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Yeah, it's always been this



We'd have so many of these at home when I was a kid. All of them broke eventually so we always got a new one, it was always as fun

Ah, Stiga! Sweden vs. Finland! We had that too. What a great symbol of national brotherhood!

Ah, good point. And thanks for asking.

Evidence will change my mind about anything, what would it take to change yours?

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Can you develope your reply?

Is that necessary?

Seriously, though, the sentence quoted from MrColossal essentially sums up 1) one of the most healthy attitudes you could possibly have about the world, and 2) one of the most crucial reasons why superstition, conspiracy theories and any other forms of pseudoscience generally fail to yield results or progress: the failure of its proponents to adopt that attitude. Hence quoted and appended with smiles, because it's damn important.

Evidence will change my mind about anything, what would it take to change yours?

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I've seen several UFO's matti, two this year alone, which is exactly why I'm checking out these "stupid" videos. And they weren't just lights in the sky. They were lights in the sky pulling un-earthly manovueres and travelling silently at several thousands of miles per hour.

Why do you conclude that they were traveling at several thousand miles per hour? Was it possible to accurately judge their distance somehow?

If you need a username, pick whatever suits you best. But if it is going to be included in your email address, make sure it is something you can forward emails from or show off your work (games?) in some years from now.

Or just use your real name in these cases, and use whatever username you want. Personally I can't really imagine a name (except my real name) that I would be comfortable using when I want to make a decent impression on somebody who doesn't know me well...

However, I've been giving it a lot of thought lately. Despite the exclusivity of the name, and its nostalgic value, I've grown somewhat tired of it. The major points of its relevance have come and gone, and I realize now that in fact adding random numbers to the end of a username just shows how unimaginative you are, not the other way around.

Any "relevance" is bound to be lost on most people anyway (I dare you to come up with a single "point of relevance" in EldKatt), and frankly I don't care how "imaginative" a screen name is. I think your current one is fine.

I reckon it'd take a while to sell it all off.

You could just leave your stuff, and compensate for the economic loss through prostitution. You only live once.

[mere implausibility]

Still, I think it's a very important point to remember that even the skeptics (a term I tend to use in a positive sense) think the prospect of, say, alien visitation is just as awesome as the believers think it is. We would love to be proven wrong. I hear time and time again UFO believers, alternative medicine folk, psi proponents and such claim that the skeptics want them to be wrong, feel that their world-view is threatened, and desperately try to avoid the notion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Seriously, you think I wouldn't absolutely love to see an alien or even traces of one, cure cancer with water, or communicate telepathically? I would! You seriously think most scientists would feel threatened by having another riddle to solve? No, that's why most of them became scientists in the first place! So why would they be denying it in absurdum and refuse to be convinced out of pure stubbornness, as suggested? Without even bringing the whole philosophy of science into it, I think the mere implausibility of that attitude coming from people who love finding out how stuff really is (even if it's sort of fucked up, like relativity theory or quantum mechanics, or threatening to an existing philosophy, like evolution--all of which caught on fairly quickly given sufficient evidence--because they make sense!) regarding a subject that is absolutely awesome should be enough to shatter that idea... But apparently it's not. And you know why I think this is? Because, unlike with a skeptic, there's no convincing a believer...

Really? In the files? I always assumed that was a decoder/application issue of some sort. Particularly seeing as how I can listen to mp3 playlists without being bothered by gaps. Or is that actually active compensation on behalf of the program?

Yes, I could research this myself, but why should I? I have a right to know! And I'm lazy.

To clarify, when I asked for a particular piece of evidence, I meant something along the lines of this particular case of crop circles. Throwing out an entire category of evidence doesn't provide much grounds for evaluation. If I were talking to a young-Earth creationist, and I got the same kind of request--if I said "Okay, transitional fossils! How 'bout it?"--where would we go from there? If I said "Alright, how about Tiktaalik?" we could immediately get to why I find that particular piece of evidence compelling and why my opponent does not, which is really the core of the issue: why does the evidence convince you, and why does it not convince me--or vice versa.

Aliens could be visiting us. They could be visiting us in metal vehicles. Are they, though? Well, it's hopefully obvious where the burden of evidence lies. So, to keep the discussion in the realm of the useful, let's do this: how about the UFO believers pick out one particular piece of evidence that you find particularly convincing, and we can discuss that. I think this is more fertile than throwing general conclusions around.

Be aware that I'm approaching this as a musician rather than a developer, but OK. I think your list of genres seems quite arbitrary and limited. Some of them are very specific, others are exceedingly generic, and some are ill-defined or obscure. If I had to categorize all imaginable game music into just 21 discreet fields, you wouldn't see "Christmas" or "post-industrial" in there, nor would you see "popular music", which could semantically overlap with (or contain) quite a few of the other categories. I'd like to see a more thought-through and systematic method for this categorization.

