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marzojr wrote:
Lets see: there are 90 slots for dynamic objects in S3&K; so if we assume some braking dust from Tails (easy to get 3-6 objects by doing 1-frame brakes), plus 4 objects for lightning shield sparks, we would need around 80 rings (considering there are other objects on-screen) to fill all slots. There are around that many rings on the initial descent in MGZ1, with a lightning shield conveniently at the start. Dodging those rings for long enough is liable to be a pain, but I will try it.
Say Marzo, what kind of central force potential (if any) do rings follow with the lightning shield? I'm just curious.
(I suspect it's not as simple as a central force potential since rings are actively drawn to the player and, in my experience, never orbit.)
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DarkKobold wrote:
As far as gameplay goes - obviously, Warcraft 2 wins. It took what Warcraft had done, and made it better. However, this is where movies are different - you can't do a sequel to Citzen Kane that is the exact same movie with just upgraded graphics, a few new characters, and other tweaks. A video game series, on the other hand, can and often does just that. Warcraft needs to be judged, not on gameplay alone, but on its impact to the industry. Otherwise, a top whatever list is just going to be nostalgic crap mixed in with the current best of every game type.
While video games do indeed suffer from "sequels with incremental changes"-itis, I dispute this point. First of all, Citizen Kane is a masterpiece and cannot reasonably be improved upon in the first place. Indeed, if you were to compare it with similar "legendary" video games, I'd argue that you see very much the same pattern of following up a great game with a mediocre or poor sequel (I'd cite Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and its sequel, The Warrior Within, as a prime example of this). Your point is correct, though, that the two industries are very different on a fundamental level. There is much more freedom to entice gamers with novel concepts and then expand upon those concepts in a sequel (Command & Conquer immediately comes to mind). I don't think the movie industry craves novelty in quite the same way that the gaming industry does.
But one particular example springs to mind of a movie that I think was made distinctly better with a fresh look. In 1997, the movie Insomnia by Norwegian director Erik Skjoldbjærg was released. The movie enjoyed a cult following and was enjoyed largely because it used a film noire style but emphasized these aspects with light instead of shadow. I've seen the film and although it is by no means a bad movie, I think it fell apart as it came to a close, failing to offer much resolution.
Christopher Nolan apparently enjoyed the film but had a unique take on its themes (which has practically become his calling card as a director). He released his version of the film in 2002, starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank. Nolan kept the noire aspects of the film but expanded upon themes of moral ambiguity, guilt, and duty. It also features Robin Williams at his creepiest, Al Pacino looking so tired that he's more dead than alive (in a good way), one of the most asphyxiating scenes ever, and a truly satisfying resolution. While this is just one example, I think that this kind of "touching up" of a previous director's work is more commonplace than we think in films, especially with foreign films adapted to suit American audiences. Sometimes, even the same director improves upon his own film-- Pulp Fiction may very well be to Reservoir Dogs what Warcraft 2 was to Warcraft 1. I think there's a lot of room in the movie industry for re-imaginings of older films, provided you don't single out something like Citizen Kane, which is practically untouchable.
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Luna Eclipsed, May the Best Pet Win, and Hearts and Hooves Day are my three favorites of the season. All others are a cut below in my book.
Because It's About Time had a fairly advanced plot (considering the target audience), I kept waiting for some great jokes, but they never quite came.
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Sonikkustar wrote:
It seems that BizHawk runs arent counted for as valid movie files for the submission queue. I havent been able to submit my new TASes, which makes me wonder how adelikat submitted his Zanac TAS.
I'm pretty sure the site has coding that says
if run.username=="adelikat" then
publish(run)
else
submission_queue[#submission_queue+1]=run
end
Naturally, since I don't know HTML, I believe the site is programmed entirely in Lua...
Edit: Debugged my code.
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adelikat wrote:
is a Multi-platform emulator, for windows systems (currently). It emulates a number of cores and provides full rerecording support and all the tas tools that the community has become accustomed to.
Currently BizHawk emulates NES, SMS, GG, SG-1000, PCE, PCE CD, SGX, and TI-83 at release quality. It also includes experimental Genesis and Gameboy cores.
