Mouse users are disadvantaged in other ways though, including no analogue control for throttle and brake, no force feedback, etc. You can delay the turn rate speed of a mouse user, but if you were really serious about levelling the playing field you'd also need to strip down pedal inputs to a basic on/off functionality, and I can't see anyone going for that!
Wow, big post... sorry to truncate to a single quote, but I agree entirely with it. These threads are always such a waste of time- good to see some empathy shining through every now and then.
I used to skate a bit, before I moved to the city. My best trick was a kickflip- which I could pull only about 25% of the time anyway. Skating's good fun but the ground is so unforgiving. Surfing is scarier but atleast the landings are softer..
Like I said, all of these details were intentionally placed. Sometimes they were really obscure, and sometimes they were as blatant as the stained glass windows of the church in the final episode. The thing though is... on how many occasions did any of these clues ever add towards the collective knowledge or insight of the characters in the show? I think this is a really important point. Whenever someone thought they had cracked a code, it usually turned out they were wrong. Sometimes fatally so. Everyone was just blindly stumbling along. All knowing Ben turned out to be know nothing Ben- and it was like that with all of them right up until the very final moments. There weren't very many times in the show's history where the audience was made to feel that they had more information than any of the characters, so these little clues must have been put in not to reveal something to us, but to obscure something from us. Heck, the very title of the show gives the real game away.
I've had a bit of a go with RBR in the past, but that was before I had a wheel. Apparently RBR is one of the great racers for force feedback- when I get some time off things next I might give it another whirl with the G25.
The numbers thing in Lost was probably one of the best 'riddles' of the show, but I think it's safe to say that they were only mainly there to add a ton of drama and mystery to the first season, and to connect up disperate elements which had trouble being connected up any other way. A bit like the protagonist of the movie '23' who sees 23 everywhere but by the end of the movie had worked out that it was just a bad case of selective focusing playing havok with his mind. Doesn't Hurley reach the same conclusion at some point in Lost?
PS, 23 is one of the numbers in the Lost sequence! Another connection!!
PSS, I'm not saying that the 'dharma' connection wasn't intentional on the part of the writers. I'm sure it was- that is what helped get people's imaginations racing, looking for all of the metaphors and becoming convinced about the importance of small details. These things were definitely purposely placed. But they were not ultimately important. I think that's what a lot of people missed out on and why the finale was disappointing for some, or atleast from some particular point of view.
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You might just call it 'film score', or if you were in a record store you will find this kind of thing in the 'soundtracks' section.
Other labels would be New Age, World Music, etc...
Other labels would be New Age, World Music, etc...
Imo, Lost was always being way over intellectualised. There were always a million theories running about what was happening at any one time. There was a cheeky scene last night which made for a great summing up of all the nonsense, when Jack says 'Locke was right about everything' and the other guy simply says 'Locke was right about nothing', and neither of them actually had any real clue about what was immediately going to happen next!
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That's probably partly true, but I'm sure that for the ending to come together in the way it did last night, the writers surely must have had a very coherent plan about where they were going, probably right from the outset. Sure, there were tons of red herrings and unresolved side plots, sometimes gratuitously placed simply to get people to tune into the next weeks episode- but people demanding that everything to finally make sense and to have every little thing explained would be like demanding all of the suspects in an Agatha Christie novel to turn out to be actual murderes. It's just not the way literature works.
Sometimes a red herring is just a red herring.I recently watched Shutter Island, which had a similar type of outcome. I thought it was really lame. But I didn't feel the same way about Lost last night. I thought it was a pretty satisfying resolution to a show which was becoming increasingly tedious and mediocre the longer it went on. As mentioned above- 'good riddance!' But that doesn't mean that I thought the ending wasn't any good. It was a good ending.
It not really that simple.. hehe
The show ended as a composite of the two timelines- the 'real' world, where Jack is shown dying from a knife wound and a fatal dose of electromagnetic radiation, and the 'sideways' world, which was revealed in the finale to be an 'after death' world. Because of the composite nature of the ending, there are characters who go on to live (escaping the island in the plane while Jack lies dying) but they are also dead in the other world (it's not revealed how they actually died)
The show ended as a composite of the two timelines- the 'real' world, where Jack is shown dying from a knife wound and a fatal dose of electromagnetic radiation, and the 'sideways' world, which was revealed in the finale to be an 'after death' world. Because of the composite nature of the ending, there are characters who go on to live (escaping the island in the plane while Jack lies dying) but they are also dead in the other world (it's not revealed how they actually died)
I thought it was a fitting and actually rather poignant ending (sorry! :schwitz
. The show really started to lose it around about the 3rd season but to its credit always managed to keep a thread of interest running, right up until the finale. Last night's episode was certainly the best of the season- I can't remember another example where a major series finished up with all of the characters dead. (perhaps there are a bunch of them :tilt PS, you didn't come into this thread before you saw the finale right? In that case.. oops!
The acceleration of individual revelations in this last episode was well paced- yeah the little flash/rememberances were cheesy but still kinda touching, and I thought Jack's cluelessness about his existential condition in the 'sideways world' and finally meeting up with his father to explain things to him was a fine emotional high note to finish the series on.
Having said all that- I still agree with DWB... "Good riddance!".
