Ramble City's dead slow these days, so here's Darunia's Excellent Movie's Thread!, wherein we discuss recent cinematic goings-on.

Movies I recently saw and would like to ecomment upon:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

A grisly, dark outing (but what Tim Burton film isn't.) There are some things, I feel, that Burton shouldn't fuck with: this is one of them. His dark, creepy creativity is well suited in films like Sleepy Hollow and Beetlejuice, but not in children's films. It had a scattering of humorous moments, but on the whole, it was a bleak, depressing, dark, and overzealously unrealistic film. The original is still one of my favorite movies. This one, however, gets a D from the Mastah Goron.

Wedding Crashers

I know... it has to be a crappy date movie. Wrong..!? I genuinely dreaded this one, and infact my friend had to pay for my ticket to get me to see it, but it was actually pretty good! Christopher Walken and Will Ferrell have excellent parts in it, and even if they didn't, it still would have been marginally good. Darunia says, A-.

See--wasn't that fun!? :) Now it's your turn.

Hey, everyone.
It's your former frequenting member, nickdaddyg. Ya know the practically male model nickdaddyg, lol. Oh boy...I do some more of those nice pictures though, hahahah.

Anyway, just was thinking about you guys, and wondering what's up. Wow, it seems the membership and posting is not great like it was, I feel bad about that. I miss those days back in say...10th grade for me...lovin my N64 (I still do, LoZ:OoT, will always be my fav. game ever...fuck Halo 2, that wasn't worth its price)...and posting at Rumble City, Cloudchaser, and Ryan's old site.

Yeah...well life's more serious now, but still not really that serious, not til maybe my junior year in college. Gonna be a sophomore at AZ State U. Accounting is my decided major for now, although Finance and CIS seem cool too.

But...um...yeah, that's me for now.

Now usually I don't do dis, but here's a lil preview of da remix...(meaning, me)... Enjoy! :shakeit:

Just be thankful I didn't show the whole pic...I'm a towel!

It's fun being me.

Miyamoto and Iwata Talk Revolution
Also, a few details on Mario 128 and DS/ Revolution connectivity.

by Juan Castro

July 25, 2005 - In a recent interview with EGM, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto commented on the upcoming successor to the GameCube, codenamed Revolution, and offered a few details on Mario 128 and the future of Nintendo in general.

To start though, Iwata faced a series of questions focused on Nintendo's philosophy on game design, which sometimes places innovation above technological pizzazz. With the next-generation of videogame consoles on the horizon, longtime Nintendo fans worry the Nintendo Revolution simply won't compete with Microsoft's Xbox 360 or Sony's PS3 on a graphical level.

"I don't think the Revolution's [graphics] will be inferior in any fashion to Xbox 360 or PS3," said Iwata. "Even if you look at Zelda on GameCube, I don't think that looks inferior to what the competition is touting as 'next generation' visuals. But we think there are more important things for now than making the system work with a high-definition television."

Iwata went on to say that most people who will be playing the Nintendo Revolution won't be doing so on high-definition compatible television sets anyway, and that 480p (progressive-scan) will remain the standard. Bottom line, according to Iwata, is Nintendo's desire to create a system capable of attracting as many people as possible. On the same note, Iwata said Nintendo had no desire to make people pay extra out of the box for the Revolution's DVD functionality, since most people already own one or more DVD players. He also reiterated that the DVD player will be built-in and not an external attachment. At E3 2005, the company confirmed that an additionally purchased dongle would activate the built-in DVD functionality.

As far as the Revolution's Internet connectivity is concerned, the system will be Wi-Fi compatible out of the box but won't come with an Ethernet port. Instead, Nintendo will sell an Ethernet adaptor for the Revolution's USB port. Iwata said it would be difficult, given where the Revolution will be in a household [probably the living room] for players to connect the Revolution to a traditional Ethernet line.

