So, is the original short representative? Because if it is: meh. Haven't we seen enough "Protagonists Who Are Shallowly Represented Jerks"? It's become just as much of a cliche as "Protagonists Who Are Noble And Stuff", and marginally more annoying.
Well, that's what case law is for. You'd just have to have a judge or two determine the meaning of the language in the law, and then everybody would just refer to State Vs. Voldemort(12, 1995) or whatever, and it'd be fine.
That's a costume? I figured it was just, well, boots and a really big birthmark.
You may not want to watch it for very long, but watching someone play this game *once* is a pretty mind-bending sight.
We *are* talking. Half of Venus, Inc. *is* The Space Merchants, and the other half is the not-quite-up-to-the-first-book sequel, The Merchants' War.
Thanks for the press ... Y'all have linked to three out of three of my wife's papers now.
The near-total lack of *game*, the near-canonization and apparent huge financial success of the lore writers, while at the same time the game has no apparent mechanisms in place to actually give people something to do besides a) griefing, and b) mining. As a mining simulator, I'm sure T'rain would be great ... but the things that Stephenson listed as the killer features of the *game* wouldn't attract anyone except grad students in geology. We've had a game like this - it was the beta version of Ultima Online - and even UO had to make certain concessions to *game* as opposed to world simulator before launch. The closest modern MMO to T'Rain that I can find is EVE, and EVE does NOT force you to learn accurate astrophysics before you can play well. Plus, even EVE's entire world takes you about half an hour to run across on foot- T'Rain's stated real-world size is just too large - you'd have a single player per half-hour run area, which defeats the whole purpose of being a MMO in the first place.
Stephenson writes T'Rain as if the goal of MMOs is the accurate simulation of a world, as if that's what people pay for - in the Bartle taxonomy, he seems to think that the Explorer archetype is all there is, with the gold farmers as something he's vaguely heard of as affecting WoW and EQ.
Really, T'Rain is a mcguffin, so it's not a big deal, certainly not as a big deal as how ham-handed Ready Player One's eighties trivia was, but I think that Stephenson read a lot of trade press about MMOs, and completely missed things like the Habitat design document. From the book, I have my doubts that he's even read Castronova's Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier, which I'd consider to be essential to anyone trying to write this kind of book.
This one.
I don't think Jones was supposed to be unprecedented; he's a lot like Carlos the Jackal in many ways. I suspect, in point of fact, that he's Stephenson's take on the Jackal archetype, as ported to the modern world, instead of something truly new.
I don't want to beat a book when it's down - on the whole it was fine - but was anybody else struck by just how unbelievable the MMO in the book was? It's as if Stephenson had *heard* of MMOs ... but limited his research on them to articles in Wired. I had this urge to buy Stephenson a gift subscription to EVE and send it along with a card saying "Learn, guys."* (* Pratchett, T., N. Gaiman, _Good Omens_.)
Most of them are heartbreaking. Unfortunately, I look at the spectacled owl, and all I can think of is the dialog from the recent Old Spice commercials.
No matter what you think of Starship Troopers the book, *it ain't depicting a fascist society*. Depending on whether you believe Heinlein or Gifford, it may not or may be a *militarist* society, but fascism has a very particular meaning, which is never, ever addressed or even hinted at in the book. There is no - and I mean *no* - discussion of the economic system beyond a) Rico's dad has a company, and b) the merchant marine wants to be considered federal service, which means there's no evidence that there's deep integration of Big Business(tm) and government. There's no discussion of the civilian administration, much less idealization of or belief in the absolute power of The Leader - we don't even know what people CAN vote for, much less who's gotten any jobs that way (except possibly for the cops, but I doubt they're elected.) In a fascist system, BY DEFINITION, the H&MP course wouldn't be what it was in the book; it'd be "Why The Leader is so bloody wonderful, and why we should all be honoured to do what he says."
The term fascist means something BESIDES "a form of government I don't like", and it *doesn't* necessarily mean "a form of government where there's a lot of emphasis on military service."
Note that I am not defending the form of government in the book; that's an entirely different argument. I'm defending the definition of a perfectly reasonable word whose definition is clear, adequate to the task, and NOT WHAT'S IN THE BLEEDIN' BOOK.
On the down side, Catan can be, with the wrong player, one of the absolute worst gaming experiences of your life. I was introduced to it by an obsessive Catan player, the kind who second-guesses everything you do, and who, after a while, basically drove me and the other players out of the game; I'm sure *he* had a good time, but the rest of us were in board game hell. We couldn't even make deals between each other without him lunging in and explaining that one of us wasn't getting the EXACT RIGHT deal, or dealing for something that he didn't feel that we should be worrying about right now. "You don't want to do that, you want to do THIS" was the most commonly heard sentence that evening, and ever since, I've refused to play Catan ever again.
Carcassone, sure. Ticket to Ride, sure. Hell, I'll play Risk, Diplomacy, *and* Arkham at the same time. But I won't touch Catan with a ten-meter barge pole. It's clearly too attractive to players who should never, ever play board games with humans. Or aliens. Or computers.
So, is Snow Piercer acknowledged to be based on La Compagnie des Glaces (the comics the not-bad-'tall 1993 video game Transarctica was based on) or not?
Didn't say it was a good thing; said it was a different thing. That said, there's little I can add to the sentiments in this here song.
Yes, but if you've got time to quote, you have time to (to invoke *my* previous rant on this subject) read the abstract. 250-odd words will give you enough data to, at least, be definitively ill-informed on the subject matter, as opposed to merely vaguely ill-informed, and that ain't hay.
That's not Kary Mullis, that's Mike Holmes.
Yup. And a massive, massive jerk, to boot. I would have avoided the hell out of him, and I'm still surprised that Woz didn't scoop his intestines out with a garden rake in the seventies. Doesn't affect the fact that he's one of the people most responsible for general computing's current state: whether or not you like the man, his advocacy of computing "for the rest of us", as those ads put it, have made the world a very different place.
The same thing that happened with the OGL as of version 4? Didn't WOTC stop licensing material under it as of then? I don't see them returning to it now.
What do you mean, modern anime? That's been a trait of anime - and a whole heap o' animation overall - forever. Go look up Clutch Cargo sometime - I won't link it because it's Just That Terrifying.
