The problem is that it's so nondescriptive it's silly. Other from what, and why in the first place? Is the graphic for this trophy a photo of a nonconformist 14 y. o. girl or a flamboyant gay? :P
On a more serious note, why not just make them all separate as is the actual default for all systems? We have 4 arcade runs, 7 PCE*, 17 (!) PS1 runs. Hardly a deficit, if you ask me. Mixing systems that are so fundamentally different in a single category is not a good idea in general because system/generation bias is going to be very strong here.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
This discussion is uneducated and based on fallacious premises.
I'll give you an opportunity to redeem it with your next post here, Speed Man, otherwise it'll be locked for good. The original question has been answered quite well already, anyway.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Misinformation → belief that things that have taken place until currently are not right →
1) tapping into the budget to do things "right" → pretending to fix the problem (which either doesn't exist, or is completely different to what is claimed) → laundering money;
2) setting up a business scheme designed around "fixing" the "problem" → pretending to fix the problem (usually with a solution that is in no way more effective than the rest, yet is implied to be better) → raking in profits.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Well, I'm happy for UK, because things sure weren't remotely as consistent here. When you see one interview contradicting another interview heard but an hour ago, and there being no universally good way of carrying on (like the one you mentioned) being promoted regularly by government officials, it becomes a chaos of ignorance with greedy people jumping on it like marauders. :(
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Oh, so he didn't survive that transplant after all. That's sad. :\
(Kinda makes me think how many more people that were once active TASVideos members silently passed away and slipped into obscurity without anybody here knowing…)
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Man, rhebus, you're really trying to make me write an essay or something. :D
rhebus wrote:
Do you really think anyone, expert or not, can be certain in advance which diseases will mutate into global pandemics killing millions and which will not? Nobody knows which diseases will mutate into virulent strains. We only know that there are some which could. That's why no expert said bird flu would kill millions, only that it had potential to.
Let me point out that, at the time the article was published (late 2003):
1) the amount of people who contracted the disease was less than a dozen, not all of which died;
2) no details were provided about sanitary conditions, genetics, immunity states, or particular circumstances of those people contracting the disease;
3) no details were provided about their treatment or the illness history.
They just contracted it and died, that's it. You're free to draw any conclusions you like. Now for some quote hilarity, starting with this press-conference from 2005.
Health experts agreed that the long period of time since the last serious flu epidemic, which had killed tens of millions of people in 1918-1919, meant the world was overdue for another epidemic. “In the natural history of these things, I am almost certain that there will be another pandemic soon.”
Why are you almost certain? Because general health care and personal/industrial hygiene is the same as 80 years ago? Because the virus targets mainly the same demographic as back then (hint: not by a long shot)? And how shameless (or sick in the head) do you need to be to use the term "overdue" in this context?
These guys exercised a position of authority right there, with regards to pretending to know better. Whether they did know better or not, you are not given a means to judge, you just have to trust whatever vague claims you hear because that's all you hear.
“I’m not, at the moment, at liberty to give you a prediction on numbers, but I just want to stress, that, let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from 5 to 150 million.”
You may not realize it at first, but this "to 150 million" is a pathologically obscene number in the order of anthrax (present-day mortality rate >50%, kills untreated victim in less than a week) victims in late XIV century. He "let's says" it without providing any details whatsoever. You just don't "let's say" things like that. If you extrapolate millions from several dozen over ~1.5 years, you better take responsibility for the potential panic of people who don't know what you know. And he knew that by that time less than a hundred people contracted the disease, of which less than a half died, and all of that happened in countries with very poor general sanitary conditions. A conclusion I could draw from that is that on a personal level the disease could be dealt with by means of immunity system and general treatment even in those countries, let alone First World ones, but that much he didn't tell. Instead of calming people down he riled them up. Let's say that was a very douchebag move — but that's UN for you. The body of evidence of them fucking things up all over the globe is by this point overwhelming, but that's another topic.
Now you may notice the ratio of big claims and secrecy (as in "we know more than you do, but we aren't in a position to tell you") to openness about the small details and particulars, but hypocrisy didn't particularly stop there.
"The United States is collaborating closely with eight international organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), and 88 foreign governments to address the situation through planning, greater monitoring, and full transparency in reporting and investigating avian influenza occurrences.
