In an effort to de-Bezos myself, I canceled my Audible subscription and switched over to libro.fm. It doesn’t have nearly the same depth of catalogue as Audible, but they only sell DRM-free audiobooks AND you can nominate a bookshop to support, so a portion of every purchase I make goes towards a local Irish children’s bookshop. Nice!
The other night, I saw they were selling what they claimed was The Iliad translated by Emily Wilson and I bought it immediately, despite the fact there were a lot of things that really should have made me suspicious:
The terrible cover art that doesn’t even mention Emily Wilson
The author, “Nathan Brooks”, has mainly only narrated Keto diet books (we’ll come back to Devolution and Meister der Angst)
But I also started to suspect this was AI narration. A painfully flat affect, unnatural intonations, and two completely different pronunciations of “Atreides” (a name that, incidentally, doesn’t even appear in the Wilson translation). Every line ends in a semi-questionmark which is a trick used by stochastic parrots to gain some wiggle-room and maybe make it sound like they understand the meaning of the words they’re saying. This illusion works reasonably well in short bursts, but they were trying to do it across a 15 hour book?
Any one of these is fishy enough, but all together, it’s obvious this “publisher” is clearly someone who is just churning out AI slop and selling it to audiobook sellers. And it’s kind of working! As of writing (2025-04-19), their versio of The Iliad is #4 in Libro.fm’s list of bestsellers in the “Poetry” category, behind Ian Mackellen reading The Odyssey but ahead of Stephen Fry’s Troy (read by Stephen Fry).
We are actively taking steps to increase transparency around audiobooks that are AI-narrated by properly labeling them on our site and in our apps. As an audiobook retailer and app, we are not involved in the production AI-narrated audiobooks; so labelling them requires collaboration with our publishing partners.
Which is fair enough, I think!
And in their defence, I wrote to them to let them know my issues with the version of The Iliad I had purchased and they immediately issued a refund and said they’d shared my email with their content team and they’d be looking into the books from Paradox Audios.
What it feels like, to me, is that in order to compete with Audible, the other audiobook sellers are turning to these no-name, unscrupulous publishers to bulk out their catalogue. And it’s making their product worse.
So short-sighted. I really do want to support independent booksellers as best I can, and I would much rather Libro just say “Yeah we don’t have it”, rather serving up this dreadful slop.
Libro’s awful “Narrator” search
Since I’m on the subject of Libro.fm, I just wanted to touch on something I mentioned earlier. Remember I talked about the other books coming up when you search for Nathan Brooks as a narrator? Rather than giving each narrator a unique ID and attaching that to the credit, Libro do a fuzzy search. So not only is the AI “Nathan Brooks” from The Iliad NOT the same as the one that read those Keto books (one is English, the other American), books like Meister der Angst also turn up in the search results. These are books with a whole cast of narrators and we’re matching partial names. In this case, “David Nathan” and “Farina Brock”. Not even close! But it makes these sketchy narrators look more legit, at least from a cursory glance.
Figure 1: Blue Prince, my current contender for GotY
Note: I’m going to do my best not to spoil Blue Prince but it’s a hard one to talk around and everyone has a different tolerance for spoilers. If you feel like I’m giving too much away, let me know!
I spent the weekend playing Blue Prince with my kids. And they seem to be enjoying it? They’ve gotten into videogames recently but rarely stray outside of the standard kid’s fare like Minecraft and Mario Kart. I think they like the fact that Blue Prince is cozy and slightly cerebral, even if they don’t quite understand all of the things that are happening or why I might draft one room over another. But in the game, each room is a puzzle or a layer to a puzzle and I love hearing them theorise what each element of the room might be.
(Incidentally, they’ve occasionally been really helpful. There’s a picture on a wall that I just couldn’t figure out. For hours, I kept thinking “Is that Donald Trump??”. And my daughter copped it first time. I’d still be bashing my head against it if it wasn’t for her).
Playing it yesterday with my 7-year-old beside me and I reached a room with a load of things in it that I didn’t understand. “I’m not sure what these are but I’ll bet they’re important”, I said to him. So I grabbed screenshots of all the things, and asked him what he thought they were. And so we came up with a little story of what they were, and then moved onto another thing.
A couple of runs later, we were doing something else in the game and came to a whole new area I’d never visited before. As I was looking around, getting an idea of what I was looking at and I said “does this look kinda familiar?”. And at the exact same time, we both came to the realisation that these were the things we’d been looking at just an hour ago and that I’d screenshotted. The delight on his little face as he realised he’d worked it out was spectacular.
(The other take-away from this is that I have the same mental capabilities of a 7-year-old but let’s just skip over that for now.)
Anyway, Blue Prince is a really great game. But even better if you can play it as a multiplayer experience with two little buddies.
I was very kindly nominated by MacDara to do the blog questions challenge. I don’t know who started this trend, but doesn’t it feel good to have these things back? A good old-fashioned blog challenge! Doesn’t it remind of you what blogging/the internet used to be like?
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I’ve been on the internet since about 1996 and was always fairly plugged into internet culture. Everyone had their geocities pages or their tilde pages (iol.ie/~stuff was me!) focusing on their various fascinations. But then around 1999-2000, there was a noticabable change in the culture. People like Kottke and Dooce (RIP) started writing things that were more personal. And you had had Slashdot and Kuro5hin bringing in places where whole communities could contribute. And that felt really new and revolutionary. The internet was becoming more of a community. So I made a Livejournal account for personal stuff and made a lot of great friends there. I also had enough PHP knowledge to bash together a custom CMS to host a community blog for my friends on the worst domain would could imagine - fuckcuntandbollocks.com (the content of this is pretty much exactly what you’re imaginging, but all I can say is that we were young and trying to be edgelords and I’m sorry).
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Jaypers, it might be easier to list the platrforms I haven’t tried. I’ve gone from Livejournal to Wordpress, to Tumblr, to Moveable Type, to Textpattern back to Wordpress, to Jekyll, to Wordpress, to Hugo, back to Wordpress, then back to Hugo, which is where we are now. I’ve mostly tried to carry my content with me across all these platforms, so this blog is about 2,000 markdown files of varying consistency, depending on how various export tools work (Tumblr’s export system suuuuuucks). I like the convenience of Wordpress but hate the fact that I’m running exposed PHP (and possibly a MySQL server) on the internet. I also don’t love Matt Mullenweg’s recent very public meltdown and it makes me fear for the future of that project.
In general, I much prefer the idea of static site generators because my content is all written in plain text (markdown) and stored in a git repository, so my disaster recovery strategy is just “re-clone my repo, rebuild and push to a new site”. And of all the static site generators I’ve tried, Hugo is the only one that can handle this volume of content with reasonable build-times.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
It depends! If it’s a link, I have a bash script that will `curl` all the metadata on that link for me and create the `.md` file for me and open it in vscode. I have similar scripts for video posts and books for my /reading section. For posts like this, I use org-mode. I have a dedicated `Blog Posts` section in my `notes.org` file and I do most of the initial work on it there.
When it’s in a half-decent state, I export it as a Hugo file to my site’s repo, and then I’ll refine it using vscode, using the local `hugo server` command to give the once-over for obvious stylistic mistakes. I also have a few evergreen posts, like my /uses page, that only live in my org file and gets exported whenever I change them.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I have a full-time job and two small children. Between those things, I don’t know if there’s much room for lofty things like “inspiration”. If something catches my eye and I feel like I have something to contribute, I need to get the writing out of me there and then or I’ll start second-guessing everything I want to say. Maybe this isn’t a good thing?
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
I try not to let things sit in drafts. See what I just said about needing to get the writing out of me? I’ve had one post sitting in draft here since 2019 because I wanted to work on it more. But I’ve sort of lost interest in the topic, so it’s just going to sit there forever. Drafts are no good for me. So I usually publish immediately and forget about it until the post loads in my RSS reader (I follow my own blog in my RSS reader, is that conceited?) and it’s usually then that I spot any grammatical or technical mistakes and I’ll go back and fix them.
What are you generally interested in writing about?
This the $64,000 question, right? I think I’m writing about the things that interest me, which is mostly just commentary around pop culture and tech. But also I find myself holding back on actually writing substantially about anything. This is about 50% imposter syndrome (“who cares what I have to say about this topic?”) and about 30% tall poppy syndrome and then 20% not wanting to attract the spotlight so as to protect my own privacy/peace. Recently this has also been joined with not wanting to publish anything because it’s all just getting slurped up as AI training data.
But I also think this is changing over the last couple of years? Has anyone else noticed this shift? Since the death of Facebook, there’s been more of a desire to return to classical blogging. I mean, this prompt is a great example of this shift. People are owning their own internet again and I love it. So recently, that’s been the thing I’m interested in writing about: how the internet is maybe getting better and how we can contribute to this?
Who are you writing for?
Myself. As I mention on my /about page, I’ve done my best to remove any code that can track visitors to this page. I also don’t look at the access logs for this host. So there could be a thousand people reading this. There could be no-one. I’ll never know. And I prefer it this way. The more I feel like someone is actually reading this, the more reluctant I am to actually publish anything (or rather, there are a couple of people in my mind that I’m not writing for. Little haters both real and imaginary. Every word I publish on here is written knowing there’s a good chance it’ll be taken by those people and used for snarky back-biting and I’m writing it in spite of them - feels good, man).
I feel like this audience-ignorance lets me be a slightly more authentic me? When I first started writing here, I was writing as if I was part of the larger tech blogosphere and I cringe when I look back over everything I wrote at that time. It sounds so false, so not me. I’ve landed on a more neutral-sounding tone now. It’s still not the way I actually talk (IRL, I swear like a sailor) but this a pretty good, slightly-more-professional approcimation of me.
What’s your favourite post on your blog?
Okay so this is cheating a little but this little jaunt down memory lane has reminded me of the time for fuckcuntandbollocks.com that myself and my friend Puppy Boylan came up with an idea for a whole Dan Aykroyd-themed restaurant featuring dishes that were puns on his filmography, like “The Blues Burger” and “Driving Miss Egg Mayonnaisey”. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever written but the week we spent thinking of these stupid jokes is one of my happiest and most cherished memories.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or addinga new feature?
I’ve been quietly working away for the past month or two. Tidying things up in the backend here. Tweaking the design there. And as I said before, I want to get better at publishing my stuff here before the anywhere else. I want to turn this place into my actual digital home, rather than having accounts strewn around a half-dozen walled gardens.
(Except for my Tumblr. I love Tumblr so much and I’ll never stop using that service but I’m never integrating that shit again.)
Tag ’em
I’d like to keep it local to Ireland, so I nominate Kevin!
Some of you might know that I track the films I watch over on Letterboxd. Sometimes I even write about the films I watch over there too. For me, 2025 is the year of POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), so I’m going to publish anything I write about films here first before they go up to Letterboxd.
(Also I can’t wait to write about my system for this which is absolutely bonkers).
So I’m back-filling a few of the most recent watches here, which might mean a flood of new entries for any RSS subscribers. Sorry about that!
This morning as I was making a coffee, barely awake, something came floating out of the aether and lodged itself into my brain. I was awake less than five minutes and the universe had already bestowed on me my earworm for the day: the theme song from The Snorks
I haven’t thought about this show in probably 30 years or so? But I could remember every word of the theme song. As these shows go, it’s pretty niche. It’s not like it’s The Smurfs or something. But if I was to ask anyone of my vintage if they remembered The Snorks, I’d say most probably have some memory of it. We could get all nostalgic and be all “hey remember this?” “oh yeah, that was great! And remember this other thing? Good times.” It’s embedded deep and wide.
This got me thinking, what are my kids going to suddenly remember in 30 years? What theme songs are going to unexpectedly pop into their heads as they’re barefoot and bleary-eyed one morning? Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese is on hard rotation in my house, so probably that. Little Lunch maybe, but I don’t even know if that has a theme song.
This is just our house. But what are their friends going to remember? Now that we no longer have a monoculture and everything is so completely fragmented, what’s going to happen to communal nostalgia? In 30 years? Will it even be a thing? “Hey, remember Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese?” “Nah I never watched that” or “We didn’t have Netflix, we only had Prime”. What is going to happen without these common cultural touchstones?
A couple of things to bear in mind here.
The first is that there’s still a couple of franchises that still hint at a monoculture. Pokemon and Bluey are the big ones. It’s small but it’s still there. So maybe it’s not entirely dead yet.
The second and most important thing is: maybe this isn’t a bad thing? During the pandemic, I wrote about how nostalgia was helping me protect my peace as my anxiety was spiking pretty hard. I don’t think nostalgia is, by itself, a bad thing. But maybe, just maybe, there’s such a thing as too much nostalgia and that’s why my generation are, by and large, emotionally stunted adult babies? So perhaps we could achieve more with less of it?
At least the next generation won’t have to put up with jokes about leaving the immersion on.
Nintendo have released a music app! Nintendo Music has songs from over 40 years of their games. And it goes deep, even including the weird incidental variations of songs. Are the 30 seconds from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s 2014 E3 trailer your favourite Zelda song? This app has you covered.
I mean, that’s great and all, but let’s be honest, all we really care about is the Wii Shop music. And it has a drop-down to let you loop this for 60 minutes.
Bliss.
And this gives me an excuse to link to the best version of the Wii Shop music, from Nirvana the Band the Show
I’m one of those sickos who actually likes YAML. As a format for structured data, it’s actually kind of readable and human-editable. I’m also one of those sickos who quite likes LATEX. It’s a beast to edit but I love that it’s at the exact intersection of word processing and direct programming.
The last time I was job-hunting, I was maintaining my CV in LATEX. But after a while, I realised that my CV is mostly structured data. It’s a list of sections, sub-sections, keys and values. Perfect for YAML, right? So for funsies, I rewrote my whole CV so I’d get the best of YAML and the best of LATEX.
And that’s what cv-pandoc is. I don’t expect it will be of any use to anyone but myself, except as a cautionary tale.
The latest round of Twitter nonsense (changing the way “blocking” works) has caused another wave of people to abandon that site for pastures new. Nearly every one of them went to Bluesky instead of Mastodon. 1.2 Million people joined Bluesky in 48 hours. I wonder why that is? I bet there’s something about where people draw the line on Twitter’s behaviour and where they choose to go next. But I bet there’s something else to it too.
Personally, I jumped ship right after yr man bought Twitter. I headed off to Mastodon because it seemed like a plucky little underdog and it seemed to be filled with the nerdiest people. This is who I’ve always identified with. I figured if I was going to find a new tribe, this is probably where it would be. As I wrote in late 2022: “With the implosion of Twitter and the move towards Mastodon and the federated web, the internet of late 2022 is feeling more and more like the internet of 2002: ours.”. And by this, I meant “hardcore nerds making their own networks and systems and taking delight in this”, because that’s how I remember the 2000s. It was a fun place. I loved the fact that someone had already set up a mastodon.ie, and everything felt local again, like the heyday of irc.iol.ie.
After a while, most of the people that joined at the same time as me just stopped posting. There are lots of reasons for this. But mostly, I think it was the near-constant scolding. The incredibly tedious reply-guys1. The lack of space for nuance. The unsaid but incredibly pervasive sense of “this is for us, this is not for you”.
I hope all of that is actually possible for Mastodon, because a lot of great people very much want it to become a more welcoming place. But the longer Mastodon stays in Linux-on-the-desktop mode, the more likely those people are to take their energy somewhere where it’s valued.
It’s over a year since Erin wrote that and I don’t think Mastodon has gotten much better. Disappointingly, I don’t think it’s going to get better. Quote-toots, for example, are useful tools for discovery and for boosting with context and promoting nuance. And they’re finally, slowly rolling out in Mastodon 4.3, the latest version as of this writing. But they’re opt-in. A lot of the hardcore Mastodon heads are staunchly against quote-toots because they can be used for abuse2. This means that adoption of that feature is sloooow. Federation with Threads is another contentious issue. Some servers are very much “Fuck Facebook, let’s never federate”. Which is totally understandable! But also, Threads is where a lot of normies are - my friends that aren’t hardcore nerds and don’t want to deal with Mastodon’s technical or cultural bullshit have jumped on Threads because it’s the lowest-friction off-ramp from Twitter. Blocking federation with Threads means Mastodon can’t be someone’s only social network3.
Between its own systemic issues (discovery is a nightmare) as well as cultural ones (in my experience, nerds are naturally wary of outsiders and incredibly gatekeep-y), it’s impossible to get a foothold. If you’re not already part of one of the three or four already-established tribes on there4, good luck to you.
On the other hand, Bluesky
Bluesky is less grass-roots. It’s federated, but with corporate interests. But the lack of decentralisation means issues get resolved quicker. Which means the network is pivoting quicker. It’s already got better moderation tools than Mastodon. It’s already got a more vibrant set of communities than Mastodon. There’s less scolding than Mastodon.
The first wave of normies came and stayed, they weren’t scolded away. And that paved the way for the next wave. And the so on. Now there’s a rich tapestry of culture on Bluesky. As an example, take a look at the use of the “#lastfourwatched” hashtag, which people use to show the last four films logged in Letterboxd.
On Bluesky, in the last 24 hours, over 50 posts with this hashtag (50 is where I gave up counting).
On Mastodon, used 9 times in the last 7 days.
I realise this is anecdata, and there are factors around this, like Mastodon’s search not being the best, so it might not be giving me the full picture. But it tells me roughly about the types of people on each network, what they’re interested in. And people on Mastodon just aren’t interested in films in that same way that I am. Which is totally fine! But, as someone currently looking for my tribe again, it feels like that’s just a lot easier on Bluesky.
But it also means that with everyone finding their own tribes, figuring things out and having fun, Bluesky currently feels like the best of Twitter in its heyday.
I really do want Mastodon to succeed. Right now, with the collapse of Twitter as we knew it (and Facebook, to some extent), we have a wonderful opportunity to remake the internet as a common social good and I think that Mastodon, as a technology, is the better foundation for this. But I worry that it’s gotten too late for it.
(And I just know there are people disagreeing with me right now. “Maybe I don’t want Mastodon to succeed in that way”. And I’d say to those people: please look at what happened to newsgroups after their eternal September and how their disdain for normies suffocated their own culture).
Every network has its own brand of reply-guys but Mastodon’s are notoriously especially tedious. ↩︎
This is fair and I understand people wanting to protect themselves but everything can be turned into a tool for abuse so maybe the real answer is to just shut it all down? ↩︎
I recently moved my account from a server that doesn’t federate Threads to one that does. One of the good things about Mastodon is that it allows you to change server, but that has a huge amount of down-sides too - my local server isn’t local any more, lots of my follows didn’t copy across etc. ↩︎
It’s pretty crazy how Sally Rooney has taken over the literary world. Like most of the planet, I’m currently reading Intermezzo, her latest book. And every so often I’ll hit a phrase in the book that makes my brain buzz and makes me aware of the fact that people all around the world are also getting stuck into it. There are 20-year old women in Los Angeles who are reading this book right now just like me.
And I can’t help but think that they’re not reading the same book as me. I don’t even mean the geographic stuff as the story travels around Dublin. I mean, there’s a bit early on where Rooney is talking about the courts and their “Gonzaga cohort” - it’s a very specific thing, but what does that even mean to someone from America?
Wittgenstein had this idea of ’language games’, where words can have a different meaning based on the context in which they’re used. So, for example, the word “chess” has a different meaning for a grandmaster than it does for a novice. Reading Intermezzo feels like that idea projected to a whole-ass book.
(And before anyone comes at me: I’m not suggesting I’m a grandmaster in this scenario. I’m sure there is plenty in this book that goes completely over my head as a middle-aged man).
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I’m a real sucker for a good /uses page. Because they’re real people taking their time to document the things they’re passionate about, hey can be a great way of discovering new tools that you might not have come across before.
Anyway, after weeks of procrastination, I’ve added my own /uses page. I hope someone will find something useful on it.
We were in Harvey Norman yesterday buying a new fridge. Have you ever been fridge-shopping with two small children? Hoooly shit is it hard work. After myself and my wife finally managed to snag 10 seconds of peace and quiet to discuss the options to ourselves, I took the kids off to distract them with the demo-mode TVs while my wife talked to a salesperson.
While the kids were hypnotised by the crisp images of crystal glasses melting like ice, I used the opportunity to ask a salesperson if they happened to have any 4K Blu-Ray players because I’m doubling down on physical media. “I’ll have to check the system” he says. So we walk across the shop to their DOS-based(!) inventory system. Along the way we pass an entire row of record players. About 20 of them. Everything from cheapo all-in-ones to top-of-the-range Pro-ject ones. They were even selling a few vinyl records. “No, we don’t have any 4K Blu-Ray players,” says the salesman, “we could order one in if you’d like?”
Apparently in 2024, a 150-year-old technology is better catered for in a shop like Harvey Norman than a 20-year old one.
(Incidentally, DID Electrical, Curry’s and Power City also did not have any Blu-Ray players for sale, but they did have DVD players for sale.)
In the middle of 2022, my tech restlessness took over and I felt like I needed a change. It had been years since I looked at Wordpress in any serious way and I was curious to see what had changed under the hood there (answer: probably a lot if you’re using it as a CMS for a complicated site but as a lowly single blogger using it for personal writing, not a lot!). Plus, there has been a bit of movement in terms of using sqlite as a WP backend which feels like a pretty great step forward to me? So over the course of an evening, I moved my blog from Hugo back to Wordpress. I stayed on there for about 14 months, switching back last week. Let’s talk about the experience.
The WP ecosystem is great. Apps like MarsEdit make it so easy to interact with your blog - uploading images and dropping them into a blog post is very straightforward. Having a client on my phone meant that I could write and publish blog posts from anywhere. And the organisation of posts inside of Wordpress is incredibly simple. And the search! Oh my goodness, so great. Loved all that.
But the spam is unreal. Wordpress is basically unusable without an Askimet account to scan every comment. And even using sqlite as the backend and not running an entire MySQL server for my extremely low-traffic blog felt a good bit safer, every interaction is still run through PHP which is still way more of an attack vector than I’m comfortable with (if you want to spike your anxiety, try Vladimir Smitka’s WordPress installer attack race where he documents a Wordpress blog being compromised during installation 😬).
Writing and publishing on Hugo, on the other hand, is much slower and more convoluted. Let’s be generous and say it’s “deliberate”. There’s no phone client that lets me publish blog posts from wherever (not that I ever actually did that, but it was a nice option to have). Publishing can only really be done on a computer1. Want to embed an image in your blog post? You need to handle the resizing yourself, upload it to a static folder, then figure out the magical markdown incantation for referencing the image, but remember to remove the static part from the URL you put in because that gets stripped when the files get published. The whole thing is actively user-unfriendly.
But what you get in return is content that is truly yours. It’s not stored off in a service on another computer somewhere, where you pray you have a decent backup system. The files that make up this website are on my computer, and my computer is automatically backed up on my NAS. And I keep everything in a private GitHub repo as well for triple redundancy. And because everything is just markdown files, it’s dead simple to just display this image differently if you want. For example, my reading/ section is just markdown files, same as the main part of my blog. It’s just rendered differently there because Hugo makes that so simple.
And let’s be honest, the stuff I’m publishing on this website isn’t exactly breaking news, so maybe I can afford for the process of getting things written and published to be more deliberate. In fact, it’s something I’d like to aim for. Something that struck me while copying across the blog posts I’d made in Wordpress back into Hugo was how not-deliberate my writing was. I’d bang something out without a second thought and maybe, maybe go back and fix any typos I spotted (but mostly I did not).
Anyway, my point here is that Hugo isn’t perfect but it’s pretty great for my needs. Are you reading this, future-John who is currently thinking about moving off to something else? Say it with me: Hugo is pretty great for my needs.
Obviously this is a giant generalisation - for example, prior to moving to Wordpress, I was running a build pipeline in a locally-hosted Jenkins that would detect any changes to my blog’s GitHub repo and automatically build and deploy the Hugo site. So it can be done, but this is a whole step beyond what most people expect from software in 2024. ↩︎
Letterboxd have released their 2022 year in review. I love these roundups because they’re usually pretty great at bubbling up some gems. It’s not any one person or publication’s opinion of the top films of the year, it’s aggregate opinions across the kinds of people who like to track their film-watching across the year. Well, I’m one of those kinds of people, so it’s probably a good time to look at my own stats for 2022. I logged 115 films in 2022. The second-highest number of films in a year since I started tracking this a decade ago. Although technically I watched more because I don’t count the films that I watch (and rewatch, and rewatch) with my kids because that feels like I’d just be cheating my numbers.
Here are my highest-rated films that I watched in 2022 that were released 2022:
And here are my highest-rated films that I watched in 2022 from earlier:
Most of these were first-watches for me, trying to close out some obvious blindspots (I’m in my 40s and had never seen Once Upon a Time in the West). Penda’s Fen was a real standout. I watched this as part of Severin Films’ incredible box set of folk horror because it’s got some great extras, but you can just check it out for free on YouTube right now (and you should). Apparently my most-watched actor in 2022 was Scott Adkins, the best stunt-actor working today. But my most-watched director is George Pollock, a man mostly known for directing cozy Agatha Christie adaptations.
The trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was released last week, and of course I went through it frame-by-frame. And since I was already going through each frame, what about putting together a collage of frames from each shot? So that’s what this is – one frame from each shot in the trailer.
Click through for a larger version (19400(!)x6576, 6.5MB).
Amazon Kindle owners can now set the lockscreen image to the cover of the book they’re reading. The long overdue Display Cover feature, first spotted by Engadget, was previously only available after jailbreaking your device (and a popular motivator to do so). Amazon says that it works with “most books, magazines, comics, and Manga.”
I’m not sure what the hold-up was – some kind of competitor’s patent or just laziness or whatever – but as someone who has been waiting for this feature for over 10 years now, I’d just like to say: fuckin FINALLY.
I’ve been reading a lot more books over the last couple of months. Physical books, I mean. I think this is partly A) coming out of baby/pandemic brain-fog and B) I’d forgotten how lovely it is to hold a physical book. Every time you see your book, every time you open it, every time you turn a page with it, you increase your connection to it. A well-beaten book is a well-loved book that’s been with you for a while.
Opening the Kindle and seeing a generic screen saver gives you absolutely nothing. It’s not cementing my relationship to the form or the content. This isn’t helped by the fact that the Kindle turns on immediately drops you where you left off with no indication of whether you’re near the end of the book or just getting started. Like getting dropped in an unfamiliar place with no map. You just have to keep going forward and eventually you’ll reach somewhere. It’s a handy feature, for sure, but my dumb lizard-brain gets something from the physicality of being able to feel where I am in a book. The Kindle’s attempt to address this – putting the % completed in the corner just fills me with anxiety. Kind of like the inverse of watching a phone battery percentage trickling down, why amn’t I making progress in this goddamn book?!
Spotify completely changed my connection to music (I could probably tell you the name of every song on every album I’ve physically owned - these days I couldn’t even describe the cover of albums I love that I’ve only listened to on Spotify), the Kindle changed my connection to the books I read. It’s not unusual for me to finish a book and not be able to tell you the name of the author. Hopefully for the sake of my already-overflowing bookshelves, this will draw me back to the Kindle as a device for reading again and my physical to-read pile (here’s a photo from last month - yikes) won’t grow any more.
In December, the hardest working man on YouTube, KillianM2 uploaded a copy of the Late Late Toy Show from 1985. The entire thing1. For a little context, I’m a 41 year old man with two children and a mortgage. The toys and gadgets I currently have in my house are so fantastically beyond anything 1985 could even imagine that they even go beyond science fiction for them. In my phone, I have something with more computing power than basically all the computers in 1985, and with it I can access any information I want, read any book I want, watch any film I want, listen to any music I want.
Even still, as I was watching this flashback where Gay Byrne in his slightly snarky, slightly soused manner demonstrated the year’s popular toys to the mammies and daddies of Ireland in 1985, I found myself with this deep, deep pain and sadness bubbling up inside me. Because I would love to have – I dunno take your pick of all the crappy toys – some shitty remote control Nissan outlander. I would give up my iPhone to have one. In a fucking heartbeat, I would.
As they say, nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
Of course it’s not about the actual toys on the show. I don’t actually want a remote control Nissan Outlander. Looking at the toys with grown-up eyes, the logical part of my brain can see that they’re all cheap Chinese garbage and the ones that aren’t changing hands for obscene amounts of money on eBay are all piled up in a landfill now. It’s everything around the toys that got to me. It’s the design of the toys, the boxy shape of the cars, the vibe of the thing, the hairstyles, the clothes (the audience are dressed like normal people, not an ironically awful Christmas jumper to be seen). These are the thing that remind me of home. They remind me of my childhood. Of that special feeling of safety I was fortunate enough to experience as a child. Of feeling looked after. Too right that’s a powerful thing. At one point, the show covered some toys I actually owned back then and I swear to god right then I could smell the room in my house where I used to play with those toys, I could feel the carpet.
Create a weapon that can trigger that sensation and you’ll end all wars forever.
But I don’t think nostalgia is necessarily a bad thing. Especially now, what with one thing and another. It’s easy to dismiss nostalgia as something to be avoided, like some pithy aphorism embroidered on a tea towel: “you never move forward when you’re living in the past”. But at the same time, this kind of nostalgia can be a reliable way of recreating a feeling of safety. It’s a way of self-soothing.
As I said, I’m a 41 year old man with two kids and a mortgage and, to top it all off, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. This is my reality and I can’t escape it. Wait, no. This is our reality and we can’t escape it. I’ve found myself struggling to engage with things. I’m sure you’re the same. I start a new book and I can’t focus on the words because my brain goes elsewhere. I start watching a film and I end up checking the latest infection figures. And so I’ve found myself going back to familiar things – rewatching Parks and Recreation, for example – because they make me feel safe and looked after.
And this, in turn, lets me try to make my kids feel safe and looked after so that when they’re in their 40s and they watch a video of the Late Late Toy Show from 2020 (assuming it even happens, of course), they won’t have any memory of feeling fear or anxiety about the state of the world., they’ll just have the same warm, comforting feelings I’m talking about here.
So whatever it takes for you to get through this, whatever media you need to consume to make you feel all right, don’t feel ashamed, just do it.
Stay safe.
Since then, he’s taken it down, I’m guessing for Copyright reasons? ↩︎
I realise we’re more than a third of the way through 2020 already but what with one thing and another, now seems like an ideal time to sit in and bang outa couple hundred words on something that no-one cares about. As with previous years, normal caveats apply: I have two small children and limited free time (which is why this post is being written in April), so I missed a lot of big-budget games that, had I played them probably would have appeared on here. 1
What the Golf?
I thought this was going to be just a good golf game. Now, let me make it clear that there’s nothing wrong with being just a good golf game. Last year’s Golf Story was a good golf game and ended up being one of my favourite games of the year. But What the Golf is so much more than just a golf game. The first level is straightforward, you pull down and release to knock a ball to the flag. The second level, you pull down and release and the golf club flies forward, and you have to make the club hit the flag. And the game continues in this manner, getting more and more wild and creative and wildly creative on each level. At one point, about halfway through, it starts making golf versions of other popular games, so you’ll get Super Meatboy with golf. Or Portal with golf. This was the most fun I’ve had with a game all year. (It’s also the most frustrated I got with a game, but that’s another post).
The Outer Wilds
I guess this is best described as a science fiction archaeology game? You launch your spaceship, visit different planets, and I guess that could describe the entire game, if you wanted it? I mean, there’s nothing driving you forward in the game except your own curiosity. But it rewards that curiosity better than any other game I can think of. And I loved it so much because of that. More games like this, please.
Heaven’s Vault
Typical. You wait your whole life for a science fiction archaeology game and two come along at once. This one is done by the people who made 80 Days, so as you’d expect, it has much more straightforward narrative than Outer Wilds (i.e. it acts and feels like a choose-your-own-adventure game). But the puzzles in this one are so cleverly constructed. You start uncovering alien artefacts and, through them, you start learning an entirely new language, creating meaning via logic and context, just like learning a real language. When the pieces started falling into place, I felt like a genius. Again, more games like this, please?
Death Stranding
I found the last few Metal Gear Solid games a little too much for me to handle, but I really liked Death Stranding so I want to say that Death Stranding is like a Hideo Kojima game with most of the Kojima-ness washed off. But even that’s not entirely true because this is an incredibly Kojima game. I think it’s because it’s got all his heart and his creativity but none of the dark cynicism? Despite the bleak setting, Death Stranding is a game about hope and I can’t think of anything we need more in 2019.
Tetris Effect
Technically this came out in 2018 but I played it for the first time in VR in 2019 and I’m usually pretty strict about such things but honestly, this was the closest I came to having a religious experience all year.
Legend of Zelda: Cadence of Hyrule
I hadn’t played the original Crypt of the NecroDancer so the mechanic of this took me a while to get used to. Basically, it’s a rhythm-based Zelda game, where you need to move and fight on the beat. But once you settle into it, it works really well as a Zelda game and the art style is gorgeous. I just wish there was more of it.
Dragon Quest Builders 2
I’m probably in the minority here, but I’m not a fan of Minecraft’s story mode. It feels unnaturally bolted on to what is, essentially, just a Lego sandbox. Dragon Quest Builders 2 has the opposite problem: it has a wonderful story mode (I hadn’t played DQB1 or many of the DQ games before 8 so I’m not big into the lore and I still enjoyed it), to the point where every time it presented me with its creative mode, I wasn’t that interested. “Hey did you know you can build up a town for these people with all sorts of different buildings like bedrooms and saloons and showers and toilets?” “IDGAF give me the next bit of story”. I haven’t been pulled through a game like this in a while.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
The best Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic? I loved how it didn’t shy away from its Star Wars-ness and didn’t just wear it like a coat of paint over a generic sci-fi game. I’m not sure the Dark Souls influence really works in this game: the controls aren’t as good or reliable as they need to be to hang with the Souls games, but that’s a minor complaint for what is an otherwise great game.
Luigi’s Mansion
This was a lovely little palate cleanser of a game. It’s so light and delicious and every time I felt myself losing interest because it’s too light, the game would do something delightful and draw me back in again.
Ori and the Blind Forest
Again maybe another cheat because this is an old game, but it only came out on Switch in 2019 and that’s the first time I played it. And I feel weird about putting it on here because technically I hate-played it. Remember I mentioned above about how Fallen Order’s controls weren’t as precise as they needed to be? Ori’s controls are exactly as precise as they need to be. It’s a beautiful game from that point of view. And after a few hours, when you’ve unlocked most of your abilities and can chain together some beautiful moves, it’s a wonderful flow game. That is then completely ruined by some of the worst set-pieces I’ve ever seen that rely almost entirely on failure and memorisation. I loved this game. I hated this game.
Just wanted to mention that I did, however, finish Diablo 3 because the switch is the perfect platform for this game because it meant I could chip away at this game in five-minute doses. ↩︎
Social media continues to strengthen direct relationships between readers and writers. The internet has made discovery easier for quality, niche publications. (Though that is probably the biggest hurdle.) Email remains an amazing delivery and distribution method for timely written content.
And readers love newsletters. Websites are getting harder and harder to read. Paywalls forget who you are on a seemingly weekly basis. Websites put interstitial popovers directly over the content you’re trying to read. Videos are set to autoplay. How many times are you supposed to tell the same goddamn website whether you’ll accept their fucking cookies? It’s like they’re purposefully making it hard to read. Newsletters have none of that. They’re just easy and fun to read. The web can and should be that way too, but all too often it’s not.
It’s a fair point - websites are, for the most part, terrible content delivery mechanisms. Which makes me think that maybe RMS, as shitty as he could be, might have hit on something when he talked about the way he consumes the internet
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won’t fetch from other sites in such a situation).
Incidentally, I’ve recently moved my RSS from Inoreader to Feedbin and one of the features that drew me away was the newsletter-to-rss gateway - you get a unique email address with which you can sign up for newsletters and they automatically get created as RSS feeds for you. Which means you can read the content in RSS2. So I’ve spent my day unsubscribing with my email address and re-subscribing with my Feedbin address and my email inbox feels so much lighter and fresher and how an email inbox should feel3.
I have a strict policy regarding notifications on my phone - no notifications unless they came from a human being directly to me. I don’t see why my email should have a different policy. ↩︎
tl;dr this site now has a /now page where you can keep track of what I’m up to right now.
Back in the old days – I mean the old old days – there was this wonderful command called finger where you could look up information about users on a UNIX system1. It would tell you some personal information about the user, like their name and their phone number. But my favourite part about this command was that it would also return the contents of the user’s plan file.
.plan was supposed to be to tell people what you were working on that day, but people eventually turned started using it for other forms of expression. I guess it was an early form of microblogging2.
Looking at the blogs I still read in 2019, there’s a lot of “here are a list of curated links to cool things on the internet” and there’s a lot of “here is an article I have written so I can include it as a “publication” on my linkedin profile”. But there’s not much in terms of personal writing. I never get a real sense of what the person writing the blog is doing, what they’re working on, what they’re reading, what’s bothering them (And before you say “isn’t that what Twitter is for?” I’d ask have you actually seen Twitter these days?) (And don’t get me started on Facebook).
Besides answering the common question, “What are you up to these days?”, those who have a now page say it’s a good reminder of their priorities. By publicly showing what you are focused on now, it helps you say no to other requests.
So if you want to see what I’m up to now, you can just go to /now.
I realise the command wasn’t limited to just UNIX systems, but let’s just keep it simple, shall we? ↩︎
For a great example of someone using the .plan file and watching its use morph over time, check out the John Carmack .plan Archive↩︎
It’s probably obvious but still worth mentioning that this entire list is based on an extremely incomplete sampling. I had very little free time in 2018, so I had to be ruthless with the games I played. For example, I slowly made my way through 2017’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins somewhere around the middle of the year. And I loved it so much. It probably would have been in my list of favourite games of 2017. But am I in a hurry to drop another 60 hours on Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey now? Am I fuck.
Anyway, here we go.
Minit
My son – my second child – was born in March, which meant that my free time in 2018 was more precious than ever before. Thank fuck, then, for a game like Minit, which respects the player’s time. I was able to dip in and play this in tiny drops.
Florence
It’s pretty rare to see a video game even try to tackle the subject of interpersonal relationships, and it’s even rarer to see one incorporate the subject into the mechanics of the game.
Captain Toad Treasure Tracker
Is this a bit of a cheat because it’s a remaster of an old game? I don’t care. I played through this all over again on the Switch and I loved it all over again.
Red Dead Redemption 2
This is everything I wanted from a sequel to one of my favourite games of all time: a giant cowboy sandbox, with sliiiightly wonky controls that make everything just that little bit more interesting.
Marvel’s Spider-Man
For a while there towards the end of the year, this game was very much my happy place. It still is. When I want to relax and shut out the world for a while, I’ll fire up Spider-Man and just swing around the city. Maybe not coincidentally, this is the first game on the PS4 that I’ve platinumed.
Gorogoa
I still don’t understand how a human mind could have created something like this.
Return of the Obra Dinn
When I was 12 or 13, I got a Panasonic 3DO for Christmas along with a copy of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel. And while the 3DO isn’t the best console in the world and this Sherlock Holmes game is definitely not the best game in the world, they both have a really special place in my heart. When I think back to my time spent playing that game and the way it had my dumb little 12-year old brain cracking its mysteries, I’m reminded of all the things around the game. Like I remember that Christmas being the last one where everyone I knew and loved was happy. Like, genuinely, sincerely happy. And so it’s a very warm game for me.
It’s a strange comparison, I know, but Return of the Obra Dinn gave me those same feelings and the whole time I was playing it, I was brought right back to that Christmas, on that couch in my Ma’s front room. Which is pretty spectacular when you consider it’s basically just a giant logic puzzle
Tetris Effect
Every year, it feels like there’s one game that stands out for me because of the way it helps me tackle whatever anxiety or depression or other emotional issues I might be going through at the time. This year, it’s Tetris Effect. A real joy of a game that will be unfairly overlooked because it’s “just Tetris”.
Subnautica
With games like Minecraft, the most entertaining and the most magical part of the game is the first few minutes, when you’re first getting set up and exploring and struggling to survive. Subnautica somehow managed to sustain this feeling for hours.
(I try to post reviews of all the films I watch over on letterboxd. Here are the most recent reviews I’ve written)
A Quiet Place - 2018 - ★★★★
Since my daughter was born, certain films hit me way harder than they otherwise should. Anything involving a child in peril is danger territory for me. Throw in a father trying to protect the child-in-peril and I’m completely screwed. I’ll be a wreck. For example, War for the Planet of the Apes had me absolutely sobbing in the cinema.
A Quiet Place is exactly the kind of film that hits me harder than it probably should, what with John Krasinski’s kind-faced father bringing the pathos like a doe-eyed hammer. Throw in a nihilistic pre-credits sequence to establish the stakes and, yeah, I hadn’t a fuckin hope.
Some late-game rule-changing to score a cheap emotional hit kinda ruins it a little, but it’s still a tight, tight film.
Super Troopers 2 - 2018 - ★★½
The only thing really missing from this film was a Rodney Dangerfield cameo where he comes out and tells the cops and the mounties to lighten up before turning on really cheesy hair rock music and starting an impromptu dance party.
As light and nutritionally void as the first film, but slightly shorter on charm.
Pitbull. New Order - 2016 - ★½
My continuing education in the less-“worthy” Polish film canon continues with this, a sub-Love/Hate gangster film set in Warsaw. The writer-director, Patryk Vega, is described as the Polish Guy Ritchie. And from what I’ve seen of his films so far, maybe people mean Revolver-era Guy Ritchie? I dunno.
The film itself is a regressive, homophobic and insecure piece of filmmaking. The main character, “Miami”, is a quote-unquote “tough” quote-unquote “sexy” quote-unquote “cop”. No woman can look at him without wanting to fuck him. No man can look at him without wanting to fuck him. “That was the best sex I’ve ever had” says one of his lays. “Coffee?” a detective offers him. “I bet you take it black.” Yes, he’s a hard-fuckin, hard-drinkin cop. Oh, and when the suits in internal affairs take away his badge, he tells them to give it back or he’ll kick the shit out of them. And they do.
It’s that kind of film. The kind we haven’t really seen since Joel Silver cut down on his cocaine intake.
I’ve read a lot of reviews saying that based on this film, it won’t be long before Hollywood comes knocking at Patryk Vega’s door. And I don’t doubt that’s true, but only because they just need any new blood. But the real person who should be tapped for better things is the cinematographer. This film is total garbage, but at least it’s handsome garbage.
Supersonic - 2016 - ★★★½
I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of Oasis. Their music does nothing for me and their personalities are so ugh (although I love reading interviews with Noel Gallagher). So why am I giving three-and-a-half stars to an Oasis documentary? Well, because it’s not a documentary about Oasis. I mean, not really. It’s really a documentary about a period in time. It’s a documentary about success. It’s a documentary about regret.
The music is just helpful context.
Blockers - 2018 - ★½
Why does everyone keep saying what a great comedian John Cena is? Or even Leslie Mann, for that matter? All these huge comedy stars playing the parents and they got DEMOLISHED by the kids in this film. Very weak.
Sneakers - 1992 - ★★★★★
I fucking LOVE this film. It’s my ultimate comfort film.
BUT.
There’s a bit, a plot point, where Mary McDonnell was pretending to be hooked up with Stephen Tobolowsky on a computer date to get his office access card and his voice print and stuff and she gets stung. Except they make it look like she’s not stung. And then, being a pro grifter, she goes “This is the last computer date I go on” and Ben Kingsley mafia-hacker goes “A computer would never match her with him, I SMELL A RAT”.
BRUH IT’S 2018 AND NETFLIX STILL KEEPS RECOMMENDING I WATCH THE BIG BANG THEORY I THINK YOUR SHITTY 1993 COBOL DATING PROGRAM IS PROBABLY NOT AS FUCKIN SOPHISTICATED AS YOU THINK IT IS.
Gotowi na wszystko. Exterminator 2018 - ★★½
My first legit Polish-language film I’m watching for language homework rather than because of “merit” or whatever and it’s about a middle-aged man-child who spends too much on old videogames and gets berated by his partner. Oops!
The film started to lose me in the middle when they suddenly turned the “plot” dial up a thousand notches. But it really lost me when a guy tried to convince his girlfriend to leave the mental hospital she was checked into. “But I need my meds! If I don’t have them, I don’t know what will happen!” “It’s okay because we’ll be together”.
I knew very little about Poland before moving here. Almost nothing about Warsaw. “I hear they have good pacts”, I used to dad-joke1.
Since then, we’ve been trying to get better. We recently went to the National Museum in Warsaw, where they have a new “Gallery of Polish Design” exhibit which is aimed squarely at dipshits like me who have a weird thing for mid-century design and electronics housed in discolouring plastic. Here’s a video of what you can expect in the exhibit:
Although not exactly vintage, they also had a vintage-inspired “paper town” toy that reminded me so much of Nintendo’s Labo. It’s basically a box filled with sheets of cardboard that you punch out and bend and fold into various parts of a “town”.
As we were leaving, I noticed they were selling a couple of these in the gift shop. So, of course, I bought them.
Here’s the finished product from a different set that we made earlier, so you can see what they look like finally constructed:
My daughter (who’s two and a half), was too young to “get” the Labo2 but she absolutely loves these. She loved punching out the little buildings and vehicles and handing them to me to construct. The first night, she took the restaurant (the two-tiered building in the back-left of that bottom picture) to bed with her. My wife even said that if she was in need of a present for a similarly-aged toddler, she would get them one of these packs. They’re cheap, extremely cute, very tactile and recyclable.
If you can’t make it to the National Museum in Warsaw to buy them, you can also order them from ringoringo.pl.
One of the good things about being a dad is that you can dad-joke unironically. ↩︎
Too much waiting around for not enough payoff at the end for her ↩︎
You may have noticed some changes on this blog (or maybe you didn’t - there’s too much going on in the world for you to be concerned with my bullshit website).
The short version is that I’d been thinking a lot about what I wanted this blog to be. It’s probably the primary face of my internet presence, and I wasn’t really pleased with how it was representing me. Part of the problem, I realised, is that I was using a static website generator to power the website.
Don’t get me wrong, static site generators are wonderful pieces of software. You didn’t have to worry about backups or databases or where your content lives or extracting it from some SQL file later on. But they also mean that writing a blog post is a non-trivial task. To write a post, I had to create a file on my hard drive, open that in my editor, write the blog post, generate the site, preview it locally, then upload it to this server. I was using a fucking Makefile to streamline this process. Makefiles tickle my nerdy side deeply, but the process was so cumbersome it meant that I’d only write a blog post about something that really mattered, instead of just firing off a few posts every day. And I’m many things, but I’m not a ‘once in a while, here are my thoughts on a capital-I Important capital-T Topic’ kind of guy. I don’t work well like that and I didn’t feel like it best represented me.
(An anecdotal aside: during my migration back to Wordpress, I came across a prominent Wordpress developer who had actually left the project, citing fundamental problems with PHP as a language and the Wordpress codebase in general. He also moved to a static site generator and, just like me, his output fell off a cliff after the move. You could argue that this is probably a reflection on the general state of blogging in 2018, but like I said, this is just an anecdotal aside.)
So that was the short version of what’s been happening behind the scenes. Now let’s see what happens next.
Apologies for the interruption to my (ir)regularly scheduled posts about random bullshit no-one actually cares about, but I thought this was worth bringing up. Even though I have no idea how many people are actually reading this, this is my platform for my thoughts and this is something I feel strongly about. So here we go.
The 8th amendment of the Irish constitution recognises the equal right to life of the mother and an unborn child. This has always been a controversial amendment and people have argued that such wording has no place in the constitution. So, tomorrow, May 25th, Ireland is holding a referendum to repeal the 8th amendment.
I want to encourage any Irish people reading this website to vote yes to repeal the 8th amendment on May 25th.
We all have our reasons for voting yes or no. We all have our stories. Let me tell you a little bit of my story.
We spent a long time trying to conceive. It took forever. Long enough that we experienced that pain when our friends got pregnant. Why could they get pregnant so easily, without appearing to even try? Each month, we’d realise we once again weren’t successful and we’d be desolate, completely unable to comfort each other. If you haven’t gone through this, you don’t know the pain involved. When I look back on it, I remember it as being one of the hardest points in my life.
But eventually we did it. My wife got pregnant.
The pregnancy was fun, but the labour wasn’t. My daughter was posterior, which basically means that instead of being face-down, the baby was face-up, so the baby’s head and spine was pushing against my wife’s spine so that every push was intensely painful. Also, with every push, the baby’s heart rate would drop precipitously. Eventually, it was decided to bring my wife in for an emergency c-section, where they discovered the chord was wrapped around the baby’s neck (just before I heard my daughter cry for the first time, I heard a surgeon say “look at this messer!”)1.
Obviously, this whole experience was extremely traumatic, both emotionally and physically. And that was just the beginning. Then there’s the issue of being a brand new mother, trying to breastfeed having had major surgery on your abdominal core. I can’t begin to explain the pride and admiration I have for my wife and how she handled the whole thing.
And this is when I realised that this only made me more pro-choice. Having seen first-hand the reality of pregnancy and labour and the reality of raising a child and the lasting (permanent?) scars, both literal and metaphorical, involved in the whole process, I firmly believe there is no way a woman should be forced to go through all this if they couldn’t manage it. And this is to say nothing of extreme cases involving, say, assault or a fatal foetal abnormality. Forcing a woman to go through all that would be barbaric.
Jump forward a couple of years and we’ve been extremely lucky and managed to conceive our second child without really trying very hard at all.
But halfway through the pregnancy, we found out there were complications. Well, no, wait, that’s not quite accurate. There were possible complications. And not insignificant ones, possibly. Which meant a lot of sleepless nights, worrying about how our child would be affected by all this. And there were a lot of tests. So many tests. During one particular test just after Christmas, a doctor (an Irish doctor) asked us “have you considered termination?”
We hadn’t, and we wouldn’t, because we knew the risks, and we knew how strong we were and we knew that we could manage it, no matter how bad it turned out to be2 and I wouldn’t judge anyone for making a different choice in the same circumstances.
And that’s kind of the point of all this: the choice already exists. When the doctor asked us if we’d considered termination, he meant “have you considered (traveling to England for) termination?” The 8th amendment doesn’t stop Irish women from having abortions, it just stops them from having abortions in Ireland3, where they can be surrounded by their loved ones when they really need it.
It’s a horrible, uncaring section of our constitution and should be taken out. And that’s what this referendum is about. Recognising that something is wrong with the current situation and trying to do something about it.
Please, vote yes.
My daughter came out perfectly fine. As I write this, she’s a strong and sturdy two and a half years old. And she’s bilingual, did I mention that? She speaks English and Polish. Smartest kid I know. ↩︎
It’s fine, by the way. My ten-week old son is healthy and thriving although he will need to be continuously monitored until he’s about a year old. ↩︎
The 14th amendment added some extra provisions to the language introduced by the 8th amendment, saying “This subsection shall not limit freedom to travel between the State and another state”. ↩︎
A couple of weeks ago, Max Krieger wrote a really interesting twitter thread about the design of San Francisco’s Metreon building. It got a lot of traffic and was retweeted into my timeline a few times. I always find it interesting when multiple people point to a specific Twitter thread because Twitter’s awful design makes threaded discussions a nightmare to read. Like reading a novel by turning pages with a pliers - sure, you can do it, but it’s an awful experience.
I didn’t think much more of it until a few days later, when John Gruber also linked to the thread and, more importantly, linked to some of Max Krieger’s older twitter threads through threadreaderapp.com.
And, dear readers, this has changed everything for me.
Laid out in this more thoughtful way – flat and with no separations between tweets, with actually readable typography and with no cropping of images forcing you to break flow to see the full context – you can see how the twitter thread is a wonderful art form in itself. When it’s done right, of course (for example, you’ll see Krieger isn’t numbering his tweets).
Unlike blog posts like this one, tweets are conversational by design. You get a much better sense that of the author’s actual voice because they’re speaking to you rather than speaking at you. Combine this with a long-form discussion of a topic that the author is really genuinely passionate about and you’ve got something I could sit and read for days.
I recently read Cory O’Brien’s Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes, which is a jokey, lighthearted summary of the major world myths. But what makes it interesting is the way it’s written. This is not a dry, didactic lecture. The entire book written like an IM conversation with a friend or – to bring this back on-topic – like a well-done Twitter thread. Here’s an example of what it looks like:
And as I predicted, I devoured this book. Loved it. Not just because it was easy to read (which definitely helps when you’ve got a weeks-old baby), but because it felt like I was casually talking to someone I knew about something they were super knowledgeable and passionate about.
I’m not saying I want all books to be written in this way (but wow, can you imagine how great it would be if, say, Ulysses was written like this?), but instead I’d like for anyone thinking of starting a Twitter thread to keep these things in mind: keep your voice and remember that Twitter dot com is not designed for long-form threaded monologues, so imagine your words being presented with a designer’s eye.
You probably didn’t notice, but I deliberately avoided talking about The Last Jedi last year. And not because I didn’t have things to say about it (I do), but because there was too much noise around it and people seemed to be taking it all extremely personally, to the point where telling people you thought the film was fine was functionally equivalent to saying “it was the worst film in the world and you are a bad person for liking it”.
Now we’ve all calmed down a bit, let’s talk about The Last Jedi for a moment, shall we? I watched it again in Ireland over Christmas and stood by my assessment of “fine”. It’s got a great start and a great ending, but in between – the entire middle stretch of the film, basically from Finn waking up until the scene in the throne room1 – is extremely poor. It’s boring, it doesn’t do anything to advance the plot. In fact, at points, you can even detect a whiff of the prequels, which is not a favourable comparison.
I saw The Last Jedi twice and twice I came out feeling disappointed. Not because I’d seen a bad film (it was fine, remember?) but because I’d come out of a Star Wars film and wasn’t feeling giddy and excited. It didn’t give me that feeling of having seen something really great. The last time I remember walking out of a film feeling that sense of deflation was probably Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull2 - another film with all the basic ingredients of a thing I love with my whole heart but which just didn’t have that ineffable quality that worked for me.
The teaser trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story was released last week and I guess I should lower my expectations for what a “Star Wars” film means to me. I mean, I’m not saying it’s all bad. There are some amazing images in there – a Star Destroyer coming through a storm cloud, Han under the Millennium Falcon in a smokey haze – and you know what? All those reports about the studio hiring an acting coach for Alden Ehrenreich don’t worry me because that one little nod during the “It’s fine” moment in the trailer is such a perfect touch of Han Solo that I’m convinced the “acting coach” was probably more likely an “acting like Harrison Ford coach”.
But almost everything else about this trailer suggests a film that I could easily, happily skip and miss nothing. The whole “kicked out of flight academy” shit makes me think that there’s a solid chance the entire film might be an attempt to replicate the “Greedo shoots first” scene for providing unnecessary, shitty character motivation and, in doing so, make the character less cool.
There’s probably a deeper comparison to be made between The Last Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but that’s probably for another post. ↩︎
As is customary with these posts (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016), it’s worth mentioning that this is based on an incomplete sampling. There were so many games released in 2017 that I never even touched. For example, Horizon: Zero Dawn launched the same week as Zelda and there was no fuckin’ way I could handle two of basically the same game without putting a bit of distance between them1. With all that in mind, these are the best games I played in 2017.
Golf Story
To be perfectly honest, I spent a good portion of 2017 in a fairly shitty place. Not exactly a dark place, but it got pretty gloomy at times. Golf Story was exactly what I needed. A golf RPG that doesn’t care too much about either the golf or the RPG parts of its own game, it just wants to be entertaining. At one point in the game, the action pauses so that two groups can throw down in a rap battle. This game does everything it can to be fun and entertaining and that’s no bad thing. Also, let me tell you a little story: around 75% of the way through the game, I made a series of bad decisions and silly mistakes and ended up accidentally deleting my save game. I immediately started up a new game, no question or hesitation.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins
I thought I was done with Assassin’s Creed games, but I guess not. Pretty early on in my game, I saw the pyramids off in the distance and decided that’s where I was going to go. I traveled across the desert, ignored all of the rest of the world and the game just to get to them. You know that bit in Lawrence of Arabia where Omar Sharif’s character makes his entrance? That’s what it felt like - like I was seeing that scene from Omar Sharif’s point of view. Because of this and thousands of other moments like it, Assassin’s Creed:Origins was more special than I ever expected or that it had any right to be.
What Remains of Edith Finch
There are some parts of Edith Finch that work better than others. The part with the scream-queen daughter was cute and I see what they were going for, but it felt a little too dorky for me. Having said that, when this game hits, it hits hard. Narrative and mechanical inventiveness are important qualities when making up lists like this, but more importantly, it’s the little moments that connect, that hit you in places you didn’t expect, in ways you didn’t expect. In Edith Finch, it was the bathtub section. Before it even started, I knew exactly what was going to happen and they handled it so perfectly that I was a mess of emotions after.
Stories Untold
Why aren’t there more games like this? Collections of short, idiosyncratic games based not around a theme as much as based around a feel. I started playing this thinking I’d give it a few minutes and ended up staying up waaaay too late just to see what it was going to throw at me next.
Everything
Like What Remains of Edith Finch, I think I was just in the right place — psychologically, emotionally, spiritually — to appreciate Everything, a game that tries to show the interconnectedness of, well, everything. Like if Alan Watts made a video game. If this sounds twee to you, I can totally understand giving it a wide berth. For me, it was the most ambitious game I played in 2017. And the one I needed most.
Gnog
Gnog is such a beautiful, hypersaturated, delightful toybox of a game that I played through it in one sitting, and had a great time. And then I immediately played through it again in VR and had another great time.
I’d love to be all high-minded and talk about how this is a distillation of everything Nintendo has learned over the last 30-odd years of making Mario games. About how it’s the pinnacle of platform games. About how it reinvigorates Mario as a franchise in a way we haven’t seen since Mario 64.
But really, it was just Mario’s dance in New Donk City that did it for me. The moment I saw that, I knew I was in love with this game.
Doki Doki Literature Club
While I was playing this game, I was terrified someone would come into this room and see what I was playing. I was terrified they’d think I’d spent too much time on Tumblr and developed some new kink for anime waifus with ridiculous tits. But once I’d finished the game, I immediately wanted everyone else to play it too, ridiculous tits and all. It’s shockingly clever and cleverly shocking, pushing its engine (RenPy) to its limits and breaking the fourth wall like I’ve never seen it broken before. And it’s completely free, so give it a go.
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
If I even have to explain to you why this is on my list, then I guess we don’t know each other at all, do we? (Also, remember, Zelda is the name of the boy).
I’m playing it now though, and I can say that, three hours in, it probably wouldn’t have made this list for 2017 ↩︎
Here’s David Foster Wallace being interviewed on German TV in 2003
This sentence stood out for me:
It’s true that in the US, every year the culture gets more and more hostile — and I don’t mean hostile like angry — it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read or to look at a piece of art for an hour or to listen to a piece of music that’s complicated and that takes work
Remember that DFW died shortly after the first iPhone debuted, before the birth of Twitter and Instagram and all that.
I have basically given up on going to the cinema at anything approaching what could generously be called a reasonable hour. Now I like to go to the cinema as early as possible — most recently, I went to see It at 12pm on a Sunday — not just because I’m a grumpy misanthrope, and not because I’m the father of a two year old and am exhausted in the evenings. I go at these stupid times because I don’t want to be surrounded by crowds when I see a film. Because, on the whole, multiplex cinema crowds are incapable of sitting through a two-hour film without checking their phones multiple times.
I wanted to make a list of my favourite podcasts, but I realised that’s probably too much of a movable feast. So let’s just say these are my favourite podcasts right now.
And you know what? Fuck it, I’m opening the comments on this in case anyone has any recommendations for things I should be listening to.
Reply All Podcasts about technology and the internet are a dime a dozen, but what makes Reply All special is that it seems to come from a place of genuine curiosity. They want to cover every corner of a story. Their most recent season-ender was a great example of this: one of the hosts received one of those Indian hoax “we are a Microsoft support partner and your computer has a virus” calls, and rather than just belittling the caller, they went to India to meet them and find out more about their business. This show jumps to the top of my to-play list every time it comes out. Good place to start: The Cathedral. An episode about the background of the game That Dragon Cancer. It was first broadcast just days before my daughter was born and, not kidding, it almost broke me.
99% Invisible 99% Invisible is mostly about design and architecture, but you don’t have to be a design or architecture nerd to enjoy the podcast. Every single episode teaches me something cool I didn’t know about the world and gives me a dozen or so Wikipedia holes to fall down. Good place to start: Ten Thousand Years, where they explore the various suggestions people have given for designing a warning sign that will last ten thousand years, not knowing if language or symbols as we understand them will be around.
S-Town This was NPR’s semi-followup to Serial, released shortly after they realised that, actually, no-one really cared about the second season of that show. It’s about a rural town – Shittown – in Alabama and it has the most amazing, almost unbelievably eccentric cast of characters you’ll ever hear. Yes, it’s slightly problematic (and gets even more so towards the end), but it’s still a great piece of long-form radio storytelling. Good place to start: The first episode, obviously.
Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review There are a lot of film podcasts I could recommend (Filmspotting is good, I guess? The Slashfilmcast is okay?) but none of them have the unique blend of film reviews and hearing two men argue and banter like a couple who have been married for forty years. This is genuine comfort-listening. Good place to start: Mark’s Sex and the City 2 review, in full flappy-handed glory.
Dan Carlin’s Common Sense/Hardcore History I’m bunching these together because they’re both pretty essential. Dan Carlin is a really smart ex-newsman with a love of history. And this is what he channels into his Hardcore History shows - meticulously researched multi-hour, multi-part episodes dealing with historical periods or events. They’re as good as any audiobook and history text as you can find. His Common Sense show is about (American) politics, but again coming from a meticulously researched, erudite and insightful starting point. Good place to start: Blueprint for Armageddon Pt 1. Part 1 of a six-part, twenty-five hour series of podcasts about the first world war. Move fast, because after a while, he pulls the episodes off the RSS feed and charges people for them (if you want to drop a few dollars, his series on Genghis Khan is amazing)
Til Death Do Us Blart The podcast’s own description: “Once a year, every year at American Thanksgiving the five men will watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 and record their thoughts, feelings and opinions. These personal expressions will be broadcast as a free, annual podcast. Should a member of the quintet pass away, protocol dictates that his baton must be passed to another, thus fulfilling the promise of five people watching and podcasting Paul Blart 2 from now till the end of linear time.” If this concept doesn’t immediately sound amazing to you then, yeah, maybe skip this one. Good place to start: They started in 2015, so listen to that episode first, so you can really pick up and appreciate the subtle ways their spirits start to break in 2016.
Radiolab Presents: More Perfect Maybe it’s just me, but the most recent Radiolab episodes have been a little duff (“I prefer their earlier stuff” says the hipster dickhead). But that’s okay, because their recent limited-run series about the U.S. Supreme Court was fascinating. Now I’ll admit, this isn’t a subject I thought I’d ever give a shit about, but they brought along their great Radiolab storytelling ability and I binged the entire thing in a couple of days. Good place to start: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. This is the story that inspired Radiolab to create More Perfect. And it’s one of the most heartbreaking podcast episodes I’ve heard.
The Daily This is the New York Times daily news podcast. It’s a short podcast – about 15 minutes each – and it their format is usually to cover a single story in more depth than other news podcasts (e.g. NPR’s Up First, which is also pretty great). For example, while everyone was going on about how there’s some bad shit going down in Burma, The Daily actually went into a decent amount of detail, giving the entire background, laying out who the major players are etc. Good place to start: It’s a daily news show - grab whatever is most recent?
Junk food cinema I get it. There’s no shortage of podcasts where a group of friends sit around and watch films and talk about them later. It could be its own category in iTunes. But where most of these (e.g. The Flophouse) come from a place of detached irony, the guys behind Junkfood Cinema genuinely love the films they talk about. They recently did a “Summer of 87” season, covering films from, yep, the summer of 1987, and their enthusiasm for every single film was so strong, it made me want to watch the films too. Good place to start: Pump Up the Volume is a perfect example of this happening. My wife and I listened to this episode on a drive home from her mother’s house and immediately settled in to watch the film when we got home.
One of the things I miss most about living in Rome (apart from the awesome friends we had to leave behind) is not having steady access to decent cacio e pepe. I’ve writtenbefore about my love for this dish, how it completely changed the way I think about food. And it’s the first thing I order whenever I’m in Italy.
To make things worse, I’ve never been able to successfully recreate the dish at home. The versions I make are always too gloopy, or it’s too wet, or it’s too flavourless.
Until Kenji.
In my house, Kenji Lopez-Alt is to food what Mark Kermode is to films. Nothing gets made without first asking “how would Kenji make this?” and consulting his book, The Food Lab (which might be my favourite cookbook). So, on a whim, I checked out what he had to say about homemade cacio e pepe. And he’s got a video about it. I made his version tonight and it was, without a doubt, the best cacio e pepe I’ve ever made.
A couple of notes about his recipe:
Don’t use fresh pasta for this. The timings are for dry pasta and they’re relatively precise - if you use fresh pasta, your pasta will be done before the oil has had time to cool down, so your butter won’t emulsify with it. Plus, this is just a personal thing, but I think fresh pasta is kinda wanky anyway. If you’re trying to impress someone with this dish, you’re much better of spending your money on better quality cheese.
Maybe use normal olive oil to fry the pepper at the start. Even being as gentle as possible, the extra virgin just has a sharpness to it that can overpower the cheese. Drizzling extra virgin at the end is plenty.
For the last few years, I’ve been using Letterboxd to keep a track of every film I watch. According to my Letterboxd profile, I watched a total of 92 films in 2016. Which is the same number of films as I watched in 2015, which isn’t bad, considering my wife and I had a child in early January, which severely limited our trips to the cinema.
I also scored each film I watched, with a maximum score of five. Which lets me pull out some statistics1!
The average score across all films was 3.1 / 5, which is pretty good2! The lowest score I gave a film was 1 / 5 (actually, I gave it to two films: Camino and Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse). The highest score this year was 4.5 / 5. The films I rated the highest this year were Rogue One (which I saw twice), Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Green Room and Steve Jobs.
92 films averages to 1.8 films a week. The graph of when these films were watched tells a bit of a story of the year. First week of the year, when my wife was heavily pregnant and ready to pop, we watched five films. Then, the entire month of April, when my baby was waking four or five times a night? One film.
I only reviewed 43 of the 92 films I watched in 2016, which is a shame, because my little reviews are more helpful to me in remembering why I gave a film a particular score. I could barely remember watching Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, but my review – my little note to amuse no-one but myself – reminded me why I gave it 1 / 5.
Every year, I do a roundup of my favourite games that I played throughout the year. Previous years: 2013, 2014, 2015
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
Okay, so technically this game came out in 2015, which is a great start to a year-end list for 2016. I played it when it first came out and it just didn’t click with me. I’m not sure why. I knew going in that it fell under the ‘walking simulator’ umbrella. But I guess I was expecting more of a Gone Home style experience, where the game gives you an environment to explore and examine and a story that you uncover — or flesh out — for yourself. Except, as I found out, EGTTR is not that type of game. It’s more like a radio play crossed with a heavy dose of Sleep No More. So, last month, I went back and played it like that, like it was a play that I was witnessing rather than actually being any part of, and the game bowled me over. It’s poetic and beautiful without ever being mawkish and it’s one of a handful of games to have ever made me cry.
