Veal comes from cows too, Greg.

Yeah, I think Fig gave himself away by not realizing that steak comes from cows, not from deer.

Also, just exactly how weird is it that I'm now trying to decide whether to spend my evening reinstalling World of Warcraft or trying to build an automated message of false hope? This forum is weird.

I enjoyed that way, way more than I should have.

Okay, so I promised you guys retribution for your sins … but then you went and gave a very moderate, even forgiving commentary.

Dang.

Here's my thing, though. Pretty much everything you guys said you disliked about the movie, I love about the movie. I even loved the fact that Newt and Hicks were killed. I even loved the way they were killed!

I get where you guys are coming from; you think it was maybe an okay movie, maybe even a good one, but that you didn't like it as an Alien movie. I can see that. But I don't agree with it. I think it was an exemplary Alien movie.

See, in my opinion, the Alien movies all use the alien as a blank canvas and project some primal truth about life onto it. (I'm not counting Resurrection here; if anything, I'd say that one is the one that doesn't belong in the set.)

The first Alien was very much about rape, thematically. Rape, penetration, violation, subjugation, whatever you want to call it; it's the theme of the movie. The fact that Ripley ended up being a woman and the alien ended up being sheathed in phallic imagery — while I doubt either of those was on the page — didn't hurt this interpretation any.

The second movie was about motherhood. Ripley's daughter, Newt's mom, Newt herself, the queen; every aspect of the movie revolves in some way around motherhood.

The third film is about death. Everything revolves around death, and what it means, and how we react to it. Newt and Hicks die off-screen, while Ripley's asleep and can't do anything about it; that's the capriciousness of death. Bishop asks Ripley to deactivate him; Ripley asks Dylan to kill her. That's seeking to control death. The prisoners are all rapists, yes, but also murderers. And they turn to God, the ultimate symbol of power over death. Hell, even Ripley's love interest is a murderer. And just in case you weren't catching on, the first and third acts of the film both end with funerals.

Alien 3 is a powerfully thematic movie. Maybe even more so than the first two, frankly; everything in the movie, practically every shot in the movie, serves the theme. Cause of that, I think it fits in perfectly with the rest of the series. If anything, in that respect … I think it's the best of the series. Not most entertaining, not best-made, not favorite. But on the scale of what's-a-theme to everything-is-symbolic, I think Alien 3 scores highest of all of the movies in the series.

Lemme just say this, then I'll stop being pretentious as hell. I think Alien 3 is a mature monster movie. In an immature monster movie, the audience is expected to care very deeply about who is and who is not going to die. But in a mature monster movie, the audience is expected to know that everyone's going to die, and to care deeply about how they die. Alien 3 is a mature monster movie because Ripley's death was inevitable from the first frame, but the story emerges from how she chooses to go out.

Anyway. That's how I see it, for what that's worth.

I played Hornface, a level-80 Tauren hunter on Eitrigg. I'd hit 80 and was just screwing around idly when I got myself into a guild that turned into a second guild that turned into a few of us starting our own guild. I was just about to get started with raiding the good stuff — Ulduar; this was like seconds before the Argent Tournament stuff got real — when came guild drama the likes of which even God has never seen.

That was … hmm. Last summer, sometime. July or so. I haven't played since.

But Kyle's right. The game offers a lot. I don't know whether this is still the case, but at the time you could get an achievement (bragging rights, basically) for assassinating all the leaders of the other faction. One night, real late, the call went out on the server and I ended up in an 80-man army (composed of two 40-man raids) that assembled on this remote, middle-of-nowhere beach — there were campfires, people brought out their vanity pets, feasts were cooked and booze shared — and then rode off en masse for the enemy capital cities.

Now, if you haven't played before, lemme splain something. WoW is set in a very large world, something like tens of miles square to scale. Each of the two factions has a bunch of little settlements, and a handful of major cities, and one capital city. Deep within each of the major cities is something like a throne room where you can find whatever they use for their king. The elves are high up in a tree, the humans have a sprawling masonry city with canals and the dwarves have this maze-like warren that's not entirely unlike Zion from the Matrix sequels.

