Seriously. I wanted Roslin to die throughout the entire series, because I fucking hated the bitch. Never was elected to office but loved being judge, jury and executioner all at once. But then when she DID finally die in the final episode, I hated it because of what it did to Adama. Come on, the ONE likeable character in the show can't have five minutes of happiness? Why the fuck did the mystery cure of "give her some of Hera's blood" suddenly not work anymore? What the fuck is this, Star Trek?

I get why you're upset but keep in mind it went on far longer than planned. Originally it was just a sci-fi miniseries and they managed to stretch it out over 4 seasons. It's not an excuse but when you run a show for that length of time you're going to go through some turnover in the production company. Just even changing a single writer on staff can have a major impact on a TV show.

Battlestar Galactica has never been about happy endings. It's about the struggle for survival in the face of overwhelming odds and humanity's ongoing battle between faith and technology. Moore himself is a Mormon and quite religious. You often saw the influence of this in the show, whether good or bad I can't say it didn't make things interesting.

I'd much rather have the characters get an ambiguous ending than the usual fluff tied into a pretty package with a bow. My impression of Kara is that she died and was an angel sent by "God" to guide them to a new home. Obviously there's a lot of interpretation and several ways the whole thing can be construed.

And then the two fuckers that DESERVED to die got to live happily ever after. Fuck off, Ron Moore.

Even Baltar has undergone significant character development over the course of the show. It's not about being fair and never has been. I'd challenge you to go through the show and present a completely fair solution to a problem they have faced. Even when they "win", there are usually complications.

Anyways I won't get too into defending the ending, I think everyone should take from it whatever they want. I will say that I thought it was cool they decided to break the cycle and I wasn't expecting that. The montage with the Aibo's and modern robots really does get you thinking about the future.

shul said:

spoilers ahead:
they killed off kuttner and say its suicide?! a bit of manipulative, don't u say??

Well, the actor wanted to go into politics. Believe it or not, he's working for the White House now.

As for the act itself, I wouldn't be suprised if they revisit it some time in the future. They could leave it as the senseless / random thing it is, or make it something "else" later if they wish (like someone with a Grudge against House).

Any jrpg fans should definitely pick up Last Remnant for PC. As I (still) have a wound vac attached which severely limits my mobility, I've been playing tons of games, and the past week I've put in something like 60 hours of this game x_x. Typical addictive jrpg stuff. I even finally got tired of the battle animations so I've turned on the "TURBO" option specific to the PC version, and boss fights that would take 25 minutes now take only 10-15! Yay!

Do they play house music on that show? If not, they should.

This comment was edited on Apr 7, 2009, 22:22.

spoilers ahead:
they killed off kuttner and say its suicide?! a bit of manipulative, don't u say??

Did you have a Voodoo 3 accelerator back in the day?

I remember buying my first 3D accelerator so I could enjoy Quake 2 in all it's enhanced 3D goodness! I also remember thinking I spent way too much money on this technology and I should wait until the price drops, but then I thought nah... this is WAY too new. It'll stay at a high price for a a year or two. Ha ha ha ha... boy, was I wrong.

Canopus Pure 3D, and Hexen II and GL Quake. Sigh, brings a tear to my eyes .....

Not one of my fondest memories.

See, but most people in IT with half a braincell knew that that was the worst that Y2K would ever do. Label some product out of date, refuse to scan / process some stuff cause it's out of date. Maybe close some accounts for having expired due to non-activity, that sort of stuff.

Annoying? Sure.

But this idea that fucking powerplants were going to melt down and planes were going to fall out of the sky and all that bullshit, fuck that irritated the crap out of me back then, because I had to keep explaining to non-IT drooltards that, no, you didn't have to hamster food and take shelter in a cave at the turn of the millenium.

Still, it got IT lots of face time and budget. So in that aspect it was very succesful.

Creston

Y2K was the most brilliant hoax we ever pulled in IT.

Y2K was a hastle for me.

Back during Y2K I was still in college, working at a local store. I was both surprised and incredibly angry when we opened after New Years that our whole primitive network was down.

Why did that make me angry? Because none of the barcode scanners were functional... they but couldn't pull the price up from the network. So for every person we had to ring up we had to get a list of what they had, go to the shelves, look it up, see if it was on sale, etc. There was a master-price-binder but it was a little out-of-date and not categorized at all.

So we were short-staffed as it was for a normal day, cutting that in half to double team the lookup and entering was a pain.

It was probably about 3-4 hours of this.

I shouldn't have been completely shocked though. While I don't know much about the network itself, I believe the 1-and-only actual PC on the system was a 386 running some DOS variant.

The worst part was the average customer. Not only were they angry at us (the cashiers) that his happened, and of course had to question/argue each price we came back with. So the lines grew quickly, and which annoyed the customers more, which slowed us down, which made the lines grow, etc.

Not one of my fondest memories.

This comment was edited on Apr 7, 2009, 15:46.

Neither GOD nor ANGELS are pure fantasy. Aliens are pure fantasy. As is the pathetic theory of Evolution.

What about trolls? You certainly make me believe trclls exist.

Anyway, I had the first Voodoo 3 card, suckers! The first!

That story about the castaway dog was fickin' cool. Tough lil' guy. I bet the Hudson and the Gunnar-man would do the same.