Moving from hardware to software, Miyamoto said Nintendo is considering a DS version of the classic brawler Super Smash Bros. He also said that he'd like to make another Luigi's Mansion game and that a Pikmin game on Revolution would be a "good match" given the Revolution's unique and totally mysterious controller. But he said nothing about Pikmin Revolution was set in stone. Miyamoto also said that if it's technically possible on Revolution, then tweaking older games such as Mario Party for online play was a definite possibility.

Finally, Iwata spoke on the Revolution's unique interface and if it would alienate third-party developers.

"Well, of course, the idea is that the Revolution will sell and sell and sell so it becomes the standard in the industry," Iwata mused. "However, at least for the launch period, we designed the controller so it can play any of the different conventional styles. After all, we are talking about it playing games from our past machines (i.e. the virtual console). So don't worry."

------------------------------

1.) The graphics will be on par with the PS3 and XBox360.

2.) The Revolution will support 480 Pro scan... which is HD. Though "the Revolution will not support HD." (?????????)

3.) The dongle will activate the internal DVD functionality. That means the system can play DVD's out of the box but will require a 'key' to operate it just like high end computers and workstations. So, by including the ability to play DVD's out of the box but selling the key seperately thy're able to keep costs down. This makes sense because if they included it out-right (no dongle) they would have to pay royaltees.

4.) We have to pay a seperate ethernet adapter. Not a biggie, i'm thinking it will be in the 15 to 20 range.

5.) SSB for DS? Luigi's Mansion? Pikmin for Revolution? Oh yes, my cups fill with drool.

6.) Older games for the virtual console will indeed be updated to include net-play. This means everything from Earthbound to Zelda could have net-play functionality but at the very least, Nintendo's 2 to 4 player games will most likely recieve a net-play update. You should all thank me for this one, we're getting this because of all the praying I did.

7.) The controller can play every game. Does this include light gun games? What's the point of the GC controller ports then? Just there on the mock-up and not in the final version (said to be smaller)? A controller so well made that it will change the industry and create a standard. If any other company said this it would be a joke. But Nintendo's changed and invented standards like nobody's business.

This isn't in debate because it'd be pretty disturbing if anyone here disagrees...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/20/intern...gewanted=2

Quote:Iraqi Constitution May Curb Women's Rights

By EDWARD WONG
Published: July 20, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 19 - A working draft of Iraq's new constitution would cede a strong role to Islamic law and could sharply curb women's rights, particularly in personal matters like divorce and family inheritance.
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Adam Nadel/Polaris, for The New York Times

Women's groups demonstrated Tuesday in Baghdad against a constitutional draft intended to strengthen the role of religious law in Iraq.

Adam Nadel/Polaris, for The New York Times

A banner saying "Stop the violence against Iraqi women" was carried at a Baghdad rally over constitutional issues as they affect women's rights.

The document's writers are also debating whether to drop or phase out a measure enshrined in the interim constitution, co-written last year by the Americans, requiring that women make up at least a quarter of the parliament.

The draft of a chapter of the new constitution obtained by The New York Times on Tuesday guarantees equal rights for women as long as those rights do not "violate Shariah," or Koranic law.

The Americans and secular Iraqis banished such explicit references to religious law from the interim constitution adopted early last year.

The draft chapter, circulated discreetly in recent days, has ignited outrage among women's groups, which held a protest on Tuesday morning in downtown Baghdad at the square where a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by American marines in April 2003.

One of the critical passages is in Article 14 of the chapter, a sweeping measure that would require court cases dealing with matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance to be judged according to the law practiced by the family's sect or religion.

Under that measure, Shiite women in Iraq, no matter what their age, generally could not marry without their families' permission. Under some interpretations of Shariah, men could attain a divorce simply by stating their intention three times in their wives' presence.

Article 14 would replace a body of Iraqi law that has for decades been considered one of the most progressive in the Middle East in protecting the rights of women, giving them the freedom to choose a husband and requiring divorce cases to be decided by a judge.

