WTF

The end of 95% horror movies and games. There are exceptions, but this a problem intrinsic to the genre.

I disagree. Or rather I'd like to make a correction. it's impossible to explain scientific concepts to a general audience who are unwilling to learn. There are those who would like to learn and are part of the general audience, they know a few things. They'd understand what a black hole is but not a space-time singularity. You can teach a willing audience. It might take time but yes they'd be willing to accept concepts even if it seems a little difficult, if you teach them slowly. An unwilling audience on the other hand needs a lot of simplification. While I know what I said is mostly true I'm also speaking from personal experience of doing some really odd community service as part of my degree.

Mediapasses and press-passes are the key . Though I do miss out on some since my wife would like to see them as well.

Well that sounds more like giving up. You know if you don't stand for what art truly means and let those take over, that's what the whole world will be filled with. It's like with anything, if you truly believe something is worth fighting for you do sort of need to. Art is something intrinsic to human culture. We've had it from cave paintings to certain expressions in modern times. Just because there are a fair few pretentious few does not mean that it has lost meaning. It means that we should strive to make art something harder to achieve and stop feigning praises on those who try to destroy what it really means. We need to be far more critical and perhaps also be more clear in it. When we give biting criticism and stand for what we believe in, despite the masses initially against one, they will give in. Nothing in the world loses its meaning until we give up and there is no lost cause, particularly in media. Since it can be shaped, all we need are the right people and the right tools. It's just your pessimism coming out, that's all .

There is one way to go about it though. Maintain a strict online persona and a real world one. However that does cause a schism in personality for some. The thing is, it's a bit futile to wipe out your whole history on the internet because you can wipe out all the things you've ever done personally. But can someone wipeout all instances of you on the internet? Not really possible. And we're talking about decades here. For instance someone could've posted something extremely unflattering about you and painted you in a bad light. Now that person is dead. Not everyone has their personal details removed after death. In fact once you die, it's like a frozen in time asset. There are no clear laws on what happens to someone's online identity once they're dead. So in this hypothetical, what's a company that will erase all your instances going to do when those associated with the dead person do not want anything changed w.r.t the dead person's profile. it's going to bring about a court case and we'll have new laws maybe. But there will a lot of unpleasantness. The problem is that we as humans work exactly like what we create sometimes and in this case the operating system. Most OSes are programmed to function as if there will never be a deadlock. Similarly we believe there will be no problem in what we plan out to do. Till we hit the snag. There have been several problems thanks to others posting info about you. Several high profile job losses, several security risks and what not. If you're one of those whose photos shouldn't come out you should tell people no photographs (this is what the security chiefs should have done in that MI6 case). If you believe that you shouldn't be tagged in photos and you don't want your photos online. Make a fuss. I do sometimes. I've always liked to disappear and you know what? It's not impossible to disappear despite having an active social life. You do have absolute control over your actions, only thing we don't have is control over someone else's. However this right to be forgotten thing isn't entirely good. What if someone dubious used that to get into politics. I mean one's political stance is also important. For instance the BBC political correspondent, Nick Robinson, is frequently said to be right-centred. It's because we are aware of his past as a head of the Young Conservatives (during Thatcher's period). Now if someone decides to erase that, probably few would see his bias. I mean he tries to be neutral at times I guess, but one's past in certain cases does define one's present. Maybe we should have a rule protecting the rights of children and those under 16 and that what they said could be removed. That's because what they can be attributed to a lack of maturity. But if someone 20+ says or does something stupid they should learn to live with the consequences of that. So long as they haven't killed anyone, the consequences won't be dire and even we as humans know that people do change. I will admit that when I hire someone for work I do look them up on the internet though. And if someone hires me for a job as well.

You know when you think about it, the greatest amount of misinformation is on Climate Change. Mostly because people people assume that global warming increases heat and associate climatic change with global warming alone. I will say this though, carbon footprint is a terrible way to actually measure it and attempt to control it. The truth is by our actions we have accelerated what should have been a natural process. However we are due a lot of things an ice age, geomagnetic shift, total polar wander, contintental drift, massive solar electromagnetic flares and so on. It's just right now we're sort of failing when we combine all these factors and try to explain everything based on these few factors. One thing is definite though, we cannot control climate change by changing our carbon footprint. We can only attempt to slow it down, which is what we're trying. The wheels are already strongly in motion. It's like trying to cure oneself of cancer but with 18th century medical knowledge. Not saying we shouldn't do anything but our current attempts are trial and error. People should accept that. At least I hope they will in the future.

