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Still, I will give one clue. Alien worm/lobster sex plays an important part in the plot. Boom!

Well that doesn't narrow it down at all! All films include lobster sex if you watch them the right way.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Something Something Ooze?

(Missed Stupot's post)

Thanks Snarky!  This pleases me, I just hope Cinebook will get more ASAP!

Just an update that Cinebook has now released Running Scared, which is one of the better Tome & Janry albums:



Hopefully part 2 of the story in Valley of the Exiles won't be too long. They've also announced Spirou in Moscow, and I'm crossing my fingers that they'll continue on to my favorite T&J album, the boringly titled Vito la déveine ("Vito the Unlucky"). I actually wrote them an email suggesting they rename it Spirou & Fantasio Sleep with the Fishes, which fits the mafia motif, the diving, and Spirou's "sleeping sickness," and for which the cover fits perfectly:



Anyway, the rate of release suggests Spirou isn't a big seller for Cinebook, so if you have any interest in the series and want to see more of it in English, please order!

Eric got it! Well done.

OK, a hint: It's a relatively recent movie, and I'm pretty sure it was Oscar nominated.

[conversation and discussion]

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Shouldn't be too hard for the film freaks in this thread...

Oh, that's The Thin Man, then.

A shot in the dark: Grand Hotel?

2. Snarky also a mentioned a tool that already handles voice acting scripts. I prefer not to recreate features already done by others, especially if the tool is built for that purpose. However, the author of that tool hasn't responded to this subject so I have no idea whether the tool is defunct, the author doesn't read this, or simply ignores it all.

I may in fact have been thinking of AJA's DialogDesigner, which now that I look at it more closely does something a bit different. Though I do think there have been other attempts to improve the AGS sound/voice system through plugins or standalone programs over the years; I would think those have been made redundant or incompatible by the new AGS sound system, though, if they ever were released in the first place. Sorry, I haven't actually tried any of them, they've just kind of been on the periphery of my awareness.

As for custom say functions, I use extender functions and in some cases functions with defined speakers (like narratorSay, say).

Guess some people were absent on the day in kindergarten when they taught the alphabet. 

There's no option. If you write the letter that comes between q and s by itself, it automatically gets "corrected" to "are": are. Same with the letter between t and v: you. Try it!

It's kind of annoying, actually. Particularly since it happens even inside code blocks.

I'm at work, but what does this plugin do?

I'm watching a presentation, but http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=45603.0. 

A number of sites seem to agree that it's from a painting of Venice by Francesco Guardi, some identifying it as "Mercanti 1738" (if that's the year, it must be mistaken, since according to Wikipedia Guardi's first signed work was ca. 1739). This seems to be the full version (or at least the most complete I've found). It doesn't actually match any paintings of his I could find online (and the composition doesn't seem like his style), though most elements are found in various of his paintings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycloid

NOW you're talking. Gaston Lagaffe BEST. COMICS. EVER. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Lagaffe )



I wouldn't know how to find them in English, though. I've found them in German in the past. Belgian/French comics have a strong penetration in Continental Europe, but the English-speaking world is totally oblivious to them (except for blockbusters like Tintin, Asterix and the smurfs -- mainly because of the animated series for the latter). the wikipedia article says it was printed in Finnish.

Cinebook is (slowly) publishing some of the Spirou albums from the Tome & Janry era in English. Adventure Down Under and Spirou in New York are available now, and they just announced Running Scared (La frousse aux trousses) to be released next spring. Also, Kim Thompson from Fantagraphics is an avowed Franquin fan, and has said he wants to give Spirou another try some time (probably in the same format that Fantagraphics just released Gil Jourdan in: two albums collected in one hardcover book).

Other than that, there are a few fan translations (of variable quality) available, including quite a lot of Gaston gags, Spirou: Machine qui rêve and Petit Spirou: Dis bonjour à la dame. Some more stuff here: http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/tag/char:+spirou

My ignorance in the field of streaming things online has bothered me for ages but I've been too lazy to post about it. There's quite a lot I want to know, since I find it all very fascinating.

1.) When a video streams, what exactly is going on? Is the computer simply taking bits of information at a time and storing them temporarily as they play, or is it actually relying entirely on another computer and just acting as a medium in which to show you?

2.)Similar to the question above, how does...well, everything else work? As far as pictures and such... when you access a website with pictures and text, are the pictures and text temporarily saved to your computer while you view them? Or does the explorer simply show you pictures and text stored on another computer without the need to temporarily store them? Does this process vary depending on the file medium?

Sorry for packing so many questions into one post but my fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works has been driving me crazy lately.

Pretty much anything you see on the web always relies on a remote computer ("web server") sending you something, and your computer displaying or rendering that something. You need to be connected to the internet because the things you want to see are on the web servers, and you need to have a computer (rather than, for example, just a monitor and keyboard connected directly to the modem) to figure out how to display the things you receive.

