From a discussion on cheap body disposal on Ask Metafilter: “My uncle was left to science. When science was finished, they returned him to my cousins, who were really quite surprised.”
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From a discussion on cheap body disposal on Ask Metafilter: “My uncle was left to science. When science was finished, they returned him to my cousins, who were really quite surprised.”
“A woman upset that she bought the video game ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ for her 14-year-old grandson without knowing it contained hidden, sexually explicit scenes sued the manufacturer Wednesday on behalf of consumers nationwide.”
On behalf of consumers? Speak for yourself. I’d like to file a countersuit against this woman on the charge of being a fucking idiot. Aside from purchasing a game for your 14-year-old that clearly states “Mature: 17+” on the box, you are also apparently unfazed by the heaping mountains of violence and gang culture glorification present in the game, but are troubled by dryhumping scenes less explicit than your standard Showtime softcore porn. And you thought grandmothers couldn’t jump on the litigation bandwagon.
Officially the coolest thing I’ve seen all month: VNC for the PSP. Control your home computer anywhere there’s a wireless connection. SWEET.
There’s some seriously flawed thinking behind this GamesIndustry.biz editorial on the movie rights to Halo, the massively successful Bungie game for the XBox. Basically, Rob Fahey applauds Microsoft for placing some extremely harsh demands on the movie studio that wins the bidding war for cinematic rights, including a large budget, an aggressive timeline, and full creative control. He claims that “the rest of the industry has been too ready to be used as a doormat by Hollywood just for the chance of getting games made into movies,” and he’s right.
But don’t assume that just because the movie studios can’t get video game franchises right, that suddenly video game developers will be any better. A movie is a far different thing from a video game, as piles of full-motion video “virtual adventure” games taught us in the heady days of Multimedia PCs and 2x CD-ROM drives. Take a look at pretty much any game out there that isn’t Half-Life 2, and you’ll see a minimum of plotting and barely any characterization. Even the king of cinematic games, Grand Theft Auto, paints in broad strokes, and often the answer to a conflict is to come out guns blazing. Which, of course, is the whole point of GTA—you get to blow things up in spectacular ways, evade the police in spectacular ways, and kill prostitutes in spectacular ways (which is why the game is evil and should be retroactively banned, as should prostitutes, killing, and floating icons with molotov cocktails in them). Interactivity allows you to fill in the blanks; you get to decide whether your criminal mastermind has a heart of gold, follows a code of honour, or likes pounding on dead corpses long after you’ve taken their money and weapons.
Which is not to say that there haven’t been games that have bucked the trend; recent examples include, of course, Half-Life 2, the original Half-Life, and the penultimate space sim, Freespace 2. On the other hand, what all three games have in common is the presence of a dedicated writer on staff to lend each game narrative coherence. As the concept of writing for games is a relatively new one, you can bet that these writers got their experience elsewhere; in the case of Valve’s Marc Laidlaw, it was from writing sci-fi novels. Volition’s Jason Scott, the writer for Freespace 2, spent years writing for theatre and teaching creative writing courses.
So, in sum, the video games with the best plots—and presumably the ones best able to make the transition from video game to cinematic experience—are the ones with honest-to-god writers supporting them. Which means that Microsoft’s demands for creative control essentially amount to the writer of a novel demanding creative control over the screen adaptation. There are plenty of cases where that control is given freely, only to see the writer screw up horribly because they didn’t realize that screenwriting is inherently different from writing a novel. Hopefully Microsoft and Bungie will similarly realize that making video games is a far different business from making movies.
Today’s hilarious Slashdot comment: “Instead of sharing non-free music, why don’t we share free music instead? Pirating music is equivalent to pirating Windows XP—why do it when OpenBSD is available instead? There’s a lot available under the CC.”
Because as everyone knows, music is exactly the same as an operating system.
Yes, it’s true. The Macintosh you buy two years from now will be running on Intel x86 silicon, and the era of the PowerPC Mac will be over. Despite the reports of no less than the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times saying it was so, a lot of people—including myself—refused to believe. It just didn’t make any sense, for a number of reasons. In fact, some of those reasons still hold true now that the announcement’s been made:
The relatively high price of Macs. Now that Powerbooks, iMacs and the rest of the gang will be moving to Pentiums, they may get cheaper. Or they may not. Until we know for sure, the question of pricing will still be an issue. Apple, despite the support it’s thrown behind its software and OS X, still makes its money largely off hardware. Macs have generally commanded fairly high prices in the PC market—the recent Mac Mini notwithstanding—and have only been able to do so for a couple of reasons: the bespoke quality of the product design; OS X; and the fact that it’s very hard to reliably compare the performance of a Mac and a Windows-based PC.
Of course, now that OS X essentially runs on the same hardware as Windows, two reasons to buy a Mac have disappeared (unless Apple pulls some DRM/hardware mojo and locks out other PCs from using OS X—a plausible, if unpopular, move). Notably, this leaves only one major reason to buy a Mac over a bog-standard no-name PC or a mean and cheap Dell: quality of experience. Macs come in nicer packaging, look cooler in their white and clear lucite, and have relatively unique form factors that are essentially impossible to create using off-the-shelf parts. What this means, then, is if Apple doesn’t lock out OS X to all but Apple computers, they’ll essentially be competing in the hardware sector on the basis of craftsmanship and luxury: buy our computer for more than you’d pay for a Dell because it won’t clash with the drapes and will be easier to put together. This is the famed “it just works” factor that the PC world finds so elusive. But to the kinds of people who are used to—nay, enjoy—mucking about in the pigpen that is their PC towers, they’d probably rather save the premium they’d spend to get a bona-fide Mac and stick with the tower they have now. Hell, they might even buy Tiger instead of stealing it off a torrent site. What they won’t do, unless they’re flush with cash and really feel the intangible extras are worth it, is buy a Mac. And that’s quite a gamble to take.
