Enjay

This guy, right? You can see him in the last minute or so of this video too:

A voodoo closet is basically a Rube Goldberg machine* built in hidden sectors for when people don't want to use a port that can achieve the same effect much more simply with a few lines of scripting code. *or as we'd more likely say in the UK, a Heath Robinson device.

I think even they (the FRAPS people) may know that. They used to update the program on a regular basis but now updates are few and far between.

That guys impression of the noise a goose makes is about as bad an animal impression as I have heard. He's right about them being noisy and shitting everywhere though. I got attacked by a swan once. I was young and, although I didn't know it, I was walking towards its nest. Damn thing started hissing, flapping its wings and charged at me then whacked me with its wings and hit me with its beak. Scary stuff. Kind of like this one but it was hissing and didn't stop short.

Can't comment on OBS because I've been using FRAPS for years and now my vidoe card also has "Shadow Play" built in. However, just to be clear, the reason that your recording stops so soon is because you are using the free version of FRAPS. It is limited to short recordings and, if I recall correctly, it also puts a watermark on the video. The paid version does neither of these things. The captured video files are indeed huge but that is deliberate. Because they are uncompressed, they are pretty clear quality-wise and therefore suitable for loading up into an editing program for post-capture tweaking. Once you've made your changes, you can save them in whatever formats your editing program supports and thereby reduce the file size.

Often it's the "I was into them before they were cool" fans that accuse bands of being "sell outs". My impression is that, most of the time, the reasons for the accusation are that: The band no longer feel like the exclusive property of the original fan who can no longer go on about the unknown band that they love - because everyone now knows them and has an opinion about them. That loss of exclusivity and the apparent (and often real) casual appreciation of many of the newer fans gets up the older fans' noses. Also, their in-depth knowledge of the band and their "early stuff" is usually pretty irrelevant to the newer fan who doesn't really give a damn about what some older fan knows about the band, and the original fan knows that (i.e. what they feel is their important link to the band is not considered important by anyone else). This pre-dates the current "hipster" culture BTW. With the lack of exclusivity comes the ease of getting the band's output. If you knew the band when they were small, you may have had to "work" to find their songs. Once the band are big, anyone can pick up their stuff anywhere; including re-issues of the stuff you had to work for. To some, that feels like a betrayal; allowing "casuals" to get their hands on stuff. The band become less accessible. They go on bigger tours to bigger venues to more countries and are less likely to be playing the small club down the street every month or so. So the original fan is less likely to see the band and when they do, will do so in a far less intimate setting. The band's sound changes. Any musician is likely to have some evolution of their sound during their career, or want to try something new or different. If they do this after they are famous, then there is an obvious association with that change/experiment and fame. To the original fan, they are "selling out" and making the change to appease the masses. They are making music other than what the original fan first enjoyed. So, they must be selling out, right? Years ago I remember listening to someone being interviewed about the topic of bands "selling out". I don't recall who it was but I know it was on BBC Radio 2 about 5 p.m. (because I was driving home from work) and that it was about 5 years ago and it was a pretty big recording star of many years experience (maybe it was Alice Cooper, but I'm really not sure). He too said that he doesn't really know what people are talking about when they refer to "selling out". His take was that if you are making music that you want people to hear; that you want people to be entertained by, you need to get it out there. You have to sell it. You have to get a contract. You have to be popular enough for people to have heard of you and want to buy your stuff. He said any artist that doesn't do that won't be heard of. So, they will be making music for no one to hear. That's fine if they are making music just for their own satisfaction but he suggested that most artists want their stuff to be heard so they have to make stuff that people will want to listen to. He also said that, despite what they say, of course many artists want the fame and the fortune and want to be popular and if that means recording a song that they think will be popular, then that's what they should do. There is no shame in that he said. Of course, there are scales of "getting it out there". Some artists will be happy with relatively low levels of sales so long as they can keep making their music. Others will want the big sales and the fame and fortune that goes with them and will try to do what is required to get them. If that's what they want to do, then the purpose of the music is to make sales. Personally, I have no problem whatsoever with an artist trying to make a commercially successful record. I'd even extend that to manufactured formulaic whining boy bands churning out bland corporate-approved dirges to sell to soggy-gussetted early teen fans. Sure, it's shit artistically but it's not made for art's sake. It's made for making money. Clearly there's a market for it and the people who make that stuff do it very well. Then the audience hit puberty and the next lot come along to replace them. A new set of engineered bands are manufactured for them and the meat grinder continues with none of the previous songs staying in the public conscience because they were always intended to be utterly disposable. And if you don't want to listen to it, it's really not that hard to avoid. So what is "selling out". Frankly, I don't have a clue. I suppose the closest I could get would be an artist who wanted to do one thing (perhaps even started out doing it) but chose not to and produced something they hated instead solely to get fortune and fame. I can certainly see why early fans of a band could interpret the actions of their idols that way after the band got their fame. But why do we get all high and mighty about musicians doing that when, in reality, that's what a large proportion of the workforce does every day too? How many people aren't living their dream but have chosen to "sell out" by doing an office job because the pay and pension deal is good? How many of those people will come home from a hard, tedious day of slaving over the accounts of an important client then put on some music from some band or other and moan about how the band has "sold out" while his pre-school poster showing how he wanted to be an astronaut when he grows up lies forgotten at the bottom of a drawer somewhere? Hmmm... not sure where that stream of consciousness came from but it's not out of character for me to do something like that so... ;)

