I meant that even if you don't especially enjoy a classic novel, you haven't completely wasted your time - you're still probably better off for having read it. But yeah, enjoyment of a book - just like music, food, and art - is all about personal taste. I've read very little Russian literature, basically for fear of exactly the same reaction as yourself. (Oddly, though, I did enjoy A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is about as depressing and plodding as you can imagine.) If you're not fond of the Russians, there are some Americans you should probably avoid too - Faulkner, Steinbeck and some (not all!) of the other early 20th century writers probably first among them.

In reply to this comment by kymbos:
Well, I'm not sure you can't go wrong with classics. I guess it comes down to taste in the end, but I found myself bored to tears with Russian classics, for example. I'm somewhat embarassed to say I just couldn't get through Crime and Punishment - it had no pace, for mine. As someone well read, this is probably sacrilege to you, but then I found the Lord of the Rings trilogy similarly overcooked.

Well, I'm not sure you can't go wrong with classics. I guess it comes down to taste in the end, but I found myself bored to tears with Russian classics, for example. I'm somewhat embarassed to say I just couldn't get through Crime and Punishment - it had no pace, for mine. As someone well read, this is probably sacrilege to you, but then I found the Lord of the Rings trilogy similarly overcooked.

I will get around to reading one of your suggestions when I'm next in the market for a book, and I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks again.
In reply to this comment by jonny:
Well, that's the thing about classics - you can't really go wrong with any of them, so yeah, A Connecticut Yankee is as good place to start as any. But it really comes down to your own preferences. Guys like Faulkner and Melville are generally considered giants of American literature, but I can't stand their stuff and would be very unlikely to recommend them. Steinbeck is another great that, while I personally like most of his work, a lot of people don't care much for it, even if they appreciate the quality.

You might find Good Reads a useful resource for finding the classics you'd most enjoy.

In reply to this comment by kymbos:
Hey, thannks for the leads. I just watched some of Midnight in Paris, and realised I'd never read the classics. Would you suggest I start with your Connecticut one?

I have heard some distressing news about Season 2. They are emulating Star Trek in a sense, where famous old series characters would make appearances in modern series to tie it all together. That always bugged the hell out of me when Spock would appear on Picards ship for example, or Riker appeared on Voyager.

Anyway, they are cashing in on the Lord Of The Rings and several of Peter Dinklage hobbit cousins from the shire will be visiting this season. And get this... Elijah Woods is confirmed. He will be "passing through the kingdom on a secret mission to destroy a powerful weapon" but wait, Sean Bean AGAIN tries to seize it.

>> ^gwiz665:

Ultimately, the service they would provide would be content before any of the knock offs. Plenty of companies have tried to make knockoffs of wow, some even with otherwise very compelling universes in the baggage (lord of the rings online, warhammer online), but no one has come close yet. Star Wars the Old Republic might, but I doubt it. A rose by any other name is still WoW. And right now they have a critical mass of users, which is all they need. They could shit in a shoebox and call it Mist of Pandaria and millions will buy it on the release day.

Sure, there exists private servers of Wow at this point too, and some people like to play on them, but for me? I wouldn't even want to. There's no challenge when everything is possible.

I think we're talking about different things. Here you're describing people making "knock offs" of WoW by actually trying to independently create a new game from scratch without directly copying any artwork or code from WoW, but still kinda looks and feels and plays like WoW.

I'm talking about firing up the DVD-burner, and making a 100% exact copy of WoW. If that were legal, people would do it. In other words, the "private server" thing. Right now they're mostly script kiddies diddling themselves with Legendary items, because if they tried to actually replicate the WoW-server service and charge money for it, they'd be forced to shut down, and probably get thrown in jail too.

If that constraint weren't there, I'm sure you'd see an explosion of "competitors" for WoW "service". And I'm sure the market would explode with all kinds of people trying to differentiate themselves on service and price, but I'm sure the competition would force the average price well below what Blizzard's charging.

And that's the rub -- without being able to hold a monopoly over the monthly service charge, or even be able to demand $40 for the expansions, would Blizzard even bother with a Mists of Pandaria expansion?

I do think we could make things a lot better if they'd stop extending the time limit on things going into the public domain. Any content older than 10 years should be public domain, period.

Ultimately, the service they would provide would be content before any of the knock offs. Plenty of companies have tried to make knockoffs of wow, some even with otherwise very compelling universes in the baggage (lord of the rings online, warhammer online), but no one has come close yet. Star Wars the Old Republic might, but I doubt it. A rose by any other name is still WoW. And right now they have a critical mass of users, which is all they need. They could shit in a shoebox and call it Mist of Pandaria and millions will buy it on the release day.

Sure, there exists private servers of Wow at this point too, and some people like to play on them, but for me? I wouldn't even want to. There's no challenge when everything is possible. I'm certain that even if a joint effort between developers of all sorts banded together to copy and create an MMO like wow, it would likely be crap, because they have no other incentive to make it than "because we can". Design decisions based on that are not good - look at linux. Even Mozilla is a company nowadays. A command structure is essential in creating a massive work of art in a reasonable time.

