I'm still kind of shocked that the MMO companies themselves haven't gotten in on the action by producing character "packages" which customers who want to start strong out of the gate can buy.
I mean, Sony Online Entertainment has taken a widely-decried step in this direction by establishing their auction site, but it seems like chasing a piece of the aftermarket pie is weak sauce compared to the power to undercut the competition and fix prices for virtual goods. (Imagine the profit margins!)
Antukin: That's a brilliant little link. (Admittedly, I've only seen the first two episodes of Lost, on Virgin Atlantic airlines... but it really does map over pretty well, doesn't it?)
Randolph: Wasn't the sky just *amazing* yesterday? That was some tripped-out weather.
And I concur that Batman Begins rocks. That was a damn fine movie.
Rudy: There's a variation on Go, known as "one color Go" (it shows up in Hikaru no Go; I'm told professional players and aspiring pros use as a memory exercise) which might have inspired Yoko Ono's innovation.
The point in the variation in Go is to learn to recall which stones are yours and which are your opponent's, despite their uniformity of color. Since professional Go players are required to be able to write out the course of a game perfectly from memory, it's not quite as unreasonable as it sounds.
Okay, John M. Ford is now my hero.
Tom: Yeah, the "swoosh" device has always been a favorite excuse inside my head for why ships produce those noises in vacuum. It's more of a post-facto justification than anything else, though.
It would certainly amuse me to see something like that referenced in Serenity, though I doubt it would make it past the editors even if it was in the script.
Kip: I do hope you're correct re: the things going "boom" in space issue. But doesn't ships swooshing as they go past kind of imply an atmosphere? Or am I getting overly pedantic over here again?
Ditto that. It looks like it'll be great.
My only (tiny!) reservation comes from the fact that they've got sound in space now, but if that's the price we have to pay to get Serenity on the big screen, I'll happily endure it.
The favored term for indefinite objects around these parts is "hootie" (phonetic spelling-- I have no idea if those of my friends who use it have ever written it down). I've heard whole conversations conducted in a mix of references to various hooties combined with a nonsense language that verges on glossolassia.
Then again, back in high school I did much the same thing with the word "geeba".
Speaking as a metal-listening nerdoid, I find it moderately amusing and a bit disturbing that people in the U.S. get their panties in a bunch over shock acts like Marilyn Manson when there are/were bands like Emperor (the most famous product of the violent Norwegian Black Metal scene) whose members actually did burn down churches and get convicted for murder and suchlike. I'm not *surprised*, exactly-- I know that there are pockets of the U.S. just as humorless as Norway is reputed to be-- but it makes me a bit sad that people see bands like Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir as threats to their children instead of the ridiculous jokes that they are.
I mean, it's not like I think most Black Metal is good music (I prefer vocalists who actually *sing*), but the majority of its practitioners are more laughable than dangerous, especially since the Norwegian scene imploded several years back.
That's... fascinating. And horrible. And more or less exactly what I'd expect from New Marvel, given how arrogantly they've been acting towards distributors, retailers, and organizations like Comic-Con International over the last few years.
That DC is apparently involved in this puts a bit of a twist on things, though. At least in my limited experience in the business, DC was generally above doing silly things like this-- or at least, their legal counsel was good enough to tell them when they didn't have a leg to stand on.
It'd be interesting to discover what's really going on here, and if all is as it seems on the surface.
I actually wrote an essay on the literary side of this problem last year on Strange Horizons; it gets a bit pedantic and rather judgmental in bits, but as a reader/critic I can only reference books that made it past the slush pile-- sorry, Theresa.
What interests me about comparing games (both paper-and-pencil and computer RPGs) and fantasy novels, however, are the levels of interaction between them. China Mieville, for instance, has mentioned that his obsession with quirky monsters and imagined races came at least partially from reading books like D&D monster manuals, which leads me to suspect that gaming has had a substantial influence on the fantasy genre in less obvious way than perpetuating Tolkien ripoffs and establishing the names of writers like Ed Greenwood and R.A. Salvatore in the minds of the public.
I'd be interested to see how other ideas and influences from gaming bleed back into written fantasy as time goes on, though I must admit that the idea of how much Final-Fantasy influenced slush there will probably be in years to come fills me with dread. (Assuming, of course, it hasn't started already; not being an editor, I wouldn't know.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 9 |
| 2004 | 3 |
| 2003 | 1 |
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