8 red coins was absolutely incredible. The wall jump during the platform ride was a fun time waster while waiting for the platform to get where you needed to be. Collecting the final red coins without using the arrow platform was awesome. Very well done.
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For sure, there will be others. Steve was just a very a likeable fellow, and people feel bad about the way he died. The Crocodile Hunter was a fun show, and I don't know if I'll ever enjoy a nature show that much again.
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I can only recall a few celebrity deaths that had any effect on me. I remember turning on the news in 1997 and seeing that Princess Diana had been critically injured in a car accident, and my mother and I watched the coverage until the announcement of her death. I remember thinking that it would have a profound impact on the world, and saying to myself that I now lived in a world without Princess Diana, but I had no great love for the British monarchy, or for her. It was shock rather than sadness.
I recall being disappointed to learn that Caroll O'Connor was dead. Besides teaching the world about prejudice and social change through his role as Archie Bunker, the thing I respected most about him was that he made a commercial where he talked about his son's suicide. I know that it filled him with pain until the day he died, and I admired his courage to take his anti-drug message public in such a personal way. I was certainly disappointed, but his death wasn't unexpected at his age, so I don't recall any deep sadness following the news.
I think I was sad when Ernie Coombs died. He had a long-running children's show called Mr. Dressup in Canada, along the lines of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood or Captain Kangeroo. He was one of my favorite people as a child.
The worst, up until now, was the passing of Charles M. Schulz. There can't be a man, woman or child in the western world who wasn't raised on Peanuts. The man devoted five decades of his life to making people happy, and I think that's special. He could have retired twenty years ago, but continued to write a comic strip each and every day until he no longer could. It's a rare gift.
The thing I've notice about the death of Steve Irwin is that I don't feel any better yet. I never met him, but I feel as bad as I did yesterday. It just doesn't feel right that a man with such passion for saving the world and it's natural wonders should be dead at 44. The living things on this planet need people like him to serve as their advocate. In a world where the rising price of gasoline draws outrage and demands for government intervention rather than any thought of conservation, our priorities are clear. We don't care about having natural habitat or clean water or breathable air if it's going to cost us anything. If saving the world is inconvenient, then it isn't worth saving. Why aren't there more men like Steve Irwin to remind us how precious nature is; how wonderous life is? Maybe in a world with 6 billion people, we've lost respect for life. The fact that life exists at all is miraculous, and every animal is awe-inspiring in its own way. Steve was passionate about creatures I would never have thought of as beautiful. He saw the beauty in all living things, and reminded me that people who share his enthusiasm are the only hope for thousands of species that could be lost before the century is over. It seems unjust for nature's champion to have been struck down by one of its creatures. In the process of filming a children's program to pass his message of the value of life to a new generation, his life was ended by one of the creatures he fought so hard to preserve. Bad things happen to good people, and his death is a reminder of how fragile all livings things are. If an invincible man can be killed by a stingray, this is an affirmation of how nature's mightiest creatures can be endangered. Not even lions and elephants and whales are safe from the injustice that man commits against nature every single day. We'll open our eyes one day and the tiger will be gone, just as I opened my eyes one day and the Crocodile Hunter was gone. Life is like that. It doesn't get any easier to live with that knowledge, does it?
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Yes, Metal Cap was extremely well done. It's amusing to see Metal Mario long jump so well, and also to continue collecting coins after hitting the switch.
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The thing is, a stingray shouldn't EVER be called "death in the face"...
I consider deep sea diving pretty dangerous, but you're right, I'm pretty sure this was a freak accident. Steve knew where animals' limits were, and wouldn't have provoked the stingray in any way. It was probably curious or just passing by, and in an instant, a barb entered Steve's chest. It comes down to, Steve had a dangerous line of work and, while doing something dangerous (shooting a documentary under water), something unexpected happened.
atro city wrote:
The guy was 44 years old, and that's pretty old for a death-defying croc-wrangler.
I don't consider Steve Irwin a daredevil. He wasn't jumping motorcycles over canyons. He was getting really close to dangerous animals, but he knew how far he could go. For my money, 44 was too young. He revolutionized his genre. In my day, a nature program was Lorne Green's New Wilderness or Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom: shows where someone would set up a zoom camera a half kilometre away. Steve interacted with nature and talked to the camera. He made it real, and drew the audience in. I can't imagine the current generation watching traditional nature programs. The world owes him a debt of thanks for making nature and conservation interesting to modern viewers. This was definitely too soon.
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This is horrible news. A man who stared death in the face so many times should have lived forever. I'm sorry to see that it finally caught up with him.
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Practice it in the endless stairway leading to the final Bowser. As long as you have less than 70 stars, you have infinite room to try it out (this is how I learned to do it). When you make it to the top, you'll be a master, young padawan. As far as getting into Jolly Roger Bay, don't bother. There's not enough room for a normal human being to make it.