I know of him and actually while I agree with some of his views, I dislike him as a person. It's just me. One of my more favourite mad scientists was Magnus Pyke. The guy was pretty good though it's a shame that a robbery was what left him weak and eventually killed him off 2 years later. People might remember him as the guy who yelled Science! in the Thomas Dolby video Blinded me with Science. Fun Fact: Thomas Dolby also invented the RMF file format and patented the synthesizers that created the first ringtones. I believe he still gets money from those early patents/creations of his. Even more fun fact, despite being smart he is also a member of the Flat Earth Society (yes it is what you think) which is quite confusing. Fun Fact 2: Ben Miller almost became a quantum physicist though he still possesses degrees in SSD. Anyways I'm not much of a fan of Cox, not because of what he knows but rather his methodology. He is a pop scientist after all. Personally I like some of Chomsky's works. I think I have a preference for a different kind of rationalist though that's a little odd coming from someone who finds Slavoj Zizek highly entertaining and interesting. I also think Venter's not bad. But it is a personal preference. I'm not saying Cox is wrong in what he says for the most part, but I tend to not watch shows of people I dislike though I do read them (as then I can remove the irritant visuals and just focus on the content). Maybe it started from enjoying reading Feynman.

That's true, I've got one which I sort of need for work. Helps me see some shows a little ahead of time. I do know that Eureka had plans to release the same version in the US but something happened somewhere. Eureka's trying to do more Criterion like releases here. Now that the BFI here has taken on the role of the UKFC (which is now defunct) it's likely that we'll get interesting re-releases.

While the Blu-Ray isn't I'm sure you can buy the DVD and it comes with pretty much everything except of course it's a DVD and won't be 1080p. I pretty much buy whatever Fritz Lang rereleaes there are. Just like I know I'd buy re-releases of Dziga Vertov.

Actually TN while your general point of there being a thin line between misinformation and over-simplification is true, the rest of it is quite frankly not. (Not the video btw, haven't watched the clip). Firstly that was very broad usage of Broadsheets and Tabloids (Having worked in Print Media a while back I can assure you that more newspapers opt for Berliners and Compacts these days with a few exceptions like Telegraph) . Now to the actual point, the mainstream non-tabloid press does have a slant, it depends on the owners. In a tabloid the slant is obvious it's more to do with the style of reporting. A non-tabloid newspaper will present both sides of the argument obviously favouring the side that the newspaper or in some cases the author believes in. It will be heavily invested in one side. Easily noticeable during the time of elections. If it's truly neutral on a subject, it usually relies on the author but then it's the author's sway that holds more tide. However the newspaper will bring to light the positives of the side that it feels is correct. A tabloid on the other hand will use sensationalism capitalising on fear and instead of giving a viewpoint drives home the fear. For instance there have been a number of articles written in the Guardian by a man who does spread some misinformation about climate change, while there are of course articles in the DM that probably say climate change is a lie and of course add on that they stole your money to invest in it. It is incorrect to say that a mainstream newspaper and a tabloid are different in that they simplify an opinion. It is one of the functions of the news-media to shape public opinion. In fact I'm sure most civics texts agree with me in that news-media is one of the tools to shape public opinion. While a tabloid acts stupid in its presentation, a mainstream paper can be disingenuous and mask its true intentions. At the end of the day, in today's world we have access to several sources of information and can correct ourselves if we are wrong. To get the big picture we cannot rely on one source of information, no matter how credible or neutral they sound. Also these media have an audience and the intelligence of the readers is directly proportional to the quality of the writing. In short, newspapers are a tool to shape your opinion, but it is upto you to prevent yourself from getting carried away by what they write and investigate