. The show really started to lose it around about the 3rd season but to its credit always managed to keep a thread of interest running, right up until the finale. Last night's episode was certainly the best of the season- I can't remember another example where a major series finished up with all of the characters dead. (perhaps there are a bunch of them :tilt PS, you didn't come into this thread before you saw the finale right? In that case.. oops!The acceleration of individual revelations in this last episode was well paced- yeah the little flash/rememberances were cheesy but still kinda touching, and I thought Jack's cluelessness about his existential condition in the 'sideways world' and finally meeting up with his father to explain things to him was a fine emotional high note to finish the series on.
Having said all that- I still agree with DWB... "Good riddance!".
Saw Avatar in 3D at the local IMAX the other day. I need to take back what I said about the CG being 'nothing too special'. In 3D, I was able to pick out a ton of detail that I missed the first time around in 2D. 1000's of little bugs everywhere, really nice subtle atmospheric particle effects, each tiny little leaf on a fern showing off true volume and unique form... I left the theatre convinced that it is definitely a leap forward in CGI for film. I'm still frustrated that they chose Duke Nukem for a leading role and were somehow able to resurrect every single personality from Aliens, but with graphics like these the story was inevitebly going to play second fiddle.
I didn't mean to suggest that SoW is the new sequel being planned by Gaijin. This new game was announced (unofficially) only a few days ago, it doesn't even have a title yet.
You're probably right. I'd bought Wings of Prey a couple of days before the developer announced that a new sequel was being planned- more PC centric, more sim oriented. I was looking forward to seeing the game develop a bit more, but it's pretty obvious now that the focus will start to shift to the new game fairly shortly (some items on the community wish list, including a mission builder, are apparently too hard to code into the current game as it is, so the devs have made a choice to start over). It's kind of good and bad news at the same time- but a nice concession to current owners is that they'll be recieving a discount on the sequel when/if it's released.
If you run WOP in simulator mode without all the HUD help, it does a pretty good job actually. No it doesn't contain every bell and whistle, but the list of demands at the high end of PC simulation is always endless. I'm happy to support the devs here- they've released a high quality titles with WOP, they are not making money and now they're wanting to move forwards into even more niche territory with the sequel. That's pretty brave...
You and me both
Hey, it simulates air combat
What else can I say?Surely it must be doing a better job at simulation than this...
Loving the new sub btw
SVS PB10 NSD subwoofer
Wings of Prey - WWII air combat simulator
I thought that driving in Dirt 2 with a wheel was pretty good actually, once I'd set it up the best I could. I never directly compared it to the offroad racing in LFS, but from memory I never thought that it was lacking anything significant that LFS was doing. It seemed pretty solid really (although as someone mentioned above, the way they handled the tarmac surfaces was pretty strange in Dirt 2).
That's good Sam. Also at work here is the largely media driven (but regularly put forward by certain climate scientists themselves) stereotyping of sceptics as right wing/creationist/flat earther/oil shill types- I guess in opposition to 'forward thinking, intelligent and virtuous' people. This is one of the most wearisome aspects of the climate debate simply because it is so far from actual fact. For example (you will already know this) the most important sceptical blog, Climate Audit- is routinely assumed by the press to be a 'right wing' blog, but people fail to realise that Steve McIntyre himself is a liberal while the blog itself is sharply focused on technical details and largely eschewes political debate.
I think it's very easy for the average person to dismiss someone like Steve as soon as they've connected him to this stereotype- they will probably not even make an effort to visit the blog. The most important thing to come out of all this for me is to realise how much I have come to value simple scientific objectivity. It's kind of a surprise- to realise that this is worth fighting for, even more so in a post modern culture where all opinions/ideas are automatically valid. Science was from the outset designed to get around this, with all these inbuilt protections to keep you from 'fooling yourself', as Richard Feynman said. But these foundations are gradually being chipped away, and perhaps we'll end up with a new science which simply agrees with whatever it is a scientist/politician wants to say. It's a real danger and I think you can look at the current state of climate science for examples to see where all this might be headed unless we can begin to sort through all the mess with a slightly more critical, less assuming, less political eye.
No, have not read the book (Hockey Stick Illusion) yet. I'm holding out for a decent e-reader and when I do I'd like to buy it as a pdf. I'm sure it would make a great primer for anyone interested in Climategate and the recent history of UEA CRU/Mann/IPCC etc.
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Here's how they did it (I'd definitely recommend watching the movie before seeing this though)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... xHjfM&feature=related
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I'm really enjoying how everything seems to be going this middle grey colour. All of my favourite applications have gone grey, it's given me hope that my eyesight won't be completely shot in five years time. 
Not sure if it's been posted yet- but the other night we watched 'Children of Men'. While not perfect, there were atleast a few scenes (the long takes) in there where I was thinking 'my god! this is insane!' I have no idea how those shots were constructed, well.. yeah I do- computer graphical trickery! But it was extremely well done.
I got on to this film through my 3d graphics class, where we saw that the last scene where the woman gives birth, is actually done in 3d (the baby, that is). It's basically seamless.
I got on to this film through my 3d graphics class, where we saw that the last scene where the woman gives birth, is actually done in 3d (the baby, that is). It's basically seamless.
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG