Revisando el más de medio millar de fotos alojadas en Imageshack.
Di con estas que me gustarón
Di con estas que me gustarón
Espero que a ustedes tambien.
Feliz año de Jiff(aka ELQUEMESIGANUNCAMORIRA)
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Monday, December 26, 2005
MS no puede con los bucaneros
Microsoft ha sido duramente cuestionado por quedarse en el reino del DVD , ahora que los juegos ocupan espacio a lo bestia, por ejemplo The bards tale para PC es más de 7 Gigas.
Bueno, esos sitios del ASIA dedicados a encontrar maneras de "darle la vuelta" a las protecciones, tal como fue la del DVD de Hollywood, han estado trabajandoi en el mes que la consola ha estado a la venta y por fin lo lograron, unos cuantos Modchips se podran ver en cuestión de semanas, aqui en Tepis o Meave ya no debe de tardar, tal vez para el lanzamiento en México.
Bueno, esos sitios del ASIA dedicados a encontrar maneras de "darle la vuelta" a las protecciones, tal como fue la del DVD de Hollywood, han estado trabajandoi en el mes que la consola ha estado a la venta y por fin lo lograron, unos cuantos Modchips se podran ver en cuestión de semanas, aqui en Tepis o Meave ya no debe de tardar, tal vez para el lanzamiento en México.
_______________________________________________________________
Xbox 360 mod chips due in a few weeks?
Ok, it was cute and all when Microsoft came out with their statements about how "hack-proof" the Xbox 360 was going to be, and they even admitted themselves that "sooner or later someone will work out how to circumvent security," but it seems like we're going to see some hackage sooner rather than later. SPOnG is reporting that the first mod-chips for the 360 will be available within a month, allowing the play of "backup" game copies, which, with the recently released software that allows Xbox 360 game data extraction, means that Microsoft might have some piracy on their hands before too long. Though, if it's any consolation for the boys in Redmond, SPOnG is reporting that "Microsoft's security is the best we've seen to date for a disc-system. It it weren't for the fact that DVD is used, it's likely that further development wouldn't have been worth anyone's time.” Oh the irony.
Carta a santa Frank Delgado
El estimado Droguelino envio esto via email
(Basada en un relato de Gomaespuma)
(Basada en un relato de Gomaespuma)
Querido Santa Claus yo te escribo
pues me he portado muy bien este año.
Yo soy un niño muy caritativo
que a los animalitos no hace daño.
Que me trago la comida
insípida de mi abuela,
que le cargo sus mapures
que le friego las cazuelas.
Soy bastón de los viejitos
en difíciles subidas,
lazarillo de los ciegos
al cruzar por la avenida.
A mi mamá la sigo en sus creencias
y a mi papá le cepillo las botas.
Realizo mis tareas a conciencia
y a fin de año tuve buenas notas.
Y hasta he ganado concursos
que premian sabiduría,
ya no escribo en las paredes
y cuido la ecología.
No me burlo de Carlitos
diciéndole "cuatro ojos",
no le digo "dientefrío" a Manolito
y no lo enojo.
Por eso es que te pido, venerable Santa Claus:
te acuerdes de este niño que tan bien se te portó.
Tal vez un tren eléctrico, un Nintendo, o qué sé yo.
O una patineta, mejor una bicicleta.
Esa es la mejor manera de premiar
a un niño ejemplar.
Entonces, Santa Claus, es que no entiendo
que me hayas traído un camión de madera,
un dominó -que no es ningún Nintendo-
y sobre todo aquella mierda de trompeta.
Te voy a decir que haces
si antes yo no te estrangulo:
esos ridículos juguetes
te los metes en el culo.
Pedante Santa Claus y me disgusta
que hasta el hijo menor de mis vecinos
que un soberbio tronco de hijueputa,
enano con instintos asesinos
se pasea por el barrio, él
con su nueva bicicleta, y yo
y yo con ganas de meterle
en la cabeza la trompeta.
Pero que se cuiden los viejitos
de mi ira despiadada
y si me encuentro a tus renos,
coño, me los cagaré a pedradas.
Por eso es que te digo, decadente Santa Claus,
me cago en tu trineo y la puta que te parió.
Hice de comemierda todo un año y no sirvió,
para el año que viene, sí,
para el año que viene, sí,
para el año que viene seré yo
un niño cabrón.
pues me he portado muy bien este año.
Yo soy un niño muy caritativo
que a los animalitos no hace daño.