Actually when I've got insomnia I do tend to watch Discovery Science after midnight shows for a laugh. Good grief at the paranormal shows. I mean there's like 1 in 10 that's a bit odd the rest are so easily explainable. Anyway while I don't really want to get political I'd like to shed some light on the situation in Bahrain. What's reported and what's not reported. For starters, I spent a good few years of my childhood there so I know what the place is like and did visit it in the past decade. I still have friends there. The natives of Bahrain are Sunnis and like a lot of expat oriented cultures in the Middle East, they have so many non-nationals that the natives are mostly a minority. A lot of people try to use the Sunni-Shia leverage in the protests in Bahrain. But it's not that simple. Most of the Shias in Bahrain are from Iran. Some of them have good ties with Iran too and some of them just wanted to escape Iran in the past. Many of them own businesses and are rich and successful. However the country is under autocratic rule. The present king does want to change things. He has changed it such that people who've lived there long enough can now become citizens, people can own land in the country (all of which are not really possible in most GCC countries). The current protests are quite understandable on one side when the Iranian Shia majority of populace want to gain more control over the government. However they're mostly people who've migrated there in the past 40 years and not all of them are fully integrated. And by this I mean that not all of them do consider themselves Bahraini despite getting citizenship. The press has actually covered the news from the protesters viewpoint. There's the issue that these protesters aren't entirely innocent. They want political might and would not stop at anything. I'm not sure if it's been reported yet but during the attacks at the university, there have been a few deaths at the hands of the protesters as well (those of innocents). It's an extremely difficult scenario where one group is using global possible public sympathy to try and gain an upper hand in local politics. Not to mention there have been reports of unarmed police being attacked by protesters and vice versa. The government isn't innocent either and them bringing Saudi in, is just going to be bad for the people living there. However both sides are at fault here. The resolution isn't quite that simple.

Rome:Total War (just to own it on steam) Napoleon:Total War (I'll get shogun when the price goes down a bit).

Emergency lamps can help a lot at night. Generally when I used to live in India during flood and landslide season the powercuts could last for between 6-24 hours. Most emergency lamps (Does National still exist as a brand or has it changed to Panasonic. It's the best one) Needs about an hour to charge and gives pretty strong light for 4-10 hours at a stretch. (Think it's 4 if you use both tubes). It's bright and helps quite a bit and doesn't take a lot of electricity to charge up. As for the reactor, the guy on the link peeter linked to pretty much confirms what I'd thought.

I have S. Korean friends Blu-Ray import I've already got the DVD for free thanks to work (which now I guess my father in law would like). My wife wanted them. So she got the top 3 and the tigrex one. Also got the MonHun keychain. A few of the things I got last week... I really need to keep track of these. I'm mostly buying a RED One camera later in the year. It should help me cut down on costs once everything's in motion.

Jaffe has a point, which is that hey what we made is now art and should be celebrated does not really bring out the 'art' from any medium. Art needs, to be honest, a lot of negativity. In fact creativity needs negativity. it's only when we are bound do we understand freedom and it's only when we appreciate freedom do we express imagination. Most of the best artwork has come from some form of repression. It may not be oppression culturally, it can also be oppression based on one's own family even. There are few artists who are able to express without this oppression and sometimes it's because of the repression from being unable to express their thoughts and imagination in one media. Art in my opinion is an expression of imagination which has some aesthetic - beauty is subjective because grotesque is an art form. Appreciation of art being subjective is where a part of the problem lies, no two people can agree 100% on all their thoughts, so when a mind interprets something it interprets it individually. There are commonalities, it can be derived, contrived, forced upon and of course opinion can be shared too. Why some companies succeed in making artistic games is because they are not game designers but come from an artistic background and do not let go of it. But most games are not art. Calling it art is detrimental because do you really want the current type of games to be the only ones. Do you not want to encourage growth. When has something just grown from sitting pretty. It just gets stagnant. Is stagnation an art? I don't think so, you don't consider sitting on your laurels art. In short, for anything to become art it needs to consistently evolve, needs to change, needs to be oppressed/repressed/held down or back so that something comes out of it. Art is celebrating the human spirit and the projection of human consciousness. Also art needs to be noticed. A pretty painting sitting in a forest seen by none isn't art but rather a pretty painting. I do not agree with labelling everything as art because it prevents progress. In fact if you think something is art, you should try your best to say it's shit if everyone else encourages it because that one criticism will provoke them do something even better. Most artists get worse as they get complacent. While I don't like him personally I do believe a good example for the last case to be Damien Hirst.