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The original was for the Famicom Disk System (FDS). You could play with an emulator, but it probably couldn't be considered for any kind of record. It would have to be for entertainment purposes only.
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I played the heck out of the orginal Advanced Wars, but AW2 I thought the storyline was corny and the graphics seemed ugly by comparison. The new, more powerful tank didn't make the game more fun, but it did add complexity. I loved the original because it reminded me of chess: there were just a few units for each aspect of warfare, and the number of possible positions is enormous. Despite have relatively few pieces, chess and go are two of my favorite games. Their complexity may make them unsolvable, so I assumed that AW/AW2 would also be unsolvable, meaning that you could never be sure if you had played a perfect game. Despite my dislike for AW2, I think they're both great candidates for TAS because they may always be improvable, leading to innovation for years to come (much like chess and go). The only problem is that the campaigns are so long. Do you have an estimate of how long the run is going to be? It may be necessary to watch on fast forward.
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Nintendo did a great job of updating the graphics in Super Mario All-Stars while still retaining the look and feel of the original game, but for TAS purposes I would probably still prefer to see the original NES version. I'll definitely watch it whichever one you choose. I vote warpless, since there's isn't a warpless SMB2J run yet.
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Nope, never took it seriously; you clearly knew enough about chess to know what a blunder is. In fact, I'd wager that you're a far better chess player than I am, considering that I'm 1600-1700 USCF on a good day. You were clearly being silly, so I tried to be silly in response by writing "The Dutch Defense is the only response to d4 now?" (the joke was on me, because I confused the Dutch with the KID, which is more absurd than the statement I was trying to make light of). That was going to be the whole post, but then I decided to explain the comment for the benefit of anyone who wouldn't know what I was talking about, so I added that d5 hadn't fallen out of favor. By the time I added that it was "a ridiculous exaggeration", which I was serious about, the post was no longer funny, but I wanted to be the first to respond to your statement about d5, so I left it as it was. I'm just glad that the merits of the move were debated academically and that the lack of emotion (or emoticons) in my objection didn't lead to a flame war. I had never considered using Wikipedia to study chess, but Wikipedia was one of Google's top suggestions when I searched for information about the Queen's Gambit.
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It's true that Queen's Gambit became less popular in the last 50 years. Originally, it was pretty much the only response to d4.
Wikipedia wrote:
As the merits of 1.d4 started to be explored it was the Queen's Gambit which was played most often; more popular than all other 1.d4 openings combined.
Fischer briefly popularized the KID in the 70s, and Kasarov in the 80s. Chess theory is always evolving, of course, so openings gain and lose popularity all the time. KID appears to be declining in popularity at the moment.
Wikibooks wrote:
At World Class level, there is some concern that Black's concept is very committal, leading Former Champion Garry Kasparov to discontinue his use of the opening shortly before he retired from the game.
I don't personally care for the closed and Indian systems after d4. I realized that the comment was tongue-in-cheek, but a blunder is an immediate substantial loss of material or position, like losing a piece or falling into a mating trap -- that is, a move that one is unlikely to recover from. One could lightheartedly refer to d5 as unwise or ill-conceived, but blunder seemed a bit strong, so I decided to point it out. Far from being a blunder, it may be the most popular response to d5 at the grandmaster level, and it's my preferred move as black.
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I haven't looked at the game yet, but the commentary certainly got my attention. The Dutch Defense is the only response to d4 now? I'm pretty sure that the Queen's Gambit hasn't fallen out of favor for black. Calling it a blunder is a ridiculous exaggeration.
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I'm afraid that that's the depressing reality of human existence. We can never know if the visible universe is the whole universe, or just a tiny part of it, because the basic laws of the universe prevent us from observing matter that is farther away in light years than it has existed in years. If the "universe" is essentially a solar system or galaxy in a much larger universe, the nearest component of which is 100 billion or even a trillion light years away, but has only existed for 99 billion years or less, we won't be able to prove that it exists, and we can't prove that it doesn't exist. Up until now, our ability to learn about the nature of the universe was only limited by the tools we could invent to observe the universe with, but soon the limiting factor may be the laws of physics. I find it frustrating to know that we will never be able to answer such questions. As the discussion went on Everybody Loves Raymond:
Ray: So God made us smart enough to know that there's an answer, but not smart enough to figure out what it is?
Robert: Come on!!!
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When you say that it is generally accepted that there is nothing outside of the universe, do you mean the visible universe? I recently saw some kind of television show about the possibility that the universe is much larger than the visible universe, and the rest of the universe is so far away that its light hasn't reached us yet. We aren't able to observe anything for the universe to "eat", but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot more stuff out there. Just be patient and some cosmic creature may drop the universe a bone in a few billion years.