At rush hour, you might find a few hundred players in each capital city, maybe just a few dozen in the smaller major cities. So to see an army of 80 players riding toward your city is a big, impressive deal. You'd think it would be utter chaos, but we had a couple of really bossy (in a good way) players who were keeping us alert and oriented, blasting out orders over in-game chat and stuff. And we got all the way to Ironforge — the dwarf capital — before the end. As the saying goes, we broke upon their defenses like water on rock.

But man, it was a fun time.

I'd totally put in for a server transfer and start playing again for the right group of people. Hint hint.

Short version: The painting's called "A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte," and it's noteworthy as one of the earliest and best examples of neo-impressionism. That style of painting was heavily influenced by late-1800s research into color theory and the science of light. Seurat and others (mainly Seurat at first) basically invented a new way of painting that uses small points of primary color that, when viewed from a distance, get perceived as subtle shades.

Fun fact? Literally all of modern print and digital media is based on the same principles.

I brought it up 'cause pointillism (as it's called) is an art form that makes the viewer an inherent part of the artwork. It relies on how light and color interact with the eye. And it's a hell of a thing to see in person. Photographs can't really capture it.

I could give a seminar on pooping. I could teach classes.

I think there's some sort of vague intersection here between the notions of "game" and "story," but I'm having a hard time sussing it out in my head. I'm bringing to bear here some of my paltry experience with games: World of Warcraft. You seem generally to run into two kinds of people who play that game. There are those who play for the game of it — the challenge, whatever — and those who play for the story of it. There's surprisingly little overlap between the two groups, in my experience.

Very little in that game is random. There's an overarching plot, and tons of little side-plots. In fact, the whole story is kind of horribly complicated; I never wrapped my head around the whole thing. There are tons and tons of characters, hidden identities, people switching sides, fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles … blah de blah. It's really very rich.

Lots of people who play just ignore that stuff so they can go fight bosses and whatnot. But it's all there, if you want to take the time to listen to the dialogue and stuff. I'll even admit, freely, that there were moments when I was playing the game that left me slack-jawed. There's one quest in the last expansion that seems wholly ordinary, but then it cuts to a big cinematic — and this is a game that doesn't do cinematics ever — and it's just epic, and … well, there's drama. Like legit drama, like you'd find in a novel. It's really quite something.

I hadn't thought about that in quite a while, but this conversation made me reflect on it again. And … y'know, I might have been wrong. Maybe the line between art and not-art is blurrier than I thought. Maybe it's possible, or even common, for video games to contain within them the essential art-ness that we find in drama or poetry or whatever.

I'm really not sure what I think, now. Except to say that maybe whoever-said-it-first is right. Maybe video games, as a thing-people-make, are too new to really know for sure what can and can't be done in that medium.

Musical instruments can certainly be beautiful, both generally and as fine examples of their kind. But I wouldn't say that an instrument is, in and of itself, a work of art. Because above all else, it has to be functional. Otherwise it's not an instrument at all; it's just a sculpture.

I don't really have one, which is why I'm struggling here. The best I can do is to be totally boring and circular: A video game is a computer program (or I guess combination of software and hardware, whatever, there's a computer in the loop) that's intended to be played. It's judged on the criteria we use for games of all sorts, and for toys.

I freely admit never having played that one. I saw it played once, years ago, briefly, but that's as good as I can do. If that one fits the criteria — it's meant to be evaluated aesthetically first and only as a game or toy second — then I concede defeat. You've convinced me.

However, assuming those facts-not-in-evidence … is "Myst" a video game? Or is it something else? Is it in some way inherently different from Tetris or Gears of War?

Yeah, I wish I'd been clearer. What I was actually doing was conflating "cooking" with … erm … "arting." The nature of the end result is defined by the process that went into producing it. It might be an unsuccessful dish, but it's still a dish, because it was intended to be edible.

But the more I harp on that point the less confident I am in it. So … yeah.

Yes!!!eleven That's exactly how I see it.

Now … can you name me a video "game" (for lack of a better word) that was made with that intent? I'm not challenging you; I legitimately don't know of one.

Ehhhhhh … sort of. I just dumped some eggs, flour, sugar and baking powder into a container. Was I cooking or putting stuff in the trash? It depends on my intent. You dig me?

Well if you're gonna be like THAT, then everything's essentially mathematics.

This thread is the best episode of Radiolab ever.