Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Dear Bisqwit:
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
A peck of pickled peppers is what Peter Piper picked.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers...
How did the peppers get pickled before Peter Piper picked them?
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Colleges are notorious for filtering things like BitTorrent. It looks like all you can really do it put up with it.
Some of the movies have alternate download links from sites like archive.org. You might also try searching Google Video. Alternatively, if you have the right ROMs (remember not to ask for them here), you can download the approriate emulators and key input files to watch the movies.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
FODA wrote:
It is the only practical way of doing it. Discussing, wips, discussing, wips, memory addresses, discuss.
I'm not optimistic. "Discussions" in this community so frequently lead to unending insults and flames and personal attacks that I doubt that substantial accomplishments would be anything other than few and very far between using this model. And, inevitably, some working on the same game would revert back to the traditional one-or-two-maybe-three-person TASing model anyway, causing offense and creating more unending discussion and debate...
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Usually the problems with BitTorrent downloading are that there are no or not enough seeds, or that those who are seeding are uploading very slowly.
But Majora's Mask has more than enough seeds, which suggests that the problem may be your ISP. The "Bad ISP" list Dromiceius mentions is located here.
Also, if you're using a NAT router or gateway, follow the instructions at http://www.portforward.com/ and see if that helps at all. With BitTorrent, users who don't upload (for example, because of being behind a NAT router with ports closed) get slower download speeds; but again, the Majora's Mask video should have worked reasonably well despite this. Check the ISP list.
As for codecs, do read the FAQ. I use the K-Lite Codec Pack (I do NOT recommend the "Mega" pack because it tends to be out of date) with Windows Media Player without problems, and that's the particular solution I personally would recommend if you use Windows. Just be sure to take the time to read the codec descriptions so that you know what you're doing. Also, be sure to select ffdshow as your H.264 decoder instead of CoreAVC, or else the videos will come out looking garbled.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Hmm... no offense, but it sounds like the ocarina needs a little bit more practice.
That being said, I am quite impressed with your sense of musical style. The sound of the tracks was very tasteful, with just the right amount of sophistication and class.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Warp wrote:
However, what I find fascinating is the nature of "structure". What is it?
I'm going to take a stab at this. It seems that the only thing actually "transmitted" in a literal sense is the pattern of ink on the paper. The "structure" (there has to be a better name for this) depends on common rules of interpretation on the parts of both the sender and receiver. "Information" is an abstract noun for a reason. Saying that something besides the ink and paper (i.e. the information) is "transmitted" is true only in a figurative sense. "Transmission of information" is nothing more than a metaphor – a handy mental convienence, an abstraction of a more difficult-to-grasp idea.
It seems that the process works as follows:
The sender formulates an intended interpretation of his message based on the believed rules of interpretation of the recipient.
Through a process probably not clearly understood by mankind, the sender encodes the intended interpretation of his message as a pattern of ink on paper.
The recipient, upon receiving the message, again in a process probably not clearly understood, proceeds to decode the patterns of ink on the paper using his own rules of interpretation into his own interpretation of the message.
There are several things to note here:
The sender does not fix the interpretation of the recipient, or even the recipient's rules of interpretation.
There are several things that could go wrong in this process:
The sender may incorrectly encode the intended interpretation of the message. This could be things like accidently writing one word when another was intended, spelling words incorrectly, unintended slips of the hand while writing, and so on.
The rules of interpretation that the sender believes the recipient to use may be partially or totally incorrect. For example, different languages, differing competencies of the same language, differing competencies of subsets of a language, e.g. slang or jargon or use of different dialects, meanings or shades of meanings understood by only one of the parties, incorrect guessing of an intended meaning of a word in the case of polysemy, and about a million other things.
It seems to me that none of these problems would exist if something outside of the "encoder/decoder" relationship were transmitted besides just the ink and paper.
For the record, I have no idea how a person formulates an intended interpretation of a message and encodes that interpretation by manipulation of matter, or how the mental processes of decoding and interpretation actually work. These things are outside my scope of knowledge, and, it seems to me, outside the scope of Warp's original question.