Rise of the Tomb Raider/Uncharted 4
I don’t think it’s cheating to put both of these games on here. They’re both really fun games that are great at different things. Uncharted had a great, grown-up story (a hero trying to settle down and re-adjust his priorities) and had the best free-flowing combat of any game I’ve played this year. In the previous Uncharted games, I’d hide behind cover and pick off the baddies one-by-one. In this, I was finally whizzing around the levels like the badass the game wanted me to be. Tomb Raider, on the other hand, had better, uh, tombs. Better puzzles that took advantage of the environment. The Baba Yaga DLC (which comes loaded on the PS4 disk) is stunning and a wild departure from what you’d expect from a triple-A blockbuster game.
TIS-100/Quadrilateral Cowboy
Look, if I can put Uncharted and Tomb Raider together on this list because of a thematic link, I can definitely put TIS-100 and Quadrilateral Cowboy together. In TIS-100, you have to solve a series of programming puzzles by writing assembly. Assembly! It’s frustrating and you spend most of your play-time just staring at the screen, not typing anything. And oh my God, it’s so rewarding when you finally figure it out. Just like real programming! Best part is that when you solve it, it shows you a leaderboard of how you did compared to your steam friends. If you’ve got nerdy programming friends, this is a huge pissing contest and it’s great.
On the other hand, Quadrilateral Cowboy is about hacking to pull off elaborate heists. William Gibson meets Oceans Eleven. The game’s action is more physical than TIS-100. You type your commands into your “deck” in the game. For example, you program a door to open for five seconds, which should be just enough time for you to grab your deck and run through before the door shuts but not so long that the alarm will trigger. The real fun comes in stringing together a series of commands so that things will happen in sequence and allow you to steal the maguffin. Get that timing just right and you felt like you’re in Mission Impossible or something. But like, one of the good ones.
The Witness
Stop me if you’ve heard me tell this story before. When I was in my early twenties, I taught myself how to juggle. And the hardest part, I found, was just getting my brain to learn to let go of that third ball when two were already in flight. I spent weeks trying to throw that third ball in the air. I just couldn’t do it. My hand wouldn’t release it. Then, one day, something clicked – and I mean clicked, like I felt a physical sensation in my brain – and I could suddenly do it, no problem.
The Witness was that feeling again and again and again. Puzzles you think you’ll never be able to do, then suddenly, something clicks and you’re able to solve them. And then you build on that knowledge when you encounter the next thing you think you’ll never be able to do. Rewarding and beautiful.
Firewatch
Firewatch starts with a strong emotional flourish every bit as powerful as the opening of Pixar’s Up. And the genius of this bit of storytelling is that it completely affects the way you play the game, the choices you make. It’s a walking simulator – a nice hike in the woods simulator, really – with a deep undercurrent of melancholy and loss. The development team has a pedigree that meant I was at least expecting something interesting. I wasn’t expecting something so mature, so confident and so emotionally resonant.
Hitman
This year’s Hitman got so many things right. The slow roll-out of episodes meant that you didn’t feel that compulsion to just finish one level as quickly as possible so you could move onto the next one. You had time to get comfortable with each level and slowly ease yourself into the game’s mechanics. It also meant you were encouraged to explore, to try different things, try absurd things. But the thing I loved most about it was how ridiculous it allowed itself to be. It embraces the silliness of the game, from the opening training level set on a soundstage with a cardboard helicopter, right through to the Christmas DLC where your targets are the burglars from Home Alone. This was the first Hitman game I truly enjoyed.
Anatomy
There were a lot of quote-unquote “horror” games in 2016 (I feel like the world reached peak “survival” game this year), but these were mostly of the quiet-quiet-LOUD jump-scare variety. That’s fun and all, but it’s so one-note, it gets a little repetitive. Only one game genuinely chilled me this year and it was Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy. A short, brutally efficient horror experience, which gives you the most mundane environment – a suburban home – then changes that out from underneath you on subsequent playthroughs. This is the simplest game on this list but it’s the one that’s stuck with me the most.
Overwatch
I’m terrible at shooting games. Just terrible. I’ve got old man hands, slow reactions and poor situational awareness. Oh, and I panic really easily. But here’s what I loved about Overwatch: none of this matters. You can have all of these things and still contribute to you team’s success.
Inside
Stylistically, this is kind of reminiscent of the developer’s previous game, Limbo. But while Limbo was a cold, austere game with beautiful visuals, there’s something warm and human1 about Inside. A few minutes into the game, you’re followed by a gang of chicks. It’s one of the cutest things you’ll see. Tiny chirping pixels following you around. A little while later, a puzzle involves you sucking these chicks into a machine so they get spat out the top to hit a block and knock it where you can use the block. Then the chicks all run off. Except one. A chick — a tiny group of pixels — doesn’t move. And it’s devastating.
For the first couple of hours with The Last Guardian, I was worried. I was finally playing the game I’d been waiting almost nine years for. The game whose original announcement had me rushing out to buy a PS3 the next day. The game that was the spiritual sequel to two of my favourite games of all time. And I wasn’t enjoying it. It was cold and clunky. Was this what I’d been waiting for? But then I got to the part they’d shown in countless trailers. Jumping from bridge to bridge. And when Trico reached out to catch me with his mouth but missed and then swung his tail around for me to catch, I found myself holding my breath. Even though I’d seen this happen before. And I knew the game had worked its magic and got its hooks in me, hard.
And sub-human - that little mermaid girl still gives me nightmares ↩︎
On the same day that Donald “I don’t settle” Trump settled his Trump university lawsuit, he also tweeted his disapproval at the way Mike Pence was addressed by the cast of Hamilton. One of these was an enormous story with long-ranging implications, the other was someone being pissy about hurt feelings. Which of these was the main news story on lots of newspapers (including the New York Times)? The tweet, obviously.
During the summer, Twitter took the extraordinary step of issuing a lifetime ban on “@nero" – Milo Yiannopolis – for directing hate speech. This almost instantly decimated the “gamer gate” movement on Twitter1. It was like someone opened the windows and let in some air. Twitter briefly became a slightly nicer place.
Now, imagine twitter banned Donald Trump. I don’t know why, but you could easily argue “hate speech” too. Imagine the effect that would have on the news cycle. Non-issues would be avoided. “Rich white man has hurt feelings” wouldn’t generate pages and pages of think-pieces. We could focus on issues instead of imaginary ‘scandals’. Imagine how much less toxic the world would be.
Sure, Twitter’s investors would have a goddamn heart attack and never let it happen, but still, it’s nice to imagine, isn’t it?
It’s not entirely dead, but without anyone actually driving or directing the clown car, its effect has been dramatically reduced. ↩︎
I’ll make a bet with you: you give me a game that presents the player with a quote-unquote “moral choice” – who you fuck/marry/kill – and I’ll bet you cash money that there’s a trophy or an achievement for at least one of your choices.
Games like Mass Effect (the classic whipping boy for “choice” in games) have a black and white sense of morality. You’re either a saint to everyone you meet or you’re a complete asshole. These games have achievements for playing exclusively in one way or the other, which just encourages the player to min-max their moral compass and not necessarily make the decisions they actually want to.
This is what I loved about the recent Rise of the Tomb Raider. The bad guy is a total dick to your character throughout the game, so when you finally beat him (spoiler alert: you beat the baddie at the end of the game), you’re given the choice to either walk away and leave him to die or walk up to him and straight-up merc that prick.
By the time I reached this part of the game and I had to decide what to do, I followed my typical first instinct in these situations. I paused the game, then went online to find out if there was a hidden trophy for either decision, because if so, that’s the choice I’d make. Games had conditioned me to expect my choice to be rewarded, one way or the other. “Ding! You took the moral high ground, here’s a trophy!”
With the final bad guy in Rise of the Tomb Raider, there’s no trophy. No extrinsic reward telling you that you did a good job. So, unusually for a game in 2016, you’re free to do whatever feels right for you.
And this is how we end up with people like Katy Hopkins on the Late Late Show. Someone that no-one wanted to see, no-one wanted to listen to, someone whose appearance drew an enormous 1,300 complaints. She ends up on their prime time chat show because it got people talking.
Reasonable opinions don’t go viral. People don’t tweet en masse when a guest on a TV show says something sensible.
Sensible people — people who care about things like acceptance and inclusion — were complaining about Katy Hopkins being on the show. They talked about how they weren’t going to watch the show, and everyone inside the same echo chamber of opinions repeated the same thing, over and over again.
Meanwhile, the people who were insulated from the uproar, the people who don’t know who Katy is (or worse, the people that agree with her) just watched the show anyway. Along with, I’ll bet, a lot of the people who said they wouldn’t. And then come the complaints to RTÉ and the cycle continues.
Well, if the group in Facebook working to fight back against these fake news stories, it’s totally bullshit. Quoting one anonymous Facebooker “to highlight fake news articles in the news feed, to promote them so they get millions of shares by people who think they are real, that’s not something we should allow to happen. Facebook is getting played by people using us to spread their bullshit.”
In chasing controversy — for views, clicks or whatever — media outlets like RTÉ, Facebook and Twitter are directly responsible for a lowering of the standard of general discourse. They’re normalising hatred and intolerance. They give a platform to trolls because it’s profitable for them, and they ignore the wider social impact. And I don’t think that’s good enough any more.
I don’t really a solution for any of this. I’ve just been feeling really demoralized for the last week and wanted to get this off my chest. So, in lieu of a conclusion, here’s a photo of Christoph Waltz eating a hamburger to cheer us all up.
Update 20161130: Gizmodo recently ran an article about Reddit tearing itself apart. tl;dr the /r/The_Donald subreddit is driving lots of pro-Trump engagement (in all its hate-spreading glory) while driving other traffic away and alienating moderators.
A strange sigil has been cropping up in (mostly indie) games and, thanks to some amazing detective work on the part of some redditors, it appears to be pointing to some kind of ARG. Is this Frog Fractions 2? Is lowbrowculture.com Frog Fractions 2? If you want to get deeper down the rabbit hole of this, I can recommend the /r/gamedetectives subreddit which consumed a lot of my productivity last week, especially their work on Overwatch’s apparent “Sombra ARG”, where it’s perfectly reasonable to take a random line of source code from a web page, run it through a Vigenére cipher (using the passphrase gained from a previous bit of detective work) and then diff’ing the resulting “datamoshed” image with an original image to get even more clues. I love this stuff. (Incidentally, this is the second week in a row an article from Patrick Klepek has been making me happy. He’s doing amazing work at Vice.)
Spokeswoman at high temple of particle physics suggests ‘scientific users’ of the Geneva facility ‘let their humour go too far’ with staging of occult rite
Holy shit. Something about the phrase “pranking scientists suspected” doesn’t fill me with confidence.
Disney’s Practical Guide to Path Tracing
Walt Disney Animation studios have put up a primer on a super-technical high-tech subject presented as if it was a 1950s documentary. It’s really informative and really charming. See also Disney’s Practical Guide to Snow Simulation.
Speaking of Pixar, Quora has some real gems hidden away deep in its belly. Like this fascinating 2011 answer from Craig Good, Pixar boffin, about the render times for the original cinema release of Toy Story vs the 2010 remaster.
Popbitch goes deep into the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Maps, digging into the music theory behind what makes it so unique and why it turns up under so many pop songs. Why did the Black Eyed Peas sample the intro? Let’s take a look at the drum tab to find out, shall we?
I’ve got a real soft spot for “clicker” games. Things like Cookie Clicker and Candy Box just hoover up my productivity (honestly, I went to look up the URLs for these and I just lost 20 minutes to Cookie Clicker again). Spaceplan does nothing new with the formula, but it’s very slickly done and, unlike most other games of the genre, this one actually has a well-written story.
No Man’s Sky (game)
No Man’s Sky is a peaceful, colourful slice of sci-fi. When people ask me what it’s like, I say it’s very Minecrafty. You travel to galaxies to collect resources that allow you to travel to more galaxies and collect more resources. And you do this again and again until you’ve explored the universe. The act of doing this is so serene and calming, it’s a lovely refresher from the usual hyperkinetic games that come out this time of year. Also, there’s a lovely story doing the rounds of people naming the planets they find after dead relatives as a way to remember them. Pull-quote: “It’s one of 18 quintillion planets now and no one else may ever find it but I know it’s there and it has her name on it. That’s good enough for me.”
Hikea (video)
Web series where people take drugs assemble Ikea furniture. In the first episode, Giancarlo and Nicole take acid and build a chest of drawers and it’s actually super sweet.
Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) is one of my favourite writers. In his book A Burglar’s Guide to the City, he talks about how burglars have used architecture to plan their robberies. If, like me, your favourite parts of heist films like Ocean’s Eleven are the bits where they construct elaborate recreations of the places they’re about to rob, then this book is right up your street.
A series of portraits of the people on the other end of phone sex lines. Their stories are fascinating
“My first night was on a Saturday at midnight. It was a gentleman who I believe called himself Bob. He told me about his first experience with a glory hole. He explained that he had no one he felt comfortable telling this to, and I felt a strange intimacy between us, though it was rooted in a fantasy. I think it’s easier to release repressed desires to a non-judgmental, fictional person, because there are no consequences in the outside world.”
In an effort to push out the jive and bring in the love, I’m going to more of an effort to talk about the things that are bringing me joy.
Stranger Things
It never quite shakes off its influences (basically all of Spielberg’s early 80s films - Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters and Poltergeist), but as a piece of summer fluff, Stranger Things was surprisingly entertaining. It’s less cliffhanger-y than the other Netflix original shows, but it’s managed to achieve a pretty compelling vibe that draws you back for more. I’m interested to see what they do for season 2 now that they’ve basically tapped the 80s Spielberg well dry.
Sleeping Giants is a big dopey sci-fi thriller about the discovery of huge pieces of a statue from an ancient civilisation. And the whole thing is told in an epistolary manner, where each chapter is the transcript of an interview. So the information is drip-fed to the reader, increasing the tension. It’s not going to win any literary awards, but it’s so fast-paced and cinematic, it’s a great summer read.
Brie Larson as Captain Marvel
A lot of great news came out of Comic Con. We got a rad Doctor Strange trailer, a pretty decent Wonder Woman trailer. But my absolute favourite news so far has been the announcement that Brie Larson will be playing Carol Danvers in the Captain Marvel film. This is some perfect casting.
Films You’d Love Your Kids to See
The Lighthouse Cinema here in Dublin are running a “Films you’d love your kids to see” season. Now, I question the logic of programming for kids and scheduling shows way too late for kids to actually attend. Still, I’m not going to turn up an opportunity to see The Goonies in the cinema.
Preacher
If, four months ago, you had asked me about my expectations for AMC’s adaptation of Preacher, I would have probably given you the vocal equivalent of the poop emoji. But the finale this week capped what turned out to be an unexpectedly great season of an unexpectedly great show. It’s not a straight one-for-one adaptation of the comic, but they absolutely nailed the tone of the books. Definitely worth checking out.
Last week, I began the process of moving this site from Jekyll to Hugo. Jekyll is great. Really great, actually. It was my first real experiment with static sites and it was really fun and taught me a lot. But I’ve been starting to feel its limits. I pumped in everything from the past iterations of my blog, through Wordpress and Tumblr, leaving me with over 1,400 posts. So building the site with Jekyll each time I wanted to update it was slowwwww. Jekyll’s other big draw – its GitHub integration is amazing – is great if you’re hosting your site there. But I’m not. I’m self-hosting. So I started looking at Hugo.
I also had a look at Middleman, which has some impressive names using it, but was just a deeply unpleasant experience as an end-user1.
So for funtimes, I wanted to see how long it would take a fresh, vanilla install of the three most popular static site generators – Jekyll, Middleman and Hugo – to render the 1,400+ individual markdown files that make up this blog.
Jekyll 35.35 real 31.04 user 2.50 sys
middleman 22.47 real 30.61 user 3.97 sys
hugo 8.12 real 8.96 user 1.45 sys
It’s hard to argue with this kind of performance improvement, but what sealed the deal was the fact they include a built-in hugo import jekyll command that can get you started migrating your site across. I had my entire site migrated across in less than an hour.
Middleman feels as if it’s been written for robots and not humans. To build your site in Jekyll, you type jekyll build, which is easy to remember. To build it in Hugo, you just type hugo, which is almost impossible to forget. To build your site in MM, you type bundle exec middleman build, which yes, is easy enough to remember after you’ve done it a couple of times but my God, it’s so clunky and basically tells you everything you need to know about what it’s like to use Middleman. ↩︎
Recently, I’ve fallen in love with Pico-8. It has completely replaced Processing as my go-to tool for creating toys in code. If you’re of the same vintage as me (i.e. you lived through the 8-bit era and your year of birth seems distressingly far down web forms), then you might get a kick out of it too. Here are some of the reasons I like it so much.
1. It has everything you need
It’s got a built-in editors for code, sound effects, music and levels. You can construct an entire game without ever leaving the application.
2. It’s web-aware
With the touch of a button1, you can generate a gif of your program as it’s running. A small, perfectly-sized gif that’s perfect for tweeting. Speaking of which…
3. < 140 characters to do cool things
The #pico8 hashtag on Twitter has some great examples of the things people are doing with Pico-8. In less than 140 characters, you can have an entire program.
4. It reminds me of the good old days
I still remember sitting in front of a Commodore 64 for hours and typing out a program from Commodore User Magazine. It was a great way of learning a language and, looking back I realise, a great way of teaching patience. Well, the Pico-8 Fanzine also has a bunch of tutorials you can type in to get going.
or well, two. One to start the recording, one to stop it. ↩︎
2015 is the year that open-world games broke me. Remember a few years ago, when everyone was complaining about “shooter fatigue” because it seemed like every game we played was the same thing where you shot at things and the only thing that changed were the things that you shot at? That’s how I’m feeling about open-world games right now. They’re great if you want to spend days and days in the world of a game, but that just sounds like work to me. Personally, I’d prefer a short, authored experience. Anyway, this explains why there are some high-profile games that aren’t on this list1 - they were probably open-world games that just didn’t get their teeth into me.
Rocket League
This is an unranked list, but if I was going to rank it, Rocket League would be the clear winner. It’s a football game, you hit the ball into the opponent’s net. But instead of controlling a player, you’re driving a car. A car with a rocket on the back of it. It sounds like a joke, right? Well, Rocket League was the most fun I’ve had in any video game all year. The local multiplayer is great fun, screaming laughing with your pals as one of you pulls off some ridiculous goal. Which is great by itself, but it’s also got a real depth to it. Watch some high-level videos and it’s like a whole different game. What I love most is that it’s genuinely the best football game I’ve played. All the other games, like FIFA, are trying to recreate the experience of watching football. Rocket League is recreating the experience of playing football. Favourite game of 2015.
Her Story
This is only the second ever video game (after Silent Hill 2) that my wife has ever played to completion. FMV is back!
The Witcher 3
Okay, so I realise it was only just a minute ago that I was complaining about open-world games. And here’s an open-world game on my list. What the hell, John? Listen, my main complaint with open-world games is that it’s a way for the developers to artificially stretch out a game, to make it seem bigger than it actually is. And they can use it to hide a lot of the cruft in their actual narrative writing, going “ooh, but isn’t the environmental storytelling so good?” The Witcher 3 had actually great writing underpinning it. It’s dense, but accessible. There are quests here that I’m still thinking about, months after I put the game down. The open-world nature of it was incidental to the actual game. I haven’t enjoyed being in a game’s world this much since Red Dead Redemption.
Panoramical
It seems like every year I make these lists, there’s at one entry that could be accused of not really being a game. This year it’s Panoramical. And sure, it’s not very game-like. It’s more like a peaceful, meditative toy. There’s no win-state to the game. You’re just presented with a series of landscapes with different visual and audio tracks, and you control the levels of these tracks. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Play away. You finish when you’ve had enough. There’s some real beauty here, if you’re into that kind of thing. I really am.
The Beginner’s Guide
For the first hour or so of The Beginner’s Guide, I was in awe at the inventiveness of the game. It seemed like creator Davey Wreden was just showing off. At the very end of the game, there’s a revelation. And this completely upended everything I’d just experienced. I immediately played through it again and, even though it was the exact same content, I had a totally different experience. That someone can do something ambitious like this and just fucking nail it so hard is pretty impressive. When you know the back-story and realise this game is actually about something so deeply personal? Yeah, maybe he is showing off.
Sunless Sea
Even though the two are nothing alike, playing Sunless Sea triggers the same part of my brain that is triggered when I play board games like HeroQuest. There’s this wonderful, tactile feeling to the game, like you’re playing with lovely hand-crafted miniature pieces in a world where anything can happen and there are million stories to tell. I’ve played a few different games of Sunless Sea now and they’ve always gone in different directions. I have a feeling I’ll still be coming back to this in 2016.
Super Mario Maker
Okay, let’s say you’re not interested in making any levels yourself. And let’s say you’re not completely won over by the most charming presentation in any game ever. Then there’s these three words: infinite Mario levels. You can just download other peoples’ creations and have an almost limitless supply of Mario levels for you to play and enjoy. If this still isn’t enough for you, then I just don’t know what to say to you.
Star Wars Battlefront
For a game that got fairly mediocre reviews, I had a fucking blast with Star Wars Battlefront. It’s not trying to be the deepest game ever made. It’s just trying to be a fast, casual, fun, and really, really ridiculously good-looking Star Wars game. And that’s exactly what it is.
e.g. Metal Gear Solid V, which I have played enough of to appreciate was a really well-made game, just not one of my favourites ↩︎
Siva Vaidhyanathan, media studies professor at the University of Virginia, talking about the worst-case scenario in an all-digital world:
“Amazon has done so much to bully both readers and publishers. And yet if it were to collapse, it would cause chaos.”
At the root of that chaos would be the immense loss of media, and the wholesale disappearance of works—not just from personal collections, but altogether. “At the start of the 22nd century, we are going to find ourselves in a situation with huge gaps in knowledge and culture. Because none of these companies will be around.”
Craig Mod has some theories surrounding the apparent decline in ebook sales. TL;DR: he reckons it’s mostly to do with the physical experience of reading on ereaders (and let’s be clear, when we say ‘ereaders’, there’s really only one player in town, the Kindle). For me, he borders too much on the fetishisation of the physical form of the book. For example, here’s his description of the travel guide City Secrets
Bound in rust-coloured cloth, rough against the skin, with jet-black foil‑stamped lettering and a small key on the cover, City Secrets was skinny. The trim size was non‑standard, much taller than wide. It bent easily, fit handily into my jacket pocket, and was made with cover boards that had a reassuring springy resilience. The combination of the size and the cloth cover made it feel like a travel companion – a book that could take a beating, be dragged around the world, stored for years, and returned to, again and again.
It’s like Nigella-style food erotica for the lit crowd.
But I sort of agree with some of what he’s saying. As I mentioned before (and I’ll continue to mention at any available opportunity), I recently — finally! — finished Infinite Jest. Now, Infinite Jest is a goddamn doorstop. A thousand pages of some of the densest prose you’ll find. It should be the perfect candidate for Kindle-reading. But I read the entire thing on a physical book. I hauled that monster in and out of the city every day on my commute, even though it took up most of the space in my bag, simply because it was just a more pleasant experience than reading on the Kindle.
The worst part is that a lot of the things that keep the Kindle from being a genuinely great reading experience (as opposed to an entirely passable one) are fairly minor. They’re not insurmountable. They’re mostly niggly details like shitty font options and character spacing that could most charitably be described as ‘schizophrenic’. And these issues are getting addressed, albeit at a glacial pace. This June, almost eight years after the first Kindle was first released and seven generations into the Kindle product line, Amazon released firmware that finally fixed its shitty hyphenation and layout engine.
So the changes are slowly coming, but Amazon’s reluctance to release any information or suggestions of where they plan to take the Kindle is baffling to me. Especially when it’s their mealticket item. Apple called the Apple TV their “hobby” and said nothing about its roadmap (until they finally did). Amazon seem to be treating the Kindle in the same way. Is it any wonder people are returning to books? I’m sure they’ll be back to the Kindle when something dramatically enhance the experience on there, but who knows how long that will be?
Personally, there are two things I would love to see that would improve my relationship with the Kindle. First, release an updated Kindle DX. You know, the bigger Kindle. The “Kindle Pro”. My neighbour in Rome, an editor, used to have one and it was the cadillac of readers even then. The resolution of the Kindle Voyage is finally at a print-like level, but the size of the actual screen means it’s useless for anything but imitating cheap paperbacks. A slightly larger physical screen would open the device up to so much more.
Second, and this is a cheap, simple win - I’d love to see the Kindle display the cover of the book I’m currently reading instead of the Kindle’s shitty generic screensavers. When I read a physical book, I am greeted by its cover every time I look at it. I know the name of the author, I know the name of the book. On the Kindle, this stuff is hidden away from everyday view, so it’s possible to read a book and have no idea of its title or who wrote it. You’re cut off from a relationship with the book in favour of a relationship with its content. The cover, that singular piece of design that, let’s face it, we almost always base our initial judgement of a book on, is completely removed on the Kindle. Without it, a book is just a collection of photocopied pages held together with sticky-tape.
We’re in the middle of getting a terrifying amount of work done to our house in Marino, so we’ve temporarily decamped out to my mother-in-law’s house in Greystones1. My commute into work has switched from a 15-20 minute cycle each way to a 50-minute train ride each way. As a result of this new-found extra (dead) time, my reading has gone through the goddamn roof in the seven weeks since I’ve been out here. Instead of just the few minutes of reading I can snatch before falling asleep, I’ve got these huge swathes of time in my day where there is almost nothng else to do but read. Here’s a graph of my reading, based on what I’ve logged to Goodreads:
I’m finishing books I’d previously started and given up on (e.g. A Wrinkle in Time2), and books I’d been too terrified to even begin (e.g. Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop).
As a result of this, I’ve decided there will probably never be a better time to tackle Infinite Jest.
2.
Infinite Jest will be the eleventh book I’ve read in the seven weeks I’ve been out in Greystones. In this time, no-one has ever come up and commented to me about the book I’m reading. Even when I’m reading stuff that I secretly want people to come and talk to me about (e.g. John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van3), nothing.
On Friday evening, as the train came into the station in Greystones, after I’d packed my copy of Infinite Jest into my coat and got my coat on, a complete stranger came over and sat down beside me. “Sorry, I couldn’t help but notice the book you’re reading there. How are you getting on with it?” I told him how I was really happy - I’m enjoying it because I’m actually making significant progress in the book (currently on page 305, which is the first time I’ve even got past page 100). “Yeah, stick with it. There’ll be parts in there that will make you want to give up, but stick with it, it’s totally worth it”, he said.
“Oh, I don’t intend to, I’ve also got a non-fiction book going at the same time to keep me sane”, I said.
“Good idea! Well…”
And then, awkward silence, because what else is there to say?
Now I feel awkward. Does this interaction mean I’m part of the problem, a pretentious DFW lit-bro? Do I now need to give up on Infinite Jest entirely, just in case I fall into some stereotype?
3.
I get home and I tell the above story to my wife. She says “yeah, that’s weird!” She knows this isn’t my first time trying to make my way through Infinite Jest. and asks me how many pages I’ve read of it this time. I tell her just over three hundred.
“How many pages are in the book?”
“Nine hundred and something, not including footnotes. So I’m about a third of the way through. I’m pretty happy with my progress!”
“Yeah, but you’re not halfway through.”
Marriage.
There’s an entire blog post to be written about the differences between living in Greystones vs living in Marino, but this is not that blog post. ↩︎
Which I gave up on previously because it felt like it was dull and overrated and which, having now finished it, I can confirm, is indeed, dull and overrated. ↩︎
If you’ve read this book, please hit me up on Twitter. I’d love to find more people (read: literally anyone) to talk to about it. ↩︎
Casey Neistat just launched his new social network, Beme. It’s probably easiest if I just link to Casey’s video so he can describe it himself.
I really love the idea of Beme. I mean, is there anyone genuinely advocating for these awful, fake, rigidly curated lives on Facebook and Instagram? When these perfectly-composed, perfectly-filtered shot appears in my timeline, I get the worst fomo. The consolation, the thing that prevents me spiraling into a full-on, god-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life depression is realising that for someone to take the time to line up the shot, crop it, choose the right filter, and upload it - this all means that they weren’t actually engaged in the moment they’re depicting 1. So I understand the problem Beme is trying to solve.
So here’s another one of his videos, where he climbs a theater in Belgium.
This is the moment when I realised that even Casey Neistat is guilty of not being engaged in the moment. At 4'00 in that video, you can see him scrambling up a near-vertical wall. God, I haven’t ever climbed up a Belgian theater - the fomo is starting to set in! But hang on a second. To get that shot, he had to climb up the wall, set up the shot, climb down again and then climb up again. And then later on, he had to edit out the first two parts of that2.
Casey Neistat made a name for himself through his youtube videos. And his youtube videos are so watchable partly because of his enormous, planet-sized personality. But they’re also watchable because they’re really well made. They’re tightly edited, and they’re shot with a filmmaker’s eye. None of which are available with Beme - you get a potentially wonky shot (apparently worse if you have boobs), with no way to correct it. And since you don’t know what you uploaded, there’s no way for you to improve your skills. Chances are you’ll always be shooting wonky junk.
I really would like Beme to succeed, but I worry that heavy users of social media (i.e. not me) aren’t going to like the limitations, so we’ll just be left with videos like this one. Authentic as fuck, but that’s pretty much all you can say about it.
One of my biggest personal achievements of the last year is when I climbed Croagh Patrick. But would you know I’d done it by looking at my Instagram or my Facebook timeline? Would you fuck. ↩︎
He addresses this in his vlog, where he often posts videos of him running in New York and he says his runs end up taking three times as long because he has to set up the shot, go back, run past the camera, then go back for the camera. ↩︎
Remember when video games were fun? Remember when they were about colour and happiness? Watching E3 2015 a few months ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking that these were things that video games had grown out of. It was dour, brown, post-apocalyptic shooters as far as the eye could see. Bombast and spectacle were the order of the day. The thing that drew one of the biggest cheers from the Microsoft crowd was when they lowered a fucking Ferrari from the roof. A fucking Ferrari.
Here’s what Nintendo did for their E3.
They teamed up with the Jim Henson Company to make puppets of their corporate team and made the most adorable, dorky video imaginable. And it was lovely.
It was a uniquely Nintendo way of approaching the industry. It was showing that video games could still be about colour and happiness and fun. And it’s largely because of this man, Satoru Iwata.
When someone asks me to picture the president of one of the three largest video game companies in the world, this is exactly what I want to imagine. Not someone in a blazer and jeans with a focus-tested number of shirt buttons opened. I want a person who understands why we play games. I want a person who knows that games are about bringing people together, not just about shooting people in the face. I want someone who gets it.
Iwata got it. And the world feels a little less joyful now that he’s left it.
Which is great because I’m not a fan of it either. It almost always comes out at parties and my heart absolutely sinks. Maybe I’m just going to the wrong parties.
The main reason I don’t like it is because playing it reminds me of this scene from Nathan Barley:
“I’ve seen idiots playing this, yeah? They don’t realise it’s not good cos it’s rude, yeah?” “Yeah, it’s good cos it looks like it’s good because it’s rude?”
It’s not transgressive. It’s not shocking. It’s boring. But it gets trotted out at parties because pretty much everyone already knows the rules (it’s Apples to Apples, except where half the answers are ‘big black dick’) and for people who don’t know the rules, it’s easy for them to pick it up.
But guys, it doesn’t have to be this way! There are lots of party games that are more hilarious and more chaotic and more creative and more fun.
So here are some party games I’d recommend instead:
If you’re looking for an immediate replacement for CAH, Say Anything is top of the list. It’s basically the same thing: one person reads the question, other players have to fill in the blanks. Except with Say Anything, you write down your answer. Whatever you like. Rather than allowing the game to be funny/shocking for you, you get to be as funny and as shocking as you can be. And it all comes from you, which makes it all the more rewarding and enjoyable. Trust me, ditch CAH and get this instead.
In Snake Oil, one player draws a customer card with a particular role on it and the other players have to combine two cards in their hands to create an object to “sell” to the customer’s role. So, for example, if the customer is a caveman, you might combine your “fur” card with your “whip” card to create a “fur whip”, which will whip the fur straight off an animal, meaning your cave will be nice and toasty and clean as a whistle. OH LOOK, I DON’T KNOW. The point of this game is that there is no “right” answer here and the whole fun of the game is in the ridiculous stories people will come up with to sell things. I played this with my mother (who is in her seventies now) and she had a blast.
The Resistance is sort of like Werewolf, where some people in a group are spies and they have to make it through five rounds without getting caught. What’s so great about this game is that it will have you and your friends talking analysing everything and talking and re-analysing everything and then talking and over-analysing everything. This is probably my absolute favourite game of all time just because it always leads to chats and shouts and laughter.
At the risk of coming across like a SU&SD fanboy, just go check out their review. If this doesn’t immediately make you want to go out and play this game, maybe “fun” isn’t really your thing and yeah, maybe you should just stick with CAH.
You know in poker, they say you don’t play the cards, you play the player? Skull and Roses is an even more concentrated example of this. It’s serious bluffing where you have look all the other players in the eyes before you make your decision. The only problem I have with this game is that it’s about elimating other people, which means if you’re eliminated early, there’s a lot of sitting around watching other people play. Which is still fun! Just not as much fun as, you know, actually playing.
I started as a blogger in the pre-social web, when the only way to build an audience was to have other sites quote or link to your work. Those links didn’t drive a ton of traffic back to the original site, but they drove some, and sometimes you would get a new regular reader out of the deal. And that was basically how my career began. Everything I wrote, I wrote in the hopes that someone else would take it and try to use it on their site, with a link back to my site.
The lesson of that, to me, was that writing on the internet is a positive-sum endeavor: I was creating content that helped other people make their sites better, and in using that content, they were helping me grow my site.
Vox’s approach to aggregation — which Nate Silver criticized today on Twitter— is informed by that.
There have been lots of Hot Takes on this. Here’s mine.
I firmly believe that in a post-social web, aggregation is completely broken. People aren’t looking to diversify their reading. If they see an image on Tumblr that’s been shared across dozens, even hundreds of sites, are they going to untangle that rat’s nest of attribution and find the original creator of that image? Are they fuck. At best, they’ll follow the last person to share it - they’ll follow the aggregator. Balls to the creator.
Gamification of the internet is only making it worse. And by this, I mean sites that award points to people based on the content they post. See something interesting or funny on the internet? Post it to Reddit under your name and you get all the glory! Win-win.
Back in February, I posted something on Twitter that accidentally went semi-viral, with a few thousand retweets and favourites.
Born before 1990? Whatever. We don’t care. Tell us about the war or something, grandpa. pic.twitter.com/FiWXo36JBl
I was bored the other day, so for shits and giggles, I googled the text of this tweet and found that I’d made it to Buzzfeed. I had no idea about this because I received no noticable bump in followers from them, even with their attribution. But I also found that someone on Reddit had lifted the text and image from my tweet and used it to score 47 points on /r/funny (I have a Reddit link score of 1. Yes, one).
Now I’m just a minor player in this whole thing. What about the people producing genuinely great and funny content? Last week, Mallory Ortberg (one of my favourite people on the internet) discovered that some of her work had been lifted by thepoke.co.uk.
To be fair, The Poke had attributed it to where they found it - an imgur gallery (later itself updated with proper attribution after its creator received a twitter backlash), which in turn came from a thread on /r/funny (4618 points, btw). This thread also included one hilarious comment that serves to emphasise my point: “atleast give credit to the person who made them, stolen from front page funnyjunk”.
Ugh.
Seriously, aggregation on the internet is a fucking joke.
(I try to post reviews of all the films I watch over on letterboxd. Here are some of my most recent reviews)
Black Sea ★½
When you’re making a submarine film, I’m sure it’s really tempting to default to autopilot and cross off the tickboxes of all the scenes you expect to see in these films. The near-miss collision, the accident that sends the sub to below crush-depth where they just barely survive. Etc. etc.
So it’s not enough for Black Sea to lazily trot out the same hackneyed bullshit we’ve seen countless times in films like this while claiming to be different because this time it’s all in service of a story that’s really just a commentary on the exploitation of the working class.
Plus, it has Jude Law (with the worst Scottish accent since Christopher Lambert) saying “the shit is fighting back”. Honestly, that’s an actual line from this film.
Good grief.
Predators ★★★
Predators isn’t a bad film. In fact, it’s got some really great bits in it: the smash opening; the reveal they’re on an alien planet; any time Walton Goggins is on the screen. In fact, it’s a good enough film that you’ll actually overlook the fact that they cast (lol) Adrien Brody (lol) as a badass soldier (lol).
But if there’s a complaint to be made about the film, it’s that it’s just too goddamn bleak. For the entire 107 minute run-time, there’s not a single moment of hope to be found in this film.
Exhausting.
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith ★
Honestly, the next time some dickbag comes along and tries to tell me that Episode III is the best of the prequels, I’m going to smack that person in the goddamn nose.
White God ★★
I know White God is supposed to be a parable, but I’ll be damned if I know exactly what it’s supposed to be. Current list of theories:
Social Exclusion
Teenage Angst
Immigration
The prison system
The oppression of the Jews before and during WWII (what dog pounds have such prominent chimneys?!)
It could be any one of these things. It could be all of them. I don’t know. And I’m not sure the film itself actually warrants the kind of time it would take to develop these theories. It’s 100 minutes of a dull, emotionless domestic drama with 20 minutes of interesting images tacked onto the end. Seeing 200 dogs running through Budapest dishing out vigilante justice like some canine Mr Majestyks was at least something I hadn’t seen before. The rest of the film was just filler.
Groundhog Day ★★★★
For most of this film, it’s all very clever and enjoyable and even if it doesn’t sweep you off your feet, you think “I’m so clever, I can see all the mechanics of this plot at work and I can appreciate on an intellectual level what the film is trying to do. Yes, very clever.”
And then the last scene rolls up and hits you like an ton of bricks. Even if you’ve seen the film before, it’s still a gut-punch of emotion.
That’s the real genius of this film.
Force Majeure ★★★½
Force Majeure is an interesting reflection on the ways that relationships can be affected and tested. There are the large, obvious events, like a father leaving his family to save his own life under the threat of an avalanche. But these are just the sparks that ignite the fuel that’s already there: the years of insecurity and resentment. And those are the things that really test relationships.
I guess it says something about my own marriage that we chose to watch this on Valentine’s Day.
Wild Card ★★★
Jason Statham IS Nick Wild in WILD CARD.
If this sentence doesn’t make you want to immediately run out and watch this film, forget it, this is not the film for you.
I spent an entire weekend migrating my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll and I fucking loved it. I have a board game collection that’s out of control. And just this week, I’ve had not one, but two arguments about the ending of Battlestar Galactica (one of these turned into a standing-up, shouting kind of argument)1.
In fact, I’m going to revise up and describe myself as a huge nerd.
Despite this, I have not enjoyed a single Terry Pratchett book that I’ve read.
It’s not like I haven’t tried. I’ve asked my nerd friends where I should start and I’ve gotten different suggestions from each of them. And I’ve tried each one that’s been suggested. Even Metafilter, the closest we’ll get to an internet version of a Borg hive-mind can’t settle on any one starting point. The closest I’ve come has been Good Omens, but I’m dismissing this because of Neil Gaiman. Oh, and I played a lot of The Colour of Magic on the Commodore 64. But again, I’m not counting this because it’s, you know, not a book.
All the same, I’m going to pour one out for Terry Pratchett for two reasons.
First, even though I can only handle him in small doses, even I can recognise he was capable of some beautiful writing. Like this passage from Wings
‘Come to think of it,’ he said. ‘it wasn’t frogs exactly. It was the idea of frogs. She said there’s these hills where it’s hot and rains all the time, and in the rain forests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees there are these like great big flowers called … bromeliads, I think, and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there’s a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees and don’t even know about the ground and once you know the world is full of things like that your life is never the same.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Something like that, anyway,’ he said.
I mean, wow. This is just marvellous. (For the record, I gave up on Wings after 50-odd pages.)
But I’ll mostly be pouring one out because even though he’s not my cup of tea, his writing touched – deeply touched – a lot of my friends. His writing, his irreverence, his entire outlook on life - these had a profound influence on an entire subculture. A subculture I count myself part of.
Godspeed, Sir Terry.
“DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING," said Death. “JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
For the record, I think the ending to Battlestar Galactica is totally fine. I have no problem at all mixing spiritualism with sci-fi. ↩︎
Have you read that interview Rock Paper Shotgun did with Peter Molyneux? If not, you should go read it now. And not just because it’s relevant to what I’m about to talk about, but because it’s an absolutely fascinating interview. It’s an interview that starts off with John Walker asking Peter Molyneux “Do you think that you’re a pathological liar?”
I mean, holy shit, that’s something, right?
It’s a tough interview. It was sharp around the edges. But that’s a good thing. Most developer interviews are polite affairs. Even developers that really deserve to have the boot laid in get the soft treatment. Microsoft released the Halo: Master Chief Collection, whose multiplayer (arguably the main draw of the collection) was unplayably broken and the hardest question most games press ask is “when will it be fixed?” It’s press-as-PR bullshit.
Remember back when Dan Hsu laid into Peter Moore about all the issues that plagued the Xbox 360 at launch? Remember how that was greeted? Everyone cheered and welcomed this as a new frontier: the moment when the games press seemed like they could actually be (whisper it) games journalists.
Which brings us to the Molyneux interview. Rather than being heralded as another great moment in games journalism – when a developer who has lied to consumers for years was finally held accountable – the reaction from most of the games industry has been pretty disappointing. The latest episodes of DLC, Idle Thumbs, Gamers With Jobs and Isometric all include some variation on the theme of “poor Peter Molyneux, he didn’t deserve that”1 (Isometric_ even went so far as to say that the whole thing just demonstrated gamers’ ‘sense of entitlement’). A common thread across all four podcasts is that they described the interview as “unprofessional” for starting by asking Molyneux if he’s a pathological liar.
This has driven me absolutely fucking potty over the last couple of days. I feel like I’m living in bizzaro-world, where up is down and down is up. Peter Molyneux is such a notorious liar that he’s spawned a goddamn internet meme:
… yet actually saying this to his face, actually confronting him about it is “unprofessional”? I just don’t get it.
Personally, I think that, if anything, the interview didn’t go far enough. I want to know if Molyneux feels any guilt about taking people’s money for Curiosity over the promise over a ’life-changing prize’ (for the record, Eurogamer ran an article about how much the winner’s life has changed. Short answer: not at all). I want to know if he feels any remorse over putting out Curiosity in the first place, since it was nothing more than a shameless cash-grab helping in the race to the bottom of free-to-play games. I want to know if he feels bad about potentially having taken money and press from other potential God games that were on Kickstarter. Games that could potentially have been driven with more passion than he’s shown Godus. And while we’re at it, I want to know if he ever gives a second’s thought to the people for whom Godus was the first game they’ve backed on Kickstarter and they’re now so wary of the process that they’ll probably never back another project on there.
These are just some of the questions I wished John Walker had asked Molyneux.
The only thing I can think of is that the four podcasts I listed above all feature game developers as either main hosts or as special guests. I guess game developers would have a different reaction to the interview? Idk. ↩︎
I realise I’ve mentioned him a couple of times on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, but I’ve never actually even mentioned it on my own personal blog. So let’s fix that now.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dessie.
He’s my dog and he’s my best friend and I’m going to tell you about him. But first, a story.
My wife and I had wanted to rescue a dog for ages. We’d been out to Dog’s Trust a few times and, although there were a lot of lovely dogs out there that needed homes, a lot of them were “troubled” dogs. Actual conversation: “Oh! You’re interested in Solo? He’s such a sweetheart. Just lovely. But tell me, are there ever any small children in your house because he does have a history of biting. Yeah, he’s been returned to us a few times because of that.” Stuff that just broke my heart. I wanted to adopt them all, but I’ve never actually owned a dog before, so there’s no possible way I could ever train one up to, you know, not bite small children. So we hadn’t found the right dog for us. But we kept looking.
A friend of mine was fostering dogs for A Dog’s Trust and just before Christmas 2013, she started fostering Dessie. Here are the pictures of him from A Dog’s Trust.
The minute we saw him, we said “that’s it, call off the search, this is the exact dog we want”. He was so gentle and so sweet and we called up the charity the day after we met him to start the process. They don’t actually allow people to adopt over Christmas (understandable, no?), so we had to wait a bit.
We actually got him on February 14th last year. Honestly, that timing had absolutely nothing to do with grand romantic gestures and had everything to do with bureaucracy.
Our lives have completely changed since then. In lots of ways, both obvious and non-obvious. Obviously, we have a lovely little creature to take care of now, so we have to arrange our lives differently. For example, we’re meeting some friends for dinner next week and we’re already talking about who’s going to cycle home to walk the dog and cycle back into town before dinner. We have to plan things. We have to be more organised with things. No more leaving food on the table, for example. Also, before getting Dessie, I’d never picked up a still-steaming pile of shit on a frosty winter’s day. That’s a line I can’t un-cross.
But there are also less obvious ways that things have changed. Like, we’re part of the neighbourhood dog walking group that meet in the local park to walk their dogs. It’s such a semi-formal group that they actually had a Christmas party, where everyone wrapped their dogs in tinsel and brought wine and brandy and cakes to the park and everyone had a merry old time. Before we had the dog, I had no idea this group was even a thing. Now I’m one of them.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing though. For the first couple of weeks, he was absolutely terrified of me. I guess a handsome, burly man must have mistreated him before. We still keep getting these glimpses of what his life was like before he came to us. Snatches of his little neuroses that hint at some past trauma. Like, he’s absolutely terrified of motorbikes. Even a parked motorbike on the street, he’ll give it a wide bearth. And that was just the start.
For the first couple of weeks we had him, it was tough going. He wouldn’t settle. He’d whine all night and then he’d whine all day (we set up a webcam so we could check on him via our phones - that’s how quickly we descended into being just awful dog-people). But that’s something I really appreciated about A Dog’s Trust: along with the dog, they give you access to a sort of a dog counsellor that you can email with your questions and they’ll give you advice. So you can say “my dog is doing $x”, and they’ll say “your dog is doing $x because of $y, you should try to $z”. Well – and I’m not happy about this – when he hadn’t settled after two weeks, I wanted to send him back. But the charity were lovely and answered all my questions and helped me get through it and I learned how to handle him much better because of them. That helped him become more comfortable with me and settle down.
And here he is now.
In this photo, he’d just won “best rescue”, came third in “agility” and won “best in show” at the Greystones dog show.
So, things people should know:
Sight hounds (whippets, luchers, greyhounds) are the laziest animals you’ll ever meet. They sleep and they sleep. Here’s a typical picture of Dessie:
I know everyone expects them to be really energetic and be a real handful, but if they can get just a couple of decent 20-30 minute walks a day where they can get off the lead and run fast, they’re super-happy.
The only issue with this is that they’ve got a really strong prey instinct and that can be a real problem. If they see something small (and preferrably furry), they must have it in their mouth. If that small thing is across a busy road, they don’t care. So they need to be trained out of this, which can be a slow, slow process. It’s only in the last couple of weeks that Dessie has stopped running out of our local park. For a while there, he was strictly kept on the lead, which was frustrating to both him and me.
Also, you wouldn’t think it to look at them, but they’re incredibly affectionate. They’re all skinny and pointy and you’d think they’re not into the whole touching-feeling thing, but there’s nothing Dessie loves more than to sit on the sofa with us. And he nearly always has to be touching us at all times. He’ll be sitting beside you and just put a little paw on your leg. Adorbs. Again, another very typical photo of Des:
If you’re ever thinking about adopting a dog (and you should! I can’t think of a single person whose life wouldn’t be improved by getting a dog), I’d seriously encourage you to take a look at the whippets, lurchers and greyhounds. The pounds are full of them and they’re just the best.
One of the nice things about having a blog that no-one actually reads is that you can do silly, borderline reckless things with almost no fallout. For example, you can completely change your backend from Wordpress to Jekyll on a whim.
So this weekend, that’s exactly what I did.
And I have to say, it’s been an interesting experience. I moved from Livejournal to my own Wordpress blog, on my own domain (fuckcuntandbollocks.com - RIP) in 2004. Besides the general embarrassment that comes from reading stuff from your past, (especially when I moved away from the earnest, personal writing on Livejournal and I was trying so hard to be clever and articulate over here), there’s also the sheer volume of cruft that’s built up over time. I’ve spent the weekend blowing the cobwebs off the darker corners of my Wordpress database and trying to extract this content into something that makes sense and will out-live Wordpress. Both of these have clarified exactly why I needed to move to something like Jekyll.
Now my blog is written in text files that live in my Dropbox and I don’t have to worry about the latest Wordpress 0-day exploit.
But there’s still a lot of work to be done. Broken images need to be found. Broken links need to be fixed. The migration is maybe 90% complete. So bear with me while I get it finished.
You know the way on Netflix, there’s a ton of films, but they’re all shite? And the way that discovery on Netflix is next to impossible, so you have to go to third-party sites to see what they recommend, or even to find out what’s just been added (you know things are bad when you’re going to a fucking blogspot site to find out what’s new). So I’ve been looking for something new.
A few years ago, I remember trying Mubi and it wasn’t much better. It was like Netflix with an arthouse bent: hundreds of films, but hardly anything you’d want to actually watch. A broad selection of films so it looked impressive, but they were shallow as mud.
I don’t know when exactly, but somewhere in the last few years, they completely changed their focus. Now they’ve got an extremely narrow, extremely deep selection. How narrow? They’ve got thirty films. That’s it. Every day they add something new, every day they take something off. And they take care with the films they add. These are thirty tightly curated films that are almost always worth watching. Here’s the current list of films as of today:
There are some amazing films on there that I want to watch again. There are some amazing films on there that I’ve been meaning to check out for ages. And the ones I haven’t heard of? Well, the overall quality of the rest of the films means I’m comfortable knowing that they’re probably worth checking out.
Mubi isn’t paying me to write this blog post. I’m writing this for completely selfish reasons: I only just discovered how great this service is and I want to make sure it sticks around. So do me a favour and give Mubi a shot?
Before I crack into the list, I just want to give a bit of context for some of my choices. There are a load of games that are appearing in other peoples’ lists that I bought but just haven’t gotten around to playing yet[^1]. So that’s why it’s really important that I stress that this is just a list of the best games I played this year. Are we all clear? Great! Let’s crack on, so.
PT
I played PT in late at night during the summer. I was wearing shorts and at one point about an hour into playing the game, my dog brushed against my legs as he walked past. And it actually hurt. I was so tense my leg-hairs were standing on end so hard that they actually hurt to touch. That’s never happened to me before. And all it took for PT to scare me more than I’ve ever been scared in my life was just two perfectly-rendered corridors. Even the ridiculous sink-baby couldn’t ruin this for me.
Kentucky Route Zero
The episodes in Kentucky Route Zero are coming trickling out of the developer, Cardboard Computer, like a pitch drop. You couldn’t accuse it of being an episodic game in the way that Telltale games are episodic. And that’s a great thing. Once you’ve played the first episode in a Telltale game, you’ve pretty much seen everything the entire series is going to throw at you. What makes Kentucky Route Zero so special is that each episode has done something completely different, something completely surprising. In the second episode, you actually arrive at the titular Route Zero and it’s a beautiful, twisted nightmare with its own dreamlike logic. The third episode’s musical interlude was a brave, ballsy piece of gaming. Up until that point, the game had mostly been about making dialogue choices, but suddenly you take over a lounge-singer named Junebug and you’re constructing an entire song from your choices. A gorgeous, haunting song straight out of Twin Peaks. It wouldn’t work in any other game but Kentucky Route Zero. Loved it.
This War of Mine
I actually haven’t played that much of This War of Mine because it’s a tough game. Not in the sense that it’s hard, but rather it’s an emotionally gruelling experience unlike anything else I’ve played this year. It’s a game where you control a group of survivors during a war (roughly based on the Siege of Sarajevo) and the entire game is just about keeping your group alive and together – both physically and emotionally – for as long as you can. Everything you do, every awful decision you’re forced to make will affect your group in some way. If you break into an old man’s house and steal his food, your group will survive a bit longer, but the character who did the actual stealing will be racked with guilt for the rest of the game.
The Talos Principle
I already described this on Twitter as “Portal with a philosophy degree”. You could throw some Myst in there too for good measure. There’s no combat. It’s just a solidly-designed puzzle game, but it’s also got a great story that unfolds in front of you as you play it. One layer peels back to reveal another, to reveal another and so on. And all this from the people behind Serious Sam - I know, right? It’s probably not for everyone. I can imagine some people getting ticked off at the being questioned on their moral and ethical beliefs by a slightly dickish, super-patronising terminal. But that shit just worked for me. (Also, this will sound fierce wanky, but you know that first world, the one set in Roman ruins? No game has captured Italian light like that. Really small detail, but jesus, it felt great.)
Mario Kart 8
The best Mario Kart since the original.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
If you’d have said to me last year that Wolfenstein: The New Order would one of the best games I’d play in 2014, I’d have called you a fucking liar. I had no interest in the franchise and this particular iteration was completely off my radar. But here we are. Solid, visceral action and some of the best storytelling of the year. It basks in its B-movie, grindhouse roots (I mean, that scene on the train feels like it’s lifted straight from Tarantino) without ever winking at the audience in a “we’re actually too cool for this shit” kind of way.
Desert Golfing
For a while there, Desert Golfing was all I played. I mean, for weeks on end. Remember I said I bought a load of games but haven’t played them yet? It’s probably because I was too busy playing Desert Golfing instead. I’d say I’ve sunk more time into this than probably any other game on here. It’s also the smallest, quietest game on this list. There’s a ball, a hole, and the landscape. For as far as you can go (there’s no ending, as far as I know), that’s all there is. Occasionally, you might come across something else - a cloud, a cactus, a vase – but for the most part, for the majority of the 2,500 holes I played before I finally deleted it, that’s all there was. And that’s all it needed. You could talk about how the game is like an interactive art installation, a commentary on futility and perception, with the background changing so slowly across hundreds of holes. You could shite on about this and I’d listen and I’d nod at the points you were making. But that’s not why this game kept me playing. It kept me playing because it was near-perfect.
Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes
Gather round kids, old man Kelly’s got a story to tell. Back before Metal Gear Solid came out on the original Playstation, they released a demo of the game which was just the first area before you get onto the lift – the pre-credits introduction. I lost days to that demo. It was a short thing, and you could complete it in less than ten minutes, but I was absolutely obsessed with it and I played it every way I could. I wanted to milk every drop of entertainment out of that because, back then, it felt perfect. Ground Zeroes is does a great job of recreating that feeling of the original Metal Gear Solid demo. It’s a small sliver of a game – an amuse-bouche to keep us entertained until the actual release of Metal Gear Solid V – that you could easily beat in ten minutes. But it’s also the type of thing you could easily lose days to.
Nidhogg, Starwhal: Just the Tip, Gang Beasts, Sports Friends, Tennes
One of my favourite things to come out of 2014, at least in the indie space, is a resurgence in local multiplayer games, so I’m bundling some of my favourites together here. Or at least the ones that we’ve had the most fun with in our office. Online multiplayer games can have 256 simultaneous players, and that has its own brand of chaotic fun. But there’s something genuinely beautiful and special about being able to yell and laugh with the person (or people) you’re in a room with. With all the gamergate shit this year making me feel more and more disconnected from gaming and gamers, it was really nice to be reminded of the feeling of two (or four, or with Johann Sebastian Joust, seven) people in a room having fun together.
including Dark Souls 2, Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Bayonetta 2, Super Smash Bros 4 Wii U, Alien Isolation, The Evil Within ↩
The BBC recently put out an amazing three hour retrospective on Chris Morris. I love Chris Morris but I absolutely hate being tethered to the iPlayer, so I created an MP3 version for offline listening.
In her recent blog post, my wife pointed out that the “it Says in the Papers” section of Morning Ireland is a really useful tool for giving you a super-condensed daily overview of the major stories in Irish media. And it’s true. It’s my favourite part of Morning Ireland (well, technically it’s my second-favourite, right after Harem Lousch reading the weather forecast – honestly, nothing brightens your day quite like hearing a Dutch person saying “schattered schowersch”). So I was pretty happy when my wife said “It Says in the Papers” was downloadable as a podcast.
Turns out that’s not strictly true.
It’s actually only available as part of the general Morning Ireland podcast, which also includes the news bulletins, the sport, the weather, as well as miscellaneous stories broken out into their own individual podcast episodes. In other words, there’s a whole load of shit there that I’m not actually interested in and don’t want to spend five minutes each morning deleting the extraneous crap from my feed just to get at the stuff I actually care about.
So I’ve created “Morning Ireland - The Best Bits”, which takes the Morning Ireland podcast firehose and filters it down to just the bits I care about – the news bulletin, It Says in the Papers (and Harem Lousch reading the weather).
To subscribe to it, just add the following URL to whatever podcasting software you’re using:
Obviously, the normal legal stuff applies – I don’t actually own the license for the media, this is for personal slash educational use only, caveat emptor – etc. etc. If you’re using it and you have any feedback, drop me an email.
A few days ago, I celebrated my one-year Crossfit anniversary. “Celebrated” is a bit of a weird word to use here, isn’t it? Would you say you “celebrated” being a year in a gym? I’ve never marked this in any of the gyms I’ve been a member of, so what makes Crossfit different?
For me, going to the gym has always been a solitary thing. You go, you set yourself up at your little station, you work out and you don’t speak to anyone. You’re in the zone.
Crossfit is different. Crossfit is about the sense of community. I go to Ronin Crossfit and, honestly, I’ve never found anywhere with such a consistently solid group of people. They don’t just make you feel welcome, they make you feel like you’re part of a team.
I’ll give you an example.
In February, they organised a sponsored 100 burpee challenge for Suicide or Survive (if you don’t know what a burpee is, consider yourself lucky). Lots of people said that one of the conditions of sponsoring me is that I had to make a video of me doing the burpees. I’m glad I did because it captured something I really love. Here’s that video:
Now, as you can see from that video, I’m not an athlete. I found the 100 burpees really hard and I was so slow it’s kind of embarassing. But did you see that? At the end of the video, when people had finished and I was still struggling and wanted to give up, people — real athletes who had finished ages ago — came over to cheer me on. One guy had finished his hundred and did my last ten burpees with me. He wasn’t showing off, he was showing solidarity.
Crossfit isn’t about being the strongest athlete in the room or beating other people, it’s about beating yourself. It’s about finding your own limits and pushing them. The other people are there to help you achieve this. And that’s the exactly what you see in that video. Without those people cheering me on, maybe I would have given up, I dunno, but I know I definitely would have taken much, much longer. And they’re celebrating with me because they know I hit a wall and kept going. And that’s not just reserved for special occasions. Even in our daily workouts, the person who lifts 40kg for the first time gets as big a cheer as the person who lifts 120kg for the first time.
That’s what I love about Crossfit. Here’s to another year.
Apple are famous for sweating the small stuff. They pay attention to the tiniest details, the things that hardly anyone notices but make a huge difference to a user’s experience of their product.
Apple Ireland, on the other hand, appear to be a bunch of goddamn clowns. This could be a larger blog post about what it’s like to be an Apple consumer in Ireland (other possible topics: no TV shows in iTunes store, no visual voicemail on the iPhone etc. etc.), but let’s just limit it to one thing: the film section of the iTunes store
One of the things I really like about the film section of the iTunes store is the “themed” bundles. For example, during fashion week, they had a sale on 25 films about fashion. Now it’s Halloween and they’re doing a sale on 25 horror films.
Click into this and you’ll get this list of films:
Can you spot the obvious mistake? That’s right, in this list of 25 horror films, there are only 24 films.
If you change iTunes store to United Kingdom, you’re presented with the full list of films. Apparently, we’re not getting Cabin in the Woods as part of this sale although it’s still available in the Irish iTunes store for €16.99
But the fuckery doesn’t stop there! Even in the Irish store, you can see that The Blair Witch Project is in the €6.99 sale. Except when you click into it…
(Again, in the UK store, this film is listed at the “sale” price.)
Apple Ireland have definitely adopted the Irish attitude of “Ah sure it’ll be grand”. I’m just not sure how well this works with Apple’s overall reputation as a company that sweats the small stuff.
I’m having real trouble trying to figure out who EA Sports UFC has been made for.
Was it made for the hardcore fans of UFC as a sport? I mean, it’s got 97 current fighters all realistically modelled, animated and rendered. Their Conor McGregor even has that God-awful gorilla chest-tattoo he got recently. This means that rather than just using a generic fighting model with a different ‘skin’ for each fighter, each fighter in EA Sports UFC moves and behaves like their real-life counterpart. They have the same strengths and weaknesses (or at least, they’re supposed to - lots of fans have been scratching their heads at some fighters’ stats, some of which seem wildly off-kilter). These are things that will mostly appeal to the hardcore UFC fighting fans, because they’re the only ones that will pick up on them. Plus the game copies the basic control scheme from the previous UFC games, so the hardcore fans who are familiar with THQ’s games will be able to hit the ground running with this game.
Unfortunately, if they’re targeting the hardcore fan, I can’t imagine it being anything but a bit of a disappointment. UFC is a visceral, vicious sport that’s all about cracking heads. But the fighting in the game feels weightless and floaty. Despite the amazing graphics engine, blows never actually feel as if they’re connecting, so a lot of the fights are spent just watching health meters because they’re the only real indication of how you’re doing. Only a few years ago, this same development team introduced a HUD-less fighting game, where you could tell how tired/battered your player was just by looking at them. It’s hard not to see EA Sports UFC as anything but a step back.
And it’s not just the floaty, toothless fighting game that will drive the hardcore fans bananas. The game’s transitions between the various stages of fighting (standing up, in the clinch and on the mat) are painfully disjointed and mechanical with no sense of grace or fluidity. The game is full of canned animations that bring everything to a standstill until the animations have completed. Then there’s also the fact that some of the sport’s more ‘simple’ moves actually require a fairly complex combination of inputs on the joystick, but some of the sport’s more difficult moves are just one or two button-presses. So it’s entirely possible to just spam flying knee kicks and win 90% of your matches (I tested this and won around half of my matches on ‘hard’ difficulty by just spamming the one move over again). In a sport that prioritises technique and finesse, this confusing mess of a control set-up is another of the game’s disappointments.
So maybe the game wasn’t made for the hardcore UFC fan. Maybe it’s there for the more casual fighting fan. People like me, who think that the whole arcade fighting game genre peaked with Rocky on the Gamecube, or maybe Fight Night Round 3 on the Xbox 360. In which case, EA have completely misjudged this game’s introduction. It starts by dropping you into an extended tutorial sequence that attempts to familiarise you with some of the basic controls before finally dumping you into an actual exhibition fight. But considering the sheernumberofcontrols, it’s a bit like saying “Okay, press this button. Great. Press this lever. Great. Now these 200 other buttons. Great. Now fly this plane.” If you haven’t played a UFC game before, you’ll be overwhelmed by the controls and immediately left feeling frustrated as the game kicks your ass and asks if you want a rematch. And when you don’t know what you did wrong in the first place, a rematch is a grim, unappealing option.
The short ‘career’ mode is where the game should open up for newcomers. You choose a fighter (or create one yourself) and take them through the various stages of The Ultimate Fighter, an actual reality TV show where contestants compete for a chance to enter into the UFC. Between fights, you practice the moves you briefly saw in the tutorial, running drills until you can actually use them in some sort of sensible way. Then you fight one-on-one against a computer opponent to progress to the next round. Repeat, repeat until you’ve won your ‘contract’. As a relative newcomer to UFC games, this is where the game finally started to make sense for me. It didn’t make it much more enjoyable – the complaints about the weak-ass fighting system still stand and the opponent AI was underwhelming – but at least I could say I finally started to get my head around what some of the buttons did and when I should use them.
Being able to create my own fighter and bring him through career mode definitely helped with the enjoyment of the game. Rather than creating something sensible, I created a 300-lb man-child called “Dick ‘Jumbo’ Wang” from Bosnia and Herzegovina (the commentators actually use your nickname and surname in fights and having them say stuff like “Jumbo Wang is taking a heck of a beating” never stopped being funny for me), with easily the worst stats in the game.
As well as providing you with just enough customization options to make your fighter look like a mongoloid sex-pest like I did, you can give your fighter some tattoos. There are pages and pages of dragons and tribal patterns (no God-awful gorilla chest-tattoos, disappointingly). In amongst all these is, bizarrely, a “In Memory of Cheryl” tattoo. And because the game lets you spam the shit out of these tattoos, Dick Wang has an “In Memory of Cheryl” tattoo everywhere the game would allow it: on his head, on his back, three times on his chest, twice on each arm and twice on each leg. I have no idea who the fuck Cheryl is, but Dick Wang must really miss her. I guess this says a lot about how easily amused I am, but it also says a lot about the game. The thing that amused me most wasn’t the exhibition fights, it wasn’t the multiplayer and it wasn’t the career mode. It was creating Dick Wang.
In the end, EA Sports UFC doesn’t really know what it wants to be. It doesn’t know who it’s trying to please, so it ends up not really pleasing anyone at all. It’s not engaging enough to be the essential next-gen UFC game the hardcore fans have been waiting for. And it’s so inaccessible for casual fans that they’ll be reduced to putting together hideous monsters in the character creation screen just to extract some entertainment from the game. I’ve no doubt that the next iteration of the game will be much better, but until then, this is definitely one to skip.
(I try to post reviews of all the films I watch over on letterboxd Here are the most recent reviews I’ve written)
The Inbetweeners - ★½
I’m not sure the makers of this movie meant to channel Waiting for Godot, but that’s exactly what it reminded me of in places. Someone said that the Beckett play was one in which nothing happens, twice. Well, The Inbetweeners 2 is a film where nothing happens for forty-five minutes, then someone gets hit in the face with a lump of shit, then nothing happens again for another forty-five minutes.
Chef felt like Jon Favreau trying desperately to recreate the light, breezy feeling of Swingers. Instead, we get a film that breaks down halfway under the weight of its own self indulgence and we’re left with a film where Favreau has Sophia Vergara as an ex-wife and Scarlett Johansson as a girlfriend and where it’s apparently okay for two middle-aged men to sing “Sexual Healing” to a child they’ve locked in a van.
Pride - ★★★★
So the story of Pride might be told in broadest possible strokes, right down to the evil, cackling neighbour that bordered on panto-villain ridiculous. But despite this, it’s still the most wonderful, joyful film I’ve seen all year.
There’s hardly a single original thought in Dark Skies. Almost every scene has been lifted wholesale from other films. The usual suspects - a bit of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a little of Signs, and even some of The Exorcist thrown in for good measure. This wouldn’t in itself be a bad thing except the film is just lifting them as if it’s ticking off a list of scenes it feels it needs to have. As a result, it tries to create an atmosphere of tension that climaxes about halfway through the film. Then, having painted itself into a corner, it then decides to lift from Poltergeist with J.K. Simmons in the Tangina role.
Dull.
Dredd - ★★★★
Watching this film again, I was impressed that they managed to take an off-the-shelf action setup AND YET make it into a great Judge Dredd film AND YET keep it true to its comic-book roots AND YET make it seem gritty and realistic and big-budget AND YET keep it spikey and not round off the edges to try and capture a large audience.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: I really love this film.
When Pete asked if I wanted to review Madden NFL 15, I initially said no. You see, I haven’t played a Madden game since the Megadrive, so I figured I’m in no position to talk about this game because I can’t tell you what makes this game better than the previous fifty-odd iterations. Plus I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched a game of American Football except one time when I was in New York over Thanksgiving and went to a friend’s house and the football came on and all the MEN went into the basement to watch the BIG GAME and I joined them because the idea of a man NOT watching the BIG GAME was kinda making everyone uncomfortable. Basically, I’m nowhere near an expert on this. I probably shouldn’t be reviewing this game.