In Australia, home of so many "nature is trying to kill you" species, there is a "swooping season" in the spring when even magpies swoop and attack people:

And also that our sun is about 25,000,000,000,000 miles from the next nearest star, with basically nothing between them. And that our galaxy is a relatively small 600,000,000,000,000,000 miles (approx) across, has about 100-300 billion stars and it is about 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 from Andromeda, the next nearest massive galaxy. The Milky Way and Andromeda are part of a group of galaxies known as the local group and that, in in total, there are estimated to be around 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Current estimates of the total stellar population is roughly 70 billion trillion. It is estimated that the diameter of the observable universe is about 28 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years, 8.8×10^26 metres or 5.5×10^23 miles). Sources Wikipedia, Sky and Telescope, physics.org, National Geographic. What I find interesting is the relative distances of the planets (and other astral bodies). We are quite used to seeing pictures showing how big, say, Jupiter is compared to the other planets and how big the sun is compared to other stars. However, we rarely see the distances between them shown correctly because it is very difficult to show them. If the sun was the size of a medium-sized beach ball, the smallest planets could be reasonably represented by a poppy seed. Jupiter in all its glory would be about the size of a ping-pong ball. On that scale, Pluto would be a little over a mile from the beach ball and all that would be between them would be objects the size of a few seeds and marbles and nothing else. So, to show them in a book, you'd need a book with a page a mile wide with only a few small spots of ink on it. And, of course, almost all of the time, the planets aren't arranged neatly along the same radius but spread out across the full "disc" of the solar system. On the same scale, the Sun would be a few thousand miles from the next nearest star. I do an exercise with my classes at school where we go out and pace out some of the distances. One kid is left holding the "Sun" beach ball, a few paces later, we drop off a kid holding a poppy seed "Mercury", then we pace to "Venus" (a bigger seed) etc etc and we pace things out until we can go as far as is reasonable and practical. We usually only go as far as Jupiter (there is a big gap between Mars and Jupiter) but we sometimes get to Uranus (yeah, I know, I know). Even from "Jupiter", when you look back to the kid holding the first seed, you can't see the seed and even the "Sun" is pretty small. In fact, the ping-pong ball "Jupiter" seems a bit pathetic when you realise that there is basically nothing between you and the beach ball a few hundred metres away yet those two balls represent the two largest bodies in out solar system. TL:DR the solar system is big, the universe is big and there is a lot of space in them.

I don't know if what you said is true, what Kontra said is true or if there is a third true story. What I do know is that bands and similar people are notorious for going on about how hard their lives are (though not many of them seem to give up and go to work in Walmart) and retrofitting sob-stories and "I didn't want to sell out" tales to their lives when the fame dies down and what they did is no longer popular. Either way, during their "sell out" period MCR shifted a lot of albums achieving gold and platinum status in many countries. (4,438,500 albums and 3,722,500 singles worldwide - according to Wikipedia.) They were never off the TV here in the UK and had obviously thrown themselves into the production of videos, TV appearances and other publicity stunts. Sure, I know that a lot of that would have been driven by business people but are we really meant to believe that the band members weren't at least a bit complicit in the so-called "sell out"? Frankly, I don't buy it. They wanted fame and big record sales. They chased them and they got them. Now that the fame has died down they can do whatever the hell they want and fund it with their "sell out" money. And good for them I say. They had about 5 years of phenomenal fame. It must have been a blast (and, yes, probably tough at times too) and now, if they're sensible, they're well set up with money and contacts to get on with their careers in whatever way suits them. If that means cranking out punk songs at a warehouse basement gig or if it means producing for the latest plastic pop princess, either way, more power to their elbow I say. When all is said and done, I think that "The Black Parade" is a very well crafted song, perfect for the time and justifiably successful.

Good to know that it's still coming at least. I will buy it when it's on GOG even though I already have a disc copy of the original.

While I agree with that, his terrible acting has also spoiled movies that I might otherwise have enjoyed. On balance, I've been disappointed more than I've been amused by his efforts.

