You know, it's interesting. I don't remember seeing this kind of vitriol for the first-generation iPhone ($599 baseline -- $100 more than iPad), or for each new rev of the MacBooks ($999 baseline) or MacBook Pro ($1199). People were happy to pay $699 (and up) for the Playstation 3, for which games cost $60 on average and some top-selling games like Rock Band retailing for $140 for a set of instrument-shaped plastic controllers that are really only useful for a very narrow selection of games, and another $60-100 for branded alternatives (e.g. the Beatles). A Game Boy or other handheld is gonna run you $150-$200 just for the device. A decent HDTV will run you at least a grand and go from there, tickets to a sports game, concert, or other one-time live event generally start at $80 a pop if you're willing to sit across the street, and the sky's the limit the closer you get.

And yet someone pays their money for any of those things, nobody bats an eye or dismisses them as having more money than sense. Most people decide they'd like to spend their money on the same thing. But the iPad -- more useful screen real estate than a phone, cheaper and more portable than a laptop, more versatile than an HDTV, more productive than a dedicated gaming system -- is dismissed as the "fuck you I've got money" purchase?

I'm all in agreement that the marketing for the iPad is a circle-jerk of the highest order. There's nothing "magical" about it (there might have been if the iPad had preceded the iPhone, but it didn't), and "revolutionary" remains to be seen; could turn out to be true if it successfully creates a new market and paradigm in consumer computing, but even so it's kind of douchey for Apple to be the ones to say it about their own product the moment it releases (although I guess it's not that different from that 1984 ad everyone venerates, so whatever).

But to dismiss it as a "fuck you, I've got money" device implies that it has no practical use. Maybe for you. But for my part:

1) I read a lot. With scripts, the larger screen makes the iPad better for that task than a phone; the form factor makes it more convenient for the task when I'm on-the-go than a laptop (as does the battery life); the digital nature makes it cheaper in the long run than printing on paper and easier to carry around more than one. With books, the same preferences for a digital reader apply; also, eBooks are generally cheaper than their printed counterparts, I save myself a trip to the bookstore when possible, I can get older or out-of-print books cheaply or even free, and read PDFs. Even reading the Web is much more convenient than a phone, laptop, or desktop computer, because it's handheld but doesn't make me strain my eyes to read tiny type, or zoom in to the point where I can only read a handful of words at once.

2) I write a lot. And while the current writing apps on the iPad almost represent a step backward in some ways (you have to email yourself your latest files in iWork instead of having them sync to/from the "cloud" a la Dropbox), there's still a lot to be said for how little space an iPad + bluetooth keyboard takes up, both in a carrying bag and out of one, vs. a laptop. As it is, I was considering getting a MacBook Air to do writing with, and reserving the MBP solely for production-related work that requires more powerful processing. Now I won't need to, and I spent half of what I would have. Once Final Draft comes out with their iPad app -- assuming it's not a poorly-implemented turd -- I'll have very little reason to carry my laptop around day-to-day.

3) I watch a lot of media. I consider it part of my job as a filmmaker, which is why I enjoy my job. Movies, television, documentaries, interviews, training. Between Netflix, Air Video, the ABC player and YouTube, I've got access to all of it, in a lightweight handheld form factor, anywhere there's an active wifi hotspot -- which, thanks to the Spirit jailbreak and MyWi, is pretty much everywhere I go. Not to mention the iPad's internal storage capacity.

It's totally understandable if you can't think of anything you would use an iPad for, and/or think that the value of what you'd use it for is less than what you'd pay for it. But to dismiss anyone who does see value there as necessarily and solely pretentious, as though it can be nothing more than bourgeois bling, has more to do with the limits of your imagination than those of their credit cards.

You know, IMO. Anyway, SUNSHINE.

And Jaws had three.

We only have one left each to record for Terminator, Alien, Gremlins, and MIB. Though we're trying to do more one-offs from not-the-2000s in the next little while.

Raiders, Batman, and Fellowship pretty much definitely. Twilight's unlikely -- I actually liked the first movie a great deal more than the book, and I just read Eclipse and had an existential crisis when I thought it was pretty decent, but I don't think I'm likely to get the other gents on board here and it's not a series I would stick my neck out for.

Actually, that would be from this thread.

Nope. As I say, they argue that the Bible contains information that the people of the time couldn't possibly have known, but there isn't a single passage on that page representing information that couldn't have been plainly obvious to anyone at the time, and/or reasonably guessed.