Que me trago la comida
insípida de mi abuela,
que le cargo sus mapures
que le friego las cazuelas.
Soy bastón de los viejitos
en difíciles subidas,
lazarillo de los ciegos
al cruzar por la avenida.
A mi mamá la sigo en sus creencias
y a mi papá le cepillo las botas.
Realizo mis tareas a conciencia
y a fin de año tuve buenas notas.
Y hasta he ganado concursos
que premian sabiduría,
ya no escribo en las paredes
y cuido la ecología.
No me burlo de Carlitos
diciéndole "cuatro ojos",
no le digo "dientefrío" a Manolito
y no lo enojo.
Por eso es que te pido, venerable Santa Claus:
te acuerdes de este niño que tan bien se te portó.
Tal vez un tren eléctrico, un Nintendo, o qué sé yo.
O una patineta, mejor una bicicleta.
Esa es la mejor manera de premiar
a un niño ejemplar.
Entonces, Santa Claus, es que no entiendo
que me hayas traído un camión de madera,
un dominó -que no es ningún Nintendo-
y sobre todo aquella mierda de trompeta.
Te voy a decir que haces
si antes yo no te estrangulo:
esos ridículos juguetes
te los metes en el culo.
Pedante Santa Claus y me disgusta
que hasta el hijo menor de mis vecinos
que un soberbio tronco de hijueputa,
enano con instintos asesinos
se pasea por el barrio, él
con su nueva bicicleta, y yo
y yo con ganas de meterle
en la cabeza la trompeta.
Pero que se cuiden los viejitos
de mi ira despiadada
y si me encuentro a tus renos,
coño, me los cagaré a pedradas.
Por eso es que te digo, decadente Santa Claus,
me cago en tu trineo y la puta que te parió.
Hice de comemierda todo un año y no sirvió,
para el año que viene, sí,
para el año que viene, sí,
para el año que viene seré yo
un niño cabrón.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Este es el ensayo
Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked
Henry Jenkins
MIT Professor
A large gap exists between the public's perception of video games and what the research actually shows. The following is an attempt to separate fact from fiction.
1. The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence.
According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population. It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers — 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. It also misdirects energy away from eliminating the actual causes of youth violence and allows problems to continue to fester.
2. Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression.
Claims like this are based on the work of researchers who represent one relatively narrow school of research, "media effects." This research includes some 300 studies of media violence. But most of those studies are inconclusive and many have been criticized on methodological grounds. In these studies, media images are removed from any narrative context. Subjects are asked to engage with content that they would not normally consume and may not understand. Finally, the laboratory context is radically different from the environments where games would normally be played. Most studies found a correlation, not a causal relationship, which means the research could simply show that aggressive people like aggressive entertainment. That's why the vague term "links" is used here. If there is a consensus emerging around this research, it is that violent video games may be one risk factor - when coupled with other more immediate, real-world influences — which can contribute to anti-social behavior. But no research has found that video games are a primary factor or that violent video game play could turn an otherwise normal person into a killer.
3. Children are the primary market for video games.
While most American kids do play video games, the center of the video game market has shifted older as the first generation of gamers continues to play into adulthood. Already 62 percent of the console market and 66 percent of the PC market is age 18 or older. The game industry caters to adult tastes. Meanwhile, a sizable number of parents ignore game ratings because they assume that games are for kids. One quarter of children ages 11 to 16 identify an M-Rated (Mature Content) game as among their favorites. Clearly, more should be done to restrict advertising and marketing that targets young consumers with mature content, and to educate parents about the media choices they are facing. But parents need to share some of the responsibility for making decisions about what is appropriate for their children. The news on this front is not all bad. The Federal Trade Commission has found that 83 percent of game purchases for underage consumers are made by parents or by parents and children together.
4. Almost no girls play computer games.
Historically, the video game market has been predominantly male. However, the percentage of women playing games has steadily increased over the past decade. Women now slightly outnumber men playing Web-based games. Spurred by the belief that games were an important gateway into other kinds of digital literacy, efforts were made in the mid-90s to build games that appealed to girls. More recent games such as The Sims were huge crossover successes that attracted many women who had never played games before. Given the historic imbalance in the game market (and among people working inside the game industry), the presence of sexist stereotyping in games is hardly surprising. Yet it's also important to note that female game characters are often portrayed as powerful and independent. In his book Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones argues that young girls often build upon these representations of strong women warriors as a means of building up their self confidence in confronting challenges in their everyday lives.
