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Messages - Arantor
5686
Development blog / Re: Banning, and what I want to do with it
« on October 28th, 2011, 09:28 PM »
I'm still not convinced about IP blocking being that useful, however if it's done it would be matched by CIDR rather than older style ranges. The one problem is converting IPv4 CIDR blocks into something meaningful for our IPv6 implementation.

But note that the CIDR blocking that I'm thinking about would be for bulk blacklisting as you're talking about, not per user banning.
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Off-topic / Re: Google Galaxy Nexus
« on October 28th, 2011, 06:28 PM »
Whether the performance sucks or not, security is a matter for concern.
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Off-topic / Re: Google Galaxy Nexus
« on October 27th, 2011, 10:20 PM »
Same chart, heh, but yes.
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Off-topic / Re: Google Galaxy Nexus
« on October 27th, 2011, 06:09 PM »
Of relevance, http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphans-visualizing-a-sad-history-of-support
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Features / Re: Google Maps feature in profile
« on October 27th, 2011, 06:08 PM »
Hmm. But yeah, it's definitely looking like plugin material. That's not a bad thing, because it'll make sure the profile area is suitably hook-enhanced.
5691
Off-topic / Re: New coding music :D
« on October 27th, 2011, 05:48 PM »
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I'd tend to suggest Paranoia Agent.
Try to watch a fansub of it. It's a 13-episode show that could be a good entry point into anime. It's a thriller about a roller-skating boy with a cap who assaults random people with a baseball bat, and people are trying to figure out who he is. It's both weird and deep. Especially from episode 5 on. Has some surrealistic stuff, opportunities to ponder over what's being shown versus what you think you've figured out, etc... I watched the entire show twice and even the second time, I didn't figure it all out. Well, I suppose it's mostly targeted to those who like The Prisoner, things like that
That sounds odd, and while I'm curious, I'm not sure that I'm curious enough yet about it, the theme doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd watch normally, but I'll see if I can find it (and find time to watch it)
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From the same director (who sadly passed away last year from cancer) -- Millennium Actress is an excellent 'romance' movie about an old actress who's reliving her memories under the prism of her major movie roles -- they're intertwined so much that you're not sure whether you're watching reality, or an idealized version of it. And Tokyo Godfathers is a Christmas story about three bums who discover an abandoned baby and decide to take care of her. It's a character-driven comedy/drama. Mostly comedy.
Not so hot on romance stories. To put it into context, I can sit and watch Dirty Dancing and Love Actually and not cringe at them, but romance isn't my thing.

I quite like comedy, though, to the point where if I look back at the last half dozen films I've watched, they're all comedy films, so that might be worth trying to find. For context, my all time favourite movie, still unbeaten since I first saw it a decade ago, is Dogma by Kevin Smith. Musically it's nothing special but comedically - and thought-provokingly - I haven't beaten it.
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Of course there's always the Ghibli movies to start with... If you want a sense of adventure, there's Laputa (Castle in the sky), or a sense of wonder, go for Kiki's Delivery Service or Howl's Moving Castle. If you want drama, there's Nausicaä or Princess Mononoke. Ghibli's most popular movie is Spirited Away but I'm not a big fan myself. If you like tragedies, best of all is Grave of the Fireflies.
Adventure is good, and drama is appreciated but not in excess. That's why, for example, I much preferred DW series 5 to 4, because the sense of adventure seemed greater, with some beautiful moments of drama and less of the angst that Tennant got to carry over his tenure.
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Also in the 'weird surrealistic' area, I could think of Utena, but the main drawback here is that out of the 39 episodes, most are of the 'formulaic' kind, i.e. it's always the same structure, character has a problem, it's analyzed in the first half, then they get to fight, and their problem is solved (or not). Plus it has a soundtrack that could be seen as either genius or pure crap. (I personally love it but I can understand it's not something everyone will like.) Hmm... Probably not a good entry point.
Sounds like the Rocky movies, all of which I have passed on so far.
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Oh... If you like over-the-top animation/story, you may enjoy Giant Robo: The Animation (1993 or so). Yeah there are giant robots in it, but it's a cult show that pays homage to the old Japanese 60's shows. A labour of love, really. I particularly recommend episodes 4, 5 and 7 (mostly because the first episodes are mostly exposition.)
Ah, now this sounds more like my kind of entertainment. I'm a sucker for giant robot stories.
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And Evangelion (1996)... Because it doesn't deliberately choose a retro style, it looks kind of dated by now. They recently made new movies out of it which are high budget and everything, but you may want to wait for a couple more years until they're done with the remakes.
I'm actually not bothered by looking dated. I still regularly rewatch the original Clash of the Titans and the original film of Jason and the Argonauts (both of which feature the work of Ray Harryhausen, and despite being 30 and 50 years old respectively, they have dated surprisingly well)
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Otherwise, well... It's another giant robot show with kid pilots, but this time it's on a Freudian level... Guy has a complex around his father, father is obsessed about reviving his dead wife or something like that, mix it up with tons of esoteric references, trauma, and a share of typically Japanese gags. It's kind of... special. If you manage to get through the first half of the show, which is quite commercial and a bit boring, the second half rewards anyone with a brain. It's basically the first prime-time anime series to show an orgasm off-screen (in episode 20), or have an episode entirely built on intertitles and still images (the very controversial episode 25).
Intriguing. Might be worth trying to get that, then.
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Oh, and Cowboy Bebop... A pretty good jazz/funk soundtrack, stand-alone episodes that allow for casual viewing, mostly a comedy show with action scenes. I'm not a big fan (except of the very Batman TAS-inspired episode 20) but it's one of the best loved shows of its kind.
My kind of show then... hmm.
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Interesting, I have none of these soundtracks...  I do like the LOTR and Repo! stuff though. Can't remember the others. Haven't seen Flash Gordon, but IIRC the OST was made by Queen? Or maybe Georgio Moroder? I seem to remember it had something in common with Moroder's Metropolis soundtrack...
Well, I blame Lego Indiana Jones for making me realise how awesome Last Crusade's soundtrack was. As noted in the booklet, John Williams didn't look for ways to 'hook' the classic riff into the soundtrack - beyond the title sequence, the infamous 'Indy Theme' barely gets a look in, but the whole thing still has the feel anyway, and I find most interestingly that the Grail Theme is uncannily echoed by the underlying theme in LotR: Fellowship of the Ring.

