> students were forced to work on Minix long after that that made any sense at all
Not to defend the textbook grift or the lack of vision here, but I strongly suspect an undergraduate minix course taught at VU would be very good. It’s not obvious to me that it would be inferior to the xv6-based course taught at MIT, for example.
That's fair, but it would be no less effective than a similar course based on Linux which would actually give the graduate a far more practical amount of knowledge. Acquisition of knowledge isn't free and to purposefully use a toy when the real thing is freely available for commercial reasons is just grift and AT and VU were well aware of this.
Note that all I'm doing here is taking AT at his word that he developed Minix solely because the source to Unix wasn't free to universities to hack on. They could have adopted Linux from the day that it became available then, or at least the beginning of the next academic year.
Soma was really good, and certainly worth playing if someone likes sci-fi and single-player FPSes and this subject matter, but there are some fundamentally frustrating things about it. Number one for me: in contrast with something like Half Life, you play a protagonist who speaks and has conversations about the world, and is also a dumbass. The in-game protagonist pretty much ends the game still seemingly not understanding what the hell is going on, when the player figured it out hours or days before. It's a bit frustrating.
This was certainly the most annoying aspect of the game for me. The logic of mind uploading has been explained to the protagonist several times during the playthrough, yet he couldn’t understand or accept it until the very end.
It’s been a while so I just viewed a video of the ending of the game. I don’t know that he ever really “got” it (either version of him, at the end). It would have been a more emotionally complex game if he’d made his peace with the reality of the situation mid-game (as almost any player would have done by that point) and had a choice about whether he uploaded himself to the Ark, or alternatively perhaps just helped Catherine finish her project and then stayed behind, by choice. Just a thought.
One of SOMA's more subtle, and much more effective, narrative choices was to make its protagonist and its player character two entirely different people.
That’s an interesting interpretation, but I’m not so sure how much of it was international, and how much it was a result of the developers calibrating the narrative flow for people who aren’t that familiar with sci-fi mind uploading tropes. I do agree that the protagonist had some perceptual blocks due to his “condition”.
If you recall, the difficulty of the gameplay focused portions of Soma has also received a radically different perception by more experienced gamers, and people who were in just for the story. Leading to the eventual release of a story mode patch.
I might suggest the two cases differ less in detail than at first blush, in that each describes an effort to pitch one of the game's ludic ('play-wise') or narrative aspects toward a broader audience than might select itself into playing something with such a high-concept story and that could also look like belonging in the sometimes fraught "walking sim" genre. I met System Shock 2 in 1999 and have been so imsim-brained since that I don't even play first-person games with nondiegetic music turned on, so SOMA is kind of a theme park for me, but I fully get why they'd ship a patch to give folks the option. Part of tuning the experience is giving its audience the tools to tune that for themselves; that's one of the things at which games can really excel.
With respect to protagonist vs. player character, that deserves discussion in detail, because it's an important and quite central decision to make those roles distinct. The technique itself isn't novel at all; in games I grant it's not that common, but Doyle for example did the same thing in his Sherlock Holmes stories, whose titular "scientific detective's" intentions and actions largely drive their plots, while we as the audience enjoy our perspective on said plots - and explanations thereof - from the viewpoint of the doughty Dr. Watson. Just as with the Holmes stories, SOMA's has, as you rightly note, a lot of work to do in explaining itself, if it's going to appeal successfully to an audience not already steeped in its ideas. Even in a book, that's better done in dialogue and action than by pseudencyclopedic "info dump," and in a game certainly no less so - indeed much more so, if we as the player are not to start rolling our eyes and skipping cutscenes. Hence placing Catherine in the protagonistic "Holmes" role of primary influence in developing the action of the plot, while Simon, the character who gives the player access to the story, acts as a kind of "Watson."
