Messages

761

General Discussion / Re: The Brain Death of Television

« on: May 24, 2012, 06:03:01 pm »

I'm not sure if it's BBC, but Sherlock seems like it's pretty good. I haven't been to sit down and watch it calmly enough like my sister has,, though... Being an adult sucks.

It’s pretty good! And Series 2 is currently streaming on pbs.org (but they’re the 82-minute U.S. cuts).

According to my dad, the only thing that he and the people in his commune found worth watching on TV in the 70's was Sesame Street.

Note that drugs may have been involved in their evaluation.

According to my dad (class of ’69), one show college kids would communally watch was George of the Jungle... the reasoning was probably similar.

762

General Discussion / Re: The Brain Death of Television

« on: May 23, 2012, 09:31:19 pm »

In general? Yes, I think TV has gotten dumber. People watch a whole lot of “reality” TV, and that’s where a lot of money is made. That’s a whole lot of dumb we’re talking.

When it comes to the very best shows? Maybe not so much. There have been trade-offs, for sure—try making a show have a real statement, and even assuming you get away with it, you’ll be covering very little ground that hasn’t already been trod and done better.

But savvy audiences today pick up on cues much faster than savvy audiences of the past; the language of film that’s been wired into us since we were kids is faster than the language of film that was wired into our parents if they had TV when they were a kid. Ever seen a decent 50s TV show? There may have been some smart people behind some of those things, and I don’t doubt many of them were smarter than people behind today’s shows, but the shows themselves are paced for people to keep up with, and that pace was slower. Not to mention that what people typically watched was most certainly a “vast wasteland” then, too, so don’t feel like you’re missing much there.

Much more now than 20 years ago, continuity between episodes matters. The audience is expected to remember things now more than they were then, and it drags you in deeper. Myth arcs are now a common feature of American dramas, but in the late 80s and early 90s only a handful of American shows pioneered that—and a lot of suits (and writers!) really did think it couldn’t be done in America unless you were writing a soap (completely ignoring that British and Japanese audiences had been doing it just fine all along).

In recent memory, TV news is longer than 15 minutes, C-SPAN is a thing, Lost experimented with being so crazily interwoven even the writers had to resort to looking things up on wikis, Futurama cooked up some genuine math, House was pretty good for a few seasons (except when it goes strictly formula or turns into a freaking soap opera), I’ve been hearing a bit about Mad Men as a postmodern epic, and I don’t even watch very much TV at all. (Oh, and fairly consistent quality producers like the BBC and HBO are still kicking ass and taking names; that never stopped being a thing.) Good TV is still around if you’re into that sort of thing; you just have to look pretty hard is the problem.

763

Gaming Discussion / Re: Re: Victoly!

« on: May 23, 2012, 08:25:37 am »

why?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWlLPJG9Cvg

764

Gaming Discussion / Re: Re: Victoly!

« on: May 22, 2012, 11:36:40 pm »

That is all handled automatically by the emulator.  Kega is way optimized, you'd have to have a really shitty processor to need that.

I strongly doubt a frameskip button (i.e. the mechanism that allows me to speed through grinding) is automatically handled by any emulator. Let me be the first to say there would be a demand for an emulator that kills grinds in game-designy ways, though ORIGINAL IDEA DO NOT STEAL*

*please totally steal

This matters why?  I mean, hard patch your ROM who cares.
...
You're really grasping now.

You’re doing a point-by-point rebuttal why? Check the bolded reason; that’s really the only serious one.

Plus Mednafen is known to haunt these forums; plugging is really just me being nice nyehhhh

All of that is configurable in Kega's directory settings.

I don’t think you understood the statement you’re replying to. Double-clicking a directory, even a symlinked directory, in OS X’s file chooser should just open that directory for further tree-browsing, same as single-clicking. This isn’t an OS X problem, this is a “not testing very carefully” problem, same as CTD on first run. If I get off my arse I’ll probably file a bug report because that’s the Right Thing to Do™.