BizHawk is built with a modular design that allows for complete separation of client and emulation cores and provides an object oriented design that allows for reuse of material between cores easily. While the current cores are all written in C#, it can and will provide support for pure C++ cores to be integrated and interact with the GUI client.
Have I ever mentioned how much I love you, adelikat?
And just so that my comment isn't a waste of space, will Bizhawk's movie files be backward/cross- compatible with "standard" emulators?
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I don't have anything to add at this point except to compliment you on a nice sample run and to say I'll at least be watching this topic very closely. If I find the time and effort, I'd also like to contribute to the run somehow.
It's been too long since I've played this game. Is Lord of the Game mode part of Arcade or Story mode? In particular, does it have bonus levels and/or purchasable upgrades? That might affect long-term strategy.
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DarkKobold wrote:
rog wrote:
What this boils down to, is that the only way to do this run without absusing emulation glitches is to do the run in dolphin,
Actually, it is still abusing an emulation glitch. Just because Nintendo wrote the VC, doesn't magically make everything about their emulation perfect.
And, yes it runs on a console. However, I can install SNES9x on an Xbox. That doesn't magically make every SNES9x glitch legitimate.
I believe rog's point (and I think this is a good one) is that emulating the game on Dolphin is a faithful emulation of the Virtual Console version of the game.
I'm inclined to say stick with Mupen and ignore any other differences unless Dolphin's emulation is improved to the point where we can reliably use it to TAS as we please. Regardless, this is a trickier issue than I thought at first glance.
Edit: I believe I stated my view in another thread that emulation errors are par for the course. We have to embrace that even with a nearly perfect emulator, there will still be subtle differences in the game. This has been important in several issues over the years. (An example that comes to mind is the limited mobility of the physical analog stick due to the controller's plastic housing, compared with the theoretical range of movement a game will accept.) I even went so far as to say that if you loaded a ROM of Earthbound and it emulated perfectly as Super Mario World, then as long as it's beaten as fast as possible and no fixes are offered, then such a run would be perfectly valid. My viewpoint was met with some resistance, however.
I don't remember the topic and I don't care to search for it, but you're welcome to view my posting history to dredge it up.
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I see no controversy here. Minor differences aside (e.g., StarTropics having the yo-yo in the original game and the Island Star in the VC release), a single emulator should always be preferred to a nested emulator. If the game does not work in its native emulator, then a nested emulator should be acceptable. The only gray area might be if the game emulates with significant gameplay-affecting glitches (but is still playable) in the native emulator but emulates perfectly on the Virtual Console. That's why we have judges, though.
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Warp wrote:
Does anyone have an idea why they changed it? Executive meddling perhaps?
I believe basic economics dictates that it is more prudent to err strongly on the side of caution when controversy arises. (I call it basic economics in an effort to deflect any requests that I explain it at this hour. Nevertheless, I think it's fairly evident that large organizations are far more risk-averse than individuals.)
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boct1584 wrote:
Okay, marzojr makes a good point. What if I stipulate that I can reverse gravity up to a set number of times in the air? I would think once in midair (to land back on the ground) would be sufficient.
While it changes the nature of the challenge and I think it has a poor chance of being published, what if you only allowed yourself two gravity reversals at a time-- once to leave the ground and a second time to return to it? I don't know how the mechanics of spindashing works after reversing gravity, but you may even be able to beat bosses this way. Although gameplay will be 90% the same as a typical run, maybe something interesting will come of it.
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People seem really upset by Derpy's voice change and the overall editing of that scene, but I've never heard anyone complain about the lines they gave her, which I thought were terrible. They turn her from a somewhat clumsy but endearing character into an oblivious oaf who actively destroys anything she touches.
I guess I hadn't thought about it much, but I never really thought of Derpy as being unintelligent, just a bit overzealous and careless. With her voice and dialogue, she reminds me of Detective Homer Simpson. While I appreciate the gesture they were trying to make, I wouldn't mind seeing Derpy relegated to being a background character once more.
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Ferret Warlord wrote:
The first one was entertaining.
That one was uncomfortable.
I agree. One can't reasonably enjoy MLP without having a sense of humor about it. The original video had some really funny comments, even from the kids who were repulsed by the show. I'm a little disappointed by the negative reaction to it from the bronies (though I suspect it's the usual vocal minority/silent majority situation).
