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24-02-2012 20:22 download file here filedcyber.com Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses. Steam also has community features, automated game updates, in-game voice and chat functionality. As of January 2012, there are 1492 games available through Steam,[4] and 40 million active user accounts.[5] The concurrent users peak was 5 million on January 2nd, 2012.[6] Although Valve never releases sales figures, Stardock, the previous owner of competing platform Impulse, estimated that, as of 2009, Steam had a 70% share of the digital distribution market for video games.[7] Many major publishers have large catalogues available on Steam, including Bethesda Softworks, Activision, Rockstar Games, Square Enix, 2K Games, and Telltale Games.
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Steam Money Adder Updated 2012 - Video
LONDON – If Chico & Rita wins the Oscar for best animated feature Sunday night, it will be a real long-shot victory – especially since the movie is up against big-budget features like Paramount’s Rango and DreamWorks Animation’s Puss in Boots and Kung Fu Panda 2.
But then Chico & Rita already has a long history of overcoming the odds.
Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba – his Belle Epoque was named best foreign-language film in 1994 – and artist and designer Javier Mariscal, along with U.K.-based animation production label Magic Light Pictures, have been working on Chico & Rita, a love story set to the beat of Cuban jazz, since as far back as 2003. And back then few would have bet on its commercial viability – let along its eventual Oscar chances.
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At the start, the biggest challenge facing the filmmakers was that the story they wanted to tell – that of a young piano player’s fractious love affair with a jazz singer that takes them from Cuba to New York, Paris, Hollywood and Las Vegas – sounded too adult for an animated movie.
There were just no immediate precendents: Waltz With Bashir, set amid the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and Persepolis, which followed a young Iranian girl’s coming-of-age, were still in the future. And the fanciful French film The Triplets of Belleville was only just beginning to peddle its way to global success. Additionally, Mariscal had never made a movie, while Trueba had never directed an animated film. And so when they approached potential backers at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, there were no immediate takers.
But Trueba tells The Hollywood Reporter he never had any doubts that an animated feature was possible. “I was always talking to Javier [Mariscal] about making a movie and one day I saw his drawings of Havana, Cuba. And then I knew, that’s what to do, write a love story about a singer and a piano player and work with him and his drawings,” Trueba says. “We had the desire, passion and music to work together and that made it easy to spend so much time together on this to do it. We’re still friends now."
The adult content they envisioned might have made it a tough sell, but “we never thought about it being live action, not for a second,” Trueba continues. “It was always going to be an animation for us.”
Magic Light Pictures, set up in 2002 by former Aardman Animations executive and producer Michael Rose and producer Martin Pope, also became convinced of the project’s potential. And so, the new animation house created a promo and pitch while Trueba and Mariscal began assembling a top flight Spanish creative team.
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One key player who was drafted early on was Spanish novelist, TV and film writer Ignacio Martinez de Pison, who began polishing the script. The filmmakers also brought in art department whizz Tonno Errando, who joined them as a co-director.
Producer Christina Huete, Trueba’s wife, helped nurture the project by finding financing from Spanish broadcasters TVE and TV3.
Further financial support came from the Isle of Man, where Steve Christian headed up the government-supported film financing and production group. Magic Lantern’s Pope and Rose had produced two previous films on the Isle of Man, so they knew Christian well. And by the 2006 edition of Cannes, Christian and the Isle of Man’s CinemaNX were on board, joining the tapestry of Spanish financiers and backers that had been assembled, and the project’s budget of €10 million ($13 million) was within reach.
“We pitched the project to distributors and financiers and everyone who saw the script and the early teaser trailer loved it but everyone said it was very risky financially,” Rose recounts. “So a lot of people told us to go and make it and then they’d talk.”
Pope says Christian’s belief and backing and the Spanish deals drummed up by Huete allowed the project to reach critical mass, financially.
It still took several more years for all the pieces to fall into place – the film sold to Walt Disney International in Spain, where it eventually grossed more $1 million during its theatrical release. And HanWay, the British sales and finance house, sold it elsewhere around the world.
The movie’s actual physical production took more than two years, although Pope puts that into perspetive, explaining, “Clearly 2½ years for an animation is relatively quick."
Eventually, after the movie played the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010, it sold to the small U.S. distributor GKids, who entered it in the Oscar race.
Its nomination was greeted by both disbelief and joy by Rose and Pope, allowing them to make their second visit to the Oscars in just two year’s time. Last year, their short film The Gruffalo was nominated in the best animated short film category.
“It’s a wonderful reward for the last seven years,” Rose says. “We commit ourselves [at Magic Light] to doing very few projects so we can try and make them of the highest quality and this feels like we are reaching the standards we aim for.”