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Noticing that particles come in many sizes (and seeing the ending of Men In Black), I've certainly considered the possibility that the universe is a giant organism/brain/machine. Solar system are atoms (the star is the nucleus, the planets are electrons), galaxies are cells, and clusters of galaxies form organs and the like. It would be rather amusing if we humans, who tend to think that the universe is for them and other tiny aliens on similar worlds, were in fact little more than bacteria or viruses within an organism too massive for us to comprehend. Such an organism might require eons to consider a thought or take an action, and understand reality on an entirely different scale. We would have no more ability to recognize the existence of such a creature than an amoeba or other micro-organism would to understand our existence.
Obviously the universe can be both infinitely large and infinitely small, as we are only able to detect the existence of objects that are close enough to have had light or radiation reach us, so the "universe", which may be a living creature, or an organ in a creature, or a desk or a sneaker, could also be a single atom in a geometrically larger organism so vast that the rest of its light will never reach us. Once you start to go down that road, there's no end to it.
Edit: Well, okay. One more. We think of the Big Bang as the beginning of the universe, but the visible universe may be a tiny quantity of matter and energy inside a universe that it 10^1000 times larger. What if the universe is, in fact, a kernel of cosmic popcorn that was created 15 billion years ago when someone put a bag with several thousand objects the size of our universe into a microwave. For the massive individual making the popcorn, we only popped about 15 seconds ago, and he or she will get off the couch and eat us in about 100 billion years.
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Interesting. I wondered if the reason why Mario sometimes jumps across the finish line and sometimes just runs had anything to do with fadeout lag. Over the course of 96 exits, I assume optimization of fadeout lag could save a considerable amount of time. Without knowing that, one could be forgiven for considering this run to be perfectly optimized.
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I cannot believe how badly you destroyed that game! You flew under lava! Juggling a big pile of mushrooms and feathers was amazing. Collecting 30+ lives in your spare time on the Butter Bridge was incredible. The glitch where you had the fade out occur below Mario and screwed up all of the colors on the map screen was the most surprising SMW glitch I've seen yet. This is the best platformer TAS I've ever seen.
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No, and neither has Linkin Park, but it sounds really good each time I hear it. They change some of the swear words, or the thing that they're angry about. Everyone knows that Britney Spears only has one song. Sometimes one is enough to have a career.
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"If the article on the work itself becomes long, then giving such characters an article of their own is good practice (if there is enough content for the character)."
As I said, a page devoted to every single muppet would be too long, and there wouldn't be enough content to give them each their own page. My point with that argument is that the same situation exists for hacked games. You can make a page about hacked games if it doesn't become too long, or you can make an article about a single hacked game if it isn't too short. Wikipedia isn't about collecting information just for the sake of collecting information. I haven't read the article to have an opinion as to whether or not this particular article deserved to exist, but I do believe that there shouldn't be automatic acceptance for every article that gets submitted. Article deletion is a fact of life on a user-editable wiki.
"An is the older form, now used before words starting with a vowel sound, regardless of whether the word begins with a vowel letter. Examples: a light-water reactor; an LWR..."
It's "an SMB3" because the pronounciation of the letter S starts with a vowel sound, even though S is a consonant.
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I don't think it's supposed to be a repository for all human knowledge. That would require far too much information to be listed on each page. Encyclopedic entries are supposed to be topical and informative, but brief. If you need more extensive information on a topic, you buy a book or find a website devoted to that topic.
The same would be true of the topic of muppets. It's fine to devote individual articles to muppets who have considerable cultural or media significance, but there are hundreds of muppets that were used only once, and the only thing that can be said about them is the date their episode aired, who created them, and who voiced them. The options are: you can make an enormous page for lesser known muppets with 200+ sections, or you can write 200+ stubs. The first option isn't very encyclopedic because the page would be too large, and the second option isn't very encyclopedic because the pages would be too small. If there isn't a reasonable amount of information that you can write about a topic, it doesn't need to have an entry. The best option is to write a general overview of muppets in general, and let a dedicated book/website/wiki go into more detail.
Edit: I don't want to create an entirely new debate, but I just thought of another reason why Wikipedia can't be a repository of all human knowledge: pornography.
Encyclopedic articles should be appropriate for all ages. Discussions of sexuality should be clinical, describing only the mechanics or nature of the act. As one of the largest industries in the world, one could easily create a wiki devoted to pornography, describing the sexual activity, and what the viewer gets to see, in great detail. Wikipedia articles about porn stars briefly describe their background and career, but contain no adult content or pornography. They would, for instance, give a porn star's measurements, but they wouldn't contain any pictures of the porn star engaged in sexual acts. They have articles for pornographic movies that were popular enough to enter popular culture, but they wouldn't describe the scenes in graphic detail. An encyclopedia is a quick reference for just-the-facts. If you want to help someone make buying decisions, including all the vulgar details, you need to make an adult-oriented wiki.
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