5. Because games are used to train soldiers to kill, they have the same impact on the kids who play them.
Former military psychologist and moral reformer David Grossman argues that because the military uses games in training (including, he claims, training soldiers to shoot and kill), the generation of young people who play such games are similarly being brutalized and conditioned to be aggressive in their everyday social interactions.
Grossman's model only works if:
* we remove training and education from a meaningful cultural context.
* we assume learners have no conscious goals and that they show no resistance to what they are being taught.
* we assume that they unwittingly apply what they learn in a fantasy environment to real world spaces.
The military uses games as part of a specific curriculum, with clearly defined goals, in a context where students actively want to learn and have a need for the information being transmitted. There are consequences for not mastering those skills. That being said, a growing body of research does suggest that games can enhance learning. In his recent book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Gee describes game players as active problem solvers who do not see mistakes as errors, but as opportunities for improvement. Players search for newer, better solutions to problems and challenges, he says. And they are encouraged to constantly form and test hypotheses. This research points to a fundamentally different model of how and what players learn from games.
6. Video games are not a meaningful form of expression.
On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. ruled that video games do not convey ideas and thus enjoy no constitutional protection. As evidence, Saint Louis County presented the judge with videotaped excerpts from four games, all within a narrow range of genres, and all the subject of previous controversy. Overturning a similar decision in Indianapolis, Federal Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner noted: "Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware." Posner adds, "To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it." Many early games were little more than shooting galleries where players were encouraged to blast everything that moved. Many current games are designed to be ethical testing grounds. They allow players to navigate an expansive and open-ended world, make their own choices and witness their consequences. The Sims designer Will Wright argues that games are perhaps the only medium that allows us to experience guilt over the actions of fictional characters. In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space.
7. Video game play is socially isolating.
Much video game play is social. Almost 60 percent of frequent gamers play with friends. Thirty-three percent play with siblings and 25 percent play with spouses or parents. Even games designed for single players are often played socially, with one person giving advice to another holding a joystick. A growing number of games are designed for multiple players — for either cooperative play in the same space or online play with distributed players. Sociologist Talmadge Wright has logged many hours observing online communities interact with and react to violent video games, concluding that meta-gaming (conversation about game content) provides a context for thinking about rules and rule-breaking. In this way there are really two games taking place simultaneously: one, the explicit conflict and combat on the screen; the other, the implicit cooperation and comradeship between the players. Two players may be fighting to death on screen and growing closer as friends off screen. Social expectations are reaffirmed through the social contract governing play, even as they are symbolically cast aside within the transgressive fantasies represented onscreen.
8. Video game play is desensitizing.
Classic studies of play behavior among primates suggest that apes make basic distinctions between play fighting and actual combat. In some circumstances, they seem to take pleasure wrestling and tousling with each other. In others, they might rip each other apart in mortal combat. Game designer and play theorist Eric Zimmerman describes the ways we understand play as distinctive from reality as entering the "magic circle." The same action — say, sweeping a floor — may take on different meanings in play (as in playing house) than in reality (housework). Play allows kids to express feelings and impulses that have to be carefully held in check in their real-world interactions. Media reformers argue that playing violent video games can cause a lack of empathy for real-world victims. Yet, a child who responds to a video game the same way he or she responds to a real-world tragedy could be showing symptoms of being severely emotionally disturbed. Here's where the media effects research, which often uses punching rubber dolls as a marker of real-world aggression, becomes problematic. The kid who is punching a toy designed for this purpose is still within the "magic circle" of play and understands her actions on those terms. Such research shows us only that violent play leads to more violent play.
Henry Jenkins is the director of comparative studies at MIT.
Sources
Entertainment Software Association. "Top Ten Industry Facts." 2003. http://www.theesa.com/pressroom.html
Gee, James. What Video Games Have to Tell Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Grossman, David. "Teaching Kids to Kill." Phi Kappa Phi National Forum 2000. http://www.killology.org/article_teachkid.htm
Heins, Marjorie. Brief Amica Curiae of Thirty Media Scholars, submitted to the United States Court of Appeals, Eight Circuit, Interactive Digital Software Association et al vs. St. Louis County et al. 2002. http://www.fepproject.org/courtbriefs/stlouissummary.html
Jenkins, Henry. "Coming Up Next: Ambushed on 'Donahue'." Salon 2002. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/20/jenkins_on_donahue/
Jenkins, Henry. "Lessons From Littleton: What Congress Doesn't Want to Hear About Youth and Media." Independent Schools 2002. http://www.nais.org/pubs/ismag.cfm?file_id=537&ismag_id=14
Jones, Gerard. Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-believe Violence. New York: Basic, 2002.