Making a copy of WoW isn't "just" making a copy of WoW, it's enormous. By the time someone has copied it to the finer details, the game will have moved on to something else; systems change all the time.

A good example of something happening like you say is Vampires: Bloodlines where the community made a huge amount of "community patches" to fix the game, after the developer went bankrupt. I like that, but they could do it because the things they were fixing were straight forward. If they wanted to make entirely new things, who decides which things are good and bad? Like wikipedia, they would need custodians. A private company like Blizzard does not have that problem.

I was certainly a little too broad when I said all intellectual property is bunk. First of all I have a problem with the umbrella term of IP. I don't think it's helpful. Different types of IP have different solutions and problems. Some are more bunk than others. (Wtf is with they way rights to music works? What is it now, 100 years after the artist dies? Crazy.)

Like you I am philosophically on the "you can't own ideas, man"-wagon, but practically I'm more loose with my morals - hell, morals are fluid baby.

I'll say this. I would rather have 50000 people playing my game and 50 people paying for it, than I would have 50 people playing my game and paying for it any day.

>> ^NetRunner:

I think this is the most plausible way I've seen anyone square this circle. I'm just not sure it really holds up to scrutiny.
Philosophically, I'm in the "information isn't property" camp, but I also put food on the table by creating intellectual property.
The confluence of my own philosophical tastes on this topic would be that not only should "making copies" be legalized, it should actually be criminal to withhold any sort of scientific or engineering advance from the broader public, especially for selfish gain.
But, I think that would essentially destroy software companies as we know them. I think Blizzard & WoW would have trouble making the case to people that their service is worth $140/yr. That's especially true in the kind of world in which any content they generate can just be copied by a knockoff service provider just as easily as the original copy of WoW was in the first place.
I have trouble even imagining what sort of service they'd be able to compete on in that world. Uptime? In-game customer service? Best policing of player misbehavior? It can't be bugfixes (copyable), and it can't be content (also copyable).
I think ultimately WoW would have to become something more like an open source project -- the community provides all bugfixes and content gratis. Blizzard ultimately would have to give up any kind of creative or engineering control at that point, and also give up on having a revenue stream of millions of dollars a month, too. They'd just be a glorified hosting company. Companies like Microsoft probably wouldn't even be that.
It'd probably be better for the whole world that way, but not so awesome for incumbents in the industry.
You know, people like you and me.
>> ^gwiz665:
Essentially you couldn't. You would not be able to provide a better service without spending a very very large amount of money and effort into doing it. An MMO is a service, and you have to provide more than just stable servers for it to work, you also have to create new content, bug fixes etc to maintain the integrity of the product.
You can design your way out of it easily. Free to play is one way of doing it, which we have a lot of success with on iOS and the big shots on PC are waking up to as well, finally. Apple in general have their app rejection policy which keeps the most things at bay, but of course there is jailbreaks, which I don't much care for.
I don't have a problem with people copying, although I would of course prefer they give me lots of money. If they corrupt our product however, with map hacks, cheats etc. then it's a much different issue.
I think it's a problem that many different types of media is lumped together under "intellectual property", because I do think things like Art, music etc should be protected from forgeries and that the original artist should be compensated for his time, otherwise we would have no art at all.
The industry is changing to provide a better service still though. Look at music - who buys CDs anymore? We have things like Spotify and Grooveshark who stream just about any music easily supported by commercials.
Any Blizzard game, and all their future games, will need a persistent internet connection, both for piracy issues but also for better service - instant patching, social networking etc. Same with steam.

>> ^A10anis:

>> ^criticalthud:
@A10anis
WWII was an economic and resource war. As was every war the US has been in.
"Just" is a matter of perspective.
Vast sums were made by war profiteering during the war, but that paled in comparison to the influx of wealth following WWII and american global domination.

For you to say; "WWII was an economic and resource war. As was every war the US has been in." leaves you in the unenviable position of being an utterly ignorant commentator on issues you don't understand. Shush.


really? you think WWI started simply because franz ferdinand was shot, ...or WWII had nothing to do with Hitler's push into the middle east and western russian oilfields? or that vietnam and korea had nothing to do with the collision of economic systems (communist totalitarianism and capitalism). or Iraq has nothing to do with oil and Afghanistan has nothing to do with rare earth deposits? good vs. evil is just fine for star wars and the lord of the rings, but on planet earth, it's about competing economic interests.
"Just" war is another term for wrapping brutality in red white and blue and selling it to the masses.

>> ^kymbos:

I'll say it - Lord of the Rings was boooooooooooriiiiiiiiinggggggg.
And by that I mean both the books and the films. Self-indulgent and overcooked.


Dear John,

I used to love you, felt like we had a deeper connection you know, like we got each other. How wrong can a person be.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

I have the opposite reaction in that the tone seems too much like LOTR. The Hobbit was a fairly cartoony book - much more of a classic kids adventure than a sprawling epic like LOTR. It should be lighter, funnier and more whimsical than its sequel. I'm guessing Jackson feels a need to unite these two books that take place in the same universe, even though the writing style varies so greatly between them. Either way, he can bank on my $24.