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The Making of 'Chico & Rita': How a Low-Budget Animation Beat the Odds to Compete for Oscar
Well, it was about perfect, wasn’t it, that Mitt Romney gave his big economic speech before about 1,200 supporters in a 65,000-seat football stadium? Whether the stadium or the speech was emptier is the obvious question of the moment. Pathetic as the pictures of the event were, I’d have to hand the trophy to the speech. Some of Romney’s specifics weren’t as far out there as those of his opponents. His proposed individual marginal tax rates, for example, are radical, but not as radical as those announced by the remaining three other Republican candidates. But his plan is even worse than theirs are in a way that we’ve come to know as typically Romneyesque. He is desperately eager to please the right wing and also to try to seem like the responsible one, but there is no way to do both of things without lying.
First, though, let’s discuss that venue. So a hotel ballroom was oversubscribed. Okay, I know Detroit has been down on its luck for the better part of 40 years, but even so I find it pretty difficult to believe that there is not a venue in the whole metropolitan area that has a capacity somewhere in between the Westin Book Cadillac ballroom’s 1,000 or whatever and Ford Field’s 65,000 (for football; 80,000 for wrestling). The University of Detroit’s basketball teams, for example, must play somewhere. Reports indicate that the Economic Club of Detroit, not the campaign, made the switch. But someone at the campaign said, “Gee, okay!” It’s not a catastrophe, but it is staggeringly stupid. Imagine the field day the right-wing agitprop machine would have had in 2008 with Barack Obama doing something like that. Indeed remember the sport they made of the mere fact of Obama giving a speech in a football stadium, even after he did in fact fill it.
But the deception involved in trying to make 1,200 supporters seem like 80,000 is nothing next to the deception of the plan itself. Romney would lower all six current individual tax brackets by 20 percent. That’s not as drastic as his opponents’ plans. Newt Gingrich, for example, would let any taxpayer choose between paying under the current regime or just paying a 15 percent flat tax. Rick Santorum would have most taxpayers paying just 10 percent. So this is the Romney-the-Reasonable part of the plan. Sticking with six brackets is supposedly meant to signal that he believes in a little stability and is not a loon.
Reducing those rates, of course—along with the reduction of the corporate rate from 35 percent to 25 percent; along with massively increasing Pentagon spending—will reduce revenue. And here’s the catch, via The Wall Street Journal’s write-up. Romney “said Wednesday that as president, he would direct Congress to make up lost revenue from the rate cuts by limiting deductions, mostly for wealthier Americans. Mr. Romney and his aides didn't say which deductions would be targeted.”
Ah! There it is. Deductions? We’ll figure those out later. Listen, I have a new fiscal plan for the Tomasky household that I am announcing today. I’m going to go half-time at the Beast and quit doing all my other work, thereby reducing my income by well more than half. But circumstances dictate that I also need to buy a new car, and a nice car, a Lexus, because this household needs a husband/father who isn’t ashamed to be a Tomasky and is prepared for the future because the roads can get awfully dangerous out there in Montgomery County. How will I pay for it, you ask? Well, first of all, you’re a freedom-hater for even asking the question, and second, I’ll simply cut all other household spending to the bone. I’ll end up revenue neutral, I swear.
Romney’s plan is literally about that serious. He won’t announce which deductions because it’s really hard to go after deductions, and because there is probably not enough money there anyway to make up for the lost revenue. But trust him, it’ll all work out.
And here’s a curious thing. Romney commits a grave error, from the right-wing point of view, in even acknowledging that there is lost revenue. If he’d gone to the Mitch McConnell School of Economics he’d know that cutting tax rates increases revenue. So the really interesting question here is: Why does Romney even bother to acknowledge that there will be lost revenue that will need to be made up?
He acknowledges it because some small but quickly vaporizing part of the man still retains some attenuated grasp of fiscal reality. So rather than tell the balls-out, red-meat lie that reduced rates will raise more revenue, he tells the squishy and weasely lie that he’ll take care of the imbalance at a future unspecified date in some future unspecified way. And that, my friends, is Romney to the core. He thinks he can finesse everything, that he’s much cleverer than he is, that somehow people won’t notice. But no one’s buying his line about the bailout. It’s patent nonsense, and Steve Rattner just demolished it on the Times op-ed page today. Romney also looks a little graceless, by the way, saying that he drives the Mustang and the GM pickup, while his wife drives the Cadillacs, plural. The way he added that after a pause, it reminded me of John McCain not remembering how many houses he owned. But Romney remembers. He just thinks he can bluff it.
He makes me really wonder about the private sector in this country. Did he earn all those millions behaving this way, telling people what they wanted to hear, then maybe doing something else entirely, then saying to them that that was his plan all along, then jovially throwing a colleague under the bus? Don’t answer that question.
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Romney’s Tax-Plan Flim-Flam