Messages

Best of luck to you!  I would really love to see this get funded.

[jwalt]

Lots of very cool costumes!  Great work, everyone!

Here are my votes:

Bronze for Witch by jwalt.

Silver for Yoda by Arj0n.

Gold for Igor by Ponch.

Well done!

Haha.

Spoiler

It's a runner bean, isn't it!

Sharp edge, like a blade?

[close]

Yeah, I think that's it. 

Congratulations Fitz!  What a creative entry.  It was certainly an interesting experience.

Also, well done DBoyWheeler!  Happy to see you participating and creating a game!  I hope to see more from you in the future!

[Atmosphere]

OK, so here are my votes.

Atmosphere - jwalt
Composition - Unlady
Functionality - JoshuaSmyth

Wonderful work, everyone!  I really liked all of the entries in this contest.  It was a great theme, I wish we had seen more!  I would enjoy my time in any of these clubs, I'm sure, even though they all seem to represent different aspects of nightclub culture.  Great job!

I'll post the next comp asap! stay tuned.

Awesome!  I'm looking forward to it!

It was hard to tell what was success and what failure.

At the very least, I can say that this was intriguing.

Thanks for sharing! 

If the individual mandate is to be seen as a necessity, then this whole thing should be abandoned.  They should really work to reform the entire health care paradigm.

(What can we learn from this? Fuck the Republicans.)

Indeed.  They are truly the ones standing in the way of progress.  Not only in preventing this ACA from going into effect, and not only in shutting down the government, but in denying the people of the only real solution available, which would be the aforementioned single-payer system.

Congratulations, boojiboy!  It really was a fantastic track, and I debated even entering after listening to it.  Nice work! 

Diamond16, thanks for your thoughtful feedback.  I really appreciate you taking the time to listen and offer analysis, and I hope that it will help me in the future.  Thank you.  I also appreciate you being so prompt with this contest!  Posting the new contest so quickly after the last, and giving us results in a timely manner has been a nice change of pace.  We may even get another contest in this month!

Anyways, I've already said it but I think the other entrants did a fantastic job, and I really enjoyed their tracks.  I'm looking forward to the next contest, and I hope I'll be able to contribute something that stands out.  Either way, it's always fun to participate and be included among such high caliber musicians.

Call it what you will, that's not the point here.  The point is that this ACA is a broken piece of legislation attempting to fix a broken system.  It's hardly a band-aid.  Better yet, it's a band-aid that's covered in caustic toxins.  It may stop some of the bleeding, but the wound is going to get infected.

Glad to see more of this type of thing.  Unfortunately, $70 is quite a chunk of cash, considering I'd also have to shell out for the full version of Unity.

Good luck with the project, though.  It looks pretty cool.

It's a definite improvement.  You are using a couple different dithering methods, but I think you could vary it a bit more.

I'd take a look at some of the suggested reading in this thread to see if that could help you out.  Keep at it, this is a really nice piece overall. 

But the problem lies not in people lacking insurance, but the existence of for-profit healthcare period.

I agree here.  I think that a single-payer system would be beneficial to the American people, and would do away with a lot of the cost inflation already present (thereby doing away with the need for private, for-profit insurance companies).  The topic of rights versus luxury came up, and I believe that in a civilized modern society, health care is a right.  I've said it before, it should be on par with police and fire services.

I would rather be taxed and provided with adequate health care than be taxed because I can't afford inadequate health care.

Mods, that was really nice!  I enjoyed the original, it was great on its own.  You've got a talent for MIDI programming.  The evolution was a nice change.  More succinct, while still elaborating on certain elements.  Well done!

Still a few hours to see if anyone else wants to participate.  I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this contest.  It should be interesting! 

Sounds like it might be Universe.  I haven't yet played it (it's on my list), so I can't confirm, but it is available at Abandonia.  Also, it's the spiritual successor to Curse of Enchantia, also available at Abandonia.

Hope I've helped.  If not, good luck in your search! 

Well, I finished my track.  I've been having trouble with my Cubase, it was adding a crackle to all of my instruments for some reason.  So, I only used Cubase for the drums this time (to avoid the clicking drum issue that happened in the last contest).  The rest was directly exported from MuseScore and laid over the drums.

Anyways, without further ado:

The original: Adventure Tune
    - This was the first Tune Contest entry, when the objective was to create a tune using only one instrument.