So some teens somewhere have a negative preconception about a cartoon aimed at little girls but embraced by adults as well? I'll grab the pitchfork, you get the torches!
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Warp wrote:
If we have a closed system that does some thermodynamic work, over time it will be able to do less and less work as entropy inside the system increases (until at some point it will not be able to do any work at all because entropy is too large).
If we have two such closed systems, identical in all other aspects except that in one of them entropy is significantly larger than in the other, and both of them are put to do the same work, then the one with the larger entropy will be able to do less work than the one with the lower entropy.
Hence there's a strong correlation between entropy and the amount of work that a closed system can do.
What's the catch? I still don't quite understand why describing entropy as "a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the amount of energy available for useful work" is so wrong. What exactly is wrong about it?
Coming back to this problem fresh, I think I've spotted the flaw. To remove useful energy from the system, it must do work. In thermodynamics, work is the P*dV term in the first law. When I suggested that integral of T*dS from the initial to the final state might be equal to the exergy if the volume is held constant, I was wrong because if the volume is constant, no work is being done. Therefore, exergy is surely related to entropy in a nontrivial way.
For a closed system (energy conserved), the change in heat is in fact equal to the work done by the system. That follows directly from the first law of thermodynamics and I should have been much quicker to spot it.
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Warp wrote:
Ferret Warlord wrote:
To briefly go back to a previous topic, if someone wants to spend a week of their life sitting in front of a theater, okay, sure, more power to them. Not gonna stop me from thinking, "Good grief, life is too precious to waste doing nothing in front of a theater! Go home and do something, y'know, useful!"
They are not doing nothing. They are having social interactions with like-minded people, they are bonding, they are forming new friends, they are having fun.
Not everything has to be "useful". Watching MLP episodes is not "useful", nor is watching TAS videos (or even making them). Going to a week-long camping trip is not "useful". However, it isn't necessarily a waste of life either. Each person should use their free time to do what they like, not what others think they should do, according to some uptight preconceived norms.
Surely you bear your own prejudices. Hunting? Political rallies? Religious service of certain denominations? Regardless of what group (or maybe even solo) activities irk you, I don't see a problem with Ferret Warlord's view as long as he keeps it to himself.
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Tub wrote:
Is there a rigorous definition of "macrostate", or would you just pick any macrostate you like?
As far as I'm aware, there is no such rigorous definition, but it's not difficult to come up with intuitive ones. We will never have the microstate of a large system (too many atoms to keep track of all at once, plus you would then start running into problems with your observations affecting the state). Whatever the macrostate is, it had better be something you can measure... macroscopically. It might be the difference in height of a mercury column that is open to the atmosphere on one end and in a vacuum on the other end (pressure) or it might be the height of a liquid in a bulb as it expands to fill a thin tube (temperature). Whatever it is, the observation should be statistically-based, usually around some mean value of some sort. While it isn't the definition of temperature, it can be shown that the temperature in many physical systems is proportional to the average kinetic energy of its component molecules. Some molecules will move a little fast, some a little slow, but temperature is your mean, macroscopic measurement. Perhaps the best way to "answer" your question is to ask you what your measuring device is. When properly interpreted, it should give a description of the macrostate.
Tub wrote:
For example, with the card deck we might also observe "cards angled slightly to the right when dealt" and "cards angled slightly to the left when dealt". We can use your formulas on that to get an entropy value, but it doesn't tell us anything about red/black any more, but about the dealer's hands. Can both be the entropy of the system, despite being different?
Let's say the system is quantized so that every card either tilts slightly to the left or slightly to the right (they act like spin-1/2 particles, by analogy). They never tilt more or less to one side, nor do they point straight up. In this case, we have two observations: red vs. black and tilted left vs. tilted right. If these variables can only be observed independently, we would need to revise our definition of the entropy to include not only red minus black but also tilted right minus tilted left. If the variables can be observed simultaneously, hoo boy. Then we need to categorize it into red tilted left, red tilted right, black tilted left, and black tilted right and then I'd need to know how you're measuring the macrostate since you should have a single scalar quantity out of all those different possibilities. In either case, however, we follow the exact same process as before: count up all the microstates corresponding to the macrostate we observe.