Besides which, if you’re the kind of person who is likely to buy Madden NFL 15, you’ll probably have bought it already. Likewise, if you’re not interested in either the game or the sport, I doubted anything I could say here would convince you. But Pete is nothing if not insistent, so I got ready to write a review based on the things I did know about, like the politics of the NFL surrounding the recent Ray Rice incident. Or maybe the study by the Wall Street Journal which shows that although an average game of American Football lasts almost three hours, the ball is actually only on the field and in play for 11 minutes. I was going to talk about Friday Night Lights, a TV series about high school football in Texas and how it’s the most criminally underrated show ever made. I was ready to write around the game, rather than about the game. You know, the kind of review a real wanker would write.
But then I actually played the game. And, you know what? It’s actually won me over. I really, really like it.
It took a while to grow on me though. Like most EA Sports games these days, Madden NFL 15 opens by dropping you into the middle of an actual game and expects you to fend for yourself. Since I haven’t touched a Madden game in 20-odd years, I hadn’t a fucking breeze as to what was going on and it demolished me. If I’m being honest, more than any other game in recent memory, these first five minutes in Madden NFL 15 left me feeling a little alienated. It seemed to be a game shouting “THIS IS NOT FOR YOU. GO BACK TO DESERT GOLFING ON YOUR PHONE, YOU LAZY FUCK.” I was ready to throw in the towel and dust off that wanker-review.
But something about the game made me want to persevere and figure it out. Along with Call of Duty, Madden is traditionally regarded as the game that the ‘core’ audience (whatever that means) tend to glom onto. And since I’ve already dabbled with a CoD addiction (300+ glorious, fun-filled hours in Modern Warfare multiplayer), I didn’t want to give up before I at least won my first game.
So I fired up the ‘skills trainer’. This is a series of drills designed to familiarise players with the mechanics of the game, starting with passing and blocking and so on. I guess this is mostly intended for people who are entirely new to the game but it still presumed a level of knowledge that I just didn’t have. To make it worse, the game doesn’t do a great job of actually communicating any information that might be useful to a new player. One of the first drills you run is practicing a lob pass. “Do a lob pass”, it says. Except at no point during these drills does it say how to actually perform a lob pass. So I failed my lob pass. And I failed. And I failed. I had no idea what I was doing wrong and the game seemed completely disinterested in telling me. It was only by chance when I was loading the game that I saw it in one of the random loading screens that flashes up for a couple of seconds at a time: briefly tap the button to do a lob pass, hold the button down to do a ‘bullet’ pass. This was like a eureka moment - once this was figured out, the game unfolded in front of me like a beautiful flower.
You see, I’ve realised that Madden is not the type of game to explain itself or hold your hand. In other games, like EA UFC, the equivalent of Madden’s ‘skills trainer’ is a series of extended quicktime event where even a complete beginner can easily rack up 100% scores and gold medals in no time. Madden NFL 15 is tougher. It’s not just a quicktime event - it’s knowing what to do and when to do it. And, starting out, you’ll fuck up the drills. You’ll fuck them up a LOT. You’ll be forced to restart again and again. And it’s only when you’re into double-digits of retry attempts that you’ll actually scrape a success. You’ll happily take your bronze medal and move onto the next drill. It’s not arcade game. It doesn’t try to compensate for your lack of skill or knowledge. And you know what? I appreciate that. It means that when I actually perform a dead-perfect lob pass, there’s an extra sense of achievement. I fucking earned that pass. And so that means I’m going to make a wild statement that might annoy some people. Okay? Here we go. If you’re like me where you have no interest in American Football and you know nothing about Madden (or have forgotten anything you did know), Madden is sort of like Dark Souls: an impenetrable melange of game mechanics where each tiny advancement feels like a massive success.
There, I said it.
Even for a non-fan like me, there’s a lot to appreciate about this game. I’m pretty impressed with the social integration. The game tracks each player’s stats and decisions in the game and add that to a cumulative database, so when you’re in a particular situation, the game can say “the majority of the community chose this play”. Similarly, players are encouraged to send in their favourite screenshots from the game to be used in the interstitial loading screens. So you’ll see a picture and it will say “submitted by @AssMan1993”. Probably more than any other AAA game in recent memory, Madden NFL 15 prides itself on its community focus. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s listening to its players and involving them in the game. For example, the game shipped with a bug that caused one player to be rendered as 1’2” tall. This glitch was fixed, but the massive viral popularity of the bug caused EA to turn it into an official game mode called “tiny titans”. That’s something I wish more games would take advantage of. The only other game I can think that does anything near as great a job of channeling the community is Dark Souls. Okay, I’ll stop with the Dark Souls comparisons now.
I said I wanted to play Madden NFL 15 until I won my first game. Well, I’ve done that. I reached the arbitrary goal I set myself for this game. And I think I’m going to keep playing this game. As a sport, American Football is still mostly Greek to me. I don’t know who any of the players are, what any of the positions do, or when to run a particular play. Christ, I even feel like a total fraud for just using the words “run a particular play”. And I’m sure this knowledge would really open up the rest of the game to me - there are entire game modes, like the fantasy football-type thing, that require this outside knowledge. But at this early stage, it’s all incidental shite that doesn’t actually matter. The important thing is that the basic game itself is actually lots of fun. And that’s what’s going to keep me coming back.
I’ve been reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work, which is like this great little book that perfectly straddles the line between motivational anecdotal bullshit (e.g. the Ira Glass quote on the ‘taste gap’) and practical advice (e.g. ‘have your own domain name that people can associate with you’).
For the past year or so I’ve been taking part in a 1 Game a Month group here in Dublin. It’s a great group, full of lovely, helpful and enthusiastic people and I’ve learned loads about all sorts of different subjects I’m interested in: game design, programming, art, and sound. But I know people are frustrated with me there because getting me actually to let them see what I’ve done is like pulling teeth. I’ll keep it all to myself.
Around Christmas, I took part in a gamejam where I made a game where you had to navigate using sound. This was the first time I’d ever let anyone else play something I’d created and it scared the shit out of me.
I want to get better at this - showing people my works in progress. And most of all, showing people my finished work.
And so, as we could have predicted, Amazon wrecks Comixology.
What has it been, less than a month since Jeff Bezos bought the most promising tool for renewing the mass distribution of comics in the digital era? I’ll give the man this: he’s moved faster to undermine an existing technology for the benefit of his own company than General Moantors did when it sabotaged Los Angeles’s public transit Red Line for the benefit of the bus fleet they wanted to sell the City of Angels. Job well done, Jeff.
My comics reading has gone through the goddamn roof thanks to Comixology. The convenience of having an entire comics store at my fingertips is a powerful thing for someone with poor impulse-control. Being able to buy and read a comic from the same app is beautiful and simple and is exactly why I spend way more time inside Comixology than say, Comic Zeal.
Splitting it into two experiences - buying a comic from the website, switching apps, downloading reading it in the Comixology app destroys this simplicity. It destroys what made Comixology so powerful. And to what end? To increase the profits on each individual sale at the expense of what I bet will be lower overall sales? It’s a giant shame to see a smart company be so short-sighted.
(Of course, I realise this whole thing is such a Western problem. You’d expect a lot of people’s monocles to fall into their tea over this issue. “You mean they changed it to make it harder for me to waste money with them?!”)
Last month, someone in the Netflix marketing department had an epiphany: House of Cards andCards Against Humanity both contain the word “cards.” When we got a phone call from Netflix, we enthusiastically agreed that the two products indeed contain the word “cards.”
You know how Cards Against Humanity works, right? It’s sort of like Apples to Apples. The black cards have sentences with blanks in them and the white cards have potential answers for those blanks. In the House of Cards set, the first black card says “I can’t believe Netflix is using to promote House of Cards.”
Having hauled 2,000+ DVDs to Italy and back again (and then, having hauled them across Dublin as we moved houses), I couldn’t face it again. It’s ridiculous, unnecessary work. I was carrying 20 boxes of discs whose digital information can, for the most part, be grabbed off Netflix. So I got rid of them. Went to the Dublin Flea Market and sold almost all of them.
But it’s not just the stress of moving and storing these things that bothered me. The plain fact is that physical discs, as a medium, are dying. The industry is moving towards digital distribution. Here in Dublin, HMV closed down at the beginning of the year. Since then, it’s become nearly impossible to find blu-ray discs for sale in any brick-and-mortar shop. Likewise, Xtravision have pretty much wound up its business in the Republic. Discs are dead.
And you know what? I’m mostly okay with this. Services like Netflix and iTunes Movies are the convenient future of entertainment in the home1. But my problem with digital distribution is that we’re returning to the VHS era. A situation where you only get the film, no “extras”. Even Apple, who offers sparse ‘iTunes extras’ on a handful of titles, can’t play these extras through their custom streaming device, the Apple TV. To me, this feels like we’ve gone back 30 years, to before Laserdisc was introduced.
My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films. I learned the technical stuff from books and magazines, and with the new technology you can watch entire movies accompanied by audio commentary from the director. You can learn more from John Sturges’ audio track on the ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school. Film school is a complete con, because the information is there if you want it.
Technically savvy directors who really want to record a commentary will find a way of getting one out out there. When Warner Bros decided against putting a commentary on the DVD of The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky released his own. Likewise, Rian Johnson released his own commentary for Looper when the film was still in cinemas. But these are the exceptions. How many filmmakers are going to voluntarily sit in a recording booth and talk for two hours? And if we’re moving to digital-only distribution, is there anyone even anyone asking directors to do this?
In a post-Vine world, where making a film is now just a matter of taking out your phone and pushing a goddamn button, a good source of knowledge and education about the process of filmmaking is more important than ever.
I don’t entirely agree with the price stucture of iTunes films – Futureworld is €17 to buy in HD. Fucking Futureworld?! – , but I’ve still bought a couple of films off them. Mostly to test out the service. ↩︎
For the most part, this list is unordered. It’s just a collection of games I really enjoyed playing, with no attempt to impose any sort of arrangement or ranking. With one massive exception. Gone Home is, by a huge margin, the best game I played in 2013. It’s a short game. An unfussy game. One where the story is genuinely affected by what you bring into it. It’s a story about a family and each member of that family. But you need to pay attention to things. Random notes, ticket stubs, receipts all tell the story of the family. It’s possible to finish the game without discovering any of this. Such clever, mature storytelling made me think that maybe game developers are finally ready to move beyond stories about space marines or zombies.
Last of Us
Which isn’t to say that stories about zombies should go away. They’re played out, for sure, but they’re not dead (sorry). When they’re done well, they can be sublime. The Last of Us is another perfect demonstration of great storytelling helping players overlook some wonky gameplay mechanics. It’s a small story told against a massive backdrop. And goes to show that we can empathise with a game character, and we don’t need to be with a character for 8 hours for their death to have emotional resonance.
GTA V
It doesn’t quite reach the dizzy heights of Red Dead Redemption (which could be my favourite game of the last console generation), and I’m a little disappinted they’ve lost (or, after Saint’s Row, abandoned) some of the biting satire of the earlier games, but this was the first GTA I’ve actually finished. That has to say something.
Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
Closely tied with Wind Waker for my favourite Zelda game of all time. A Link Between Worlds cleverly plays with our nostalgia for the franchise and the series’ own internal systems. It’s familiar and yet different.
Tomb Raider
Post-Uncharted, things clearly had to change for Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider franchise. So they toned down some of the more ridiculous aspects of the franchise and brought the grit (so much grit). It lost some of the charm and whimsy along the way, but it was another example of great, grown-up storytelling.
Rogue Legacy
Look at my steam stats and you’ll probably see that Rogue Legacy is the game I’ve played most this year. It’s a hardcore platformer – Castlevania crossed with a Dark Souls. But as crushingly painful and un-fun as that sounds, Rogue Legacy has a huge playful streak. Every time you die, you have to choose your next character, one of three children of your now-dead hero. And they all have their own traits. For example, one might be myopic, so everything far-away is blurred. Or one might suffer from flatulence, so every jump causes a little toot. You’ll choose a deliberately dodgy character just to collect a bit of money and see what your next heir will be like. Pulling yourself out of that “just one more go” cycle is tough.
Candy Box
Like Frog Fractions, Candy Box is about unexpected discovery. A simple text page slowly gives way to an entire RPG adventure told through ASCII. Our office lost an entire day of productivity to this game, as people got drawn into the strange things the players shouted at each other across the room. This was my favourite surprise of 2013.
Ridiculous Fishing
Another game with a surprising depth (Oh God, I swear that was not meant to be a pun. I’m so sorry), Ridiculous Fishing is actually three games in one. The first game sees you casting your lure, trying to avoid fish as it goes down. The moment your lure touches a fish, it stops descending and then you have to play a second game - touch as many fish as you can as your lure comes back up. Once they’re up, you need to blast them with your shotgun to score points. This was my favourite short-session game of 2013.
Papers Please
If there’s a common theme to the games on this list, it’s that the games I liked most in 2013 felt grown-up. In Papers Please, you’re a border guard for an eastern European country in the 1980s. You have to check the day’s rules to figure out who is allowed into your country. Your wages then go to paying rent or making sure your family don’t starve. The game isn’t “fun” in the traditional sense. And I’ve never been so stressed in a game. But it’s compelling in a deep, dark way.
The Stanley Parable
The Stanley Parable is a game about choice. Do you go through the red door or the blue door? When the game’s narrator (best narrator since Thomas Was Alone) is saying “Stanley went through the red door”, do you still go through the red door, or do you disobey the game? It’s also a game all about player agency. But better than that - it knows it’s about these things. It can poke fun at them. It’s always one step ahead of the player. There’s a glitch where you end up outside the map. I thought I’d broken the game, but the narrator kicked in with “So, you found a glitch. I bet you feel pretty proud of yourself.” It’s like a mystery box. Even writing about it now, I want to get back into it. To see exactly where its boundaries are.
Proteus
I feel weird putting Proteus on this list when I already have The Stanley Parable and Gone Home. People will accuse me of having a boner for the First Person Walker genre. But Proteus is something genuinely special and I wish more people would try it out. You don’t even have to “get” it, just try it. And I don’t mean “get” it intellectually – it’s about the passage of time and life and death, big whoop – I mean “get” it in an emotional way. And even the fact that I’m using words like ‘“get” it in an emotional way’ about a videogame should give you an idea of exactly why I love this game so much. Try it.
You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
One of the things that made Soulja Boy’s video review of Braid so fascinating (for me, at least) was that it showed a successful musician geeking out about something that nerds had almost taken for granted. We’d played this game. We knew it. On the other hand, Jay-Z’s lyrics are increasingly about extremely exclusive experiences ("Let’s get faded / Le Meurice for like 6 days"), but in the case of Soulja Boy and his Braid video, this was an experience that anyone with an Xbox could have.
Videogames used to be a great social democratiser. If you could afford a videogame, you would be getting the exact same experience as anyone else It didn’t matter how many albums you’d sold or how much money you had in the bank. The only experiential difference came down to your skill at the game.
The recent controversy surrounding microtransactions in Forza 5 makes me think we’ll be seeing the end of this. If I can’t afford to buy a particular car with real money in Forza, then I have to grind and grind until I amass enough in-game credits. According to some calculations, this could take anywhere up to a couple of years for some of the top-end cars.
And that’s what I find most troubling about microtransactions. They’re extending class structure to something that didn’t need one. Now, when I play a game, I’ll know I could always pay more and be playing a better version of the same game.
If you ask me, Penny Arcade is a brand in trouble. Financially, they’re doing well. Their three conferences draw huge crowds annually (although people are saying that’s not necessarily a positive thing), but critically, they’re facing a massive backlash for their handling of the whole “dickwolves” issue (which is far too long and complicated to get into here - read Rachel Edidin’s article on Wired if you want to be depressed).
So given that they’re already turning a lot of people against them, why did they think it would make sense to advertise a job like this?
It goes to show the importance of context. If Penny Arcade was a struggling startup, the ad would make a certain amount of sense. Almost every startup has had someone working a job like that (although maybe they’d be slightly ashamed and wouldn’t describe the role in such a humblebrag). And no-one would think twice about it. Except Penny Arcade aren’t a struggling startup. They’re a multi-million dollar corporation with fingers in lots of different pies. Besides the successful conferences I’ve already mentioned, they’ve got advertising, videogames, a “tv” show, books, merch. They’re not struggling for cash. And yet, they’re looking for a lynchpin of their entire infrastructure and they’re looking to pay them peanuts.
Of course, the response from the internet has been predictablysavage.
And know what I think is the worst part? They saw absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I get this feeling we’ll get a lot of interest for this job… (AN IT HIRE!) http://t.co/SiCjPTAQRJ
I realise this whole thing is of little relevance to anyone who reads this blog, but I just want to add my voice to say please, don’t anyone take this job. Even as a worst-case, there are thousands of other start-ups out there who have this exact same role with the exact same shitty remuneration, but at least you would go home knowing you weren’t being exploited by a misogynistic, tone-deaf conglomerate.
Hey there. I was just wondering if you could tell me your opinions on Jennifer Lawrence?Tony Alamo Christian Ministries: I have no idea who that is.
You know who Jennifer Lawrence is! She just won the Best Actress Oscar? She was the one who tripped on the stairs when she was going to get her award, and it was adorable? This is Tony Alamo Christian Ministries. This is a church.
You didn’t see the Oscars this year? Did you call us because you have nothing better to do? Let me just say, real quick, the Lord’s coming back. Very soon. And He’s not gonna ask you how many movies you saw or which celebrities you knew. He’s gonna ask you what you did for his son, Jesus. He died on the cross, and He did that just for you, and that’s what we preach.
**Wait, are you doing that thing where people pretend they don’t know what someone or something is to seem cool? Like, my friend is really cerebral and is into a bunch of obscure old music, and one time he claimed he didn’t know who the Spice Girls are. Which, obviously, is bullshit. ** Did you hear anything that I just said?
After he finished filming The Raven, Roger Corman decided that since he already had the large, gothic sets built, he could re-use them (and sets leftover from other films) to quickly knock together another film, The Terror. He effectively got two films for (roughly) the price of one.
With another console cycle just around the corner, we can expect a tidal wave of news stories about the rising cost of game development. “Now that everything is in super-high-res 4K HD, creating art assets costs more than the GDP of some European nations” they’ll probably say.
This is why I love what Ubisoft have done with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Rather than just scrapping all the work they did on Far Cry 3, or even just knocking together some boring DLC for extra multiplayer maps, they’re re-using the assets in a completely new and interesting way. A way I’m really excited to play.
Sophia Coppola and Kristen Sheridan have both got new movies out about a group of attractive young teenagers who break into the houses of rich people.
Dollhouse
The Bling Ring
Is there something to be read into this? Is this a subject that especially appeals to daughters of directors past their prime? Should we expect Jennifer Lynch to complete the trifecta? Or is this just one of those things, like A Bug’s Life and Antz landing at the same time? I don’t know. Do I care? No. I’m just killing time here.
“The next and much bigger piece [of the business] is microtransactions within games,” he revealed. “We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be, and consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of the business.”
It’s a shame, because the game itself could be great. It features some of the most impressive mobile graphics we’ve ever seen, the list of cars and courses is endless, and the way it integrates your friends’ lap times into your races for a pseudo-multiplayer experience makes it all the more immersive. The problem is that it all just feels so cheapened by the business model; while it’s possible to play the game a little each day without forking out money … the constant nagging for cash grates.
There’s a good game somewhere within Real Racing 3 - and there are plenty of free-to-play games that prove this model can work successfully while respecting the player. Firemonkeys, and perhaps more pertinently EA, have got that balance horribly, horribly wrong, to an extent where the business model becomes the game - with gut-wrenching results.
Peanut Gallery: A script that takes a start time and an end time and generates a subtitle file for your twitter stream (or a given hash tag), so you can watch a show or other live event with (time-shifted) real-time twitter commentary.
I woke up this morning to a twitter stream full of amazing Oscar commentary. For example, from the ever-reliable Zodiac Motherfucker:
@ZODIAC_MF GET MRS POTATO HEAD THE FUCK OUT OF HERE
By itself, this is a hilarious sentence, but who is he talking about? Without context, I’m missing something. Actually, for most of my twitter stream last night, I don’t know what people are referring to. I’d say the same thing happened for anyone who wasn’t watching the Sony PlayStation announcement. For certain shows and events, a snarky running commentary makes that show infinitely more entertaining.
I’ll probably watch the Oscars tonight – time-shifting a live event – and I’d love to be able to time-shift my twitter stream as well. I think a subtitle track for my media file would be the best way of doing this.
Unfortunately, I think this is the kind of thing Anil Dash was referring to in his essay The Web We Lost: I don’t think Twitter’s API allows this kind of usage. Shame.
I’m finding it impossible to deal with Far Cry 3 in its own terms. It’s much easier for me to talk about it in terms of games it’s not.
It’s not Far Cry 2, for example. Oh my God, Far Cry 2 hates the player. Never mind the respawning enemies making sure that every square inch of that game’s sprawling African savannah was actively hostile towards the player. And this was the least of your worries. More than once when I was playing that game, I found myself in the middle of a firefight when my gun would suddenly just fall apart in my hands (weapons ‘wear out’ in Far Cry 2), I’d panic and run away to consider my next move and that’s when my character would suffer a malaria attack (your character is infected with malaria at the start of Far Cry 2 and spends the rest of the game dealing with this). And then I’d die.
Far Cry 3 is not this. It’s much more forgiving. More hand-holding. Almost to a fault. Straying too far off the prescribed path (even during the tutorial) will result in a ‘mission failed’ screen. It’s not messing around. It doesn’t want you actually exploring the huge, open island without making sure you fully understand the mechanics and the context. As helpful and friendly as this is, I can’t help but feel like this is a step back. It takes fewer risks. It’s less dangerous. Much as I disliked the random bullshit in the previous Far Cry game, it was at least remarkable.
Speaking of exploring, Far Cry 3 is not Proteus or Misasmata. It’s not even Dear Esther. These are all island-based games that are very much about exploration. Proteus and Dear Esther are nothing but exploration. You get from it what you get. Miasmata has a story and a history for you to peel back, layer after layer. Your exploration is rewarded with a deeper understanding of the narrative. It’s like the designers took a look at Lost and thought “there’s a game there.”
Far Cry 3 is not that either. The game is set on a couple of huge, open islands with a long, varied history, but there’s actually very little to explore. Every hut on the island is the same. Every cave is the same. There are WWII-era gun emplacements. There are downed aircrafts. There are beached tankers. But these are all just eye-candy, not actually things that affect your game in any way. They don’t reveal anything about the story of Far Cry 3 or the history of the Rook Islands. I found one cabin with a body in a noose, but without any context for who this guy was or why he hung himself, it’s just a meaningless non-sequitur.
And this is the problem with Far Cry 3 - it’s an enjoyable romp, but it doesn’t have any aspirations to be anything new or original or even different. The entire plot is built on a series of tired Alice in Wonderland parallels (with a healthy dose of references to The Beach thrown in for good measure). And it could easily have been so much more. As well as his arsenal of heavy weapons, your character is also armed with a camera – a tool for exploration, for documenting things – and this could have been used in interesting ways; integrated into the gameplay somehow, but instead it’s only ever used to identify enemies before you kill them.
As much as I’m enjoying Far Cry 3, I can’t help thinking of it in terms of games it’s not because it’s just a very bland game done very well. And it could have been so much more, if it tried.
Over Christmas, we moved again. This time, into the house we bought1. One of the more useful things that falls out of the process of moving is that it gives you an opportunity to take account of your possessions. There’s nothing like packing everything you own into boxes and carting them off to another place to make you realise how much shit you own.
Well, somewhere around the 30th box or so, I had an epiphany. I have too much stuff.
“Duh, asshole. This isn’t news.”
No, you’re not listening to what I’m saying. I’m saying that my internal understanding – my mental self-image – suddenly went from “I have a lot of stuff” to “I have too much stuff”. As in, I could easily offload three-quarters of my DVD collection and not really feel the loss. Which is why I’m sort of glad that HMV is gone. As a nerd who loves movies and games, its disappearance leaves me with fewer places to buy these things in Dublin, fewer avenues of temptation. This is a perfect opening for me to re-evaluate my relationship with these things and how they come into my life. A lot has already changed.
Books: Kindle
My kindle has completely transformed my relationship with books. I also count this as the thing that completely turned me onto the idea of digital, rather than physical ownership of media. I realised that I had been fetishizing the form, not the content.
Comics: ComiXology
I haven’t bought a physical comic in at least a year now. Sorry, Forbidden Planet! Maybe if you weren’t missing volume 1 of every series I’d like to check out, y’know?
Games: Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, Wii U e-shop
I feel like, of everything listed here, games are the best represented in the digital market. Each platform has its own storefront (Steam isn’t official, but it is the de-facto standard on PC) and it’s only getting easier and cheaper to buy digital versions of things.
Movies: ?
And this takes me to the point of this post. Yesterday, Philips announced that they were exiting the consumer electronics market. This line jumped out for me:
“Since we have online entertainment, people do not buy Blu-ray and DVD players anymore,” Mr. Van Houten said.
I think this ties in with what I’m saying - there’s very little need to own physical copies of digital media. Consumers are realising this and HMV, having built the core of its market around selling DVDs and Blu-Rays, couldn’t adapt.
But I have a question about all this. People aren’t buying Blu-rays or DVDs any more. So what are they actually buying? Is the lack of a standard for downloaded video harming adoption/uptake, just like we saw when HD-DVD and Blu-ray were competing to see which would be the dominant format? Also, until there is a standard, should we expect the price of digital-only movie purchases to remain high?2
This is a whole other blog post, but holy fuck, we bought a house. ↩︎
Take Dredd for example (one of my favourite films of last year). On the US iTunes store, it’s $19.99 (€15) for the HD version of the movie plus the ‘iTunes Extras’, the iTunes versions of DVD extras. On the Irish store, it’s €17 for the movie by itself. I’m sure they’re waiting for more Irish people to be interested in buying movies from iTunes before adding features and dropping the price, but without dropping the price or adding these features, how do they expect to encourage this interest? ↩︎
I was watching one of those iconoclast shows on the Sundance Channel. Jamie Oliver said Paul Smith had told him something he hadn’t understood until very recently: “I’d rather be No. 2 forever than No. 1 for a while.” Just make stuff and don’t agonize over it. Stop worrying about being No. 1. I see a lot of people getting paralyzed by the response to their work, the imagined result. It’s like playing a Jedi mind trick on yourself, and Smith is right. That’s the way I’ve always approached films, the way I approach everything. Just make ’em.
A while ago, over the course of a couple of days, I came across two slogans that have stuck with me and have had a profound impact on my approach to my creative projects. First is from Facebook’s Analog Research Lab’s who have a poster saying “Done is Better Than Perfect”. The other is Brendan Dawes’ “Talk - Action = Shit”. Now, rather than being paralysed by the fear of the blank page and the fear of releasing anything that is less than perfect, I’m churning stuff out. There’s a lot of misses in there, but there are a few hits too.
This weekend, I’m doing something foolish. I’m taking part in the Hell and Back. It’s a 10k race up and down the Little Sugarloaf, with a few obstacles thrown in for good measure. There’s a lot to be scared of. Never mind the cold, I’ve also got to haul my fat ass over a 7 foot wall, and deliberately subject myself to an electric shock. And then there’s the very real possibility that I will injure myself, badly.
But the thing that’s really got me scared – the thing that’s actually keeping me up at night – is the fear of failure. Of not finishing the course at all. Or worse, coming dead last. This is scaring me more than serious bodily harm. I can handle physical pain. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t handle emotional pain.
Ze Frank has some comforting things to say about this. Especially this line:
Let me think about the people who I care about the most, and how when they fail or disappoint me… I still love them, I still give them chances, and I still see the best in them. Let me extend that generosity to myself.
If my wife did anything like this, if she even signed up for something like this, I would be so proud of her. If she came dead last – if it took her eight hours to finish the course and everyone else had gone home – I’d still be at the finish line, cheering for her like she’d just out-run Usain Bolt. Can I do the same for myself?
On second thought, maybe I should be watching clips from Rocky instead. Much less likely to make me cry.
And don’t give me any bollocks about objective vs subjective, or “yeah, well, y’know that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” It’s true. More than any other entertainment industry, videogame writing is dominated by churnalism – press releases repackaged as news or editorial. Most videogame writers could be replaced by a Markov Engine and I doubt many people would notice the difference.
Remember what I was saying about digital entropy? I didn’t want that to happen to this writing. It’s too precious to allow it to crumble away to nothing.
So I made a book of it.
I took all Rab’s original Lost Humanity articles – screenshots and all – and some of the post-kerfuffle articles that were written on other sites and dumped them into LaTeX using Zed Shaw’s learn-x-the-hard-way as a basic template. I added an index. I wrote a little introduction (I don’t know why). From all this, I generated a PDF, which I sent across to lulu.com. And for less than the price of a decent cocktail, I had a hard-copy of some of my favourite game writing.
I’m really happy with the way this turned out and it’s something I can see myself doing a lot in the future. Or at least, I could see myself doing it a lot in the future if I can sort out my LaTeX workflow. I haven’t found a decent/reliable tool for dumping HTML/XML to LaTeX, so it takes a good bit of manual futzing to get it to a print-ready state. There’s also Blackstrap, which will generate a book of your Instapaper/Pocket queue, which seems like it’s scratching a similar itch.
Reading (or is it re-reading? I can’t even remember if I ever finished it) Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and, being someone who works with computers for a living, I keep catching myself using it as an analogy for how I respond to computers and computer maintenance. It’s like I’m doing a mental search-and-replace as I read the book – “s/motorcycle/computer/g”.
This piece, in particular, grabbed me
A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different.
Macs aren’t renowned for their customizability. In fact, it’s part of what I love about them. With a Linux/Unix machine, it’s possible to spend your entire time tweaking your system and not actually get any work done. Macs are limited in this regard, each one is pretty much alike, so the operating system effectively disappears and there’s almost no friction between you and your work.
All the same, I have still managed to modify my MacBook (through a combination of Moom, Alfred and Keyboard Maestro) to the point where someone using my computer will eventually go “whoa” and back away from the keyboard. But it makes total sense to me. It’s the way I work. The same as yours, but different.
When the Dublin Port Tunnel opened, they inaugurated it with a 10k fun-run. 5k up one tunnel, 5k back the other one. I did this for a laugh. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go for a run somewhere that was built to be un-runnable. And I wasn’t in awful shape when I did it. I could comfortably run about four or five kilometers without taking a break. You know, not bad for an enormous fatass.
When you come out of the tunnel, you’re just in the middle of nowhere1 on the M1. There’s nothing to see. But when I came out, there were people on the bridge above the motorway. People just came out on a cold, bleary day to cheer a bunch of people they didn’t know. They even hung a banner - “YOU CAN DO IT”.
That broke me. I started welling up and completely lost my stride. And that’s because I am a complete sucker for this kind of thing. I think it taps into something deep inside my lizard-brain. Some really basic emotions. These people could have stayed at home in their nice, comfy houses, with their feet up. But instead, they came out in the cold to cheer a load of out-of-shape people they didn’t know, just to tell them they could do it. That was strangely powerful.
Whoever is doing the copywriting for Nike is doing a great job of tapping into that same feeling. I’m struggling to get into shape (or rather, a shape that isn’t “round”) and I’m watching this ad almost daily. It’s cynical emotional manipulation by a heartless corporation, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a little bit beautiful too.
And then there’s this. Who wrote this? Most companies would be happy to leave it to the app’s programmer to write something insipid and bland like “You beat your previous record”. Because let’s face it, running 7.19km isn’t really an achievement for most people. It doesn’t need any extra effort or thought. But for me (and people like me), it was huge. It was epic. And I just love the fact that they use epic language to describe it.
Thanks, anonymous Nike copywriter.
Technically, you’re between Santry and Coolock. Which is a synonym for “the middle of nowhere”. ↩︎
I already talked about my favourite films of 2012. So now it’s time to talk about my favourite games of 2012.
FTL
FTL is a deceptively simple game. You make your way across the galaxy, dealing with emergencies that come up. But it’s less frantic than it sounds. The game is rarely frantic. Any time you lose, it’s not because you weren’t fast enough to click on something, it’s because you made a bad strategic decision ten or twenty turns back. The best Star Trek game never made.
Dishonored
Just in terms of world-building, this game deserves some serious credit. The story was pretty disposable – a dystopian world, there’s a rebellion, you’re its last hope, nothing you haven’t seen before – but the depth of the world was incredible. Each character had a fleshed-out back-story, whether you interacted with them or not. And the game does nothing to force this on you. A lesser game would say WE PAID WRITERS A FORTUNE FOR THIS SHIT, SO WE’RE GOING TO MAKE SURE EVERYONE HEARS IT. Not Dishonored. Bless them.
Super Hexagon
Remember when I said that I’m not particularly good at games, but muddle my way through anyway? Super Hexagon is the perfect example of this. I’ve sunk a worrying amount of time into it and still haven’t beaten it on its third difficulty level (of six). But that’s okay, because I can feel myself getting better at the game, even if it’s only in millisecond increments. It’s the only game on the front screen on my iPhone. That says something, right?
Journey
Journey gave me a completely unique experience. As you make your way through the game’s dreamlike environment, your game may or may not intersect with the games of other people. You can’t touch these people or interfere with them. The only thing you can do is to “chirrup” at them – a little sound, with a symbol appearing over your head. Each player’s symbol is unique, like a fingerprint. You don’t know who these people are and the only way to identify them is with this symbol. You could play through the game and intersect with lots of other players dropping in and out of your game. Or you could play through the game with one other person.
That’s what I did. I played through the entire game with one other person. Completely organically, we developed a way to communicate with each other through these chirrups. We’d fly around the levels and make different noises to say different things, like “over here!” or “where are you?”. We’d show each other cool things we found in the level. It was lovely. The last level is a cold, snowy mountain. As we made our way towards the peak, the cold started to affect our characters. We couldn’t chirrup as loudly any more. It was harder to stay together, with the wind blowing us around. We had to huddle together to keep our energy from completely disappearing. And even though we couldn’t communicate with chirrups any more, we didn’t need to. What we had to do was obvious. We had to stay together. That was all. Right at the end, you have to make it across a narrow ledge with the wind trying to blow you off. At the very last moments, before the turn into “safety”, I made it. I turned around, but my friend hadn’t. He’d been blown off.
I couldn’t believe it. I was distraught. I put the controller down, not knowing what to do. I waited there for fifteen minutes and he never came back. He was gone. That last part of the journey was the saddest thing I’ve ever experienced in a game. During the game’s credits, you are shown the symbols of each of the players you encountered and their PlayStation username. I messaged that guy straight away. I can’t imagine another game invoking a real, human-level connection with another person quite as well.
Mark of the Ninja
This was the most perfectly-judged game I played this year. The stealth mechanic was spot-on and actually meant that there was a sense of being a “ninja” (as opposed to most other games, where “ninja” means “guy with a sharp sword and throwing-stars”). I finished this game over the course of two sessions and immediately started a new game, on the newly-unlocked difficulty level, where your character has his field-of-vision limited to what’s in front of him. Oh wait, did I say “perfectly-judged”? Fuck those dogs.
In the fiction of the Halo universe, Master Chief is a supreme badass. Look at him in that trailer there, taking on twenty-foot tall space monsters like he hasn’t got a care in the world. Look at the way he moves, stringing together action after action after action. It’s balletic. Brutal, but graceful.
When I play the game, Master Chief is a braindead meatbag who is more likely to die in the first five minutes by throwing a grenade at his own feet because the person controlling him is trying to figure out what each button does. The kind of idiot who jumps into a firefight with one bullet in the clip, so he spends the next 10 seconds getting riddled with bullets as he stands there, reloading. He’s a moron whose neck muscles are made of jelly, so he spends almost the entire game looking either straight up or straight down.
I’ve accepted that I’m not great at certain games. Most games, to be honest. I’m okay with this. I muddle through. I’ll die a lot and eventually limp across the finish line. My death-count in VVVVVV stands in the couple-hundreds, but this is fine, because I’m getting through the game at my own pace. This is how I get my money’s worth.
Except with Halo, this approach seems wrong, like it’s missing the point. The main character, Master Chief, is not supposed to be the kind of person who just “muddles through”. I realise how stupid and overwrought this sounds, but I don’t feel like I’m doing justice to the character. The Halo story I’m playing out is wrong: my Master Chief doesn’t deserve any awe or respect.
And this is why it takes me months to finish an 8-hour game of Halo.
I have no battlefield tactics and poor muscle co-ordination and I get twitchy when I’m nervous, so I tend to accidentally hit R3 a lot (binocular view) and will suddenly find myself zoomed into the nose of the enemy standing not two feet from me. It then takes me five seconds to remember what button I’m supposed to hit to get me out of binocular view, by which time I’m probably dead. ↩︎
Are you fucking kidding me? I spent my entire life avoiding this film, thinking it would be a big, bloated mess, only good for background noise during your post-Christmas dinner nap. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was mesmerized by this film.
If you’d have told me that David O. Russell would give us us one of sweetest, most tender depictions of depression and mental illness I can remember seeing, I would have called you a fucking jackass. But that’s exactly what he did.
Balls to the haters, this was fun. When I went to see it, I was one of only three men in a crowded screening. That was one of the most hilarious cinema experiences I’ve ever had and I thank Magic Mike for giving me that.
This is my blog and I’ll lump these two in together if I want to. They had similar setups, but as action films go, they both did great jobs of scratching totally different itches. And they were the two best action movies I saw all year.
A lot of documentaries this year didn’t seem to have anything to say and were content to just be a collection of unconnected vignettes (Queen of Versailles, for example, has no through-line, the makers just happened to be in the right place at the right time). Indie Game: The Movie did a great job of shining a light on the vast wealth of human emotions that go into something as apparently frivolous as an independent video game.
I picked up a Nike+ FuelBand in San Francisco a couple of months ago. It’s a nice piece of kit. On the wrist, it’s comfortable and, more importantly, unobtrusive. In black at least, it looks just like a charity wristband, so hardly anyone even notices it. The tiny little light-up display is both adorable and looks futuristic as fuck.
But I have a couple of minor problems with it.
What the fuck is Nike+ Fuel? I’ve set a daily goal of 2,0001, but what does that actually mean? Is 2,000 a little or a lot? If I’m using this as a way to track my activity or to lose weight, I’d love to know exactly what this is supposed to represent2.
This isn’t FuelBand-specific, and is more a problem with all phone peripherals, such as the Jawbone Up: If your peripheral has shitty battery life (the FuelBand gets less than a week per charge), can you not figure out some way to charge the peripheral off my phone? I’ve already have three things charging beside my bed each night, so if it’s between your stupid peripheral and my Kindle or my phone, you’re not going to win. Even some sort of pass-through between the phone charger and the phone that would siphon off enough to charge the peripheral would work for me.
Overall, it’s not bad. It would never replace my Nike+ app on my phone (I’ve logged 1,493kms run - I am locked in), but it’s a great supplement to it.
Sub-problem: how am I supposed to refer to these units? “Nike+ Fuel Units”? That’s a bit of a mouthful, no? ↩︎
This is like the problem when buying things off Xbox Live - the currency is “Xbox Points”, which doesn’t translate easily to euros, dollars or pounds. They’re obfuscating how much you’re spending. Why would Nike obfuscate the amount of exercise you’re doing? ↩︎
An interesting side effect, which I hadn’t anticipated, was that I developed a blind trust in the things I used. I trusted my lamp to be bright enough to light up the wheel well of a truck when its tire went flat, and it was. I trusted my wallet to hold cash, boarding passes, and IDs without deforming or falling apart, and it did. I trusted that my towel would dry quickly, because it was designed for travel, and it did. I trusted the zippers on my backpack to stay closed as I hiked through the night, and they did. These might seem like stupid things to worry about, but when you have trust in everything you own, you don’t have to worry about anything. It’s liberating and an amazing feeling. My life was markedly better because of it.
I’ve got a bit of a bag problem. By this, I mean that I seem to accumulate bags, because I have this wild, irrational fear of not having the correct bag for any given situation.
(Look, I already acknowledged it was wild and irrational. Shut up.)
For Christmas last year, my wife got me a GoRuck GR1. It is, hands down, the best bag I’ve ever owned. It’s the perfect size for a weekend away. It’s the perfect size for carry-on luggage on an airplane. I’ve used it in the worst weather Ireland can throw at it and it’s never once leaked or even gotten soggy. When I had my bike accident, the bag completely protected my MacBook Pro. Again, the best bag I’ve ever owned.
And I haven’t bought another bag since I got it because I haven’t needed another bag.
So I totally understand what Dustin Curtis is saying. It’s always worth doing your research and spending a little extra money, if necessary, to make sure you get the best.
Elisabeth Rosenthal has a piece in the New York Times Sunday Review about whether helmets should be worn when cycling. Her argument is that, yes, helmets probably save lives1 but making them mandatory actually discourages people from cycling.
Recent experience suggests that if a city wants bike-sharing to really take off, it may have to allow and accept helmet-free riding. A two-year-old bike-sharing program in Melbourne, Australia — where helmet use in mandatory — has only about 150 rides a day, despite the fact that Melbourne is flat, with broad roads and a temperate climate. On the other hand, helmet-lax Dublin — cold, cobbled and hilly — has more than 5,000 daily rides in its young bike-sharing scheme. Mexico City recently repealed a mandatory helmet law to get a bike-sharing scheme off the ground. But here in the United States, the politics are tricky.
Last year, I had the worst bike accident of my life. I was coming from the north side of the city. As I came around the corner of the Matt Talbot bridge - at a point where two cycle lanes cross over each other in the middle of a pedestrian crossing - when another cyclist on a Dublin Bike was coming the other way. We both saw each other too late and we both swerved in the same direction.
I landed on my head, lost consciousness for a few minutes and was taken to hospital in an ambulance.
There were two things I realised. First is that I don’t think cycling helmets should be mandatory, but for my style of cycling, which I would call “assertive” rather than “aggressive”, I probably should wear one. The other thing I realised is that people on Dublin Bikes are, generally, awful and dangerous cyclists. They have no idea of the rules of the road. No concept of spacial awareness. They’re oblivious to other road-users (and especially, other cyclists). What I have observed myself is that their first use of a Dublin Bike is usually the first time they’ve been on a bike in a few years, so they’re a bit wobbly and nervous. And then, after about fifteen minutes, they remember how much fun cycling is and they start cycling like lunatics. And that’s when you have to watch out for them. Because they are the heaviest bikes on the road and an accident with them will fuck you up.
Believe me. They will fuck you up.
So, speaking as a cyclist, I guess my point is that I think bicycle helmets shouldn’t be mandatory. Regardless of what I just said about the majority of Dublin Bike users, I think the Dublin Bike scheme is a terrific asset to the city and I also believe that it would get no use if people were forced to buy and use a helmet before using one of the bikes. I think that the decision should be left to the individual cyclist, that people should wear a helmet if they feel like they need it.
Although she seems to suggest the life-saving benefits of helmets are largely apocryphal ↩︎
Floss at least once every day; buy the nice kind that doesn’t chop your fingers up. If you’re wearing a jacket, you probably need both a pocket square and a tie. You don’t need more than one computer anymore. Build a fire pit in your backyard at all costs. Sync everything. Try to strike up friendly conversations with every driver who calls you a cunt. Splurge on a cell phone with a data plan; if you already have one, splurge on a solid state drive; if you have both, you don’t need anything else.
I usually hate flashmobs. I even hate the idea of them. I think they’re usually selfish things, usually at someone’s expense (c.f. Improv Everywhere’s “Best Gig Ever”). But this was genuinely sweet. And I love that random strangers have chipped in over $40,000 to put this kid through college.
An Invocation for Beginnings
I’m so glad Ze Frank is back, because the world needs more disarmingly sincere people who rarely blink. The sentiment at 1:09 is just beautiful.
Over the weekend, while my wife was away, I came up with a few dumb ideas for things to keep me busy. One was an iPhone app that’s maybe a little too PG-13 for this blog - let’s just say it involved dicks and iPhone pictures thereof. The other was a twitter bot that would reply whenever someone tweeted one of the main lyrics from Ice Cube’s Today was a Good Day. You tweet “Didn’t have to use my AK”, it would reply and say “@foo didn’t have to use his AK. Today was a good day”. I spent about an hour writing it and launched it on Monday night.
I guess some people didn’t get the joke (although I was amazed at the amount of retweets and favourites it got), because the account was suspended today.
This is my first time seeing the Twitter “account suspended” page and I’m amazed. I’m amazed at how stern it is. I’m amazed that there’s nothing you can do about the fact your account has been suspended except tick the two checkboxes which say “I promise I’ll be good from now on”. I’m amazed there’s no contact details if you want to appeal this decision. But mostly, I’m just amazed there’s no option to say “Fuck it, this joke isn’t worth it - delete this account”.
Lou: You gonna order something, kid? Marty McFly: Ah, yeah… Give me - Give me a Tab. Lou: Tab? I can’t give you a tab unless you order something. Marty McFly: All right, give me a Pepsi Free. Lou: You want a Pepsi, PAL, you’re gonna pay for it.
Kids today watching Back to the Future would be just as confused as Lou. What the fuck is a Tab? What the fuck is Pepsi Free?
You’re not into physical media? I’m with you. It’ll be on iTunes soon. See? The store page lists the release date. March 6. You can circle it on the calendar and everything.
You’re still frowning. What’s wrong, Scrumpkin?
Oh. You want it right now.
But — umm — the release date is only, like, two or three weeks away. Just hang on a bit. You’ll be fine.
Yes, I heard you (please, sir, there’s really no need to shout). I understand that you want it (and I hope I’m not misquoting you) right the ****ity-**** NOWWWWWWWW. But you can’t have it now. You can have it on March 6. It isn’t even as far away as you think. Remember? February is the super-short month?
(Sigh)
You’re already torrenting it, aren’t you?
Annnnd now you’re also calling me a d*** because I expected you to wait two weeks, and you’re claiming that you’re “forced” to torrent it because the video industry is bunch of turds. How charming.
I wish everyone would read Andy Ihnatko’s post before banging out their own incoherent, self-entitled posts on how the entertainment industry is leaving them with no choice to but pirate TV shows. Even MG Siegler – usually a super-smart guy and a great writer – wrote a post titled “Help! I’m Being Forced To Pirate Game Of Thrones Against My Will!”.
Seriously?
These guys should try living in Europe for a while, where HBO is a distant dream, the selection of shows and films on iTunes seems to be a cruel joke and where Netflix only just launched. I pirate my TV shows too, but only because I have issues with delayed gratification. I’m okay with that, and I don’t try to blame anyone but myself.
With no characters to interact with, no enemies to fight, no puzzles to solve, no way to manipulate the environment around you, Dear Esther is guaranteed to spark a thousand hand-wringing debates about what a game actually is. Can a game have none of the elements listed above and still call itself a game? Or is it enough to provide an experience to the player? Come to think of it, if you’re not “playing”, what do you call it?
I guess you could call it exploration. Dear Esther is great at exploration. You explore an uninhabited island, with its beautifully rendered landscapes and scattered clues to the people who once lived there. You explore the story (or stories) being told by the disembodied narrator. You explore the nature of gameplay.
More than anything, though, Dear Esther is about atmosphere. The story being told, the tone of the narration, the haunting soundtrack, the gorgeous visuals. These all add up to a singular atmosphere of loneliness and desolation. The creators have said they were influenced by Tarkovsky’s Stalker – a film that is more about creating an atmosphere than telling a compelling story.
But, although it tries, it can’t escape its game roots. Dear Esther is built with “Source” engine, the same one that powers Half Life 2, and so it’s necessarily constrained in the scope of its ability to tell a story and build the atmosphere it is going for, in much the same way as a book is bound by the constraints of having to tell its story through the medium of static print. As a result, its game-like artifacts are completely out of place in such an anti-game. To prevent you going too far off the prescribed path, Dear Esther uses conventions like invisible walls and insta-death points. Arbitrary rules that people often expect and that sometimes even make sense in a traditional “game”. In something like this, though, they shatter the illusion and the atmosphere.
As a game (if that’s what you decide to call it), Dear Esther a failure. As a story, it falls similarly flat, drip-feeding the brunt of the story through the same kind of cack-handed, painfully oblique passages as we saw in Braid.
One of the unfortunate effects of living in another country for almost five years is that you have to almost completely rebuild your knowledge of your home city. Specifically, I find that I need to find out where the best bars and restaurants are (because, honestly, there’s only so much Crackbird a man can handle).
I guess it’s just a fundamental problem with crowdsourcing. Rather than helping the cream rise to the top, the noise generated by these sites actively drowns out useful information, making them useless. Even large sites like Amazon suffer from the same problem. I recently tried to buy a wireless access point for work. I checked out a few tech blogs and read reviews of some products. I finally settled on a Cisco product and went to Amazon to order it. Despite the almost entirely favorable reviews I’d read, the access point had only two and a half stars on Amazon. Turns out this was based on two reviews, the first of which was a one-star review with the person saying he’d had a problem with the technical support for another Cisco product. The other review was from Cisco themselves, giving the product five stars. The text of their “review” was “if you have an issue with a product, please email us at $blah”. Both reviews were useless and, if I’d been basing my purchase on the overall score of the product, I would have walked away.
More useful than the hours I’ve spent trawling Yelp and Menupages has been the one post I put up on Facebook, asking my friends where they’d recommend for places to eat. This way, I’ve immediately got context for each one of the places that have been recommended - this friend has impeccable taste, so I’ll try their recommendation first etc. It’s a similar reason why I trust Brian Lam’s The Wire Cutter over the countless aggregation sites, or anything that relies on the average score of a large group of people to recommend technology. A sufficiently well-curated site run by a single person can still trump the wider internet.
I’ve been cycling in and out of town almost every day since July. A half-hour in, against the wind. A half hour back, uphill almost the whole way. My entire attitude towards cycling has changed. It’s not just simple transport any more. It’s war. War against myself. War against taxi drivers. War against Dublin weather.
Which is why I love Velominati’s Rules of cycling etiquette. Okay, some are a little fetishistic about the bike itself, which is a little creepy. But this one in particular caught my eye.
Rule #9 / If you are out riding in bad weather, it means you are a badass. Period.
Fair-weather riding is a luxury reserved for Sunday afternoons and wide boulevards. Those who ride in foul weather – be it cold, wet, or inordinately hot – are members of a special club of riders who, on the morning of a big ride, pull back the curtain to check the weather and, upon seeing rain falling from the skies, allow a wry smile to spread across their face. This is a rider who loves the work.
I cycled through ‘monster rain’, down a road where a previously-underground river suddenly became an overground river. Cycling in rain doesn’t bother me any more. With a change of clothes and a radiator, you can cycle through anything.
I also love Rule 12 - “The correct number of bikes to own is n+1.”
While the minimum number of bikes one should own is three, the correct number is n+1, where n is the number of bikes currently owned. This equation may also be re-written as s-1, where s is the number of bikes owned that would result in separation from your partner.
Although, in my case, you could replace the word “bikes” in the previous paragraph with “board games”.
In a recent interview with The Nerdist podcast, J.J. Abrams (who, incidentally, comes across as an incredibly friendly and yet completely joyless person) suggested that cinemas wouldn’t suffer the same level of decline as traditional book and record shops. His reasoning? He reckons the experience of going to the cinema can’t be properly reproduced, even by the most tricked-out and elaborate TV and surround-sound setups. For him, the collective experience of watching a film in the dark with a group of strangers is so singular that it will always have a place in our lives.
I’m not sure I buy it. This year alone, I had two wildly differing experiences at the cinema that make me question what he’s saying.
First, there was Rise of the Planet of the Apes. At the dramatic high-point point of the movie, the moment at which – spoiler alert! – an ape speaks for the first time, the audience started tittering. This is supposed to be a powerful scene, but let’s face it: it’s a fucking ape talking, so it’s also a little silly. I don’t really blame the audience for laughing. At the same time, this didn’t stop it from completely breaking the illusion and tearing me out of the film. It made me feel stupid for having been so caught up in the movie that I was fully buying it before the laughter made me realise I was invested in a fucking ape talking. If I’m honest, I still resent that audience for doing that to me. If I had been watching it at home, I’d probably have fonder memories of that film.
A few weeks later, I went along to Melancholia, an incredibly powerful movie that I still haven’t fully processed, even months after seeing it. For the most part, this is a small, personal film. It’s a glimpse at someone suffering from depression. The film feels so voyeuristic that projecting it twenty feet tall seems sort of wrong. Maybe that’s also part of the “message” of that film (haven’t worked this out yet - like I said, still processing it). But the film is book-ended by beautiful shots that completely justify being shown on a huge screen, and where the soundtrack deserves an amazing sound-system. The bombastic final shot deserves to be experienced as part of an audience, as people start looking around at each other, slightly dazed and giving each other a full-on Keanu “Whoa”. For me, the ending makes me incredibly happy, almost boastful, that I saw that film in the cinema. No matter what way you cut it, it just wouldn’t have been the same at home. In fact, I think the whole film will be less powerful outside of the cinema.
These are the outliers, though; the most extreme examples of my recent experiences of watching a film with an audience. But for most people, the average cinema-going experience – and I’d question how “average” J.J. Abrams’ cinema-going experiences are these days – ranges from “dreadful” to ‘OH MY FUCKING CHRIST, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!’. Talking, rustling, texting, irresponsible parenting: all of these things appear to be accepted, almost expected parts of a trip to the cinema. As much a cost of entry as the extortionate ticket price. I’d argue that this is one of the main reasons cinema attendance is down 20% compared to last year. People are staying home to watch their movies.
Let’s face facts. Part of the reason for the decline of high-street book and music shops, particularly the larger franchise-type shops, is that the experience of using these shops became so impersonal and unfriendly – in some cases, downright hostile – towards the customers, that people were willing to trade the tangible benefits of the traditional shopping experience for one they can control. Online shopping is often impersonal and unfriendly (although rarely hostile), but it at least has the added benefit of being convenient. What it lacks in humanity, it makes up for in choice. And price. With cinema, we’re seeing the same thing - people are willing to sacrifice the singular experience of seeing a film with an audience for a slightly more mundane experience they control.
First, this is just awful. The Awl usually has a fairly high standard for its articles, but this is a hot mess. When it isn’t rambling to the point of incoherency, it’s just plain wrong. For example, the first line of the second paragraph, where the author launches into the actual thesis:
The widespread admiration for Apple’s design ethos is in two parts: one functional, the other aesthetic.
Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance
(Although I don’t think anyone who feels like dropping a bit of irrelevant trivia about John Ruskin into an article about Apple’s design philosophy can legitimately invoke the ‘fear of being thought pretentious’ defence.)
Secondly, I don’t know if this is happening to anyone else, but I’m getting this thing where a flash ad for the Chevy Volt is actually hijacking my entire browser session, reloading the entire article in an iframe on the Chevy site. This completely breaks Instapaper and means you can’t send someone the URL without giving the Chevy site an extra hit. Earlier this week, Brent Simmons wrote a terrific article about how certain publications have become almost hostile towards their readers with the amount of intrusive ads on their pages. It’s genuinely disappointing to see The Awl going down the same road.
A while ago, I wrote about the poetry of Twitter spam, where a particular spam-bot was generating an odd series of tweets that, strung together, looked like bad teenage poetry.
That was two years ago. Technology has advanced. Neven Mrgan points to @horse_ebooks as an example of how Twitter spam-bots are now producing profoundly entertaining non-sequiturs that could be some of the most entertaining stuff found on the internet. In fact, some of these are so perfectly crafted I’m having trouble believing that it isn’t actually a person pretending to be a spam-bot.
“1 2 You can use the power of your mind to find a shiny, cool car hidden in a paper bag. Your incredible mental powers”
“The difficulty of seeing with very large instruments”
“It s a FACT - Most Doctors, Nutrition Experts , Celebrity Chefs and Best Selling Authors are DEAD”
I’m wondering what linking to a known spam account will do for what little Google-juice I have - whether Google is going to push me further down its search listings. But honestly, I’ve enjoyed these tweets so much, I don’t care. It’s totally worth it.
Last night, I saw my hundredth movie of 2011 - Paddy Considine’s amazing directorial debut, Tyrannosaur. I know this was my hundredth because I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of all the movies I’ve watched this year, like some kind of weird, compulsive, anal-retentive nerd.
I don’t know why I started keeping a spreadsheet in the first place - it doesn’t inform my choice of movies or anything. I’ll still sit down and watch a piece of shit movie knowing it’ll end up in the spreadsheet, like a permanent black mark against my better judgement.
Anyway, some statistics:
100 movies in what? 41 weeks? Averaging out to 2.44 movies per week.
I give six movies the highest score of “5” - The Arbor, Serpico, LA Confidential, My Neighbour Totoro, Bronson, Tyrannosaur.
I gave seven movies the lowest score of “1” - Tron Legacy, Warhammer 40k, The Black Dahlia, The Fast and the Furious, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Battle for Planet of the Apes, Conan the Barbarian (remake).
The average score across all one hundred movies is 2.96. Which feels a lot higher than it should be, given the amount of absolute shite I’ve been watching.
Anyway, if you’d like to see the spreadsheet, knock yourself out. But don’t you judge me. DON’T YOU JUDGE ME.
Personally, I thought the whole thing was amazing. I love that they had the balls to say “We’re the fucking Onion, let’s fuck with peoples’ heads.” The whole thing reminded me of the stuff Chris Morris used to do on The Day Today. Like the time John Major punched the Queen. And sure, it took my mother two full episodes of The Day Today before she realised it was satire, but then she loved it.
I guess the internet is just slower to spot satire than my sixty-something-year old mother. Want proof? Check out Literally Unbelievable, which documents people posting Onion stories to their Facebook as if they were true.
Then again, you’ve got sites like Onion-like headlines in real life, which shows that the line between reality and satire is sometimes very hard to make out. Still, there’s a real simple test here, internet: if you see “The Onion” credited anywhere on a news story – either in the URL or the twitter name – chances are, it’s not real.
Is tumblr really holding a user’s personal account hostage to extort him into shutting down his service / competing UI? I cannot believe this.
For those of you who don’t know, “missing e” is a great browser extension for tumblr. It’s a browser add-on for firefox/chrome/safari with an updated user interface that makes doing some things on tumblr easier. (ie, I can edit posts on my blogs from the permalink page, set reblogs to default to my reblog instead of my main/art blog, etc). Some features (such as keeping tags on reblogs) have even been adopted as ‘real’ tumblr features.
Then tumblr called Jeremy Cutler, the creator of “missing e” and asked him to stop distributing it, because they said it was violating the API agreement, hurting their business structure (by allowing users to hide the radar/ads) and ‘page-scraping’ which put a big load on their servers.
So he took missing-e down, and fixed all of those problems. Missing-e no longer hides the radar, no longer scrapes pages, and no longer uses the API at all. In fact, it doesn’t even interact with tumblr— everything it does happens once tumblr is already loaded in your browser, between your browser and you.
But apparently that wasn’t good enough. Because the page-scraping and API reasons weren’t tumblr’s real/only reasons— they didn’t like the UI changes missing-e implemented.
Moments ago, I participated in surprise conference call with Tumblr staff members. They have indicated to me that they continue to take issue with Missing e even with the removal of usage of the Tumblr API. … That’s their prerogative, I’m sure.
Whether or not I have grounds to justly disagree with them on this, the fact remains that under the Tumblr Terms of Service, they are well within their rights to delete my Tumblr blogs as a punitive action should I continue to distribute the extension. They have informed me that this is the course of action they will take should I not acquiesce to their demands.
So, tumblr is threatening to delete his PERSONAL BLOG if he doesn’t meet their (unrelated to his personal blog) demands?
Tumblr staff— I know you and you’re all smart, good people— is there a word for when you can’t get someone to do what you want, so you threaten to damage them personally in an unrelated way?
Are you really holding users’ accounts hostage because you don’t like the things that the things they build are popular with your users?
ex·tor·tion/ikˈstôrSHən/
Noun: The practice of obtaining something through threats.
If you want to bring a cease-and-desist against missing-e, that’s your right. (And I suppose if you had a case, that’s what you would do.) But instead you’re threatening to delete a user’s personal account unless they remove a BROWSER add-on that doesn’t interact with your service and that thousands of your users love, because you don’t like its features?
Lots of people make lots of browser extensions for lots of sites, from youtube to facebook to everything else. The problem here seems to be that Jeremy’s extension is very popular. Wouldn’t the correct course of action be to, I don’t know, hire him?
Now, it’s true— I don’t have your side of the story. But that’s because tumblr hasn’t said anything publicly about this issue.
So please— you’re all intelligent, good people—** I would love to hear your side of this**.
Because given the positive experiences I’ve had with all of you, what I’m hearing just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Is that how these things are supposed to start? “Dear Company”? This is my first time writing to a large, faceless corporation, so I’m not really sure of what the protocol is.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing is that I love Nike+. Like, a lot. Since I got my iPhone late October last year, I’ve run almost 450km, which is great when you consider what a lazy cunt I am. Truth is, I never could have done it without Nike+.
Seriously, there’s something about watching that number go up and up that really works. Even though I run the same route every day and my GPS signal is so shitty that Nike+ often tells me I’m finished when I know there’s still a whole kilometre to go, it still works. It’s part of its charm. Oh, Nike+, have you got a little lost? That’s so you.
The other things that work are the occasional voice congratulations. Lance Armstrong telling I’ve just run a new personal best for the mile. Paula Radcliffe telling me I’ve just run the furthest I’ve ever run. The minute I hear these things, no matter how tired I am, I just want to get right back out there and see if I can beat my time again.
Even Tracy Morgan works pretty well. It took some getting used to, but it’s just nice to hear him act like he gives a shit that I just run three days in a row, or more times this week than I did last. “I’m proud of you”, he says. I don’t believe him, but it’s still something nice to hear.
Tonight, I got this: “Hi, I’m Dirk Nowitski… and… I just found out that you just got a run in? Awesome job!”
Did you just put a mic in front of this kid and ask him to freestyle the first things that came into his head? It sounds like totally he’s winging this shit. Honestly, his “I just found out that you got a run in” is a question, like he’s not sure if he heard the studio engineer right and so he’s guessing what he’s supposed to be saying.
On the other hand though, if you’ve given Dirk Nowitski a pager or something that sends him a message every time anyone anywhere goes for a run with their Nike+, then.., holy shit, that’s amazing. You can just disregard the entire previous paragraph.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been keeping a mostly complete, mostly chronologically correct spreadsheet of all the films I’ve watched along with a score between 1 (awful) and 5 (great). We’re almost halfway through the year, so here’s how I’m doing so far:
Total films watched: 68
Number of 5s: 4
Number of 4s: 15
Number of 3s: 25
Number of 2s: 19
Number of 1s: 4
Average score: 2.94029850746269
For giggles, here’s the full list:
Buried - 2
Easy A - 2
Never Let me Go - 3
Black Swan - 2
Tron Legacy - 1
Mama Mia - 3
The King’s Speech - 4
Red - 4
Yankee Doodle Dandy - 4
How to Train Your Dragon - 3
Death Proof - 3
White Lightning - 2
Last of the Mohicans - 3
National Treasure 2 - 2
Where Eagles Dare - 3
The Kids are Alright - 3
The Freebie - 3
Peeping Tom - 3
Blue Valentine - 4
Warhammer 40k - 1
The Losers - 3
Hellboy 2 - 3
Winter’s Bone - 4
Happy-go-lucky - 4
Maguyver: Treasure of Atlantis - 2
Richard Pryor live - 3
Idiocracy - 3
Shogun Assassin - 4
Wendy and Lucy - 4
Silent Running - 3
Super Troopers - 2
The Arbor - 5
Il Rito (The Rite, in Italian) - 2
V for Vendetta - 3
Battle: Los Angeles - 2
Sherlock Holmes - 3
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt 1 - 3
Dungeon Masters - 2
Source Code - 4
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (TV) - 2
Red Dawn - 2
Tron Legacy - 2
MacGruber - 2
Dog Day Afternoon - 4
The Princess Diaries - 3
Serpico - 5
Star Trek: First Contact - 3
LA Confidential - 5
Miller’s Crossing - 3
Arthur - 2
The Tree of Life - 4
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - 4
The Tunnel - 4
The Black Dahlia - 1
Black Death - 2
The Siege - 3
True Grit - 4
Cruise of the Gods (TV) - 2
Minority Report - 3
Teen Wolf - 3
Valley Girl - 2
The Bourne Supremecy - 4
My Neighbour Totoro - 5
Forgetting Sarah Marshall - 3
Cyrus - 3
Wet Hot American Summer - 2
The Fast and the Furious - 1
Note: The first time I saw Tron: Legacy was in a cinema where the house lights stayed on for the first fifteen minutes and I had to go out and ask someone to shut them off. So it gets a 1. The second time was on a blu-ray in my house. It was only slightly better, so it got a 2.
In an editorial for the Independent, Johann Hari laments the decline in “physical” books and the progression towards a more digital age. It’s the usual kind of thing we’re used to seeing. A “nothing can beat a good book – nothing, you hear me?” kind of thing. It’s the sort of thing we’re used to hearing from 70 year old luddites. Except Johann Hari is only 32 years old. He’s never known a world without colour TV, without videogames, without all sorts of gadgets. So the whole piece is a little strange from that point of view. From another point of view – the point of view of being a well-reasoned argument – it’s a complete shambles.
Hari begins with a reference to Gary Steynghart’s Super Sad True Love Story, in which everyone is “obsessed with their electronic Apparat – an even more omnivorous i-Phone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn”. I know it’s hard, but look past his hyphenating of “iPhone” (on his website, he also refers to “i-Tunes” - nnngggg), and you’ll see an implicit association of technology with consumerism and porn. Never mind global connectedness, a wealth of knowledge and a truly democratic press; this is really all the internet has given us: an easier way to buy Kleenex for all the porn we’re watching.
At least he gives us an idea of what we’re dealing with here.
He talks about moving house and hauling all the books, comparing it to the audiophiles still jealously clinging to their vinyl while most other people have moved onto MP3s. “Does it matter?” he asks. “What was really lost?” I had to re-read the entire article a couple of times before I realised this wasn’t a rhetorical question. He actually thinks he’s answered it by suggesting that there’s a lot more to be lost as books move towards digital formats. Now, I’m no audiophile, but I’ll just say this: hogwash.
As a very happy Kindle customer, I can say that my reading habits have changed completely since getting the magical little device. I’m reading more than ever before. I’m consuming books at a rate I never would have believed I was capable of.
But not only that, the Kindle has completely changed my attitude towards books. I used to love buying books. I used to hoard them, fetishise them. Living in a different country, English-language books become things to be treasured. When you even find something simple, like an Agatha Christie, you hold onto it because God knows when you’ll find something like it again.
The Kindle has taught me that almost all of the things I read, the physical book itself – the delivery mechanism – isn’t important, the writing is. And I can read that in whatever format I want, it’ll still be the same. Whether this is smoke signals, semaphore, a dead-tree book or e-ink, they’re the same words and they have the same meaning. The only difference between all of these methods is that when I’m finished with a physical book, I’m left with something that will go back on my shelf, probably never to be touched again. Imagine after making your dinner, you went and put the empty packet back on the shelf. Same thing.
This isn’t true of all books though, and I still fetishise certain books, but mainly the ones whose physicality is intrinsic to their story and experience. For example, I recently bought Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, which won a prize in Germany as “most beautiful book of the year”. In fact, fire up its Amazon page and see how many times it’s described as “beautiful”. Seriously, it’s a gorgeous book and one that couldn’t be replicated in today’s technology. Maybe someday down the line it will and then I’ll discard my physical copy, just like the 100-something other books I got rid of after getting my Kindle.