The evolution: Adventure Tune: Evolved
    - I pushed the track a little further by adding several instruments and a new section.

This was a lot of fun!  Evolution was a good theme!  I really enjoyed listening to the progression of the Mario tune as an example, they've done so much with it over the years.  I also enjoyed listening to the other entry.  I'll say again that boojiboy's track is really cool.  Well done!  This is the last day, maybe Mods will get a track completed in time for the end.  I'd like to hear what he's been thinking up.

With my cell phone, I only pick up if I know the caller / they are in my contact list.  If I don't recognize the number, I'll let voicemail pick it up.  If they don't leave a message, it wasn't that important anyways.

Well, a deductible is the first X you pay each year... so with a 3000 deductible, and costs of 2000, you pay 2000. With a 3000 deductible and costs of 200000 (e.g. cancer, brain surgery, etc) you pay 3000 + some percentage of the rest. Not sure what typical percentages are for ACA plans.

Of course, 3000 sucks as a deductible. I'm lucky enough that my employer "gives" me a good plan, but I still hate having to pay the first $400 when I'm already paying so much as a premium.

One example of crazy US costs: my doctor visit copay is $15, Insurance pays the other $400 or whatever it is. In Singapore, $15 was THE ENTIRE COST of a doctor visit.

That's the point.  I'm a fairly healthy individual, and I typically only need to visit a doctor once every year or two for relatively minor things (this year I had strep throat), so I don't really need insurance.

If a doctor visit normally costs $100, and if my deductible is higher than that, then I'm stuck not only paying for the $100 doctor visit, but also the monthly insurance charge.  I'm pretty poor as it is, so adding another monthly expense is not going to help matters, especially if it's not going to cover the $100 I'll end up spending out of my own pocket.  If I'm still going to have to pay deductibles and copays, insurance isn't really helping me very much as a relatively young and healthy individual.  Taxing me because I can't afford health care is essentially a poverty tax as well (and I find that to be unethical).

I understand that the ACA is already helping many, but so would alternative plans (like the "Medicaid for All" plan I mentioned above).  There is a better way, and it would be nice if the government would work towards it, or at least strike the individual mandate from the ACA.

I'll have to look into it a bit more, but I don't like the prospect of forcing me to pay any more than I'm already paying (which is the cost of visiting a doctor whenever I'm too sick for over the counter medicine).  I also think that more medication should be made available over the counter.

Additionally, a drunken or otherwise inebriated yes means no, too.

Eh, if every drunken shag is rape, then we'd better arrest 90% of the population (and offer them victim's counseling, too).

We can make conscious choices even while intoxicated (sometimes bad ones, to be sure). The legal standard is therefore rather tighter, often something to the effect of "functionally unconscious" (which doesn't necessarily mean unresponsive).

Not all of them are rape, that's for sure.  I'm not trying to imply that every sexual act committed with a slight buzz is a rape.

But, it often happens that a victim will give consent while intoxicated and later realize that their inebriation prevented them from making a sound judgement.  This isn't just a bad choice on their part.  This is a physical inability to properly consent.  I'm not sure how far your definition of "functionally unconscious" would go, maybe it covers this, but it sounds like someone who is awake enough to answer, but not conscious enough to understand.  Maybe that's where the law draws the line, but I would suggest that unless consent was given (or understood) prior to intoxication, it is probably better to err on the side of caution.  Even a fully conscious person can have their judgement sufficiently clouded by intoxicants.

Getting away from the intoxication debate, another thing to consider is that coerced consent is not really consent.  There are of course examples of coercion under threat or duress, but I'm talking about a more subtle variety.  A good example is the Family Guy's version of the James Bond character saying "50 no's and a yes means yes."  Obviously, this is a joke meant to parody that mentality, but some people out there might actually believe this to be true.  50 no's and a yes means coerced consent, or rape.

I think that these are the more complicated but important parts of the issue, because it can be difficult to understand where that line is drawn.  More education on these points would probably go a long way towards the prevention of sexual assault.

I think the main point to get across to men is that "No means no". And if people want to play games where that rule doesn't apply, it needs to be clearly agreed beforehand. Unfortunately all kinds of movies propagate "no means yes" as a default.

Additionally, a drunken or otherwise inebriated yes means no, too.