I believe this kind of bookkeeping of degrees of freedom comes up all the time in statistical mechanics. If you "forget" a degree of freedom, you will make different predictions about the system (if you're lucky, it won't affect the system appreciably in the temperature regimes you're interested in).
Tub wrote:
For the gas, you're naming pressure, temperature and volume. Do you observe them separately? Are they a combined macrostate?
I believe they are a combined macrostate (any three of the four relevant quantities will completely define the state of an ideal gas). Don't blindly trust me on that. (Or any of this, actually. I'm doing my best to draw on my intuitive understanding of Stat Mech. I am woefully bad at tackling real problems, but I hear that's not such a big deal when it comes to Stat Mech.)
Tub wrote:
Also, how would you determine the entropy of a card deck dealt inside an ideal gas?
*SLAP*
In all seriousness, this is actually an easy problem to tackle. Unless conditions are extremely unusual (many cards, low pressure, low temperature, tiny volume of gas), the ideal gas is going to have many orders of magnitude more entropy than the deck of cards. Therefore, the entropy of the cards won't add an appreciable amount of entropy. You can see this in the roughly 10^-21 J/K result I offered earlier for 100 cards. I believe that the entropy of a typical ideal gas (the kind you'd be able to deal cards in) is roughly of order unity in J/K. It's basically a logarithm (order unity, plus or minus a few orders of magnitude) times the Boltzmann constant, times the number of atoms. Since we're talking moles of atoms, we end up with order unity.
For a more thorough answer, as above, you would just add their individual entropies. This is because the ideal gas shouldn't affect the entropy of the deck or vice-versa. Microstates of the deck are totally independent of microstates of the gas, so to find the total number of microstates of the combined system, just multiply the number of microstates of the component systems together. Since we take the log of this number, this is equivalent to adding the entropies.
Tub wrote:
Can we even say "The entropy of this system is X", or do we have to add "..with respect to macrostate A" every time? And if so, how do we avoid comparing apples with oranges when dealing with entropy?
This is a very good question and I'm not sure how to answer it. I would say that certainly if you have enough physical quantities to completely define the macroscopic state of the system, then your entropy must be consistent, regardless of what quantities you are measuring. I believe, however, that if you have forgotten a crucial measurement (say you measured the pressure, temperature, and volume but not the net electric dipole moment, which happens to be measurable and nonzero), you don't get away with the entropy you calculate. The entropy of the fully-described system is accurate while the entropy you have is incorrect. This keeps you from gaining information via willful ignorance (something Bayesians think they can do).
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Dragonfangs wrote:
I see your point Bobo. Though I'd say that At the Gala does the exact same thing (tells us through song something we, as followers of the show, already know(they're really excited about going to the gala) as a setup for a later point), but I guess I'm not surprised you ranked that low too then^^.
Bingo. Its biggest crime, however, is having an almost non-existent rhyme scheme.
Dragonfangs wrote:
And since Party of One, I constantly think of Pinkie's almost unnatural urge to please others as more compulsive than anything. So I can't really agree with the uncanny valley comment :P.
She is by far the most cartoonish of the mane six. I think she makes an outstanding supporting character but I have some trouble enjoying episodes where she's the focus. A little bit of Pinkie goes a long way.
Ferret Warlord wrote:
To briefly go back to a previous topic...
(I wouldn't encourage that...)
Ferret Warlord wrote:
... if someone wants to spend a week of their life sitting in front of a theater, okay, sure, more power to them. Not gonna stop me from thinking, "Good grief, life is too precious to waste doing nothing in front of a theater! Go home and do something, y'know, useful!"
I had a similar thought earlier tonight. I think cosplaying is an ugly waste of time but-- crucially-- I almost always keep that opinion to myself. If I run into a topic on cosplay, I just think, "Welp, it's my own damn fault for clicking on it. They're not hurting me."
Ferret Warlord wrote:
On the topic of songs: I haven't heard all of them, but by and large I find myself not wanting to listen. "Giggle at the Ghosties" may be infectious, but it's a bad, annoying sort of infectious.
