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The plot differed substantially in that Naruto was the son of the demon fox instead of being the container...

So the present Naruto is the container? I understand. This seems very exciting on many levels.

I don't really have one of these. My addictions are rarely long-lasting, I tire of most games relatively quickly, and often leave them unfinished even if I enjoy them. The game that best fits this description, I guess, would be Elastomania. I've returned to it now and then since I heard of it. I put on an audiobook or a podcast, and play Elastomania. My mind is occupied by something that's actually meaningful, and my fingers are occupied by mindlessly trying to beat a record by a hundredth of a second, again and again. Even that, though, I seem to have tired of in the recent past.

For a short while I played Battlefield 2 a lot. For a somewhat longer while, and much, much longer ago, I played TFC a lot. Around the same time, I guess, a text-based role-playing game called FiranMUX took a lot of my time. Way before that, I played a MUD called Ancient Anguish. MU*s are basically out of the question nowadays, since they tend to crave more time than I'm willing to invest. Games like BF2 and even Half-Life mods are a fun pastime, I still think, but since my hard drive is rather small, I regularly end up removing large games to make space for more urgent things.

Then of course there are games that are very dear to me that I occasionally feel a desire to replay. It's not entirely on topic, but I'll take the opportunity to give them an honorable mention. Final Fantasy VII, above all, I played when I was very young. Its general awesomeness aside, it is in fact to a fairly large extent responsible for teaching me English! I still remember the exact place in the game where I actually learned what "ladder" means. (Try to guess where!) Also, Beneath a Steel Sky was probably the first adventure game I played, I loved it then, and I still love it. I also play the original Worms game whenever I get the opportunity. With people, that is.

Nah. Really strange point in this story is that warehouse is rather large, maybe quarter of a football stadium or so. But boxes fell exactly where I left my lifter. Okay, this could happen.

But why was I walking past my lifter (accident spot)? I wasn't even going to work anymore, I was heading for exit. There's about many other, as short paths I could choose. And I still somehow took the dangerous one. If there's God/luck, it PUT me there, just to show how close I was from head trauma if I wouldn't decide to leave. Fate decided those lucky centimetres, not what happened... I could go other way, choose another exit, go to my boss (who was eating at the moment) and say I'm still leaving, anything...

What I'm trying to say is that the accident would have happened anyway. But me witnessing it, and hair-thickness-close, that's a miracle of some kind. Of all logical options I had before just walking this path, this one was most unlikely for me to pick.

Well, yes. I understand that it was a very unlikely event. That was in fact much of my point. Whether a supposed "intelligent agent" caused an accident near you or merely caused you to be near the accident is irrelevant (and frankly I'm not quite sure how you can be so certain that it's one and not the other). I have nothing to add to what I've already said, really.

From your description, I assume the hallway looks as if it's being recarpented. This is different from looking generally messy and untidy. "Excuse us, we're having the hallway recarpeted" is completely different from "Excuse us, the hallway is a bit of a mess because we haven't cleaned it for months". The latter is probably not very good, but I can't see anything wrong with the former. If anything, it's even more serious and mature or whatever than having a perfectly clean hallway. You're having the hallway recarpeted! Does the avarage beer-drinking bachelor who just moved out of his parents' basement recarpet his hallway? No? NO. But you're recarpeting your hallway? Yes? YES! You have an opportunity here to show mom what a great homeowner you are. So show off!

I am, by the way, a carpet fitter living in the Sussex area. I lie about my nationality here to get Swedish girls in bed. I can't help you, though, because my jaw is broken.

As for luck I don't belive in it, because it tends to cancell itself out. i do however belive in chance.

I'm not sure I understand you. How would you define "chance"?

It all missed me by few centimeters. If I would listen to my boss and decided to continue my work instead of going home, I would probably directly at lifter, loading a pallet onto it. Which means I would end up in hospital with severe head trauma. Nice addition to extremely sick and weak feeling I had that night.

Was it luck?
Sometimes, when I doubt something, this God/luck entity proves me right just after I've finally made up my mind.
A nice thing to remind me to always trust my intuition.

It's not my intention to crap all over your religious experience, but I'd still say it's perfectly explainable by confirmation bias and the law of truly large numbers. Don't get me wrong: I've had experiences similar to this--perhaps not as dramatic, but still. I know what it's like, and it does astonish you in a way. But one ought to realize that since stuff happens all the time, some of it is bound to seem really really implausible. How many times have you been loading pallets with nothing like this happening? How many people are doing the same right now? Alright then.

Please do.

"Other people do stuff at the same time" doesn't mean "Christmas is not a Christian holiday".

The more I think about the initial logic about the eggs, the stranger it seems to me. Consider the following.

I poured myself a glass of milk. It was sour! Then I poured myself a second glass of milk. It was also sour! What are the odds?

If one egg is bad, is it really that odd that other eggs from the same batch are also bad?

Confirmation bias and the law of truly large numbers are enough to explain most or all of the peculiar events which people tend to attribute to luck or divine intervention.

Spoiler

The Historical League of Bouncy Boxing.

"Leeg" was clever. "The" I'm not sure I get. Tea?

[close]

The Dub Room Special. Best Christmas ever.

[Infinitely small]

If time could be sliced infinitely, how do those infinitely small parts, or zeros, add up to the movement we see? Zero times any number you care to name is still zero.

Infinitely small does not equal zero, though. Given that, your proposition doesn't really prove itself in such a foolproof logical or mathematical way as you imply.

That said, I'm not a theoretical physicist, and this topic is really way beyond my knowledge and understanding. And, to be honest, probably beyond the knowledge of pretty much everyone here AFAIK. I do not personally find it possible to "believe" anything about stuff I don't understand. The most I can do is have a rough idea of the scientific consensus, and in this case, I don't even have that. If this makes me a boring person, k, but there's enough things to speculate about that I actually can speculate about to keep me occupied, so I'm pretty happy.