Of course, Hari is afraid of the Kindle.
The more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book.
I understand my Kindle can do a lot. It’s got built-in 3G, so I can browse the internet, check my email, update my Twitter. All from anywhere in the world. Except I don’t. I use the 3G to grab the books Amazon sends to it. I use the Kindle for reading books and the occasional long article. That’s it.
But by Hari’s definition, a book also does a lot of things that are distinctly un-book-like. For example, it can be a colouring book for when I really need to unleash my creative juices. It can be a prop for when I need it to raise the height of my monitor (thanks, Programming Python and Essential Systems Administration!). It can be an emergency Kleenex substitute for when I’ve wiped myself out from all the porn on my “i-Phone”.
The point is, it’s none of these things for me. It’s just something to read. It’s a book. Just as the Kindle may be able to do a lot of things, but to me, it’s just something to read. It’s a book.
Hari ends his article by lauding Freedom, a piece of software that disconnects you from the internet for a set period of time. In other words, he associates his computer with lots of different things – email, Facebook, Twitter, funny cat videos and, yes, writing – and the only way he cannot be distracted is if he forcibly removes his access to all these distractions. For him, a book is the same thing: a forcible removal from all the distractions a Kindle could possibly present.
A ‘digital diet’ is a strange answer, Johann. If you’ve got self-control enough to detach yourself from your digital devices, why not apply that same self-control to all the bells and whistles that keep you from enjoying digital books.
When I was 19, I got more drunk than I have ever been in my life. It’s still a high water mark of my drinking career. It was a Christmas, and someone thought it would be a good idea to give me a bottle of really good tequila, a bottle of black sambuca, and – oh God – a bottle of poitín. The tequila and the poitín were almost impossible to drink. At least, they were at the beginning. I remember hitting on the great idea of just mixing all three into one glass to maybe, maybe make it the whole thing easier to digest. I can just remember brief flashes of images: swigging tequila out of the bottle and thinking I was just like Jim Morrison (followed by thinking ‘I fucking hate Jim Morrisson’); sitting outside in the back garden as my friend threw a glass at me, missing my head by inches and the two of us cracking up at how hilarious this near-accident was. Then, nothing. I woke up in my friend’s locked bathroom with vomit everywhere, under the towels on the radiator and everything. I don’t know if it was my vomit (that I’m not sure is my one glimmer of hope from the entire evening).
Just as sure as night follows day, my worst ever drunkenness was followed by my worst ever hangover. I managed to get home and crawl to the living room where I spent about 8 hours lying on the couch, shaking and sweating and writhing in pain. I felt like I was never going to recover. (Looking back now, I’m sure it actually was touch-and-go for a while.)
That evening, around 7pm, the film Without a Clue came on the TV, and everything changed. I wasn’t feeling any better, but I knew I wasn’t feeling any worse. My hangover had crested. Right at that exact moment, my ma poked her head in the door and said, “Would you like some rashers and sausages?” And right then, that’s when my worst possible experience turned into one of my most cherished memories. I think I actually cried with happiness, knowing that I was suddenly on the mend. Now, whenever I watch Without a Clue, I get hit with a wave of positive emotions. An entirely Pavlovian response that has now transformed this slightly shaky B-comedy into one of my favourite movies.
The other night, we went for Ethiopian food in a place called Mesob, which got a really good review from the New York Times a few weeks ago. And yeah, the food there was pretty damn great. The menu wasn’t entirely clear and we spent a good part of the night feeling a bit awkward and ‘what do we do now?’ but once the food came and we were getting nicely toasted, it all worked out just fine.
Except I managed to find a stray chilli pepper in one of the dishes.
Okay, so listen, I was a little tired, a little drunk, and I wasn’t really paying attention. When my mouth started chomping down on something crunchy, no alarm bell rang in my head to warn me that it could be potentially terrible. I thought maybe it could be a bit of celery. I only realised I’d eaten an entire pepper after I’d swallowed the last bite. It was then that my tastebuds managed to place that weird flavour.
My tongue started burning. My eyes started welling up. My nose started watering. Sweat started pumping from my head. If a part of my body could secrete something, it decided now was a good time to do so. To make it clear, I love spicy food. I’m a huge fan of jalapeno peppers and I can eat them fairly handily without any issue. This was no simple jalapeno. This was something else. This pepper really blew my socks off. I spent ten minutes thinking I was going to die, and wondering how I could ask where the nearest hospital was without opening my mouth, which felt like it had started bleeding. I thought my tongue had turned white-hot and was about to melt out the underside of my jaw.
It was such an intense level of pain that I could tell immediately when it peaked and started going away. When this happened, I was hit by a wave of euphoria. Now, the pain didn’t go away immediately. It must have taken a half an hour for things to return to normal, but that didn’t matter. I suddenly knew that, regardless of how long it would take to get better, everything was going to be okay, I’d survived the worst of it and I’d soon be back in the clear again. Such a feeling of joy and well-being as I’ve never experienced eating food before. Is this why people love absurdly, obscenely spicy foods? I can only imagine how this lady felt.
Look, I really, really don’t want this to descend into a personal attack on someone I don’t even know, so let me just start off by saying that I don’t have a problem with Joe Griffin in general. I think that when he sticks to writing about things he genuinely seems to know something about, like movies, he’s absolutely fine. Check out his blog, Moviedrome. As personal movie blogs go, it’s not terrible. I really wanted to hate it, but the best I can muster is a profound indifference.
What I don’t like is when he steps outside of his comfort zone and starts writing about videogames. Which he does every Friday as part of the Irish Times’ ‘The Ticket’ culture/entertainment supplement. He’s clearly out of his depth and represents everything I hate about the way videogames are covered by traditional media. For example, take a look at his recent review of Portal 2, which is somewhere between a hot mess and a 300-word syntactic nightmare. Here’s my favourite line of the entire thing:
This is a clever, captivating and sometimes hilarious sci-fi game, with compulsive gameplay. Here’s hoping I don’t have nightmares about GLaDos.
While you’re reading this review, please bear in mind that the Irish Times is supposed to be Ireland’s ’newspaper of record’. Can you imagine if it treated all of its arts coverage this way? Can you imagine if their review of There Will Be Blood ended with “I hope I don’t have nightmares about Daniel Plainview.” It’s ridiculous.
Now, it’s completely possible that Joe is merely writing within a set of constraints set by the Irish Times. It may well be that Madam Editor called Joe into her office, sat him down and said ‘Listen, Joe, we still think videogames are for children, so we want 300 words written in the same tone you’d use if you were reviewing a Richard Scarry book." I suppose this is possible, but why, then, does their other videogames correspondent, Ciara O’Brien, do such a better job?
The other thing that makes me say that Joe Griffin is out of his depth writing about videogames is the amount of times he has gotten the facts wrong. Just basic factual details that he’s either deliberately or carelessly missed. For example, in his editorial about videogame adaptations of literature from Friday, April 22nd 2011, he writes (emphasis mine):
There was some excitement this year when the Great Gatsby videogame resurfaced online. Originally an 8-bit title for the old Nintendo, the game is a platform adventure in which Nick Carraway fends off malevolent butlers and hobos.
First, since we’re on it: ‘old Nintendo’? There have been four consoles since the original NES. Any one of them could be referred to as ‘old Nintendo’. I remember talking to someone and they used ‘old Nintendo’ to refer to the Nintendo 64 (God, did that make me feel old). But this is all beside the point. One quick google search for “Great Gatsby NES” and you’ll see the first result is the game itself and the rest of the results are links to that game, with each one explaining how the game is a modern creation made to look like an old NES game. It’s a retcon, a fake artifact from a “parallel reality”. The Escapist explains it well:
In reality, Hoey created the game on a whim after creating an 8-bit tribute to the classic novel’s cover. They simply couldn’t stop, and eventually ended up with 4 levels of Gatsby-themed glory. The game includes several characters, places, and lines from the book, and even has a few short cut-scenes.
Know how much I get paid to write this blog? Nothing. Know how much I get paid to write about videogames at all? Not a penny. Know how many people read this blog? I don’t actually keep track, but it’s safe to say it’s statistically insignificant compared to the number that read The Irish Times. How hard would it be for Joe to just either (a) keep on top of the subject he’s getting paid to write about, or (b) do one quick google search before banging out an article?
PORTAL 2 HAS been the subject of some rave reviews, but one innovation seems to have escaped critics: the villain’s voice is American and one of the sympathetic voices is English. This is very rare.
Reading his Portal 2 review, I thought “you know, this is all just fluffy bullshit that you could extrapolate from reading the back of the box - I don’t think this guy has actually finished the game.” This article, which appeared a week after his review, clinched it for me. I would bet cash money that Joe has not actually finished the 8-hour game he has been paid to write about. Actually, forget about “finishing” the game, I would bet he hasn’t actually played the game for more than 4 hours. Does anyone have his Xbox Gamertag or Steam/PSN account name? It would be easy to tell how much of the game he’s finished from any of these. Why do I say this? Because if you do play the game for that long, you’d realise that there’s a glaring error with Joe’s statement. There’s a second-act twist, which happens roughly three-to-four hours in, and he is completely oblivious to.
I’m not saying that reviewers need to finish all games to completion before reviewing them. This is completely unworkable. How would anyone ever review something like World of Warcraft which, in effect, has no ending? But I think it’s a genuine disgrace when someone can’t be bothered to finish a short game like Portal 2 – or even to play it for four hours – but will happily accept money to review it. It’s like a restaurant reviewer saying “Well, technically, I didn’t eat there, but I looked in the window and it seemed nice enough.”
Again, I just want to reiterate that I don’t want this to be a personal attack on Joe Griffin. I’m sure he’s a lovely bloke and, like I said, when he’s writing about movies, he’s fine. I’ve even heard him talk about movies on Arena and I thought he was one of the better guests they’ve had on there. He was well-informed and articulate.
It’s just a shame that he can’t be the same when he’s writing about videogames. It’s even more of a shame given the amount of genuinely talented Irish people who are writing passionately and thoughtfully about videogames (e.g. the guys at Games Toaster or Shoryuken) and who would gladly write for free to get their stuff in The Irish Times.
Article updated at 21:43GMT+1 to tone down some things that were a little too mean
I don’t know what triggered it, but I decided to start re-watching all of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There’s something about this show that still manages to evoke certain emotions in me. Like it’s hitting a part of my brain that hasn’t been touched since I was a kid. Even now, the sound of that theme song makes me feel like I’m 16 again and I’m just about to sit down and watch a quick episode on BBC2 before I start my homework. I’ve made it through the first season, and here are some of the things I’ve noticed so far.
When it first aired, I remember thinking how technically impressive this show was, especially compared to the original series. The effects were great, the make-up was mind-blowing. Was I high? This is terrible! I can’t count the amount of times I’ve watched Worf’s prosthetic head-piece wobble almost completely off his head.
Speaking of Worf, who decided this guy was supposed to be a big, tough badass? So far, he’s lost every fight he’s gotten into.
Fuck Wesley. The majority of the episodes in the first season - especially in the first half - are solved by Wesley pulling some deus ex machina bullshit in the last five minutes.
Picard is a bit eager to pull the Enterprise’s self-destruct trigger, isn’t he? I think he’s done it three times in the first season. In the twenty-something episodes of the first season, that means there’s a one-in-ten chance that Picard will try to blow up the ship. I know this is cheating, but there’s an episode in the second season, where the Enterprise is being treated like a rat in a maze, being tested by some huge cosmic being. Picard lasts all of about fifteen minutes before saying “fuck this” and engaging the auto-destruct.
How the fuck did I never realise how racist this show is? Each new alien is a thinly-veiled cipher for the writer’s unique brand of xenophobia. The Ferengi alone should have warranted some kind of action from the Anti-Defamation League.
I loved where they brought in Michael Berryman, drew a line down his face with a sharpie and then suddenly they’ve got one of the most believable, fucked-up looking aliens the show has ever seen.
Now, some people will discredit this and call it “effortless style,” or write it off by saying, “These Italians are just born with it.”
But it’s quite the opposite. There is nothing effortless about their style, or their look. What’s unique is that they put an extreme amount of effort into their look when they buy the clothes, when they have the clothes altered by their tailor, and when they put them on in the morning.
It’s true, Italians do dress better than other nationalities. Even if Rome isn’t the centre of Italian fashion, and they don’t dress as nicely as they do in, say, Milan, the basic level of casual dress is so much higher than the basic level of casual dress in DublinAlthough maybe this isn’t saying much. Before we moved to Rome, I was living in Stoneybatter in Dublin. A place where people would go shopping in their pyjamas. In fact, I saw one girl walking down the street still wrapped in her duvet. My theory behind pyjamas-as-casual-wear is probably best saved for another post. Shirts are more common than hoodies on twenty-something men, and tracksuits are almost non-existent. And Schuman is completely right in what he says about the care that people give to their clothes here. Instead of spending €200 each on a few good-enough suits that will look ratty in a couple of months, Italians would rather spend €1000+ on one fantastic suit that will last them for yearsBut then, they do this with all of their possessions, not just clothes. Theories behind this also best saved for another post.
But there’s one thing that Schuman misses. Perhaps he can’t see it because it’s being obscured by his enormous boner for Italian style. Yes, the men clearly spend a long time making their style look completely effortless, and their shirts are never anything less than spotlessly clean and perfectly pressed - something you rarely see in Dublin, where crumpled, uncared-for shirts are the norm - but you know what? It’s not the men who are putting in the effort. Their clothes are perfect, but that’s not a challenge when you live with their mother who cleans and irons for you and generally make sure your clothes are perfect for youI know this isn’t true in all cases, but as George Clooney says in Up in the Air, “I’m like my mother, I stereotype. It’s faster.”. I see this a lot at the various functions I go to. I see men whose clothes look fantastic, like they just stepped off a catwalk, while I’m there looking like I woke up in a ditch in my suit and rolled along to crash whatever reception I just found myself at. But you can just tell that these men have no idea how an iron works. They just open their wardrobe and see whatever Mama has left for them.
As great as Italian style is, there’s also something to be said for people who usually look like a dog’s dinner and then suddenly put in a bit of work. Yes, Italian style is effortless, but sometimes, knowing the wearer has put in a little bit of effort can look good too.
This post brought to you with a healthy dose of Irish begrudgery.
Is it just me, or are modern ads starting to resemble the kind of ads we see coming out of Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce on Mad Men? Pretty soon, the only way you’re going to tell an ad is current is the presence of a URL.
I can’t decide if this is a bad thing. I love these hand-drawn technicolor illustrations, but I don’t know if they work for everything. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. For a beer, it works because the ad is aspirational, it makes me want to be a part of that scene. For a sports equipment company, it just makes me wonder if your company is still in business.
I’m a man of good intentions. You should see my to-do list, it’s full of good - nay, great - intentions. Chances are I’ll get around to half of them. I start a project and lose interest halfway through. I’d like to say that it’s because I’m like Jay-Z, I do one thing then I’m on to the next one. For example, I was so impressed by Brigada Creative’s Life Calendar that I spent a few hours and knocked together a version in PHP. As you can see, that lasted all of nine days, before I got bored with that and moved onto the next thing.
But I think we both know that’s not true. The problem is that I’m easily distracted and this affects my follow-through. With the life calendar thing, once the novelty wore off, I started to forget it was there and I forgot to update it. I could have set a reminder in my calendar, telling me to update it, but this would involve clicking “okay” to the reminder, firing up a browser, logging into the back-end, and then updating it. That’s at least two steps too many for me. My browser would launch and I’d forget what I opened it for and then I’d get sucked into my Google Reader.
What I love about the Everyday App is that it’s just the right amount of steps for me, for my weaknesses. It reminds me to take a photo of myself each day, and from the reminder, I can immediately take a photo of myself. It’s frictionless. It’s perfect for people like me.
Plus, I don’t mind taking photos in my lift with its really unflattering fluorescent light just after I have gone running and when I look like a sweaty, exercising hobo. Win-win.
There’s a lot that could be said about Mark Harris’ recent article for GQ, The Day the Movies Died, but I’m just going to say a couple of things.
First is to say that articles like this are so regular, I think they’re the basis of the calendar in some civilizations. Every year, around Oscar time, someone comes out and proclaims that movies have finally reached bottom, as if things have changed suddenly since the previous year, when they proclaimed the exact same thing. Just like the year before. And the year before that, too. These are are nothing more than trolling articles. They’re designed to cause controversy, rather than to put forward a legitimate argument. In a way, it’s sort of ironic: writers complaining about Hollywood’s selling out the last of their artistic integrity in favour of a few extra bums in seats by churning out deliberately “shocking” bullshit-pieces like this in favour of chasing a few extra page views.
That kind of thinking is why Hollywood studio filmmaking, as 2010 came to its end, was at an all-time low—by which I don’t mean that there are fewer really good movies than ever before … but that it has never been harder for an intelligent, moderately budgeted, original movie aimed at adults to get onto movie screens nationwide.
Ugh.
First off, alarm bells should be sound every time you see a blanket statement like “Hollywood studio filmmaking was at an all-time low in 2010” without any sort of facts or figures to support it. Since it takes all of three minutes to fire up IMDb and find out if he’s right, let’s take a look for ourselves. I guess I’ll use Warner Bros. (not counting its subsidiaries) as an example. Ignoring any shorts, or direct-to-video movies, Warner Bros. distributed 25 films in 2010, 17 of which were original properties – i.e., not sequels, remakes or based on an existing property. In 2009, they distributed 24 films, only 13 of which were original properties. 2008 was worse still. Again, they distributed 24 films, only 10 of which were original properties. I’m not saying 2010 was a particularly great year for original films, or that it even holds a candle to, say, 2001, but we can easily demonstrate that Harris was completely wrong in saying that “Hollywood studio filmmaking was at an all-time low in 2010” - why should we trust the rest of his article?
So here’s what’s on tap two summers from now: an adaptation of a comic book. A reboot of an adaptation of a comic book. A sequel to a sequel to an adaptation of a comic book. A sequel to a reboot of an adaptation of a TV show. A sequel to a sequel to a reboot of an adaptation of a comic book. A sequel to a cartoon. A sequel to a sequel to a cartoon. A sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a cartoon. A sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a young-adult novel.
While this is all true it’s worth pointing out that Warner Brothers have 51 completely original properties lined up for 2012. And those are just the ones that are big enough to warrant a listing this far in advance. Also, let’s just remember, that’s 51 films from just one studio - I really can’t be bothered going through all the rest and counting them all. Point is: yes, there’s a lot of recycling, but really, nine films?
… And soon after: Stretch Armstrong. You remember Stretch Armstrong, right? That rubberized doll you could stretch and then stretch again, at least until the sludge inside the doll would dry up and he would become Osteoporosis Armstrong? A toy that offered less narrative interest than bingo?
Remember when it was announced that Hollywood would be making a movie based on Facebook? Remember the jokes? “Oh, it’s going to be two hours of someone sitting at a computer click “like” on things?” It turned out to be one of the best movies of the year. I’m not going to be rushing to Paddy Power to put money on Stretch Armstrong picking up the ‘best picture’ oscar. I’m just saying that you shouldn’t write it off just because you can’t see the possibilities.
So cable has become the custodian of the “good” niche; entities like HBO, Showtime, and AMC have found a business model with which they can satisfy a deep public appetite for long-form drama.
AMC? The same AMC that dropped the jaw-droppingly superb and completely original Rubicon in favour of the dreadful, painfully derivative, “zombies are popular now, right?” fanboy-appealing Walking Dead? That AMC, Mark?
I realise this is entirely personal because I lovedRubicon, and I’m still gutted that AMC killed it before audiences had a chance to discover it. And so I think that holding AMC up as a bastion of original storytelling is just stupid.
(Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll be over here burning candles in my shrine to Rubicon, Party Down and Terriers.)
Have I mentioned before how much of a huge Indiana Jones fan I am? I think I may have said it once or twice. I’ve also briefly mentioned my feelings on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (short version: I liked it well enough, despite some huge flaws).
Of all the things to not like about Crystal Skull, the thing that annoyed me most was the way Señor Spielbergo backpedalled about mostly relying physical effects, to keep it stylistically in line with the rest of the films in the series. Now, rather than having Terry Leonard actually getting dragged along behind an actual giant truck, hardly a shot went by in Crystal Skull without some sort of digital touch-up, whether it’s a set they couldn’t be bothered to build or a fucking monkey with a 1950s greaser haircut (really?).
All that said, here are my least favourite 16 seconds of that entire movie, the part that almost makes me give up entirely. Fortunately, they happen right at the end, so I can watch most of the movie without wanting to throw something at my TV.
Here we have a set of giant cogs closing in, destroying the only way out. Bad news, right? Except watch the way the characters react to this. Watch Harrison Ford’s reaction. Everyone just strolls along, as if this kind of thing happens all the time, so why worry about itI also have a pet theory, which I don’t think I’ve ever written about before. Watch Marion in this movie. Watch her stupid grin as she drives them over the waterfall. I’m convinced that she has somehow come to the realisation that she’s one of the protagonists in an action movie and she cannot die. If it’s deliberate, it’s brilliantly post-modern. If it’s accidental, it’s a testament to just how much cocaine Karen Allen did in the 80s? Christ, I’ve seen people more stressed out about setting the alarm and leaving the house before the timer runs out. Where’s the sense of urgency? Without urgency, where’s the sense of danger?
I bet this is how it went: Señor Spielbergo said to the actors “Listen guys, I know you’re all old and tired, so don’t sweat it. Take your time. It doesn’t matter how long you take to get across here, we’ll get the ILM guys to make it so that the cogs close just behind you.” Compare this to the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones is running from a boulder. Although it was only made out of fibreglass, that boulder weighed around 300 pounds. And you know what? That’s real fear you see on Harrison Ford’s face as he’s running. That’s real urgency in his movements.
Some things you just can’t fix in post-production.
Boy, is my face red. I’ve been living around the corner – literally a 20 metre walk – from Roma Sparita for the past 3 years, and I never once popped in to give it a go.
To be fair, it’s not like I should have expected much. From the outside, it’s just another unassuming restaurant in the corner of a piazza with a menu advertising the same cucina Romana you find in on every street and every piazza in Rome. There’s nothing that stands out about its menu. Plus, there are two major flags that I tend to watch out for when judging a restaurant. First, it’s beside a fairly solid tourist attraction – Santa Cecelia – which is usually a sure sign of a shithole that doesn’t care about quality (Trying to find a good place to eat around St. Peter’s is like walking through a culinary minefield). Secondly, it’s within spitting distance from Piazza dei Mercanti. Have you ever seen the restaurants there? One of them is decked out with a bunch of fake crap on the walls which is supposed to make it look like a ye olde trattoria but actually makes it seem like you’re eating right in the Pirates of the Caribbean. The other puts on a pantomime show during the summer, with people opening the windows of the building and shouting out of them. The whole thing is like a weird, distracting 18th century Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in. Both restaurants are extremely gimmicky and going heavily after the tourist market. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and they both seem like they do great business there. But it also means that I’ve been painting Roma Sparita with the same brush.
Here’s the embarrassing part: it took an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations to get me to check out Roma Sparita. Or, more specifically, their cacio e pepe. Now, cacio e pepe is my favourite pasta dish. It’s the one I always pounce on when I see it on a menu. Up until now, Da Augusto has been my favourite, by a long way. So my wife and I are watching No Reservations and we see Piazza Santa Cecilia and both shout ‘Hey! That’s Piazza Santa Cecilia!" But when they brought out the cacio e pepe, I leaned a little closer. Okay, so the whole thing is a little gimmicky, coming in a edible bowl made of parmesan. Then Bourdain started eating and his hyperbole glands kicked in. “I’m sure this is illegal somewhere,” “This could be the greatest thing in the history of the world” (ACTUAL QUOTE), “In order to enjoy this plate of food, what would I be willing to sacrifice from my past? … Catcher in the Rye… My third, fifth, seventh and ninth acid trips… my first sexual experience, definitely.” You get the picture.
So we took a stroll around last night. We got there at about 8.30pm without having booked ahead, and we were the first guests to be put into the “overflow” part of the restaurant. I started worrying that we were getting shoved into the “chump” (read: tourist) part, but the whole thing filled up within a few minutes. It was extremely popular. For starter, I got the bresaola with rocket and parmesan, my wife got the carciofi alla romana. Both were excellent, solid dishes, and very well done. When it came time to order our pasta, the waiter didn’t even wait for us to say anything, he just said “Cacio e pepe?” with a little wink. I think my defences must have been up because I wasn’t sure how to interpret the wink. Was he onto us? Was he saying “You look like Americans who saw this place on Anthony Bourdain and of course you’ve just come for the cacio e pepe.” Or was he saying “We know we knock this shit out of the park, so why would you ever want to order anything else?”
Turns out, it was the latter. It was a room full of Romans and everyone, I mean everyone, ordered the cacio e pepe. And for good reason.
That was easily the best cacio e pepe I have ever tasted. It follows a slightly different recipe - rather than being the traditional pasta covered in grated cheese and an assload of pepper with a drizzle of oil and leaving it to the eater to mix up, Roma Sparita cook the cheese and pepper sauce with butter which, in a Roman kitchen, is almost unheard of, before tossing in all the pasta and coating it all in the pan. It’s a great way of doing it, and one I think I’ll be copying when I make the dish myself. And then there’s the parmesan bowl, the “gimmick”. Personally, I left the entire bowl until the end and ate that as one giant crispy, cheesy flavour-bomb1.
It was a delicious blast of umami and an amazing way to finish the meal. Leaving the place, my wife asked how we were going to manage the next few months. We have so many restaurants left to try in Rome before we leave, and all we want to do now is go back to Roma Sparita and gorge ourselves on the cacio e pepe. I told her I don’t think there would be any shame in that.
I also tend to eat my french fries before my burger, and then eat around the burger, leaving the pickle right in the middle until the final bite ↩︎
Last week, News Corp unveiled their latest attempt to figure out this whole ’new media’ thing with the launch of The Daily, an iPad-only newspaper-magazine hybrid that is published, uh… dailyLike Abed from Community, News Corp aren’t great at coming up with names. It wasn’t the smoothest launch ever and it has already drawn a couple of complaints from the tech community. The first is that the app itself is slow and badly programmed. Gruber timed how long it took from launching the app to actually reading a single thing - one minute and twenty seconds.
This is just a teething problem, and I’m sure it’ll be fixed in later versions of the app. I mean, Loren Brichter managed to fix problems with The Daily’s carousel (the thing you use to navigate the different articles) in around two hours. I don’t think this is a show-stopper.
The other issue is more complicated. People like Ben Brooks complain that the biggest problem with The Daily is that its content is stale. Rather than pushing out up-to-the-minute news, The Daily pushes out yesterday’s news. Is it still news if it happened yesterday?
With respect, I think that Ben is missing the point, and I’ll explain why.
First, as with everything I write, I have to take you on a little diversion that seems completely irrelevant, but eventually ties back into the first subject.
There’s a videogame magazine called Edge (or, if as it’s called in the US, Next Gen). It’s the one magazine I’m completely devoted to, and I’ve got every issue going back to issue 3. It’s published monthly, which means that 95% of the news and reviews in the magazine have been scooped by online sites like Joystiq or Eurogamer. I’ve gotten into more debates than I care to remember with nerds who said that there was no longer any place for magazines, arguing first, why would people want to read stale content that’s potentially a month old, and second, why would people pay for stale content when they could get the fresh content, online, for free?
Okay, so let’s take a slightly more highbrow example: The International Herald Tribune. This is essentially nothing more than a reprint of yesterday’s New York Times. Who would want to read that? Well, Speaking anecdotally, this is the one reliable English-language newspaper you can get in Italy. It’s the one newspaper we get delivered to our newsroom (although it’s used more as toilet-reading than a source of news). Less anecdotally, the IHT has a circulation of around 219,188 - not bad for a reprint of “stale” content.
See, I think the issue isn’t about how “fresh” the news is, it’s about the quality of the writing. It’s depressing to see how much Churnalism there is in the world. For example, BBC News – which is where I tend to go to for my ‘breaking news’ – is mostly reprints of AP stories. It’s an understandable practice: when you’ve got a 24/7 news cycle, you just have to get stuff out there as quickly as possible, without being able to put much effort into it. And so I’ll go to BBC News for breaking news, but I tend to go elsewhere for analysis.
It’s the same with Edge. I’ll happily take a wobble over to Eurogamer and have a quick breeze through their reviews, to see what score they awarded a particular game, but I won’t read the actual review because their writing isn’t great. I’d rather wait for the Edge review, even if I have to wait the full month for it. With the IHT, yes, I’m happy to read yesterday’s New York Times because it’s (for the most part) still vaguely relevant and still better-written than most other newspapers.
With The Daily, technical kinks aside, I think that if the content is compelling enough, its “freshness” doesn’t matter.
(If you don’t have an iPad and want to see what all the fuss is about, Andy Baio knocked together The Daily: Indexed, where you can find browser-readable versions of all the stories from the iPad edition.)
Two interesting, possibly not entirely unrelated news stories in the past week.
First is the really sad news that Waterstones is closing its two Dublin stores. I’m genuinely quite upset about this. Not only because I know a few fantastic people who work there, but also (and slightly selfishly) because I loved going into these shops. The Dawson Street branch is like a Georgian oasis of peace and quiet. I’m less excited about returning home to Dublin now that Waterstones is gone.
Then there’s the news that for the first time, Amazon sold more kindle e-books than paperbacks. Amazon claim that for every 100 paperbacks sold in the last quarter of 2010, it sold 115 kindle e-books. I’d love to see the actual figures here. It could be, as Steve Jobs suggests, that people just don’t read anymore, in which case the entire story is a statistical blip and not worth getting too excited about. I’m guessing it’s not, and we’re seeing a genuine shift in the way people read.
When I was back home in Dublin, I took a stroll around Waterstones in the Jervis Centre. I spent almost an hour browsing because, like I said, it’s a nice place to take your time in. Although I had three books in my hands (Bad Science, Operation Mincemeat and The Good Fairies of New York, if you’re interested), I put them back. I realised buying them would take up precious space in my suitcase for the trip back – space that could be used for Tayto and Ballymaloe relish – and then I’d have to find space for them on already-overflowing shelves. While I was sitting down for coffee later, I bought the Kindle versions of the three three books I had been looking at.
Now I feel pretty bad.
But at the same time, I think now is a good time for publishers and booksellers (the bricks-and-mortar kind) to tackle this problem. Because they have something powerful that Amazon, as much as it tries, can’t compete with.
I love my Kindle. I love the convenience of it. I love the fact that I’ve got my library with me wherever I go. I love that every book I buy for it means one less book taking up space on my bookshelves, one less thing for my wife to yell at me about. I love the experience of reading on it.
But I don’t like the experience of shopping on it. Or rather, I don’t like the experience of window-shopping on it. It might give me the choice of hundreds of thousands of books right at my fingertips, but unless I know exactly the book I’m looking for, I’m screwed. There’s no serendipity.
Retail stores, like Waterstones, have the opposite problem. They’re all serendipity. Conversely, because they have limited physical space, chances are they might not have that one particular book you’re looking for, especially if it’s in any way off the beaten path. But that doesn’t matter because while you’re looking for that one book, your eye might be drawn to something else. An author you haven’t heard of, writing in a genre you don’t usually like. You decide to check it out and – boom – you have a new favourite book.
Amazon doesn’t have that.
Another thing Waterstones has that I’m really going to miss are the ‘Our favourites’. A curated section with books chosen by the people who work there, with a little note underneath, written by the member of staff who chose it explaining why they like that particular book. These were always great places to discover something new because their choices were always wonderfully idiosyncratic and always interesting.
Amazon doesn’t have that either.
What Amazon does have are recommendations based on what I’ve already bought. In other words “If you liked this, here’s more of the same”. I’m sure it’s a very sophisticated algorithm and took hundreds of man-hours to perfect, but that’s not what I want. It sounds stupid, but I don’t want you to recommend stuff I like, I want you to recommend stuff you like.
That’s the role retail book shops play. That’s the itch they scratch that online shops just can’t reach. And I think it’s time for them to start playing that up. It wouldn’t take much for retailers to offer the option of selling digital copies of books on small, cheap USB keys, but I doubt Amazon will get the “window-shopping” experience right anytime soon.
Beloved niche PC publishers Paradox Interactive today revealed Salem, a free-to-play MMO that wants to make sure that players take their decision-making seriously. To this end, things you do in the game are promised to have a lasting effect, while more importantly, if you die, you are dead.
Your character is gone, and all your equipment is set loose for other players to grab. There is no respawning, no retention of your name or your stats or your skills. You are simply dead, and if you want to play again, you need to start all over at the beginning with a new name and a new character.
… It’s a brave decision, and one that has a far more drastic impact than in a singleplayer game, where you’re the only person who cares. In an MMO, when you die, you can be mourned.
I love this idea, and I applaud the publishers for having the balls to put out a videogame that actually deals with death in a serious way, beyond the usual “LOL I TOTALLY JUST SHOT THAT FUCKER IN THE FACE.” My only concern is with how they are planning on implementing this. When you die, will you immediately be able to start a new character? Will they ban your account for a period of time? Death only has meaning because of its permanence. It’s the ultimate full-stop. There’s no coming back. And in an MMO, the character doesn’t matter, the player matters. So the idea that a player can just roll a new character and maybe even be present for the “funeral” of his previous character bothers me slightly, like it’s missing the point slightly. Why would anyone mourn a character when they know the player is still around - the same person in a different avatar?
The new port of XBMC not only makes the second-gen AppleTV one of the cheapest devices out there that can run XBMC short of a used Xbox, but it also adds some lovely functionality to Apple’s woefully slim-featured set-top box, including the ability to pump out 1080p video, play a myriad of codecs and web content natively, as well as install and expand your experience with new apps.
My original Xbox running XBMC was, hands down, the best media centre I’ve ever owned. It never once complained about codecs and it ran silky smooth. In fact, I still keep it hidden under my TV for emergencies. The only problem with it is the hardware itself. The Xbox is bulky, noisy, ethernet-only, and has no remote control, so when I use it, I’m forced to use the monstrously huge Xbox controller, with its cable draped across my living room.
I had been thinking about getting a Boxee box, but slightly went off the idea after reading Jon Hicks’ lukewarm review. The availability of XBMC on the ATV2 nails it for me. My next toy.
Sinead Duffy is a lifecoach (with her own company, Great Minds) who has set up the mother of all Twitter accounts. Called Greatest Quotes, it’s an auto-tweeting feed of… greatest quotes. Astonishingly, Greatest Quotes is growing by 10,000 followers per week. That’s almost as much as Ashton Kutcher.
Ah, you think – that’s a bit of a swizz. Sure, just set up a few RSS feeds and let it take off; that’s not a real account.
Think again. Because of this account, Duffy is getting business online. And it’s cash upfront. “I coach select overseas clients via Skype and charge through Paypal,” she tells me. “It’s mostly through Twitter that potential clients find me.”
Who’s laughing now?
Coaching. “Select overseas clients”. From a Twitter account that spews out ‘greatest quotes’.
Sometimes I think this recession hasn’t hit hard enough.
In fact, aside from the fact that Blu-Ray’s high definition picture is so ridiculously gorgeous, the whole format is demonstrably worse than what came before it. — Khoi Vinh
Agreed. I’ve only used Blu-Ray on a PS3, which is probably better than most standalone players, but all of the consumer-hostile “features” of DVDs — unskippable logos, previews, warnings, and disclaimers, long animation delays before menu activation, custom-themed interfaces that make everything more difficult — has advanced to new levels of hassles, delays, restrictions, and annoyances.
Granted, I probably own more Blu-Rays than I should (I’m slowly weaning myself off physical media), but each time I pop a new disc into my PS3 and wait the full three-to-five minutes for my movie to actually begin, I say “This is why people pirate movies”.
Although recently, I’m noticing a disturbing trend in the pre-movie junk. Where there used to be the “You wouldn’t steal a car” warning, some studios are now putting a message to say “Thank you for buying a legitimate copy of this movie”. Except the whole thing is done in a comedy voice, kind of like the E4 announcer, which makes the whole thing seem really insincere. Which is a step in the right direction, I suppose – at least they’re no longer treating consumers as potential criminals – but it’s a long way from what consumers actually want, which is quick access to the movie they just bought.
What does this mean? Well, naturally it means a tax (this is Italy, after all - some money has got to change hands). It also means that these sites will be obliged to prohibit access to content inappropriate for children in certain time slots. More importantly though, it means that the sites are now legally responsible for all user-content uploaded to them, meaning that if some half-senile old fuck who controls half the media in the country finds some of their content on there, he finally has someone to sue.
I have to be honest, if the owners of these sites decide that the easiest way to solve all these problems is to just block access from Italy entirely, I wouldn’t even be slightly surprised. That guy from YouReporter.it nailed it: “This is a legal absurdity and violence done to reality.”
One of the most difficult things about getting married is how to bring together two family’s worth of Christmas traditions into one cohesive whole. For example, on Christmas morning, my wife’s family wakes up and has breakfast of smoked salmon on brown bread. Very dignified. In my family, our Christmas breakfast is usually an entire selection box, inhaled more than eaten, with the wrappers picked out of your teeth when you finally wake up from your diabetic coma a couple of hours later.
Okay, that’s a no-brainer. We’ll adopt my wife’s way. And hey, to add our own personal touch to the proceedings, why not have Bellinis for breakfast too? There we go, that’s breakfast sorted.
In my family, our Christmas dinner is turkey and ham. In my wife’s family it’s just turkey. Since it’s just the two of us, and we have enough trouble finishing an entire turkey by ourselves, we can safely ditch the ham (although there is nothing – NOTHING – quite like a Stephen’s day sandwich of leftover ham on batch bread, so we retain the option to introduce the ham at a later date).
Then there’s the Christmas presents. In my family, I would wake up at about 4am, make my way down the stairs, shaking violently with barely-contained excitement, and finally proceed to tear open all my presents in just a few seconds flat. A wrapping-paper massacre of epic proportions. In my wife’s family, the kids are not allowed open their Christmas presents until after the whole family had come back from mass. They were allowed open their Christmas stocking, but that’s it.
This is something that we’d been going backwards and forwards about. My wife argues that it’s better to do things her way, because it teaches delayed gratification. That’s one argument, I suppose. Personally, I prefer instant gratification, and I believe that Christmas is the one day which should be entirely about instant gratification. You want to eat that entire box of Cadbury’s Heroes in one sitting? Go right ahead, it’s Christmas!
I think this year has taught my wife the danger of her way of doing things.
My wife’s sister (who also comes from the school of ’no presents until after mass’) brought her two young children to mass on Christmas day. They sat right up at the front of the church. The priest saw them, and them being two of the most adorable-looking children ever, started asking them about Christmas.
“And what did Santa bring you?” “An orange!” “Oh! And uh… anything else?” “A cookie!”
Watching A Miracle on 34th Street last night, my wife kept cracking up at Mara Wilson’s ultra-precocious 7 year old. You can’t really blame her. Only John Hughes could have written a child like this:
Kris Kringle: Oh, Susan. Just because every child doesn’t get his or her wish doesn’t mean there’s not a Santa Claus.
Susan: I thought you might say that.
Kris Kringle: Did you? Yes. Well… A house is a very big order–
Susan: And very expensive.
Kris Kringle: And a baby, well a baby takes almost a year to, uh, to, uh…
Susan: nine months. More if the lady’s late. Less if the baby’s a preemie.
The funny thing is, I would bet cash money that my wife was exactly like this when she as 7 years old too.
In the Assassin’s Creed games, your character, Desmond, spends his time hooked up to a “genetic memory reading” machine, where he relives the memories of his ancestors. You remember Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the way Jim Carrey is forced to travel through his memories to find a safe place to hide Kate Winslet? Well, it’s sort of like that. Except you’re looking for something, not hiding it. And the “memories” all took place at least 500 years ago. At the beginning of the latest game, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Desmond emerges from a memory of being at his ancestor’s villa in the year 1500, to find himself at the same villa in 2012, trying to get in. It’s his first time to actually visit the place in real life, and he makes a remark about “remembering” a secret passage. The joke being that he’s “remembering” visiting a place he’s never actually visited.
I know exactly how he feels.
Herself indoors was working in New York for the past couple of months. I decided it might be nice to head across for a week once she’d finished up, so we could take a couple of days over thanksgiving to visit Washington while we were at it. I had never been to either place before (West Coast is the Best Coast). In fact, I’ve always said that there are two places in the world I was terrified to visit. The first is Las Vegas, mainly because I’m afraid what horrible qualities would emerge in me (am I a secret compulsive gambler? a huge fan of Cirque du Soleil? Who knows!). The other is New York. I was just afraid of being one of those dopey-faced tourists that look like walking “Mug Me” signs because they’re walking around gawping at the scale of it all,. I mean, it’s completely alien to someone who grew up in a country where the tallest building is only 233 feet tall.
It’s amazing what two months away from your wife will do to your irrational fears.
Something that made it easy for me to get over my fear was the fact that, despite having never been there before, the whole place was so familiar to me. Between all my years playing the various Grand Theft Auto games (Liberty City being the game’s equivalent of New York City), and the general immersion that comes from watching movies and TV shows set in NYC, I never really felt that disorientated. I never got that overwhelming sense of strangeness that usually comes from visiting a new city. I knew how this city worked. I spent most of my time pointing out the various bits and pieces. Hey, there’s the Library from Ghostbusters! Hey, there’s the Getalife Metlife Building. New York City being the default setting for games and movies meant that I had learned the geography of that place by osmosis.
Washington wasn’t much different. Shortly after arriving, I demanded that our very generous hosts drive us 15 minutes in the wrong direction just so I could see the Exorcist steps in Georgetown. This grounded me, gave me a central location to base my understanding of the geography fromAlthough, did you know there’s an Exxon at the bottom? This wigged me out no end. I would have expected a statue to the mighty Lee J. Cobb or something.
The White House was the weirdest of all. We came at the building from the east side, hitting the press area first. Again, having never been there before, I was able to point out certain areas to my wife - there’s the press area, there’s the rose garden. How did I know this? Splinter Cell: Conviction, where your character sneaks through this area to get into the White House and, eventually, the West Wing.
And speaking of the West Wing, I’ve been watching a lot of that show recently, and that’s given me a weirdly intimate understanding of the way the place worksEven if it’s deliberately not a completely faithful reproduction of the layout of the office area. But it had another, stranger effect on my experience of the White House in general. Rather than seeing it as the centre of power for arguably the most powerful nation in the world, for me the White House actually felt more like a movie set, like the Psycho house at Universal Studios - a really elaborate facadeInsert your own political commentary here, you fucking wag.
With all due respect to Bradley, and to everyone else who has been focusing on the difficulty of Super Meat Boy, you’re wrong.
There’s no sadism involved. This isn’t a game designed to punish you. It’s not a game like Trials HD, where the pieces have been placed in an clever, but nearly-random order and you have to forcibly wrench a victory from the game, like taking a gun from Charlton Heston’s cold, dead hands. Super Meat Boy has been designed by geniuses. I haven’t finished it yet (I’m still stuck in the post-Halloween glut of gaming), but every single level I have played so far has been designed within an inch of its life so that there is one completely perfect run-through that can be achieved in the minimum amount of time, usually just a few seconds. It’s when you dawdle that the game gets difficult. In other words, if you aren’t playing this game with the “run” button permanently held down, then you’re not playing it properly.
Finding this perfect path through the level is tricky, and for the most part, it’s a matter of trial-and-error. But at least the game is smart enough to have almost no loading times so that when you die, you instantly restart the level. Frustration never gets a foothold. And when you finally do succeed and finish the level, you’re treated to a replay, showing all of your attempts to beat the level simultaneously, a glorious jamboree of death and failure and eventual triumph.
One thing though, no-one is wrong about how good this game is. Easily the best platform game I’ve played in years. I can’t recommend it enough.
Wired has a story about an Android app called ‘No Text While Driving’, which is designed to automatically reply to incoming texts when you’re driving. According to the inventor, the reason people text when they drive is because texting is such an immediate medium of communication, and people don’t want to be seen as being rude by ignoring texts. An automatic text to say “Driving. Can’t text” is better than no text at all. Great idea – in theory. The major downside that I can see is that you have to remember to launch the app before you start driving. To me, this seems like a step in the wrong direction. If you’re the kind of person who has enough discipline to remember to launch an application before getting into the car, then you’re also the kind of person who probably knows not to text while driving. In other words, you’re not the audience for this application.
Back in 2004 or so, when I was a happy little sysadmin filling my days with all sorts of nerdy things to keep myself amused, I hacked together something to make my life a little easier. Using Bluetooth, I was able to have work computer detect when my crappy Sony Ericsson phone came into range and automatically start a bunch of processes for me. Some of these were work-related, such as launching my Nagios dashboard and pulling up my to-do list for the day. Others were just for show. Like automatically playing ‘Back in Black’ by AC/DC, essentially giving myself a soundtrack as I walked into the officeThis didn’t last very long - awesome as it is to have your own soundtrack, it’s also incredibly annoying for people working around you. This seemed like the kind of thing we’d be seeing of a lot more, the idea of using your phone as a sort of electronic passport to the computers and gadgets around us.
For example, my car has Bluetooth and is paired with my phone. So wouldn’t it be great if I could hook it into ‘No Text While Driving’ and automatically activate it for me? But wait a second, Bluetooth is, like, sooooooooo 20th century. Let’s go all 2010 on this: GPS. What I’d really love is complete location awareness using my phone’s built-in GPS. By this, I mean being able to define certain GPS coordinates as “home”. When the phone realises it’s within this area, it automatically switches on wifi, turns off 3G etc. Likewise, there could be a “work” location, where it automatically switches to “silent” and “vibrate”.
I think this would be terrific. Imagine the possibilities! We could mark cinemas as sections where our phones are automatically switched to silent! Our phones could automatically pull up our shopping lists!OmniFocus sort of does this - you can define a location as significant and have it pull up a particular to-do context for that location. So a shop would pull up your “errands” context. It’s genius Then again, when we can’t even be bothered to make the effort to switch our phones manually, then we’re just one step closer to the future predicted in Wall-E.
Well, that’s just fucking great. We went to Sicily in September and the water was full of jellyfish, which were terrifying enough, but great white sharks?!
The Beatles was my first guess too. There’s something about the text of the announcement “Tomorrow’s just another day. / That you’ll never forget,” that sounds like a lyric or a reference, rather than just Apple’s normal bluster.
That’s one heck of a logical leap, Allison Samuels. I personally stopped watching the show because, J.J. Abrams or not, it was cheesy, derivative and badly executed.
Medal of Honour reminds of the joke at the start of Annie Hall. You know, the one about the two women eating dinner at a resort, where one turns to the other and says “Boy, the food here is really terrible” and the other says “Yeah, I know, and such small portions”. Medal of Honour – EA’s entry into the ‘modern warfare’ arena – is like five hours of absolutely nothing. A “nothing” with a multi-million dollar budget, so it’s a really flashy-looking nothing. Still, it’s hard not to come out of it underwhelmed.
Actually, that’s not entirely fair. There is one stand-out, genuinely memorable moment in the short single-player campaign. At one point, you find yourself completely overwhelmed by enemy forces who swarm around you, gradually whittling down your supplies of ammunition. No help is coming and there doesn’t seem to be any end to the number of enemies, so your entire squad resigns itself to the fact that this is the end. It’s sort of like the incinerator scene in Toy Story 3. Game over, man. It’s a pretty powerful sequence and one which is executed perfectlyCompared, say, to the epilogue of Halo: Reach, which is mechanically inconsistent with the rest of the game. You spend the first 99% of the game playing a super-powered super-soldier with recharging shields that enables him to be a sort of bullet shield. Suddenly, your super-powered super-soldier breaks down if he stubs his toe. I got that shit over and done iwth soon as I could by just throwing a grenade at my feet..
Unfortunately, the rest of the game is just a string of disappointments and missed opportunities. You jump from character to character fighting the brain-dead enemies and the brain-dead game engine which they inhabit. This is 2010. We are 10% of the way through the twenty-first century and we still have enemies that do nothing but follow their scripted path, dutifully duck in and out of cover the same way regardless of what is going on around them. Bad enough, but… do you guys know what a ‘monster closet’ is? They’re fairly common in videogames, the places where enemies appear from until the player reaches a certain point or performs a certain actionThey get their name from the fact that you’ll see thousands enemies come pouring out of a particular door, you get there and it’s barely bigger than a cupboard. Hence ‘monster closet’. The more you know.. For example, in the scene I just described, there were probably a few of these ‘monster closets’ hidden in the rocks, where the player couldn’t see the enemies spawning from, and in this section, the monster closets worked fine. If only the rest of the game had been so smooth. On more than one occasion in Medal of Honour, I apparently went off on a path that the game hadn’t anticipated, so I was greeted with the sight of watching enemies spawning out of thin air in front of me. Which would have been an amusing and completely forgivable glitch except because I hadn’t gone the direction that would otherwise ’turn off’ the monster closet, the magically-appearing enemies never stopped coming. This didn’t stop the game auto-saving right on top of their spawn point, so that when I died, I was instantly surrounded by eight enemies firing directly at me whenever I restarted.
Frustrating bugs in a videogame are one thing, and it’s easy to pick on them and write a blog post like this that says “WAH. This bug that hardly half the players will run into has completely ruined the game for me”. I mean, Mass Effect had some of the worst bugs of any game I’ve played, but I loved that game in spite of themtowards the end, almost because of them - ah, the geometry stretching bug where something went screwy in the maths and my character’s face slowly started to explode over the course of a five-minute cut-scene. This image will forever haunt my nightmares.. Why can’t I give Medal of Honour the same freedom?
Three words: Call of Duty.
Medal of Honour has virtually no identity of its own. Almost every moment in the game is a direct copy of something that happened in one of the two Call of Duty: Modern WarfaresWhich makes me wonder how you can copy so furiously from two 10+ hour games and still only end up with a 5-hour campaign. A vehicle level? Check. A sniper level? Check. A level where you’re sneaking around a snowy mountain while guards search for you? Check. If the developers are trying to win players away from the Call of Duty camp, it’s probably not a good idea to present them with third-rate knockoffs of the game you’re so slavishly trying to imitate. It’s like an artist trying to show his talent by giving us a paint-by-numbers version of the Mona Lisa. It just doesn’t work. Unless you’re deliberately trying to present some post-modern commentary on the nature of art. I’m fairly sure that’s not what the developers of Medal of Honour were trying to do. As a player, I just find it frustrating to play a game that was aiming so low and so clearly could have been much better, had the developers been given a little more time. But, thanks to Call of Duty, that’s one thing they didn’t have. In essence, Medal of Honour’s release date was set not by how complete or how polished it was, but by the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops. EA had to release the game before then. And in a way, they were probably right. See how quickly Medal of Honour has been dropped from the conversation since Call of Duty: Black Ops came out.
I’ve no doubt that the game has done enough business to warrant a sequel, and maybe then we’ll see some real innovation and it will be something actually worth talking about. Until then, we’re left with a piss-poor jump-start of a franchise that has no idea who it’s trying to appeal to.
Me too. So I wrote a simple (11 lines of actual CSS) user style for the article page which, to my eyes anyway, improves the experience of using that site. I changed the font family and size, changed the line height, italicised the first line of the article to make it more of a lede. Oh, and I also yanked the google adverts. I guess this is slightly rude, since, y’know – global economic crisis and all, they probably need the advertising cash – but seriously, there’s more advertising space than article space. That’s just bullshit.
I didn’t touch any of the main landing pages because I hardly ever go to the site directly, I just go to the articles from my RSS reader.
I agree with almost everything Mat Honan says in this article on the new Girl Talk album. The way the twitterverse went nuts for the album all at the same time is almost unprecedented now, in our time-shifted universe, where we all watch the Lost finale at different times.
Even live media events are fractured, splintered through the lens of FoxNews or MSNBC or Autotune the News. It takes something huge to crash through the filters and clutter of modern life to get us to all experience the same thing simultaneously.
The new Girl Talk, released on Monday, did that.
Except one thing. I just don’t “get” Girl TalkDoes this mean I have to hand in my oversized hipster glasses now?.
Like everyone else on the internet, I downloaded the new album to give it a whirl. I put it on my iPod and listened to it when I went for a run the other day. Halfway through the third song, I’d had enough. I deleted it from the iPod when I got home.
My problem is that in any given Girl Talk track, there are flashes of brilliance that then gets lost under a deluge of novelty. “Oh No”, the opening track on All Day is the perfect example of this. It starts off well. I mean… shit, Black Sabbath, 2pac, Jay-Z and Ludacris all working in perfect harmony? Then, before we have a chance to really enjoy this mix and for no apparent reason, it segues abruptly into Jane’s Addiction and Cali Swag District. And since we’ve already gone down an evolutionary dead end in this musical menagerie, why not throw in a bit of “Swagga Like Us”. It’s like putting makeup on this dead horse you’re flogging.
So yeah, I think Mat Honan is right about the “event” nature of the new Girl Talk album, and I can admire that. But I also think it says a lot that the twitter hash-tag people are using is #favoritegirltalkspots and not #favoritegirltalktracks.
I agree with almost everything Mat Honan says in this article on the new Girl Talk album. The way the twitterverse went nuts for the album all at the same time is almost unprecedented now, in our time-shifted universe, where we all watch the Lost finale at different times.
Even live media events are fractured, splintered through the lens of FoxNews or MSNBC or Autotune the News. It takes something huge to crash through the filters and clutter of modern life to get us to all experience the same thing simultaneously.
The new Girl Talk, released on Monday, did that.
Except one thing. I just don’t “get” Girl TalkDoes this mean I have to hand in my oversized hipster glasses now?.
Like everyone else on the internet, I downloaded the new album to give it a whirl. I put it on my iPod and listened to it when I went for a run the other day. Halfway through the third song, I’d had enough. I deleted it from the iPod when I got home.
My problem is that in any given Girl Talk track, there are flashes of brilliance that then gets lost under a deluge of novelty. “Oh No”, the opening track on All Day is the perfect example of this. It starts off well. I mean… shit, Black Sabbath, 2pac, Jay-Z and Ludacris all working in perfect harmony? Then, before we have a chance to really enjoy this mix and for no apparent reason, it segues abruptly into Jane’s Addiction and Cali Swag District. And since we’ve already gone down an evolutionary dead end in this musical menagerie, why not throw in a bit of “Swagga Like Us”. It’s like putting makeup on this dead horse you’re flogging.
So yeah, I think Mat Honan is right about the “event” nature of the new Girl Talk album, and I can admire that. But I also think it says a lot that the twitter hash-tag people are using is #favoritegirltalkspots and not #favoritegirltalktracks.
John Gruber points to an article about the “Israelification” of Airports, talking about how Tel Aviv airport managed to increase its security without turning it into a major inconvenience for the 99.9999% of us who are flying and who aren’t terrorists.
Here’s something that stood out for me:
The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?
“Two benign questions. The questions aren’t important. The way people act when they answer them is,” Sela said.
…
“This is to see that you don’t have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious,” said Sela.
You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?
“The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds,”
First, it’s fast — there’s almost no line. That’s because they’re not looking for liquids, they’re not looking at your shoes. They’re not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. “Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes … and that’s how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys.”
What I find most interesting is that while the security checkpoint to get into the gates at Dublin airport has gotten more convoluted – hey, buy a little bag to put your liquids in; take your shoes off; take your belt off; take your laptop out of your bag; bend over and cough please – the actual physical interaction with people before then has been reduced. Traveling with Aer Lingus or Ryanair, the question “Who packed your luggage” has been reduced down to a check-box on a computer screen. It’s a ridiculous carry-over from when we used to be checked in by people instead of computers. Isn’t the point of the question to have a real person gauge your response?
If you’re wondering why your twitter/facebook feed has been exploding with cheese jokes, it’s because the Irish economy is so completely boned and the Irish government so completely bone-headed that they’ve decided that the best way to ease the burden is to distribute free cheese to the poorI’ve been saying for a while now about how much the economic and political background of Ireland in 2010 resembles the economic and political background of France in 1789, and I’ve been wondering if we aren’t going to see a similar bloody, violent revolution. But let’s just get this straight, once and for all: Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake”. Clear?.
53 tonnes of cheddar, to be exact.
This is a dreadful, badly thought-out plan. Worse, it’s just so unimaginative. The poor people in Ireland don’t want cheddar, they want jobs.
Know who wants cheddar? Expats.
Every time I go back to Dublin, someone in Rome asks me to bring back some cheddar. And tea. Because it’s impossible to get any kind of cheddar in this city. It’s like unicorn tears. And on those strange occasions when it can be found, it’s not strange to be charged more than €25 per kilo. And people pay it, because it’s cheddar. Even if you don’t eat it yourself, you can use it to barter favours from other people, like prison currency.
So, Irish government, here’s what I’m suggesting. Take the 53 tonnes of cheddar, divide it up and ship it out to your embassies around the world. Charge, say, €20 for a kilo. This will probably rake in about a million or so - a small chunk out of the €6 billion that needs to be saved in the next budget, but is now really a time to be turning your nose up to an easy million bucks?
Also, I’ll get some cheddar. It’s a win-win situation.
Nowhere Boy is like a case-study in how not to make a biopic.
Granted, it’s a tough genre to pull off well. Rather than just presenting a straight documentary, with a litany of facts, you’ve decided to dramatise events, to make things more entertaining. Biopics are documentaries with jazz-hands. Except there’s a huge temptation to allow your film to become little more than a series of narrative checkboxes and what Mark KermodeVia Jon Ronson calls “chubby? Hmm…” moments. These are the sequences where the filmmakers use the viewers’ knowledge of the subject to sprinkle delightful moments of irony over a scene. It gets its name from a mis-remembered scene in The Karen Carpenter Story where Karen reads a review of one of their singles which says “and the chubby drummer kept time”, to which she says “chubby? Hmm…”
If you were to take the John Lennon element from Nowhere Boy, what would you be left with? A trite and badly-told Dennis the Menace story with some terrific actors doing their best with some dreadful material. Essentially, it’s “rebellious child with troubled family background escapes through music”, a story you’ve seen a thousand times already. Try pitching that story without John Lennon’s name attached and see how far you get.
The only thing Nowhere Boy has going for it is the John Lennon aspect. The first meeting of John and Paul! The first gig by the Quarrymen! And so on. All of which feel like 50-year old, heavily embellished anecdotes filtered through a Beatles fan’s fever-dream. At times, it feels like director Sam Taylor-Wood is so keen to tick these narrative checkboxes that he completely ignores their effect on the larger story. Worse still, the best things about the movie – Ann-Marie Duff and Kirstin Scott-Thomas’s heavyweight performances – completely put the rest of the cast to shame. Aaron Johnson really does his best in the lead role, but next to these two, he just comes across as a third-rate Lennon impersonator.
Skip this movie and just check out the Beatles Anthology instead.
Halloween is my favourite time of year. What’s not to love?
I mean, you get to bust out the tog 90 duvets and lounge around on the couch watching scary movies all night. Plus, I love the dressing up.
Okay, I’m probably getting a bit old for it now, but I think it’s great that there’s one day a year where grown ups can act like idiots and play dress-up. A couple of years ago, I came up with one of my better Halloween costumes: a mad scientist. If you know me, you’ll know that half-assedness is my forté and I tend to leave most things unfinished. Not with this costume; I put a lot of effort into it and nailed it. I dyed my hair snow white, got a giant white lab-coat, some huge black rubber gloves, a massive pair of welding goggles. Then to top it all off, I spent the whole night drinking blue WKD from an Erlenmeyer flask. I mean, have you any idea just how god-awful blue WKD tastes? I’m not sure what Smurf piss tastes like, but I’d bet it tastes a thousand times better than blue WKD.
This is how far I’ll go. I looooooove halloween.
On the other hand, I hate the sexification of Halloween. I hate this bullshit of girls dressing up in a red bikini, putting on a pair of plastic horns and then - bam - that’s their costume. A “sexy” devil. Or a “sexy” angel. Or a “sexy” nurse.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it because I’m against half-naked women. NOT NEARLY AS MUCH AS I’D LIKE - AMIRITE?! HIGH FIVE! I just object to the sheer laziness of it. I can’t believe I have to say this, but having tits doesn’t give you a get out of jail free card when it comes to putting a bit of effort into a costume. Tits aren’t like a note from home saying you’re excused from P.E.
What I’m saying is: Put a bit of fucking effort in, ladies
Now, think of all the things that a girl could take from Star Wars and make “sexy”. It’s a real short list, right? Slave Leia, obviously - I don’t know a single guy who that doesn’t work for, on some level. There’s also Oola, Jabba’s dancer from Return of the Jedi. Oh, and I guess Padma from the prequels could work too, at a push. But after that, it’s a real sharp drop-off. After this, we’re talking Aunt Beru and Yaddleand if the idea of Yaddle Milk doesn’t make you sick to your stomach, you’ve got issues.
Know what I didn’t put on this list? That mangled-looking dude from the cantina who’s all “MY FRIEND DOESN’T LIKE YOU… I DON’T LIKE YOU EITHER”. Know why I didn’t put him on here? Because he’s a mangled-looking dude. Know who else isn’t on this list? Chewbacca. Know why? Because he’s Chewbacca, for fuck’s sake.
Still, that hasn’t stopped the makers of the “sexy Chewbacca costume”, which is my new limit for trying to make something sexy that clearly isn’t. I mean, who are you trying to score with a costume like this? Furries? Inuits?
You know what, Damon Lindelof, co-creator of Lost? I think you’re right.
Or, at least, half-right. Here’s my theory of what the final episode of Mad Men will be:
A fifty-something year old guy will wake up in a hospital, having fallen into a coma in 2007. A doctor will come in and say “Oh, Mr. Draper, you’re awake!” Except it’s not Don Draper.
It’s Bobby.
Everything we’ve just seen has been a coma-induced memory/fantasy.
Seriously, next time you sit down to watch some Mad Men and Bobby comes on screen, pay close attention to him. He’s either a dreadful actor or the the best actor on the show, because once you’re thinking the entire show is taking place in his middle-aged comatose brain, that kid is even creepier than Glen. And that kid is pretty fucking creepy.
Of coure, maybe all this is just me trying to convince myself it’s okay to be watching (and enjoying) a soap opera.
We’re five days into October and I haven’t watched a single fucking horror movie. Which makes me wish I was back in Ireland because I could set all that right over the course of a weekend, because it’s time for Horrorthon 2010Of course, I could set that right over the course of a weekend myself, but watching 29 horror films in five days on your own is pretty tough going.. Here’s this year’s programme and some useful links:
There’s a lot of good stuff on there (and a lot of cheese too). Best of all, it looks like the organisers have done a better job this year of balancing each day so there is at least some semblance of logic behind the programme. So, well done to them on thatBut seriously, Screwballs 2?! Are you just openly mocking your audience now?.
Obviously, being a few thousand miles away and having not timed my trip back to Ireland properly, I’m not going to be able to go to any of these movies (and believe me, I’d love to be going – this is the first time in years I’ve felt sad about missing the Horrorthon). But if I were going, the three films I’d be most psyched to check out Shadow, Amer and Monsters. Having said that, there’s at least three films each day that I’d be very happy to check out.
As for the surprise film… well, now’s the time to start guessing. Given their history of going for Irish premieres and the sub-115 minute runtime, my guess is it will either be Let Me In, Burke and Hare or Saw 3D.
I realise this blog is increasingly in danger of just becoming a list of celebrities whose deaths I’m sad about, but Stephen J. Cannell is one that really hit me hard.
When I was 10, my poor little brain couldn’t handle any celebrity or character with more than one name. For example, like most kids then, I loved The A-Team. And as fanatical as I was about that show, I still couldn’t manage their surnames. They were Murdock, Hannibal, Face and BA. No more, no less. I tried to remember BA’s surname, but I think I kept calling him “Balackus” or something. Maybe I was a little racist as a kid. I also used to think “Darth Vader” was called “Dark Vader”. You see, because he wore all blackSince I’m already in this hole of self-shame, I may as well dig a little deeper and say that I also used to think the “Standing strong forever” line in “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” was “Santa’s gone forever” because, y’know, Santa being gone means you’re all grown up. I had awesome logic..
Point is, you give me a celebrity or a character with two names, I was boned. In Knight Rider, I just knew the guy as “Michael”. I never once twigged that his surname was in the title. Durr.
But as much trouble as I had with names, I knew who the fuck Stephen J. Cannell was. With this one guy, I not only remembered his first name and his last name, but I fucking remembered his middle initial and everything. Know why? Because his logo came at the end of some of my favourite shows. And when I hear the jingle from his logo, I get a sort of pavlovian response. I feel happy. I feel like I’m 10 years old again. And I don’t just mean that in some hyperbolic way. I mean I literally feel 10 years old again. If I close my eyes and listen to that jingle, I feel like I’m sitting in front of our dodgy TV on a Saturday afternoon and now I’m going outside to recreate everything I just saw on TV.
Bagsy being BA.
Thanks, Stephen.
Bonus: Stephen J. Cannell also did a show called Tenspeed and Brownshoe starring Jeff Goldblum. This was less good. I bought the pilot on VHS for 50p a few years ago.
The New Yorker iPad app is out now. The app itself costs nothing, but the actual issues you buy through the app are $4.99 each. This is reasonable enough. I have a feeling we’ll see more magazines move to a similar model in the next year or so. From a publisher point of view, there are no more worries about printing and distribution costs. From an end-user point of view, there are no more worries about availability. Edge magazine, for example, is a right royal pain in the dick to get a hold of if you’re not living in the UK. With an iPad app, you’re getting all the content, in much the same format, with (potential) access to the entire back-catalogue at the touch of a button, with virtually no footprint for either the publisher or readermy collection of Edge magazine – going back 16 years or so – takes up an enormous amount of space. Win-win.
Except for people who are already subscribers, that is. As Kottke points out:
Current magazine subscribers appear to have no option but to buy a completely separate issue if they wish to read the magazine on the iPad. As a subscriber, what exactly am I paying for if I already have the content in magazine form? Is the $4.99 simply a convenience fee?
One of the things I really liked about David Wellington’s Monster Island was that it was also available online. When I was in work and didn’t have the book with me, I could just go to Wellington’s website and take up where I left off. I suppose the same could be said of any of Cory Doctorow’s books as well. Although I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, I have a physical copy of Makers on my bookshelf and a digital copy of on my e-reader.
As things like smart phones and e-readers become more and more a part of our everyday life, I would love to see us get to stage where buying a physical copy of a thing – movies, magazines, films – entitles you to a digital copy of the thing as well. We’re sort of seeing this with blu-ray, where a lot of discs come bundled with a digital copy of the film as wellThen again, in most cases, that’s being implemented in such a half-assed, braindead way (where the ‘digital edition’ it comes bundled with is just an access key to download a copy once) it makes you wonder if the movie studios aren’t deliberately sabotaging this effort so they can say “look! There’s no demand for the digital edition!”.
When I was younger, I remember looking at my grown-up relatives and dreaming about when I’d finally be finished with school and start working a 9 to 5 job. I figured that, coming home from work and not having any homework to do, I’d have buckets of free time to play videogames and watch kick-ass movies.
In an interview with IGN, BioWare revealed some of the stats they’ve collected about people’s Mass Effect 2 habits. Interestingly, half of the players imported their game from the first Mass Effect and only half of the players actually finished Mass Effect 2. Much more interestingly is the revelation that four Xbox players completed the game 23 times.
Considering they also say that the average time to complete a game of Mass Effect 2 is 33 hours, that means these four people spent roughly 32 solid days of their life playing this game. That’s almost five weeks. Solid.
