Enjoyed reading it. The way I saw it there wasn't much to go on about "who won", and that's perhaps the wrong way to frame it anyway.

It seemed to boil down to ideals vs. reality, where you were the realist and he the idealist; what teh intarwebz can do and might enable vs. what it actually seems to have done and seems to have enabled. Facts on that, either way, are pretty slippery.

I'd have to say I fall more on your side of the equation there...and that's of course my opinion, not a fact. Unfortunately, I'm as biased as anybody else. I wish that merely recognizing it could make me feel as though I've transcended it.

I'm not sure if I'll have the bandwidth to take in your book anytime soon, but I think it's the Lord's work you're doing in exploring the topic, at least. I find it and its related issues very very interesting.

Have you decided to take him up on his offer next time you're in LA? If it would result in another audiofile as fun to listen to as this one, by all means sir, do it, and thank you for this one.

Also...what about the movie? Was it any good? And what's known about its wider release? Anything yet?

Raises the question. Begging the question is to assert something as proven that hasn't been. I weep for the future of this concept, as nobody on teh intarwebz ever seems to use it as designed any more.

(that is also on topic!)

http://billboardliberation.com/HQ.html

...apologies if someone pointed this out already and I missed it, but this seemed to be a good place to share it!

I had never heard of this stuff before a friend gave me a tube of it and some other take-care-of-yourself type stuff as I was about to take a flight.

As it happened this flight was for a funeral, and I was in pretty bad shape, hence presumably the intent of the gift. I was also in bad enough shape to not think to read the instructions. I just assumed they were pills or chewables, not that you dropped them in a glass of water like an Alka-Seltzer.

So, halfway between the east and west coasts in a window seat, I ate one to humor my friend.

I'll spare you the details, but afterward, the rest of the tube went unused, let's put it like that. I guess since they were a gift I can't get my money back, huh?

I'm gonna have to go with the late great Bill Hicks on that one:

"...just like Koresh, except without the guns and pussy."

Virtually every woman I've known intimately enough to have the conversation honestly and directly with, has been. And I've known two who didn't survive the experience.

I'll grant that some of the specifics of their stories put some of the decisions that facilitated it into not-the-best light. But that's absolutely as far as I'll go about that. It's heinous no matter what light it's put in.

So you 25% doubters? If I were to go on personal experience alone, I'd call 25% a way lowball figure.

I'm glad that your college experience, if you had one, was so unspoiled by certain realities.

Thank you.

You know I could swear I read the above post, factcheck1, somewhere else. As opposed to factcheck2, whose posts differ a little bit in wording but never in intent, tone, or missing a chance to plug herself/cityedition in the closing sentence.

Please, STFU you worthless postbots. Mild application of the banhammer to these shills, if you would be so kind, Salon.

The realism of a character is not the main barrier to emotional engagement with a game; it's the other mechanics, most particularly the story and writing (in the case where such is the supposed main focus of a game), all too often bolt-ons to gameplay.

And yes, "The Casting" is an incremental step and not much of one. If you've been playing any recent releases in the last 6 months, this technology in real time is not new.

I'm surprised there was no mention of a recent release for the 360, Mass Effect, that was released about four months ago. I don't see much in "The Casting" that's done as well if not better by Mass Effect. Although it suffers from many of the same not-quite-there-yet minor problems, there's no denying that the designers did an insane job of character animation.

Particularly amazing is that the character you play, which can be male or female, can have an entirely custom face, beyond just simple variants or a list of preset choices. And no matter what face you created, it still expresses the same range of facial motions and lip-synchs to the dialogue as well as the default face did, thanks to whatever real-time facial animation system they came up with there.

And yet, of course, none of that is what makes it a good game. Had the characters been half as realistic looking, it'd still stand for the story and writing, and the voice-acted delivery.

...can enable you to determine not only whether or not your copy-and-paste from your other program actually displays correctly, but in certain cases will allow you to spot mistakes in grammar, spelling, and (this last, extremely rare) rationality.

Try it.