I'm really impressed with the storyboarding throughout the show, but especially during the songs. Here's a link to Giggle at the Ghosties, which you can mute to spare your ears, but I'll make a few comments on the details:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tiynTPuUUM
0:15-- Cute dance.
0:18-- Butt wiggle.
0:22-- Pinkie defying gravity as usual.
0:28-- You've got to love that jumping animation (I think they've used it several times throughout the show).
0:38-- Effing adorable. My mother used to call that kind of look "Stimpy eyes", in reference to Ren and Stimpy, when Stimpy would squint by raising his lower eyelids.
0:40-- Pinkie presses into Rainbow Dash's face, much to her disapproval.
0:47-- A great, sweeping arm movement.
0:50-- This is my favorite Pinkie Pie face of all time.
The rest of the song is fairly standard with not much to note. If we were judging it just on the merits of the song alone, I'd probably agree with you.
Ferret Warlord wrote:
The CMC performance and You Gotta Share may have been intended to be bad, but that doesn't make up for them being bad; having characters in the show snark about how awful that was simply doesn't win me over.
The CMC theme song really grew on me. I'm not going to analyze it second-by-second as I did above, but I think it also has some of the best animation in the show. They really stepped up the shading and I think the framerate is even a little higher. You might try watching it while it's muted to verify this. As for You Gotta Share, You Gotta Care, I get a kick out of Pinkie Pie's naive optimism as she peeks through the curtain at the start as well as the audience's confused and repulsed looks to each other. The animation on Pinkie's bobbing hair throughout the song is outstanding.
Ferret Warlord wrote:
Pinkie's Invitation has a decent melody, but the lyrics! Just like almost every other song in the show, the lyrics are reminiscent of something a high school senior wrote during the poetry unit in English class just to get their instructors off their back. The words and rhymes don't flow very well.
I said I like my songs to advance the plot and this is one of the best Pinkie Pie songs for that purpose. I also think it's hilarious that we so rarely see Pinkie Pie exhausted, so it's kind of a treat here.
Ferret Warlord wrote:
Art of the Dress is probably the best of the ones I've heard since Tabitha is a great singer and is overall very fun, but is docked points for ripping almost wholesale from other sources and including such asinine lyrics as, "I'm stitching Twilight's dress!" Um, okay?
Erm... but Rarity's singing voice is Kazumi Evans. Don't ask me why she sounds so off in Becoming Popular (Shoot! Forgot that one! Throw it in at number 6!). I thought MLP really expanded on Putting it Together, which is all I can ask for from an homage. The MLP version is a bit more rhythmically stable and varied in its verses ("Dressmaking's easy...", "Hour by hour...", and "Piece by piece..." are all original creations, as far as I could tell). I love the exasperated way Rarity sings "Dressmaking's easy" in the second half of the song. It really reveals her emotional state. And you're absolutely right about, "I'm stitching Twilight's dress," and, "I'm sewing them together," which make me cringe a little when I hear them (they're sort of cop-out lyrics). I think the song is amazing even despite those shortcomings.
Ferret Warlord wrote:
Oddly, I find both of Pinky's songs in The Ticketmaster to be okay. Nothing good, nothing bad.
I think her Gala Fantasy Song may be her weakest entry (maybe with the exception of her piggy song, if we're including season 2). I like Twilight is my Bestest Friend mostly thanks to Twilight's monotone interruption at every line.
In conclusion, my opinion reigns supreme and no one can question it. You are all obligated to like the same songs that I like because my arguments were ironclad. Those are my reasons for liking the songs and I hope you eventually warm up to them, but if not, you seem to enjoy the show for plenty of other reasons. Even if you don't like the songs, I think you'd have to admit they usually put a lot of effort into them.
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Warp wrote:
Bobo the King wrote:
So I have a much simpler answer that should satisfy everyone: "No."
I got the notion from wikipedia, where it's described exactly like that.
If it's incorrect, then what would be a more correct description, in layman terms? (I'm honestly asking because I want to know.)
A more common (and probably older) description is that entropy describes the amount of "chaos" in the system, but AFAIK that's an even more vague and inaccurate description. In some sense it might be equivalent to "amount of energy available for useful work" (if we understand that as some kind of ordering, and hence the less ordered the system, the less able it is to perform useful work). Also, equating entropy with chaos leads to tons of confusion.