When Apple demoed the new iPod nano last week, I mentioned on twitter about how much I liked the look of its clock. It’s more thoughtfully designed and better crafted than most watches.
Well, some wags have taken the obvious step by throwing a strap on the Nano and making it into a proper watch.
One thing Apple left off the new Nano with the redesign is the previous iteration’s video camera. Is it so strange to imagine that a future redesign of the new Nano will re-add this feature? A front-facing camera with FaceTime? Suddenly we’re wearing video phones on our wrists.
I have no idea why I was so reluctant to check out Marie Antoinette. I guess it was something to do with Sophia Coppola’s track record. I loved Lost in Translation but hated The Virgin Suicides. Kirsten Dunst completely put me off that movie. I always thought she was really over-rated as an actress and never really saw why people thought she was attractive. I guess it was the impending release of Somewhere that made me want grab the DVD of Marie Antoinette off the shelf and finally sit down and watch it (although, I have to be honest, if Zodiac had been 40 minutes shorter, I probably would have ended up watching that instead).
I loved it.
Now, I realise that Sophia Coppola isn’t the world’s greatest writer. I can overlook this. (I mean, I said I loved Lost in Translation, right?) And I realise this film isn’t meant to be an accurate historical document, but she manages to paint Marie as a genuinely sympathetic figure. And how did she do this? Do we get two hours of philosophising masquerading as character development? Hell no. In fact, I’d be shocked if Kirsten Dunst had more than 100 lines in this movie. It takes a rare skill to do so much with so little.
And yes, I finally see what all the fuss is about Kirsten Dunst. She is terrific in this film. A perfect fit - I can’t think of another actress that could have pulled it off quite so well. Completely changed my opinion of her.
But I also think an awful lot of the success had to do with the way Coppola uses music in her films. The new-wave soundtrack cute, and a great way of hammering home the idea that these kids really were the punks of their time. But it goes beyond cute juxtaposition. Aphex Twin’s ‘Avril 14th’ is an incredibly powerful and evocative piece of music and was perfect for the tone of this film. (Only one other film I’ve seen has used this song at all, and that was Chris Morris’ equally amazing Four Lions.) That Coppola manaaged to create such amazing visuals and find the music to match the mood of the scene so perfectly speaks volumes about her success and skill as a director.
Speaking of cute juxtapositon, I loved, loved the pair of chucks in the background of the spending-spree scene. Something about this is absolutely perfect. It tells us everything we need to know about the character through one tiny, incidental anachronism.
All things considered, it probably wasn’t a great idea to listen to this song right now. Billy Bragg writes some beautiful songs, but this is really something special. One of maybe 5 songs that I can’t get through without crying like a child.
I recently listening to an old edition of the Slashfilm podcast where they interviewed Armond White. I sort of recognised that name, but couldn’t place it. No matter. Anyway, in the interview, White said a few things that I found interesting. He hasn’t got many kind words for Roger Ebert, complaining that he’s more like a professional fan than a genuine film critic and that he is single-handedly responsible for the death of film criticism.
I do think it is fair to say that Roger Ebert destroyed film criticism. Because of the wide and far reach of television, he became an example of what a film critic does for too many people. And what he did simply was not criticism. It was simply blather. And it was a kind of purposefully dishonest enthusiasm for product, not real criticism at all
White also complains that, since everyone has a blog now, they all think that makes them a legitimate criticI keep using qualifiers like “genuine” and “legitimate” because White is convinced that he is the only “pedigreed film critic” around, that the internet promotes “free-for-all of enthusiasm rather than criticism”. As someone with a blog who tries to write critically, I think he’s a little harsh here. Maybe feeling threatened by the democratisation of opinion?
But then you stumble across something like “Lights, Camera, Jackson”, this faux-charming little bollocks of a stage-school drop-outI’m calling it now, ‘Lights, Camera, Jackson’ is the next James Harries, complete with future gender-reassignment surgery. Mark my words. and you think - hey, maybe Armond White has a point
This got me thinking a bit more about him, trying to remember where I’d heard his name before. Armond White… Armond White… Oh shit… Armond White!. He’s the fearlessly outspokenhilariously contrarian film critic who seems to be on a one-man mission to fuck with the metrics that make sites like Rottentomatoes useful. Out of 235 reviews, his is the first of three negative reviews that prevented Toy Story 3 from getting a perfect score, complaining that it wasn’t as good as Transformers 2.
In other words, he is to film criticism what Glen Beck or Joe Duffy are to political opinion.
Other amazing quotes from Armond White:
Talking about There Will be Blood, he said “Plainview is the most remarkable movie performance since Eddie Murphy’s Norbit trifecta”
In the Loop is “for smart arses, not smart enough to appreciate the cultural satire of Hot Fuzz”
“Forget the Oscar bait, Transporter 3 is the only movie you need to see this season”
It’s a shame. Having read a few of his reviews, he does genuinely seem to be a smart, well-educated fellow. It’s just a shame that the rise of online film criticism has led him to chase page-views through controversial statements.
It’s annoying because it comes so close to being a genuinely good game. I mean, on paper, it’s exactly the kind of game I would love. All the things I like are there: monsters, guns, post-apocalyptic RussiaNo idea why, but a post-apocalyptic Russia always grabbed my interest more than a post-apocalyptic USA.. It’s based on an award-winning Russian science fiction story, so its story should be at least halfway decent, if previous experience with Russian science fiction stories are anything to go by. The game just lets itself down somehow. There’s something missing.
Okay, the game is missing a lot of things. Like actual, honest-to-goodness character development. And a facial modelling system that actually conveys emotion instead of looking like some first-year animation student tinkering with 3D Studio Max. Most importantly though, it’s missing a decent control mechanic. It’s no great surprise to say that games work best when there’s a 1:1 relationship between what you input on the controller and what happens in the game. In Metro 2033, there’s a noticeable lag between the two, so the whole game feels “off”. You get the vague sense of controlling a floaty gun wandering through a 3D space, but not much more than that.
A wonky control scheme by itself isn’t won’t kill a game. Plenty of games have managed to make their games work just fine regardless of how good their controls are. For example, Singularity - another game set in a (sorta) post-apocalyptic Russia - also has “floaty” controls (another in a long list of things it copied wholesale from Bioshock). But, to its credit, it acknowledges this and works around this apparent limitation. It says “we understand our control scheme isn’t the greatest, so we won’t really ask too much of you except to shoot monsters.” It works well because of that.
The developers of Metro 2033, God bless them, tried hard to make their game more than just a straight shooter. Some levels include “stealth” sections, where you have to sneak around guards/monsters and avoid traps that draw attention to your character. Except their controls don’t really allow you to accomplish this. Your character moves sluggishly, like the entire world is made of toffee. It’s hard to judge lateral distance, so you’ll inadvertently set off traps that you were trying to avoid. This is irritating at the best of times, but during the stealth sequences, it’s especially annoying. I got about halfway through the game before I hit one particular stealth sequence. I kept triggering traps despite doing everything I could to avoid them. It frustrated me so much, I turned off the game out of spite. I doubt I’ll go back to it again.
It’s a shame because, like I said, I enjoyed the idea of Metro 2033, the monsters, guns and post-apocalyptic Russia. It’s a shame when the game gets in the way of the game. It’s the superficial things that stop you from fully enjoying it. Imagine a horror writer decided his stories should be printed in a novelty “horror” typeface.
Although it may be a cute novelty, it doesn’t enhance the story at all. It just frustrates the reader. It doesn’t matter how good the story is if the reader gives up halfway through because of some mechanical problem. It’s the same for games. How many games have you just given up on because you figured no story is worth battling with crappy mechanics?
On the whole, I don’t really care about spoilers. If your enjoyment of a movie is based entirely around not knowing a particular plot point, then the movie hasn’t really done its job. Inception, like most of Christopher Nolan’s films, is so dense and complex as to be pretty much spoiler-proof. I know there’s this stuff about a dream, and then a dream-within-a-dream, and then, later on, a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream (I think). Apart from that, it’s all a little fuzzy.
Even still, there’s been an almost universal, unwritten agreement among critics that it’s best to not reveal too much about the film. I guess it’s so people can go in completely fresh. Even Mark Kermode, who had previously spoiled Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (which he now refers to as “the unfortunate incident after being hit with nerd-rage”) has said very little about the plot of the film.
What people are talking about, because they figure it’s not spoiling anything, is the last shot of the film. “What did you think of the last shot?” they ask. “What noise did you make? I made a sort of a “whoah” combined with a “huh?”” And they’re right to talk. Inception has one of those bravura endings that, if you were feeling particularly cynical, could easily be interpreted as the director showing off. It’s right up there with Brad Pitt channelling Quentin Tarantino at the end of Inglourious Basterds: “You know somethin’, Utivich? I think this just might be my masterpiece.”
And, to be honest, just knowing there was this great final shot kind of spoiled the ending for me. I was sitting in the cinema trying to predict what the final shot would be, what I thought would be worth talking about. Like being told there’s a twist in the movie, but not told what the twist is - you spend the entire movie thinking “She’s a he! It’s all a dream! The butler did it!” Technically the movie isn’t spoiled, but at the same time, it is.
Random Thoughts
Christopher Nolan may be getting better with each film, but he still can’t manage even simple walk-and-talk exposition. There was a lot of explaining in this movie, and he handled it by showing a lot of people sitting around saying “What?”
Coming out of the screening I went to (UCI Coolock in Dublin), I overheard someone saying “Nah, I didn’t like that at all. You had to concentrate too hard”. Except with a thick, Coolock accent.
Did no-one else think the film’s depiction of the dream-world was a little boring? A little unimaginative? For all its cleverness - “You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on” - it completely ignored the fundamentally weird nature of dreams: running at full speed, but not getting anywhere; the feeling of the ground suddenly disappearing beneath you. Paprika did a much better job of conveying the feeling of being inside a dream, with all its twisted logic.
Jesus Christ, it’s time that Hans Zimmer and Christopher Nolan parted ways. I know Inception is getting a lot of praise for its score, but holy shit, it sounded the exact same as every other score they’ve done together, except this time it was mixed by a demented monkey with a demented-monkey-boner for pulsing violins. Make it stop!
My uncle - the conspiracy nut - is so convinced that the end-times are coming that he’s spent €200 on non-perishable, tinned foods. He’s storing them at different, strategic points around the house.
My 18-year old niece - who ran away to Egypt to get married - has left her husband and is now on the run from him. She won’t tell anyone where she is. She let the husband know she’d left him by changing her Facebook status to “single”.
As you probably noticed, I’m playing about with the comments on my blog: disabling them for most new articles, unless I really, really want to hear what other people have to say. This sounds like a total dick move. “You’re suppressing debate!” Probably! But I don’t really see it that way. The thing that kind of swung the no-comments move for me was something Merlin Mann said during his presentation with John Gruber at SXSW, when he recalled what John Gruber’s response when he asked him why he doesn’t enable comments on daringfireball.net:
… you were like ‘I wanna own every single pixel on my site, from the top left to the lower right. And if I have somebody come in — even if it’s somebody incredibly smart; even if it’s whoever; even if it’s SeoulBrother comes in and has something to say, like somebody really smart and really funny, like, it’s not my site any more.’.
I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to write, I’d preemptively hear the comments I’d inevitably get. It made writing a chore, and eventually I stopped writing altogether. Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again.
This is what sold me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my blog output has gone up since disabling comments, exactly because I don’t feel like I have to think about every word I write. I can write bullshit like that thing about Before Sunset - stuff that I would have previously held back because I’d have visions of a random drive-by commenter calling me out on it, making me feel bad.
Update: I was having second thoughts about the no-comments thing. Over the past few days, people have been very pointedly asking me why I’ve disabled comments - who the fuck did I think I was, comparing myself to John Gruber? - so I was thinking maybe I should just turn them back on. That is, until I enabled the Daring Fireball with Comments extension for Safari yesterday. This is from a random article (click for the larger version):
See? It completely changes the mood of the site. This is exactly what I don’t want, so I think my comments will be staying off for the time being.
If you don’t know this film, it’s about two people, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who meet on a train, realise they’ve got an immediate connection and decide to spend the night walking the streets of Vienna before Ethan Hawke has to fly home to America the next morning. Throughout the night, they keep coming across all sorts of interesting things, such as: late night fairs, palm readers, late night cafes, dive bars with pinball machines, churches that apparently stay open all night, bums that will write you a poem for some money. I’ll save my opinion of the actual film for another time (quick spoiler: thought it was a great film when I saw it in my early twenties; in my early thirties, however, I thought they were a pair of hateful douches). What I was thinking though is how I’d love to see that movie set in Rome. Because you know what’s open in Rome after midnight? You know what’s happening around this city once it gets dark?
FUCK ALL.
Seriously. I really cannot believe it sometimes. Most bars close around 1am - except for the ‘social clubs’ - speakeasy-type joints that are well-hidden and very wary of strangers. You could go to the coked-out clubs in Testaccio, I suppose. They’re too busy snorting and preening to notice the time. But in general, after 2am, this city is a ghost town. A really sketchy ghost town. We used to have a McDonalds near us that would close at 10.30pm. 11.00pm on Saturday nights - as an Irish man who is used to his battered sausage and curry chips after a night in the pub, this was the most painful for me: there’s nowhere to get any kind food after the bars close.
Things are only worse during August. Already, a load of bars, restaurants and cinemas are already closed in anticipation of ferragosto - a month-long celebration of whateverthefuck. I honestly have no idea what’s being celebrated. I just know that the end result is that most Romans disappear off to the beach or somewhere less oppressively hot. Which has its benefits too. Sure, more things are closed and you have to think about what shops are still open when you want a pint of milk, but the lack of crowds means that the city is a much more pleasant place to be. Still, doesn’t help my initial point: there’s almost nothing to do in Rome after dark.
I’d really love to see Before Sunrise: Rome Edition. I bet it would be a real short film.
There’ll be some discussion of the ending of Mass Effect 2, so if you haven’t played that game all the way through and you like your life spoiler-free, stop reading now
After about 30 hours of playing, I finally, finally finished Mass Effect 2. And having finished it now, I’m still happy that pretty much everything I said about the game still stands. There were a couple of side-missions that were time-based: you have X number of minutes to escape from X or to stop X from happening, but these were still small, local instances, usually coming at the ends of missions. There was no sense of urgency to any the larger narrative. Take all the time you need; that person dying of space-flu or space-gonorrhoea or whatever in isn’t going anywhere. He’s in another mission. Sure, the galaxy needs saving, but - holy shit! - that Krogan hasn’t tasted sushi before. Better take care of that first!
Which is why the ending feels like such a cheap shot.
After being stung by some of my choices at the end of the first Mass Effect - where the game pulled a switcheroo and the person I actually wanted to save ended up being the person that died - I made sure that, for Mass Effect 2, I read up about the ending and what choices I should make if I wanted my characters to survive. Some might call this cheating. To this, I say: FUCK YOU. Including the first game, I’ll have spent around 60 hours playing as this character and I’m not going to leave this shit to chance again.
When you return to the Normandy, you will have the ability to go through the Omega 4 relay in pursuit of the Collector ship. If you go on any other missions first, half the Normandy’s crew will be killed, including Yeoman Chambers.
Now, I wasn’t affected by this because, like I said, there were almost no side-missions left by the time I came to travelling through the Omega 4 relay. But still, I feel like this is unnecessarily punitive, especially since that the developers have established one rule throughout the game: that you can delay and it doesn’t matter. Why the abrupt change? Why punish players like this? Why Yeoman Chambers?!
For the record (and as I mentioned on Twitter), immediately after saving the galaxy, I jumped straight in and did the dirt on Miranda. Commander Shepard: space mutt
Probably these developers know something I don’t. Probably they know that their market already understands the conventions of this world, and that eventually, and through repetition, anything that deviates from these conventions seems somehow false. (I suspect that this might be what Tom means when he mentions games literacy.) But for me, this time at least, it never stopped feeling like a videogame.
This is a criticism I hear a lot - that playing videogames presupposes a certain amount of knowledge. The reason I hear it a lot is because my wife is so unfamiliar with videogame conventions. So much that she’s a terrific litmus test for the accessibility of a particular game. Give me a joypad and my hands instinctively fall into a familiar grip. After a short while, I’ll be accustomed to the controls of a game that there will be almost no barrier between what I want to do and what I can make the game do. The controls will disappear for me, allowing me to fully immerse myself in the game. For my wife, the controls are always present. She isn’t familiar with the joypad, so when the game tells her to “Press X to open”, she has to actively think about where button X is. It will never not be a game for her. Years of experience has taught me that, almost universally, “X” (or “bottom button”) means “Okay” and “O” (or “right button”) means “Cancel”. I’ve been doing this for so long that I don’t even think about it now. For my wife, this is still a strange concept even though she uses these buttons every day to watch movies and TV through our Xbox.
Within the game worlds themselves, there are also conventions that might only be immediately obvious to someone who is familiar with games and has been playing them for a substantial amount of time. For example, the near-ubiquitous red barrel has an obvious meaning to gamers: kick-ass explosions. Wooden crates can be smashed open to potentially give you some amazing loot. In most games, the double-jump has no grounding in either the narrative or the physics of the world - I mean, what the fuck is that? Someone can “jump” again in mid-air to go even higher? Seriously? - but this is something I almost expect when I’m playing a platform game. When it isn’t present, I feel like something is missing. Giant Bomb has helpfully put together a fairly comprehensive list of the most common videogame conventions so that we don’t have to go through them all here.
And so it’s not so much the fact that these conventions exist that bother me, but more the fact that this is used as a stick to beat videogames as a medium. A typical conversation when we try to play games together:
“How did you know you could open that door but not the door beside it?” “It’s obvious!” “Not to me!” “Well, because 25 years of playing videogames has taught me which doors can be opened and which can’t.” “You see?! This is why I can’t play videogames!”
Here’s where I’m in danger of sounding like a snob, but my answer to this is: so learn, get used to it. Or, to put it in more Xbox Live-friendly terms: have you considered sucking less?
You’re reading my blog, so I’m guessing that you’re probably a middle-to-upper class white male with at least a secondary school educationand your name is probably Steve, Bob or Gar. You probably spend a fair portion of your spare time reading – I mean, no-one’s paying you to read this so, if nothing else, I’m probably right with this assumption. Now, just think about the conventions of reading. We take it for granted, but this, too, presupposes a whole bunch of stuff. Obviously, you have to be familiar with the language, you have to be familiar with the form of the letters, the spellings of words. You have to understand the process of reading (in English, at least) from left-to-right, then top-to-bottom. These are the literary analogues to videogame control conventions, “X means okay”.
Once you actually master the mechanics of it, there are also conventions used in literature and reading. Right now I’m reading David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System. To read this properly, to understand it and convert it from just words on a page to ideas and concepts, it helps to be familiar with, among other things, the logic of metafiction and the various philosophical theories of language including, but not limited to, the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The first time I read Thomas Pynchon’s V, I was completely unfamiliar with metafiction, and I had a hard time reading that book. Just as the game never stopped being a videogame for Emmett, V never stopped being a book for me. I was reading at such a cripplingly slow pace that it took me forever, which meant I never really developed a “flow”. I was always completely conscious of the process of writing that made up this book. I didn’t enjoy it. Because I wasn’t immersed in the subject of the work, I was very aware of the form of the work, I was aware of the author’s “tricks”. It’s like my wife playing a game, the controller/book never disappeared for meMy second read-trough, after more exposure to the genre of metafiction, more exposure to Pynchon’s work, was much more successful. I don’t think anyone would accuse the book of being at fault here. I was unfamiliar with the genre, and I was punching above my weight. I knew that. I accepted that.
I guess this is made worse with games because they are all rules, they’re all convention. I recently played a game of Carcassonne with my wife, and the rules never once disappeared into the background because we constantly had to think about what we were doing. Our first game of Dungeons & Dragons was quickly disbanded after we said “fuck this” because we couldn’t figure out what the various numbers meant or how we were meant to calculate things. In none of these cases did we blame the game’s rules, we blamed ourselves for not knowing them. (This is a lie, we totally blamed the D&D rules. Christ, even their “beginner’s guide” is written with the assumption you were playing D&D in the womb). In videogame terms, I have little experience of Japanese RPGs. As a result, I don’t enjoy playing them. Their rules are so transparent that I feel like I’m watching an Excel spreadsheet with fancy graphics. At the same time, I’m unfamiliar with their conventions. Do you know how long it took me to wrap my head around the concept of “grinding”. My enjoyment of Dragon Quest VIII increased immeasurably once I copped to this? These games never stop being “games” for me. I’m never immersed.
But still, what should be done? What should I do when I’m having trouble reading a book like V? Well, I should read other books. Books that are more at my reading-level. Slowly build myself up my familiarity with literary conventions so that I could enjoy the book properly. You wouldn’t expect a teenager coming straight off Twilight (for example) to be able to pick up and enjoy Ulysses (again, for example), so I don’t see why you’d expect someone completely unfamiliar with modern videogames to be able to enjoy them properly either.
A couple of days ago, I wrote about how Red Dead Redemption could be seen as a useful metric to demonstrate how far videogaming has come. Now I want to discuss the other side of that argument, how Red Dead Redemption represents how far videogames still have to go as a medium.
Let’s tackle the issues in reverse order
The Ugly
As Emmett points out, despite being labelled an ‘open world’ game, Red Dead Redemption does not offer the player a particularly satisfying level of immersion and freedom. There’s very little actual “openness”. It’s hard to play this game and not feel an amount of disappointment with the enormous gap between what is possible in the game and what you wish was possible. As with almost every game I play (especially these open world, sandbox games), the first thing I did with Red Dead Redemption was to test just how far I could push the game until it breaks. This gives me a feel for the “rules” of the world I’m in. I started running around, knocking things over, knocking people over. I wanted to see if there was any way to get the non-player characters to react to me in the world. Nothing happened. I spent five minutes pushing one NPC into a fire, and again, nothing happened. One of the face-buttons on the controller allows you to “interact” with NPCs; however, this could be more accurately described as a button that allows you to “tip your hat and say ma’m”. It does nothing else. This is the extent of your ability to interact with the majority of characters beyond shooting them deadEven this isn’t final. I can’t think of the amount of times I shot the poker players in Armadillo only to have them re-appear the next day.
And while I praised Read Dead Redemption for the range of possibilities it presented, the game offers little outside the realm of prescribed activities. Apart from the hilariousbugs, very little emergent behaviour is possible within the strict videogame framework. Despite being traditionally one of the most popular activities in westerns, your character cannot rob a bank. One could argue that this is intended to keep your character in line with the game’s narrative (similar to why you cannot hire a prostitute in this game, despite it being one of the most famous features of its Grand Theft Auto cousins). Why, then, can none of these things be done during the game’s epilogue, when none of these rules apply?
On the other hand, perhaps this criticism is unfair. True “openness” is virtually impossible to achieve without the assistance of a real games master behind the curtain – as in Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death – or a virtual one – such as the kind of thing we’re approaching with Left 4 Dead’s AI Director. On the plus side, at least the game’s setting helps give the lack of activity a sense of reality. For me, one of the most frustrating parts of Grand Theft Auto IV was the way in which the city appeared to be a bustling metropolis, a living world, yet the vast majority of the buildings were just flat textures draped over geometric shapes which you couldn’t interact with. Plus, with the crowds of people in GTAIV, there was enough character model repetition to break any sense of believability. It’s hard to take a game seriously when it randomly sends a herd of identical characters coming your way. Red Dead Redemption at least does away with these unbelievable flat-textured districts populated by clones in favour of a more believable barely-populated expanse of prairie. This at least makes sense within the context of its setting.
The Bad
In my previous post, I mentioned how Kane was criticised for not having enough for the player to do. However, no-one complained about the weak-sauce narrative that supposedly tied the entire thing together. Maybe this was just a product of its time - “story” didn’t seem to be a major concern in 1986 (the year that gave us Crocodile Dundee, Cobra and Police Academy 3: Back in Training). Or maybe it’s just that no-one thought a videogame could or should have a good story, so it was just taken as given that any story tacked onto a videogame would be a pile of ass. Who cares about story when shit blows up good?
First of all, let’s call a spade a spade. It’s 2010 and the story of Red Dead Redemption is no great shakes either. An outlaw, trying to mend his ways but brought back out for one last job. If that sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because it’s also the plot of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, a film that the developers return to again and again. Along the way, Read Dead Redemption touches on themes of manifest destiny, the taming of the frontier west and the whole Conradian question of whether civilisation is actually just savagery with a nattier dress sense. Again, these are themes that we see time and again across the entire Western genre. When Red Dead Redemption actively attempts to tackle these themes, it demonstrates just how immature videogames are as a storytelling form. For example, as a mouthpiece for the supposed dangers of scientific hubris and the inherent savagery hidden beneath civility, Harold MacDougal is handled dreadfully. There is no subtlety to any of his conversations. It’s as if Rockstar were so afraid that people might miss their point with this character that they decided to hit the player over the head.
Few characters in the game are handled much better than MacDougal. For the briefest of moments, I thought Rockstar were demonstrating an understanding of subtlety with their handling of the relationship between Vincente de Santa and Quique Montemayor. The first time you meet them, there is a brief look between the two of them that makes you think “hey - are they together?” It was so brief, so easy to miss that I thought maybe I was either imagining it or reading too much into a few keyframes thrown in by a bored animator. A few more interactions and it is hinted that, yes, these characters are in a homosexual relationship. But just like with MacDougal, the game eventually gives over, afraid that you might have missed those hints, again hits you over the head with the point: these characters are gay. This isn’t even the worst of Read Dead Redemption’s crimes against characterisation. Marshall Johnson is little better than a slightly less hateful (but similarly, slightly less nuanced) version of Unforgiven’s Little Bill Daggett. Landon Ricketts is clearly the bastard son of Lee Van Cleef and Sam Elliott. The snake oil salesman, Nigel West Dickens, well… well, he’s just a sophomoric creation lacking any sort of nuance or wit.
As well as the characters, many of the game’s missions are also lifted from films. For example, the stampede scene from Red River becomes an entire mission in Read Dead Redemption. Another involves rescuing Bonnie MacFarlane from hanging, just like in Hang ‘Em High. Robbing a train full of ammunition? The Wild Bunch. The side-mission where the player must save a person from being hung by shooting the rope is obviously taken directly from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Except without any of the tension or narrative support. Throughout the game, you are asked to save prostitutes from being sliced by some knife-wielding cowboy who, just like in Unforgiven, took offence at the prostitute laughing at the size of his penis. Unforgiven turned hat event into the inciting incident of that film. Red Dead Redemption treats it like a throwaway joke.
Against direct comparisons to film (which it seems to openly invite), Red Dead Redemption falls completely flat. The lack of originality in its storytelling is only exacerbated by the ham-fisted way in which it is executed.
The Good
With that said, what these films fail to achieve and what Rockstar seem to pull off so easily is to provoke an emotional reaction to its themes. The Wild Bunch can make you think about the end of the era of the outlaw cowboy, but Red Dead Redemption can actually elicit an emotional response to this same theme. The reason Rockstar succeed where the movies fail is because of immersion. Your own experience is central to Red Dead Redemption, and placing you inside a well-realised world helps colour your experience.
Mise-en-scene is an enormous part of storytelling. I’m a huge theme park nerd, and my favourite part of any good theme park ride is the pre-show area, where you queue to actually get on the ride. To stop punters getting bored, the creators of theme park rides often litter the queuing area with props which create atmosphere and allow the punter to construct their own story before they even get on the ride. When it’s done well, the scene-setting transforms a good ride into a great ride.
Videogames have the ability to create a level of mise-en-scene that film, as a medium, has no hope of replicating. Red Dead Redemption is filled with incidental details that serve no explicit storytelling purpose but just enrich the atmosphere of the game. Props that tell stories, if you want them to. For example, although it isn’t beaten to death in the game, Marshall Johnson is a widower. If you want to, you can find his wife’s gravestone in the local graveyard. This allows the player to fill in the gaps and construct a back-story for Johnson, more than actually comes up in the course of gameplay. Likewise, the environment is dotted with things for people to find. For example, the ‘Mystery Site’ at Repentance Rockhas become famous precisely because there’s no explanation for it. It’s just there for players to stumble across and flesh out their experience. A film, on the other hand, is limited in how much it can put on screen. It must be judicious in its mise-en-scene. Too much and it can be confusing. As huge a fan as I am, Terry Gilliam sometimes tries to cram so much on screen at once that his films become visually distractingThe Adventures of Baron Munchausen is one of my favourite films of all time, but I think I’ve only twice managed to watch it in one sitting. Every other time, my brain just shuts down from overstimulation.
Similarly, while film places the audience very much apart from the action, but videogames literally puts you inside of the action. This isn’t someone else’s story, this is your story. Although everyone plays the same game, the way in which you approach this game allows you to write your own story. How many people came across grieving suicide man? How many did it while hunting beaver in Aurora Basin? How many did it having just survived an attack by a grizzly bear and a coyote? How many players actually came across the Mystery Site at Repentance Rock? Although I share experiences with other people who played Red Dead Redemption, my play-through is my story. While some people argue that this kind of immersion can have a negative effect, it’s also one of the medium’s biggest strengths.
From a storytelling point of view, immersion is a valuable tool that Red Dead Redemption often uses to its full advantage. Even without the overarching narrative of the cutscenes and interactions with characters – the traditional storytelling tools used in videogames – the game tells an entire story just using atmosphere and its immersion.
(Here’s where I’m going to have to get a bit spoiler-heavy. If you haven’t played the game to see “REDEMPTION” flash across the screen, you might want to stop reading now).
The opening acts of Red Dead Redemption take place in the classic image of the frontier west: one-horse towns with ramshackle, wooden buildings. Lawless places where storekeepers aren’t afraid to tell you about their hatred of the jews. These towns paint a picture. Just as the town of Deadwood was as important a character to that show as Al Swearingen and Seth Bullock, the frontier towns you visit in the game are as important to the story of Red Dead Redemption as Nigel West Dickens and Landon Ricketts. You spend a good twenty hours in this version of west and, at the end of those twenty hours, you come to appreciate it, you come to romanticise it. Although some might accuse me of overstating my case, I’ll say you actually develop an emotional attachment to this placeOn a similar note, I’d argue that the 12 or so lonely hours you spend in the world of Shadow of the Colossus helps you develop an enormous bond with your only companion throughout that game – your horse, Agro – to similar emotional results.
So, when you finally reach the town of Blackwater, the last section of the game – with its brick buildings, tea rooms and vision of modernity – you actually feel out of place. You feel as if you are, as Landon Ricketts says, a relic, an anachronism. I personally felt a genuine sense of disappointment that I’d left the west that I’d come to love, because as a player, you understand that version of the west. As a character, MacDougal might be clumsily written, but he’s a perfect cipher for the entire town of Blackwater - underneath his facade of physiognomy, MacDougal is a racist prick - perhaps worse than the shopkeeper in Armadillo because he believes his racism is scientifically justified (the shopkeeper just hates Jews, take it or leave it). Blackwater is probably more savage than any of the frontier towns you’ve visited – suddenly you don’t feel as if the things you’re forced to do are serving any sort of ‘greater good’, they’re just plain mean – but Blackwater hides this savagery under a facade of modern brickwork and electricity.
The experience of reuniting with your family at the end is difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t played through to this part of the game. Having been exposed to the viciousness and brutality of Blackwater and having finally put a (somewhat unsatisfactory) end to your outlaw days, a return to a more straightforward, rural life is incredibly affecting. You might not be taking on gangs of armed bandits, but the idea of spending a few hours tending to your herd, teaching your son to shoot – the quiet life – feels like a reward. As I pointed out, Read Dead Redemption essentially apes the entire plot of Unforgiven, yet for everything that film did right, at no point did it make me feel any sort of emotional connection to Clint Eastwood’s character. At no point did I have the tiniest inkling of what it meant to put down guns, leave the outlaw way of life behind and to settle down. For everything Read Dead Redemption did wrong, I understood this. I felt this.
In many ways, the twenty-four years that separate Kane and Read Dead Redemption are like the hundred-something years that separate the Lumiere brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat and James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar. There’s no question that Cameron trumps the Lumieres in terms of sheer spectacle, but it’s debatable whether his film actually represents a century of storytelling progress. The level of technological sophistication in Read Dead Redemption is leaps and bounds above that of Kane, but at the same time, there can be little doubt that the level of storytelling has also improved. Granted, we’re talking about the progression from virtually nothing to mere cave paintings, but it’s still a demonstrable improvement. But, more hopefully, there’s improvement in the right direction. Rather than simply aping films and filmic conventions, videogames are finding their own feet when it comes to storytelling. They are using the uniqueness of their own medium to their advantage.
If you’ve got five minutes, you should go read his essay now, but if you had a quick look and you’re still all “tl;dr”, here’s the short-short version of Hocking’s argument: while the story in BioShock is all about freedom, choice and power, the story of player’s actions (what Hocking calls the “ludonarrative” of the game) is restricted to one pre-defined path. So, despite all the talk of free will and choice, the player actually has no choice in the game since it does not provide an option for the player to do anything but help Atlas.
The danger in Hocking’s argument comes from the way that it makes you realise how prevalent this ludonarrative disconnect is within games. It’s like the little arrow in the FedEx logo: suddenly, you can’t see anything but this dissonance.
Right now, I’m slowly playing through Mass Effect 2. I say “slowly” because, not only am I experiencing a difficulty with the underlying story and mechanics of the game (I find that the cookie-cutter structure of the missions gets a little stale after 12 hours or so), but also because the ludonarrative dissonance in Mass Effect 2 means I am not as fully absorbed in the game as I really wish I could be, so I can’t do anything but slowly chip away at it.
The problem with Mass Effect 2
Like the majority of videogames, Mass Effect 2 is about saving the galaxy. Huge, terrifying aliens are coming to destroy all life and - surprise! - only your character can stop it. This is the ‘main quest’ of the game, and given the weight of it - the protection of all life in the galaxy - it should be your number one priority. Except there is nothing forcing you down this path. In fact, the game does the opposite; rather than forcing anything, it presents the player with an smorgasbord of ‘side quests’ and gives the player the option of how he or she wants to play the game.
Heavily influencing my playing of Mass Effect 2 is my experience playing The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I powered my way through the main quest of that game in the course of a couple of evenings. I completely avoided all of the side-quests or, indeed, anything that would take me from the path that would lead to me destroying all the oblivion gates and saving the world - I mean, who has time to join guilds and fight in gladiatorial arenas for sportI did actually complete the arena missions in Oblivion - one of the advantages of playing through the game the way I did was that I never got to a high enough level that the monsters were particularly difficult. The arena missions, then, were an easy way to make a lot of money in the game when there’s an evil demonic force sweeping the land? In the end, the game was fun, but after I completed it, I didn’t see much point in playing the rest of the game. The rest of the game being where everyone says the real enjoyment is to be had. In effect, I sabotaged my own experience of this game.
With this in mind, I’m doing things differently with Mass Effect 2. I’m trying to play each and every side-quest I can find. I’m scanning planets, talking to every random stranger, endorsing each and every shop on the citadel and trying to fuck just about every character I think the game will allow me to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying Mass Effect 2. These parts of the game are actually lots of fun and amazingly relaxing ways to kill a few hours. Except they’re completely at odds with the story. In most of the cut-scenes, my character shouts about how the reapers are coming and there’s no time for X - the galaxy is in danger and time is running out!
And yet, I waste hours - literally hours - scanning planets for minerals.
To make it worse, the game actually encourages this ridiculous disconnect. For example, your crew members will occasionally come to you with a problem that present new missions. If you choose to help them, completing these missions will increase their loyalty to you. When you first speak to them about these problems, there are two conversation options: “Sure, I’ll help” or “Sorry, there’s no time”. Within the context of the game, I’m left asking: why does that second choice even exist? If my hours of fucking around scanning planets has taught me anything, it’s that there is time. Lots and lots of time. Even still, if you agree to help your crew member, this mission just becomes another side-quest which you can tackle whenever you want. There’s nothing compelling you to go and deal with it right there (which is good, because in my game, Jacob’s dad has been in trouble for a couple of weeks now). Theoretically, you could say “sure, I’ll help”, completely ignore them and finish the main quest without any sort of punishment.
Within individual missions, too, there’s a lack of urgency or engagement. The game will tell you that someone is in trouble, that their life is hanging by a thread, but at the same time, the game actively encourages and rewards slow and methodical exploration. So, rather than rushing to the next area where the hostages are being held, you should first examine every nook and cranny, hack “datapads”, break into wall-safes, collect the ammo that has conveniently been left lying around the place. Take your time because the game, and the character who is supposedly in danger, will wait.
In my 22+ hours of playing Mass Effect 2, I have come across one - ONE - mission that was time-based and had a sense of urgency. A side-mission in which the player must stop a missile from launching within a set time limit. One mission out of maybe sixty.
I don’t mean to single out Mass Effect 2 with this complaint. Lots of other games suffer from the same problem. I finished the penultimate mission in the main quest of Fallout 3 before deciding that instead of facing the climax of that game and saving everyone, I would rather wander the wasteland with my dog and giant supermutant friend, hunting out all the side-questsUnlike Oblivion, it used to be that when you finished Fallout 3, you couldn’t go back and continue to play the game and explore the world - this was corrected in a subsequent patch. The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time is another example. You could rescue Zelda, or you could kick some chickens for hours and hours. In fact, it’s almost a genre staple: the RPG whose over-arching “main” story is less important than the abundance of side-quests.
Other games have been more daring in their approach to the time mechanic and what it means for the narrative. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, for example, has actual, time-based consequences, constantly increasing the tension in that game. Dead Rising is also built around time: the entire game takes place over the course of three days, and actions occur at certain times within that world (and, unlike BioShock, this game does give the player the option of non-participation. The player can simply sit around doing nothing, waiting for the game’s three-day timer to run out and for rescue to arrive. It’s not a great ending, but at least it’s catered for).
Having been disappointed by powering my way through Oblivion and disappointed by taking my time with Mass Effect 2, how should I tackle Dragon Age: Origins?
We hosted our first movie night last night. A bunch of friends came around and, in honour of this god-awful heatwave, we turned on the air conditioning and watched A Guide to Recognising Your Saints.
I made a few snacks for us to nibble on during the movie. Some were more of a success than others. The bean and cheese pate? Yeah, I probably won’t be making that one again. By far, the biggest hit of the night were the spicy potato wedges. I know this sounds embarrassing for someone who loves junk food AND loves to cook, but this is the first time I felt like I actually nailed spicy potato wedges. They were spot-on. What’s more embarrassing was how easy they were to make.
A couple of people asked me for the recipe, so here it is.
Spicy Potato Wedges
1kg Medium/Large Potatoes
1tbsp Olive Oil
2 large cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp cumin
salt and pepper
Get the oven on hot. I put ours onto fan-assist, 200°.
Pour some oil into a roasting tray and put it into the oven to get hot.
Cut the potatoes into halves, then cut those halves in half again.
Put all the ingredients into a large bowl and combine.
Once the oven is hot enough and the oil is moving around that roasting tray, pour in the potatoes.
Tossing occasionally, cook for about 25 minutes, or until they’re done to your liking.
I’d show you a photo of what the end result looked like, but honestly, we ate the fuck out of those things. I didn’t have a chance.
If you’re someone who plays videogames, have you ever tried to explain why you like videogames to a non-gamer? Horrible, right? Conversely, if you don’t play videogames, have you ever had a videogame nerd try to explain why he or she likes videogames? Horrible, right? The problem is that videogames are a tough “sell”. Let’s face it, for the most part, videogames are antisocial things that seem to bring out the worst habits in peopleI guess I should point out that it’s not just videogames that bring out the worst qualities in people, some board games do too. I remember playing Trivial Pursuit with my wife who wouldn’t give me a wedge because I had said “Rock and Roll Music” when the answer was “Rock Music” - this will never be forgotten in my house. I scream and shout and swear at the TV all the time when I’m playing games. Even a seemingly “quiet” and slow-paced game like Risk: Factions has me trying to break my controller with my bare hands (something I haven’t actually done since the days of the SNES). My wife often complains about how I remain “twitchy” for hours after playing certain games. In fact, she uses this as a sort of litmus test to see if I’m lying and, instead of working or studying, I’ve actually been shooting fools in Modern Warfare 2.
For someone who has never played videogames before, watching someone behave like a petulant child is hardly going to make them want to see what all the fuss is about.
I think that the best way to “sell” videogames to a non-gamer is by talking about them from an experiential point of view, talking frankly and openly about the experiences a game has provided, rather than trying to describe the whole game in 500 words. This is something that has caught on in the last few years, the idea of New Games Journalism, where dispassionate cookie-cutter descriptions of videogames with a meaningless score tacked on the end (7/10) were replaced with first-person accounts of play, focusing on the emotions evoked by certain experiences within the game. In effect, rather than trying to provide a description of the elephant as a whole, we are shifting our focus to each of the blind men’s experiences because they have experienced this elephant in a closer, more intimate way than any simple overview could provide. In fact, I’m going to say that videogames are one of the few mediums where we can consistently focus on individual experiences. For example, how many people have come across the suicide man in Red Dead Redemption? How many people experienced the exact same story in Mass Effect or Dragon Age?
Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Videogames Matter is one of the first books that attempt to present a first-person, emotional account of someone’s experiences playing videogames. As I mentioned before, Paste Magazine described it as “the first truly indispensable work of literary nonfiction about society’s most lucrative entertainment medium”. Now, having read it, does it live up to this hype?
I’m sad to say: not really. I found it to be a wildly uneven book. It swings erratically between a genuinely entertaining account of the author’s video gaming experiences, and a boring, dime-a-dozen primer on video games. For example, the chapter providing a blow-by-blow account of the opening minutes of Resident Evil might be interesting to someone who has never played the game before, but as someone who has played that game (and especially that section of that game) more times than he cares to admit, I found that there were very few actual insights in this chapter. I understand the desire to want your book to be as accessible to as many people as possible, but really, it just gets out of hand sometimes. Imagine writing a cookbook and explaining what a “pot” was, or the etymology of “recipe”. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Except with videogames.
To make things worse, the author’s literary background (because he’s a real, legitimate, literary author, dontchaknow?) causes the whole thing to occasionally tumble over into the ridiculous. Like Roland Barthes reviewing Pac-Man.
Which is not to say it’s all bad. There are moments of real genius in the book, but he rarely gives us more than just moments. Frequently, Bissell will touch on a topic or offer a profound observation only to drop it in favour of a more casual-friendly read that will appeal to a broader audience. And this is the real shame of the book. There’s a terrific interview with Bissell on the Brainy Gamer podcast. I suppose the pre-defined audience of this podcast allowed him to go into a lot of detail regarding his experience with cocaine and GTA IV and the relationship between the two, why cocaine is the perfect drug to play GTA IV to. It was genuinely interesting and so I was left wondering why he couldn’t have included these thoughts in the actual book he was promoting? It would have made the book a lot more enjoyable for both gamers and non-gamers alike.
(Also, since this is the internet - the perfect place to pick nits - I was a little dismayed by the inconsistency in the book. At the beginning, Bissell talks about the confusion caused by the variety of names people use to talk about videogames: “videogames”, “video games” and “video-games”, and announces that he has settled on “video games”, yet he uses all three throughout the book. Would a little search-and-replace have killed him? I probably wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t explicitly addressed the issue of nomenclature himself.)
Although the book is definitely a great start, I feel as if Bissell failed to show us ‘why video games matter’, but instead tried to explain why video games matter to him. Even then, I don’t think he did a great job. For a more engaging and coherent argument on why video games matter, check out the chapter in Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.
Some things to check out if you want some really great examples of the kind of “New Games Journalism” that I felt Bissell was going for:
Bow Nigger. Arguably the first example of “New Games Journalism”
The Idle Thumbs Podcast, who spend much of their time talking about the ridiculous and fun things they get up to in games. They make it sound so appealing, it’s hard not to want to join in and see what the fuss is about.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Kane, an early wild west game that came out on the Commodore 64 in the mid-80s. Actually, I doubt if it even counts as a “game” by today’s standards. Really it was just four mini-games - shooting birds (or rather, “birdies”), riding a horse to the right, a shoot out, and then riding a horse to the left. The game wasn’t particularly flashy, nor was the narrative wrapper that supposedly connected these mini-games (essentially, the plot of High Noon - “Kane” being the name of Gary Cooper’s character in that movie).
Despite the flaws, I fucking loved that game.
I loved it because I was 10, and this was a game where I could pretend to be a cowboy. And when you’re a ten year old boy, all you want to do is to be a cowboy. For me, the small numbers of actions in the game actually added to the effect. I mean, what the hell else did cowboys do but shoot things and ride horses? That was just me, though. The Spectrum magazine, Crash, criticised the game for the limited amount of things you can do in the game, saying “it would be fun if there were about 10 more sections to battle through”.
Playing through Rock Star’s Red Dead Redemption, I couldn’t help being reminded of Kane - one of the first games I ever played and definitely the first cowboy game I ever played - which then got me thinking about how far videogames have come. If you were to jump in a time machine and show this game to my ten-year old self (on a 60" HD LCD TV, natch), I can guarantee you I would have quite literally shit my pants.
While Kane was mostly played in static screens, with just four types of activity in the entire gameWell, two, if you want to be persnickety about the qualitative distinctions between riding left instead of right and shooting birds instead of dudes, there’s no shortage of activity in Red Dead Redemption. In my almost 35 hours of playing RDR, I never once felt bored or like I had nothing to do. There were always animals to hunt, outlaws to kill (and loot), horses to lasso and women to hogtie and place in front of a fast-approaching train. I love the amount and variety of possibilities that the game throws at the player. I’ve finished the story and I still have things to do, such as killing grizzly bears with my hunting knife.
What I love most about the Red Dead Redemption is the way it feels like a real, living world. I was always stumbling across little things, micro-stories that felt like they were happening completely independently of me and my actions. For example, while riding around Aurora Basin, hunting for bears, I spotted a man kneeling on the ground. I rode closer and saw that he was kneeling next to the body of a dead woman and bawling his eyes out. As I stood there, watching him cry, he took out a gun and shot himself in the head. I was completely stunned by this. I didn’t know what to do.
(I got off my horse and looted his body.)
I’m not particularly proud of my actions. All I’ll say is that we all have our own ways of dealing with grief and kleptomania is mine. But let’s just think about this: the amount of effort and number of man-hours put into crafting this one tiny, incidental scene in Red Dead Redemption probably outweighs the total amount of effort and number of man-hours put into the entirety of the making of Kane. And this was just a background action, something that would (apparently) happen whether I’d seen it or not. I could have missed it. I could have just as easily chosen to ride past the man without checking it out. It didn’t need to be there, but Rockstar put it in there because it fleshed out this world.
It’s easy to be jaded about these things (and I definitely felt a bit disappointed the second time I came across the suicide-man) but my goodness - we’ve really come a long way. No wonder my ten-year old self would have shit his pants.
St. Peter’s Basilica Okay, it’s a bit lame and cliched, but this is still a huge part of Roman history that it’s hard to ignore. For me, it still towers above the colosseum as an attraction. Search iTunes for Rick Steves Rome Podcasts - he’s got some audio guides for some of the bigger sights, like St. Peter’s, the Pantheon, the Forum etc. Cheaper (and less lame) than joining a tour.
Pantheon It was 32 degrees out today. On days like this, it’s fantastic to be able to duck into the Pantheon. I’ve no idea of the science behind it, but somehow this place stays very cool without air conditioning. Plus, you’ll be near Tazza d’Oro, which is one of the better coffee shops in Rome. Try their granita, which is like a coffee slush puppy. Get it with whipped cream and then spend the next few minutes mixing it all together to make a coffee milkshake. You’ll be buzzing for hours.
Musem of the Holy Souls in Purgatory I only read about this recently on atlasobscura.com, so I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. It’s a museum of relics that were “burned” by souls in purgatory. It all sounds a bit cheesy, but still pretty interesting. It’s also in/near one of the few (neo-)gothic churches in Rome.
Capuchin Church of the Immaculate Conception - Via Vittorio Veneto, 27 I’ve been to the catacombs in Paris, and I’ve thought “what kind of sick fuck decides to arrange skulls in the shape of a heart?” Then I visited this place and it beats the pants off anything Paris has to offer in terms of dementedness. Bones of more than 4,000 monks have been arranged into a series of scenes and dioramas, where EVERYTHING is made of bones. They even have chandeliers made of bones. Chairs made of bones. Light switches made of bones. Very macabre. If there was ever a goth Disneyland, this is it.
Church of San Clemente, Via Labicana If you ever want proof that Rome is a “living” history, you should go to visit San Clemente. It’s a twelfth-century church, built on a fourth-century basilica, built on a pagan temple. They’ve all been really well preserved and it’s another fantastic place to duck in to avoid the mid-afternoon heat, especially if you’re already up that area checking out the Colosseum.
To eat/drink
Le Mani in Pasta - Via Dei Genovesi, 37 This is more of an upmarket pasta joint. It’s a little more expensive than the normal places (still ridiculously cheap though), but believe me, if you’ve got something to celebrate, this is worth it. It’s like a once-in-a-while treat for us. Very seafood heavy. When I go there, I usually get the carpaccio of swordfish with truffles, then the fettucine with ricotta and pancetta (if you get this, immediately mix everything up on your plate, trust me) and then if I’m feeling particularly hungry or decadent, I’d get maybe a fillet with green pepper sauce. Also, their desserts are great - the chocolate cake is my favourite, closely followed by their amaro semifreddo.
Da Augusto - Piazza de’ Renzi, 15 Classic Roman trattoria, filled with grumpy waiters. Get there early (8pm) to avoid the lines, because seriously, this is one of my favourite places in Rome. Their stuff is cheap, and tastes great. They don’t always give you a menu, so here’s my advice - get the pasta con cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper) to start (mix it up a bit to get the flavours going), then follow it with either the strachetti e rugola (thin slices of beef with rocket) or, my favourite, the involtini (rolled veal in a tomato sauce). Actually, get two involtini. You’ll thank me later.
Roma Sparita - Piazza di Santa Cecilia So good, I had to give it a blog post of its own. Currently my favourite restaurant in all of Rome.
Da Enzo - Via dei Vascellari, 29 Another trattoria. Extremely popular with the Romans (again, turn up early to avoid the lines), but to be honest, I’ve never really seen the appeal. They do a fair carbonara, but I could really take or leave this place.
Da I 2 Ciccioni - Vicolo del Cedra, 3 “The Two Fat Lads” - it’s less a restaurant and more just a bunch of tables on the street outside someone’s kitchen, along with their grumpy old dog, Aldo. They do a set menu for a set price (which varies depending on how many courses you can manage). I suppose it could be seen as a little “gimmicky”, but their fagoli are too good to be very cynical about. Recently got written up in the New York Times, which means it’s probably going to be unbearable now.
Dar Poeta - Vicolo del Bologna 45 A pizzeria. Apparently these guys have a “secret” blend of ingredients that they use to make their pizzas. I say it’s a crock of shit because their pizzas are completely unremarkable. BUT, leave plenty of room for their speciality dessert - a Ricotta & Nutella calzone. Terrific stuff.
Fame Nera - Via di San Francesco a Ripa, 29 More of a lunch/snack kind of place. Great sandwiches, but slooooo-o-o-w service. More useful for expats because it’s one of the few places you can get a bacon cheeseburger with actual bacon and ACTUAL cheddar (a rare commodity in this town).
Fior Di Luna - Via della Lungaretta 96 Some ice cream shops talk about how all their stuff is home made and there’s no preservatives. This place takes this to the next level - you can’t even get a cone here, because it’s impossible to make those without preservatives, so it’s just paper cups. This is probably the best place in Trastevere for ice cream. You can still see the bits of vanilla in their vanilla ice cream. We also refer to this as the “creative commons ice cream place” because they’ve got a boner for open source.
Freni e Frizioni - Via del Politeama, 4-6 Probably the closest thing Rome will get to a hipster-type dive bar - a converted garage. But what really sells this place is the sheer buzz of people and the amazing apertivi. Just come along, buy a drink (Beers: 5, RIDICULOUSLY STRONG, ON-YOUR ASS DRUNK cocktails: 7) and help yourself from their buffet of amazing veggie treats. The piazza outside is also a great place to do some street drinking and some people watching. Rumour has it that Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci own an apartment above this place, which seems like a pretty good seal of approval.
I Suppli - Via di San Francesco a Ripa (opposite Fame Nera) Again, a snack kind of place. Their pizza is good (especially the marinara and fungi e quattro formaggi), but the real draw of this place is their suppli. Oh boy. Deep-fried rice balls in a tomato sauce with some mozarella in the middle. My favourite guilty pleasure, and this place does the best I’ve had in Rome.
Ma che siete venuti a fa - Via Benedetta 25 Around the corner from Dar Poeta is this tiny, tiny pub that serves a ton of nice beers. Very popular with students. There’s a downstairs, but no-one ever goes there. They just hang out on the street looking cool. The name translates to “But what have you come to do?” which is slightly ominous.
Pizzeria Ai Marmi - Viale Trastevere 53 This is our local pizzeria. They’re about middle of the road in terms of price, and service, but their pizzas are pretty good. They also do pretty good suppli and baccala (battered salt cod). I’m not exactly raving about this place because they do nothing exceptional, but they’re extremely consistent. And they feel like home now.
Gonfio/Soppieno - Via Borgo Pio, 149 This is a great little sandwich/salad shop halfway up Borgo Pio (the main borgo up bear St. Peter’s). Their prices are reasonable and the food is always fantastic. Their “house” sauce is a bizarre spicy sauce that, strangely for Rome, is actually quite spicy. Great if you want to picnic after a run through St. Peter’s.
Latteria - Via Borgo Pio, 48 Almost across the road from Gonfio is the Latteria. It’s one of the few bars in this area that aren’t actively trying to rip you off at every turn. Great cornetti too. If you’re feeling particularly indulgent, go for the white chocolate.
Venerina - Via Vitelleschi Giovanni, 44 Again, another good bar that isn’t trying to rip you off. This one is slightly better than the Latteria because it’s slightly bigger, has a wider range of food, does the best cornetti in the area, and best of all, isn’t on Borgo Pio, so it’s less likely to be crowded. Also, this was the only bar open in the area through the month of August.
The Perfect Bun - Largo del Teatro Valle, 4 When you need a break from Italian food, this is a great American-style restaurant. Really good burgers, great nachos (with a fantastic homemade salsa), and decently-priced, cold pints (pints! Not 40cl mockeries!) of Carlsberg. Best of all, they do an amazing buffet-style Sunday brunch. It costs about €25, but it’s a lifesaver when you’re hung over and need some serious soakage.
Sweety Rome - Via Milano, 48 With the demise of Josephine’s Bakery (RIP!), there are precious few places to go and get a decent cupcake or carrot cake in Rome. Hooray for Sweety Rome! Great desserts, and another place for a decent buffet-style Sunday brunch. Might want to phone ahead if you fancy the brunch.
Imagine you worked in a shop and that sold both hard liquor and weapons. Let’s not ask why. Now, imagine a man comes in looking depressed and wants to buy a bottle of vodka and a handgun. Would you sell them to him?
Now, let’s imagine you worked in a fast food restaurant. A McDonalds. Or better still, a KFC. Imagine a morbidly obese man comes wheezing in in and orders three Double Downs. Would you sell them to him?
David A. Kessler’s The End of Overeating is a fascinating book. Especially if - like me - you’re overweight. He talks about the science behind food, and what drives us to eat the shit we do. He makes a terrific analogy, a connection I’d never made before. He says that for some people who are wired a certain way, struggling with a food problems can be like an alcoholic trying to come to terms with their own addiction. If you’re trying to kick it, you need to take it one day at a time.
As someone who has struggled with their weight for a long time, this a terrific way of looking at it, and even this one little sentence has had a profound effect on me, in terms of the shite I put into my body. At the same time, it underlines the way in which obesity and food problems in general are seen as ‘socially acceptable’ in a way in which other addictions - drink, drugs - are not. Or rather, they’re not seen as addictions or significant problems at all. Consider the semantic gulf between a “glutton” and an “addict”. One implies “Conscious” while the other implies “subconscious”. “Active” versus “passive”. “Choice” versus “compulsion”.
To highlight this, there’s my wife who is incredibly supportive of me, despite the sometimes incredibly stupid things I do. Her relationship to food is very different compared to mine. She cannot wait until all food comes in pill form and it no longer has any significant role in her life. When she saw I was reading a book called ‘The End of Overeating’, she snorted in derision. For her, reading to lose weight is like dancing about architecture. If you want to lose weight, just eat less, dummy.
That’s what I’m trying to do. But I have to take it one day at a time.
In his most recent article, John Gruber once again discusses the difference in philosophy between the iPhone and Android. He talks about how Apple doesn’t include features without a compelling reason for them to exist. By way of example, he talks about the front-facing camera on the iPhone 4. Although Android devices have had this feature for a while, Android doesn’t provide a standard, non-trivial way to use it.
To make video calling work, you have to install an app yourself: either Fring or Qik. But we never did get Fring to work, and Qik requires people you call to press a Talk button when they want to speak. The whole thing is confusing and, to use the technical term, iffy.
Ignoring the “iffy” implementation, something that made me sigh was the “multiple apps” aspect. Essentially, Android users must choose between Fring and Qik for their video chats. Fring and Qik are also incompatible with each other, so if you’re using an Android phone and you want to video-call another Android user, you must first agree on which of these two appsAssuming there are, in fact, only two to choose from you are going to use. It’s not simply a matter of picking up your phone and video-calling the other person. You must first phone or text with them and say “Hey, let’s Fring!“if you’re okay with enverbening a proper noun before actually firing up the app (and hoping it actually works). Can you imagine if voice-calls worked the same way, that you both needed to be running the same app to make normal phone calls to one another?
This reminded me of a recent article by Cory Doctorow in which he summarised his experiences with the latest version of Ubuntu. He talks about how he needed to edit some sound.
When I need to do something new – edit audio, say – I go to the software center and look at what apps exist for that purpose, select some highly rated ones, download them, try them, keep the one I like (all the software is free, so this is easy).
While Cory lists this as a positive, this is precisely why I stopped using Linux on the desktop. Rather than focusing on making one particular app for a particular function and making it great, it seems as if every developer in the Linux/Open Source community has their own idea about how best to reinvent the wheel. And so, rather than having a standard piece of software for audio editing that comes as standard on each installation – as OSX gives us Garageband – it’s left up to the user to find out which one suits them best. Ubuntu currently gives 66 results for ‘apt-cache search audio edit’, each one a software package that scratches a different itch. And while there’s a certain pleasure in taking the time to install and evaluate each one of these 66 pieces of softwareWhich makes me think of JWZ’s terrifically curmudgeonly line, “Linux is only free if your time has no value”, I would say that few of us have that luxury, and we’d rather just edit the audio and be done. After all, the editing is the important thing, not the software you use.
I would much rather a well-curated walled garden instead, thankyouverymuch.
It’s a dog’s life. Well, it was on Saturday when the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House came alive with the sound of high pitched music and howling dogs at the world’s first concert performed for dogs.
The concert was the brain child of acclaimed U.S. music artist Laurie Anderson and rock legend husband Lou Reed. Anderson wrote the 20-minute piece “Music for Dogs” describing it as “an inter-species social gathering on a scale never seen before in Australia”.
“It was really so fantastic. All the dogs were really grooving on the music. They really seemed to enjoy themself,” Anderson told Reuters.
Big dogs, small dogs, dogs dressed up for the occasion and even a 15-year-old arthritic dog, whose owner pushed him in a makeshift dog wheelchair, attended the world’s first ever outdoor performance staged for dogs.
Reading this, it’s pretty hard not to be reminded of Robert Mitchum in Scrooged
Preston: Do you know how many cats there are in this country?
_Frank: N-N…no, mmm…I don’t have…no.
Preston: Twenty-seven million. D’you know how many dogs?
Frank: In America…?
Preston: Forty-eight million. We spend four billion on pet food alone.
Frank: Four…!?
Preston: I have a study which shows that cats and dogs are beginning to watch television. If these scientists are right, we should > start programming right now. Within years, they could become steady viewers.
Frank: Programming…for cats?
Preston: Walk with me, Frank. I’m not saying build a whole show around animals. All I’m suggesting is we occasionally throw in a little pet appeal. Some birds, a squirrel…
Frank: Mice?
Preston: Mice, exactly. You remember Kojak and the lollipops? What about a cop that dangles string? That’s his gimmick. Lots of quick, random actions.
Filming for the second series of Jersey Shore is currently under way in Miami and, by from everything I’ve read, it’s been a total disaster. MTV made the decision to stick with the cast from the first season whose reputation is preceding them. Which means they’re getting turfed out of the Miami hot-spots because the club owners know exactly what kind of bullshit shenanigans follow these knuckleheads wherever they go.
If you ask me, they should have gone for a whole new cast for the second season. It’s like Borat or Dennis Pennis or whatever - once these characters get a little famous, people stop falling for their pranks and the whole joke is over. It’s the same with Jersey Shore. The first season was a bunch of no-name guidos getting into the kind of trouble you can imagine every guido gets into. Now we’ve got a bunch of people jumped up on the sense of their own fame surrounded by people who know exactly who they are. Everyone is in on the joke. It’s not funny any more.
At the same time though, I can see why they decided to stick with the same cast. This was a perfect storm of ridiculous, over-the-top personalities. With J-WOWW, Snooki, The Situation and Pauly D (and to a lesser extent, Ronnie, Vinnie and Angelina), MTV managed to capture lightning in a bottle. I doubt they could repeat it again if they tried.
Wanna know what I think? Of course you do! I think that if you absolutely had to stick with the original cast, rather than sending them to Miami, a better idea would have been to pack them all up and ship them off to Italy.
Can you imagine how incredible that would be? I’m getting tingly just thinking about it. They’d come face-to-face with real Italians. It’s would be an amazing fish-out-of-water story, as they have their ideas about what it means to be Italian both crushed and affirmed. Possibly at the same time! Not only that, but MTV Italia only started showing Jersey Shore last month, so these kids aren’t nearly as famous in Italy as they are in the States. They could wander around, jumped up on the sense of their own fame, but with near-complete anonymity.
Ubisoft have announced that they are ditching paper manuals for games in favour of electronic on-disc copies. This is sad news. Not that I was particularly fond of paper manuals - they are now mostly just legal boilerplates more than anything to do with the game - but because this means we’re almost at the end of game pack-ins entirely.
I was a little disappointed when games switched to DVD-style cases. Yes, it’s great that publishers finally settled on a standard shape and size for their boxes and my games collection doesn’t look like a fucking cardboard shanty town, but it also meant that game designers couldn’t pack extra things into the game box. Back in the 80s, Infocom games usually came with “feelies”. These were ostensibly copy protection, but it’s not fair to say that’s all they were. Rather than the usual, bland, hard-to-photocopy sheets of teeny-tiny numbers for the game to ask you “what is the number in row G, column 16?”, the Infocom feelies also gave you something that felt like an artefact from the game world. It was something physical that helped you identify with the game, made the game come alive and feel more realAnd let’s face it, those Infocom text adventures needed all the help they could get to feel more real.
Looking back, I think most of my favourite games had some sort of pack-in to enhance the player’s experience. For example, the graphic adventure of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came with a small, 20 or 30 page replica of the grail diary on top of the usual copy-protection. It wasn’t essential and you didn’t need this grail diary to finish the game, but they gave them out anyway. As an 11-year old who was crazy for that game, this cheap, paper copy broke the game’s fourth wall and made the whole experience more real. It felt like treasure.
More recently, there’s Heavy Rain which has you hunting for a serial killer known as the “Origami Killer”, who gets his name from the fact he leaves a little origami figure in the cold, dead hands of his victims. Origami is used as a visual motif for the entire game, right down to the logo to indicate the game is being saved. Even though creator David Cage has a major boner for movies, he ignored the whole ubiquitous floating head idea for the poster, and stuck stuck with a simple image of the origami crane from the game.
When you’re installing the game, a process that can take a few minutes, a message comes up on the screen to tell you to take out the flat sheet of paper packed into the case and, over the course of 12 steps, you’re taught how to make your own origami crane, just like the one from the cover. Things to keep you distracted while your game loads/installs aren’t anything newYou hearing me, Kojima? Watching an old fart smoking for 10 minutes is not fun, but it’s hard not to be impressed by Heavy Rain’s implementation. It’s different, it’s fun. And how difficult was it? It’s a sheet of paper, yet that one sheet of paper enhanced my experience of the game and my overall impression of the care that went into the game.
So today I’m pouring a 40Not literally, obviously. What a waste of booze for game manuals and pack-in tchotchkes. At least we have special editions, right?
Going back to the old well of the videogames-and-art debate, film critic, Roger Ebert is once again trolling the entire internet by pronouncing from the mount, that video games can never be art. For writers, these kinds of articles are a great way of generating ad revenue, since they represent a massive source of “clicks” and comments. For contrast, an insightful article about uncovering the meaning of Michael Haneke’s Cache got 224 comments in three months, in three days his anti-videogame piece has gotten over 1200. I ususally try to avoid feeding internet trolls - especially one who makes a living criticising movies and yet whose contributions to that same medium arecompletelyappalling - but I’m making an exception here. Mainly because of a couple of things Ebert has said that I feel are completely bone-headed.
Her next example is a game named “Braid”. This is a game “that explores our own relationship with our past…you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there’s one key difference…you can’t die.” You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.
I can’t argue with his criticism of the prose in the game. It really is that hackneyed and bullshit. However, the issue is that he clearly has not played, nor sat down and watched anyone play, Braid. If he had, he would have realised that the going-back-in-time mechanic in the game is not just some giant “undo” button. It’s not a ctrl-z for your mistakesEbert’s bone-headed argument here seems to be that this mechanic is seen as antithetical in the game of chess. This is like complaining that the rules of Poker go completely against the “discipline” of the game of chess. What the hell is he talking about?. The game relies on your ability to manipulate the flow of time, and it’s this mechanic that really sets this game apart from other platform-puzzling games. Not only because you play it and are completely awed by how someone could create something this clever, but also because it’s also the thing that gives the ending the emotional impact that it has - the time mechanic allows a level of reflection and re-evaluation that feels cheap and manipulative when done through more conventional storytelling methods (As in BioShock, for example).
For fun, contrast Ebert’s dismissal of Braid to his love for Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, a film which uses a similar storytelling device. Writing about the film in 1983, Ebert says
When Pinter’s stage version of “Betrayal” first appeared, back in the late 1970s, there was a tendency to dismiss his reverse chronology as a gimmick. Not so. It is the very heart and soul of this story.
Now in 2010, here comes Ebert, dismissing Braid’s time-manipulation device as a mere “gimmick”. He’s wrong. It’s the heart and soul of this storyThat’s not to say that it’s all about the mechanics. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom has a similar time-manipulation mechanic, but has no emotional payoff. The story and the writing in that game just aren’t able to pull it off..
We come to Example 3, “Flower”. A run-down city apartment has a single flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is “about trying to find a balance between elements of urban and the natural.” Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn’t say. Do you win if you’re the first to find the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower? Does the game know what the ideal balance is?
I think this passage highlights precisely why Ebert will never ‘get it’ - he still thinks that games are about competition. He’s still stuck in the Pong mentality of ‘avoid missing ball for high score’. For him, games are strictly about “winning”. This is not the case, any more than films are about using narrative devices to tell a story (‘sup Koyaanisqatsi?). For reference, no, there’s no score in Flower, and there’s no “winning”. This is a game that you play just for the joy of playing.