Now in principle, the web server could just send you "this is what your screen should look like" and an image that you just splatted directly to the monitor (or to be more precise, to the video memory in your graphics card). Essentially a constant video stream sent just to your computer. And in that case you might not even need a computer, or at least not a very advanced one: this is often called a terminal system. That's how VNC works (where you can control a computer remotely from another computer). But it would take a lot of bandwidth, be very inflexible between different screens and computers, and cause a long lag any time you wanted to scroll, or hover over a link, or do anything else that would update the screen. And it would be a ton of extra work for the web servers. So what they do instead is to just send you the data and say "you figure out how to display this", and then your browser interprets it and renders the screen locally. That's why the same web page can look slightly different in different browsers, and also allows you to do things like change the font size without bothering the web server.

Web pages are sent as text files in HTML format, and you can just save them if you want to look at them when you're off-line (though links between different pages may not work because they're pointing to the internet address instead of the local copy, and interactive stuff that involves talking to the server, like the buttons on this page to post the message I'm writing, obviously won't). Images are sent as image files, just like the ones saved on your computer.

With video streaming, they could send each image and the sound constantly, and your computer would just have to put it on the screen and send it to the speakers, but again, that would be very inefficient, and if any of the images or sound bits got lost it would ruin the video. (And messages get lost all the time on the Internet; it's just that the system is smart enough to detect when it happens and send it again until it gets through.) So instead they send little chunks of the video file (in order) and lets your browser figure out how to decode and render it. So you can take the same video and make it full-screen, for example. That's also why sometimes some videos won't play on some systems (like the iPhone had trouble with a lot of videos for a long time), because they don't know how to render it. The server keeps sending you the next chunks of the video as fast as you're playing them (or even faster, and then the browser just keeps them in a buffer until it's time to play them), but if you jump around too much in the video you have to ask it to send you the bits from the part you jumped to.

So the web server sends you text, images and chunks of video, and the browser keeps those things in memory while it needs to display them. Then it either throws them away, or saves them to files on your computer. Anything you see on the Internet has been sent to your computer and can be saved if you want to, but it won't always work by itself. For example, you can save the Google homepage as a file, but it won't let you do Google searches offline because every search involves talking to the Google servers.

One of my problems in GWBasic and generally when coding is that I don't know how to 'keep track what's been done already'. So if you asked me to take on a phonebook and search for a name, I would go blindly until I found the name, or somehow go closer to the name little by little, but not crossing out names already done... (

There are generally four approaches off the top of my head. The first is to keep a list (or more generally, a data structure) of things you've done which you keep adding to (and checking against). The other is to keep a list (/ d.s.) of things left to do that you keep removing things from until it's empty. The third is to set a flag on each item to let you know whether it's done or not. The last and often most efficient one is to do things in some particular order, and just keep track of how far you've got in that order.

In your phone book example, the last approach is best. The book is ordered alphabetically, so we use a method called binary search. That pretty much means we open the book in the middle, and see whether the name you're looking for is before or after that page. Then we look in the middle of that half of the book, check whether it's before or after, and so on. We keep track of the beginning and end of the pages we are looking at (top and bottom indexes). So if the phone book is 500 pages, we know when we start that the name we're looking for is between page 1 and page 500. Then we look in the middle, and might find out that it's between page 250 and 500. Then we check in the middle of that, and see that it's between page 250 and 375. Then between 250 and 312, between 281 and 312, 281 - 296, 288 - 296, 292 - 296, 292 - 294, and finally, that it's on page 293. That's 500 pages searched in 9 steps.

You can keep the top and bottom indexes in two variables, which show how far you've got in your search so far.

[TWO]

Two sequences of TWO notes are a repetition. And yes it's not indifinite, I know that!

I think that the solution could be to have 22*22 (but that's impossible as well... Eventually you'll run into a dead end).

It's worse than that, mate. If you don't want any repetition of even one interval, your sequence can't be more than 23 notes long!

[three]

There are no chords, just single notes?

And how do you define the repetitions that are disallowed? Two sequences of at least three notes each with the same intervals in each sequence?

There's no way to have an indefinite sequence of notes that never repeats the same two intervals. Since after the first note there are only 22 possibilities for the second note, and 22 possibilities for the third note after each of those, there are only 22*22 = 484 different possibilities for the intervals in a sequence of three notes.

So before you've played 500 notes, there will have to be some repetition.

Edit: Guess I didn't read your condition 2 carefully enough. Seems like you're already aware of this. I would represent the notes as a sequence of intervals (since there are 22 possibilities, we can represent them by a string of letters [A-V]), and each time I want to generate a new one, I'd do 22 substring tests to check whether the last two intervals + each of the possibilities already exists in the string. Then I'd select one at random from the others, add it to the string, and repeat. If all were taken, I'd go back recursively and change the last note. (You might want to keep track of the blocked notes for each position as you go along, or the process will get really slow as you get close to the limit of the possible sequences.)