If adopted, the shift away from the more secular and egalitarian provisions of the interim constitution would be a major victory for Shiite clerics and religious politicians, who chafed at the Americans' insistence that Islam be designated in the interim constitution as just "a source" of legislation. Several writers of the new constitution say they intend, at the very least, to designate Islam as "a main source" of legislation.

By rough count, nearly 200 women and men showed up in the fiery heat to hand out fliers and wave white banners in a throng of traffic. "We want to be equal to everybody - we want human rights for everybody," read one slogan. The demonstration came hours before two Sunni Arabs involved in writing the constitution were fatally shot near a Baghdad restaurant, threatening to throw the drafting process into turmoil.

"We want a guarantee of women's rights in the new constitution," said Hannah Edwar, an organizer of the protest. "We're going to meet with the constitutional committee and make our thoughts known."

A dozen women, some sheathed in full-length black robes, showed up to denounce Ms. Edwar's protest. They said they were followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the fundamentalist Shiite cleric who has led two rebellions against the Americans.

American and Iraqi officials say that several draft chapters of the constitution are floating around Baghdad and that no final language has been agreed on. Changes can still be made before Aug. 15, the deadline for the National Assembly to approve a draft. Protests by women and relatively secular blocs on the constitutional committee, like the Kurds, may force Shiite members to tone down the religious language.

"Some of the points regarding women's rights in this chapter are still to be reviewed," said Mariam Arayess, a religious Shiite on the committee.

Ms. Arayess said she believed that the draft was the most recent working version, and that it had fairly generous provisions for equal rights. She is one of fewer than 10 women on the 71-member drafting committee.

The chapter has 27 articles, most of which have relatively liberal provisions aimed at ensuring various civil rights. The first says that "all Iraqis are equal before the law" and that "equal opportunities are guaranteed for all citizens according to the law." The final article forbids censorship of the press.

Quote:Iraqi Constitution May Curb Women's Rights

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Published: July 20, 2005

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References to Islam and Shariah appear in a few places. One clause says Iraqis will enjoy all rights stated in "international treaties and conventions as long as they do not contradict Islam." Such language is accepted by many Iraqis, including moderates, who say Islam is a vital foundation for the country.

But women's groups are incensed by Article 14, which would repeal a relatively liberal personal status law enacted in 1959 after the British-backed monarchy was overthrown by secular military officers. That law remained in effect through the decades of Mr. Hussein's rule.

The law used Shariah to adjudicate personal and family matters, but did it in as secular a manner as possible, pulling together the most liberal interpretations of Koranic law from the main Shiite and Sunni sects and stitching them together into one code.

Critics of the draft proposal say that in addition to restricting women's rights, it could also deepen the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shiites. The draft also does not make clear what would happen in cases where the husband is from one sect and the wife from another.

Religious Shiite politicians tried once before, in December 2003, to abolish the 1959 law. As is happening now, women's groups and secular female politicians took to the streets.

Faced with the mini-rebellion, L. Paul Bremer III, then the effective American proconsul of Iraq, rebuffed the move, to the anger and dismay of many religious Shiites.

"We don't want to use separate Sunni or Shiite laws," said Dohar Rouhi, president of the Association of Women Entrepreneurs. "We want a law that can be applied to everyone. We want justice for women."

A Westerner familiar with the writing of the constitution said that when he saw a draft of the civil rights section less than a week ago, it did not contain the sweeping language on personal status law. In that version, he said, most measures - even those citing Shariah - were not as severe as they could have been.

"Compared to what some of the conservative Shiites were pushing, the glass is half full," said the Westerner, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, because he did not want to appear to be interfering in a sovereign Iraqi process.

He said there was some cause for alarm, though, pointing to a proposal to phase out a measure in the interim constitution requiring that a quarter of parliamentary seats go to women.

Ms. Arayess, the Shiite drafter, said some of the writers were considering keeping the quota for the next two terms of the parliament before allowing it to lapse. After that, she said, women should be able to stand on their own.