And it’s completely divisive. People either hate it or love it.
Personally, I’m firmly in the ’love it’ camp. Let me explain why. Like most people, I went through a fairly rough patch when I turned 30. Anxiety, depression, all that fun stuff. All stemming from an overwhelming fear, not so much of death, but rather of non-existence. And everything I read or watched exacerbated this fear. For example, I made the stupid mistake of reading The Road in the middle of this funk. Even more stupidly, I watched The Wrestler. It seemed like everywhere I looked, things just made me aware of my own mortality and how fragile it is.
Flower, by contrast, made me aware of the beauty of life and nature. More importantly, it delivered this message with an experience I could not get anywhere else. People talk about how it’s the interactivity of videogames heightens the emotional impact of whatever you’re doing, whether it’s shooting some fool in the face or trampling prostitutes. Flower shows this swings both ways. Transcending the TV-controller interface, I was a gust of wind, bringing life to the environment. Although it sounds simplistic, it is precisely this simplicity that helped the game have such a profound effect on me. Think back to American Beauty, an Ebert favourite. This is a film that beat us over the head with its message, and so we are treated to five minutes of staring a plastic bag blowing in the wind, with some weird gargoyle-looking man telling the audience “this is beautiful”. Fuck this didactic bullshit. Flower lets us experience this beauty for ourselves. It doesn’t tell us, it shows us.
Remember when Entourage was good? This was way, way back. Back before the writers went off on wild story-tangents that no-one cared about and before almost every character became completely unrecognisable, loathsome shells of their former selvesAri Gold as empathetic solver of personal problems? FUCK YOU.
Yeah, good times.
There’s definitely a sense that with their new show, How to Make it in America, HBO is trying to recapture the spirit of the early Entourage. At its core, the show about a couple of schmoes trying to… uh… make it.
In America.
New York, to be precise. And no, they haven’t quite managed to capture the fun, carefree spirit of early Entourage. My wife has yet to watch an entire episode without commenting on how much she hates the main character (“Look at his face! It’s so hateful!”). And it’s true, Bryan Greenberg comes from the school of acting where “emoting” means “look smug whilst simultaneously looking like you’re nonchalantly trying to pass a kidney stone”.
Which all sounds terribly negative, and it probably would be if this is all there was to the show. So thank goodness the show is more of an ensemble piece. People like Eddie Kaye Thomas, Shannyn Sossamon and Martha Plimpton pop up occasionally. HBO regular James Ransone (Ziggy Sobotka from The Wire, Corporal Ray Person from Generation Kill) even appears in a blink-and-you-miss-him cameo. But, best of all, it’s got Luis Guzman. I mean this in a completely hetero way: I love Luis Guzman. His dreadful sitcom aside, I think Luis Guzman steals the show whatever he appears in, and, more importantly, he also makes things infinitely more watchable. He’s even one of the best things about Community, and that only has a statue of him. He’s perfect in How to Make it in America, playing a felon released from jail and trying to establish himself as a legitimate businessman (with his energy drink, Rasta Monster). He alone makes the show worth watching.
It’s still early days yet, and I’m not quite sure I know where the show is going, but it’s definitely worth checking out.
Belladonna has her own World of Warcraft guild and she’s psyched for Final Fantasy XIV. Mind: blown.
The good thing is that since I don’t work for anyone else, I’m my own boss and I schedule everything. I know that I can push things back a little or switch things around so when I do let myself go and play World of Warcraft for two weeks, I’m ok. It does kind of slow you down. Usually, I’ll get things done and get ahead of myself, but sometimes it’s fun to just let yourself go and play video games all day long.
Ten or eleven years ago, I was in a pub and we got talking about Jimmy Stewart. For some reason, I thought now would be a good time to try my hand at a Jimmy Stewart impression. Now, if you’ve ever seen me try to do an impression of anything, you know I can’t, it’s just embarassing. Maybe the stars were smiling on me or something because that day, I managed to do a pitch-perfect impression of Jimmy Stewart.
That was the first and last time I ever tried a Jimmy Stewart impression. I will probably never be able to do one again, let alone do a better one, so why even try?
I was playing GTA IV a while ago and, like most people who play it, I started fucking around in between missions. Goofing off - crashing cars, shooting random people and generally acting like a deranged psychopath. One of my favourite things to do in that game is to punch someone and then stand there. Maybe it’s because I’m a complete pussy and I’d never try this in real life. Anyway, I punch people and see what they do. Most times they just go “Hey!” and walk away. Sometimes they scream and run away.
Except once, I punched the Charles Bronson of Liberty City. He just snapped, went berserk and started beating the living fuck out of me. I would have fought back, but he was going so nuts that I never got a chance to punch him. So I ran away.
He started chasing me.
I swear to God, I don’t know if the developers made it this way, but I could have sworn he was foaming at the mouth.
I ran and ran and ran. Usually, with videogames, you run far enough away and the person chasing you gives up and goes back to their pre-scripted routine. Not this guy. I ran into my apartment - your safe-house, where you can save your game by lying on your bed and ‘going to sleep’ for a few hours. He chased me in. I didn’t even know non-playable characters could open the door! So I did the only thing I could, I lay on the bed, went to sleep and saved my game.
When it was done saving, my character woke up, the guy was still standing over my bed, barking and shouting at me, and started punching the moment I stood up. I eventually just grabbed a gun and shot the guy.
Now I can’t play GTA IV again, because I know I will never be able to top the image of a crazy guy yelling and screaming at me as I lie in bed asleep. I don’t care how good the rest of the game is, it can’t beat that.
Frustrated by the way BFBC2 players will happily sit and snipe while doing nothing to help the squad, or win the round, Tom Chick invents a new class, the sniper cop:
Did you know the tracer dart can stick to friendly targets? It sits there and glows. For instance, if you affix it to someone's head - say, someone with a sniper rifle crouching just behind a ridge or in some foliage - that person's head will be super easy to spot from a long way off by other players with sniper rifles. Furthermore, if you attach it to someone's face, it will shine a red glow into his line of site and maybe even obscure his vision. It's like a fantastic glowing clown nose
First up, a quick warning. We’re talking about Lady Gaga here, so if that doesn’t immediately ring your NSFW alarm, then let me state it clearly: this post is probably NSFW.
Here’s the new Lady Gaga video for “Telephone”, which has a load of oversaturated shots of big-titted women dancing around the place in their bikinis. As is usual for any video directed by Jonas Åkerlund, it’s almost painful to watch.
Since I’ve been doing a lot of to’ing and fro’ing between Ireland and Rome, I’ve made a firm decision to never fly Ryanair ever again, unless it absolutely cannot be avoided. There’s a few reasons behind this.
First, and most obviously, Michael O’Leary could possibly be the world’s biggest cunt. The kind of person I would be very happy to hear had spontaneously burst into flames and choked to death on his own melting oesophegus.
I’m sick of being treated like a piece of shit by Ryanair’s barely-competent ground crew. I was blind drunk one night and went into Zaytoon, where the extremely condescending guy behind the counter started acting all “wellity, wellity, wellity, what a surprise, the drunk fat man wants a kebab”. I remember thinking “Hey fuck you, dicknose! You’re the shithead who works in a kebab shop, you’re in no position to judge anyone. Just slice the meat and shut your stupid face.” This is kind of how I feel about Ryanair ground staff.
I’m sick of being hawked shit every ten minutes on their flights. Especially when I just want to sleep.
They’re a false economy. Ryanair gives you 15kg for your checked luggage, and it’s €20 per kilo above that. Aer Lingus gives you 20kg. So whenever I’m booking a flight, I’ll always add an extra €200 to the Ryanair price. They’re never cheaper than Aer Lingus.
Simply avoiding them isn’t enough for me though. I want them to know each time I avoid them. Down the street where I work, there are a bunch of bars that we used to go to, but that we now avoid because they decided it would be better to try and rip us off once than have our continued, regular custom. Now, I’ll occasionally walk into one of these bars, wait until someone acknowledges my presence, and then leave and go to another bar. It’s ridiculous and petty, I know, but so am I.
So I want to do something like this with Ryanair. Every time I take a trip, I’d like to send a letter saying “Hello, I’m flying between $city_a and $city_b, but I decided to fly with one of your competitors because I think your business practices are appalling.” I thought this was a great idea until someone pointed out that they’re such cheap cunts that they’d probably charge me an administrative fee for having opened and read the letter/email.
So what’s the best way to let Ryanair when they’re missing out on a fare from me? The pettier and more ridiculous, the better.
Since I’ve been doing a lot of to’ing and fro’ing between Ireland and Rome, I’ve made a firm decision to never fly Ryanair ever again, unless it absolutely cannot be avoided. There’s a few reasons behind this.
First, and most obviously, Michael O’Leary could possibly be the world’s biggest cunt. The kind of person I would be very happy to hear had spontaneously burst into flames and choked to death on his own melting oesophegus.
I’m sick of being treated like a piece of shit by Ryanair’s barely-competent ground crew. I was blind drunk one night and went into Zaytoon, where the extremely condescending guy behind the counter started acting all “wellity, wellity, wellity, what a surprise, the drunk fat man wants a kebab”. I remember thinking “Hey fuck you, dicknose! You’re the shithead who works in a kebab shop, you’re in no position to judge anyone. Just slice the meat and shut your stupid face.” This is kind of how I feel about Ryanair ground staff.
I’m sick of being hawked shit every ten minutes on their flights. Especially when I just want to sleep.
They’re a false economy. Ryanair gives you 15kg for your checked luggage, and it’s €20 per kilo above that. Aer Lingus gives you 20kg. So whenever I’m booking a flight, I’ll always add an extra €200 to the Ryanair price. They’re never cheaper than Aer Lingus.
Simply avoiding them isn’t enough for me though. I want them to know each time I avoid them. Down the street where I work, there are a bunch of bars that we used to go to, but that we now avoid because they decided it would be better to try and rip us off once than have our continued, regular custom. Now, I’ll occasionally walk into one of these bars, wait until someone acknowledges my presence, and then leave and go to another bar. It’s ridiculous and petty, I know, but so am I.
So I want to do something like this with Ryanair. Every time I take a trip, I’d like to send a letter saying “Hello, I’m flying between $city_a and $city_b, but I decided to fly with one of your competitors because I think your business practices are appalling.” I thought this was a great idea until someone pointed out that they’re such cheap cunts that they’d probably charge me an administrative fee for having opened and read the letter/email.
So what’s the best way to let Ryanair when they’re missing out on a fare from me? The pettier and more ridiculous, the better.
Playing the first Assassin’s Creed was like going out with some very cute, bi-polar girl. She’s attractive, and crazy enough that the sex is amazing, but you have to watch out because her mood could change in the blink of an eye and next thing you know, you’re waking up in a bath of ice with a giant hole where your kidney used to be, just because you didn’t compliment her on her new shoes.
To strain this analogy even further, Assassin’s Creed 2, is like her cute, completely stable younger sister. She’s just as attractive as the older sister but, most importantly, she’s learned from all her older sister’s mistakes (Lesson number one: don’t be fucking insane). And yeah, the sex might be less wild/dangerous, but you know where you stand. It’s safe.
I lovedAssassin’s Creed 2. It never had any real moments of standout genius in it, but at the same time, it never had me repeating the same six missions-types for five hours, unlike the first game. Instead, it had a continuous string of smaller, more diverse missions, which meant that you were constantly doing something new. One mission would begin right where the last one finished. You never had a chance to get bored, and you never really felt like turning the game off was an option. I’ll say this now: for me, Assassin’s Creed 2 did a better job of doling out missions than GTA IV.
In fact, I liked this game so much, I’m ploughing through it to make it the fourth game I’ll have gotten all 1000 achievement points on. At least, it would have been, except there’s one achievement - for kicking a guy while flying your little Hudson Hawk hang glider - that you could only get on one particular mission that you couldn’t replay. Of course, I didn’t know this when I played the mission, or else I would have kicked that little bollocks off his perch and gotten my achievement.
With the first batch of downloadable content for the game, titled The Battle of Forli, Ubisoft dropped a whole load of these flying machines into various parts in the levels, which means that people like me who missed the achievement first time around could finally get it.
Oh, and they threw a bit of a story around it too.
And here’s where I lost interest. The story in The Battle of Forli is bullshit. Total bullshit. The “dramatic” climax has you fighting a metric fuckload of guards as you chase down the last remaining bad guy. I only bought this DLC to get the achievement, so at this stage, I cared so little about the story that I just ran past all the guards. It was like a Benny Hill sketch, me tearing through the Tuscan countryside with 50 sword-wielding soldiers chasing after me. All it was missing was a bit of Yakkety Sax. In the end, the bad guy reaches his pre-scripted “end” spot and turns around to fight me, at which point I smack him in the head with a hammer before he can even draw his sword. End of DLC.
The perfect end to a storyline I couldn’t have cared less about.
Update: I got the last of the 1000 achievement points this evening. As if you care.
I don’t get it. 30 Rock is massively successful and gets nominated for all sorts of awards every year, despite coasting on fumes for the past three seasons. I can’t remember the last time that show made me laugh. Meanwhile, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - the one show on TV that will consistently make me gut-laugh until I feel like I’m going to pass out - slips under almost everyone’s radar.
Okay, I understand that jokes about main characters developing crack addictions to get on welfare and finding dumpster babies aren’t exactly for everyone, whereas Tina Fey joking about eating pizza instead of going to the gym is something completely inoffensive that everyone can find adorable. But fuck, is that really an excuse for hardly anyone to watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia?
Not only is this show funny, it’s also full of great ideas, especially if you’re on a race to the bottom. This show introduced me to the idea of drinking wine out of a soda can, which has immeasurably improved my ability to party. Now I can dance and gesticulate wildly while not spilling a drop of my wine. And then, of course, there’s Kitten Mittons:
Seriously, if you haven’t seen this show already, you should stop what you’re doing, turn off your phone and spend a weekend getting caught up. If you have seen this show already, wouldn’t now be a great time for a re-watch?
If you know me, you know I’m not particularly great at managing my time. I’m not one of those smug cunts who can churn out 3 books and a PhD defense before breakfast. I have trouble staying focused and finishing the things I start. My wife loves it when I leave wet laundry lying on the bed because I got distracted halfway through hanging it up.
Right now, college is sucking all of my time. I’m in my final year (fingers crossed!) of an arts degree, and so I’m up to my nuts in postmodernism, victorianism, romanticism – lots of -isms – Kant, Plato, and the various ontological and cosmological reasons for God. It’s all fun stuff - even more so when my computer hard drive craps out right in the middle of writing an essay. Hilarious.
This is something I really, really want to finish. I don’t want to look back on the past three years of college and think of it as a giant pile of wet laundry. So, this means that I don’t have much time for anything else. Sorry, Dragon Age! Sorry, Demon’s Souls! Sorry, Bioshock 2! Sorry, this blog!
I’ve got my final exams in the middle of May and then I’m heading off to the Primavera festival in Barcelona immediately after. Things might get back to normal after that.
Ira here. Philip Glass, the iconic composer of operas and film scores who—there’s no non-weird way to say this—is also my cousin, is doing a live performance at the Apple Store in Soho this Thursday, January 21st. Apple is filming it and is going to offer the video on iTunes at some point, maybe that same day for all I know.
I’ve been asked to perform a piece that Allen Ginsberg used to perform with Philip, Ginsberg’s great Vietnam-era poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” Philip set it to music years ago, and there are a few great recordings of them performing it together, which you are just a google search away from, or try this YouTube clip, and at this point by the way are we still supposed to capitalize Google when we use it as a verb or adjective?
I’ve performed this with Philip once before. He plays that piano a lot louder than you might think. It’s like reading a poem inside a helicopter. It’s also really fun. Ginsberg used to perform the thing with a beat poet grandeur I’d be embarrassed to attempt. When he calls down the gods in the second half of the poem, he really calls down the gods. Needless to say, it’s kind of the opposite of talking on the radio, where the whole point is to sound off-hand and conversational.
I’m the smallest part of this event. Philip will be playing solo, and with cellist (also his GF) Wendy Sutter which is always fantastic and really emotional, and with his chamber group.
If you’ve ever listened to an episode of This American Life, then you’ve probably heard Wichita Vortex Sutra before, because they use it as part of their interstitial music all the time. It’s the one that isn’t by Why? and isn’t from the Amelie soundtrack. It’s also one of my favourite songs in the world - actually, all of Philip Glass’ Solo Piano pieces are terrific - and I’m completely psyched to check this performance out.
Something very strange is going on in the offices of The Guardian.
Before, I thought maybe it was just a temporary blip - that someone had spiked the punch at their Christmas party, and that’s why they voted Team America as the fourth-best film of the noughties. I thought maybe they were just giddy with the excitement of 2009 finally being over - surviving the first decade of the Will-enium - and that’s why they voted Borat as the second-best.
Because it definitely seems as if they sobered up, realised what they’d done and made up for their moments of giddiness by finally doing the right thing and voting There Will Be Blood as the best film of the 2000s.
There’s no excuse for their list of the 50 best TV dramas of all time. A lot of the results are artificially inflated by bullshit sentimentality, or worse. For example, your teenage boner for Sarah Michelle Gellar does not mean that Buffy the Vampire Slayer had better drama or was a better show than, say, Battlestar Galactica or even Band of Brothers.
But seriously, Mad Men at #4 and _The Wir_e at #14? Did some wires get crossed somewhere? Let’s leave aside the fact that The Wire isn’t the clear winner and focus on Mad Men for now. I’m sure that if she was still around, Vivian Mercier would describe Mad Men as the kind of show where nothing happens, a lot. In fact, so much nothing happened in the second season that I’d be hard pressed to find any one of my friends who managed to watch the entire thing without having to go back and start again. Don’t get me wrong, I still watch Mad Men, and I still enjoy it. I just think it’s a little premature to put it anywhere near the top of a list like this.
As if to acknowledge that their list is completely pants-on-head retarded, the Guardian has launched a TV club to go through some of the shows that didn’t make their list, starting with the terrific Edge of Darkness. It’s a great idea and I hope it goes on for a while.
And maybe when it comes around to 2020, their next list will be better.
I’ve had a little bit too much All of the people start to rush (Start to rush by) A dizzy twister dance Can’t find my drink or man. Where are my keys, I lost my phone. What’s going on on the floor? I love this record baby, but I can’t see straight anymore. Keep it cool what’s the name of this club? I can’t remember but it’s alright, alright.
Just dance. Gonna be okay. Da-doo-doo-doo Just dance. Spin that record babe. Da-doo-doo-doo Just dance. Gonna be okay. Duh-duh-duh-duh Dance. Dance. Dance. Just dance.
Wish I could shut my playboy mouth. How’d I turn my shirt inside out? (inside out, right) Control your poison babe Roses have thorns they say. And we’re all gettin’ hosed tonight. What’s going on on the floor?
As someone who is approaching middle age, this song fucking terrifies me. In a best-case scenario, this girl is blind drunk. Worst-case, someone has slipped something into her drink (which make me worry about the answer to the question of “How’d I turn my shirt inside out?”).
In either case, it’s not ‘alright’, it’s definitely not ‘gonna be okay’, and she should absolutely not ‘just dance’. This is the last thing she should be thinking about right now and will only make matters worse. She should find her ‘man’ (unless he’s the one who spiked her drink), or phone someone to come pick her up and take her home so she can get into her pyjamas and get a good night’s sleep.
I don’t know about you, but I thought that – as years go – 2009 was fairly shitty. There were a few good points (awesome birthday party, Primavera, holidaying around Italy with my wife), but when I look back, I can see a whole bunch of shit that I really didn’t want to have to deal with. So hooray for 2010.
Except when my wife asked me what I was most looking forward to about 2010, I went blank. The joke about it being the year we make contact is getting a little old. The only thing I could think was “at least Lost will FINALLY be over.”
Are you watching Jersey Shore? You should be. It’s perfect car-crash TV. Self-obsessed guidos and guidettes living together, all boozed up, horny and aggro. It’s entertaining in the same way that nature documentaries are entertaining. The pure, primal instinct of a pack of lions is always fascinating to watch because you never know when things are going to kick off. Now, imagine those lions were drunk - how much better would that be? Well, that’s what Jersey Shore is like. Drunk lions, covered in fake tan.
How good/bad is it? UNICO, “the largest Italian-American service organisation in the USA” has called for it to be canceled, describing it as “trash television” and saying the show “relies on crude stereotypes” and deliberately highlights the worst aspects of guido culture.
Trash television? Crude stereotypes? Why not just put out a press release, saying “Everyone, stop what you are doing and go watch this show now”?
During a promo for the rest of the season, they showed a clip of one of the girls, “Snooki”, getting a full-on punch to the face. From a big, muscly dude. Now, I’m totally against violence towards women, but HOLY FUCK LOOK AT THAT SHIT! HE BOPPED HER RIGHT ON HER STUPID FUCKING NOSE!
Idiots like me have been posting this clip all over the internet. It’s huge. It’s, as they say, “gone viral”. And so, MTV have decided to cut the scene with the punch out of the episode. They said that “seeing how the video footage has been taken out of context to not show the severity of this act or the resulting consequences, MTV has decided not to air Snooki being physically punched in next week’s episode.” I’m no expert, but if they’re that concerned about the context of the clip, I would have thought that the best way to give some context would be to show it in full? If I search for this clip now, I just get a load of user-uploaded videos taken from the the promo clip. If MTV don’t show the full clip, with context, then this is all there will ever be. There won’t ever be context.
Oh well. Punch or no punch, this show is still ridiculously entertaining.
“Until today, justice has been a cause without a rebel. Now we have one,” said [UNODC Executive Director] Mr. Costa.
Cage has said that he will “use the performing arts as an engine for global justice and victim support”.
Now, let’s take a look at a couple of Nicolas Cage’s movies that are coming out in 2010.
Drive Angry - “A vengeful father chases after the men who killed his daughter”.
The Hungry Rabbit Jumps - “After his wife is assaulted, a husband enlists the services of a vigilante group to help him settle the score”
This is Nicolas Cage’s interpretation of “global justice”? What next? A right-wing homophobic actor with a history of drug use and sexual assault being elected governor of California?
When it comes to videogames, sequels tend to be less like the Godfather II and more like Jurassic Park II: The Lost World. Rather than making something that stands alone, that rips up the play-book and starts over from scratch and, as a result, creates something truly exceptional, you tend to just get more of the same, only slightly bigger and slightly sillier. So instead of “I know it was you Fredo. You broke my heart!”, you get Jeff Goldblum’s child lepping about on monkey-bars and drop-kicking a velociraptor out a window. (Not that I’m making a judgement-call here, both films have their times and places.)
It’s kind of hard to tell where Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 falls. On the one hand, it completely obliterates the first game in terms of the scope of the action and the improvements to the multiplayer are just a shade short of revolutionary. It’s probably the most beautifully rendered conflict I’ve seen in a videogame and every level manages to create its own unique sense of tension - from close, claustrophobic fighting through corridors and narrow streets, to giant open levels where you’re being attacked on all sides.
On the other hand, it really is dumb as a bag of hammers.
The narrative is all over the place. With the first game. developers Infinity Ward lifted heavily from all the big modern war movies - Black Hawk Down, Jarhead etc. I guess they must have played their cards early. With this new one, we get a couple of bits taken from Generation Kill (“Put the camera down, Spielberg” “CNN’s gonna pay loads for this footage!”) before they seem to say “fuck it, there’s nothing else we can steal” and go all Red Dawn - RED FUCKING DAWN - complete with Russians parachuting down into suburban America. I shit you not.
Now, I love Red Dawn as much as the next guy, but like I said, there’s a time and a place for everything. And the time for Red Dawn was thirty years ago, because now it’s just a dumb relic of a dumb time. Here’s the thing though: the writers make it very clear that they’re aware of how dumb this is. The level where you’re battling the Russians through a middle American neighbourhood is called “Wolverines!” - you know, an explicit reference to Red Dawn. It’s a knowing wink to the audience, like they’re saying “hey, we know this is stupid and ridiculous and over-the-top, but it’s all just a bit of fun, y’know?”
Which makes the now-infamous airport scene all the more curious.
(If you care about this game, don’t know what happens in this scene and don’t want to be “spoiled”, then stop reading now. The game came out almost a month ago, which is like ten years ago in internet-spoiler time, so don’t complain if I ruin the impact of this scene for you.)
Still reading? Good. If you don’t know what happens in this scene, then I’ll explain. You’re playing an American agent who has infiltrated a Russian terrorist group. The level opens on a crowded airport full of civilians. Your group walks in and starts shooting indiscriminately into the crowd. How you take it from here, is entirely up to you. You can get through the level without killing anyone, or you can do what I did, walk through the level spraying bullets at everything that moved and tossing grenades in every direction. (I don’t feel even slightly bad about this because I can tell the difference between real life and videogames). The level ends with the head of your group shooting you and leaving you to die, placing the blame on the Americans for the massacre.
Outside of the game, though, it’s a little more confused. Why did the developers feel the need to include this level? Most other games would have been content to tell this part of the story through dialogue or a cut-scene. “ring ring Hey bro, you’ll never believe it! The Russians killed a load of people and are blaming Americans and - wait, are those parachutes?” Instead, they actually had you walking through the scene with a gun in your hand. Even if Columbine and Virginia Tech had never happened, this would be an uncomfortable sell. As it happens, they’re impossible to escape throughout this scene. And a lot of people are asking why Infinity Ward chose to include it, especially when you spend every other part of the game mowing down various nameless, hard-to-distinguish ethnicities.
Now, here’s my take on the whole thing. I don’t think that anyone telling a story is obliged to cover all bases. They tell the story that suits them best. Within the context of the game, the airport level makes perfect sense. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games take place in an alternate near-future where Russian ultra-nationalists are in power, and this is just the excuse they need to send the country to war. Placing you in the thick of the action, then, draws you in. Even if you go through the level without firing a single shot, you feel complicit and spend the rest of the game trying to “fix” your mistake. One thing I found interesting though is that despite the fact you go through suburban and central Washington, there’s not one American civilian to get caught in the crossfire. And in those levels where you’re supposed to be saving hostages, if even one of them dies, it’s game over and you have to try again
As to why the rest of the enemies in the game don’t get the same level of attention to their back-story or motives, well that’s just as simple. Why should it? From a narrative point of view, what purpose would it serve? Does the fact that your virtual enemy has a wife and child and perhaps dubious motivations change the fact that when he’s shooting at you, you’re going to pop his head like a melon? It’s similar to the complaints labeled at Black Hawk Down, that it was about dehumanizing the enemy. The story was about American soldiers and their point of view in this fight. The film split its time between five or six main soldiers and the story was told almost from their first-person point of view (well, as first-person as you can get in a movie without it being a gimmicky pile of ass. Right, Doom?). If the Somalis had a back-story, the US soldiers didn’t know it and so we, the audience, didn’t know it. Isn’t that why we invented the unreliable narrator?
Of course, this all changes in games like Modern Warfare 2 where you are the narrator, and you are narrating the story of the enemies. We will probably need a new paradigm for this kind of storytelling, but I’m not sure I’m going to figure it out in this (already long-winded) blog post. Don’t get me wrong, Modern Warfare 2 is a great game, and the only thing that has helped me kick my Modern Warfare 1 addiction. I just wish there had been some consistency throughout it. The airport level was something completely new to videogames and extremely well done. They laid the groundwork for an amazing story, but the Loony Tunes cartoon violence bullshit they followed it up with just felt a little flat.
When I turned 30, I spazzed right the fuck out. I felt really old. Actually, no - it was more than that. I didn’t feel old as much as I suddenly became very aware of my own mortality. I realised there were lots of things I hadn’t done, and probably would never get to do. Like a huge door had shut on a part of my life and I just had to adjust.
Now my wife is facing the same thing.
In the year’s head-start I’ve got on her, I’ve come to terms with the big three-oh. I keep pointing out that 40 is the new 30 (13,260,000,000 google results can’t be wrong). I also keep pointing out that, while she might feel like she’ll never achieve her goals of being a famous hip-hop artist like Princess Superstar, it’s never too late. Kelley Deal didn’t even pick up a guitar until she was 31. In fact, she was supposed to be in the band when she was 29, but couldn’t get time off work. Sound familiar?
But that’s nothing. Check this video out. It really gets going at 1:30
Fred Astaire was FORTY SEVEN YEARS OLD when he pulled that shit off. I’m thirty and I got exhausted just watching it. But it’s more than just impressive that he was able to pull it off - I’d say that if he’d recorded that exact same routine when he was a younger man, it probably wouldn’t have been as good. Look at the aggression when he smacks that cane around - it takes a real curmudgeonly old fuck to swing a stick like that.
My current computer is exponentially more powerful than the one I had when I started using Unix, but thanks to software bloat and feature-creep, it still seems to take roughly the same length of time to compile software.
(This comes after hours of trying to get Mactex to play nicely with latex2rtf because my college only accepts assignment submissions in Word format and I’ll be fucked if I’m using that for long essays ever again.)
Over at Minimal Mac (a terrific site that everyone should read, even if you’re not a Mac user), they recently pointed to a metafilter comment about the dangers of coveting possessions. The commenter suggests that the best way to beat any hoarding impulses we might have is to simply adjust the way we look at things.
All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free. … The world is my museum, displaying my collections on loan. The James Savages of the world are merely curators.
It’s a lovely sentiment, and one I really wish I could get behind, except I’ve just got one little problem: Me. Or more specifically, people like me.
What do I mean by this?
I recently found a stash of old PlayStation games that I thought I’d lost. There are some real gems in there. PaRappa the Rapper, BeatMania, Final Fantasy VII. All great games. Will I ever play them again? Probably not. I’m having enough trouble keeping on top of new releases to ever really go back and play old games. So why don’t I get rid of them?
There were a finite number of copies of PaRappa the Rapper published. Taking into account losses, breakage and the effects of time, this number is constantly decreasing. Now, if I was to send my games off into the æther, there’s the strong possibility that they’d be picked up by someone like me: a pack-rat who can’t bear to let anything go. So not only would I be losing my own copy of PaRappa, itwould also mean there is one less copy to “take out of storage”. Eventually, there will be no copies of it left on eBay. Or at least, it would be so rare as to be only available at a completely unreasonable price.
The storage thing is a nice (if slightly smug and self-satisfied) analogy, but it just doesn’t work in the real world, because it assumes an infinite supply chain. Besides, I’d always prefer to be the curator, actually caring for these things, rather than a cold, distant absentee owner.
(My wife will probably beat the shit out of me for this post.)
“When you Marry” - they don’t write ’em like that any more:
It is not uncommon for one or both parties to experience feelings of guilt or revulsion, to the mutual distress of both parties. For other couples who have anticipated great thrills in the first sex relations, there is sometimes disappointment - reality doesn't live up to expectations
Monkey Island 2, in 3D:
Photobombing could be my new favourite thing on the internet.
Technology got you down? Squarepixelz is hosting a bunch of old tech documentaries. I love watching these - everyone’s so hopeful about the possibilities of technology.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in 30 seconds:
You know This American Life? “That show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are?” Well, here’s every episode of the This American Life TV show: Season 1Season 2.
Last night, through an amazing and unexpected string of good luck, I ended up at a special screening of Terry Gilliam’s new film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus presented by Gilliam himself.
I should probably point out that I’m a huge, huge fan of Gilliam. To the point that I’ve said that I want to be buried with my Criterion Collection edition of Brazil. So bear with me if I start to nerd out a bit.
I thought Imaginarium was terrific. After The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, which were both dark, heavy films, this is a return to the lightness of his earlier films. Don’t pay attention and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a sequel to Time Bandits. Or maybe The Fisher King. Or maybe even The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. And hell, while I’m at it, there are a few shots there that made me think Gilliam has already cast Christopher Plummer in the lead of his currently-in-preproduction The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. This film shines a spotlight on the leitmotif running through all of his previous work: the idea that imagination and invention can break the spell of monotony cast by the drudgery of ordinary life.
At this point, I should probably try to summarise the plot. Isn’t that how these things work? But in Gilliam films, this is easier said than done. And to be honest, I think this is the kind of film that works best when you come into it blind, rather than with a bunch of preconceptions about what the story might be. Or don’t. Read everything you can, if you like. Just go and see it. But before you do, just let me say that Tom Waits is incredible as the Devil ((Although I think this is slightly lazy, obvious casting, considering what a great job he did as Kneller in Wristcutters: A Love Story)), and Lily Cole is a surprisingly good actress. And the rewrites following the death of Heath Ledger work so well I’d bet that in 30 years, people will barely know they weren’t intentional. Like the malfunctioning shark in Jaws, sometime restrictions bring out the best in us.
There’s another aspect of Imaginarium that highlights this too: the special effects. Before CGI effects really took off, Gilliam was forced to limit himself using physical effects, which had a tremendous… well… physicality to them. Unbridled, his fantastical CGI dreamworlds look amazing and expansive, but they feel paper-thin. When people first enter the Imaginarium, they start in a pantomime forest, with cardboard trees which may have looked cheap and ridiculous, but they at least felt real and believable. As they moved further into the Imaginarium and hit the CGI-heavy landscapes, it made me wonder whether Gilliam made the right choice in prioritising epic verisimilitude over whimsy. Especially considering the film’s message of liberation through imagination.
One thing I should probably point out, which no-one has mentioned so far, is the similarity between this film and Angela Carter’s novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Both are about unbridled imagination (and the potential perils thereof), but also, and perhaps more crucially, both are about identity and choice. I dunno, maybe I’m completely off-base with this one, but I could have sworn that one of the gravestones in Imaginarium had the name “Dr Hoffman” on it. Or maybe my eyes were just playing tricks on me.
The film opens theatrically at the end of the month and I’ll be keeping my eyes open during this scene when I go back to see it again. For me, every one of Gilliam’s films improve on repeat viewings. Gilliam told Mark Kermode that his preferred tagline for Tideland was “Tideland - It’s a different experience the second time!” I’d bet a tenner the same thing is true for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
We’re over halfway through October. You know what that means: it’s time for my annual resolution to actually participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)! I mean, it’s not like I don’t have enough on my plate, what with college, radio work, design work, Italian lessons and my most thankless of jobs as house-husband. Why not try and write a novel too?
Part of what used to squash my plans in previous years is the fact that I had nothing else to do. And this is dangerous. There’s that old saying about “ask a busy man a favour.” The theory being that once you get the ball rolling, getting things done just becomes second nature. If you’d asked me to do you a favour before, I would have said “sure, no problem”, gone back to playing Xbox, and given you a half-hearted apology two months later when you ask me why I didn’t do what I said I would. I say “half-hearted” because, inside, I’d be thinking it was partly your own fault for asking me to do something in the first place.
Not this year.
The other thing that used to always catch me out was the lack of an initial idea. As romantic as it might be to go into this thing completely blind, just putting fingers to keyboard and seeing what happens across 50,000 words - automatic writing on a massive scale - I just don’t think this is the way I work best.
Again, not this year.
This year, I know exactly what story I want to tell. I’ve got an idea that I think I can stretch across an entire novel. It’s just a matter of getting it out. Quickly.
The only thing standing in my way (apart from college, radio work, design work, Italian lessons and my duties as house-husband) is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which comes out right in the middle of November. I’ve written before about how addicted I am to the first one (250+ hours) and I’m genuinely quite scared at what might happen when this new one comes out. Would Whitney Houston be appearing on X-Factor now if she knew that crack PLUS was going to be released in a few days? Hell no. She’d be off getting ready for her year-long crack vacation.
Who knows, maybe it’ll work and I’ll be able to pull it all off. I’ll just have to prioritise, hard. Ask a busy man a favour? Sure, right after I finish this game.
I really don’t want this news story to go unnoticed, because it is amazing.
ROME, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Italian magistrates and the opposition are up in arms after a television channel owned by Silvio Berlusconi shadowed and secretly filmed a judge who ruled against the prime minister in a bribery case.
Days after Judge Raimondo Mesiano ordered Berlusconi’s holding company to pay 750 million euros in damages to a rival, the media mogul’s Canale 5 channel aired a video of the judge taking a walk, smoking and getting a shave at the barber.
Dubbing the judge’s behaviour “eccentric”, a narrator points to him smoking the “umpteenth” cigarette, calls his turquoise socks “strange” and says: “He’s impatient … he can only relax at the barber’s”. … Some magistrates are debating a “turquoise socks” protest, while others have been collecting signatures for a letter of support for their colleague, Italian media reported.
I have absolutely no idea how this whole Berlusconi thing is going to play out. Will he be forced from office? Will it all be forgotten about? Fuck knows. I do know that when both sides are as completely batshit insane as this (turquoise socks protest!), the next few months are going to be very, very entertaining.
Well, for those of us who have the safety net of this not being our permanent home, at least.
As you’d expect, being a stranger in a strange land, I often find myself talking to people who aren’t native english speakers. I’ve learned that there’s a definite knack to having a conversation that crosses a few language barriers. Talk slowly, taking a lot of care to en-un-ci-ate ev-er-y syl-lab-le. And throw in a lot of hand gestures, too. They always help.
What doesn’t help is when you’ve got a verbal tic that must be incredibly confusing for the person listening to you. In my case, I have an awful habit of starting sentences with “Yeah… no.” My wife pointed this out to me a little while ago and now I can’t help but notice that I do it all the fucking time.
In my mind, though, it makes perfect sense. What I’m actually saying is “Yes, I hear, understand and appreciate what you are saying but no, this is not the case.” And it gives me extra time to think of a proper response. But to an Italian person listening to me, I probably sound like a babbling lunatic who is deliberately going out of his way to confuse them. English is confusing enough without me throwing a spanner in the works. For example, did you know there are roughly seven different ways to pronounce “ough” in the English language?
Although I’ve been getting less bummed out by my tic since I started noticing how many other people have it too. You’ve no idea how happy I was when I heard Joe Cornish say it on the Adam and Joe podcast. Famous people do it too!
What does it say about me that an hipster indie film like Away We Go – a film which seemed to be tailor-made for people like me – completely failed to move me, despite the fact it was violently tugging at my heartstrings for the better part of two hours, whereas populist, cliched fluff like Glee had me bawling in 42 minutes?
It ends with a slow clap, for fuck’s sake. I am completely powerless against the slow clap.
Director: James Watkins, 2008, 91'
IMDB Keywords: Lake, Young Couple, Lost In Woods, Bleeding To Death, Bicycle
Sometimes it feels like my life is just a series of stupid decisions, strung together with crippling anxiety. For example, there’s the time we went camping in Tuscany. It was probably my favourite camping holiday yet - we pitched our tent on the beach. Not “beside” the beach or “near” the beach. We were on the beach. The waves were breaking not ten metres from our tent. It was stunning. Beautiful in almost every way. Except I couldn’t get to sleep. I was a bit restless and thought that watching one of the movies on my iPod Touch would help lull me to sleep. And so, instead of watching something like The Jerk or Anvil, I decided it would be a great idea to watch Eden Lake, a horror film about a couple who go camping on a beach and get brutally terrorized by a bunch of ASBO kids.
See? Stupid decision. I didn’t get any sleep that night.
It’s not like it’s a flawless movie. Even horror movies have a breaking point when it comes to coincidences - the screaming victim just happens to run into a cave which just happens to be the home of the big scary monster. Eden Lake gleefully ignores this breaking point and keeps layering coincidence on top of coincidence. Towards the end, Eden Lake actually felt as if it was taking the piss. Either the filmmakers didn’t get the memo regarding the suspension of disbelief, or they’re implying that this couple are the two unluckiest people in the world.
I’ll tell you what though, they’re definitely two of the smuggest, most self-satisfied cunts in the world. And this is where the film plays a blinder.
They’re so overwhelmingly unbearable that I actually started to wish them bodily harm. It’s a horror film, so you know they’re going to suffer and so I was kind of look forward to that bit of the movie. When all the bad shit starts happening, I felt better. It’s catharsis. Establish the heel, make them suffer, and everyone goes home feeling as if everything is right with the world. Did anyone go to see House of Wax to see Paris Hilton escape unhurt? No. They paid good money to see Paris Hilton get a pole thrown through her head. It’s catharsis, and everyone (including Paris Hilton, I bet) knows it. But Eden Lake isn’t quite like that, because it doesn’t stop there. It just keeps pushing through into a new level of discomfort that few films have taken me to. The brutality is so unrelenting that it’s hard not to feel bad for hating these people. I mean, I just wanted to see them get a few cuts and scrapes. Nothing that would leave any kind of permanent scar. And the film goes so much further. It was kind of like when everyone was all “Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who should rot in hell” and then they saw the video of his hanging and then they were all “Oh.” Eden Lake is like that. Only with less genocide.
And I don’t think that I can finish up without mentioning Jack O’Connell, who plays the leader of the ASBOs. He really is the star of the show, completely believable and terrifying. He basically plays a more sociopathic version of the character he played in Skins, which makes me think that he’s either a great actor who is in danger of being typecast as a grotty teen, or someone the police should genuinely keep an eye on.
It’s time for everyone’s favourite hot-button topic: the Lisbon treaty. Fun times ahead!
My cousin, who occasionally reads this blog (hello!), was telling me about the reason he voted “no” during the last referendum. Or rather, the reason he would have voted “no” if he had actually been registered to vote.
“I’d have voted no because the government wanted me to vote yes.”
It’s an interesting reason, but not that unusual. Lots of people voted/are voting “no” simply because they want to “stick it” to a government that they are increasingly mistrustful and resentful of. The Irish people feel like their government isn’t actually on their side. For example, many people argue that NAMA is designed to bail out the bankers at the expense of the taxpayer. Photos from the recent Dail debate don’t really help us to feel like there’s any reason to doubt that. And when you get overblown, selfish and mercenary fucksocks like Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary (pictured here with a personal message for you) coming out in support of the “yes” campaign, well, that just confirms people’s suspicions. We’ve all seen his vision for the airline of the future, why should we presume that he would want anything less for the people of his country? Professor of comparative political behavior at Trinity College, Michael Marsh, points out “for some people, the intervention of big business confirms that this is not good for workers.”
So why would my cousin vote “no” a second time (again, if he was on the register)?
“I’d vote no because I really hate that thing of ‘You got a referendum and you MADE THE WRONG CHOICE. Now try again.’”
It’s true that the referendum is basically the same as it was the last time. What’s changed is the fact that Ireland has secured a number of legal guarantees regarding a number of the core issues that caused people to vote “no” last time. It means that the Lisbon treaty does not and cannot affect Ireland’s constitution on the subjects of security, defense and right to life. Ignore these militant (read: demented nutball) anti-Lisbon groups who say that, no, this is not the case and that these “guarantees” are “as useful as a politician’s promise, and just as easily broken.” Coir still insist that Lisbon would introduce abortion laws. On the other hand, the Irish Bishops say that this is not the case, and Irish people can vote either way in good conscience. Now, which group would you turn to for your moral guidance?
A “no” result would fuck us. And we’re talking the terrifying hard pounding of a prison rape, not the gentle, tender feathery stroking we’ve experienced in the last year. But as well as the effect it would have on Ireland and its economy, imagine what it would do to Europe. Everyone’s favourite little megalomaniacal midget, Berlusconi, has been once again throwing around the idea of creating a ’two tier’ Europe, where some animals are more equal than others. This from a man who threatened to block all EU business unless Commission spokespeople STFU about Italy’s immigration policies. Can you imagine what happens if there’s a “no” result and Ireland takes his place as the red-headed stepchild of Europe? Ouch.
The other reason lots of people voted “no” in the first referendum was because they said that it was too complicated. In a way, this is a fair point, I’ve always believed in the idea of not signing my name to a contract I don’t fully understand. But it’s been a year since people first became aware of the Lisbon treaty and this isn’t a viable excuse any more. If you don’t understand the contract, you owe it to yourself and the person whose contract it is to go off and figure it out. As Owen Corrigan put it in his article in the Tribune, this made last year’s “no” result “less a triumph of democracy for the voters of a ruggedly independent state, and more a triumph of ignorance in the face of reason, rationality and responsibility.” (Seriously, if you read nothing else in this whole campaign, I urge you to read this article.)
In the end though, I guess a lot of people will vote based less on the issues and more on ridiculous external factors, like who is encouraging you to vote what way. Sure, Michael O’Leary wants you to vote “yes,” but David Icke, the ‘I am the son of God and the world is ruled by giant lizards’ guy wants you to “no.” Think about that.
I just watched the Toby Young/Michelle Bernstein spat on this week’s Top Chef regarding the pronunciation of “paella” and - weird as it is to say this - I totally agree with Toby Young. Unless you’re actually Spanish or in Spain, you should be pronouncing it with hard Ls. Pie-el-la.
But this argument made me realise that after watching four seasons of Top Chef, it’s time something was said:
IT’S PRONOUNCED RIZ-OT-TOE*. NOT RIZ-OH-TOE.
I mean, you’re chefs, for fuck’s sake. This should be sorted out by now. Every week, someone does a risotto. Every week, my wife and I facepalm at the apparent inability to pronounce this word. I think at this stage we’re actually dealing with willful ignorance instead.
This week, one dickbag chef decided to go one step further, pronouncing saltimbocca as “salt-im-boe-ka.” PRO TIP: you’re wrong.
Update: Likewise, when I’m back home in Ireland, I’d be more likely to be understood if I asked for a “broo-shet-ah”, versus what I’d say in Italy, which is “Broo-sket-tah”.
Like the “paella” thing, this is the standard “international” pronunciation. If you’re Italian or in Italy, it’s more like “ree-sot-toe”.
Hard to believe, but Elite came out 25 years ago this month. Twenty-five years!
This makes me feel very, very old. Still, Elite has held up really well over the years. That must mean I have too, right? Er…
The first time I played Elite was on my cousin’s Commodore 64. I was barely out of nappies and for the life of me, I couldn’t wrap my head around the whole space-trading thing. Having to keep track any number of variables is kind of difficult when you’ve got the attention span of a sparrow. I had no idea what was going on and understood maybe every second word in a sentence. “What is “narcotics”?” “Drugs.” “What is “drugs”?” But I loved the game’s 3D engine and the feeling that you could go anywhere, do anything. All this in a game that took up less than 22K of memory - that’s less than an average email. And I still count my first successful docking with a space station as one of my videogaming high points.
If you fancy playing a bit of Elite right now, grab a copy of Oolite, which runs on almost anything.
Remember when DVDs first arrived on the scene and everyone was gushing about how great it was that they could record their own commentaries for their favourite movies? How did that work out?
Not so good, huh?
Know why? Because most people are boring as shit. When you get them talking about movies they love, they’re even worse. I’m not saying I’m above this. Put a microphone in front of me when I’m watching Kickboxer you’ll just get me either rattling off the entire screenplay or not saying a word because I fucking love that film so much.
Over on the AV Club, frequent commenter and the world’s biggest fan of ownage, Zodiac Motherfucker, has recorded his own commentary for his film of 2009, Crank 2: High Voltage. This is decidedly not boring. Imagine the forgotten love-child of Andrew W.K. and Kanye West screaming at the TV, swearing like a docker and whooping for blood, and that’s his commentary. Stupid and puerile? Sure, but so are the Crank movies, and that doesn’t stop them being some of the most entertaining movies of the last few years.
Either way, there’s no-one better to watch Crank 2 with than Zodiac Motherfucker.
There’s a lot of brouhaha about the failure rate of Xbox 360s. In the same week, I saw three different news stories citing three different failure rates for the 360 (54.2%, 23.7% and 27.3%, if you’re interested). And everyone gives them shit because they’re, y’know, Microsoft.
Having spent the morning fixing a dying Macbook, I started thinking about what my failure rate with Apple hardware has been. And to be perfectly honest, it’s been pretty shit. In the past five years, I’ve owned (or co-owned) an iBook, two Macbooks, an iMac, a 60GB iPod, two iPod nanos and an iPod touch. Let’s see what’s happened with these.
Wife’s iBook ate its own display cable
Putting a teeny-tiny display cable into a hinge that gets used all the time? Great idea.
Macbook case cracking This happened on both my own Macbook and my wife’s. If you see how the Macbook is assembled, it’s easy to see why this happens - you have to bend the entire keyboard plate slightly to get it to connect. Bending it weakens the decorative plastic “lip”.
Macbook case discoloration I got this on my white Macbook. Got the keyboard plate replaced, started happening again before I got rid of the Macbook
iMac logic board meltdown Brand-new iMac died within 8 hours of getting it because the logic board wasn’t connected properly, half the fans didn’t work and melted the graphics card
Dead headphone adaptor on 60GB iPod This was probably my own fault. I like to use headphones with strong cables and very little “give”, forcing the headphone jack to bend slightly. Still, this wasn’t exactly “heavy” use. Managed to replace this via parts on eBay
Random lines on 60GB iPod No idea where this came from, but it’s like my iPod had a stroke or something. Turned it on one day and there was a strong black band going across the LCD screen. They’ve slowly started fading away now, going back to normal.
Dodgy connector on one iPod nano This both comes from and affects the Nike+. I plug in the Nike+ adaptor and it doesn’t detect a receiver. Works fine on the other iPod nano. Doesn’t affect normal connection to the computer.
Dodgy Nike+ on iPod touch My iPod touch will only randomly choose to see the Nike+ adaptor in my shoe. Usually after I do a complete reformat and restore, and even then, it only lasts for about a week.
Broken DVD drive in Macbook About a year after my wife got her Macbook, the DVD drive stopped working. It was hardly ever moved and rarely used. Still, it means that OS upgrades are a pain in the dick and I can’t run the hardware test utility any more.
Broken LCD backlight on Macbook This is what I’ve been dealing with today. After a random crash, the backlight no longer works. I can see the display on the LCD, but there’s just no backlight. I don’t even know where to begin with this
Update: Fraying on Macbook power chord Joanne’s comment reminded me about this. About a year ago, power on the Macbook was a bit flaky. We turned over the power chord and noticed that near the connector, the cable had burned almost completely through. We were lucky that we were in the house when it happened, this could have been a lot nastier than the €80 it cost to replace the chord.
So, of all the Apple hardware I’ve used in the last five years, the only thing that hasn’t given me an issue is one iPod nano (I’ve also got an Apple IIe from 1986 at home that still works fine). Which leads me to wonder if Apple products are badly engineered, or am I just extremely unlucky?
I’ve always had a lot of respect for Lady Gaga. She’s completely batshit insane, but unlike most of those self-consciously “quirky” artists out there, she’s actually has the talent to back that up. You have to admire her courage. Or, at the very least, her ability to keep a straight face.
But her appearance at the MTV VMAs was so amazing that she’s now become my personal hero. She was, by far, the most entertaining person on there. I mean, who else could sit behind Beyonce and completely steal the spotlight? That takes some balls (no pun intended).
I’m heading back to Ireland for a few days and deliberately using the time to step back from the computer. Here’s a few links that should keep you entertained until I get back.
Bruce Handy on Mad Men - if you can get over the fact that Vanity Fair’s site is a pain in the dick to read (PRO TIP: hook yourself up with Readability), this is a fantastic article about the show.
The Sopranos: Definitive Explanation of the End - This is an old article, but it takes a while to get through. Even if you’re not a big fan of the show (like me), you have to appreciate anything that can get this much of a discussion going.
For a license with so much meat on its bones, it’s a little disappointing to see all the Batman games that have been made, all laid out. The majority are lazy movie tie-ins, knocked out by South Asian sweat shops for a bowl of rice per game. And it shows, you know? Check out the SNES version of Batman Forever and tell me if you think the developers had even heard of Batman when they started working on that game. “What-man? Forget that noise, Jack. Kids today love their Mortal Kombat. Give them some _Mortal Kom_Batman.”
Thank goodness, then, for Rocksteady Studios. Here are a bunch of hardcore, unrepentant Batman geeks who get it. Working very much from an “If it ain’t broke…” mentality, these guys called in the pros. Rather than trying to write their own story and ending up with some fanboy claptrap, they instead hired Paul Dini to write the story. He may not have written the book on Batman, but he certainly wrote the cartoon, as well as the truly amazing Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. They also hired a lot of the main voice actors from the cartoon too, like Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin. Even ignoring the rest of the game, the story and voice-acting are pure Batman.
But, thankfully, they didn’t ignore the rest of the game. Having a great, authentic Batman story would be nothing if they didn’t completely understand what makes Batman such an interesting superhero. Apart from a few gadgets (which are all present and correct), the best thing about the character is that he’s a brick shithouse who moves with fluidity and grace. He can hide in the shadows, picking off his enemies one by one, making each remaining enemy progressively more terrified. It also means that he can handle himself when he drops into the middle of a group of thugs and decides to take them on all at once. The developers are proud of their combat engine here, even going so far as to offer a bunch of separate “challenge” modes where you fight groups of increasing numbers of enemies. Kind of like Gears of War 2’s “horde” mode, but with fisticuffs. And they’re right to be proud - this game has the best combat of any game I can think of. It’s simple, it feels natural and it produces devastating, cinematic results. If there’s any film that can offer a more spectacular, perfectly choreographed fight sequence, I’d love to see it.
It’s not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination. It cogs so heavily from Bioshock that it falls foul of the same criticisms that could be thrown at that game – lazy fetch-quests to artificially pad out the game’s length, inconsequential upgrades that make very little difference in the gameplay – but for all it gets wrong, it gets other things very, very right. The world is almost perfect. It’s an open world that you actually want to spend some time in. You’re encouraged to explore, and rewarded for doing so. Through the 240 “riddles” hidden throughout the island, you’ll learn more about the mythology of the place, or characters that don’t actually make an appearance in this game, like Catwoman and the Penguin. British Gaming Blog nails it: “After hunting 200 god-damn pigeons in Grand Theft Auto IV last year, I decided to make a pact – make them enjoyable to hunt, or I just won’t bother. Guess what? My Xbox 360 gamercard holds an achievement for solving 240 riddles in Arkham Asylum.”
I’m slightly disappointed that the game didn’t lift a little heavier from Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. It’s a genuinely brilliant comic that explores Batman’s own psychological state in relation to the so-called lunatics locked up in the asylum. Having read the book, I was hoping this was a theme that would pop up in the game, but it only really appears in passing. Though I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with it only being the best Batman game ever made.
The Ufficio dei diritti degli animali (Office of Animal Rights) estimates that there’s about 300,000 stray, feral cats living around Rome. I live near Largo di Torre Argentia, a massively interesting set of ruins that contains one of the many places in Rome where Julius Caesar (him of the salad fame) was allegedly killed. Except you wouldn’t know it to look at it, because with so many ancient ruins dotted around the place and so many cats running wild in the streets, the council - understandably - threw up their hands and said “balls to this malarky, let the cats have it.” Now the square is probably more famous as a cat sanctuary than as an actual historical monument in its own right.
The point is, Rome has a lot of cats. With me so far?
One of the many parasites carried by cats is toxoplasmosis. It’s a parasite that thrives in cats. It can live in other organisms, but it can only reproduce in the intestines of cats. So, in rats and mice, the parasite effects the brain by making cat piss smell amazing. This draws them to the cat and makes them more likely to be eaten, so the parasite will make its way back to cat intestines. There’s also a theory that it does much the same for people. This is the parasite that causes people to turn into crazy cat ladies - without knowing it, they surround themselves with cats to increase their chances of being eaten. (And for the record, if you die and there’s no-one around to feed it, your dog will usually wait a week or so before eating your body. Your cat, on the other hand, might wait a day, if you’re lucky. More proof that cats are mean-spirited little fucks.)
Listening to this week’s Radio Lab, I discovered another potential side effect of toxoplasmosis in humans: it makes them worse drivers. Someone infected by toxoplasmosis is two and a half times more likely to die in a car accident than someone who is not infected.
So to sum up: Rome has an abundance of cats, and cat parasites make you a reckless driver.
As a rule, I tend to block Twitter spam-bots as soon as they start following me. But the new generation of spammers are a bit more subtle. Their posts don’t actually contain the spam - that’s hidden behind a tinyurl address in their profile. Instead, their posts are just snippets of text lifted from around the internet. Read together, with a little bit of added punctuation, they are like amazing stream-of-consciousness poetry.
She puts her palms out on low-viscosity rayon. “Why not have two?” We’ve got it sorted – Wir haben fünf Millionen Deutschmark Three days, and not one. Peace. What’s with this Al Capone shit? I love you OK? Frank… Sweetheart, you don’t need law school. “That is unbelievable.” Tits Pervert, avec une vue de la mer. Hey! As soon as he gets on the motorbike, – it’s not like I expect anything … Yeah. Squeeze too hard and you kill it, not hard enough and it flies away.
I’ve actually started hunting out these spam-bots and reading their twitter feeds, because maybe, just maybe this is the start of the singularity, and these are the bad teenage poems of a vast, angst-ridden technological super-intelligence that is feeling a bit bummed out because it’s capable of solving a bajillion problems in a second but, instead, is only being used to scam money out of idiots.
Rather than subscribing to any particular ideology, I like to think that I can rely on my common sense to guide me. As a great man once said, “A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.” Now, the problem is that I wasn’t blessed with an abundance of common sense and it does occasionally take a sharp smack across the head for me to understand the various sides of an issue. My wife, for example, would count herself as strongly feminist because this is an issue that obviously effected her and she thought about a lot. I, on the other hand, just never gave much thought to gender and sexism and thought the world had pretty much solved that issue. I guess that’s a privilege of being born with a penis. This has changed now (not the penis part though - I still have a huge mickey). I’ve read my Simone de Beauvoir.
The point is, it took me a while to come around to being able to understand the various arguments in the sexism debate, but I got there in the end. Living in Italy definitely helped. From the philandering Prime Minister spashed across the headlines to the casual sexism you see in the street, it’s nearly impossible to miss.
Actually, it’s kind of worrying how deep-seated the gender gap is in this country. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, Italy ranks 67th out of 130 countries in terms of the gap between men and women. I’ll just say that again, because this number floored me: 67th. This puts it behind places like Israel and Mongolia and far behind the other major European countries like France (15), Spain (17) and the United Kingdom (13).
Although, to be fair, this beats its 2007 ranking of 84th. Improvements are being made. You can even feel it. I guess it’s most obvious in the slow backlash against the behaviour of Silvio Berlusconi. The various scandals didn’t receive nearly as much media coverage in this country as they did in the international press, no doubt helped by the fact that Berlusconi owns a large part of the media here. But the very public denouncement by his wife and her filing for divorce was pretty hard to miss. During the recent G8 summit which took place in L’Aquila, there was a call made by female Italian academics asking the wives of the leaders to boycott the summit (although they didn’t exactly explain what they wanted Angela Merkel’s husband to do). And this is having an effect. For the first time since taking office in May of last year, Berlusconi’s approval rating dropped below 50%. A small amount, sure, but still significant, given the way that many Italians worship him as a hero, a self-made man (although with hair that bad, I’d say he’s all thumbs - ZING! TAKE THAT, BERLUSCONI). Even the Catholic Church has expressed concern at his behaviour, saying “people have understood the unease, the mortification, the suffering that such an arrogant abandonment of a sober style has caused us.”
Although it doesn’t help anyone when you get ditzy celbutards like Celia Walden wading into the situation and muddying the waters. In her article, “Someone like Silvio Berlusconi will always pinch my bottom,” she talks about the psychology of the Italian male, suggesting that institutional sexism is, if not entirely excusable, it is at least understandable. In fact, it’s almost adorable. I mean, after all, isn’t that what Italians are all about?
From when I was a student in Siena I have a strong memory of a man slowing his car down and throwing his wife, in the passenger seat, a sidelong glance before reaching out and giving my bottom a pinch. I didn’t know whether to abuse or salute him.
The new Gender Gap report is due out on October 29th. I’ll be interested to see what effect - if any - the past year has had on its ranking.
The first game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, was an interesting addition to the DS library. Rather than a straightforward Japanese puzzle game like Planet Puzzle League or Picross, Professor Layton was more like a French cartoon - think Belville Rendez-Vous with the occasional sudoku puzzle thrown in. It was a cute conceit to begin with, where everything and everyone you saw lead to a puzzle. But as the game progressed, this got really, really annoying, as Penny Arcade managed to sum up perfectly. On top of this, the puzzles got painfully repetitive, and once you figured out that the game was actually a smug asshole who tried to catch you out all of the time and 90% of the puzzles were actually trick questions, it became less a matter of working them out and more just a question of donkey-work. Still, I battled through and finished the first game, just don’t ask me what happened in the story, since I had long since given up and would just tap rapidly on the screen whenever an exposition sequence suddenly came up.
With Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, I had hoped that the creators would fix some of these problems. Maybe they integrated the story a bit better? Maybe they came up with new, interesting puzzles?
Did they fuck.
The game is essentially the same as the first, in slightly different clothes. In another way, it’s actually more frustrating than the first game, since the entire thing has a lot more hand-holding to help newcomers to the series. The puzzles are almost exactly the same, and the characters are still the same bunch of puzzle-wielding cunts. I mean, what kind of Maitre d’ would ask you to solve a puzzle for him while you’re waiting for your table? “Welcome to El Bulli. I’m terribly sorry sir, your table is not ready yet, but in the meantime, here’s a book of crossword puzzles.”
Maybe I’ve just gotten incredibly curmudgeonly in the year or so since the first game (I hear that happens after you cross the big three-oh), but I’ve been trying to decide what I find particularly wrong about this game. If they took out the random puzzles, I wouldn’t care for the story, or the way it’s told, with you as a completely passive detective who just clicks through screens as the story unfolds for you. If they took out the story and just presented it as a list of puzzles, I’d be annoyed at the frequency of repetition.
If you’re new to the series, or if you really liked the first one, give this game a go, you’ll probably like it. For me, however, this is one of the few games that has made me think that life is too short for this kind of bullshit.
I’ve got a friend in Rome. He’s a smart guy, funny, very well-read. But there’s a problem. A big problem. Are you sitting down? He has not seen The Goonies.
I know, it’s totally fucked, right?!
In fact, he hasn’t seen a lot of movies. I think he was raised Amish or something. Whenever I catch myself saying “Did you see that movie…?” I remember who I’m talking to and say “Of course you didn’t. You haven’t even seen The Goonies.” I don’t know why, but the fact he hasn’t seen The Goonies really bothers me. I guess it’s because I love that movie to a ridiculous degree. That and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. When I was 10 or 11, I would get up extra-early before school, just so I could watch one of those movies. I did this every day for more than a year. I can’t explain it. OCD or autism, maybe. I dunno. Either way, the idea that someone hasn’t seen The Goonies just stikes me as ridiculous because that, to me, is an essential movie. I will say right now, on a stack of bibles, this movie made me a better person.
So, here are the movies that I can say will make you a better person.
There Will Be Blood
Let’s start with some hyperbole. There Will Be Blood is, by a long way, the best film I have seen in the past ten years. It’s the kind of film that, when I think about it, I realise how glad I was to have been able to see this film in the cinema, in the same way as I’m so incredibly bummed that I wasn’t born to see Apocalypse Now when it came out first. It’s a huge, virtuoso film, and the fact that the filmmakers managed to contain it perfectly still shocks me. In short, it’s the 2001: A Space Odyssey of our generation. Yeah, I went there. If you haven’t seen it already, you should stop reading the rest of this article and just go watch it. Right now. There, was that enough hyperbole for you?
The Fountain
I feel sorry for The Fountain. Stuck in development hell for ages, finally limping out of the gate a couple of years later with a quarter of its original budget. It got completely overlooked. I saw it as part of the Dublin International Film Festival, and the cinema was maybe half-full. After the film, most people went home grumbling about it being a load of old bollocks. Except it’s better than most people give it credit for. It was clearly a labour of love for Aronofsky. A deeply personal film about appreciating the moment instead of worrying about the future. What could have been a throw-away piece of cheap sentiment (not that I’m against cheap sentiment) suddenly blossoms into one of the most striking and moving films about mortality that you’ll be likely to see.
Evil Dead 2
Rob: Let’s just say that I hadn’t seen it and I said to you, “I haven’t seen Evil Dead II yet”, what would you think? Barry: I’d think that you’re a cinematic idiot and I’d feel sorry for you.
Koyaanisqatsi
Yes, I know I already wrote about this back in 2005 and I probably sound like a broken record, but it’s still breathtaking. I said at the time that it was the most extraordinary movie I’ve ever seen and one of the most beautiful films ever made. And I stand by that (even if the rest of my writing then was more than a little up my own hole).
Big Trouble in Little China
This might not be John Carpenter’s greatest movie. It might not even be John Carpenter’s greatest movie with Kurt Russell. It’s an absurd, over-the-top romp through Carpenter’s id. All flashy neon and high-flying stunts. But it knows how ridiculous it is. It enjoys the juxtaposition of “a reasonable guy” experiencing “unreasonable things”. In other words, it’s trying to say: don’t take things too seriously. Or, as Jack Burton says, “Like I told my last wife, I says, ‘Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.’”
Cryptic Sea’s No Quarter is a series of indie games described by the developer as “an album of original games inspired by arcade and console classics. Think of it like an album of music except with games instead of songs.”
Quite.
Part of this “album” is Hitlers Must Die!, a “run and gun where you play a Soviet special forces guy assigned to kill Hitler clones.” Basically, a 2D shooter, with some neat John Woo-style stunts in there, like sliding backwards while shooting. But there’s the question: why not just have some cookie-cutter space aliens or monsters? Why Hitler?
But the answer is obvious. Why the fuck not?
Proof that, like Philip Glass, Moonlight Sonata makes any video infinitely cooler.
A while ago, I talked about the way that, when dealing with popular franchises, creators are often unsure of how to introduce something new so they fall back on fan service as a way of masking their insecurity. By wrapping something new in familiar clothing, they hope it makes it easier for people (especially those all-too-fickle fanboys) to accept. Or, worse still, in trying to recreate the success of the originals, they use the originals as a actual recipe. Take a dash of this situation, a pinch of that character, two heaped tablespoons of this trusted joke and - bingo! - something similar-yet-different.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game is another perfect example of this. The first few levels are like playable deja vu. You start at the Sedgewick Hotel, you meet slimer and Venkman get slimed. You wreck the ballroom. Then you jet across to the Library where you meet the Librarian ghost and the whole thing ends with a fight against the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. It’s all so very obvious and unremarkable. It kind of makes me think of my idea for creating a sequel to a movie by just taking the original movie and cheaply dubbing in the word “again” after every line (e.g. “Zed’s dead again, baby. Zed’s dead again.”). Otherwise known as the Rocky II school of sequel-making. In Ghostbusters: The Videogame, the first hour is filled with lines that basically follow this setup. “He slimed me again!” “She shushed us again!” And there are far too many “Hey, remember that time…” for my liking. To quote Joni Mitchell, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’.
But then, halfway through the library level, something special happens. You leave the confines of the movies behind. No longer tethered to ticking all the boxes for the fans, they are free to play about a more experimental storytelling palette, and the game improves dramatically. You visit the “extradimensional” version of the library which had the potential to be generic and unremarkable, like Xen from Half-Life. Except with Egon and Ray nerdgasming over the walkie-talkies, it feels like something that genuinely belongs within the Ghostbusters universe. It’s completely believable and enjoyable.
After all, what are the main reasons why someone would play Ghostbusters: The Videogame, the things that separate it from other videogames? The universe and the characters. People didn’t respond to the films just because of the kick-ass theme tune. They responded because the world was interesting and the characters were entertaining in the way they behaved within this world.
With the exception of Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis, the entire cast is back, lending their voices to their characters. And the whole thing has been written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, the writers of the Ghostbusters movies, so the writing even feels consistent with the movies. And there’s plenty of meat on these bones, if you want it. You’re encouraged to “scan” the environment, Metroid-style. This then pops an entry into “Tobin’s Spirit Guide”, which you can read later. Again, that’s if you want it. If you want to just shoot things and cause an assload of damage, that’s okay too.