That full transparency part is not for you. You don't get full transparency or the means to judge it, what you get instead is seeing birds burned alive on the tv served as an active prevention measure whose efficacy is at best dubious if we were to believe the information from the same sources that the virus could be, and was, spread further by wild birds who realistically couldn't be randomly thrown in a fire. Obviously you can't estimate the efficacy after you burn the birds because there's no way to tell if they were contagious or if somebody would have contracted the disease from them. So what else there is to do? Right, speculate:
As it was, only six people died—and all of them had contracted the virus from chickens sold in Hong Kong poultry markets. The only thing that saved us was the quick thinking of scientists who convinced health authorities to slaughter more than a million domesticated fowl in the city's markets.
Btw, that's the exact article that started the hysteria. I can't find the complete version freely available anywhere (even Wikipedia has a dead link to the original site), so let's return to the UN officials' claims.
Officials wanted to minimize the effect of a pandemic on people’s health, as well as on trade, travel and the economy.
Or did they? By fueling the mass hysteria surrounding the epidemic, they achieved exactly the opposite effect.
To provide you with some data for comparison, here's more statistics:
The annual flu (also called "seasonal flu" or "human flu") in the U.S. "results in approximately 36,000 deaths and more than 200,000 hospitalizations each year. In addition to this human toll, influenza is annually responsible for a total cost of over $10 billion in the U.S."
That's US alone, correct. Bird flu was nothing compared to seasonal flu (literally: nobody contracted it in the US), the evidence was already there in 2006, yet people were still led to believe they're enduring a most dangerous pandemic since the early XX century and UN&Co are doing everything in their might to prevent it. They're heroes, they don't need to apologize for the panic they created themselves. Neither do pharmacies who started offering new medicines at a high price point, whose effectiveness against bird flu was impeccable considering the target audience had a zero chance of actually contracting it anyway. Neither do governments who provided pharmacies with a free (?) advertising substrate in the form of PSAs and similar measures aimed at reminding people of the imminent danger of bird flu (yeah, we had banners on the streets dedicated to that shit).
Interesting that SARS, which was a far more palpable danger, was not only dealt with a lot more effectively (less than half a year to complete containment) and with less media circlejerk with potential death estimates, it was quite quickly forgotten, too, for some reason. And that also was a virus with unknown origin with no vaccine existing before discovery, it spread faster and killed more people in 7 weeks than H5N1 did in 7 years. If I were to speculate, I'd say it was because milking it was way too hard and dangerous, especially when compared to a pathetically slow-moving disease like bird flu that only kills citizens of the Third World countries who have a direct contact with sneezing chicken. It wouldn't surprise me if curbing SARS required funding in orders of magnitude less than those invested in bird flu, too.
rhebus wrote:
Let me pose a simplified model to you. If disease X has a five in six chance of killing only 150 people, but a one in six chance of killing 150 million people, what would you do? Would you spend no money, risking 2% of the world's population to a dice roll, safe that it will "probably be fine"? Would you spend money trying to save lives, knowing that there was a 5 in 6 chance the money would be wasted since the disease wouldn't spread anyway? Personally, I would spend the money. The expectation for the number of deaths is 25 million, even though the most likely outcome is 150 deaths.
Excellent, now where would that money be taken from, what actions will I take, and how will I go about communicating about this with the public? Your simplified model is so simplified it omits that entirely, but this is the main point of my criticism. Jumping on rails in front of a moving train has a mortality rate higher than any virus known to date, is very popular in Asia, unpredictable, and potentially contagious because onlookers and the mentally unstable may get a wrong idea. Now I have enough prerequisites for a pandemic I'll report as targeting anywhere from, let's say, 1 to 8 billion people, for which I'm going to take inordinate amount of funding and come to no definitive conclusion. The UN way.™
So yeah, back to my options as a citizen who doesn't want to get ill. As such I've been mainly told to take Arbidol™ by the people in the tv and people who watch tv. Others said I should take vitamins and lead a healthy lifestyle in general so that flu wouldn't take me down. The second option is arguably cheaper and more universally useful (flu doesn't have a cure and doesn't explicitly require vaccination, so either way your personal immunity system is the main player in this game), but somehow it's not promoted as actively, even though any government should be interested in healthy population enough to sponsor that out of a federal budget.
