The top-100 NES soundtracks thingie reminded me of something I have noticed before: Many of the so-called 8-bit chip-tunes use arpeggios (rapidly alternating between three or more notes) in order to kind of emulate more sound channels than there are actually available. The sound of arpeggios almost defines C64 music, and was popular in many other "8-bit" gaming computers such as the Spectrum 128 (just one example of many).
However, I have noticed that almost no NES game uses arpeggios in their soundtracks. There are a few that do, but they are extremely rare. I have always wondered why.
(And please; this is not intended to be a discussion on which style is "better". I'm just curious to know why arpeggios are almost inexistent in NES games.)
I'm not really sure that such "game-specific" TASes would be accepted here
Their major problem is that more often than not such files are of the form "this object is at this place at this time" rather than "this button is pressed at this time". The problem is that there's no way of knowing if there's cheating involved (in other words, the file format has not been edited to perform things that are impossible normally via keyboard/mouse only, such as the character moving too fast).
Poe's Law as an article doesn't exist on Wikipedia
I assumed that Bisqwit meant that, but when I checked Wikipedia, the article was there alright, so thus I wondered what else he could have been referred to. Because this works for me just fine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Not every country celebrates halloween (even though in the last couple of years they have tried to forcibly introduce it to Finland for a reason that still escapes me; well other than trying to cash in, of course).
Quit taking things so seriously, man. Loosen up, calm down, and carve a pumpkin.
My comment was not intended to be serious (even though reading it afterward does indeed make it sound more serious than intended). My wording might not have been completely well-thought.
Not every country celebrates halloween (even though in the last couple of years they have tried to forcibly introduce it to Finland for a reason that still escapes me; well other than trying to cash in, of course).
There are animals that are forced to commit immoral acts to survive.
...
Plants lack any form of a central/semi-central nervous system. They are sentient though, so it's still slightly immoral as well.
No offense intended (and I assure you I'm completely honest and serious about that), but I think I'll have to pass on commenting about the above, or this conversation way turn unproductive. (I'm also very tempted to draw a comparison to another regular visitor to this forum, but I'll pass on that as well.)
Let's just leave it at: Ok, we disagree on some points.
It's certainly immoral to kill animals. We can choose not to, but we do it anyway.
That argument makes no sense. There are tons of things that we can "choose not to", but doing it anyways doesn't automatically make it immoral.
And where do you draw the line? Is killing flies immoral? Cockroaches? Bacteria? Worms?
Killing animals is ugly and unaesthetic. We have to suppress the idea of it happening to be able to enjoy our meals properly.
To most people childbirth is ugly and unaesthetic (especially when they see it in person). Not a good measurement of what is "moral" and "immoral".
Edit: I'd like to add that "other animals do it as well, therefore it can't be that immoral" is really a very silly argument imo. Where does the presumption come from that everything animals naturally do must be morally alright?
Excuse me? Do you understand that some animals are carnivores, right? In other words, they cannot survive on anything else than other animals. How does acquiring food make it not "morally alright"?
About the survival of the fittest, I'd have to say that mankind has certainly not survived because we're the fittest on our own, we're only doing so well because we're highly intelligent social animals, and as a group we are strong.
"The fittest" does not mean "the fittest individual". It means "the fittest group of individuals". And individual does not survive. A species does.
FODA wrote:
It is immoral to eat meat because, like kuwaga said, we really don't have to eat meat at all.
We really don't have to eat carrots at all either. Does that make eating carrots immoral?
Doing something that one isn't technically forced to do is not any kind of measurement of morality.
So why do we raise and kill young animals by the billions? To satisfy a pleasure. The pleasure of taste. That is why, to me, eating meat is immoral.
That's like saying that since kitchen knives are used to kill people, we should ban kitchen knives completely. (Or substitute any tool that is used to kill people.)
I think the immoral part here is that we don't have to go through any risk (or any effort at all) to kill for food. In that sense we're now closer to carrion eaters than hunters. Many vegetarians I've asked say they would have no problem eating meat of an animal they'd hunted in person.
There are all kinds of animals that do not take much risk nor effort to eat other animals. Regardless, I really don't see what effort has to do with morality.
I think this notion is rather utopistic. I see these people envisioning nature in a very idealistic way, such as it consisting of mostly gallant predators (such as wolves, lions, and so on) and beautiful plant-eating galloping prey (such as deers, antelopes and so on), where there's a perfect balance and natural order between hunter and prey.