Quote:Thorny Issues Remain on Draft of New Constitution for Iraq

By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: July 23, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 22 - With only about three weeks left before the parliamentary deadline for the draft of a new constitution, a senior Western diplomat in Baghdad said Friday that some of the most contentious issues still remain to be resolved, including regional autonomy, women's rights, electoral law and the control of revenues from natural resources.

The disclosures came on the third day of a walkout by the Sunni Arab members of the constitution-writing committee, who halted their participation after two Sunni colleagues were assassinated, throwing the constitutional process into doubt. The comments by the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Western officials are trying to remain in the background, seemed to counter recent comments by some Shiite committee members that the draft was almost complete.

The American authorities have insisted that the National Assembly meet its Aug. 15 deadline to approve the draft to win public confidence, both in Iraq and the United States, in Iraq's fledgling democratic process.

The Americans are counting on clear momentum in the constitutional process to help undermine an unceasing insurgency, which on Friday continued its bloody campaign to topple the Iraqi government with scattered violence.

In the most deadly incident, three brothers, two of them policemen and the third a Sunni cleric, were kidnapped in northern Baghdad around midnight on Thursday, tortured and shot dead with a machine gun, according to an official at the Interior Ministry. Their bodies were found Friday, the official reported.

Gunmen attacked police patrols in Baghdad in three incidents, killing five and wounding four, the official said. Other gunmen killed two members of an Interior Ministry antiterrorism task force in the capital.

An American marine was killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb while conducting combat operations near Zaidon, the American military command reported Friday.

Among their demands, the Sunni Arabs on the 71-member constitution committee have called for government-funded bodyguards and security, as well as an international investigation into the killings of their two colleagues, who were shot on Tuesday in central Baghdad.

But the diplomat also said that in spite of its staunch public demands, the Sunni contingent has privately expressed its intention to return to the negotiating table.

"They definitely want to come back in," he said.

The Sunnis' temporary withdrawal from the process has worried the Bush administration, which views their inclusion in the political process as the decisive factor in deflating the Sunni-led insurgency. Additionally, many Sunni Arabs boycotted elections in January, and the Bush administration's fear is that should Sunni Arabs not help finish the constitution-writing process, their sense of alienation from the new Iraqi government could deepen, with catastrophic results.

Arguably the most contentious remaining issue is regional autonomy. The Western diplomat said that while the Shiites and Sunni Arabs have agreed that the Kurds should keep their autonomous powers, a debate remains over whether and how the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan should be redrawn. At the same time, the Sunni Arabs appear adamant that no other part of Iraq, namely the Shiite-controlled south, should be able to declare autonomy.

The Sunnis are concerned that with Kurdish autonomy in place in the north and Shiites agitating for an autonomous region in the oil-rich south, they will be left with an impoverished region barren of any natural resources.

A prominent Sunni Arab cleric on Friday criticized proposals to transform Iraq into a federal state, saying such a "division of the country" would be a betrayal of the population. "The voices that call for federalism are not those of loyal people," the cleric, Sheik Mahmoud al-Sumaidie, said Friday at the prominent Umm al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad, Agence France-Presse reported. "The patriots are against dividing the country, and I call on them to fight for maintaining a united Iraq."

The Western diplomat said the disputed issue of women's rights was still on the table, though he said that in the most recent draft he had seen, the drafters had removed a section - Article 14 - that would require court cases dealing with matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance to be judged according to the law practiced by the family's sect or religion. Among other constraints dictated by that measure, Shiite women in Iraq generally could not marry without their families' permission.

Committee members also still have to decide whether national elections are going to be based on a system of provincial representation, as the Sunni Arabs prefer, or a nationwide system, which would favor the majority Shiites and the Kurds.