Well, you're asking for a layperson's definition of a concept that's mathematically convoluted. If I were talking to my non-physicist friends or family, I'd just say entropy is the amount of disorder in a system. As far as I know, there's no middle ground between that and the formal, mathematical (or physical) definition.
Fortunately, I'm not talking to friends or family, I'm talking to you, and I know you're not afraid to get your feet at least a little wet. The best I can do is walk you through a toy problem.
The following is based on the overall magnetization of a paramagnetic substance, but in case you're not familiar with the physical laws governing that (though it's not especially crucial), we'll just work with a very large deck of cards. I have adapted this example from Daniel Schroeder's Thermal Physics and my own memory.
Suppose you have an enormous shuffled deck of cards that are all either red or black. You do not know what ratio the two flavors of cards come in, nor do you need to. You deal off a substantial number of them, say 100, then count up the number of red cards and subtract from them the number of black cards. This is your macrostate. It is what we can observe macroscopically (perhaps we have a machine that can count the number of red and black cards, but doesn't tell us what order they came in). What we are interested in is the number of microstates corresponding to this equivalent macrostate-- i.e., how many ways we might have achieved the same number. For example, if we found 99 red and 1 black, the number of microstates corresponding to the macrostate would be 100-- the first card could be the black one, or the second one, or the third one, etc., all the way up to the 100th one.
The general formula for the number of microstates corresponding to a single macrostate in this system is
Ω = ncr(N, Nblack) = N!/(Nred!*Nblack!)
where N is the total number of cards, Nred is the number of red cards, and Nblack is the number of black cards. You can quickly check that Ω is 1 if all the cards are either red or black (there is clearly just one microstate that corresponds with each of these macrostates) and Ω is 100 if just one card is red or black, as I showed earlier. If the deck is fair, then the most "likely" state is with half the cards red and half of them black which can be analyzed using Stirling's approximation to yield an Ω of roughly 10^29. Clearly, as the distribution of cards gets closer to 50-50, the system will strongly gravitate toward there being 50 red cards and 50 black cards (+7 or so, according to probability theory).
So let's say there's a 50-50 distribution of red and black cards. That's the macrostate and I've already computed the corresponding number of microstates. What is the entropy of the system? We have to do two things: First, it's a large number that will grow catastrophically (more than exponentially) as the size of the system increases. Second, it has the wrong units. To solve the first problem, we take the natural log. To solve the second, we multiply by the Boltzmann constant, 1.38*10^-23 J/K. The entropy of this deck of card system is therefore 9.22*10^-22 J/K. Note that, consistent with the intuitive definition, the entropy would be very low if many of the cards were red or black and it is at its highest when half the cards are red and half are black.
As it turns out, this definition happens to be consistent with the definition demanded by the first law of thermodynamics: dE = T*dS - P*dV + mu*dN. I cannot show this for you, not because it is too complicated but because I don't regularly use statistical mechanics and I am not familiar with the proof offhand. If you followed the derivation up to this point and are still interested, I'll try to look it up.
Almost all derivations of entropy are dependent on the ergodic assumption which basically states that all microstates are equally probable (in this context, it would mean the deck is well-shuffled). As a counterexample to this, suppose there is an ever so slight electrostatic attraction between red and black cards, due to the inks used to make them. In this case, you would be slightly more likely to draw a red followed by a black or a black followed by a red rather than two consecutive cards of the same color. Trying to account for this will wreak havoc on your probability distribution, rendering the problem practically unsolvable (I think you can get around it by using techniques like the Metropolis algorithm, but this is getting too technical even for me). Thankfully, the ergodic assumption is at least very plausible for systems near their most probable state, but it is nevertheless unsettling from a theoretical standpoint (at least I think so).
If you want to apply this to other systems-- say, an ideal gas-- you would determine the macrostate (the pressure, temperature, and volume), then divide up the position and momentum space of the system into equal quantum bins and examine the probability for each particle to be found in a bin. This leads to popular statements like, "The probability that all the air molecules in this room will suddenly rush to one side and leave a vacuum on the other is vanishingly small." I might have even been able to carry out that calculation for you a few months ago, but statistical mechanics is all a blur to me.