The reality is much cruder than that.
Drinking milk or eating eggs does not necessarily mean the cow/chicken has to suffer or die. Eating meat does.
You understand that in nature animals kill other animals for food all the time, sometimes even in the most gruesome and tortuous ways? Exactly how is that any less "immoral" than humans killing animals for food?
Mistreatment and unnecessary suffering may be seen as immoral, but considering simply eating animals as immoral is just outright hypocrisy IMO. Humans eating animals is exactly as natural as any other animal eating animals.
One other thing. Is Hourglass r77 stable enough to do other PC TASes now? I was kinda hoping I could get back to Lyle in Cube Sector.
I'm still waiting for a modern Doom TAS...
On the subject of branches & goals, I think that the "best ending" should be removed and have this be the main branch. Any other branch would just be this run without the last 18-20 minutes. So I dont really see the point in having another TAS that is claiming to be different when it would be almost identical to this one.
The default TAS is assumed to reach the/an ending as fast as possible, regardless of the means. This TAS uses an alternative goal that makes it not as fast as would be theoretically possible, and hence the category tag is warranted, IMO. I don't think it matters if there's only one published TAS of a game, it still warrants the category tag if it's not a "default goal" run.
Actually not eating meat is not only viable now, it is also smarter as resource management for the society.
As long as you don't go fully vegan. (Children require animal products for normal growth and development. There are sad cases of new age hippie vegans permanently damaging their own children by forcing them on a vegan diet.)
I just love the contradiction of the same person talking about the evolutionary history of the human diet (we are omnivores for a reason) and at the same time discussing the "immorality" of eating meat. Effectively you are saying "evolution has made us omnivores, which is good, but we shouldn't eat meat, because it's bad".
Please don't mix tree-hugging and science. The result is not pretty. :P
One of the problems is that there is no standard load time as it varies between each system
That's not a problem. Lots of things vary between systems, such as CPU speeds, amount and speed of RAM, and so on. Each emulator emulates each individual system independently. They don't share common "average" specs between emulated systems.
Even if the hardware (in this particular case the CD drive) varied on the same system (which I don't think is very common, as invariability of the hardware is one of the basic tenets of game consoles) that wouldn't still be the problem, as an emulator could easily emulate any of the possibilities that are/were available for the console in question.
The actual problem is that, unlike a game cartridge, the speed of a CD drive is effectively non-determistic from the point of view of the CPU (for instance, it's very easy for seek times to vary by many frames depending on a ton of things, most prominently the physical properties of the drive and the disk).
Btw, what happened to the (admittedly not-absolutely-strict) rule that the English version of a game should be preferred unless there's a good reason not to?
Or was it so that the English translation is not "official"? (I have played the game, but I don't remember if the English version was "official" or a third-party translation.)
If we ate natural food we wouldn't need to brush our teeth, but ever since we started to burn our food we haven't eaten natural food, which is why we have caries. Many diseases like the many forms of cancer are the result of us burning food, which destroys the nutrients in the food and creates toxic chemicals that we then consume. Our bodies have evolved to eat the food that exists in nature, the raw food that animals eat. Our bodies haven't evolved to eat burned food, so we get problems like caries and diseases.
What a beautiful example of post-new-age hippie dogma.
Caries goes way back well beyond the times that we started cooking food. Besides, cooking food has nothing to do with caries. The germs that cause caries thrive on carbohydrates, and cooking has nothing to do with this. It doesn't matter if you eat your meat raw or well done, it makes no difference to those germs.
From an evolutionary point of view, cooking food has actually been a crucial step that helped humans to survive and thrive. That's because cooking kills harmful bacteria from the food, lessening cases of food poisoning, increasing chances of survival. It may well be that without it humans might have never become the predominant species.
Say, why don't you put your money where your mouth is, and start eating completely "naturally", ie. eat all your meat and vegetables completely raw, without any kind of cooking. Let's see how long before you get your first food poisoning. (Oh, and when you do get it, don't go to the doctor. After all, they are just evil scientists who fight against Mother Nature and Her ways. Instead, only take natural remedies. Mother Nature is sure to heal you from the food poisoning She gave you in the first place.)
I watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTkuCXRZnyM
and I'm like: "Paisanos? PAISANOS? Mario is Italian, not Spanish!"
Critical research failure much? Arrivederci.