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
Sternheimer, Karen. It's Not the Media: The Truth About Popular Culture's Influence on Children. New York: Westview, 2003.
Wright, Talmadge."Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games: Playing Counter-Strike." Game Studies Dec. 2002. http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/wright/
Henry Jenkins
MIT Professor
A large gap exists between the public's perception of video games and what the research actually shows. The following is an attempt to separate fact from fiction.
1. The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence.
According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population. It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers — 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. It also misdirects energy away from eliminating the actual causes of youth violence and allows problems to continue to fester.
2. Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression.
Claims like this are based on the work of researchers who represent one relatively narrow school of research, "media effects." This research includes some 300 studies of media violence. But most of those studies are inconclusive and many have been criticized on methodological grounds. In these studies, media images are removed from any narrative context. Subjects are asked to engage with content that they would not normally consume and may not understand. Finally, the laboratory context is radically different from the environments where games would normally be played. Most studies found a correlation, not a causal relationship, which means the research could simply show that aggressive people like aggressive entertainment. That's why the vague term "links" is used here. If there is a consensus emerging around this research, it is that violent video games may be one risk factor - when coupled with other more immediate, real-world influences — which can contribute to anti-social behavior. But no research has found that video games are a primary factor or that violent video game play could turn an otherwise normal person into a killer.
3. Children are the primary market for video games.
While most American kids do play video games, the center of the video game market has shifted older as the first generation of gamers continues to play into adulthood. Already 62 percent of the console market and 66 percent of the PC market is age 18 or older. The game industry caters to adult tastes. Meanwhile, a sizable number of parents ignore game ratings because they assume that games are for kids. One quarter of children ages 11 to 16 identify an M-Rated (Mature Content) game as among their favorites. Clearly, more should be done to restrict advertising and marketing that targets young consumers with mature content, and to educate parents about the media choices they are facing. But parents need to share some of the responsibility for making decisions about what is appropriate for their children. The news on this front is not all bad. The Federal Trade Commission has found that 83 percent of game purchases for underage consumers are made by parents or by parents and children together.
4. Almost no girls play computer games.
Historically, the video game market has been predominantly male. However, the percentage of women playing games has steadily increased over the past decade. Women now slightly outnumber men playing Web-based games. Spurred by the belief that games were an important gateway into other kinds of digital literacy, efforts were made in the mid-90s to build games that appealed to girls. More recent games such as The Sims were huge crossover successes that attracted many women who had never played games before. Given the historic imbalance in the game market (and among people working inside the game industry), the presence of sexist stereotyping in games is hardly surprising. Yet it's also important to note that female game characters are often portrayed as powerful and independent. In his book Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones argues that young girls often build upon these representations of strong women warriors as a means of building up their self confidence in confronting challenges in their everyday lives.
5. Because games are used to train soldiers to kill, they have the same impact on the kids who play them.
Former military psychologist and moral reformer David Grossman argues that because the military uses games in training (including, he claims, training soldiers to shoot and kill), the generation of young people who play such games are similarly being brutalized and conditioned to be aggressive in their everyday social interactions.
Grossman's model only works if:
* we remove training and education from a meaningful cultural context.
* we assume learners have no conscious goals and that they show no resistance to what they are being taught.
* we assume that they unwittingly apply what they learn in a fantasy environment to real world spaces.
The military uses games as part of a specific curriculum, with clearly defined goals, in a context where students actively want to learn and have a need for the information being transmitted. There are consequences for not mastering those skills. That being said, a growing body of research does suggest that games can enhance learning. In his recent book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Gee describes game players as active problem solvers who do not see mistakes as errors, but as opportunities for improvement. Players search for newer, better solutions to problems and challenges, he says. And they are encouraged to constantly form and test hypotheses. This research points to a fundamentally different model of how and what players learn from games.
6. Video games are not a meaningful form of expression.
On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. ruled that video games do not convey ideas and thus enjoy no constitutional protection. As evidence, Saint Louis County presented the judge with videotaped excerpts from four games, all within a narrow range of genres, and all the subject of previous controversy. Overturning a similar decision in Indianapolis, Federal Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner noted: "Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware." Posner adds, "To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it." Many early games were little more than shooting galleries where players were encouraged to blast everything that moved. Many current games are designed to be ethical testing grounds. They allow players to navigate an expansive and open-ended world, make their own choices and witness their consequences. The Sims designer Will Wright argues that games are perhaps the only medium that allows us to experience guilt over the actions of fictional characters. In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space.