On the other hand, they said the same thing about the iPod and the MP3 player market, and look what happened. So perhaps this really was a smart move and all the naysayers were wrong.
You might’ve seen the work of Improv Everywhere from their meticulous reports of elaborate pranks they’ve pulled in New York City. My favourite one was the in-store appearance they held for Anton Chekov.
That is, it used to be my favourite. But now there’s a new sheriff in town. This looks like the most audacious stunt they’ve pulled yet, and by all accounts it came off spectacularly.
Lately I’ve become acutely aware of the inconsistencies and problems plaguing various computer and internet technologies, and never have I thought so much about how to start from scratch and redo everything.
Before I left for grad school, I’d barely ever touched Mac OS X, but was a fan of Apple nonetheless. I was convinced their laptops were top of the heap, and that the overall proposition was far better suited to new computer users than a comparable Windows machine was. This may still be correct, but eight months later, I’m no longer as big a fan of OS X as I once was. In fact, it’s fair to say I’m barely a fan at all. Apple is supposed to be renowned for its outstanding user interface design, but OS X is a veritable pain in the ass to use sometimes.
Windows come in Aqua, Brushed Metal or fill-in-the-blank visual themes with no apparent rhyme or reason. If you dismiss a window and need to recall it, you first have to figure out if you a) minimized it (check the dock, beside the trash), b) hid the application (hit the app’s icon on the Dock to unhide the window) or c) mistakenly closed it (what, didn’t you know YELLOW meant minimize?). Quick application switching was, until Panther, worse than the equivalent Windows feature. And heaven forbid you should ever want to look through all the windows on your system; Command-Tab only scrolls through apps, not their individual windows, and Exposé seems to only deal with active windows, not hidden or minimized ones. Finder windows resort to icon view, possibly the worst possible view for doing anything of significance with the filesystem. And unlike Windows (which, to be fair, also defaults to icons), there doesn’t seem to be any way to force OS X to show all folders as lists. The list of frustrations and annoyances go on and on.
And yet there’s no denying that OS X has some very nice features to it, namely the full integration of a PDF rendering system and the shiny pretty facade, thanks to Quartz. But if I have to forego drop shadows and anti-aliased text just so I can use Windows Explorer’s tree/folder view, then so be it.
And then there’s web design, a.k.a. the industry no one but twelve-year-olds take seriously. We’ve come a long way since the pinnacle of table-based design in the late 90s, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other mountains to climb. What the web standards people routinely forget is that by the late 90s, Netscape and IE were actually very good at rendering table-based layouts in a predictable manner. The same cannot be said today, where IE6, Safari, Opera and Mozilla-based browsers could all render a piece of HTML+CSS differently, despite it all being standards-compliant code. And while a lot of this has to do with IE6 being horribly outdated (just as Netscape Communicator 4 was in 1999), there’s also the fact that CSS is by no means perfect itself.
While I think everyone is pleased that the days of one-pixel-wide table cells and messy HTML markup are long gone, what the push for form-content seperation has gotten us is not structurally sound content markup and clean presentation markup as we had hoped. Thanks to XHTML, we can now reasonably place all our content into simple, human-readable markup without a bunch of messy <table cellpadding="0" cellborder="0"> and <td colspan="3" width="250"> tags getting in the way of everything. But clean presentation markup? Have you looked at a CSS file lately? They’re all jungles of margin-lefts and position: absolutes and line-heights.
Furthermore, unlike tables (and may I just note my extreme reluctance to praise table-based layouts in any shape or form, but…), CSS code will often fail because it doesn’t act the way you expect things to. For example, say you want to position an object in relation to its parent container. Guess what? You’re out of luckposition: absolute will position an object in relation to the document, not the parent object, meaning if you subsequently set the object to sit at the bottom-right corner, it’ll sit at the bottom-right corner of the document. Meanwhile, your parent container will appear to have nothing inside it, both visually and according to the browser’s rendering engine. So its width and height are set to zero, emaning any border effects you may have had going on are screwed up.
The collapsing parent container is perhaps the most frustrating part of CSS in its current form. Nearly any positioning model aside from the standard “relative” model will cause the parent container to collapse. All I did to that grey box to the right was set its position to “absolute.” I haven’t actually tried to place it anywhere, so it defaults to the position it would take had I been using a relative positioning model. And yet look at its container, outlined in red: ignores the grey box’s existence altogether. This kind of thing starts to rear its ugly head when you’re dealing with complex combinations of paddings, margins and floats, almost to the point where not only can you forget about writing human-readable CSS code, but you can’t even write code that works because you no longer know what’s causing the problem. Is it this errant margin rule? Or the absolute positioning? Or perhaps I should turn my inline content into a block of its own? Or…
I realize there are certain cases that have informed the eccentricities of CSS, but things like position: absolute breaking everything just seems wrongheaded. The strange and still somewhat mystical world of floats and clears begs for clarification. Seperate treatments of typographic and positioning rules would be a godsend, as would clear guidelines on what rules take precedence if an element is overloaded, and what rules will be ignored for an element no matter how you apply them. Recognizing the parent-child relationships now guaranteed by XHTML would be even better. As for now, the whole thing makes me want to run screaming for my copy of InDesign. And all this is to say nothing of the multiple colour depths, browser configurations and screen resolutions webmonkeys have to deal with.