Finally, the diplomat said, the committee has been wrestling over the sharing of revenues from natural resources, namely oil, and whether revenue will be controlled by local or federal authorities or both. The Kurds believe that in the near future they will be able to gain control of the northern city of Kirkuk, which has oil fields, while Shiites in the south are sitting on the country's largest oil resources. The Sunnis, who dominate the desert region in the western part of the country, are trying to ensure that they will have what they regard as a fair share of the oil profits.

Okay, this is seriously getting old.

There's too many birthday threads!!

Just recently, an odd thing has occured. Now whenever the urge to see if IGN has any new info comes up and I go there, I get an ad. No, that's not new. Just click on the skip button and, it's another ad. Okay, so by random chance I got it again.

Well, fast forward to 3 hours of me trying to get in, off and on, and you have someone who just can no longer access IGN.

What's the deal? Did IGN actually GET to this point without me realizing it?

The answer, is no. Turns out that the skip link no longer works correctly, but directly clicking on the IGN image on the left seems to have done the trick.

IGN SUCKS!

Correction, while I can now view the main IGN page, all clicks to articles lead to the same stupid advertisement page, and clicking on the IGN image only takes me back to the main page. At this point, viewing any and all articles on IGN has been rendered an impossibility.

Okay, after deciding to repeatedly try to just click on the article link itself, I can occasionally get through.

They made a very stupid mistake, because they don't understand basic probability.

They seem to have raised the chances of seeing one of those adds instead of the article to ABOVE 50%. This means that people will see the ads MORE often than seeing the article. What they don't get is EVERY SINGLE CLICK is independant of the previous attempt, so there is ALWAYS a greater than 50% chance. It is very likely that a person CAN in fact attempt to read an article many many times and fail on every attempt.

They have screwed their readers. I can understand needing to make money off of ads to sustain themselves. I never had a problem with their banners. This stuff though... Sorry, I just find no motivation at all to actually go to IGN any more. Gamespot it is then, for now.

Nintendo Power's interview with Sega's Simon Jeffrey

Quote:NP: Some of the beloved Sega franchises such as Panzer Dragoon and Shinobi haven’t done as well as they deserved on other consoles. With the success of Sonic on GameCube, why not bring some more of the classic franchises to the GameCube, or moving forward, Revolution?

SJ: I think that’s something that we’re absolutely looking at, to be honest. I think we’re really looking at which of our classic IPs are appropriate for different platforms. We’re very interested in Revolution at the moment. We obviously haven’t made any announcements, but we, like other people, are talking with Nintendo about what Revolution will be, about potential opportunities on Revolution. With regard to GameCube itself . . . it’s interesting how something like Panzer Dragoon Orta would have done on GameCube if it had come out on that versus Xbox. That’s an interesting scenario. I’m not sure what would have happened there. We’re always really looking at what we can do that best exploits for us the classic IPs that we’ve got for a particular market. A GameCube player, like you say, is very, very different from an Xbox player.

Quote:NP: Do you think that those rising costs might lead to even more cross-platform games, and if Nintendo decides to do something radically different with Revolution, is that going to potentially discourage third parties from supporting the platform? Or do you think it might be attractive in terms of trying something different?

SJ: A bit of both, probably. I think it depends how Nintendo rolls out its third-party relations. We’re very excited about the prospects of Revolution, because, like we were talking about earlier, the Nintendo platforms have been great for Sonic and the classic franchises. We think Revolution can absolutely be the same. But I think you’re absolutely right. If Nintendo does choose a different model than Sony and Microsoft, then it might be very difficult for some third parties to adopt this three-pronged, multi-platform approach.

NP: This is kind of a wild idea, but it could be very cool. At E3, Nintendo announced that the Revolution would have the capability to download NES, SNES and N64 games. Would it be at all feasible, do you think, to partner with Nintendo and perhaps add the Sega Genesis to that list?

SJ: That’s a pretty wild idea. (Laughs.) You should talk to Nintendo about that.

1920-2005

Guess which console it wasn't announced for? :p

Resident Evil 5 Announced for PS3 and Xbox 360