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June 17, 2006
"Although they have them in their own lands, they do not labour to obtain them, nor do they value them."
In addition to explaining how the old device worked, the NES Light Zapper FAQ also predicts the Wiimote:
Next comes the 'modern' light guns,
They can sense the position of the white sprites relitive to
their feild of view. This is why they have the larger barrels. This is also
why they must be calabrated. I suppose this new methode could be combined
with the old methode to produce some amazing games where the game could
know the distance, position, and angle of the gun from the screen. This
could be used to make very realistic 3D shooting games where distace to
taget accually had reallistic effects like gravity, vicosity and wind (not
just the size of the enemy graphic). This would dicourage players from
putting the gun against the screen, they'd only gain at most 25 feet closer
to your oponet, since the game knows where the gun is it could just
electronically move everything back 25 feet. Add another device, a box
sitting on top of the TV, and a reciever the player wears and enemies in
the game could accually shoot back (electronically of course) forcing the
player to run around the room, dive behing the couch and so one. This
also, would discourage the player from walking right up and putting the gun
on the screen. And of couse the ultimate would be to add 3D glasses, you
could watch the illusion of a vapor trail shoot from the barrel of your
light gun into the screen then continue the target. So what does the
sensor on top of the TV do you ask. Well it basically just becomes a pain
in the ass! It's a plain vannilla run-of-the-mill infa-red reciever, JUST
LIKE ANY OTHER WIRELESS CONTROLLER. The benefits of these IR recievers
include interference, blocked reception, two extra lenses to get dirty,
data delay and data loss, any of these can happen just at the right moment
to ***** you and messup your game. Believe me, the wire hanging of the
Zapper is far better setup. Of course 'the ultimate 3D gun game' I
described above could not be done with a wire, neither would an IR reciever
work reliable with the players running around the room. A 900mhz reciver
would work best. I'm not sure the FCC allows the use of 900mhz for 'toys'
however. I think it's only authorised for voice transmission with
restrictions on that too.
The etymology of America is fitting.
It is ostensibly named after Amerigo Vespucci, who was one of the first to suggest that the New World was actually a continent of it’s own. But why name it after him just because of that? Perhaps this line from the etymological dictionary sheds some light on the subject: “The name Amerigo is Gmc. [Germanic], said to derive from Goth[ic]. Amalrich, lit[erally]. ‘work-ruler.’” An online name dictionary offers this explanation of Amalric, which is pretty similar:
Derived from the Germanic elements amal “work, labour” and ric “power”.
So from the start, the very name of the continent and country has essentially meant “the power of labour” or “work as ruler.” You could perhaps extend this to the idea of democracy and the ability of the ordinary man, the worker, to have power both over his life and of the life of the nation. This somewhat esoteric reading also dovetails ever so perfectly into the so-called Protestant work ethic upon which this country is founded, and the American Dream, which Wikipedia defines as “the faith held by many in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity.”
And then of course there is the All-Seeing Eye of the Eye of Providence which rests atop an unfinished pyramid on the back of our dollar bill. Though various people suggest a connection to Masonic-conspiratorial imagery, we could extend our idea of the “power of labour” to this symbol as well. Since, you’ll recall, that pyramids were supposed to have been built by slave labor (Jews, the Bible tells us). So we have the Work-Ruler as the one(s) constructing the pyramid, overseen by “I Am the Ever Ruler” - the All-Seeing Eye, the “I AM THAT I AM” (”Ehyeh asher ehyeh” in Hebrew), the response God gave when Moses (of the former slave-caste) asked for His name. What we see is a symbolic union of the eternal “the ever ruler” within the field of “work” or of time…
Since we’re on the topic of Judaism and mysticism, we ought to also pull in the Kabbalistic concept of Tikkun Olam, as put forward by Isaac Luria in the 1500’s (born only two decades after Amerigo Vespucci’s death). Tikkun Olam essentially means “world repair” and relates to the hard work that is required to bring the sparks of God trapped in the material world back to liberation and re-unification with God. Though the phrase today is more commonly referred to in the sense of social justice or taking steps to improve the condition of society, it’s mystical meanings are rather more interesting:
The “repair,” that is needed, therefore, is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts. The goal of such repair, which can only be effected by humans, is to separate what is holy from the created world, thus depriving the physical world of its very existence—and causing all things return to a world before disaster within the Godhead and before human sin, thus ending history.
This in turn is reminiscent of the controversial (and possibly apocryphal) quote attributed to James G. Watt, Secretary of the Interior under Reagan in 1981, “After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”
Posted by Jon Rubin at June 17, 2006 08:09 PM
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