I've always thought of The Hobbit as being a book based on someone "finding There and Back Again" (in a fictional sense) and then making a book from *that*. Sort of a book within a book premise. So though The Hobbit takes place in Middle Earth, just like Lord of the Rings, it's narrative is based on Bilbo's writting (perspective).

This irons out all the kinks in my mind, as clearly the two stories *do* take place in the same universe otherwise. And anywhere there's a difference in tone, or what not can be attributed to Bilbo's perspective on how the tale is told.

I'll say it - Lord of the Rings was boooooooooooriiiiiiiiinggggggg.

And by that I mean both the books and the films. Self-indulgent and overcooked.

They do need to be connected, but trailers can be deceiving too. Let's see when some more stuff is released. This does look very close to the lord of the rings, I'm cool with that.
>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

I have the opposite reaction in that the tone seems too much like LOTR. The Hobbit was a fairly cartoony book - much more of a classic kids adventure than a sprawling epic like LOTR. It should be lighter, funnier and more whimsical than its sequel. I'm guessing Jackson feels a need to unite these two books that take place in the same universe, even though the writing style varies so greatly between them. Either way, he can bank on my $24.

>> ^Nebosuke:

Part 3 is the best...


I was going to sift each one individually as they stand alone, but didn't bother cos it didn't get through

I liked how I could go into Oblivion's dir and change the game music to my liking... and burn the MP3's to play in my car when commuting. I need to check around to see if anyone figured out how to extract the Skyrim tunes from an installed copy... looks like the tunes are no longer as easy to get to.

For a fresh take on Oblivion though.. the Lord of the Rings soundtrack fits perfectly.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

The best DVD commentary I've heard was that of American Beauty, from the director. I learned that I didn't actually know about half of the stuff that was going on in that movie. Things like the shadows created by the vertical blinds in his office evoking prison bars. I LOVE that stuff. >> ^spoco2:

>> ^jimnms:
>> ^spoco2:
Commentary tracks are the one special feature I don't like, actually those and the stupid 'watch the film with popup behind the scenes snippets'.
I LOVE behind the scenes stuff, but if I want to watch the movie I WANT TO WATCH THE MOVIE. I don't want to half watch a movie, half listen to people talk about the movie. Give me a behind the scenes documentary that shows and tells me about how things were done and you'll have me watch for longer than the running time of the film even (which many of the docos are)
So... yeah, I just don't listen to them.

I don't watch entire movies with commentaries on, but sometimes I'll go back and watch a scene or two with it on. There was on movie that I did watch with the commentary on, Sunshine. I went back to watch one scene like I sometimes do, but the commentary with directory Danny Boyle and Dr. Brian Cox on as the scientific adviser was so damn interesting that I ended up watching the rest of the movie before I knew it. I had to start it back from the beginning with the commentary on and watch back up to that scene.
The special feature I never cared for were the interviews with the actors where they just brown nose and ass kiss the director, producer and other actors.

Oh yeah, the press kit half hour long ad 'making of' 'docos' are terrible. But things like the bonus features on the Lord of the Rings discs, or those on Blade Runner, ooh, or the making of 'The Abyss', that's awesome. That stuff is fascinating to me. I LOVE seeing how movies are made. I just would rather watch a movie OR making of... not a half way house

>> ^jimnms:

>> ^spoco2:
Commentary tracks are the one special feature I don't like, actually those and the stupid 'watch the film with popup behind the scenes snippets'.
I LOVE behind the scenes stuff, but if I want to watch the movie I WANT TO WATCH THE MOVIE. I don't want to half watch a movie, half listen to people talk about the movie. Give me a behind the scenes documentary that shows and tells me about how things were done and you'll have me watch for longer than the running time of the film even (which many of the docos are)
So... yeah, I just don't listen to them.

I don't watch entire movies with commentaries on, but sometimes I'll go back and watch a scene or two with it on. There was on movie that I did watch with the commentary on, Sunshine. I went back to watch one scene like I sometimes do, but the commentary with directory Danny Boyle and Dr. Brian Cox on as the scientific adviser was so damn interesting that I ended up watching the rest of the movie before I knew it. I had to start it back from the beginning with the commentary on and watch back up to that scene.
The special feature I never cared for were the interviews with the actors where they just brown nose and ass kiss the director, producer and other actors.


Oh yeah, the press kit half hour long ad 'making of' 'docos' are terrible. But things like the bonus features on the Lord of the Rings discs, or those on Blade Runner, ooh, or the making of 'The Abyss', that's awesome. That stuff is fascinating to me. I LOVE seeing how movies are made. I just would rather watch a movie OR making of... not a half way house

Tags for this video have been changed from 'marine, dinosaur, raptor, lord of the rings' to 'marine, dinosaur, raptor, lord of the rings, gollum' - edited by calvados