I was just thinking that the show wouldn't easily pass the inverted Bechdel Test.
Edit: Speaking of which, when you think about it, MLP's universe seems to be quite matriarchal in nature. The vast majority of important positions, from positions in the government to just running a business, are mostly occupied by females, while most males are usually delegated to servitude (as royal guards, carriage horses and, such as in Spike's case, assistants) with very few exceptions.
Because the world outside mom's basement is a dark and scary place whiere people actually expect basic social competency of him, so he dares not go there.
But outside there's this big flaming orb that burns your skin and gives you cancer...
Whether or not at least one of our spatial dimensions is infinite is related to the topology of the universe, though I think that having an open universe doesn't necessarily require any dimension to be infinite. I'm not even sure if infinite dimensions are compatible with the big bang model - I can understand a small universe growing, but how would its size increase from a finite value to infinity?
I'm not a physicist, nor even a mathematician, but I would imagine that it's mathematically not impossible to have a zero-volume singularity that nevertheless is infinite in some manner (such as being an infinite line or plane) and which then expands. And that's just thinking about it in a cartesian manner. When we go to topology things can get really weird. You don't even need a singularity extending to infinity in order for it to have some infinite dimension.
But even assuming such a spacetime, the construction of an infinite singularity is still a problem. Postulating "it just magically pops into existence" or "it has always been there" doesn't count.
Well, the whole question of how the initial singularity became, where it came from and what its original characteristics were is completely open, so I wouldn't dare to postulate anything about it (eg. that it must have been a point, for instance.)
Reminds me a bit of the logic that some vaccine-opposers use, like: "Diphtheria vaccines are a scam. There haven't been but a few dipththeria cases reported each year in the US" (or whichever country.) "The drug industry is just selling vaccines for their own profit."
They don't seem to understand that there are so few cases because of the diphtheria vaccines, not regardless.
It would be cool if there were some way of distinguishing between manual rerecording and scripted rerecording. Both numbers would be informative. Unfortunately neither record files nor emulators support this.
It's also not ambiguous because console game modifications have to be hacks (the whole point of consoles is to have locked software and hardware content).
I did not disagree at all with the concept that modifying a console game requires hacking. My objection was simply to using the word "hack" for an extremely specific form of hacking which in other contexts already has another name.
It's a bit like someone asked how they can make a TAS, and someone answered "use a program." That's not very descriptive. The more proper answer would be "use an emulator." An emulator is indeed a program, but there's no reason to use the more generic term when the more specific term exists and is more descriptive.
Actually many AIDS denialist use it as a convenient excuse. After all, you don't die from AIDS itself (ie. from your weakened immune system). Instead, you die of whatever disease (or diseases) that you catch and your immune system is too weak to fight normally. Thus the denialists have a good excuse: "He didn't die of AIDS, he died of pneumonia."
(Well, duh. Why exactly do they think that AIDS is so dangerous? Because even diseases which normally are mostly harmless, such as pneumonia, which has less than 1% mortality rate among people with normal immune systems, can kill you because your immune system is devastated by AIDS.)
The fact that HIV-positive AIDS-denialists tend to die prematurely from diseases that do not normally kill people, while HIV-negative AIDS-denialists don't, doesn't seem to faze them.
Sadly, with the advent of scripts and bots, the "most rerecords" statistic has become practically obsolete because it doesn't tell much. As much as I would hate to see it go, perhaps it should be dropped from that page. (The list could still be available, just not listed there, because it says little about anything.) The "fewest rerecords" could still be informative, but would feel odd without its counterpart...
(I know I could remove it myself because I have editor rights, but this was kind of a semi-poll to see people's opinions. Possibly wrong thread for that, so I apologize if it's disruptive.)
Hack: A modification of a game that was not programmed explicitly with that possibility in mind.
Mod: A modification of a game that was programmed explicitly with that possibility in mind.
You may want to define them like that, but I don't think that's how it works in reality. Many mods are made to games which were not really designed to support modding (and in many cases it actually requires some level of hacking of the game). And as I commented in my original post, "hack" is a much broader and generic term than simply "modifying a game".
Using the same word to mean both "use computer-technological expertise to figure out how a system works, usually without the system creator's support or consent" and "modifying a game by hacking it" can be confusing. A generic term is used for a very specific purpose.
(Edit: How about a compromise: "Hack-mod", or something similar? Yes, I know that it will never catch on, but just throwing some ideas.)
Console games that have been modified in some manner have been called "hacks" here. However, I propose that we stop calling them that and use the more accurate term "mods" instead.
"Hack" is a much more generic term that can mean a lot of things. Modding a game can be considered one form of "hacking", but "modding" is a much more specific and therefore accurate name for it than the more generic "hacking". Also, "modding" is a quite established term in gaming.
I don't think there is anything that would fundamentally forbid that, it just couldn't happen in the universe we live in.
Isn't it kind of an open question whether our universe is open or closed?
If it's open then it would have required for the initial singularity to have a certain topology (because you obviously can't get an open, infinite universe by expanding a point singularity). Don't ask me what this topology would be, though, because that goes well beyond my grasp.
I have to admit, the word "hack" in the submission title threw me off. Made me think it was just another hack.
Curiously, I'd say that in this case the usage of the word "hack" is more accurate than normally. Those modified games would be more correctly named "mods".
Morimoto's smb3 is legendary.
It was amazing for famtasia standard.
Not to diminish the worth of it, but I wonder if there isn't quite a bit of nostalgia filtering attached to that particular run. It has the notoriety of being one of the very first TASes of an emulated game and therefore it's historically quite important, but is it really all that good? After all, it even got obsoleted later by another faster Famtasia run (IIRC)...
If a new major category is implemented in some manner, I suggest that we at least consider creating another one as well, so we have three:
- Speedruns.
- "Superplays".
- Concept demos.
(Not a new idea, of course, but just putting it out there once again for consideration.)
Another question: A gravitational singularity doesn't need to be a point. However, can it be infinite? (If yes, would it be an infinite line or surface? Can it be a 4-dimensional surface?)
"Tool-Assisted Superplay" doesn't require completing the game, so Pokemon Yellow fits TASing well.
Arbitrary goals are not usually accepted, and not ending the game tends to be quite much such a thing (because the termination point almost invariably tends to be quite arbitrary.) If we allow runs ending wherever the author wants, it opens up a whole can of worms.
(Btw, personally I find it a bit annoying that so many people seem to want to distance the TASing genre from its roots of speedrunning, as if the original "tool-assisted speedrun" were somehow a name to be avoided. This especially after the years of "fighting" to get tool-assisted speedrunning to be widely accepted as a legit variant of speedrunning rather than something that's despised and looked down by the regular speedrunning community. "Tool-assisted superplay" is a backronym, really, not the original meaning of "TAS".)