So, I need to exercise my critical thinking by challenging the notion of the pandemic hysteria being artificially constructed with existing stakeholders. Quotes and statistics above gave me the notion, nothing you told me so far, aside from a model too simplistic to serve a useful example, actually disputed it.
As andymac said, it's not a big secret that we're being manipulated every day (hell, I spent five years studying advertising only to realize most of these people really have no shame), the key is to become better equipped to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Since there are at least two strong runs that can compete for the prize, it's already fair. The previous year Banjo Kazooie would have effectively been competing with itself.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Oh, you're underestimating human greed. A good deal of global campaigns contain inherent backdoors to federal budgets (or are designed precisely for this purpose), as in "we need this large sum of money to do something that doesn't cost as much, develop something that isn't more effective than existing solutions, or use something we were going to use anyway".
Sometimes stuff like that is done right under your nose. Remember the so-called bird flu pandemic media was up in flames about a few years back? Here's a Wikipedia quote:
On September 29, 2005, David Nabarro, the newly appointed Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, warned the world that an outbreak of avian influenza could kill anywhere between 5 million and 150 million people.
[…]
H5N1 has evolved into a flu virus strain that infects more species than any previously known flu virus strain, is deadlier than any previously known flu virus strain, and continues to evolve becoming both more widespread and more deadly causing Robert G. Webster, a leading expert on avian flu, to publish an article titled "The world is teetering on the edge of a pandemic that could kill a large fraction of the human population" in American Scientist. He called for adequate resources to fight what he sees as a major world threat to possibly billions of lives. Since the article was written, the world community has spent billions of dollars fighting this threat with limited success.
Death toll? 302 people worldwide as of 2010 (remember, that's over 7 years of its existence, not even a season). Which is… about as much as an average flu would take. Without causing such an uproar either. But you have all kinds of experts appointed to the fields created specifically for them. Mind-boggling stuff.
At the same time as the media was infected with bird flu panic, a company here in Moscow started manufacturing a new anti-flu medicine called Arbidol, which was placed an above-average price point and widely and aggressively marketed in Russia (and, I take it, China as well) as the ultimate flu prevention and treatment drug.
As you can see, nothing openly illegal has been going on, but a clever manipulation of facts, selective awareness, and a business plan designed strategically around the unfolding hysteria can make you billions upon billions on the spot. Make somebody afraid and offer them an easy solution that makes you profit. After it's over you can boast how effective your solution was and keep getting profit. It's but one case of effective distraction p_s was talking about.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I support this, and the notion that votes should be hidden until the end.
There was a precedent last year when Crusader of Centy was everyone's #2 choice and, after enough poll resets, it actually proved itself able to win the award. With approval voting it would have won right off the bat without poll resets.
(That's not to mention that poll resets often have ambiguously defined highpass…)
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Small change I'd like to see this year - TAS of the Year should not also win Platform TAS of the Year, and that should instead go to the 2nd runner up for that Platform. I'd like to know if people agree with me.
Agreed, although there may be other interesting options.
DarkKobold wrote:
A second, probably less popular idea, would be to prevent the same TAS from winning multiple categories, such as Glitchy and Innovative, or etc.
Disagreed as long as the movie actually deserves to be represented in its respective categories. Admittedly that's not always the case.
I'd also suggest not nominating new iterations of the runs that have previously received awards for the same award categories; i. e., S3&K any% has received Sega TAS of the year for two years in a row (2007 & 2008), but surely it didn't become much worse (or at all different) since then, and, granted that it's accepted for nominations this year as well, it's a very strong competitor many other Sega runs just can't go up against. Same with SMB3, MM2, and other such games. With N64, it's always going to be won by OoT and SM64 because those two are by far the most popular titles on the platform. Less popular games, and thus their TASes, get overshadowed as a result, which I don't believe is fair.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Rating own movies objectively is impossible. Rating others' movies objectively is equally impossible.
It is a non-issue if the authors evaluate their effort fairly, because they know the game better and can actually tell how polished the run is (like adelikat does; I mean his tech rating for own movies is sometimes lower than what I give). If they just do 10/10 on whatever they submit, it's really irksome, but doesn't become much of a problem if there are many other users who have rated those movies.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