I mean, just take the astronomy bit. They're going to try to argue that a Bronze Age shepherd wouldn't be able to say "There are more stars than I can count" just by looking at them? And couldn't have deduced that the fact that there are multiple visible stars indicates that they're all individual and different from each other?

Really?

They try to gussy it up by painting a coat of recent scientific knowledge on top of it to pretend it's validation, talking about analyzing the spectra, but the Bible said nothing about spectral differentiation, it just said one is different from another, which again would be obvious to any half-retarded person looking up outdoors at night.

I'd have been far more impressed if it contained information that was counter-intuitive based on mere observation -- like, say, that though we perceive multiple stars that they all originate from the same source and something in our atmosphere makes it diffract into the apparent multitudes (in an alternate universe where this is true, of course). Then for an ancient book to say such a thing as this but only be able to demonstrate it empirically millennia later, well, that book would be worth a second look. But that's not what the Bible does, it only says things that would be perfectly intuitive to anyone with eyes and a child's intelligence.

Or take the bit about blood, from Leviticus. Yes, blood "carries water and nourishment to every cell, maintains the body’s temperature, and removes the waste material of the body’s cells. The blood also carries oxygen from the lungs throughout the body."

But the Bible doesn't say any of that, the Bible says only that "the life of the flesh is in the blood" which would again be apparent to any idiot who'd watched things die after they had lost a significant amount of blood -- which both hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies would be dealing with on a regular basis.

Etc.

And in other places, they're just wrong. Human flesh is NOT made of "dust." We know that this is NOT true. Why is it being touted as an example of the Bible containing scientifically accurate information?

So to reiterate, I've heard these arguments, but I have never seen a Christian provide a passage that contains modern knowledge that human beings at the time could not possibly have known. The Bible contains no such information. Likewise the page about the Quran, which in places is even more shameless in its apologetical retcons.

I've seen them argue that. I've never seen one provide such a passage.

I don't play.

I have no contempt for people who do, in fact I bet I would really enjoy it and get really into it if I started playing.

Which is why I won't.

People who loved Karate Kid when they were 8 would be 34 now, and if they loved Karate Kid at 8 there's a good chance they became martial arts enthusiasts in the interim.

At any rate, even if Karate Kid's fan's aren't martial arts enthusiasts in general, Jackie Chan's sure are, and the producers would know that.

Yes, Eddie and I are well aware of that one. He doesn't learn karate, he learns kung fu.

So they briefly thought of calling it "The Kung Fu Kid." But that would have defeated the purpose of remaking the film, which is to cash in on nostalgia for the original by using the title.

So they went back to "Karate Kid," which is apparently what the other kids call him, as an insult, since they consider it an inferior martial art. Which I have no doubt the producers hastily inserted into the film as a reshoot so as not to piss off their core audience, which knows the difference between the two.

Yeah, I didn't get it either. But it seemed besides the point to ask.

Teague edited my last post instead of quoting, because Admins have extra buttons to click and break things with (I did it earlier with one of JH's posts), so this post of his technically doesn't exist except in this quote, but I copied it from my post and edited it in here.

Confused? Good. Anyway...

It's not. In SAT analogy syntax, you said:

Gamer is to video game as musician is to instrument.

This is an inaccurate analogy. More accurate would be either:

Gamer is to video game as musician is to song.

or

Gamer is to game console as musician is to instrument.

As no one currently posting here has a uterus or vagina (that I know of), none of us are qualified to speak on the subject.

Which is difficult to address, since you have not given the definition of "art" which you hold and by which you are making these evaluations.

Not to play hard to get, but I'll repeat my question that got lost in the shuffle: what is your operating definition of "video game"?

EDIT: even more pertinent in light of your point of debate re: Photoshop.

Three contemporary games that fit this criteria are Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Fable.

But then, again, this doesn't jibe with your attempt to paint video games as inherently "not art." If someone TRIES to make a video game that invokes an emotion or aesthetic experience or sense of the sublime, then they are making art whether they "succeed" or not, correct? Just by trying?

Earlier you tried to say "a game is not art because a game is one thing and art is another," but that's nonsensical. A game is one thing and a painting is another and a sculpture is another and a movie is another. Art is a category, and you are willing to accept the last three things into that category but not the first one, and you may think you've explained why but you honestly haven't made a meaningful distinction between what that medium can offer versus the others, particularly movies, which you have said you feel are art "more often than not" (and that's farther than I would go, TBH).

Aside from songs that animals (particularly birds) sing. And the fact that music is just audible mathematics -- in that sense, it's really the most concrete.