You're absolutely right to move chiptune from genre to tag, but I think you might actually benefit from turning all of these into tags, simply because no matter how much you improve on your choices (which you can and should do in any case), there will always be room for plenty of overlap. OK, so there's a bunch of music that falls squarely into "blues", but a game developer clicking "blues" probably doesn't care whether or not it has twelve bars and goes to the subdominant on the fifth bar, or if it has narrative lyrics in three-line stanzas where the first two lines are identical. He'll want a "bluesy" feel, and there's nothing to say a "Ballad" can't be bluesy. Or a piece of "Popular music". Is "My Funny Valentine" a "Ballad" or is it "Jazz"? Of course, it might seem that all I'm doing is pointing out weaknesses in the current selection of genres, but such problems of categorization will always exist, and by admitting right away that you can't ever think up a perfect set of genre categories and just turning them into tags, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble.

OK, another area. I think you'd have a lot to gain from having a set of tags that describes "instrumentation". For any music made for a particular set of instruments (whether recorded or synthesized), it's very helpful to be able to search by such criteria. Tags for particular instruments, for particular types of instrument groupings, or a combination, I'm not so sure. Maybe discussion will ensue and forum magic fix the problem.

Regarding the other suggestions you mention:

• Looping is obviously quite necessary. Good.
• The JavaME MIDI thing and Protracker-compatible are both technical stuff that I have little insight into, but sure--and I'm sure there are plenty of other aspects of the format that could use further classification, although in some cases that might be better accomplished with something other than tags.
• "Has vocals" and "Instrumental" seem obviously mutually exclusive. "Instrumental" might be better served by searching for "NOT 'has vocals'", in which case there is no need to tag the probably vast majority of instrumental ones particularly.
• "Acoustic music" I assume means recorded with real instruments, as opposed to pure computer or synthesized music? If so, there are probably better ways to put it. If you apply it literally, a recorded jazz piano trio would go as "acoustic", but if you add a guitar, or the bassist switches to electric bass, it's not. I do not see the need for such a distinction.

OK, that's all.

Looking at the trailer and screenshots (random example: "You must be of big importantness for them to lock you all up!"), it's kind of a shame that it wasn't released. It must have sucked hilariously.

I'd be hard pressed to name a band that musically outmatches The Beatles simply because I think the whole notion is stupid. Music isn't about who outmatches whom. Nobody is the best anything ever. I realize that not everyone has my perspective on this, and I'd be an idiot to expect them to, but having spent much of my time studying music as a craft, and studying the work of great artists objectively and soberly (and "escaping into the past" a great deal, out of practical necessity--often a past way more past than the 60s...), the inherent lack of perspective in a discussion like this really stands out to me.

I think I've said it before. If the revenues are not high (talking about something around $300,000 per year or so), then there is no royalties. Fraunhofer won't come to get a 2% from the $1000 you've made! Problem lies with the decoding (the player), rather than the mp3s themselves...

At least I think so, cause I contacted the company a few years back regarding this very question and licensing issues and that was the impression I got.

Heh. I usually try to research my factual claims at least a little before posting them... and the moment I choose not to, it really shows. But yeah, it's my understanding as well that the crux of the matter is shipping a decoder rather than the encoded files. Still, I'm sure you know this stuff better than I.

With risk of stating the obvious (or the uninteresting)... Another point which might be practically relevant to very few, but perhaps philosophically relevant to a few more, is that if you've used mp3 and you ever decide to sell your game, you have to pay royalties to Fraunhofer. Ogg is all free.

Since you're emphasizing "old"... I guess the oldest stuff I've listened to more than briefly and found awesome is Antoine Busnois. Probably his most famous song is a four-voice motet called In hydraulis. It's great. Oh, and Georgian choral music is nothing short of really awesome, and probably counts as really old, considering that the Georgian tradition of polyphony (so I've heard) predates Western polyphony--and then we're talking well over a millennium ago. What can I say. The Georgian tradition of polyphonic music gets my rocks off.

Seriously, though, (though that is not to say that the previous is not serious) if The Platters (or even Jerome Kern in this case) are "really old", then I am not able to pick one old song, even as an example. The vast majority of all music is not exactly new, you know.

I'm not sure it would work even on Linux, SSH. The size of a directory (which is just a file that is a directory) has nothing to do with its contents, right? Mine are all 4096b, whatever they contain.

Doesn't run or just doesn't work? If the latter... do empty directories really have zero size? Thinking out loud here.