But for what was in the scope of the original question... somebody please blow a hole in this if it's wrong, because, for the number of intelligent people taking part in this discussion, why this is still a question is something I don't understand. It's like asking, "How do computers send pictures to each other if there are only wires connecting them?" The answer to Warp's question is common sense observation of how humans communicate. Hasn't anybody bothered to sit down and observe this?
P.S.
This is an expression of genuine bewilderment; there is no intention to flame or offend anybody. But I guess we'll see how the recipients interpret it. ; P
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Bisqwit wrote:
Deep Loner wrote:
I was unofficially officially not a member anymore, but this has got to be the funniest thing I have ever seen!
I'm not sure what you mean!
I mean that when I saw the "Ask Fabian" and "Ask Bisqwit" threads, I simply cracked up! It is simply one of the funniest things I have ever seen posted in an internet forum! It's one of those things where LOL can actually be taken literally. Maybe it's irrationality on my part; I don't know.
Another question: I remember that you have (had?) some kind of tile/sprite identifier program that you used to make the cool animated .gifs of Racoon Mario jumping around. Could that idea eventually be expanded into an efficient 8/16-bit video game video codec?
And doesn't this commitment to answer everybody's questions kind of make you a slave to them? : )
The Free Software Foundation's Campaign for Free BIOS page insinuates that it is actually unethical to run proprietary software on a computer. What are your thoughts about this?
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
JXQ wrote:
Phil isn't going to care what I say about him [...] and I'm not going to care what he says about me
...then it sounds like it's pretty pointless to continue. Not to mention that some of us are getting pretty sick and tired of all the bullshit being thrown around...
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
OK, here's a proposal:
Pitchers:
Bisqwit: all-round solid throwing statistics; a good starting pitcher.
DeHackEd: supreme technical accuracy at the expense of a slightly slower fastball; knows everything about pitching and is excellent at hitting the razor's edge of the strike zone.
nitsuja: throws mostly straight pitches, but has a 197 mile per hour fastball.
Bag of Magic Food: messes with batters' minds by throwing trick pitches; is able to throw the baseball in such ways that normal people just can't throw a baseball.
Hitters:
Genisto: a legendary old-timer. To be placed next to Phil in the batting order.
Phil: tends to hit high pop-ups. Very liberal base leader and steals bases at every available opportunity. Always brags about how he's going to steal home. Intentionally throws his bat at JXQ after making a hit.
JXQ: intentionally throws his bat at Phil after making a hit. Otherwise a solid performer.
AngerFist: brandishes his bat menacingly while at the plate. A strong hitter.
Upthorn: an all-around solid hitter.
adelikat: an all-around solid hitter.
Truncated: an all-around solid hitter.
FractalFusion: an all-around solid hitter.
Pinch Hitters:
moozooh: a good enough hitter in his own right but regularly increases the statistics of other team members as well.
CtrlAltDestroy: a solid power hitter, actually better than some of the regular hitters at times.
NesVideoAgent: invoked by commands in the IRC channel; calculates optimal batting swing based on wind speed and direction, velocity and rotation of the ball during the pitch, turf and terrian condition, and exhaustive statistical and psychological data of the other team; always hits the ball to the exact spot that takes the outfielders the longest amount of time to get to, allowing the other players to run the bases and score; during times of heavy server load NesVideoAgent may use Bisqwit's body to make the actual swing; has -124 RBIs due to integer overflow in someone's poorly designed statistics tracking software.
Deep Loner: An oddball; has been told that he thinks like a baseball player, but has never really done anything useful with a bat and glove before; you may actually want to find another pinch hitter, to tell you the truth. ; P
I think this represents a good cross-section of the site. There are, of course a lot of other great contributors that deserve to be on the list but can't be because of the 4-8-4 limitation.
Oh, and please don't be offended by anything written here. I tried to keep it all positive and it's all in good fun.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Bisqwit wrote:
Deep Loner wrote:
For the longest time I used to be able to recognize our beloved site admin by his Mega Man helmet.
Like this?
Err.
It's a good start! : D
But I was thinking something along the lines of this...
Da-da da da-da... da-da da da-da... da-da da... da-da da...
It's BISQ-MAN!!!
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
moozooh wrote:
Deep Loner wrote:
I am especially curious about what the diminutive means applied to the word square.
"Squareling"?
For a while zefiris' avatar wasn't showing up in my browser. It makes a bit more sense now, although expressions like squareling or (even worse) darling square sound... well, strange...