I'm glad that the scientist was right about the earthquake, and managed to get his baby sent off to Krypton ok.

Voodoo 3? Bah, you kids, off my lawn! Skull

LOL. Post of the day award!

My first Voodoo card was a Voodoo Banshee. Upgraded that from an AiW ATI Rage II+(or c, can't remember).

Made Half-Life awesome to play.
Was looking forward to 3dfx's new line when they went under.

I guess I wanted a stellar and surprising ending. Instead I got dissapearing acts, smoke and mirrors and some of the worst acting ever.

What bugged me the most was that after four years of drama and fucking depression, we couldn't get five minutes of happiness for the main characters at the ending?

Seriously. I wanted Roslin to die throughout the entire series, because I fucking hated the bitch. Never was elected to office but loved being judge, jury and executioner all at once. But then when she DID finally die in the final episode, I hated it because of what it did to Adama. Come on, the ONE likeable character in the show can't have five minutes of happiness? Why the fuck did the mystery cure of "give her some of Hera's blood" suddenly not work anymore? What the fuck is this, Star Trek?

Congrats Apollo, you made it to the end. Sorry, but your wife killed herself 10 episodes ago, and the love of your life actually IS dead, ALSO because she killed herself, and the copy that's in front of you is just a copy and poof, is now gone.

And then the two fuckers that DESERVED to die got to live happily ever after. Fuck off, Ron Moore.


What also really baffled me was their logic. We found a planet, it's perfect! It's got this prehistoric lifeform on it with compatable DNA, so we can just mate with it.

Eh, what? You have thirty THOUSAND survivors, plus however many of the fertile Sharons and Sixes were left. I'm pretty damn sure that that is more than enough to sustain a viable population without genetic inbreeding occuring after ten generations, so you don't have to go breed with some cro-magnon ape beast...

Creston

That PC is around here somewhere, and as a testament to how things were better engineered back then, it *still* works fine.

Heh. It also had like 5000 transistors, compared to the ~ 1 billion (total) that modern PCs have.

Creston

The Voodoo 3 thing doesn't affect me nearly as much as considering that a decade ago the Y2K thing was just starting to kick into gear.

Y2K was the most brilliant hoax we ever pulled in IT. Make people believe all sorts of crazy shit will happen (planes will fall out of the sky because their computer tells them they shouldn't be flying at this particular date!) and they will give you practically unlimited funds to

A) Hire your buddies into cush jobs
5) Buy state of the art gaming systems, ostensibly to "run network checks."
x) Get paid ludicrous amounts of overtime for sitting there, "on watch" for the bug to hit.

(bullet point numeration by Peter King, SI.com.)

It was glorious. How I miss the days when I'd get paid 80 bucks an hour to play doom on the company network provide desktop support.

Creston

Hardly. 3DFX drove themselves out of business by requiring developers to code for a 3rd API - GLIDE - when we already had OpenGL and DirectX. People refused to make games for it, and it killed the company.

I don't remember that at all. I never saw a shortage of glide games, until 3dfx pulled the plug.

The way I remember it (and granted, it's been years), their undoing was when they started making their own hardware. Instead of getting payments from 3rd party companies for using their technology, they went to a making their own hardware, and trying to compete with everyone else. Which didn't work...

edit: looks like we were both right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx#Cause_of_decline

Then 3dfx released word in early 1999 that the still-competitive Voodoo2 would only support OpenGL and Glide under Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, and not DirectX. Many games were transitioning to DirectX at this point, and the announcement caused many PC gamers – the core demographic of 3dfx's market – to switch to Nvidia or ATI offerings for their new machines.

Fourth, the merger with STB alienated 3dfx from much of its previous market, and never developed into the right kind of arrangement to broaden 3dfx's distribution base from what the company had when still acting as a chipset supplier to third parties. The merger consequently diverted vital resources from 3dfx's chip development operations without ever producing a corresponding payback in sales.

This comment was edited on Apr 7, 2009, 13:42.

I had a Voodoo 3 3500, the one with the TV tuner. That was probably the second worst video card I've ever owned (behind the Voodoo Rush, my first 3D card). I had to underclock the card to get it to work properly, and the TV tuner barely worked.

Yeah I had a Voodoo3 2000, kickass card. Glide rocked, as well as OpenGL but unfortunately the card sucked in DirectX, its a shame Microsoft and Nvidia teamed up to destroy the pioneers of graphics acceleration 3dfx.

Hardly. 3DFX drove themselves out of business by requiring developers to code for a 3rd API - GLIDE - when we already had OpenGL and DirectX. People refused to make games for it, and it killed the company. NVidia just bought the rights to the technology and ported it to DirectX.

I swore by anything with "Canopus" and "Voodoo" on it.

I had a friend that bought the S3 Virge. It came with Mechwarrior and I'76, so he figured it was a good deal. I told him not to. Sure enough, over half the games looked awful, often with HUD transparencies not being transparent.

When he finally upgraded I couldn't talk him out of a Voodoo Rush.

Ug.

I still have a pair of Voodoo 1 cards. Yeah, the first Monster 3D cards. they gave me such good fps in Quake back in teh day

This comment was edited on Apr 7, 2009, 12:38.