For all the things you say Kega doesn't do, it DOES do a dozen other really cool things.  Like allow for graphics filters, frame by frame stepping, and it plays 32X games for example.  Kega is seriously THE emulator all things SEGA pre-Saturn era.  But to each their own space cowboy.  I understand people like Mednafen because it is such a universal emulator, but in my experience with it, said emulator doesn't do as good of a job as the specialized-per-individual-system ones do.  IN MY OPINION DON'T MAKE ME BITE YOUR FACE

I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU TRY

765

Programming / Re: Image decompression routine help (also: x86 code)

« on: May 22, 2012, 10:07:53 pm »

Yes, please document here or on the wiki (you can use the same account credentials)—it’s the kind of thing we like to see around here.

766

General Discussion / Re: Font with full unicode support? (For typing musical symbols past U+FFFF)

« on: May 22, 2012, 05:17:22 pm »

Get yourself a copy of fontforge and frankenstein it.

Not like that’s easy or anything, but by far it’s a more compatible solution.

767

Gaming Discussion / Re: Re: Victoly!

« on: May 22, 2012, 05:06:42 pm »

Why did you choose it over the latest Kega Fusion?

- muffin rewind button
- controls are way more configurable (i.e. you can map emulator functions)
- truth be told, I can’t even find a frameskip option in Kega Fusion, much less a button for it
- automated IPS soft patching
- open sores
- ’m cool wit command line apps
- not doing anything special other than rewind and fast forward; just playing the base game, patched, on an SMS. no emulation glitches far as I could tell.
- does not exit with no message the first time you run it
- does not hilariously try to open a symlinked directory as a ROM when you accidentally double click it in the file chooser
- I thought Kega Fusion was a Winders-only program until just now

768

Gaming Discussion / Re: Re: Victoly!

« on: May 21, 2012, 10:40:28 pm »

Phantasy Star 1: beaten (retranslated version, of course, mostly for the FM music, but the better English is definitely a plus).

Mednafen is a pretty cool emulator. Except for that matter of not pitch-compensating the audio during speedups (my ears!).

769

Script Help and Language Discussion / Re: Good editor for script dump with duplicate lines?

« on: May 21, 2012, 04:52:29 pm »

It’s cross-platform (Java) and I can attest that the OS X portion is maintained pretty well although it does not conform to every OS X norm. Best as I can tell from changelogs, it works just as well on Windows and Linux but I have not actually used those OSes for real work in a long time.

It’s a bit weak at automatic dictionary lookup for Japanese because it can’t tokenize it very well. One of these days I oughtta figure out how to make a tokenizer plugin for that... I’d say that’s the biggest problem. Still, it’s pretty much the best of its kind before you get to the proprietary solutions (Google Translator Toolkit is another good one, free of charge, but proprietary nonetheless).

Check out filler’s thread and you’ll have a better idea of how it works, even though that’s a different thing.

770

Script Help and Language Discussion / Re: Good editor for script dump with duplicate lines?

« on: May 21, 2012, 03:41:27 pm »

In the app I use for for some scripts (OmegaT), exact duplicates in are treated as exact duplicates out. So you’ll see duplicate lines in position, but editing one instance will change the rest.

It’s an app for translation. It saves a lot of work. But it takes a bit of set-up, too, and you gotta learn how to use it, just like any other kind of app.

Don’t know if other translation memory apps work that way.

771

General Discussion / Re: Van Damme does movie with Chung Le

« on: May 21, 2012, 02:22:50 pm »

Jackie Chan and his stunt double

772

General Discussion / Re: Capcom employee attempts suicide after being bullied.

« on: May 21, 2012, 12:51:27 pm »

I’m glad you have the fortitude of character to have not considered suicide in a horrible situation, but not everyone is so strong... or lucky enough to be able to do that.

You may have noticed this lady had access to antidepressants, so she probably was already diagnosed for depression. Well, in Japanese culture, depression is stigmatized and suicide is often glorified. Culture and mental state provide us lenses through which we view the world, and we often have very little power to change them.

For depressed persons, there being hope at the end of the day may be true, but it also don’t mean shit, pardon my French. That people who contemplate or attempt suicide are selfish or cowardly for doing so is to perpetuate the stigma and in many cases it couldn’t be further from the truth to begin with. People who are depressed need help, not simple advice.

773

General Discussion / Re: Font with full unicode support? (For typing musical symbols past U+FFFF)

« on: May 21, 2012, 02:56:49 am »

Try BabelMap?