Labyrinth... David Bowie. Need I say any more.

And yes, Queen did write the OST for Flash Gordon. It's campy, cheesy and over the top, just like the film. Interestingly though quite a few pieces of the film dialogue are in the soundtrack album.
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And still looking... Anything that sounds like the 16-bit era is what I'm seeking after. Not the 8-bit era though... Except if it sounds like a Commodore 64, in which case it's okay
I'm actually not that fussy. I grew up playing with a Spectrum and have fond memories of programming sound on that. Though I also have the soundtracks to things like Bastion which are regal and majestic and full of richness.
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Didn't even know/remember there were OSTs for it...
There's an album for series 1 & 2 combined, plus an album each for series 3 and 4, plus double albums for the specials and for series 5. Don't know about series 6 yet though.
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I am no good judge for dialogue.
Although I watched 'The Sky Crawlers' this morning (from Mamoru Oshii), and I found it to be really well written. Only problem is, the story wasn't so great... (Well, I'm not a big fan of depressing movies with no encouraging ending ) One of Kenji Kawai's best soundtracks though (along with Patlabor 2), if you like minimalism. I have a feeling you don't, though!
Nah, I'm not a fan of minimalism, it tends to not leave enough scope for my imagination. My brain is wired for certain kinds of pattern recognition - spelling it out blatantly doesn't leave enough for me to play with and not giving me too much to work with just leaves me waiting for more.[1]
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Bowie = which era?
There's just a Best Of album of sorts on here, so it has a bit of a range.
 1. Incidentally, several adventure games, both text and graphical, leave me with the same feeling. Just dumping me in the middle of somewhere and expecting me to find my way to a goal isn't going to work so well, whereas with the likes of the LucasArts games, I had a defined quest pretty early on and everything was geared to solving that.
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Features / Re: Google Maps feature in profile
« on October 27th, 2011, 04:17 PM »
Updating I can understand would be through the API, but do lookups as they are in Noisen call the API too?

(For big member maps, I can imagine they would, but for individual maps?)
5693
Features / Re: Google Maps feature in profile
« on October 27th, 2011, 03:41 PM »
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But quite honestly, I think that after the novelty effect, maps aren't that exciting at all.
Would you say, then, that it's probably worth making it a plugin and (as a consequence) letting users deal with it themselves? I get the feeling that simple embedding isn't as awesome as a member map but it does make me think twice about it being close to a core feature.

As for competitors... there are competitors?
5694
Features / Google Maps feature in profile
« on October 27th, 2011, 03:15 PM »
Noisen and here have the facility to add the Google Maps feature into your profile so you can indicate where you live (if you so choose), and there's a mod or two on sm.org for it.

We talked about it being core, but whether it is or whether it is a plugin in the end is up for debate but that's not what's prompted me to post.

I discovered this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/27/google_maps_api_no_longer_free/

I'm not sure whether we're using the API or not, though I suspect we are - which means the game has changed slightly, and not for the better. 25k calls a day may sound like a lot but on a popular site, I can envisage plenty more.
5695
Off-topic / Re: Battlefield 3
« on October 27th, 2011, 03:08 PM »
No but I do get to sift through lines and lines of code at times trying to figure out if I've found a bug or it's because I'm not using it correctly. Today, for example, I found a case where I'd created an empty template layer (with a _before template defined), the layer was called and shown but I couldn't seem to add anything to the layer with wetem::load after it, but if I declared it as a layer that wasn't an empty array, it worked as expected.

(Basically that's me just being lazy and using that for area navigation and declaring it once in the header function before going off to whichever specific area. For a similar amount of effort, really, I just declared the navigation block as a block in default, then added everything after that to default with add instructions. Effort's the same really, it's just very slightly semantically different.)

Did I mention I'm playing with createList?
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Off-topic / Re: Battlefield 3
« on October 27th, 2011, 02:28 PM »
Yeah, and I'm skiving off writing plugins :/ Egad!
5697
Off-topic / Re: Doctor Who
« on October 27th, 2011, 12:09 PM »
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Why would Moffat make a topical episode based on a joke he made over a year ago..?
Because that's the sort of thing he does, he buries things and pulls them out when he thinks you've forgotten.
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Anyway -- I'm probably going to give Pyramids of Mars a try.
:) It's worth it.
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The Pub / [Archive] Re: Logo Madness
« on October 27th, 2011, 11:29 AM »
Sure they do. Creativity is the manifestation of instinct.
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Off-topic / Re: Google Code-in
« on October 27th, 2011, 10:51 AM »
Nice, hope you do well :)

(It's kind of sad really, I was 14 when Google was founded, there just wasn't the same kind of thing around when I was in the right age group for this sort of thing)
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Off-topic / Re: Battlefield 3
« on October 27th, 2011, 10:50 AM »
I still don't really get the attraction for FPS's.