I just want to see him start acting instead of whatever it is he does when he is in front of the cameras.

Yes++ Oh, and even though it's already been done, to tie things together...

Yeah, here's a video of his reaction to selling out: Must have been tough for him.

Heh, I'm going to have to go back and listen to the radio plays again too. It's been a while and I don't remember how they handled that aspect of the relationship. A lot of people hate on the radio plays but they were made before there was an EU to speak of and, IMO, they added quite a few interesting nuggets of information and back story (much of which was later disposed of). This included (as I remember it) a scene with Leia and Bail Organa having a meal on Alderaan with an imperial dignitary of some sort and them finding out about the Death Star as a result. "A New Hope" was probably the best of the plays and expanded things the most. "The Empire Strikes Back" was somewhere in the middle (although John Lithgow as Yoda was amusing). "Return of The Jedi" added very little. It was a more direct "porting" of the film to radio and did feel a bit like "well, I suppose we'd better make the last one too" (kind of like how the final Family Guy one ("It's A Trap") starts out).

No. It's still a dwarf planet. Despite an emotional attachment that means many people would like to see it named as a planet again, the current categorisation makes more sense and the old designation as a planet was never fully secure or even agreed on by all astronomers from the outset.

Well, at least nearly everyone is rude so that's not particularly discriminatory. ;)

Depends who's riding them...

Yeah, I really like the way they followed up on their promise of a GOG release so speedily. :/

Yup, in that time frame we've increased pollution massively, had some of the biggest ecological disasters ever, had the most destructive conflict in history ever, systematically killed six million people in industrial death factories, killed millions in China, the USSR, Cambodia, Bosnia... and "ethnically cleansed" many other areas, invented nuclear weapons and used them on two cities, witnessed the rise of fundamentalist terrorism, globalisation, we continue to ignore the millions who die from preventable diseases, we've had wars in more places than it is worth listing and so many, many more examples of man's voluntary and wilful inhumanity to man... Yup... Now, if we could just stop being dicks to each other for a few minutes, imagine what we might really achieve. All that being said, New Horizons is indeed cool. :P

People often go on about how Lucas had a "grand plan" and how everything was mapped out from the beginning. However, even the most cursory of research will show that is not the case and if you've read early script drafts and seen cutscenes like the ones I linked to, you can see that it isn't merely "not the case" but "utter bullshit". He may have had a sort of bigger overview of some of the stuff but most of the detail, even some very important detail, simply wasn't there at the start and a lot of what was there got changed or dropped too. That was also the case for the prequels. IMO, the very early drafts for Episode 1 were much neater, much more efficient, much more satisfying story telling and far more in keeping with the original movies than what eventually appeared on screen. In fact, much of what annoyed the fans and is generally agreed to detract from the movie was actually added in later drafts and the often better options from the early drafts got revised or replaced with Lucas' brain-farts. Having seen the Ep VII trailer, I'm pretty stoked about it and I expect it to be much better than the prequels. Disney is a very intelligent company and I believe that they will do a good job at targeting the movie appropriately, will honour the old movies and bring in some very genre-appropriate new stuff too. I also think that Abrams has the capacity to do it for them. Here's hoping that I'm right.

Skip to about 5.35 if you don't want to watch all the deleted scenes.

I don't know how big your file is but I have run a multi-map WAD file in Risen3D and the WAD had enough resources in it to make the the file almost 200MB. I would see if I can get your WAD to run but the link is giving me a 404.

Having just spent the last couple of days sorting through my metal CD rips to get hi-res art images for as many albums as possible, I agree. Don't get me wrong, usually the artwork is amazing and often of very high quality but after sorting through hundreds and hundreds of death, thrash and black metal albums, oh yes, they are so clichéd. By the end I was constantly and genuinely laughing out loud as I found yet another death/torture/Satanically themed image from an equally death/torture/Satanically named band for their equally death/torture/Satanically themed album with equally death/torture/Satanically themed songs on it, almost all of which featured frantic drumming, over the top guitar riffs and classic growling vocals. I like it but, after so many, the whole thing just got ridiculous. I think the point where I may have broken was when listening to Deicide's "Bastard of Christ" from the "Satan Lives" live album. LOL [edit] BTW, if anyone is looking for decent hi-res images of album covers, I found this site very useful: https://fanart.tv/ . They deal with music of all genres but I did find that, provided they were a reasonably big band, metal bands did seems to usually have most of their albums listed. Album art images are all 1000x1000 pixels and there are usually band logos, CDs and band images too. An example page picked random(ish)ly https://fanart.tv/artist/af8e4cc5-ef54-458d-a194-7b210acf638f/cannibal-corpse/