I have mixed feelings about Bisqwit's avatar. For the longest time I used to be able to recognize our beloved site admin by his Mega Man helmet. The new avatar doesn't seem to stand out as much.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
It's common knowledge that pride has two connotations: one good and one bad. Pride movie is evidently intended to refer to the negative connotation; that is, a movie to show off, "Hey! Look what I did!" without actually being a quality movie. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with being proud (in the good way) of a quality movie. That's why I like my earlier definition of a pride movie.
Some members of this site who have made very high quality movies have had issues with pride (the bad kind), yet that does not (necessarily) make their movies pride movies. On the other hand, a certain less egotistical individual might submit a pride movie to "show off" to another community: Hey! Look what I can do with tool assistance!
A wise king once wrote:
Pride is before a crash, and a haughty spirit before stumbling.
Before a crash the heart of a man is lofty, and before glory there is humility.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
JXQ wrote:
I don't see it as an embarrassment. The two communities aren't out to claim victories over each other anyway. This is just a case of someone from the unassisted community developing new strategies that both communities can benefit from. It happened the other way as well; inichi credited hero of the day's TAS with many of his boss strategies. Just because the overall time is faster, doesn't mean that the TAS was sloppily executed.
I never meant to claim that hero's run was sloppy or that unassisted runners were in some kind of competition with TASers. I just thought that with the tools available, a TAS should never be slower than an unassisted run. I think that this was based on the erroneous assumption that the "domain knowledge" of sorts for the game was already complete or nearly complete for both communities, so that both were working off of the same foundation. It never occurred to me that a "new strategy" could save that much time with unassisted play (and no, I've never played the game before). Naïveté? I'll confess to that.
So while retracting my earlier statements about embarassment, I still see this as quite a victory for the SDA community. And I thank you, JXQ, for correcting me, and for having a much better attitude than either me or hero of the day on this matter.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
hero of the day wrote:
Everyone knew about this run 2 months ago.
That helps put the matter in perspective. And you're right that I would have done well to follow the relevant thread. But when I see an unassisted run that's 10% faster than a tool-assisted run, I get concerned. I would be quite embarassed if it were my run, and I didn't know what the site's response to this would be.
Do you really believe that your abusive attitude was necessary?
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
...so SDA's time is roughly 27 minutes shorter? That's a pretty unacceptable state of affairs. So what happens now? Could the TAS get un-published from this site?
Whatever happens... ouch!... but I must admit that this is an absolutely monumental victory for the unassisted speedrunning community!
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Is it true that TASVideos timing differs from SDA timing? If so, how does this affect the comparable times?
I admit that this is a pretty embarassing development...
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
VirtualAlex wrote:
My Russian teacher told me what that is called once, but I totally forgot. But it's like changing the word "dog" to "doggy" and it makes the dog a little smaller, and a little cuter. English doesn't have too many examples of this I can think of, but in Russian it can be done to nearly anything.
Are you referring to diminutives?
I am especially curious about what the diminutive means applied to the word square.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Deep Loner wrote:
I think a lot of good points were made here. I'll just offer my proposed definition of a "pride movie" as it relates to this site:
A pride movie is a tool-assisted speedrun created for ego or for "showing off" that is irreparably lacking fundamental qualities of a publication-worthy production.
"Irreparably" refers to being able to make a "fix" within the scope of the original submission, not within the global scope of the game. For example, the one-lap MK64 run that was recently rejected falls into this category, because it will never be a publication-worthy movie no matter how many improvements the author makes to that one lap.
Of course, there are many "fundamental qualities" required for publication, like fastest time, technical quality, completion of the game, and you can probably think of more. Also, no definition of a pride movie is going to make any argument go away, because nobody's going to admit that their submission is a pride movie.
The idea of "ego" or "showing off" is fundamental to the idea of a pride movie. Someone could make an unacceptable movie by simply not understanding the purpose of the site, like the full-speed, no rerecords submissions that occassionally pop up. Rather than being pride movies, those are simply unacceptable submissions. Needless to say, the accusation that one has submitted a pride movie should not be thrown around lightly.
This is of course just a suggestion, and not by any means a "pride suggestion". : ) Criticism is always welcome.
