambivalent about this, because Cave Johnson and 60s aperture science are really nice findings. Maybe may main gripe is that, like Bioshock and a few other recent games, it suffers from the its background story being just way more interesting that's what actually happening during the game : . Finally, somehow, I feel like there were a bazillion loading screens; most of which preloading could have get ridden of. Still, it's a very well rounded game very clever in its puzzles and design : the new ingredients are really nice and the associated puzzles are great - with about the perfect ramp-up of difficulty and complexity. And the sound design is about the most interesting one I've experienced in a loooooonnng time. I wanted to end on a positive note because it is a very good game on its own... but I can't shake the sad after-feeling that Portal just went from being this little quirky thing that was done with ingenuity to this institution whose weight makes it less graceful.

Yes, that's why I'm citing specific artists (I could also quote specific films and eras, because they're not consistent throughout their career; like James Baxter) for which I have lots of respect instead of qualifying the branch as a whole, forever.

What does the fact that Disney is 'such a large corporation' has anything to do with anything? It's big, so it's wrong to defend it ? By the way, I'm not the one making broad statement about a company with a century of history, dozens of CEO, surely a few hundreds of projects and several thousand employees; you seem to be. You read me wrong if you think I'm defending the corporation as a whole : I'm not, I'm defending the fact that it is false to state that their animation branch became successful because everybody involved was an opportunistic bastard... management and Walt Disney himself did go down that route several times - I'm pretty sure I know about the most rotten skeletons in their closets - but to bundle everybody together is too much of a shortcut. Complete and utter shit, then.

Don't you think you might be exaggerating just a bit ? There were - and still might be - shady businesses at Disney, but you can't say that Frank Thomas, Milt Kahl, Mary Blair or even more recently Glenn Kean leeched their way to success : they pioneered animation and 2D art in a big way throughout the 20th century and it's ignorant - or if you know, then it's a bit asshol-ish - to not at least recognize that.

I don't understand your wrath : it's like 20meg in your "windows/system" folder that allow several gigs worth of games to run on you PC...

Actually I'm a bit disappointed by the final "challenge" ; I was hoping for one final epic ARG - what with GladOS hijacking some ARG player steam accounts in the last hours of the countdown - a game that would unlock Portal 2 upon it being solved... Hurray for indie promotion and all, but farming potatoes and leaving Super Meat Boy on in idle is really an underwhelming and non-sequitur conclusion to this affair, in my opinion.

I don't really care if Portal is released early but I love the idea - if it turns out to be true - that Valve is challenging a few hundreds of their most hardcore fans to make it happen, and since these really care about earlier release; they'll try even harder than before. It makes me want to say "Reinforcement marketing never look so good" but if doesn't feel like marketing, more like a way Valve found to connect with their core audience - the educated/brainy gamers that clicked with the Portal humor - and reward them with free, sophisticated and entertaining content that has real-life impact. Also, coincidence or not, the valveARG wiki is now down.

By stacking them on top of each other ?

This is a lie! Seriously though, I found hiraganas and katakanas to be quite difficult - nowhere near Kanji's insane level, but still - and I'm really impressed that you managed to learn and remember them in 2 weeks when it took me about 2 months to be comfortable with reading and writing hiraganas. The good thing, though, is that grammar and syntax are way more accessible than, say, French or German ones ... Actually, I started learning Japanese last year, but gave up on the course a month ago - nobody was taking it seriously and we made no progress for about 4 weeks - but I kind of regret it : learning on my own and without conversations is very hard and all sorts of boring.

First thing I checked was Vanaman's tale of FarCry2 and it's even better with moving pictures ... Also, the poster was pretty neat! Thanks Jake.

I'm not willing to help, but I thought I'd criticize the Ozzk's example nonetheless : to me, those 2 sites are very confusing and thus not to be followed : everything seems to be clickable but only some items are and on instagalleryapp the four buttons at the bottom don't do anything when you click on them... also, golive uses 5 different fonts, a bright yellow background and I can't even tell what it's about after looking at it for 2 minutes. So, your camping website could be a little less template-y; but those seem to go completely overboard imo.

I'm a bit confused by the reviews and feedback i'm seeing : I liked Crysis because Icould choose how to approach a problem, when to retreat, replan and that, even in Delta, I always saw a chance to un-fuck up situations provided I was smart and concentrated enough... do Crysis 2 emulates any of this ?