The parallel is far from exact and shouldn't be overindexed upon, but the technique is the same in both cases and, absent an authoritative comment on the matter from the authors of SOMA, I don't see cause to assume it more accidental in one case than the other. Indeed, absent evidence otherwise, its importance here makes the only sensible assumption that the choice was extremely intentional, in that a player naïve to the game's ideas may well also need them explained several times, and doing that in a game with its own clock demands more artifice than in a novel whose text unfolds exactly at the reader's pace. Even in a game allowing cutscene replay, that's a lot more disjointing to the experience than rereading a paragraph in a novel, or even pausing to think it over for a moment. Artifice, then, is required to obtain an excuse for organically repeating the plot's basics several times from different angles, to help make sure it can sink in and not leave the naïve player with a plaintive "...what the hell?" Giving the player access to the story via a well-meaning but brain-damaged, ignorant, incurious, and mostly useless early-21st-century airhead such as Simon constitutes exactly such artifice, and I regard its implementation here as a minor stroke of genius. SOMA's is a story I'd be proud to have written.
And for those of us not in need of so much handholding on ideas like the difference between mind uploading and consciousness transfer...well, this is meant to be an existential horror story, after all, what with the extinction-level event immediately following the prologue in our (and Simon's) subjective experience. Irritating though his obtuseness can be, try to have a heart for the poor dumb ox, won't you? It's good emotional exercise. After all, he just thought he was going in for some kind of experimental MRI or something. It isn't really his fault he finds himself in this situation so far beyond his comprehension, both in circumstance and in the demands with which it taxes the character of those present.
You or I would speak and act much differently, no doubt. (One hopes. TBI and fear can both change a person for the lesser.) But the story isn't trying to be about what you or I would say and do. I think that choice improves the result, which I admit is slightly surprising; in this sense it resembles Ian McEwan's Solar, which I cordially despise exactly for its viewpoint character's constant venal fecklessness, but that guy had a lot of choices which Simon really doesn't, and I think that makes a real difference in how the characters deserve to be read. That as far as it goes is opinion to which the usual dictum applies, but I do mean to push back on the idea that the game's story is like it is in any way by mistake.
(If nothing else, good grief, think how much complexity would be alleviated by not voicing Simon. No VA to find and work with, none of his dialogue to write and accommodate in the narrative, no ludonarrative dissonance to attend - Simon cost the devs a lot of money to implement the way they did! If that core a decision to both story and production had been made by mistake, it might be hard to understand how the same people who screwed that up so bad could get so much else so right, you know?)
When reached for comment, a Department of Defense official told Business Insider, "There is no Department of War directive requiring service members to see this film, though the film is fantastic."
The strategic adversary their fighters are likely to encounter, Russia, flies propeller-driven subsonic bombers for the most part. Any modern fighter is adequate to the task.
(it's beyond the scope of the current conversation but Canada's more pressing problem is having enough pilots and getting them enough flight hours)
The key thing is, the endorsement was already written and Bezos intervened to prevent its publication. This was sort of a double-whammy: not just the paper engaging in an act of cowardice, but Bezos finally performing the sort of editorial interference everyone was worried he'd perform when he bought the paper.
It's an occurrence that, whether you approve or not, is a normal thing for an editorial board to do, and people pay for it. They would have already lost any subscribers who find the practice of editorial endorsements of candidates so offensive that they are unwilling to support it. They lost a quarter million subscribers because the owner of the paper began making editorial decisions.
I haven't measured this but all the ingredients are there: they're unjacketed or copper washed, and they are made from soft lead rather than a hard-cast alloy. You can get a polymer-coated or pure copper round but that's pretty unusual since it goes against the cheap plinking purpose most people are using the .22 for.
The base of the bullet is lead (with jacketed pistol rounds, that's often true even if it's a "full metal jacket" and some brands are trying to draw a distinction there with "total metal jacket" branding) and it's exposed to the explosion when the round fires. There's some vaporized lead, most if it will move downrange and some of it won't. Airborne lead is potentially more of a problem at an indoor range.
Copper, polymer-coated, or total metal jacket rounds will also result in less lead on the firearm, I'd think, and less on the user's hands. One old guy I know who had lead poisoning at one time believes the real risk is getting the lead on one's hands and then handling a cigarette.
Not to defend the textbook grift or the lack of vision here, but I strongly suspect an undergraduate minix course taught at VU would be very good. It’s not obvious to me that it would be inferior to the xv6-based course taught at MIT, for example.
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