774

General Discussion / Re: Font with full unicode support? (For typing musical symbols past U+FFFF)

« on: May 21, 2012, 01:55:45 am »

Perhaps they would give you the “certain point of view” line if you pressed them about it....

You can make a macro with AutoHotKey to input special characters. Depending on how often you plan to do this, it might be preferable to copying and pasting all over the place.

775

General Discussion / Re: Font with full unicode support? (For typing musical symbols past U+FFFF)

« on: May 21, 2012, 01:06:51 am »

That would be U+D110. Windows, IIRC, only supports up to U+FFFF with alt codes. If you know the hex code, you can type it into WordPad and hit Alt+x to do the conversion. You’re much better off using something like AHK macros to type extra-special weird symbols using Unicode, if you have to do this often.

776

Site Talk / Re: The SIZE tag.

« on: May 21, 2012, 12:57:20 am »

There is a wide gap, good sir, between needs and conceits. I do not pretend this is not a conceit. But it is an important one to my own communication. Probably-don’t-needs are far different from nice-to-haves. You absolutely don’t need the ability to post images or attractive clickable URLs to communicate on a forum (and you can’t do that on a typewriter, not the same way). But then why are we here and not on the wild-west unmoderated USENET anymore? Because this is a step up, and the nice-to-haves are indeed nice to have. We can have nice things, sometimes. Nice things that have been around for over ten years on this kind of software.

And speaking from under my graphic designer and translator hats, size and bold are very different effects. In Script Help, from time to time (although the opportunities have dried up of late) a complicated kanji is enlarged as a courtesy. Size up makes it clearer; bold makes it muddier.

Moreover, there is no analogue between my whispertext and something like boldface. The alternative is to just not say it, which is basically being institutionally required to shut up as far as I’m concerned, which is basically why it going bye-bye means I do, too. It would be a reluctant parting, but the majesty of my tower of hats must not be tarnished.

777

Site Talk / Re: The SIZE tag.

« on: May 20, 2012, 06:16:03 pm »

Okay, but is there a valid use for it on a forum? You just showed what good use it would be on a wiki, which is awesome, but what realistic point does have a forum have with size code?

Do you only speak at one volume? I for one do not sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops over the world at the same volume I call someone a dumbass out of earshot. This is an effect conveyable through text size. I might point out, on an aside, that in the Personal Projects subforum, it is occasionally necessary to present a project using an article-like format.

When conversing in a forum, we must occasionally use emphasis or deëmphasis in ways best conveyed through styles. I often find it  to use the full range of options from time to time, especially in cases where refactoring a sentence for clarity would be less clear than, say, italicizing or parenthesizing particular terms for clarity or flow management. I fully admit the amount of times I use it would be considered offensively frequent in literary prose, but this is a forum; a message board, if that brings to mind master rhetors in their togas orating in debates at a level that would put Lincoln and Douglas to shame, although it really shouldn’t when it is not generally considered a faux pas to converse using yellow smiley faces. Even text color, largely a forum annoyance, has recently found a not in any way useful or elucidatory purpose here.

I am going to assume for politeness’ sake that you seriously missed or didn’t understand my first post, but if you are being passive aggressive with your insinuation that it is not “valid”, Neil... know that I think rather highly of you, sir, but you’d be challenging an established belief of mine here.

If you must know, I usually prune things when posts get about this long and flowery and irate (even to the point of just not posting), but no such mercy today.

778

Site Talk / Re: The SIZE tag.

« on: May 20, 2012, 02:53:30 pm »

To make text a different size, of course!

Section
I am an article content. I contain lots of interesting things.

Subsection
This product may be used with alkaline or rechargeable NiMH batteries. Rechargeable NiCD never to use!!! Do not forget to charge the batteries from time to time.*

* batteries not included

779

General Discussion / Re: Random pictures thread!

« on: May 20, 2012, 02:45:41 pm »

^

780

General Discussion / Re: Font with full unicode support? (For typing musical symbols past U+FFFF)

« on: May 20, 2012, 02:42:19 am »

No, I just want a font that will let me type musical symbols. Searching Google tells me this is possible (and even Symbola has come up as a solution once), but checking character map does not show me that to be true.

Basic stuff like quarter and eighth notes are standard and easy to type, but anything beyond that I cannot find. 

~DS