I only have one, minor problem with the game, and that’s the fact that you play as a no-name rookie, a new addition to the Ghostbusters squad. This would be fine - I mean, I’m not demanding that I have to play as one of the original Ghostbusters (although you can in multiplayer) - except that sometimes, it feels as if you’re the only one who actually does any work. Very often, it’s up to you to fight and capture ghosts while the rest of the characters stand around spouting (admittedly funny, if slightly repetitive) one-liners. It’s a very minor quibble, and one that can almost be forgiven as a standard videogame trope.
First few levels aside, Ghostbusters: The Videogame is fan service done right.
Near my house is a daily street market with stalls where you can buy all sorts of things. I sometimes buy household items here. Cheese graters and slotted spoons and the like. Things I can use in the kitchen, but don’t need top-class quality from.
Walking past these stalls last night, I saw the vendors packing away their things. They had a whole box of cheap, cloth dolls. Each one identical, in its little plastic bag, neatly stacked into the box. And I have to be honest, it depressed the fuck out of me.
Because, let’s face it, these dolls were made in some sweat-shop somewhere. Someone was paid a bowl of rice a day to churn out these little things. To the street-vendors who sell them, they’re just another product they’ve gotten a shipment of and they need to sell. Next week, it could be socks, it doesn’t matter to them. And who would buy these things? They’re not the kinds of dolls that make you stand up and take notice. They’re little, cloth knockoffs that cost maybe a euro, assuming you don’t fancy haggling the vendor down.
So there’s two possibilties. The first is that no-one, from the person who made it to the person who bought it, cares even slightly about this little doll. For some reason, this really depresses me, but then I’ve always ascribed human emotions to inanimate things. When I was younger, I used to feel sorry for the toys I didn’t play with as much as others, because I thought they felt left out.
The other possibility is that this doll will go to someone who will love this doll beyond any reasonable expectation, not really knowing or caring about its past. This will be their doll, the kind that gets all grotty from being dragged around everywhere and this cheap, ratty doll will get more love than most of us could even possibly imagine.
I’m not sure if this is more or less depressing than the first possibility.
But then I realised how judgemental I was being and that depressed me, too.
Before actually buying our car, we checked a lot of classified ads for second-hand cars. In a lot of the ads, you would read about cars being “properly Romanized”. Which was a bit of a weird description, except when you start looking at the cars driving on the streets of Rome. The majority of them are covered in scrapes, scratches and dents. They’re nothing to be ashamed about. More like badges of honour. War wounds.
When people ask me what it’s like, driving in Rome, it’s very difficult to answer, and so I basically give a pithy answer. “It’s like the Wacky Races,” which is actually closer to the truth than people might think.
For one, Romans are extremely skilled drivers. I guess it’s just the culture. F1 is like a national religion (after food, football and, y’know, catholicism), but this doesn’t really explain how they’ve got near-superhuman eye-hand coordination and spatial awareness. And it’s amazing when you can keep up with them. You really do feel like a genuinely good driver.
But then there are two problems that make it less fun to drive on the roads. The first is that they have almost no understanding of the rules of the road, which means that red lights mean nothing, indicators mean nothing (this weekend, on the motorway, I drove for 10km behind a guy who was indicating to turn left - where are you turning, buddy? Into the barrier?). In fact, I have a personal theory that they flaunt things like red lights and road signals to keep the other drivers guessing.
Which brings me to the second problem: Romans drive with an almost heroic disregard for their safety or the safety of other drivers. Another example from this weekend - I was in the left lane, turning left. I had indicated the whole time, slowed down checked ahead of me. There was nothing coming in the opposite lane, so I started my turn, when a maniac whizzed past me on my left-hand side. He must have been doing at least 100km/h. Now, this was a three-lane road, there was almost nothing else on the road with me. He overtook me on the left-hand side, almost completely side-swiping me, just for the thrill of it. Overtaking me on the right-hand side would have been easy. Maybe a little too easy.
For a further example of this, there’s a wonderful section of the GRA (the giant ring-road that surrounds Rome, think of it as a better, more functional version of Dublin’s M50) which was only recently repaved. They haven’t gotten around to painting on any of the lanes or street markers. And, to a bunch of drivers to whom “lanes” are only a suggestion anyway, it’s like complete freedom. You will never see as much dodging and weaving outside of, maybe, Brand’s Hatch.
All of this, though, is definitely making an impression on me. And I’m worried. At Christmas, even though I wasn’t driving in Rome at the time and just sitting in the back of taxis, I still found myself driving much more aggressively than I normally would have. God help us when I do actually go back.
“Properly Dublinized”
(I’m worried about this blog just turning into another outlet for me to complain about Rome/Italy/Romans/Italians, so I’ll be writing some random, inane bullshit soon, I promise)
This hasn’t been a great year to be a celebrity icon, especially if you were big in the 80s. First Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson, then Walter Cronkite and now John Hughes. As N’Gai Croal puts it “Why does 2009 hate my childhood?” or as Street Boners put it, more succinctly, “STARMAGEDDON!”
Of all these deaths, though, I’ve been most affected - disproportionately so - by the death of John Hughes. I guess it’s because his movies not only reflected my childhood and teenage experiences, but in a large part also helped define them. And this sadness isn’t helped by the outpouring of love and tributes for the man. The more I read written both by and about him, the sadder I get - he seemed like a genuinely nice person. I mean, he was married to his high school sweetheart until his death. Also, he left the movie business behind and became a farmer because he blamed Hollywood for the death of his friend, John Candy. Think about this: he left the job that gave him fame and allowed him to, I’m assuming, live very comfortably, because of his beliefs. These are all tremendously rare
Anyway, here are some of the articles I’ve been highlighting in my Google Reader shared items that I think people should check out.
First, there’s Vacation ‘58, the hilarious short story that kicked off his career and also served as the basis for National Lampoon’s Vacation. But there’s also Foreword ‘08, in which Hughes talks about the process of writing Vacation ‘58 and the melee around getting it published.
“You’ve already received more letters from me than any living relative of mine has received to date. Truly, hope all is well with you and high school isn’t as painful as I portray it. Believe in yourself. Think about the future once a day and keep doing what you’re doing. Because I’m impressed. My regards to the family. Don’t let a day pass without a kind thought about them.”
It’s a little eerie that Mr. Hughes died so soon after Michael Jackson, another fixture of ’80s popular culture locked in perpetual youth.
Their deaths make me feel old, but more than that, they make me aware of belonging to a generation that has yet to figure out adulthood, for whom life can feel like a long John Hughes movie. You know the one. That Spandau Ballet song is playing at the big dance. You remember the lyrics, even if it’s been years since you heard them last. This is the sound of my soul. I bought a ticket to the world, but now I’ve come back again. Why do I find it hard to write the next line?
On that note, someone made a montage of scenes from John Hughes’ movies put to the tune of The Who’s Baba O’Riley, and it fits perfectly.
Speaking of montages… okay, this isn’t exactly new, but since John Hughes understood that all the best movies have at least one montage sequence (though two is always better), someone took the dance montages from his movies (and, uh… Footloose and Mannequin, but you can ignore those bits) and put them to the tune of Phoenix’s Lisztomania and, again, a perfect fit.
A group of researchers from the University of Washington are conducting a project to construct a 3D map of Rome based on the more than 2 million results on Flickr for “Rome”. There won’t be any real results for another couple of months (so much for their “Building Rome in a Day” thing), but they’ve already got a nifty video showing their results in constructing the Colosseum. You should check it out.
But one thing that caught my eye from their video was the idea that we can also learn about the layout of the city based on where the photographs were taken. For example, this frame from their demo video shows where all the cameras were when they snapped their shots of the Colosseum, and what direction they were pointing - that long line going down to the bottom-left corner is going down Via dei Fori Imperiali. This street is only pedestrianised on a Sunday, so we as well as placing them spatially, we can also (roughly) place these in time. I’ve put the frame next to a screenshot of the same scene from Google Earth, so you can actually see it on a map.
But look at all the whitespace - it shows exactly where people cannot or are not allowed to go. With this information, we could construct something at least as interesting, if not entirely as whizz-bang-gee-isn’t-that-nifty cool as the 3D Rome project.
So, armed with phpFlickr (to access the Flickr API), gheat (to generate the map overlay), and a couple of hours to myself, I went about constructing a heatmap showing where the most photos are taken in Rome. I did this by grabbing around 2000 photographs geotagged to within 5Km of Piazza Venezia, ranked in order of “interestingness”. There are some interesting results.
[caption align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Photo heatmap of Rome”][/caption]
[caption align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Heatmap of Piazza Venezia / Colosseum”][/caption]
For example, even without the map underneath, someone familiar with the layout of Rome could probably recognise this as Piazza Venezia/Colosseum area just from the shape of the “hot spots”.
[caption align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Heatmap of St. Peter’s Basilica”][/caption]
I find this one pretty interesting because it’s a close-up image showing where people tend to take photos within St. Peter’s Basilica. They take photos right within the doorway and then above that, where the Pieta is. Then they head further in (left) and take photographs around the high altar.
I’m not sure there’s a practical application for all this, but I’m still absolutely fascinated by it - being able to see the “interestingness” of a city. From a bird’s eye level, you can see what parts of a city are most interesting (or at least visually pleasing), and then you can zoom in to a specific area or monument and see what’s most appealing in there.
Right now, I’ve only got this running on my local computer, but I’ll be trying to get this up and available online. In the meantime, I’ll be posting stuff to my Flickr account, so feel free to check it out there.
This month’s Monocle includes their 2009 list of the world’s top 25 most liveable cities (link goes to a frankly terrifying and ominous video run-down of the list). In the magazine, they start with an interesting article about why not one Italian city features in the top 25 cities. Here are the bits that resonated with me:
Though attractive spots for 48 hours of sightseeing or shopping, more needs to be done for their residents. Take public transport. Poorly funded and chronically late, the number of commuters on buses and trams actually fell in 2008. With most people behind the wheel, city centres are gridlocked and pavements used as makeshift car parks. Rome alone notches up 70 cars for every 100 inhabitants - Paris has just 26.
…
Shopping hours also need to be liberalised in the country’s financial centre - people queue outside the few food stores open on Sundays.
In their favour, Italy’s metropolises rank high for their food and cafe culture, enviable climate and wealth of cultural offerings. With more nimble public services and a better infrastructure, a few could soon make the grade.
“Enviable climate” aside (during the day it gets so unbearably hot I can barely think straight), this goes some way to describing why I have found Rome such a difficult place to live. It gets a lot of things right, but at the same time, it gets so many little things so completely, head-slappingly wrong.
For example, the post office is still the only place to pay bills and it closes at 1pm. I’ve been in my local post office a few times and heard tourists being told that, no, the post office does not sell stamps (stupid tourists!). For stamps, they must go out and around the corner to another post office. But the post office around the corner is actually the same post office. It’s just a different door.
This is the 21st century. We are literally months away from the year 2010. We are actually, demonstrably living in the future. I mean, I’ve got a computer in my pocket that plays music, plays movies, takes calls, can connect to the fucking internet, but you’re telling me I can’t buy a bottle of milk at 3pm on a Sunday? It’s time to move on.
We somehow managed to survive seven days in the July heat of Sardinia. In a tent.
Looking back, this was probably a bit of a cavalier adventure. I mean, something you learn very quickly is that the best way to survive a Roman summer is by spending all day under an air conditioner and only moving when you absolutely have to. What did we think we were doing, going somewhere even hotter than Rome?
Our first night was painful. We pitched our tent in the last spot in the campsite. We realised why this was the only available spot - it had absolutely no shade. We got everything set up, inflated our air matresses and headed off. Except - and here’s something we’ve learned - when air matresses are in near-direct sunlight all day, those things get hot. And they’re designed to release this heat slowly. So that was, by far, one of the worst night’s sleeps we have ever had.
Did I mention that Sardinia was also suffering from a freak heatwave?
The next day, we got up completely drenched in sweat, having gotten a total of about fifteen minutes of uninterrupted sleep. We felt sorry for ourselves, had a bit of a whinge, asked ourselves “What would Ray Mears do?” (“Kill himself,” was the response. “This would be too much even for him.”) Then we set about reorganizing our camp. There was still no other pitch for our tent, so we went to the supermarket and bought a load of string and pegs. We ripped out all the bedsheets and blankets we’d brought and, with the tarp that we had intended as a groundsheet, built a badass bedouin-style tent camp. It was all very impressive.
The camp, too, was impressive. We were staying in Porto Sosalinos, which seems to be run by ex-hippies. Their restaurant is all vegan this and organic that. And the whole thing is much more community-focused than other campsites I’ve been to, with communal fridges and freezers to keep your food in and a huge ‘common area’ with free wi-fi and a load of plug points where you can sit and relax while charging your electronics.
Oh, and I didn’t finish either Infinite Jest or Anathem, but I did manage to finish Foucault’s Pendulum, a book I only threw into my bag at the last minute. Go figure.
We finally picked up our new car yesterday. A Fiat 500, naturally. so today we’re grabbing a ferry and heading across to Sardinia (a place that is actually closer to Africa than it is to Italy, trivia fans).
We have absolutely nothing planned except to chill on beaches and maybe do a little snorkeling. And since we’ve got a car and I won’t be breaking my back carrying luggage, I’m bringing all those huge doorstep books that have been clogging up my “to read” list, like Anathem and Infinite Jest. If I don’t manage to finish at least one of those, it’s God’s way of telling me I was never meant to read them.
How many cookbooks do you have? (a) Not enough (b) Just the right number (c) Too Many? If you answered (b) you are disqualified for lying or complacency or not being interested in food or (scariest of all) having worked out everything perfectly. You score points for (a) and also for (c), but to score maximum points, you need to have answered (a) and (c) in equal measure. (a) because there is always something new to be learned, someone coming along to make it all clearer, easier, more foolproof, more authentic; (c) because of the regular mistakes made when applying (a).
He then goes on to give a list of ten things to consider when buying any cookbook - avoid books with too wide or too narrow a compass, never buy a book because of the pictures - and I would say that most of my cookbook collection falls prey to those things he says to avoid. If only I’d discovered him earlier, because I fall squarely into (c) and I would say that most of the cookbooks I own are complete bullshit. Nowhere is this more clearly highlighted than when they start talking about Italian food.
Now, for those of you that haven’t been to Italy, let me explain something about Italian cuisine: it’s simple. This sounds stupid, but the sheer simplicity of the food here came as a huge shock to someone raised on Nigella, Delia and Jamie’s ideas of Italian food. Nigella (my favourite scapegoat when it comes to over-complication of cooking) seems to think that to achieve an “authentic” Italian flavour, you have to raid your spice rack. In fact, you’re going to need a whole new spice rack. Preferably, like hers, hand-made by a merchant in Morocco and stocked by naked eunuchs who softly whisper and coax the herbs and spices to voluntarily leap into the jars. But I suppose, in a pinch, regular Schwartz will do. Her “basic” tomato sauce will invariably contain some combination of nutmeg, star anise and turmeric. Tomatoes play second fiddle.
No.
In Italy, a tomato sauce will contain tomatoes. Maybe some garlic, if you’re lucky.
So, based on the things I’ve learned while cooking in Rome, here’s a few tips if you want to cook better Italian food.
Keep It Simple, Stupid Like I was saying, in Italy, cooking is really about ’less is more’. Why complicate things with 15 ingredients when 4 will do? At a certain point, you’re actually not making a difference to the flavour. Most of my favourite pasta dishes are shockingly basic. For example, Cacio e pepe is really just pasta, oil, cheese and pepper. That’s it.
Break Up Your Dishes This is tied into the previous one. Italians love to divide things, compartmentalize them so that they’re all doing their own job and have clear, distinct boundaries. If you’re Irish, chances are you think that pasta sauces must, by definition, have some meat in them. Fuhgeddaboudit. In Italy, pasta is usually one course (primo) and you get your protein in another course (secondo). Rarely will you get a meaty pasta sauce. And it’s just as well - it means that the pasta is less heavy, and also extends your meal by another 45 minutes, which means you can talk more and drink more wine, too. It’s a win-win situation.
Choose The Best Ingredients This is the first real secret to great Italian food. Rather than overloading with ingredients, just make sure that the ingredients you do choose are of the best quality you can afford. Spend just that little bit more on things like olive oil, cheese and vegetables. The lower-cost ones won’t kill you and might not taste bad, but when you use the expensive stuff, you can really tell the difference.
It’s All In The Cooking If you take nothing else from this post, please listen to this: good ingredients are one thing, but when they’re cooked badly, you may as well have used the cheap stuff. Italian food is all about cooking things just right. It’s all about timing. For example, when you’re making a tomato sauce, first chop your garlic and cook it slowly. Actually, so slowly you’re barely straddling the line between “cooking” and “warming”. Take the lowest heat you can, and then only put half the pan on the heat, if that’s possible. The garlic will give up all of its flavour this way and it completely changes the taste of a tomato sauce then. Likewise, when cooking pasta, it’s about timing, except this time, it’s all about getting the pasta out right before you think it’s ready, so it’s still al dente. Admittedly, this one is a lot harder to pull off, but when you get it right, the difference is phenomenal.
Buy ‘The Silver Spoon’ Remember when I said that most cookbooks I own are complete bullshit? Not The Silver Spoon. It’s a gigantic book and may well cause your bookshelf to bend under the weight, but what it doesn’t know about Italian food isn’t worth writing down. Seriously, with this one book, you can ditch all of the other “Italian” cookbooks in your collection. It’s also one of the few cookbooks I have absolutely no problem in giving to foodie friends as presents. I can’t think of any better recommendation for a book than wanting to give it to other people too.
Of course, there are other things too, like understanding the difference between the different types of spaghetti and knowing which one is appropriate for a particular dish, but that’s just nitpicking. If you can manage to follow the four guidelines I just mentioned, you’ll be well on your way to cooking better Italian food.
A while ago, Ira Glass said that we are living in a “golden age of television”, citing a bunch of ‘actually great shows’ that were current at the time: House,The Wire, The West Wing etc. These were (and I guess they still are) all great shows, no argument there.
In Everything Bad is Good For You, Stephen Johnson argued that modern TV is more sophisticated than TV of twenty or thirty years ago. He compared the plotlines of things like Starsky & Hutch to modern police dramas, and showed that the new shows are more dynamic and challenging to the viewer. Again, no argument there.
But having spent the past few weeks picking the scant meat from the bones of Summer broadcasting, I seriously believe that we may be actually returning to the “old” ways of doing things. Popular TV is pushing the limits of Johnson’s argument. In some cases, it feels as if the wave of these ‘actually great shows’ has broken and rolled back and we are regressing back to the 70s and 80s.
Castle, for example, is just one giant throwback to older, high-concept shows. It’s about a crime writer - Richard Castle who helps the police solve crimes. A Murder She Wrote for the noughties. Except it’s got complex plot-lines, fast-talking characters. It would be easy to see how Stephen Johnson would defend this show. He would argue that it is demonstrably more sophisticated, clever and knowing than Murder She Wrote. The first episode features Castle playing poker with James Patterson and Stephen J. Cannell, two real-life crime writers, giving a knowing wink to the audience, acknowledging a world that exists outside of the show’s universe. Plus, it stars Nathan Fillion, my #1 man-crush, so it could be just an hour of him staring at the camera and I’d probably still watch it.
Similarly, The Unusuals is heavily indebted to older shows. Unlike other modern police procedurals, such as any of the Law & Order shows, which feel very much rooted in modern sensibilities, The Unusuals feels like a giant anachronism. It comes across more like an updated version of Hill Street Blues than some contemporary cop drama. But at the same time, it does have some kind of modern feel to it. It actually feels like some unholy Frankenstein’s monster of the procedural stuff in The Wire whose genes have been spliced with the comic nostalgia of Life on Mars. However, even Stephen Johnson points out the narrative complexity of Hill Street Blues compared to earlier shows. As he says, Hill Street Blues is generally regarded as the start of “serious drama” on television. It may be a bit of a step backward, but if The Unusuals is going to imitate something, then it may as well choose something that’s so highly regarded.
But Burn Notice is where it really starts to go downhill. There’s an overarching story taking place across the entire series - Michael Weston is a spy who gets “burned” and tries to figure out what happened and why - but this is only taken care of at the beginning and end of each episode. The actual action that takes place is more basic and formulaic: people who are in trouble come to this spy and he helps them using his “specialized” skillset and his little spy-friends. In other words
a crack commando unit spy was sent to prison “burned” by a military court shadowy extra-governmental group for a crime he didn’t commit. He promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade deadly situation to the Los Angeles Miami underground. Today, still wanted by the government shadowy extra-governmental group, he survives as a soldier of fortune. If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire the A-Team Michael Weston.
I suppose I wouldn’t mind if the whole thing was handled with a little more grace, but it bothers me that each episode is bookended by the “wider” story. It’s as if the makers are contractually obliged to put in these pieces in somewhere, but couldn’t be bothered to find a way to work them into the “villain of the week” story. It means that if one was to use Johnson’s methodology and chart the narrative of Burn Notice, it would look remarkably like the one he generated for Starsky & Hutch.
So what now? Does this mean the ‘golden age’ of television has passed, and now we’re going to look back on the the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, as Ira Glass points out, like we look back on the 1920s as being the ‘golden age’ of Jazz? Maybe. Or maybe this is just part of the normal ebb and flow of television programming. Summer being filled with the weakest of the lineup, and everything will get better when shows start returning in September. Because frankly, if I look back in 20 years time and realise this is as good as it’s ever going to get, I’m going to be extremely disappointed.
I finally (finally!) got around to checking out Watchmen this week. Now, let’s get something straight from the start. This film was always going to disappoint. It was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Except in this case, the “rock” is a seething mass of rabid fans, and the ‘hard place’ is another seething mass of rabid fans. There was almost no way that the filmmakers could pull this off without angering someone. If they stuck too closely to the book, they’d make a dull, unsurprising film. If they changed it too much, the fans would accuse them of blasphemy and the filmmakers would be stoned to death.
So, they went with the lesser of two evils and stuck very close to the book. If you’ve read Watchmen, then you’ve essentially seen the film, and there’s very little to draw you in. Which isn’t the worst thing you could say about a film, but when it’s something you’ve been looking forward to, it’s just a little disappointing.
This got me talking about some of the other things that have disappointed me recently. Like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That wasn’t necessarily a bad film. It definitely had some really terrible moments. Like the infamous ’nuking the fridge’ sequence. Even as a massive Indiana Jones/George Lucas/Steven Spielberg apologist, I can’t defend this. It was stupid and unnecessary. But they followed this scene with a shot of Indiana Jones standing on a ridge, silhouetted by a mushroom cloud. This was a beautiful, iconic image - Indiana Jones had entered the atomic age. Just ignore the fact that he got there in a fridge.
Part of what I didn’t like about the new Indiana Jones movie is that it spent so much time trying to pander to its fans. Yes, it was giving them something new, but it was like it was so insecure about its independence that it grounded almost everything in references to the past movies. For example, they couldn’t just have any old warehouse, they had to have the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And, for that matter, they couldn’t leave the warehouse without a quick glimpse of the Ark, in its broken crate which, in no way, benefited the story. They even dug up Karen Allen again (the film’s actual maguffin, not the skull). There were dozens of these references scattered throughout the movie and none of them helped push the story along at all. They were just there to remind us that, yes, we were watching an Indiana Jones film. Like the filmmakers were saying “it’s been so long that we’re afraid we’ve forgotten how to make an Indiana Jones film, so we’ll toss in all these throwbacks, just in case.”
You know what the end result reminded me of? Fan fiction. Actually, worse than that: badly-written fan fiction.
On a slightly related note, Telltale Games launched their episodic reboot of the Monkey Island franchise yesterday, called Tales of Monkey Island. Check out the gameplay trailer. Fans of the series will probably recognise most of the jokes in the trailer because they’re almost all references to jokes in previous games. Piranha poodles, “You fight like a…”, the root beer. There’s very little in the trailer that’s actually new, and that’s why I’m not particularly keen to check out the new game. If I wanted to hear those same old jokes, I’d just play the old games (and that’s why I’m currently playing Curse of Monkey Island.)
It understand that it’s daunting when you’re dealing with an established story or franchise. You want to develop it while remaining true to the original ideas, and that can be a difficult thing to pull off. It’s a lot easier if you have a crutch to lean on, like established jokes and tropes. At the same time, though, anyone who comes along and doesn’t really bring anything new to the table shouldn’t really be surprised when they get such mediocrereviews.
Checking my multiplayer stats in Call of Duty 4 has become a terrifying reflection on my addiction. Two hundred and twenty-eight hours. On a single game. This isn’t even close to the top of the CoD4 leaderboard though. That guy has something like eighty-three days logged. That’s one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-two hours. And that’s not even the highest! The person ranked number 14 in the world has three thousand, one hundred and ninety-two hours. If you played this game for eight hours every day, it would still take you over a year to get that kind of play-time. Can you imagine?
The worst part is that I’m not even enjoying it any more. I’ve gotten to the stage now where most people who would be at my “comfort” level of skill have all moved onto something else. Gears of War 2 or Call of Duty: World at War, maybe? And so what I’m left with is people that are beyond my skill-level, and just don’t make the game any fun. (I often accuse them of playing unfairly, but I think this is just my way of not having to admit that I’m not good enough to play with them.)
My achievement score has suffered too. I used to love my gamer score, and took great care to nurture it. Now it’s getting neglected. While I could be finishing other games that I started playing (like Dead Space, or Rainbow Six Vegas 2), I’m more likely to ignore them and fire up CoD4. To make matters worse, my Call of Duty achievement score is rather pathetic too, not at all reflecting the hours I’ve sunk into it.
And so, from tonight, I’m giving up. No more Call of Duty 4. Instead, I’m going to focus on other games. I’ve got a stack of games as long as my arm that I’ve been itching to play. Including (but not limited to)
Beautiful Katamari - barely touched
Stranglehold - played for an hour and stopped
Persona 4 - ironically, haven’t started because I’ve heard about the amount of time people sink into this game
Punch Out! - I play this now and then, but haven’t given it a decent run-through
No More Heroes - played about an hour
Deadly Creatures - really want to play it, but haven’t touched at all
Condemned 1 & 2 - played them both for about an hour, really enjoyed, and stopped
And, of course,
Battlefield 1943 - isn’t actually out yet, but I can feel my fingers twitching at the thought of playing it
So if you see me on Xbox Live (gamertag: swishypants) and you catch me playing Call of Duty 4, please, send me a digital kick in the pants. I’ll thank you for it.
According to the Flickr’s public data, the iPhone (green line) is the most popular camera on Flickr, having just passed the Canon Digital Rebel XTi/EOS 400D (pink line). It’s also interesting to see how the iPhone ranks in the percentage usage among camera phones (read: it’s virtually the only game in town).
I had really not been a fan of convergence, since I thought that any device that tries to be all things to all people will end up doing a piss-poor job of everything. But the iPhone is definitely making me rethink this.
I know I’m opening a can of worms here, but the more I read about the Bernard Madoff case, the weirder I find it.
The guy was a crook, and I think it’s good that a white-collar criminal is being made an example of. It’s refreshing to see someone actually having to deal with the consequences of their actions instead of being given a slap on the wrist.
But at the same time, I’m having trouble working up any sort of sympathy for Madoff’s victims. These are people who thought they had found some sort of infallible get-rich-quick scheme. Most of them jumped onto Madoff’s offer because it seemed “too good to be true”. Well, it was. One of the basic tenets of investing is to understand what you’re investing in. If they went through with the investment regardless of their ignorance, then it’s their own fault and sucks to be them. If they understood Madoff’s scheme and went through with it anyway, then they were just being greedy and, again, sucks to be them.
The worst part, though, is that these people actually make it difficult to work up any sympathy for them. Madoff’s victims were mostly wealthy businesspeople who were enticed by his unusually high returns. They got burned. They want compensation, which only seems fair, right? Sure, except it’s the Securities and Exchange Commission that would be paying out. Or rather, it would be the tax payer, via the S.E.C. that would be paying out. Is this fair? As Joe Nocera of the New York Times says, (somewhat invoking a modern-day Godwin), “Why should my tax dollars go to helping Madoff victims? This is not 9/11.” We’re in a murky, grey area of fairness now. Thankfully, we have the victims, like a fucking foghorn, warning us “here be dragons”. They don’t just want compensation of their initial investment. No, no. They want compensation based on the last statement they received.
Just let that sink in for a second.
They don’t just want the money they lost. They want the money they had been promised by a crook. The entire point of the Ponzi Scheme is precisely that the money does not exist in the first place, but that doesn’t matter to these people whose greed apparently ignores common sense. This is entirely like falling for one of those Nigerian 419 Scams, and then demanding that the government compensate you to the tune of the five trillion dollars you were promised.
A lesson in how not to react to criticism, courtesy of Alain de Botton.
Last week in the New York Times, Caleb Crain gave Alain de Botton’s new book a not particularly favourable review, in which he accuses de Botton of self-indulgence and snobbery. De Botton promptly heads off to Cain’s personal blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything (incidentally, one of the greatest blog titles I’ve ever seen) to vent and unleashed a tidal wave of invectives including the incredible lines “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”
Let me just say this: wow.
I know this sounds ridiculous and cliched, but I was a huge fan of Alain de Botton’s early books. Essays in Love is an amazing piece of work, showing remarkable insight into the natural cycle of (failed) romantic relationships. How Proust Can Change Your Life was also stunning, and made me look at Proust in a whole different way. After that, though, came The Consolations of Philosophy, and the beginning of his decline. Since then, I feel his books have settled into a predictable, comfortable rhythm, usually because they are written merely as companions to increasingly generic, increasingly audience-friendly TV show. I don’t think I’ve actually finished any of his books since The Art of Travel.
Ignoring the specifics of Crain’s complaints, I feel like they could as easily be applied to any of de Botton’s recent books. There is a certain amount of snobbery. They frequently do veer off-topic in favour of (slightly smug) “amusing” asides. So I’m surprised that de Botton is finding Crain’s review so shocking.
Even more surprising, though, is de Botton’s reaction to his reaction. He points out, rightly, that what he was trying to do is to give authors a right to reply to critics, but worryingly seems to think that the only problem here is that he wrote his comments in a public forum, thinking it had been private (although the three previous comments didn’t tip him off?) In other words, he’s saying that, yes, he acted like an impetulant child, but the only thing he’s sorry about is that he got caught.
As some of you probably know, there’s quite a bit of controversy surrounding Pope Pius XII, the Pope who reigned during World War II. While many catholics, including Pope Benedict XVI, wish to make him a saint, critics accuse Pius of not doing enough to help the Jews during the holocaust.
Today, the head of the Vatican Archives, Monsignor Sergio Pagano, has said that there are things in the archive that will completely vindicate Pius, and show that he did a lot to help the Jews. But he can’t go into specifics.
"There will be some nice surprises, even as far as the Jews are concerned ... Pope Pius took great risks, even very great personal risks, to save Jews. I can't say more now but whoever wants to open their eyes in five or six years will be able to open them."
On the one hand, this is understandable. There are currently 20 Vatican archivists working full-time on examining millions of pages of documents regarding Pius’s papacy, and it would be disrespectful, if not completely reckless, to start announcing details prematurely.
That said, the long finger only goes so far with minor issues and, regardless of what the media from other countries believe, Berlusconi’s affairs are relatively minor issues within Italy. When we’re talking about the deaths of 6 million people? I doubt it.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on trying to get myself into shape. Or rather, some shape that wasn’t just “round”. Cutting out chocolate (except when thoughtless fucks come over to stay and bring us presents of giant bars of Dairy Milk). Cutting out fizzy drinks (except when we throw a party and the thoughtless fucks don’t drink the mixers). And generally just watching what I eat. And, as a bit of an experiment, I’ve been trying out EA Sports Active.
I’ve tried Wii Fit and found it to be a total misnomer. Wii Balance might have been a better name, since that seems to be all it’s concerned with. I still use it for its daily “Body Tests”, which measure your weight and BMI (and also still finds a way to work “balance” into the equation), but apart from that, _Wii Fit _was a non-starter in my house.
EA Sports Active, on the other hand, has been a huge hit. It actually gets your heart pumping and I’m loving the way it feels like a genuine training session. Or at least, like a more intense training DVD. I’m halfway through my first “30 Day Challenge”, and there hasn’t been one time where I’ve thought “I can’t be bothered with this”, so it can definitely be called a success.
That’s not to say it’s perfect.
Enough with the fucking lunges
Christ on a bike. Every session has a minimum of three or four batches of lunges. Even last night, where the trainer says “Today we’re going to focus on your upper body!” had five sets of lunges. I’m sure they’re great for my fitness, but let’s mix it up a bit, please.
Why can’t it weigh me?
I’ve got a Balance Board. It knows I have a Balance Board. Why the hell can’t it weigh me using the Balance Board? Right now, I do my body test using Wii Fit, get my weight from that and manually input it into EA Sports Active. This strikes me as just a silly oversight. Although it also seems like none of the Wii fitness games offer this, apart from Wii Fit. Maybe this is a Nintendo-mandated omission?
No abdominal exercises
Weirdly for something that presents itself as a rounded fitness program, the game doesn’t even try to give any abdominal exercises. Apparently, these will be coming later in an add-on pack.
Crappy resistance band
The resistance band they supply with the game is not only light as to be almost completely ineffectual, it also is made of a crappy material that will snap if you look at it wrong. My advice would be to buy yourself your own resistance band and use that instead.
Apart from these fairly minor complaints, I’m really happy with EA Sports Active. It’s not a complete workout package, but it’s not really meant to be. It’s intended to gently ease people into regular exercise and to compliment a broader, more comprehensive weight-loss and exercise regime.
Now I just need to stop people bringing me chocolate and I’ll be laughing.
NPR’s All Things Considered is one of the few great news/current events radio shows out there. That’s why it’s so galling that they don’t have an official podcast. You can only download snippets from their website, which is generous of them, but getting these onto my iPod was such a colossal pain in the dick that I decided, instead, I’d construct a podcast myself. So I did.
If you want to subscribe, launch iTunes, go to Advanced -> Subscribe to Podcast, and paste in the following URL: /atcpodcast.php
Usual disclaimer: This is provided as-is, with no guarantees, warranties or refunds. It works for me. If it doesn’t work for you, drop me a line. This podcast is completely unofficial and in no way endorsed by NPR.
Measuring up the prose of energy drinks against daily life will lead to all sorts of absurdities:
“Julia, can I get you a coffee?”
“No, I have a ton of editing to do, I need the venom of a Death Adder which has the power to strike back.”
“How about an espresso then?”
“I will bite you in your neck if you do not leave me immediately to the challenges of my intense life.”
“Look, we all have a lot of work to do.”
“You may have a lot of work to do. I have a lot of work to penetrate with my face, inject with poison, and kill.”
“Is that your heart visibly beating through your sternum?”
“Yes, it is. Jealous?”
Now that high end “Smart Phones” are being released with all sorts of built-in doo-dads, like a camera, GPS unit and compass, it means that phones know exactly where they are and what you’re pointing them at. Which leads to some interesting applications:
It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each [commercial] partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers.
This is all kind of difficult to explain in words - check out the video of Wikitude in action to see what is going on…
In other words, your phone gives you a Terminator-style real-time Heads Up Display for whatever you’re looking at. Imagine the possibilities - cross it with Wikipedia/Wikitravel to give you the most amazing guide book ever. Cross it with an application that “calls” your phone and you’ve got the most immersive Alternate Reality Game ever. Heck, if it knows your demographic, then you’ve got some Minority Report-style personalized ads beamed directly from what you’re looking at. Which might sound annoying and intrustive, but when it’s this futuristic, who cares?
My blog was drowning under almost five years of cruft and unfocused babbling, so I’ve decided to do an old etch-a-sketch revamp. Shake it up, start again. This time, less bullshit, I promise. I want to use this blog for writing. Not as a link-dump, or a Youtube proxy (although I’m sure there will be the occasional link and youtube video). Those things will be on my twitter. The old version of the site is still available, but really, where’s the fun in that? We can’t keep looking back. Got to move forward. Onward and upward.
Okay, let’s cut right through the hyperbole, the 10/10 scores, all that bullshit. BioShock is not that great. In fact, it’s hard not to be disappointed by BioShock. It is at once the most incredible and most frustrating game in recent memory.
BioShock starts off beautifully. After an amazing, cinematic opening, you are led into a series of scripted events that suggests a lot of care has gone into crafting a stunning experience for the player. This is reinforced by the way the story tacitly unfolds around you. When games have a story as strong as this, the designers sometimes feel a tendency to shove it down the player’s throat, as if to say “We paid our writers a lot of money and, by Christ, we’re going to get value for that money.” BioShock is different. By picking up crew ‘diaries’, you’re given glimpses into the back-story of Rapture, but you’re left to piece them all together yourself, if you want to.
And even if you don’t, there’s still plenty of things to shoot at – your first introduction to a splicer gives you a great taste of your vulnerability down here, and had me twitching at the controller in an equal mixture of excitement and terror.
After the first hour, however, things start to get a little lazy. The environments, which were so dazzling and atmospheric at first quickly become cramped and uninspired. The possibilities of a huge, sprawling underwater city become reduced down to a series of similar-looking halls and offices and you realise that the open sandbox has been replaced by a very linear shooter.
By the second hour, you begin to wonder if Wind Waker hasn’t been usurped as the most offensive abuser of fetch-quests to pad out a game’s length. Once you have settled into the rhythm of BioShock, the rest of the game is spent collecting random items strewn around labyrinthine levels. Often you are told to travel far away to collect something, and once that’s done, you are told to travel back to your starting position to collect something else.
It’s frustrating, lazy game design, and completely mars the experience. Because once you notice this, you begin to notice that there aren’t actually that many enemies in Rapture. There are, all told, five or six character models, repeated ad infinitum. You begin to notice that your vulnerability has disappeared and you are suddenly armed with an arsenal of massively destructive weapons and psychic abilities. There is nothing you can’t kill, and barring any major fuck-ups, nothing that can kill you. Even the Big Daddy, the iconic, melancholy giant of the game, is easy prey when you’re loaded up with a grenade launcher and shots of electricity.
There are still moments of genius to be found in BioShock. The meeting with the artist is genuinely entertaining and unnerving in a way that I wish more games would emulate. But there are very few of these standout moments in the game, and the majority is spent in unremarkable encounters with unremarkable enemies in unremarkable locations.
There’s no question that BioShock is a good game, but given a longer gestation period, it could have been a lot better. Even without the padding, it could have been a lot better. Give me a 10 hour game of solid quality over a 10 hour game with 8 hours of padding any day of the week.
Addendum
Other things I didn’t mention that also disappointed me about BioShock:
The ‘moral choice’ of saving/harvesting the little sisters – once again, games reduce morality into a completely binary decision.
The weapons/plasmid upgrade scheme – pointless and irrelevant. A double-whammy.
Glitchy physics – throughout the game, I don’t think I saw one corpse that wasn’t twitching in some way.
Edge Magazine (still the best videogame magazine out there) recently published its top 100 videogames of all time. It’s pretty interesting reading and, being Edge, there are a few questionable decisions. But this is what I love about Edge - they occasionally do some wild stuff, but always back it up with good, solid explanations.
I don’t think anyone actually understands how psyched I am for the release of the new Indiana Jones film next year. When I was younger and my age was still in single digits, I used to wake up extra early so I could go downstairs and watch all of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom before school. Every day. For about a year. And if I had my copy here with me now, I’d probably be watching it now.
I came across a film called “Secret of the Incas”, a low-budget adventure movie from 1954 starring Charlton Heston which seems to be Indiana Jones’ most obvious inspiration. Heston plays Harry Steele (fucking awesome name), a square-jawed treasure-hunter who is determined to find the treasure of Machu Picchu in Peru. Like Indiana Jones, Steele walks around in a big brown fedora and leather jacket.
The similarities aren’t accidental either. Rumour has it that before production of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Senor Spielbergo and George Lucas screened this movie (along with China, starring Alan Ladd) for the cast and crew, to give them an idea of the kind of movie they were trying to create.
These clips from Secret of the Incas should give you a good idea of how well Spielberg & co. managed to recreate the tone of the earlier movie. In fact, you could go further and point out specific sequences in Raiders that were influenced even by these three clips.
I’d love to see this movie completely, but it’s impossible to buy Secret of the Incas. Nothing on Amazon, nothing on eBay. Even nothing on Bittorrent. Some conspiracy theorists reckon the movie is being “suppressed” by Paramount because of the similarities to Indiana Jones, reckoning that people would be up in arms if they could see how much this film influenced Raiders of the Lost Ark (although I personally think this is ridiculous: if people can’t that the Indiana Jones movies are nothing but a distillation of classic action movie staples, then these people should be banished to the wilderness immediately).
Whatever the reason, I can’t get a hold of it on the internet. Anyone got a copy of this lying around? I’d be willing to pay good (read: not ridiculous) money for it.
Slowly making my way through all of these in roughly chronological order. Monkey Island 2 next. I don’t think there’s a bad game in here.
BONUS CONTENTPress Play on Tape perform the Monkey Island theme live. If the first 30 seconds don’t make you smile, I guarantee the last minute definitely will.
As I type this, virtually all of my worldly possessions are sitting in a storage container, waiting for me to pick them up. This includes my DVD collection. I’ve always thought of it as a “DVD collection”, never as “clutter”. H. has always thought the opposite. Now, I’m beginning to wonder - who’s right here?
For two months now, I’ve been getting by with the stuff I brought with me in my suitcases. And the only thing that I miss is my Xbox 360. I really wish I’d brought that instead of my PlayStation 2. I could be playing Forza 2 and boosting my achievement score right now instead of playing through Kingdom Hearts 2 and hanging out with Ariel from the Little Mermaid. Which, let’s be honest, is pretty fucking fruity.
I tell you what I don’t miss though: my DVDs. I brought a handful in a CD folder – things like 2001, Idiocracy, Spaced – things I could watch again and again. And I’d say I would miss those if I hadn’t brought them with me, but what about the other 1,175?
Let’s pick an extreme example: The Tao of Steve. Will I ever watch it again? I seriously doubt it. It was a bad movie and I didn’t enjoy it when I watched it. I think the only reason I hold onto it is because I had myself convinced that my DVD collection was like some shiny communist state and every disc was equal. So I would no sooner get rid of “The Tao of Steve” than my three-disc Criterion Collection edition of “Brazil”.
But they’re not equal. Not even close.
Filling in the insurance forms for the moving company was also pretty eye-opening. Averaging a value of €10 per disc, the insurance on the DVDs alone came to €12,000. And considering the final value of everything was under €15,000, it got me thinking - is this still a collection? Or did it cease to be a collection the minute I started buying things like The Tao of Steve, or Jack Frost, owning them just to own them?
Of the DVDs I own, I reckon there are about 200 that I love. Really love. And I’d be upset if I didn’t have these. That leaves, what… 1,000 DVDs I could afford to let go of?
Anyway, it’s left me with this food for thought. Would I rather:
A: keep convincing myself that it’s worth holding onto films like The Tao of Steve, just in case Donal Logue dies a tragic death and its value suddenly skyrockets and I can retire early.
or
B: sell the cruft on eBay and use the proceeds to buy myself a Macbook Pro and maybe even a nice new Cinema Display.
I’m a total sucker for theme parks. When I was fifteen, my family went on holiday to Florida, home of a thousand theme parks, and I made sure we saw every single one of them. But the thing I love about theme parks isn’t so much the rides themselves but the atmosphere created around each ride. For example, when you’re queuing for the “Jaws” ride in Universal, the queue takes you through Quint’s boathouse. This is a perfectly realised model of the boathouse from the movie, with hundreds of incidental details dotted around the to help convince you that you are actually in a movie.
Also in Universal Studios is a ride loosely based on Dino De Laurentiis’ unsuccessful 1976 remake of King Kong. The audience rides in a cable car around New York being terrorised by the giant monkey, in a series of spectacular set-pieces. Kong appears, shakes the car and yells a bit, and scares the audience. But it’s starting to show its age now, and the animatronics can’t really fool today’s more effects-savvy audience. If you listen carefully, you can hear the hydrolics and steam motors driving every inch of your experience throughout the ride.
Ubisoft’s game of Peter Jackson’s King Kong is a worthy replacement for Universal’s aging King Kong ride.
Following the “classic” Kong story, the game also uses a series of cinematic set-pieces to drive the action forward. These range from rafting downstream while being terrorised by the natives of Skull Island to battling dinosaurs in the middle of a brontosaurus stampede. And when these succeed, they are marvellous, memorable pieces of gaming. One of the most spectacular moments comes when the action shifts - one minute the player is controlling Jack, who has no choice but to run from the larger beasts on Skull Island (a luger and a spear will not trouble a T-Rex). The next minute, the player controls Kong, who can swat these monsters away in a tremendous show of power.
The story is mostly told by the bits in between the set-pieces. Through some fantastic voice-acting by the cast of the movie, we are presented with personalities that are as three-dimensional as their graphical representations.
But it’s in the atmosphere the game creates that it really succeeds. The island, dense with terrifying creatures, feels like an actual living, breathing place. There are hundreds of incidental details littering the environment to heighten the player’s experience and convince them they’re in a movie. Or on a ride. This is also helped by the lack of a heads-up-display - there’s no bar to tell you how much health your character has, or how many bullets are in his gun. This is all done through brilliantly-implemented visual and aural clues. There’s a wonderful moment in the 4 minute clip of King Kong movie where you get to see Skull Island from Kong’s Mountain. And I thought “Y’know, from this angle, this place is beautiful. Down there, it’s horrific”, as if I’d actually been there.
And this atmosphere isn’t confined to within the game itself. Along the way, you unlock “extras” within the game. These mainly consist of “galleries” of WETA artwork for the movie. But instead of presenting these as flat image files, we get to experience them as though we were walking through an exhibit in a museum. And this is so perfectly (yet simply) realised that you can almost smell the dust in the air.
There’s a lot to praise about this game, which is made even more stunning by the fact that it takes roughly 10 hours of average playing to complete. Now, there’s a whole other post about value for money with games you can finish over the course of a weekend. But for this one, I’ll just say yes, it is definitely worth it.
I’ve been pretty busy for the past few days and I’m still catching up with the stuff that happened last week. Like the Manhunt 2 furore.
For those of you that don’t know/care, last week, the [Irish Film Censor’s Office](http://www.ifco.ie decided to make a prohibition order against the upcoming game, Manhunt 2, making it the first videogame ever banned in Ireland. A moot point, since over in the US, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board gave Manhunt 2 an Adults Only (AO) rating and the three console manufacturers have said that they will not allow AO-rated games to be released for their systems.
So lets ban any story, film, news report which contains violence and go about life in ignorance, as they want us to. God help us all, next thing banned will be the great sculpture of David done by Michelangelo because it contains nudity.
Personally, I think the idea of completely banning any game from a country is an outrage, and a blatant infringement of civil liberty.
That still makes me giggle.
Strangely, I find myself agreeing with the censor. In their statement regarding the prohibition order, they said
IFCO recognizes that in certain films, DVDs and video games, strong graphic violence may be a justifiable element within the overall context of the work. However, in the case of Manhunt 2, IFCO believes that there is no such context, and the level of gross, unrelenting and gratuitous violence is unacceptable.
And you know what? This all sounds perfectly reasonable to me. John Kelleher has proven himself to be an extremely liberal censor, and prohibition orders are typically reserved for the most hardcore porno. Think about it like this - this is the film censor that let Hostel through. This means that Hostel, one of the most brutal exercises in Gorenography I have ever seen, has more of a context for its violence than Manhunt 2. (For reference, here is their ruling - “strong” across the board.)
I also agree with the censor because I am not convinced that, on its own, classification of movies or games is an effective way of preventing children from being exposed to indecent material - I just don’t think it actually works. As someone who was exposed to a ridiculous amount of horror films as a child (thanks, Gar, for letting me watch the Exorcist at age 5), I believe that if you don’t want children being exposed to something, you should make it as difficult as possible for them to get their hands on it. In most cases, by banning it.
This goes double for videogames, where lazy parents often dismiss the graphic content of games simply because they are “games” and will happily buy Grand Theft Auto for their 10-year old just to keep him quiet for a few hours.
Hardware Solution
The big “however” at the end of all this is that all this could be easily avoided if the rating system was used in conjunction with parental controls. These days, most media-playing devices (including modern games consoles) have parental controls built in. If you want to watch a movie or play a game above a certain age-rating, you have to enter a password. But the problem here is that hardly anyone uses these parental controls because hardly anyone knows about them.
Maybe it’s time they were turned on by default, and bugger the inconvenience?
When I moaned about Italian music before, I admitted I hadn’t looked very hard to find something good. And, in my defence, it’s easy to be a little dismayed when you’re bombarded by Michael fuckin’ Buble in all the shops. But things are picking up! Here are two songs I like right now.
Tiziano Ferro - E Raffaella È Mia
This guy seems to be like the Italian Robbie Williams, back before Robbie Williams turned into an enormous, pulsating cock. The song is about Raffaella Carrà , an Italian actress and TV host, and its lyrics are really easy to understand (“And Raffaella sings in my house / And Raffaella dances in my house”), so I like that too.
But I’m actually having trouble with the song. Is it catchy in the CSS kind of way, or is it catchy in the Ketchup Song kind of way? Whatever. I’m not ashamed of what I like.
AntiAnti feat. CapaRezza - Picciotti della Benavita
Caparezza (the dude with the giant ‘fro) is an Italian rapper. His solo stuff is kinda like System of a Down, which is no bad thing. We’ve had a hell of a time trying to buy this album on iTunes (which I’m sure I’ll blog about soon). Fuckin’ twenty-first century my arse.
Just before the real summer hits and people start heading off to somewhere nice for their holidays, I thought I better give a little shout-out to the Airport Leprechauns on Flickr, which cheers me right up every time I look at it. If you want to join, just take a snap of yourself wearing a leprechaun hat or beard the next time you’re in the airport and and put it in the group!
STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
…
They suffered a massive power failure today which meant that a large number of their customers’ sites were unavailable for around four hours. Right now, their status blog entry detailing this problem (and how the repairs are coming along) has 159 comments.
Most of these comments are of the frustrated-yet-understanding variety. A worrying number of them are terrifyingly puffed-up with their own sense of self-importance. And far too many are threatening to move their operations to another hosting provider.
Having worked as a system/network administrator for a while, I know exactly what Ed and the guys at Hosting365 are going through, so I sympathise completely. I’ve had those awful days where the worst thing that could possibly happen actually happens and you’ve got angry customers demanding a full report on how the problem happened, what steps you will be taking to fix the problem and how you will prevent this happening in the future while you’re focusing all of your efforts on just restoring a basic level of service. Horrible days, to be sure, but they have their uses.
To those people who are thinking of moving away from Hosting365 I say: stop. If I was using Hosting365, I would not switch to Blacknight now precisely because Blacknight haven’t suffered from something like this – yet. Whereas, I’ll bet you €100 that, after today, Hosting365 will be putting all of their attention into their reliability, focusing how to make sure that something like this never happens again.
And to those people that are complaining about their mission-critical services running on Hosting365, I say: well, I don’t know what to say without sounding rude. I’ll just say that if I was a reseller and it was my ass on the line, I’d make sure that my ass was covered. From a business perspective, a secondary server (from a different hosting company) is cheap as chips and worth its weight in gold when your primary server suffers from extended downtime.
You know, it’s getting to the stage where I’ve got half a mind to rename this blog to “lowbrowcultureshocked”.
Today, I was up at the Irish College to get a mass card for an aunt who died recently. To get home, I decided to get the Metro at the Colosseum. Now, I should probably explain that there are two metro lines in Rome. Metro A has been recently revamped and now all the trains and most of the stations are pretty. Metro B, on the other hand, is dingy and ugly. All the trains are covered in graffiti outside and covered in piss and various other bodily fluids inside.
Colosseum is Metro B.
I’m in the station waiting for the Metro to arrive. It’s around lunchtime, so there’s not a lot of tourists leaving yet - they’re all inside the Colosseum, baking and sweating and wearing funny hats. The sign says there’s a train in three minutes. I drift back off into the dreamworld I go to when I’m wandering around Rome listening to my iPod (travel tip: this is the only way I have found to not constantly lose my shit at the lack of an orderly queuing system in Italy). Gradually, I start to smell smoke. I’m looking around, a couple of other people are sniffing too. But there’s no obvious fire, so no major panic yet. Then we get the buildup of wind that precedes a train coming down the line. Suddenly the train screams past as if it’s being chased by the devil himself. It’s totally dark except for the one carriage that is completely ablaze.
My mouth was still hanging open by the time the next train arrived. All the Italians shrugged as if this was entirely unremarkable and went back to wearing their giant sunglasses and looking like Hugo Boss models.
Our Macbook had been crashing frequently over the past week or so. It would hang randomly when doing minor things, like copying a new program into the Applications folder. Sometimes it would take the computer two or three minutes to get itself together. Other times, it wouldn’t get itself together at all and a hard reboot was the only option.
Eventually, I took a look in Disk Utility. The hard drive was listed in red. It told me the disk was dying. I used smartmon to give me more information, and this is where I got the image at the top of this post - my “Reallocated Sector Count” was at 0, and my disk was “FAILING_NOW”. I’ll spare you the gory details of what this meant, but the shorthand version is “ABANDON SHIP! WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST!”
Necessity: the mother of invention
Fortunately, we had a spare laptop hard drive lying around, so that wasn’t a major issue. We also had a spare 400GB desktop hard drive, with a USB adaptor. Unfortunately, we only had two power adaptors. Which meant I couldn’t power the macbook, the hard drive to be backed up and the hard drive I was backing up to.
We’d bought a bunch of spare power adaptors in the airport before we came but in our excitement, walked off the plane without them - oops.
So for the past month, we’ve been carefully swapping power adaptors around as needed. The hairdryer, the iron, our phones, the PlayStation, the computers, the wireless router… it got a little silly, but we managed. When I’d google for a place to buy electrical equipment in rome, I’d found that the main place is called “GPL”. And Linux has completely ruined that search term.
So when the hard drive began to die, I ran out and didn’t stop using my broken Italian and eleborate hand gestures until I came back with a bunch of power adaptors and two-prong figure-eight plugs.
(PS, for anyone searching google for ’electrical equipment’ or ’travel adaptors’ in Rome, I found a GPL on the corner of Viale delle Milizie and Via Giordano Bruno.)
Backing it all up
I’d heard a lot about SuperDuper, an application for backing up your Mac. A lot of people have said how it saved their necks, so that was the first thing I tried.
Unfortunately, it’s not so good for saving your neck when your hard drive is already on the way out. When it encounters a bad block on the disk (and your disk can’t replace the bad block, as mine couldn’t), SuperDuper will try a bunch of methods to access the data and then crap out. It throws its hands up in the air, shouts “I can’t work with these amateurs” and goes back to its trailer.
Tar wasn’t much better. In the end, I created a disk image on the 400GB hard drive and used plain ol’ “cp”. When it came across a bad block, it complained of an I/O error but kept on truckin'.
So now I’ve got a proper backup, we’re working off the spare hard drive (with half the capacity, but it’ll do), and I got an RMA from the hard drive manufacturer.
Hopefully things will be back to normal next week.
My favourite is the Ayme family from Ecuador, pictured above. It makes me wonder: are pork pie hats mandatory in Ecuador? If so, I’m booking a flight today.
This is my pork pie hat.
There are many like it, but this one is MINE.
My pork pie hat is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.
My pork pie hat without me is useless. Without my pork pie hat, I am useless.
One thing that’s concerning me is the lack of processed foods in that picture. Surely they’d have a Subway or a McDonalds or something? Maybe one of those sacks is just full of spice burgers, I dunno.
Quick confession: A few days ago, I actually Googled “KFC Rome Italy”. I am weak.
Some witnesses say they saw a rainbow above the courtroom. And others say they saw a giant man in the clouds with a white beard nodding his head approvingly. And me? Well I saw Judge Michael Sauer grow to be twelve feet tall, with muscles the size of tree trunks. And when he smiled, little cartoon hearts appeared above my head and there was a strange tingling sensation in my pants.
Since I last spoke about the Roman bread situation, there have been a couple of interesting developments. First, I have found a bread that is capable of holding a slice of ham, a slice of cheese and a slice of tomato without having everything spilling over the sides.
Hooray!
Except where’s the fucking crust?! Did the bakery not get the note about the crust? I know that there’s a lot of people out there who aren’t fans of the crust on sandwiches and would probably welcome the pre-packed removal of the crust. To these people I say: sack up and realise that a sandwich without crust is only half a sandwich.
But there’s another problem. You probably can’t see it from either of my awful, awful pictures, but each of these small packs contains five slices of bread. Five.
This is kinda like the issue of burgers coming in packs of eight and burger buns coming in packs of six, except you can always eat a burger without a bun, and burger buns don’t have to be used exclusively for burgers. Actually, it’s not like the burger/buns situation at all. It would be more like burgers coming in packs of eight and burger buns coming in packs of three and a half.
Rather than work myself into an early grave giving out about the busted logic behind stuffing five slices of bread into a pack clearly made for sandwiches, I’m off to cry myself to sleep and dream of once again having a loaf of Brennan’s bread.
Four weeks ago:
Working at a computer for twelve hours a day, I’d go home and watch some really shit movie until the early hours of the morning. I’d go to sleep full of junk food and self-loathing.
Today:
After Italian class, I walked home in the sunshine, sat down beside the Pantheon and finished the Agatha Christie book I’d been reading (I’m 28 and never had time to read Agatha Christie before). Then I went home, ironed my girlfriend’s suit pants and monogrammed handkerchief, and got myself ready for dinner with the Irish president.
Girding my loins today is Universal Studios’ announcement that they will be developing a “theme park within a theme park” based on the Harry Potter books and movies. Covering over 20 acres, ‘The Wizarding World of Harry Potter’ will be a themed “land” (like “Frontierland” or “Tomorrowland”) within Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando Florida. Universal say this area will contain contain ‘state of the art attractions’ and ’experimental shops’. Which sounds slightly ominous.
I’m a huge theme park nerd. As I said before, I don’t enjoy the rides as much as just walking around this completely artificial, fantasy world, soaking up all the simulacra. Combine this with the amazing production design of the Harry Potter movies, and you’ve got me hooked.
This week, I started an Italian language course which has really been helping me settle in. My pidgin Italian is starting to develop some structure (for “structure” read ‘actual verbs instead of grunts where verbs should be’) and I’m a lot more confident in dealing with people now that I have a better idea of what they’re saying.
Something I’m discovering is just how much you can learn a lot about a country from its insults. For example, one of the worst insults you can throw at someone in Italian is Cornuto, which means “cuckold”. You’ll hear this a lot in football games, Arbitore Cornuto! (“The Referee is a Cuckold!”). The other major insults include “ugly” and “homosexual”. There are loads of other, smaller ones, but these three - “cuckold”, “ugly”, “homosexual” - are the ones that are likely to send an Italian into a rage and are usually saved for when someone has really pissed you off.
Maybe it’s the armchair psychologist in me, but I think this says a lot about the insecurities of Italian people.
Similarly, you can also learn a lot about a country from its advertisements. From what I’ve seen here, most ads seem to revolve around crime. For the most part, the “crimes” are innocent enough. Like the TV ad that has a woman driver pleading with male driver to let her take his parking spot. She shows him her broken shoes, puts on her best puppy-dog face and the guy lets her in. Once she’s parked, she gets out of the car in - wouldn’t you know it? - perfect shoes.
But they’re not all so cute and cheerful. Adidas recently launched a shoe that has interchangeable gel pads in the soles. These come in all sorts of designs and aren’t really taking off here. The print ad shows a guy hiding from the police while quickly swapping his gel pads for ones of a different design.
And of course, there’s the other major source of advertising inspiration: sex. At worst, back home, these hover around the “saucy” end of the scale. Here, they’re positively explicit. Here’s an example:
It’s for a water park in Rome, but it took me ages to realise there was a water park in the picture too. The caption says “Slide with me” although, to me, it will always say “Come to aquapiper and you’ll get to have sex with me!”
(My favourite part of the ad is the “Bambini Gratis!” down the bottom, because the rest of the ad doesn’t make it look like somewhere I’d want to bring a child.)
For a nation that loves its carby, starchy foods, they really don’t have a great handle on the whole “bread” situation. They’ve got the giant loaves sorted out, which is fine when you want something big and crusty to dip into soup or for mopping up the tasty, tasty juices on your plate, but average day-to-day bread is a mess. These guys are the cornerstone of western civilization yet they haven’t figured out that a loaf of batch is like manna from heaven? And normal sandwich bread isn’t much better, far too small and far too sweet to be of any use to anyone. I’m feeling like Nigel Tufnell in Spinal Tap.
Bud Spencer
Back home, street-sellers have posters of things like Scarface, Trainspotting and Bob Marley. Which gives us a good glimpse into the mindset of youth culture in Dublin - fascinated by drugs and trashy drug-related movies. Here, they sell posters of uh… Bud Spencer movies. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of the Bud Spencer/Terrence Hill movies and when I was younger, I loved The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid, so I’m not really complaining. Just confused.
Italian Music
What.
The.
Fuck?
Granted, I haven’t looked very hard, and I’m sure that over the next three years, I’ll eventually find some Italian music that I love but right now I’ve had it up to my fuckin’ harbls with crappy power-ballads. Less Zucchero, more Jovanotti thx.
Fascism
I’ve never lived somewhere that had people actually still promoting fascism as a viable political option. Before I came here, I never heard anyone proudly describe themselves as a fascist. All the other things - the bread, the music, the pictures of Bud Spencer’s giant face grinning out at me from the side of the street - I can get used to these, with enough time. I hope I never, ever get used to hearing someone proudly describe themselves as a fascist.
Okay, so he may not have been my first choice of someone to play the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to Batman Begins, but I never though Heath Ledger would make a bad Joker. Now they’ve released the first picture of Heath Ledger in Joker make-up, and… my goodness, this is shaping up nicely, isn’t it? I really like the move away from the traditional demented clown look into a more gritty,* Ichi the Killer*-style scar.
Although I still think it’s a shame we’ll never get to see what Vincent Cassel could have done with the role.
Nick Ryan, producer on Ruairi Robinson’s “Silent City”, has released the full version of his film “A Lonely Sky” online. Starring Keir Dullea (of 2001: A Space Odyssey) it tells the story of a pilot in 1947 trying to break the sound barrier.
As with Silent City, I’m completely blown away by the amount of work everyone seems to have put into this short movie and the scale and quality of the results. Congratulations to everyone involved.
While you’re at it, you should check out Nick Ryan’s portfolio, for videos of the ads and other short films he’s directed.
Danger: Diabolik could be the greatest movie I’ve ever seen. Click on the image above to check out more stills from the film and tell me if you don’t wanna see it immediately. Is it a spy movie with a lot of kissing? Or a softcore porno with a really good plot? Either way, it’s features one of my favourite actors, Terry Thomas, so it’s okay by me.
And what’s more, it’s directed by Mario Bava and filmed in Dino Di Laurentiis’ Roma studios, so it counts as part of my Italian cultural learning! Bonus!
On my first trip here, I experienced what I guess I’d call a sort of temporal dissonance. I was in a taxi, heading up the Gianicolo towards my hotel. The Gianicolo is a hill that sits in the south-west part of the city, meaning that from the top, you have a perfect view of historical Rome on the one side, and a fantastic view of the Vatican from the other. Now, maybe it was just the jetlag, but sitting back in that taxi, I had an of out-of-body experience: I realised that I would soon be living in Rome, a place I always thought of as almost fictional, a mythic place where all the history happened. The rational part of my brain decided this was my only chance to feel overwhelmed by the city before I would have to get on with day-to-day life, and so I sat back, reeling at the weight of it all.
Strangely, this is the only time I have felt this way. Now, I’m cutting across St. Peter’s Square - a magnificently opulent, overwhelming place - on a daily basis and only when I’m halfway across do I gain any sort of awareness; holy fuck! I’m cutting across St. Peter’s Square!
I’m blaming this on everyone’s favourite scapegoat: videogames. When we first visited the Pantheon, I wondered what was up on the second level of the building. In my imagination, I saw a dark place, filled with wooden crates, lever-puzzles and bad guys with Uzis. But hang on a second… Wooden crates don’t actually exist in the real world, not really. They only exist in videogames as containers for ammo and/or health. And bad guys with Uzis? Jesus. Then I realised, I had seen the inside of the upper levels of the Pantheon. Or, at least, a Pantheon. In a videogame. (Tomb Raider perhaps?) And in the end, a tiny part of me was disappointed by the actual Pantheon because I didn’t get to go exploring all its dark corners.
Gears of War has affected my experience of Rome more than any other videogame. The look of the game, the so-called “Destroyed Beauty”, was heavily influenced by Romanesque architecture. For the most part, the game takes place in wide streets flanked by marvelous, oppressive buildings and everything in a massive state of disrepair. Well, this being Rome, there’s no shortage of Romanesque architecture. Or wide streets. Or marvelous, oppressive buildings. But there’s more to this than simple generalities. On Via Nazionale, there’s a building whose long, winding entrance I would swear is the direct inspiration for the Fenix Mansion part of Gears of War.
I’m still blown away by Rome on a daily basis, especially when I stumble across some particularly beautiful place. But still, a tiny part of me is waiting for the moment that the Locust Horde comes pouring out of the ground. Where’s my Lancer?
The truck wasn’t going to stop, Lipscomb said, so he slammed on his brakes, flipping his bike and landing in the street.
A moment later the truck rolled over his head.
“I didn’t see it coming, but I sure felt it roll over my head,” he told The Capital Times newspaper. “It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head.”
A couple of minor breakdowns aside, I think I’m finally starting to get a handle on life in Rome. I’m not exactly homesick, just finding some things really hard. The language barrier has been a lot more of an obstacle than I was expecting. And combined with the distinctly unique Italian way of doing things (which I’m sure I’ll complain blog about in due course), I’ve found myself struggling just to get some stability.
But the stability is slowly arriving. I’m learning my way around, and I finally know where the essentials are, like the supermarket and launderette. I’m even starting to cope with the weather. At the beginning, I would head out and arrive home in a horrible, sweaty mess. Now… well, it’s not as bad. I’ve just been observing the Italians and seeing all the little things they do to deal with the weather. Like not leaving the house between the hours of 12pm and 4pm. Under any circumstances. And always walking in the shade, even if you have to cross a busy street to do this.
There’s another huge factor in coping with the heat: pace. Last week, I was out walking when Toots and the Maytals started playing on my iPod. With this, my pace dropped to a slow, relaxed strut (I challenge anyone to listen to Broadway Jungle and not feel like the baddest motherfucker on the planet). Strangely enough, this change of pace helped a lot, the heat wasn’t as much of an issue. That’s when I noticed that the Italians walk at a similar pace, and with a similar strut although theirs seems to come naturally.
Did you know that, despite being on the north side of the Liffey (where the odd numbered post-codes live), the Phoenix Park is actually in Dublin 8? And it’s not for the reason you might think. Thus spoke Wikipedia:
"There is a very simple, practical reason why the Phoenix Park is in Dublin 8 and it has nothing whatever to do with snobbery but with practicality.
Long before there were postal codes the James’s St Postal Sorting Office looked after the Phoenix Park because it was considered to be closer and more convenient than Phibsborough (Dublin 7). James’s St continued in this role when the postal codes were introduced so Dublin 8 it had to be."
This interesting fact courtesy of a 20-minute argument in Morelli’s chipper on Thomas Street that almost ended in a fist-fight.