I just thought that since there's several things that we come across and read and find that are mostly untrue and promoting some sort of agenda. I'll start with a personal one. The History Channel and Nat Geo (it's sister or rather mother channel) to a lesser extent. Now it might seem weird but the History channel is pretty much fear-mongering disguised as information. A lot of times the content of the shows aren't really educational or historical. For instance comparing the biblical plagues and talking of the Anti-Christ in an absolute scaremongering manner. Prophecies and predictions. They have a show about vampires. This is such a vague show. Basically they were trying to tell you that vampires existed and then went on to prove that vampires could exist based on circumstantial evidence like - some poor old lady who while fortunate enough not to get the plague had her body examined and was considered to be a vampire. I know they're pandering, but it gets ridiculous at times. While my wife likes the Discovery channel/animal planet show - Monsters inside me, there's tiny bits of misinformation in the show and weird bits like do not travel outside the USA you will get something and die. Do not travel to Florida, you'll die. I mean yes there's one thing to presenting news, and there's another to basically say hey you travelled abroad and that's why you got this disease. When they're basically talking about tapeworms and other parasites that live in meats which can die if cooked at very high temperatures. I mean they should educate people on the need to eat cooked meats and to cook meats like pork at much higher temperatures to kill any parasites if they live in the animal (also probably best to suggest to cut down on the intake). Pseudoscience. Linking the Mayans to polar wander and sometimes geomagnetic reversal when it's just speculation feeding into 2012 nonsense. Yes those are both real, but linking Mayans to it isn't quite right since the position of the stars is not an accurate way to map tectonic movement. Well of course if they don't do this, it's about Hitler. While I understand that can get boring, they can show quality research and programming to be honest... Of course there's thing about White Tigers and White Lions. The gene is recessive, so it's pretty hard to come by in nature. Just like most albinos are. As a result most zoos try to purpose breed them, which results in issues. The mother doesn't wantonly try to kill the cubs. It's doing a mercy killing in order to prevent 1)prolonged suffering. 2)spread of tainted genes. Animals of course don't work the same way as us. While we don't kill humans for being born with deficiencies we do not breed humans like we do animals. Certain zookeepers do it because it helps bring in visitors. It's quite terrible really and also it isn't easy to bring out recessive genes that strongly. I think we should appreciate the rarity. A lot of time misinformation is linked with specific types of industry and research. Particularly when there's misinformation linked with pharmaceutical companies. Anyways I thought it'd be a good idea to discuss all the misinformation and disinformation that we'd come across. On that subject, the supermoon causing the earthquake is disinformation, however the supermoon could cause an increase in the tidal height on the 19th. The disappearance of bees and it's impact on local ecosystems is not disinformation though. It's real and could cause major problems. p.s. I'm not really discussing Fox News or Daily Mail since we know the amount of stuff they can make up. Oh and if anyone wondered what those weird glows were in ghost shows, it's usually reflected light. Dust picks up light which when they reflect back form a circular light pattern on a photo. Come across this often when working in dark areas.

For you folks with a PS3 and PC this is a pretty good deal. Portal 2 at HMV for £29.99 use the voucher 3OFFHMV25 which essentially means you get the second version for £3 (if you count in the steam discount. Regular price at HMV without discount is £32.99). Of course it's for UK and EU customers.

Glad to hear you're ok Peter. I think the problem with those posters are a lack of awareness probably more than lack of education and of course common sense. This is one of the reasons why it's bad to let everyone have an opinion and not a well-formed opinion. What would be nice would be if we had stuff like 'are you sure you want to post that?' based on a word parser and keep questioning the user. Of course it semi-prohibits certain kinds of speech but after 3 user prompts it is likely that they'd have time to think about the dumb things they said. More than that and it'd get annoying and people would post worse stuff.

