Roderick

You know, if you're a snow hater.

Sexy Sax Man, fantastic

Can we please get back to gushing over Skyrim? Thank you. I played Oblivion yesterday and it started snowing. After a moment of supreme beauty and goosebumps (proving that games are art, Mr. Ebert!!), I noticed the snow moved along as I walked through the forest. It became so painfully clear there was just a particle generator slotted to my vector in the world, it made me chuckle. Apparently Skyrim has dynamic snow that falls and sticks to surfaces. It seems like an indulgent special effect, but for a game where the mountainous setting is so important to the experience, this can potentially be a huge thing.

It is an interesting difference though, the lack of looting. Whether that's due to Japanese culture differing from ours or a combination of socio-economic factors (New Orleans was/is full of poor, marginalized minorities, right?), that's not for me to say. But the difference is there.

I read a paultry 16 of that cloud. Dorian Gray came at the right time for me, I found it so deliciously dangerous when I read it four years ago, the sheer debauchery and twistedness of ideas really turned my gears. I don't really know what to say to change your mind, or if it's even necessary. You like what you like, and if you don't that's perfectly valid.

Ooh! Allow me to start a torrent on that. Sakamoto Ryoma is an interesting figure, I'm curious how this series will display him. I loved Shinsengumi's take on him, so it'll be interesting how much it will differ from that.

Wow, I loved that piece on the nuclear reactor. Highly informative, and it clearly illustrates how much BS there's going around about nuclear energy and its dangers.

When Marek BM Bronstring was namedropped, I half-expected him to make an appearance Otherwise, neat second part to the original 'nade Famous designed the Epic Mickey logo, how utterly insane!

Wholeheartedly! Luhrmann never topped Romeo + Juliet afterwards. Moulin Rouge is nice if a little self-indulgent, Australia I couldn't even be bothered to see through to the end. I'm looking forward to his next movie: The Great Gatsby. It's definitely up his alley. Anyway, back to R+J. See it, if only for the set design and cinematography, and stellar soundtrack.

Ugh, I hate irresponsible movie-goers. Conversely, I was at a Dutch children's movie a week ago and there was a little girl whose dad would occasionally explain quickly what had happened. I didn't mind at all, it was OK with this movie. But with Rango it would've been misplaced. Anyway, I watched Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet, as I do every few years, and this movie always destroys me. I don't know what it is, but the tragedy is so utterly gripping, the romance so true in all its theatricality, and the style of the movie so awe-inspiring. I love it, and can't bear to watch it, but must. -BVSj76rREI

What a bunch of ignorant assholes. Enough about them. I'm curious how events will continue to unfold in Japan. The second nuclear power plant was going postal this morning, but I'm not sure if anything happened to it in the meantime. This is a true test of all the preparation that a natural disaster-prone country like Japan has taken over the decades. Let's hope it pays off.

I've thought about this some more, pretty much against my own desire as this discussion is rather tiring. One of the things that bothers me is that Moriarty says choice is the enemy of art, but he backs this up pretty much only by saying that Schopenhauer said so. I can understand why you might find a philosophical concept like that interesting or appealing, but just because he wrote it doesn't mean it's true. It's presented as an axiom, 'interactivity is antithetical to art'. Again, he might consider it so, but there's no reason why it should be so. Why should a carefully designed palette of interactivity not be able to evoke the same deep thoughts as any good bit of art might? Experientially it is able to go far deeper. Interactivity is more dangerous and wild than passivity, but that doesn't mean it's inherently not capable of being art. The many interactive installations in musea all around the world readily attest to that. I stick to what I said, the apologists of Games Are Not Art use deliberately narrow and old definitions to exclude gaming. They become outraged when you question their logic, as Moriarty does when he scathingly writes that to search for new definitions of art is to 'dismiss the wisdom of the ages to flatter ourselves'. Not the words of a person who'll ever progress our thought himself. I bet Shopenhauer readily dismissed the wisdom of the ages! video games and Games in general are most deserving of reinterpretation, beacuase the wisdom of the ages has nothing to say about them. Because, you know, video games didn't exist back then.

Read the article, in the Forbin camp. He makes valid points, but there's still something iffy about it. I guess the whole 'games aren't art' camp is so desperately trying to find a way for games not to be art, that they're deliberately making unfair claims about it or digging into rather oldfashioned ideas about what a game is or should be. His view is decidedly pointed at the past, instead of the future.

NO WAY.

Considering this earthquake/tsunami is apparently bigger than the one in Haiti, 30 would be an incredibly low number. So either that's the difference between emergency planning in an advanced country versus a second/third world country, or the worst is yet to come.

I hope all's well with her family. Japan will be in chaos right now, what with the lack of internet/mobile connections. The odds are good, if they didn't live in the danger areas, that they're OK.

I read that a tsunami warning had been delivered beforehand to countries enveloping the Pacific. It's fair to assume people were advised to take precautions.

Sweet ********* pineal gland! That is fantastic news! I want to be a stranger in a strange land again, call me outlander, dammit :tup: On another note, I bought Oblivion GOTY secondhand for the Xbox 360, just to see how an Elder Scrolls would play on a console. So far, I'm loving the experience. There are a few downsides: less accuracy with pointing your bow and arrow, none of the advanced options (calling down the code menu or even things like playing around with physics objects and corpses) and less visual fidelity (though still impressive and beautiful). It is, however, an amazingly tactile experience, feeling much less cumbersome than on the PC. Racing around towns and dungeons is great. On top of that, the console version is super stable. In 24 hours of play it crashed only once: a far, far cry from PC versions of any Elder Scrolls game. This has given me at least the comfort that playing Skyrim on the console might not be a wholly foolish enterpise. I'll wait for some reports on how it plays first though: after all it took Bethesda the GOTY release to get the console version quite right. I hear the original release was slow, buggy and ugly. [EDIT] I can't believe "pine*apple" is still censored :'D

Horrific devastation in that live stream. You see whole towns floating on the waves of water. Was there any warning that this was happening? After the Indonesian tsunami I thought there was a big warning system placed. Because of the earthquake it might have been more unpredictable...

Waitaminute, all Brits are villains and schemers, right?

Didn't the actor state that he modelled his accent after a Serbian one?

Grenade x2 modifier!

The Star Trek thing works exactly because the humor is so low-brow. It contrasts with the super clean, asexual crew to ensure comedy.

Nothing in that article is good, it's all depressing, including the movie Del Toro will make in between waiting for news. 'Pacific Rim'? Ugh.

Looks infinity more fun than Dante's Inferno.