Edit: By the way, I think the integral of the temperature with respect to entropy from a system's initial state to its maximally "scrambled" state is the exergy as long as it's not changing in volume or allowed to exchange particles with the universe. This is just a guess, though. At the very least, it should provide an upper bound to the exergy in such cases. Because the conditions I placed are so finicky, I'm not surprised they give exergy its own definition.
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I don't recall Warp saying, "MY DEFINITION OF ENTROPY IS THE RIGHT ONE! ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE IS LYING! I'M A SUPER-SMART MATH GUY AND THEREFORE YOU CANNOT QUESTION MY DEFINITIONS!"
In fact, his actual quote was
Warp wrote:
Isn't a more modern, semi-informal definition that entropy describes how much energy there is available for useful work in a system?
(Note the question mark.)
So I have a much simpler answer that should satisfy everyone: "No."
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Warp wrote:
Bobo the King wrote:
Pinkie Pie's Smile Song? It really just tells us what we already know: Pinkie Pie is friendly to everyone and likes spreading cheer. Sure, that point ended up being the focus of the episode, but the song seemed like pure fluff.
I'd say that if the song caused emotions on someone, it succeeded in its goal perfectly. What more could a song wish for?
(And no love for "you gotta share, you gotta care"?-) )
I actually had a conversation on this topic with a friend just the other night. I explained that I value experiences over emotions. From his response (and other people's tastes), I get the feeling I'm a little unusual in that regard.
The Smile Song is certainly the happiest song on the show (edging out Winter Wrap Up), but it's this sort of endless, unjustified exuberance that makes it a little creepy. I think it's unsettling for the same reason people don't like clowns-- with nothing but happiness, there's no underlying drama and it sits at the bottom of the uncanny valley. I'd have preferred another verse in The Perfect Stallion to the ending chorus in the Smile Song.
As for You Gotta Share, You Gotta Care, I excluded the Pinkie Pie songs because they're on a whole other level (and YGS, YGC is by far my favorite Pinkie Pie song). More subtle exclusions were So Many Wonders and the Cutie Mark Crusaders Song. So Many Wonders was too short for me to consider it a "full" song, plus Fluttershy is by far my favorite pony, so I didn't feel like I could fairly rate it. The Cutie Mark Crusaders Song was hilarious, but because it's so bad it's good (not unlike Pinkie Pie's songs), I didn't know where to put it on the list.
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Dragonfangs wrote:
So gais, Pinkie's Smile song leaves me in joyful tears whenever I hear it. <3 this show.
I dunno. I thought it was one of their weakest (if not their outright weakest) "featured" songs. For starters, it just isn't my kind of music, but I don't want to focus on that. I think what really bugs me about it is that it's the first major song that doesn't advance the plot at all.
• Winter Wrap Up demonstrated what all the ponies do.
• Art of the Dress did a fantastic job of showing Rarity coming unhinged under the pressure.
• At the Gala was filled with optimism that set the mane six up for disappointment later in the episode.
• Find a Pet showed how picky Rainbow Dash is (and was just awesome anyway).
• The Flim Flam Brothers was like the Simpsons' Monorail song, winding the crowd up into senseless enthusiasm.
• The Perfect Stallion was short and sweet, showcasing the many ineligible bachelors around Ponyville.
Pinkie Pie's Smile Song? It really just tells us what we already know: Pinkie Pie is friendly to everyone and likes spreading cheer. Sure, that point ended up being the focus of the episode, but the song seemed like pure fluff.
Just for fun, I'd rank the songs:
1) Find a Pet
2) Art of the Dress
3) The Flim Flam Brothers
4) Winter Wrap Up
5) The Perfect Stallion
6) Smile Song
7) At the Gala
I was thinking about it recently and I realized that one of the things I value most in a good song is its rhyme scheme. That's why I especially like Find a Pet and Art of the Dress-- their rhymes are unexpected and keep you on your toes. At the Gala almost forgoes a rhyme scheme.
Anyway, that's all just my opinion. I'm really glad you (and lots of others) enjoyed the song. No reason not to have more songs to suit different fans' tastes.