[The entries were all very enjoyable to listen to, and it was far from obvious to me how to pick the winner, but I have done this, because such is my grim duty. And the winner is:]

Alright. This worked out fine, despite my foolish impatience at the closing day. Good job, everyone!

I was planning to be ambitious and actually write some comments about each entry. I would like to do this, but it's Christmas, I'm short on time, and I really feel more obliged to close this contest and let people get on with their lives. If anyone is itching to know what I thought of their entry, they will ask somehow. As if. So.

The entries were all very enjoyable to listen to, and it was far from obvious to me how to pick the winner, but I have done this, because such is my grim duty. And the winner is:

Jens!

This means that you get to start the next tune contest! Lucky you!

In sheer terms of math this makes (to me) more sense than a "time freeze". If time is numbers, time is infinite, and having a method to use all the infinite time "numbers" between the regular ones (seconds, minutes...) is at least some sort of fuzzy logic.

This concept reminds me (if ever so slightly) of Zeno's paradoxes. The thought is appealing somehow, but really makes as little sense as these.

Just simply moving really fast (with no metaphysical trickery really necessary) is probably the closest you can get to stopping time around you. And you wouldn't really be doing that. I'm no theoretical physicist, but I doubt that there's a valid model of the world that allows time to be stopped in this sense, let alone predict what would happen, so any speculations about photons stopping and making you blind, or frozen molecules freezing you to death, are just... speculative General Discussion on an internet forum, with little connection to the real world.

Sorry to be a spoilsport, but there's just so much awesome or mindscrewy stuff that actually exists or is possible that pondering something as arbitrary and whimsical as this is of limited appeal to me.

(Incidentally, I have planned for this Christmas when my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend inevitably invites herself around. I'm going to answer the door with our two new cats in my arms, pretend not to recognise her for a moment, and then say, "oh, lee-anne!" (which isn't her name), and when she corrects me I'll apologise with an irritating little laugh, then invite her in to our newly redecorated, recarpetted house. As she's coming through the hallway I'll yell out to my boyfriend to tell him that she's here... but I'll mispronounce her name slightly wrong, even though she's just told me what it is. Then I'll make her comfortable on my new sofa and offer her a cup of tea.

While I make the tea, I'll feed the cats a little too so that they hang around me and she doesn't have a chance to stroke them. I'll talk about how the cats are a good judge of character and my boyfriend and I have learned never to trust anybody that the cats don't trust. Then when we're in the living room again...   while she's stroking the cats, I'll turn on the anti-cat device I bought last week, that emits a sound inaudible to humans but that makes cats freak out. Nobody will know I've done this, but the cats will appear to hate her. I'll do it every time she approaches them.

Subtle yet highly evil... )

Wait. Can you repeat the part where you explain how this would benefit anyone?

Some thoughts about the design itself.

With the caveat that I don't really know what the vogue in set design in the 40's was, the scenery looks a bit odd to me. Specifically, the hill and the houses far away. I take it that these are part of a backdrop, while the buildings are flats placed in front. I would expect the backdrop to be more neutral and less eye-catching. The more bright little houses you put in, the harder I expect it is to create the illusion of depth. Maybe.

Also think about the curtains. Are these the front curtains? In that case, it feels to me like they're too far back on the stage. Either that, or there's massive unused space behind the scenery. As you might expect, there's usually more space behind the front curtains than in front. If they're not the front curtains (in which case they'd be wing curtains or legs), they would be a more inconspicuous colour, like black, grey or dark blue. And given the way the whole stage is built, it surprises me somewhat that they aren't drawn back into the wings, since their flashy redness detracts somewhat from the otherwise realism of the scenery.

Then there's the lightning. Again, I don't really know for sure how theatrical lightning worked in the 40's (though it's probably easy enough to research), but this just looks really odd. I don't think I've at all seen a stage lit from below like this, and I can assure you that lighting in the 40's wasn't too different from the way it's done now. From this point of view the lights themselves wouldn't be visible, so I guess you could just shade it so that it looks neat, without having to think up what sort of a setup would look like that. Be aware that there would probably fewer individual lights than in a modern theatre, but since this isn't a rock concert that probably won't matter.

You might want to google up some pictures of actual sets from the relevant time period for reference. And if you ever find one that's lit like this, let me know. Also, please don't think "since the game is set in the 1940's the background wouldn't be well-painted/the lighting would be ugly/it would look cheap". That might be true if it's a small venue or a bad production (just like today), but really, stagecraft in the 40's was very sophisticated. Really, even earlier the only thing that would be notably inferior is lighting, but by the 40's they had modern-looking electric spotlights and stuff like that so even that won't be a large factor in this case.

Also, I second that the stage is too high. If text or an object will divert attention from that fact, fine, but fact remains that it's way too high. You could make it lower (i.e. place the floor higher) and fill up the space with some faint chairs and people. Or you can not and hope nobody notices, which I guess can be fine.

I'm not sure why you're using the Critics Lounge board. You don't seem to be at all interested in critique. People here have given you really constructive advice, and it doesn't seem to satisfy you, so I wonder what you're after.

It is personal, everyone believes that thing that suits his personality. It is like when you can't eat something because its taste is in your opinion HORRIBLE. It is the same principle.

No it isn't. Even if it suits me not to believe in the theory of gravitation, I'm still not falling up. Not everything is a matter of taste.

Unless they were also in on it.

Turnout is low. Does anyone else have any intention of participating, or should I go ahead and judge and close this? Answer now.

[Edit: Why did I ask this before it actually closed? Stupid. Ignore.]