7. Video game play is socially isolating.
Much video game play is social. Almost 60 percent of frequent gamers play with friends. Thirty-three percent play with siblings and 25 percent play with spouses or parents. Even games designed for single players are often played socially, with one person giving advice to another holding a joystick. A growing number of games are designed for multiple players — for either cooperative play in the same space or online play with distributed players. Sociologist Talmadge Wright has logged many hours observing online communities interact with and react to violent video games, concluding that meta-gaming (conversation about game content) provides a context for thinking about rules and rule-breaking. In this way there are really two games taking place simultaneously: one, the explicit conflict and combat on the screen; the other, the implicit cooperation and comradeship between the players. Two players may be fighting to death on screen and growing closer as friends off screen. Social expectations are reaffirmed through the social contract governing play, even as they are symbolically cast aside within the transgressive fantasies represented onscreen.
8. Video game play is desensitizing.
Classic studies of play behavior among primates suggest that apes make basic distinctions between play fighting and actual combat. In some circumstances, they seem to take pleasure wrestling and tousling with each other. In others, they might rip each other apart in mortal combat. Game designer and play theorist Eric Zimmerman describes the ways we understand play as distinctive from reality as entering the "magic circle." The same action — say, sweeping a floor — may take on different meanings in play (as in playing house) than in reality (housework). Play allows kids to express feelings and impulses that have to be carefully held in check in their real-world interactions. Media reformers argue that playing violent video games can cause a lack of empathy for real-world victims. Yet, a child who responds to a video game the same way he or she responds to a real-world tragedy could be showing symptoms of being severely emotionally disturbed. Here's where the media effects research, which often uses punching rubber dolls as a marker of real-world aggression, becomes problematic. The kid who is punching a toy designed for this purpose is still within the "magic circle" of play and understands her actions on those terms. Such research shows us only that violent play leads to more violent play.
Henry Jenkins is the director of comparative studies at MIT.
Sources
Entertainment Software Association. "Top Ten Industry Facts." 2003. http://www.theesa.com/pressroom.html
Gee, James. What Video Games Have to Tell Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Grossman, David. "Teaching Kids to Kill." Phi Kappa Phi National Forum 2000. http://www.killology.org/article_teachkid.htm
Heins, Marjorie. Brief Amica Curiae of Thirty Media Scholars, submitted to the United States Court of Appeals, Eight Circuit, Interactive Digital Software Association et al vs. St. Louis County et al. 2002. http://www.fepproject.org/courtbriefs/stlouissummary.html
Jenkins, Henry. "Coming Up Next: Ambushed on 'Donahue'." Salon 2002. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/20/jenkins_on_donahue/
Jenkins, Henry. "Lessons From Littleton: What Congress Doesn't Want to Hear About Youth and Media." Independent Schools 2002. http://www.nais.org/pubs/ismag.cfm?file_id=537&ismag_id=14
Jones, Gerard. Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-believe Violence. New York: Basic, 2002.
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
Sternheimer, Karen. It's Not the Media: The Truth About Popular Culture's Influence on Children. New York: Westview, 2003.
Wright, Talmadge."Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games: Playing Counter-Strike." Game Studies Dec. 2002. http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/wright/
Habra que leerlo
MIT's Jenkins dispels eight video game myths
What we think and what we should know
By Nebojsa Novakovic: Thursday 15 December 2005, 00:10
IN HIS revealing essay, Professor Jenkins details the finer points of perception and myth.
Video games are new, culturally speaking, and plenty of opinions abound. Our conception of video games can't keep up with their development.
Jenkins' essay is based on extensive research and covers eight myths including 'only kids play video games,' 'girls don't play video games,' and 'video games make their players violent.' In fact, four of the eight paragraphs discuss violence and video games, so it might better be described as a five-point essay.
However, the emphasis on myths of violence is not unwarranted, since there are many arguments out there and much legislation in the works regarding the topic.
I personally find myth six "Video games are not a meaningful form of expression" to be the most disturbing, at least for Americans. Jenkins writes, "On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. ruled that video games do not convey ideas and thus enjoy no constitutional protection."