Streets of Rage. Yuzo Koshiro. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hikFCwduCIQ Probably my favourite X Capcom game intro. The game wasn't too bad either and lots of characters that I used to like made an appearance in the game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAUfyCz-BGU Grim Fandango Opening. Nier Opening cinematic. Totally unexpected and amusing at the same time. Filled with expletives so NSFW. God of War 3 cinematic opening. Even though the game's opening was epic in the Greek sense of the word, the intro sequence was a classic throwback to older Greek Myth based movies and done well too.

A few intros I like have already been mentioned. So here's some of my more memorable ones. Tekken 3. So many memories of playing this during Uni years. Friends would come over and we'd boot it up and watch the sequence almost everytime we played. It just was a good intro for characters. Crash Bandicoot 3. The narrator. NFS: Porsche Unleashed. Probably my favourite game in the series to be honest. Played it a lot on the PC. While Blizzard has several memorable openings. The one that really stood out for me was Diablo 2. It was of course the wanderer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRhY5OXtLd0 Forgotten Worlds. Probably my favourite Capcom game. The intro was less than 30 seconds but you could see most of the bosses you'd face in that tiny sequence. Not to mention the game had some funny Shopkeeper music. Turns out the shopkeeper was the princess in the end. I think I hit my limit on that post. So continued

I might be wrong but for a steamworks title, we practically have no control. As far as I can remember with Civ 5 and New Vegas (both of which I bought via online retailers), they both pretty much launch steamworks, download content and install at the same time and the disc is practically useless unless you want to keep it in a shelf along with the box to remind you that you own the game. I don't feel the disc has any purpose. However in the UK, physical retail is almost always cheaper than steam at release. I only buy from steam during sales because I can get most PC games for £24.99 or £17.99 during the launch week and steam charges me £26.99 to £34.99 which when compared to online retailers is more. However if you're one to keep the box then it makes sense. Outside of that reply, I got my copy of DA2 today and after all the registration I noticed that unlike DA:O this pops up right on your EA download Manager. So you can't de-auth it anymore unlike with DA:O where you could. You know someone should get them to update their PC Manuals. There's no ea.onlineregister.com and you can register games on the EA site based on interest. If you've played it, they'll know and do it for you. But the last page on the manual is totally obsolete. However there seems to be a lot more streamlining at the moment.

P.E.O.P.L.E W.H.O. T.Y.P.E like that. Gah! Doesn't get me all the time though it is annoying nonetheless. And screw you Noah and the Whale for your 'life goes on' song.

I can't believe I actually forgot about this. Sales talk. I mean sure if you're sincerely interested in sales fine. But seriously most gamers don't have a clue what sales figures mean. Currently all consoles are close to 50M or in the case of the Wii 70M so that means they're all successful. The Gamecube had issues because it sold around 20M. We don't have problems of support these days since all platforms have sales which means developers need to focus on consoles equally (unfortunately it means sometimes PC gets the shaft because they're trying to appeal to the 100+M closed platform holders, but there's plenty of good PC exclusives too and some indies are better suited for the PC than PSN and XBLA. e.g. Torchlight. It doesn't mean don't release or don't play it unless you'll play on the PC. Wider releases are good, but certain platforms are optimal for certain games). So unless someone is truly genuinely interested in sales or is an investor [[i've stock in MS, but I prefer the Playstation platform amongst consoles for Multiplatform games (PC is the first preference (with a few exceptions)).]]don't bring it up. You're only making yourself seem stupid. Most people who bring up sales are just annoying. I know it's trollbait at times, but really they shouldn't be talking about what they don't know about. No one needs to worry about support for the platform they own at the moment. If you do own all games though look at gameplay videos and see which platform leads and make your decision [LA Noire seems to be PS3 from the footage, not to mention it was once an exclusive not published by Rockstar, DNF is obviously PC though platform-wise looks like the 360 and so on) . Deus Ex has the best philosophy currently (hopefully TH4IF follows that. Maybe Rage next.

Yeah that's the thing about making the first post, so whoever made it or mods can keep editing it to give info about the game and/or key info so that you don't have to go through every discussion when you just want some quick info . I'm not saying don't discuss but if it's a good game the thread can go on forever if we keep at it and info can be lost and we're sometimes just looking for info. lol that was just a test really, I'll try posting more for Infamous 2.