Does this mean that anything can be deemed to convey no ideas by a court and be taken out from under the protection of the first amendment? Can paintings and songs be legally censored via this loophole? And if something doesn't convey ideas, how in the world could it convince people to commit acts of violence? Since video games supposedly do that to too.
I hope Jenkins' well-founded article is taken seriously by law makers and parents alike. The vast canyon between perception and research data regarding video games is in dire need of a bridge. µ
What we think and what we should know
By Nebojsa Novakovic: Thursday 15 December 2005, 00:10
IN HIS revealing essay, Professor Jenkins details the finer points of perception and myth.
Video games are new, culturally speaking, and plenty of opinions abound. Our conception of video games can't keep up with their development.
Jenkins' essay is based on extensive research and covers eight myths including 'only kids play video games,' 'girls don't play video games,' and 'video games make their players violent.' In fact, four of the eight paragraphs discuss violence and video games, so it might better be described as a five-point essay.
However, the emphasis on myths of violence is not unwarranted, since there are many arguments out there and much legislation in the works regarding the topic.
I personally find myth six "Video games are not a meaningful form of expression" to be the most disturbing, at least for Americans. Jenkins writes, "On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. ruled that video games do not convey ideas and thus enjoy no constitutional protection."
Does this mean that anything can be deemed to convey no ideas by a court and be taken out from under the protection of the first amendment? Can paintings and songs be legally censored via this loophole? And if something doesn't convey ideas, how in the world could it convince people to commit acts of violence? Since video games supposedly do that to too.
I hope Jenkins' well-founded article is taken seriously by law makers and parents alike. The vast canyon between perception and research data regarding video games is in dire need of a bridge. µ
Secuela asegurada
En la pagina de marvel venía algo. más o menos así:
Ok, so my math’s a little off, but fans can rejoice because Marvel’s First Family, the Fantastic Four, are back on the big-screen in a sequel to this year’s blockbuster feature film, set to debut July 4, 2007! The original four cast members will reunite with director Tim Story and writer Mark Frost. The first film, which earned over $150 million dollars, was credited with saving not only the world from Dr. Doom, but the U.S. Box Office from a record-breaking 19-week losing streak. Who will the FF save next? Keep checking Marvel.com for more updates!
¡4 por 2 = 7/4/07!
Ok, so my math’s a little off, but fans can rejoice because Marvel’s First Family, the Fantastic Four, are back on the big-screen in a sequel to this year’s blockbuster feature film, set to debut July 4, 2007! The original four cast members will reunite with director Tim Story and writer Mark Frost. The first film, which earned over $150 million dollars, was credited with saving not only the world from Dr. Doom, but the U.S. Box Office from a record-breaking 19-week losing streak. Who will the FF save next? Keep checking Marvel.com for more updates!
Sunday, December 11, 2005
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Paramount buys rival Dreamworks
 Spielberg's more recent films have been released on DreamWorks |
Viacom, which owns Paramount, has agreed to pay $1.6bn (£914m; 1.36bn euros) - more than $1bn in cash, plus taking over Dreamworks' debts.
It gives the company the talents of one of the most famous filmmakers in the world, ET director Steven Spielberg.
And it appears to show that even a top name like Spielberg cannot create a new independent film studio these days.
Dreamworks was established 11 years ago to combine three talents in the world of film, animation and music - Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Spielberg is known around the world for directing huge Hollywood hits like Jaws and Schindler's List.
Geffen had been a top record producer and Katzenberg a leading light at Disney.
NBC outbid
By buying Dreamworks, Paramount has now acquired an impressive library of films, which includes Gladiator, American Beauty, and Saving Private Ryan.
It reportedly plans to sell off the library, expecting it to fetch $850m to $1bn.
The deal does not include Dreamworks' animation studios - the creators of hits such as Shrek - but it does include the right to distribute already-made animated Dreamworks films.
Paramount will also take over a television division with long-running popular shows like Spin City.
NBC Universal, a unit of GE, had offered $900m but was outbid. Last Friday, it was given an extra hour to improve on its offer but walked away.
BBC North America business correspondent Guto Harri says Viacom hopes the deal will enable it to establish Paramount as an industry leader.
He adds that for Dreamworks, the deal is the final proof that despite the talents involved, the company has failed to become the ambitious media conglomerate that it had once hoped to be.
Recent Dreamworks films include Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and War of the Worlds - coincidentally a joint production with Paramount.
Spielberg and Geffen will reportedly stay with the company.Thursday, December 8, 2005
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