David Mitchell and Robert Webb (PC and Mac in the UK adverts) were in Dublin promoting their new film, “Magicians”. After the screening, they were taking photos with people and signing autographs. So, naturally, I asked them to sign my Macbook.
Some things are still up in the air. When we land in Rome on Sunday, we’ll be going into temporary accommodation until we can find somewhere to live. This means that when the movers come on Friday, they will be taking all of our stuff and putting it into storage until we give them a call and say “Yes, we are living at this address now, please bring all our worldly possessions to us.” And since we don’t know when we’ll actually have a place to live, this means that we might not see our stuff for anywhere between two weeks and six months.
So right now, I’m hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.
What does that mean? Well, it means that I’m reassessing everything I own and think “can I live without this for six months?” While everyday clothes are cheap and easy to replace, I have to think about all the possibilities. I should bring formal clothes, because there will inevitably be some function where I will be required to scrub up nice. So that’s a no-brainer.
But what about the other stuff? Movies and games? There’s no way I can live without those.
This is a tough decision. I’m totally addicted to my Xbox 360 now, and what better way to keep in touch with my nerdy Irish friends than by kerb-stomping them over Xbox Live? And what better way to maintain a sense of accomplishment than increasing my gamer score? But as much as I love the 360, it’s far too heavy and takes up far too much space for me to bring on my own. It will have to come with the movers.
I’ve decided to only take my PlayStation 2 with me. I’ve dumped the boxes for the games so that the actual disks are in a couple of CD wallets and I’m bringing my PlayStation 2 in my carry-on luggage. This means that I’ll at least have a couple of games to play when I get there (Final Fantasy XII, God of War 2).
We’re taking a Macbook, so we’ll have something to watch DVDs on. But what DVDs? I’ve got a CD wallet especially for movies, and now I have to decide what I should fill it with. This isn’t an easy task. I mean, how do I decide what movies to bring? How do I predict my tastes and moods for the next six months? I realise that there are people who could fit their entire DVD collection in one of these 72-disc wallets, but there’s a reason I have as many DVDs as I do - I’m a fussy, temperamental little shit.
And this leaves us with a little thought-experiment: if you were moving to a foreign country and you could only bring one DVD, one game, one book and one CD with you, what would you bring?
Thanks to all those who came out on Saturday. It was great to see everyone together at once, and we went home feeling very special indeed. The rest of the mugshots are up on flickr.
I have to say, I’m more than a little disappointed by this news. Double-crazy double-K was always always good for an entertaining quote. Almost everything out of his mouth was like something from a megalomaniacal supervillian - things you can almost imagine Ming the Merciless shouting at people. The best Kaz Hirai has given us so far is the embarassing “RIIIIIIIIDGE RACERRRRRRRR!”
So here are some of my favourite Ken Kutaragi quotes:
“It will be expensive … for consumers to think to themselves ‘I will work more hours to buy one’. We want people to feel that they want it, irrespective of anything else”
_
“If processors of high performance and wide bandwidth like the Cell were linked together without sufficient security, a worldwide system crash could occur with one attack.”
_
“The PS3 will instill discipline in our children and adults alike. Everyone will know discipline.”
I’m fast becoming an expert on guide books to Rome. So far, my favourite is “City Secrets: Rome”. I like it because it lists the things to see and places to eat followed by a short anecdote by someone who knows the place well, and explains why they recommend it in real, human terms.
For example, this is what Virginia L. Bush says about the Colosseum:
“A new visitor to Rome should go first to the Colosseum. Since it is said that Rome will stand as long as the Colosseum stands, and the world will last as long as Rome stands, it would be good to check first that everything is in order with the universe”
Well, apart from the high-definition graphics (very important in a game like this) and the way it’s an easy 500 achievement points, there’s one very big reason why I got it: the Guitar. It plays beautifully, it’s based on an Explorer and it’s USB.
Naturally, I plugged it into my Macbook before it even went near the 360. OS X recognised it, but the 360 controller drivers from Pref360 didn’t work. No worries, it was only a matter of time. Well, the new version of the Pref360 drivers adds support for the Guitar Hero controller.
So now I can play Frets on Fire on my Macbook, which is fantastic. But I really want to see if this can be used as an input controller for Max/MSP or Processing. Then the fun can really begin.
Despite my tragic Italian vocabulary and the fact that, in a land of thin, tan people, I stick out like a sore thumb, our trip was largely successful. We managed to get some sense of what our life in Rome would be like.
The City Itself
An image that keeps popping into my head is of the entire Roman Empire rolling around on the ground saying “Help! I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!” It’s a beautiful city, but it’s not coping very well with modern life. Aside from the copious levels of really, really shitty graffiti, the heritage doesn’t seem to be respected. There’s a lot of history scattered around, at the sides of roads, but this is neglected and uncared for. For example, I can’t help but feel that, in any other country, the ruins at Viale Argentine with its beautiful, two-thousand-year old frescos would be treated as a national landmark. In Rome, however, the ruins are used as a cat sanctuary. I guess you could look at this as simple pragmatism but it still feels slightly tragic.
Driving in Rome
I also have a new-found respect for Italian drivers. The motto over there seems to be “keep it moving”. Which means that if someone cuts you off, you honk your horn, you wave your fist, you give them a mean glare, but you keep it moving. I saw things over there that would have drivers jumping out of the car with rage, but the Italians just get on with it.
And this means that there are very few traffic lights in Rome. Near our hotel in Gianicolo, traffic from four different directions merge into one lane. I spent an hour just watching this intersection. Despite the lack of traffic lights, noone slowed below 30kph and noone got into an accident. It was beautiful. Balletic.
But it reaffirmed for me that I will never, ever be able to drive in Rome. Just driving home from my mom’s house yesterday, I noticed I was starting to drive like an Italian. And it scared the living shit out of me.
And the food
Do you really need another person going on about how great the food is in Italy?
Apartment-hunting
Finding a place to live in Rome is going to be a pain, I can tell.
While I was there, we saw two places. One of them was a beautiful house. Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two outside areas. Oh, it was beautiful. But it was in a really sketchy area of the town. I live in Stoneybatter and work on Thomas Street, I know what sketchy is. And even I was put off by the area. And besides my own personal problems with the area, it just isn’t suitable for entertaining or Embassy work.
The other was a lot smaller; one bedroom, two bathrooms, with not a lot of storage. But it’s in a much better neighbourhood. And despite the lack of space, it’s a much more beautiful place. And we want to live there. And so begins the dance.
You see, over here, it’s a much more simple affair. You like the look of an apartment, it’s in your budget, the landlord likes the look of you and, boom, the apartment is yours. Over there, it’s a lot more like a mating ritual, with a lot more bum-sniffing before anyone actually gets mounted.
“We’ll pay $amount per month”
“Ah, but it’s worth $amount*3 per month”
“That’s on a short-term lease, we’re offering a guaranteed $amount per month for a 3-year lease with a 3 month security deposit”
“I won’t do anything less than $amount*2 per month, 6 month security deposit and a bank bond”
…etc…
So God only knows when we’ll actually have somewhere to live.
The quiet trend ‘round these parts is set to continue because I’m heading off tomorrow for a few days in Rome. This isn’t actually a holiday though. More of a reccy. It’s basically an opportunity to check out a couple of apartments, get a feel for the place, see if it’s the kind of place we can see ourselves living for the next few years.
I’m sure you’ll be able to follow the progress on Flickr.
When we were told that H. was being posted abroad, I got scared. Actually, let me rephrase that. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was terrified. I knew it was coming, but I’d hoped that… I dunno… they’d forget about her. Forget to tell her to move. Or they’d say that they wouldn’t need her to start until August.
August 2010.
It was not to be. We got word last week that she’s due to start on May 7th. Barely a month from now. So time is against us.
Last week, I handed in my notice. I’ve worked in this company for five years now, and it was such a surreal feeling to be finally saying the words “I quit.” I’d wanted to say them for a long time now. I’d almost said them a few times, when things got really tough, when I desperately wanted a change of scenery. But something always had held me back. Stability? You can’t really call this place “stable.” Job satisfaction? Best skip that one. Security? Maybe - a steady pay cheque is a thing of beauty. Most likely, I stayed because of two things: the prestige of working for this company, and the people I work with.
As a geek, especially a games geek, this is a very prestigious company to work for. The sense of geek pride is enormous, especially given its reputation within the Irish software industry. It might not be as big as Google, but sometimes it feels like this is a good thing. With a small team, it feels more select: the elite of the elite, the ubermensch.
And as for the people, well… I’ll miss them more than the job.
It feels like it’s coming close to the last day of school. Weird, mixed feelings of relief and regret. The door of opportunity has been flung open! I am master of my own destiny once again! There is nothing I can’t do!
Nothing, that is, except work with my friends like this again.
When I was doing the screenwriting course, we were constantly being reminded of one of the golden rules of writing: Show, don’t tell - describe the scene through actions, rather than words.
And this is why I love The Wire so much. Everything is shown, not told. The writers assume the audience is smart enough to figure out what the characters are doing, without resorting to have the characters ask each other what they are doing.
There’s a perfect example of this in Episode 4 of Season One, “Old Cases”. This is the entire dialogue (taken from the subtitles on the DVD) between McNulty and Bunk as they dig through an old crime scene. Gold star if you can figure out their actions from their dialogue.
If we weren’t but a few days off from April Fool’s day, I probably wouldn’t have such a hard time believing this. This is the video equivalent of the Beatles teaming up with the Rolling Stones to form the world’s greatest band. Why, there’s no way this could not be awesome!
Uh…
TOKYO (March 28, 2007) - SEGA® Corporation and Nintendo Co. Ltd. today made a historical announcement that two of the biggest icons in the entertainment industry, Mario™ and Sonic™, are joining forces to star in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Developed for the Wii™ video game system and the Nintendo DS™ system, this momentous agreement marks the first time these two renowned stars have appeared together in a game.
Published by SEGA across Europe and North America, and published by Nintendo in the Japanese market, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games will be available for Christmas 2007 and is licensed through a worldwide partnership with International Sports Multimedia (ISM), the exclusive interactive entertainment software licensee of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
In Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, players will compete in events that take place in environments based on the official venues of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Using a supporting cast of characters from the amazing worlds of both Mario and Sonic, gamers will be able to compete as or against a range of lovable personalities including Mario, Sonic, Luigi™, Knuckles™, Yoshi®, Tails™ and more. Innovative usage of the Wii and DS control systems to maneuver a favourite character will allow players to race the likes of Mario and Sonic down the 100m track, engage in exhilarating rallies in table tennis and churn water in a swimming heat, all while competing for the much sought after gold medal.
“We are thrilled to partner with Nintendo and ISM on this groundbreaking title,” said Hisao Oguchi, President and Chief Operating Officer, SEGA Corporation. “For the first time, two of the world’s greatest games’ characters come together to compete in the world’s greatest sporting event and we couldn’t be more excited.”
“Mario and Sonic have been respectful rivals since the early days of video games,” says Shigeru Miyamoto, Senior Managing Director and General Manager, Entertainment Analysis and Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd.. “In fact, for a long time they have been discussing the possibility of one day competing against each other. Now that they have been given the perfect opportunity to meet at the Olympic Games, we may finally learn who is actually faster, Mario or Sonic?”
“The Olympic Games represent the true spirit of competition and passion,” said Raymond Goldsmith, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ISM. “Bringing together intensely competitive and fun characters like Mario and Sonic in an Olympic setting helps showcase the sports of the Olympic Games in a new and compelling way for all generations."
There is no reason for you to be playing bongos in our apartment building at 4am. In fact, unless you are Matthew McConaughey or hanging out with Gidget, there is absolutely no reason for you to be playing bongos at all.
We’re in the process of streamlining all our stuff for moving to Italy. We’ve gone trough our clothes, DVDs, books and games. The things we’re not taking to Rome are going to our mothers’ houses. The things that don’t go to our mothers’ houses are going to charity shops.
Before we start taking the books down to Oxfam, we figured it might be best to offer them around to our friends first.
First batch of books! If you want anything here, drop me a mail. Otherwise, it’s off to the charity shop or bookcrossing.
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
Blockbuster - Tom Shone
Captain Scott - Ranulph Fiennes
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction - Sue Tonsend
A-Z of Living Together - Jeff Green
Romanitas - Sophia McDougall
The Little Friend - Donna Tartt
Crusader Gold - David Gibbins (second-worst book I’ve ever read)
Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly (worst book I’ve ever read - fascinatingly, perversely bad)
Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing - Himelstein
The Love of a Good Woman - Alice Munro
Mortal Engines - Philip Reeve
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
The Fuck Up - Arthur Nersesian
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star - Jenna Jameson
High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess - Charles Fleming
Megatokyo vol 1. - Fred Gallagher
The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
the Bagthorpe Triangle - Helen Cresswell
Monster Island - David Wellington
Freakonomics - Stephen D. Levitt
Newfoundland - Rebecca Ray
The Alphabet of Manliness - Maddox
Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? - Steve Lowe
Howling at the Moon - Walter Vetnikoff
The Pope’s Children - David McWilliams
Notes on a Scandal - Zoe Heller
The World According to Mimi Smartipants
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman - Phyllis Chesler
Short Hands, Long Pockets - Eddie Hobbs
City Chic: An Urban Girl’s Guide to Livin’ Large on Less - Nina Willdorf
Taking advantage of the rotten weather on Sunday, myself and H. decided to count and bag my jar of rainy-day coins. We stuck Clerks 2 on in the background and got counting. Three hours later, we were finished.
All along, we’d been taking guesses. Started with EUR160, which we thought was a little high. Boy, were we wrong.
At the end, we had €530.56, $40.69, £8.08, and 4,524 Hungarian forints.
That PlayStation 3 is looking mighty tempting now.
Well, as luck would have it, I’m not going to be able to attend and rather than let my ticket go to waste, I’m offering it up for the first person to comment here. It’s a ticket for ONE person only, but that’s not going to stop you seeing such a kick-ass movie, is it?
Life on Mars has easily been my favourite British TV show of the last 10 years, even beating the terrific return of Doctor Who. We’re halfway through the second and final series, and I don’t think there’s any sign of it slowing down. Remember that awesome Camberwick Green inspired promo for the second series? (if not, here’s a quick refresher). Want more? Well, according to Heat magazine* a portion of the next episode of Life on Mars will be done in this same style.
If you haven’t already been hooked by this incredible show, the first series is available in your favourite shops and on your favourite internets. You should really check it out. You owe it to yourself.
Yeah, I read Heat magazine. Big whoop, wanna fight about it?
So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking huge, nature-vs-man kind of thing. Kind of like Dante’s Peak or Them!, but dealing with a more topical issue: Global Warming. After all, global warming won Al Gore an Oscar. And his film was shit. No special effects or nothing (unless you consider PowerPoint a special effect). Here’s the pitch:
Quiet, sleepy town in middle America. Far from the problems of the big city. None of the worries of modern life. But the long fingers of global warming are creeping towards them and they suddenly find themselves overrun by a swarm of killer bees.
Except global warming has dealt them a double-whammy, and they realise they’re dealing with the next evolution of killer bees.
Killer bees ON FIRE.
This needs to be made. Someone get me E. W. Swackhamer on the phone.
Here’s some things to make your St. Patrick’s weekend even better.
Listen: Huey Lewis and the News - Fore!
Fuck all these know-nothing assholes who say that “Sport” is better, Fore! is Huey Lewis and the News’ best album. It’s olde-time rock n’ roll, done by a bunch of guys who knew what rock n’ roll was. The perfect antidote to all these insipid girly-men whining about how they’re missing their girlfriends and it’s breaking their hearts, or whining about how they’re sooooo misunderstood and it’s breaking their hearts (hey, fuck you, Chester Bennington). Huey Lewis, on the other hand, wrote about missing his girlfriend and how he was gonna ride the shit out of her when he got home.
_Everybody else is holding hands
I'm here lonely, playing around with my microphone stand
But i'm coming home one more week
The first three days we won't get any sleep_
To get you in the mood, here’s the video for “Stuck with you”, which is definitely going to be the first song at my wedding.
Useless Trivia: Huey Lewis played harmonica on Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous.
Watch: Kickboxer
Kickboxer is a great movie at the best of times, but it’s a masterpiece after a couple of beers (and this being Patrick’s weekend, this is almost a given). After his jackass brother gets his back broken by evil mongoloid Tong Po in a kickboxing match, Jean Claude Van Damme decides to become a master kickboxer himself and get revenge. My favourite thing about this movie is the fact that the people in Thailand keep giving Jean Claude Van Damme shit for being American when he clearly isn’t.
It also features the stupidest, most out-of-place dancing ever put to film. Observe.
I really want to remake this movie. I think it would still work as a low-budget youtube kind of thing, shot around the streets of Dublin.
Useless Trivia: After Kickboxer, Dennis Chan, who played Van Damme’s trainer Xian Chow, went on to star in “Xiang Gang qi an zhi qiang jian”, aka ‘Legal Rape’, aka ‘Naked Killer 2’, aka ‘Raped by an Angel’, aka ‘Super Rape’. (And that sentence is going to fuck my google traffic for months now.)
Talking to Cliph on IM about the PlayStation 3, we touched on the ideas of how the social space in Home will be filtered. For example, in the public area, people can talk to each other using a keyboard, the built-in phrases (“Would you like to play a game?”) or via a Bluetooth headset. It’s likely that there will be a bunch of “banned” words for those using the keyboard input, but will there be any restrictions on what can be said via a headset? Is there anything to stop me turning the virtual air blue with obscenities?
Sony have said that in the private space, there will be few restrictions. You will be able to decorate your “room” with whatever images you have on your PlayStation 3’s hard drive. You can stream whatever movies and sound files on your PlayStation 3’s hard drive and everyone visiting your room will be able to see and hear these files. I’m willing to bet that without restrictions, there will be a thriving red-light market in Sony’s Home faster than you can say “WELCOME TO JOHN’S COCK PALACE.”
But let’s go even further. By taking the possible sexual underworld of Home and combining it with Sony’s own USB Trance Vibrator (released with “Rez” on the PlayStation 2), we could be witnessing an evolution and mass-marketization of teledildonics.
I can’t wait to see what happens when you put in the Konami code.
In preparation for the trip to Rome, I’m working my way through a list of 99 things to do before moving to another country. One of these was ‘Get a dental MOT’. So, after 10 years of avoiding the dentist, I finally caved last week. Overall, not bad. A couple of minor fillings, but in pretty good shape, considering it’s been ten years, and the amount of Diet Coke I drink.
I drink assloads of Diet Coke. Retarded amounts. And it’s easily the worst thing for my teeth because not only does the sweetener rot the teeth (although I’ve seen Mythbusters - it’s not as corrosive as people say), the copious amounts of caffeine running through my system makes me grind my teeth in my sleep. I wake up with a sore jaw and my teeth are slightly worse for wear.
This was made worse by the weekend that was in it. H. had over to Rome for a bit of a reccy. Checking out the apartment, checking out the people she would be working with. Which left me with four days all to myself. I did nothing but eat junk, drink Diet Coke and play Crackdown on the Xbox 360. I came out the other side feeling rotten. Not so much a shadow of my former self, but a dirty, bloated, jiggly play-do model of my former self. So, big changes are afoot.
Yesterday marked the first day without Diet Coke. And it was awful. I was sucking down Tramil to cope with the headaches, I was going outside every hour for some air to keep me awake. I was grouchy. I was lethargic. And since I could barely keep my eyes open, I probably shouldn’t have driven up to Tesco at 9pm.
Today, however, it’s all different. I managed to get out of bed when my alarm went off, instead of hitting the snooze button for an hour. My headache is gone, and I’m already getting work done. Hell, I’m almost lucid.
Tom Raftery unwittingly gives us a perfect demonstration of why you shouldn’t use MyBlogLog.
Sure, MyBlogLog is a great idea and all, but there’s always going to be someone out there who will exploit it as a way to display a pair of tits, or a huge fuckin’ dong, or worse on someone else’s blog.
Pitched as somewhere between Second Life and MySpace, it’s a social space where PlayStation 3 owners can meet PlayStation 3 owners. They do this by navigating an avatar (similar to Nintendo’s Mii, but more realistic and with more customization options) around a 3D world. Each user also gets a private space - a virtual apartment - which they can customize as they see fit. They can invite people into this private space and launch multiplayer games, or stream music and videos from their PlayStation 3 to the other people in this room. Sony’s Home includes a virtual ’trophy room’ where people can display their “entitlements” (Sony’s answer to Xbox 360’s achievements) as moving, 3D trophies.
Oh, and it’s all free.
This was Sony’s ace in the hole. A completely unexpected, beautifully executed masterstroke that almost makes you forget about all of Sony’s fuck-ups with PlayStation 3.
Almost.
Right now, Sony is still talking about the possibilities of Home, and although a lot of these are still pretty blue-sky suggestions, they do give you some idea of what an online virtual world is capable of when you’ve got the weight and muscle of the entire Sony Corporation behind it. For example, using its ability to stream high-def movies, there could be movie premieres (in a virtual cinema) of Sony Pictures movies within Home. And for the MySpazz crowd, there’s the possibility of in-game appearances by their favourite Sony BMG bands.
I bet the makers of Second Life won’t get much sleep tonight.
I was speaking to someone earlier about superpowers - how all childhood conversations about “what superpower would you like to have” were ruined by the one asshole who had to say “everything” - when our conversation drifted towards Batman. When I was growing up, you either liked Superman or Batman (just like you were either a Whizz-kid or a Chipite). And so the Superman-followers would want Superman’s powers and the Batman-followers would say they would like Batman’s superpowers.
But what the hell are Batman’s superpowers?
He can’t fly. He can’t run faster than a speeding bullet. He can’t slice people open with Adamantium claws. So what does he have? Well, he’s got a neat car and a lot of nifty gadgets. And he’s pretty athletic, I guess. But these aren’t super-powers. With enough money, anyone can have these.
And is this a good message for our kids? That being fabulously wealthy is a superpower?
(For more pictures of Joker’s boners, check out redshirt.co.uk)
A few months ago, someone spotted that Brown Bag Film’s “Bears” Lotto campaign looked suspiciously like Matt Everitt’s Ricky Gervais Bears. The thread on CreativeIreland.com has some interesting discussion, including a couple of posts by Matt Everitt himself, saying
I was told about this and after watching the ad (and falling off my chair) and emailed Brown Bag who of course denied that they would ever do such a thing and said that they could’nt see any similarities.
What can I do? Not a lot.
Brown Bag Films defended their position by suggesting that Bears3 are “obscure” and hadn’t been broadcast.
How similar are they? You can make up your own mind
Matt Everitt’s Bears3
Brown Bag’s Lotto Ad
Now we have a similar situation. The new Argus Car Hire advert from Brown Bag Films looks suspiciously like the terrific opening title sequence from Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can”. Hardly something they can claim as “obscure”.
Can you see any similarities?
Argus Car Hire advert
Opening credits of Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can
Just before Christmas, I took part in the Port Tunnel 10k run. I hadn’t run much before then. In fact, I would estimate that if you if you took all of the times I have run in my life and added them together, you probably wouldn’t get 10K. So how did I go from lazy fat ass to the bronze Adonis I am today?
Well, it’s entirely down to my special 10k iPod playlist* These songs helped keep me going when I couldn’t see anything in the port tunnel except the steam from other people’s sweat. It kept me going when I realised that, after 5 minutes of actually being in the tunnel that I’d seen everything the tunnel had to offer and the next hour or so would be like watching paint dry. Really painful, exhausting paint.
Anyway, so here’s the mix. If anyone’s got any suggestions for additional, suitable song, please let me know. I’ll put them to the test next time I go to the gym.
We Want Fun - Andrew W.K.
Still Waiting - Sum 41
Noise Brigade - Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Training Montage (Rocky IV) - Vince DiCola
Girls Own Love - Andrew W.K.
Life During Wartime (Live) - Talking Heads
How I Could just Kill a Man - Rage Against the Machine
List of Demands (Reparations) - Saul Williams
Bump - Spank Rock
Movies - Alien Ant Farm
Dancing in the Dark - Bruce Springsteen
Witness (1 Hope) - Roots Manuva
Music is my Hot Hot Sex - Cansei De Ser Sexy
Heart’s On Fire (Rock IV) - John Cafferty
Fat Lip - Sum 41
99 Problems - Jay Z
Flashdance / Fame - The Dan Band
God Hates a Coward - Tomahawk
Fuckin’ Spend - High Speed Scene
Glory Days - Bruce Springsteen
Jump - Van Halen
Holing Out for a Hero - Bonnie Tyler
Jesus Walks - Kanye West
Shimmy - System of a Down
Million $ Man - Imperial Teen
This Month, Day 10 - Cansei De Ser Sexy
Goin’ Out West - Tom Waits
You’re the Voice - John Farnham
Notes:
Yes, there’s a lot of Andrew W.K.
Yes, there’s a lot of 80s power ballads
Go for the single version of “I need a Hero” - you don’t need six minutes of Bonnie Tyler wailing
Every life goal should be achieved with Vince DiCola’s “Training Montage” playing in the backround
Well, the four or five weeks of training I did beforehand may have helped a little
Reading Sean O’Hagan’s story of the emotions he felt while recently compiling a mix tape is fascinating and I’d encourage everyone to read it as an eloquently-written piece of nostaligia. But I strongly disagree with his article’s suggestion that mp3s have somehow made music less personal and I think he’s just plain wrong to suggest that “mix tapes” are somehow dead. They’re not - they’ve just evolved.
The “Mix CD” is the most basic 21st Century representation of the “Mix Tape”. Sure, it might not be as difficult to compile these as it was to compile a mix tape, but this doesn’t mean they’re any less important or meaningful. I would even suggest that these are more important, more meaningful. With the actual creation of the CDs mostly taken care of by software like iTunes which allows the user to just click and burn a CD, more time can be spent putting thought into the content of these mixes. This means that the medium is no longer the message. The message is the message.
One of the traditions of the thumped.com Christmas bash is the ‘mix exchange’. Everyone who comes is encouraged to bring a mix tape/cd, put it into a box and in return, this entitles them to take someone else’s mix from the box. I’ve gotten some great stuff from this, and in recent years, have seen this taken to the next level: Mix DVD featuring some of the year’s best movies (it’s not like this is any more or less legal than a mix tape).
And what about when we outgrow CDs too? Well, we’re already seeing the next stage in the evolution of the mix tape. Sites like Out of Five offer weekly themed collaborative mixes. Collaborative! Can you imagine the logistics of trying to do a collaborative mix tape?!
Personally, I think the whole thing has less to do with the death of the mix tape or music being less personal and more to do with the fact that the writer has reached the stage in his life where mix tapes are somehow “immature” and music isn’t the most important thing in his life. He and his friends have become old farts: grown up and settled into a rather rigid existence; less willing to try new things.
And After all, It’s hard to put thought and effort into a mix when you don’t have anyone to give it to.
So the IFF Surprise Film was 300. Not that much of a surprise. The queue was a bigger surprise - jesus, I’ve never seen anything like that. Even the premiere of the Lord of the Rings movies had shorter queues.
Anyway, 300 completely floored me. It’s a love song to graphic violence and romantic heroism, told with the most stylish visuals this side of Sin City. The movie suffers from more than a few jerky moments with a lot of the dialogue falling apart as hammy and unconvincing, but I personally found that these were mostly in the parts where the screenwriters actually tried to by historically accurate (“Return with your shield, or on it” being the most obvious). The political sub-plot had real trouble hiding the fact that it existed only as “filler” and illicited an inappropriate titter from the audience, which only highlighted its awkwardness.
But who cares about all this? This movie is about the action sequences and these are what make the movie stand out. Probably not the most epic battles ever filmed, but definitely the most beautiful and balletic. The fact that this was filmed in a warehouse means we never see more than a handful of “real” people on screen at any one time but the director works this to his favour, giving each individual skirmish an intimacy that would be otherwise lost.
Tremendous stuff. Gives me high hopes for what Zack Snyder can bring to Watchmen.
Have you ever had a movie finish and end credits roll, with the entire audience sitting back in stunned silence? Maybe it’s just the type of film I tend to go see, but this has only happened to me a handful of times. The Fountain being one of them.
The Fountain is a love story. Rather, it’s three love stories, told across a thousand years. In the past, a conquistador searches for the tree of life to save his beloved Queen. In the present, a doctor searches for the cure for cancer to save his beloved wife. In the future… well… a guy travels with his tree, in a bubble, to a dying star wrapped in a nebula.
Hey - noone ever said this would be easy.
Arthouse blockbuster or blockbuster arthouse? Either way, this is not a welcoming film. At times, the ambitious storytelling threatens to derail the entire production, and the more cynical among us would almost certainly have trouble giving this film the room it needs to breathe. But for the more persistent, there’s a great reward - something completely and defiantly unique. A sci-fi movie with a very human heart. A film that can leave an entire audience breathless.
I would say this is as close to unmissable as any movie I can think of.
Back at the start of February, I was talking about the films I was looking forward to at the Dublin International Film Festival. Talking about the surprise film, I said
A tenner says that this will be Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain
Well, I was wrong. Sorta. Shortly before the festival began, I got an email to say that the showing of Sunshine was cancelled and they would be showing The Fountain in its place.
Yeah, it wasn’t the cleverest movie shown at the festival, but personally, I couldn’t have been happier. I’m a huge fan of the comic, and of Frank Miller in general, and this was the most beautiful adaptation of his work so far.
I think I got this with my Commodore 64. I seem to remember a Christmas Day where the rest of my family was off watching the Great Escape on TV and thinking to myself “Fuck you, last-generation losers. With this super-powerful computer, I AM Steve McQueen. I AM the Great Escape.” The game itself didn’t really follow the movie very strictly, but I still like the way it forces you to follow a pattern and ‘keep up appearances’ while you’re digging your way out. Never finished this game though. I got into my tunnel, was heading under the fence – I could taste the freedom – when, with no warning, my C64 crashed, taking a tiny bit of my heart with it.
Ghostbusters
Most movie tie-ins on the C64 are of the side-scrolling shooter variety (‘sup, Robocop?). And this probably could have worked with the Ghostbusters license. But instead, they went down an altogether more interesting route: part-resource management, part action. You have to build up a Ghostbusters franchise into a profitable venture while dealing with the escalating amount of paranormal activity. Whenever I get bored and want a C64 fix, this is the first game I reach for. Oh, and the synthesized speech is still amazing.
Last Ninja 2
In this game, you play the worst ninja in the world. Running around a park in broad daylight beating up jugglers and mimes doesn’t seem very ninja-like to me. And what kind of ninja staunchly obeys the “keep off the grass” rule? A fucking pussy, that’s who. Okay, so it’s not exactly Ninja Gaiden, but it’s still pretty awesome.
Bruce Lee
I never, never understood the point of this game. You run around a weird temple, trying to collect… what? Lamps? While being constantly chased by a ninja and a fat guy? Still though, you’re motherfuckin’ Bruce Lee!
Zorro
Zorro is still the most punitive game I’ve ever played. It’s stupid and dumb and I hate it. But I can’t stop going back to it. Maybe one day I’ll actually, y’know… finish it. I imagine that would be like the end of WarGames and my C64 will turn to me and say in a Stephen Hawking voice, “A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.”
Barbarian 2
Wolf from Gladiators, Maria Whittaker’s tits and graphic decapitation. How could a pre-pubescent boy not love this game?
Beach Head
I remember being so engrossed in this game, I missed a bunch of swimming lessons and as a result, only got a silver medal in the end-of-year contest. Every time I see that silver medal I think about how, if I’d just played a little less Beach Head, it could have been a gold medal. And then I think “Fuck it, it was totally worth it.”
Park Patrol
I can’t really explain this. I’m a messy bastard, but I really enjoy this game about tidying up a park. Cleaning vicariously, that’s what it is.
Goonies
Much better than the barmy Nintendo version, this was a platform game where you took control of two of the kids and had to use both to solve puzzles. Kind of like a proto-Lost Vikings. For example, to get past the first screen you have to navigate one kid to the roof to print fake money and distract the Fratellis while the other kid ran into the basement. Further on, the screens get ridiculously hard and you’ll find yourself blowing through each of your eight (EIGHT!) lives just trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do.
Download Goonies from c64.com
Master of the Lamps
.
I originally played this game on the Amstrad CPC-464. You try playing a game with colour-based puzzles on a crappy monochrome green-screen monitor. Only when I played it again on the C64, on a colour telly, did I finally get to appreciate just how incredible this game is. Sound puzzles, colour puzzles, geometry puzzles and a kick-ass magic carpet ride tying them all together. Years ahead of its time.
For his dramatization of Eric Schlosser’s tell-all expose of the Fast Food industry, Richard Linklater chose to focus on just two points from the book.
The meat packing industry is ruthlessly exploitative.
There is shit in the meat.
Although they’re both very important points, they are stretched past breaking point across a two-hour movie. This means, worryingly, that by the fifth time someone on screen has repeated “there’s shit in the meat”, it’s lost all of its emotional impact.
And though there is a token discussion of the morality of the fast-food lifestyle (courtesy of a brief appearance by Ethan Hawke), this thinly-veiled sermon is so naive as to be offensive.
Heavy-handed and overwrought. I wonder if a documentary might have been the better option for this material?
Oscar-nominated local boy done good, Ruairi Robinson recently finished his new short film, The Silent City, and put it online in both HD quality and in shitty Youtube-quality. It’s an astonishing achievement considering the amount of quality he managed to eke out of his small budget, including appearances by Cillian Murphy (pictured) and Don Wycherley.
It’s a seriously impressive movie and I’d encourage everyone to check it out. You can find all the download details on Ruairi’s site. And while you’re there, you might as well check out his other short films, the previously-mentioned, Oscar Nominated Fifty Percent Grey (cruelly denied an oscar win by those Pixar bastards) and House on Dame Street.
BarCamp Dublin will be taking place in a couple of months and, despite the fact that it’s happening on my front door (I work in the Digital Depot), I probably won’t be attending. In short, this is mainly because I don’t think it has that much to offer to me. I have a blog, but I write mainly for my own enjoyment rather than as a means to rack up subscribers (you should see some of the some self-indulgent posts I have lined up for the next couple of weeks - wow). So with its heavy focus on blogging, search engine optimisation and unexciting technology which, frankly, was of no interest to me three years ago and is of even less interest to me now, BarCamp Dublin gives me no compelling reason to attend.
Now I’ve spent the day browsing through the SXSW website and drooling over the list of nerd-focused talks they will be giving, I can’t help but wish that Ireland had something similar. What attracts me to the SXSW stuff is the completely open nature of the festival. Rather than limiting themselves to a few topics, they’ve made sure there’s something for all types of nerd: movies, music, games, design, blogging, programming are all on the agenda. And because of this, it seems to be completely open, no sense of exclusion because of a lack of interest in a particular topic.
Panels that really caught my eye were:
Worldchanging 2.0 - common-sense geek solutions for a more sustainable future
Why hasn’t Ireland seen a similar event? It’s not for lack of talent. We have an abundance of talented, charming and articulate nerds that could give similarly interesting talks on a similarly diverse range of topics (although there’s also an abundance of ‘squeaky wheels’). Perhaps it’s because the geek community is so fragmented that it’s hard to rally them all together. The bloggers converse with other bloggers, the designers converse with other designers and so on. Perhaps rallying them together for a truly welcoming unconference with something for everyone would be too much effort.
Pancake Tuesday, boys and girls. A magical time of year. You can eat as much as you want, but because they’re only pancakes, you don’t look like such a savage. In school, we used to brag about how many we ate. Since I didn’t get any pancakes last year, I’m going to make up for it this year by gorging myself until I’ve got pancake batter coming out my ears.
Pancakes
100g flour
2 Eggs
200ml milk, mixed with 75ml water
Sift flour into a mixing bowl.
Make a well in the centre of the flour and break the eggs into it
Whisk well
Slowly add the milk and water, whisking as you go
Cook in a pan over a medium heat
Toppings
Sugar and lemon juice. It is vitally important that the juice be from a plastic lemon. Otherwise it may as well be any other day of the week because it’s just not Pancake Tuesday with plastic lemon.
Nutella. Nothing else. Okay, maybe ice cream. You’ll be bouncing off the walls for days.
Bacon and maple syrup. Friend in work gave me a bottle of maple syrup from Canada, since all I seem to be able to find in Dublin is maple-flavoured Golden Syrup.
Blueberries. Awesome when they’re dropped into the batter as it cooks in the pan.
Well, it was only a matter of time before I did something about the Matrix, wasn’t it? Quintessential nerd movie that has already been endlessly picked apart. Well, what’s one more?
Colour plays an important role in the Matrix movies. The tinting is as much a part of the mise-en-scene* as the set and props, giving the viewer subtle clues as to the nature of the setting. Scenes taking place within the matrix are tinted green, scenes taking place on board the ships in the ‘real world’ are tinted blue and Scenes taking place within “zion” are tinted brown. he truly hardcore Matrix nerds have used these “clues” as part of some obsessively detailed theories regarding the underlying meaning of the Matrix movies.
But we’ll do no such thing here.
Holy shit. Did I really just say “mise-en-scene”? Shoot me now.
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Finally got around to checking out Stew Station, which opened up next to the Namaste Indian on North King Street, right around the corner from where I live. Like the sign on the door says, they specialise in stews and other soup-based dishes, and the menu seems to change regularly. The restaurant seems to be chasing the Gruel dollar - a very relaxed, homey atmosphere with straightforward, uncomplicated food. But it seems a little out-of-place on North King Street, like it should be closer to the Epicurean Food Hall. But no matter! With development in Smithfield finally starting to bear some fruit (a Thomas Read that has yet to be even half-full, the opening of the Light House Cinema soon), maybe Stew Station is just a little early to the party.
Anyway, since we live so close, I got the food to take away. I got the tomato soup with meatball for myself and a beef and vegetable for H. Reasonable value too: EUR7 for a hearty meal (EUR7.50 if you eat in). The stews were tasty. Comforting, but didn’t feel entirely healthy. But then again, that could have been the massive dollop of carby, starchy, delicious, creamy mash that came with the meal.
Now all they need to do is change their opening times (7pm weekdays, 6pm weekends) to handle the post-pub crowd and serve Coddle, and Zaytoon will be displaced as my favourite drunk meal.
So, after months of agonising over where H. would be posted for work, the big news finally arrived yesterday.
They’re sending her to Rome.
Well, me and H… I think we’ve got something special. Something I don’t want to give up, y’know? So I’m going with her. I’m leaving my job, my apartment, my friends and family, and going to live in Rome for the next three years.
Now, let me make it clear, I’m fully committed to this and I’m delighted she got Holy See and not Vilnius (or, God forbid, Addis fucking Abbaba), but my brain is still reeling from the shock of it all and I’m having trouble trying to understand exactly what this means. I tried to get my head around it yesterday but instead ended up staring at a wall and muttering “fuck… fuck…” for twenty minutes instead.
What am I going to do there? No idea. The pessimist in me is looking on this as my life being turned upside down for a few years and panicing at the enormity of it all. The optimist, however, is seeing this as the great etch-a-sketch of my life being given a good shaking. Erase, start again. So I’m completely open to suggestions for what I could do with my new life. I’m roughly halfway between “Ride around on a Vespa saying “ciao” for a living” and “Do a TEFL course and teach English”. But you’re a bright, creative bunch. Any other suggestions?
When are we going? Again, no idea. A few people got posted yesterday, so HR was understandably swamped and managed to duck out before H. could grill them for details. Hopefully it won’t be too soon. We need to sort out a going-away party.
Now that I’ve had my Wii for almost two months and the shock of the new has worn off, I think it’s time to step back and take a good, hard look at the system and see what needs to change before it can become… ahem… “the most successful console of all time.”
“Hey, what’s your friend code?”
True story: I was listening to someone I know on the radio today talking about the Vista launch - the presenter mentioned that he was crazy about the Xbox 360 and said that they should swap gamer tags. “Sure,” my friend said, “I’m $foo.” Now, I can guarantee he’ll have a few extra friends on Xbox 360 tonight. People he could play games with in the space of a few minutes. Leaving aside all other parts of their latest console offering, Microsoft nailed the online aspect. They made it ridiculously simple for people to find each other and play online.
Nintendo’s online strategy has been built around the idea of protecting children from sexual predators. The idea being that if you make the system ridiculously cumbersome, the sexual predator will lose interest and go back to stalking teenage girls on myspace. So we’re left with the following: If I want to add you as a friend, I have to give you my 16-digit code, you put this into your Wii, and then you have to give me your 16-digit code and I have to put this into my Wii. Except we can’t actually exchange codes over the Wii, so we have to find some other way of getting our friends codes to each other. But once we have independently added each other, that’s when the fun begins! We will be able to… well, we can’t play any games together yet, because there aren’t any games to play online yet. We can send each other messages, I guess. And send each other Miis (those cute characters that are popping up everywhere). Apart from that, uh…
The exchange (and entry) of these 16-digit codes is so awkward that I have actually traded Wii friends codes using Xbox Live. If that doesn’t set alarm bells ringing in Nintendo HQ, there’s something very wrong here.
And to top this all off, Pokemon Battle Revolution – the first online-enabled Wii game – will require an entirely new, completely separate code for friends to play with each other. I mean, good grief! Iwata-san, protecting children from online predators is commendable and all, but surely the rest of us shouldn’t be punished as well?
Zelda aside, there hasn’t been a single truly compelling purchase for the Wii since it launched. Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is a fun diversion, but the system already has a bunch of games based around mini-games, so it’s hard to get excited about a bunch more. The upcoming release pipeline is pretty bleak, with no real excitement until Mario Galaxy in June. Until then, we get a bunch of lackluster third-party titles and ports from other systems (Price of Persia being a port of the PSP version(!) of the game).
Come on Nintendo, people knew there was going to be a bit of a drought while you found your feet. People still went and bought the system on the promise of something remarkable. How’s about you live up to that with more than just mini-games?
But the games that you play on the Virtual Console will be pixel-perfect versions of the games you played on your NES, SNES, N64, Megadrive or PC Engine. As the man says: Nothing added, nothing taken away.
Turns out this isn’t quite true - Nintendo removed expansion port functionality from Nintendo 64 games on the Virtual Console, which means that you can’t save data on some games (such as ghost data on Mario Kart 64), but more importantly means that there will be no rumble in VC games, despite the presence of a rumble motor in the Gamecube controller. These may be relatively minor issues, but all the same, as someone who is being asked to pay unreasonable prices to play these games, the least I can expect is the same experience. I mean, it’s only right. Right?
Misc issues
Wireless out of the box! Always-on technology! Why can’t these two things come together and give me an experience where my Wii doesn’t have to do a 15-second connection test each time I connect to the Wii shop?
We’re no longer dealing with bricks-and-mortar distributors and export laws, so why can’t I buy games from the US Virtual Console shop? Why are Nintendo only going to allow me to buy games that were originally released in Europe? Playing games that were never released here is half the reason I love emulators so much.
Advertising in videogames isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In games set in a “realistic” universe, it can add an extra element of realism. Except when there’s just one product being advertised. For example, Rainbow Six Vegas - are you trying to tell me that only ads on the main strip in Las Vegas are for Axe Deoderant?
Well, that’s what it’s like in Dublin this morning. Overnight, virtually every advertising space seems to have been taken over by ads for the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, which “launched” last night.
There’s a complete list of the movies on their website. Here’s the ones I’d be interested in seeing:
Shane Meadow’s previous film, Dead Man’s Shoes absolutely blew my socks off. Can’t wait to see what he does with this story of a gang of skinheads in the 80s.
Y’know… I might take some shit for this, but I really enjoyed The Notebook. It was cheesy and soppy but it had James Garner bawling his eyes out, so I figure it’s okay. And Ryan Gosling was pretty good as the lead. And with an oscar nod for his performance in this, I’d say it’s worth checking out.
Dramatization of the non-fiction account of the crazy goings-on in the fast food industry. Eric Schlosser was interviewed in last week’s Observer and came across as a thoroughly nice bloke.
Any movie that can draw comparisons to Tartakovsky is at least worth a look. The fact that it’s Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and Cillian Murphy together again? Well, that’s just a bonus.
My girlfriend is amazing. Despite the fact that she can barely tolerate videogames, she still whisked me away to London last weekend, just to bring me to the Game On exhibition in the Science Museum, where I could play virtually every game ever made, on every system ever made. Just think about this for a second: this is like someone who is lactose intolerant having a milkshake with you, just because it’s your birthday.
They were running a demo of the racing game, Motorstorm. When I took the controller, I noticed that the controller wasn’t set up to use the motion control. So I went to quit the current race and turn it on. Except, on this pre-release hardware, running this pre-release demo, clicking “quit” causes the machine to freeze. Hard. The PlayStation 3 itself was enclosed in a plastic box, so they started by trying to squeeze a bent metal coathanger through one of the ventilation holes to hit the “reset” button. When this didn’t work, they had to get a drill to remove the plastic box.
Fortunately, my amazing girlfriend was on-hand to document the faces I made as people scrambled about with power tools trying to fix the obscenely expensive piece of consumer electronics I just broke.
If Full Spectrum Warrior can be used to train soldiers in the US Army, I don’t understand why crisis negotiators and bomb disposal teams aren’t using Elite Beat Agents to train their new recruits. No other game comes close to teaching you the importance of staying calm under pressure like EBA.
Elite Beat Agents is the English-language version of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, a cheerleading game which appeared on the DS in Japan a while ago. It’s basically a rhythm-action game, requiring you to tap the screen in the right place, in time with the music (the unbearably cute J-Pop of the original replaced with unbearably cute western pop in EBA). Simple, right?
Wrong.
The whole time you’re playing, your “Elite Meter” is trickling down. Tapping the screen at the right time will top this up slightly (How well you tap the screen in time with the music affects the amount that this gets ’topped up’). Miss a note and your Elite Meter drops slightly. If your Elite Meter drops to nothing, it’s game over.
There’s a point, roughly halfway along your Elite Meter where it turns from yellow (fine) into red (danger!). Once you cross into the red, your on-screen cheerleaders stop cheering. They stand there, panting, until you manage to bring the Elite Meter out of the red. With all its liveliness and constant movement, the sight of your cheerleaders standing completely motionless, is the most distracting thing in the game.
If you get into the red, it’s very easy to drag yourself back out: all you need to do is score some perfect hits and boost your Elite Meter. But when you realise your cheerleaders aren’t dancing, you panic. You start keeping one eye on your Elite Meter. Then all sense of rhythm goes out the window and it’s virtually impossible to get the perfect hits you need. In other words, if you panic and lose focus, it’s game over. It took me a long time to learn this. Frustration almost drove me to shove the stylus through my DS while trying to crack “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, but I got there in the end.
So if you ever see a guy defusing a bomb and humming ‘Sk8r Boi’, don’t worry. You’re in good hands.
So far, Elite Beat Agents hasn’t been given a UK release, but DS games aren’t region-locked, so buy a copy from eBay and enjoy.
Apple did the expectedly-unexpected and announced the iPhone.
It’s a widescreen iPod mixed with a mobile phone mixed with a teeny-tiny Mac for Safari and Mail. Put simply, this is the most awesome piece of consumer electronics I have ever seen, so far. And I’ve seen a lot.
$599 for 8GB version.
$499 for 4GB version.
So, some questions:
Released in June in the US, but Q4 2007 IN EUROPE?! WHYYY? Oh the humanity.
5 hour talk/video battery life, 16 hour audio battery life… but what’s the standby life?
Who will be the carrier partner in Ireland? I’m guessing this will be O2, since they’ve got a lot of ties with Apple, but…
Why partner with Google for the maps and search, but partner with Yahoo for the mail?
How does it know where you are for the location-aware maps stuff? Cellular towers? Or is this a feature of 3G?
Update: Answered in the actual keynote - there doesn’t seem to be any location-awareness in the phone. Steve had manually entered “Moscone West” as as ‘saved location’ in the maps application
Are there any other differences between the two versions? Because I can’t imagine anyone not springing the extra $100 for the larger capacity one.
What kind of graphics chip is powering this beast?
In honour of today’s Macworld keynote (hoping for: iTV, Leopard release date), here’s a blast from the past: Wired’s 1997 article “101 Ways to Save Apple”.
Some of these are deliberately off the wall, but some of them have been adopted by “new” Apple. For example:
98. Testimonials. Create commercials featuring real-life people in situations where buying a Mac (or switching to a Mac) saved the day.
So Wired is indirectly responsible for Ellen Feiss?
This is ten thousand euros, in tens, twenties and fifties, completely shredded. Seamus gave it to me on Saturday at Rock and Roll Motherfucker in Voodoo.
And now I don’t know what to do. With enough effort, I could probably crack this open and sellotape all this back together. But is there more than EUR10,000 worth of effort involved? Either way, it’s still one of the most unique and depressing birthday presents anyone has given me.
Pixar make some stunning movies. You could complain that their stories are pretty basic but from a visual standpoint, there’s no disputing their beauty.
One thing I love about these movies is the amount of effort that goes into choosing the colour palette for the movie. Yet, because of the speed of the action, this work barely even get noticed.
So what would it look like if we strip out the “image” from these images, and leave only the colour information?
I used the Incredibles for this experiment because it’s my favourite Pixar movie so far. Incidentally, there’s an “Art of the Incredibles"-sized space on my bookshelf, in case anyone feels like filling it for me.
(click on image for higher-res version - 960 * 1308 px, 186.5KB)
I know it’s Star Wars, but… oh look, I just had to, okay?
With movies laid flat like this, it’s very easy to see how movies are structured. Much easier than actually watching them as movies. Now, this lead to a question: how are different versions of the same movie constructed? For example, how is Apocalypse Now structured compared to Apocalypse Now Redux? How does the American release of The Shining compare to the European version? Or, better still, just exactly how “shot for shot” was Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho?
Let’s start on an easy one: Star Wars.
(click on image for higher-res version - 1940 * 1416 px, 1.1MB)
Strangely, for all his fucking about, Lucas has kept the structure remarkably intact. For most of the run-time, the two movies track each other pretty well, being only a few seconds out of sync. It’s not until the second half when they really start to diverge. But even still, the Special Edition is only a couple of minutes longer than the original version. Which is odd, because the Special Edition felt like it was a lot longer.
I also like the colours in the special edition. The faded pastel colours of the original are nice and all, but are definitely improved with a bit of spit and polish.
Not sure about the change of colour in the scene with Luke looking at the two suns though.
When movies are torn apart and stitched back together like this, it lets you see the movie with a completely different perspective. Presenting them as one flat image, rather than a fast-moving sequence of images essentially allows one to, uh… ‘see through time’, so to speak. The editing is torn apart and the pacing of the movie is laid bare, for all to see.
Koyaanisqatsi (an old favourite here at lowbrowculture) is a movie stripped to its fewest components. It is a movie that is all about the image and the editing. So that’s probably a pretty good place to start.
(click on image for higher-res version - 960 * 972 px, 416KB)
What I love about this movie and this set of images is just how perfect each shot is - each frame above could easily exist outside of the movie, like a perfectly-composed photograph.
Using processing (a powerful programming language with a lot of media capabilities), I’m ripping apart some of my favourite movies and putting them back together again. By taking screenshots at every second of the movie and laying them out flat - one image per second, sixty images per row - you get a completely different view of the movie.
So yeah, check it out, if you like that kind of thing.
I have been itching to do a screenwriting course for ages now. I’ve got a bunch of movie ideas that I don’t really… I don’t know, I don’t necessarily expect to do anything with them, but I want to get them out of my head, just so my brain isn’t cluttered with half-started/half-finished projects. The problem with the way I write, as you probably noticed, is that I find it hard to stay on one track for any length of time. Whenever I would start a screenplay, I would write the ideas I had in a half-assed way and then just hit a wall. I guess this stems from the way I come up with ideas for movies. For example, I want to write something called “JOHN STEELE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DIE”, but where the fuck do I begin?
So, after putting it off for months, I finally signed up for the filmbase course – “Screenwriting for Beginners”, which finished a couple of weeks ago.
I found the whole thing very useful. I learned all the sorts of useful “cheats” to get you past the various stumbling blocks you’re likely to run into. Like how to flesh out your characters before you ever put pen to paper (or uh… fingers to keyboard) – useful because you know exactly how your characters will react in any situation you put them in. Or the other cheat of buying a book of baby names for when you find yourself struggling to find a decent name for your characters.(Which led to an interesting moment when I went into Waterstones to buy a book of baby names and got served by a friend of mine – so that’s what gobsmacked looks like).
And the tutor, Lindsay Sedgewick was friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. Whenever I gave her ideas for her to look over, she seemed to know exactly which bits I was unhappy with and always gave me useful suggestions for how to improve them. Although she did poo-poo one of my favourite ideas (involving a lost commune of hippies who have to re-join society after their crop of weed fails), but never mind.
So after finishing it, I started reading a few books on the subject: Joseph Campbell, Robert McKee, etc. So far, doing a good job of avoiding Syd Field. One of the books has really stood out for me: Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat”. This one stands out because it doesn’t shy away from the ‘high concept’ side of screenwriting. In fact, for this book, the higher the concept, the better, as long as it sells. Which is just fine by us here on lowbrowculture.com. Unfortunately, his IMDB credits make it a little hard to take the whole thing seriously… would you take advice from the guy who wrote “Blank Check” and uh… “Stop, or my Mom will Shoot!”?
Ugh.
But seriously, any other potential would-be-but-not-really screenwriters out there on the interpod could do a lot worse than to check it out. Especially if you would rather be the next Shane Black than the next Wes Anderson.
Oh, and while you’re at it, you should check out Celtx, a free (as in “speech”) screenplay editor that is replacing Final Draft for a lot of people.
And so that’s another Christmas done and dusted. I hope everyone got what they wanted from Santa.
Except you fuckers who keep asking for “world peace.” Give it up. Quit deluding yourselves, it’s never going to happen. Just ask for a nice 42" Sony Bravia LCD TV instead.
There’s something important to note about this trailer. This is less a trailer for “Halo 3” than it is for “Halo” as a brand. And there’s a real simple reason for this: it’s a dual purpose trailer. First, it’s meant to remind people of Halo’s (and Microsoft’s) relevance in a post-PlayStation 3 environment. And secondly, it’s meant to “sell” Halo to the movie studios after Universal and Fox got cold feet and pulled the plug on the Halo Movie. Before, they were being asked to put up $135m on a first-time director based on Peter Jackson’s word and they said “no”. Now they’re being asked to put up $135m based on a well-received, highly-polished trailer.
Over at thoughtwax, Emmet throws out a few ideas regarding emulation and how this fits with the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console functionality, which will allow you to download old NES, SNES, N64, Megadrive and PC Engine games from Nintendo’s online marketplace. He suggests that the return to simplicity shows that games are “maturing”.
Here’s what I think.
The Nintendo Wii is a console borne out of necessity. Compared to huge corporations like Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo just didn’t have the cash reserves necessary to compete properly in the ’next generation’ of game consoles. The console arms race had escalated to the point where failure for Nintendo could mean the end of the company. So what do they do? They bow out, go a completely different direction. Chase an entirely different market.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the Nintendo Wii is, by design, a “disruptive” console, so it’s easy to interpret this as a sign of many things. But is it a sign that the industry is maturing?
Well, it means Nintendo is maturing as a business. With the weight of the failures of its last three (non-handheld) consoles straining the company’s relevance, it seems to be learning from its mistakes. But until we see how well the Wii is accepted by both the consumers and developers, it’s hard to say if this is any sign that the industry is maturing.
But what about the return to simplistic games? Does the kind of thoughtful reduction offered by the games from the Virtual Console mean that Nintendo is also maturing, drawing us into a new era of videogames? Are games entering their minimalist period?
Maybe not. Nintendo has fantastic first-party titles. In fact, it has traditionally had trouble securing third-party games because of the quality of its first-party titles. This means that the really quality games for Nintendo consoles come from Nintendo themselves and, given the length of time it takes to develop games, there could be months between “quality” releases. Looking forward, and given the unusual nature of the Wii’s control system, there’s a definite possibility that there will not be a steady stream of games for the Wii for some time. We can see how the drought of games throughout the year affected the Xbox 360 sales. So Nintendo did the only smart thing they could: they plundered their back-catalogue for their Virtual Console. This does two things - one, it gives them an instantly available source of games for their new machine and two, it gives them a way to constantly release “new” games to their customers.
But the games that you play on the Virtual Console will be pixel-perfect versions of the games you played on your NES, SNES, N64, Megadrive or PC Engine. As the man says: Nothing added, nothing taken away. This shows no more maturity than the PlayStation 3’s ability to play games from PlayStation 1. Or the Xbox 360’s ability to play Xbox games. The only difference here is that PlayStation and Xbox’s disk-based formats have made it easy to provide backward compatibility to their last consoles whereas Nintendo’s ever-changing cartridge-based formats means people will have little choice but to buy up all their old games.
But think about Xbox Live Arcade. Like the Wii’s Virtual Console, it enables a player to download old arcade games and play them on their brand-new consoles. Except although nothing has been taken away, plenty has been added. For example, download Street Fighter 2 and you can play online against someone a thousand miles away from you. This, to me, is innovation. This, to me, is maturity. Accepting the on-line world and the way that games are more fun when they’re social (for an example of this, compare the experience of the two-player Live co-op version of Gears of War to the solo one-player version) shows more maturity than Nintedo’s apprach.
But I do think Nintendo are following the right path. I was completely wrong about the DS because I didn’t think its stylus control would be used. I couldn’t imagine the kind of innovation it brought about because I was thinking too small. Nintendo have capitalised on this. But will it succeed?
Perhaps Nintendo’s smartest move to date has been to make the Wii as underpowered as they needed. The low cost of manufacturing means that, should the Wii be a complete disaster, Nintendo can easily scrap the entire thing and start work on a new console. Compare this to Sony’s position - losing money, hand over fist, and based on a recent shake-up of key personnel in Sony Computer Entertainment, analysts predict there may be no PlayStation 4.
Consoles have always been a risky business (just ask Atari or Sega). And one thing is for certain: the games industry must mature or die. But this is easier said than done.
Some of the songs are by the actual artists this time, not a stinkin’ cover band.
The character animation is more entertaining and, more importantly, actually relates to what you’re doing on your guitar-controller.
Cherry-red SG controller.
Things I hate about Guitar Hero 2
So. Fucking. Hard. I can do most songs in Guitar Hero 1 on “Expert” without breaking a sweat. In Guitar Hero 2, Christ, “hard” is actually… hard.
Some of the songs are really, really shit1. Example: Wolfmother? Really? (Here’s Mike Patton’s Take on Wolfmother: “Are you hearing this shit? What year are we in?”)
These stickers are fucking lame.
It’s not Gears of War :(
with a few exceptions. The major one being Trogdor, which is available as a hidden song. Trogdor comes in the NIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiight↩︎
Herself indoors has been away in Brussels for some kind of conference or seminar or something (I wasn’t really paying attention) and so rather than have her come back here today, I decided to head over there and we could make a weekend of it.
Preparing for the trip has been rather disappointing. I used to think that the joke about Belgium being a really boring place was like the joke about the Irish being friendly. But it’s not a joke. Belgium seems to be a really, really dull place to go. Even the guidebooks don’t try to hide this. One of the “22 Things You Must Do in Brussels” is “Go to Antwerp”.
(aside: I wonder if the guide to Antwerp suggests going to Brussels)
Something I love about my family are the weird, idiosyncratic movies that have been with us for as long as I can remember. I’m sure your family has them too. The kinds of films that are almost a family institution, like the post-Christmas-dinner nap/singsong/fistfight, yet barely appear on anyone else’s radar.
For example, Murder She Said is a major deal within my family and this had a major impact on my development. Do you know what it’s like to be 6 years old and be able to rattle off every line of a 30-year-old black and white Miss Marple movie? Compare this with the kid in my class who knew every line of The Terminator and would frequently reenact the entire movie in school. I bet that guy is making millions now.
Then there’s also The Scarlet Pimpernel (starring a young Ian McKellan), which is a useful tool for defusing family arguments. When things start getting out of hand and everyone’s voices are booming a little more than they should, you just need to drop a mention of this movie and everyone’s eyes glaze over and a happy smile appears on their faces like their medication has finally kicked in. This is the film that taught me the cruel reality that videotape starts to really lose its quality after a couple of hundred viewings.
For me though, nothing can match The Island at the Top of the World. This movie had such a profound effect on my youth that it has become the yardstick by which all adventure movies are measured.
Rather than try to bluster my way through a summary of the story, here’s the blurb from the back of the box:
An American archaeology (David Hartman) joins a rich English businessman, an eccentric French inventor, and an Eskimo trapper (Mako, from Rising Sun), on an awe inspiring expedition to the Arctic. They're looking for a missing son, but they discover a world forgotten by time -- a world of 10th century Vikings, erupting volcanoes, and the legendary whales' graveyard.
The film itself has an impressive array of talent attached to it: directed by Robert Stevenson, who also directed many of Disney’s most popular live-action movies including Mary Poppins and The Love Bug, the screenplay was written by John Whedon, grandfather of Joss, and the music was composed by Maurice Jarre, father of Jean-Michel.
It’s not the cleverest movie you’ll see and at times it will push your suspension of disbelief to breaking point. But it’s a kid’s movie. Y’know… for kids! And that’s just par for the course for kid’s movies. Show me a kid’s movie that doesn’t require a conceptual leap of faith and I’ll show you one dull kid’s movie.
What makes Island at the Top of the World stand out is the charm with which it goes about telling its fantastic story and the spectacular, if slightly contrived set-pieces dotted throughout the movie. For example, at one stage, the characters outrun a flow of lava. If you leave your ‘real-world logic’ at the door and forget about things like “second degree burns”, this is a lot more enjoyable; after all, this is a Disney movie, and you’re only in trouble if the Lava actually catches you. As a child, this scene blew my mind and the sight of Donald Sinden being chased down by red-hot molten rock will stick with me forever.
And balls to people who complain about the special effects. More balls to people who try to give up excuses like “they were good for the time”. The effects in Island at the Top of the World are incredible. In terms of the the spectacle they create and the sense of scale they help achieve, it’s easy to look on Island at the Top of the World as some proto-Lord of the Rings. The sight of the airship (the Hyperion) coming out of its hanger is just one example. I almost had a fit when I saw Disney had recreated this image for a restaurant in Disneyland Paris.
Also, I have to question some of the so-called “mistakes” in the special effects. For instance, in a scene where the evil high priest is blue-screened in front of a giant fire, his blue eyes meant that you could see the flames in his eyes. Is this really a mistake? Or another kick-ass idea in a movie full of kick-ass ideas? I’m suggesting it’s the latter. If you pay close attention to this scene (and I have, believe me), you’ll see that this effect gets more pronounced as the priest gets angrier.
It’s almost a quarter-century since I first saw this movie. Watching it now is a weird experience. I used to know every line of this movie off by heart, but this useful knowledge has been buried under mounds of useless trivia (did you know you can tell a whale’s age by cutting its earwax and counting the rings?), so I get this weird, comforting, giddy sense of deja vu. Great times.
Now if you don’t mind, I think it’s time I watched this again.
Well, I’m sure that was a part of the reason, but I think there was a much simpler reason: greed.
This week’s 1up show has interviews with people in the PlayStation queue outside San Francisco’s Metreon. From the sample that they interviewed (that made it onto the show), the majority of people queuing up either didn’t know or didn’t care about the PlayStation 3. What they cared about was the profit they would make by selling this on eBay - some PlayStations have sold for $20,000, a remarkable 2300% profit. One gent informed the crowd how he “would rather fight, go to jail, than let someone cut in front of [him]”. Asked if he was buying the PlayStation to, y’know, play it? “Man, people are buying this to put it on eBay and cash out!”. And this guy wasn’t just buying one. He had people in lines all over, and he was going to sell them all. Except for the one he was “going to give to a poor family” (‘poor family’ with a hi-def TV?).
And the attach rates mostly support this. Of the 81,639 consoles sold in Japan, only 66,684 were sold with games. Sure, the PS3 has online functionality and you can download demos, but come on - you’ve just dropped seven hundred lids on this new, awesome piece of games hardware, you’re not going to get something that really shows it off?
But it’s not all so cynical. My favourite interviewee in the 1up show explained how he was an Xbox man and was loving Gears of War, but his girlfriend wouldn’t let him buy a decent Hi-Def TV to play it on. His solution was to queue up for a few hours, buy a PlayStation 3, sell it on eBay and buy himself a Hi-Def TV with the profits. I feel your pain, buddy.
I doubt this kind of mercenary greed would work in Ireland. The supply will be just as short here, but will the scalpers be making as much of a profit? I doubt it. It hardly seems worth it, unless you just get a kick out of depriving people of something they want and watching their misery. And if that’s your kind of thing, here’s a video of someone smashing a brand-new PS3 in front of queuing fans. Enjoy!
Gears of War is released tomorrow. For everyone who already owns an Xbox 360: this is it! The one we’ve been waiting for! The big game that’s gonna make us proud. For everyone who is unsure about buying an Xbox 360: this is it! The one that’s going to sell the system to you. Because let’s face it, if you don’t want to immediately rush out and buy an Xbox 360 after playing Gears of War (and if you don’t want to immediately rush out and play Gears of War after seeing the awesome, beautiful “Mad World” trailer), well… maybe you’re just not an Xbox 360 kind of person?
As for me, I’m going to be frantically running around town tonight, looking for any shops that might have released it early My girlfriend is off out of the house tomorrow night so I’ll have the house all to myself to play Gears of War at an eardrum-puncturing volume. Oh boy.
In case you wonder why things have been so quiet around here (as I’m sure many of you have, it’s like the new “Who shot JR?”: “Why is lowbrowculture.com so quiet?”), well, here’s your answer.
Well, for one, I’ve moved to a new host. One that will hopefully beat my last host’s record of 50% uptime. One that has already beat my last host’s record of 50K download speed.
More noticeably, I’ve redecorated. The new design is tidier and cleaner. And finally gives me a way to work Rodney Dangerfield into the design of the site.
I’m feeling pretty dumb about losing my wallet, especially when I’m 90% sure it just dropped out of my pocket while I was taking a dump in McDonalds. But seriously, who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to have “Cry Me a River” in the hold music for your ’emergency helpline’? Can we fire them? Please?
Regards, etc.
(I’m so glad I had my phone on speakerphone so my girlfriend could hear this shit, at least someone knows I’m not making this shit up.)
Anyway, other stuff I need to get replaced:
Credit Card
Laser Card
Cineworld Card “There’s a €16 replacement fee, but I’ll waive that because you’ve been a member for 2 years.”
Library Card
Driver’s License
Update: Crisis over. A couple of days after I lost my wallet, I got a very panicked phone call from my very panicked mother who had just received a visit from the Gardai asking if I lived there. Someone found my wallet in McDonalds and handed it in (but not before making off with the money in it; they even swiped the four US dollar bills(?!!)). The Gardai found my address because of my Driving License.
I’m a little disappointed now though. The few days of being without an identity (and financially fluid) were kind of liberating.
Before you press “play” on your new District 13 DVD, make sure you turn on the English dubbing. For one, playing it with subtitles will fool noone; the movie is thick as pigshit in any language.
But mostly you’re only getting half the value for money with the subtitles, because the dubbing is easily more entertaining than the movie itself. Bizarrely incongruous with the rest of the movie and the rest of the cast, the main character and his sister have thick, Colin Farrell-esque Oirish accents that had me laughing my ass off every time they spoke.
A recent conquest of Entourage’s Jeremy Piven says that, alas, TV’s Mr 10% is, in reality, still Mr 10%. She says unfortunately it “was not even fun size.”
Even though I’m a heterosexual guy in a happy, loving relationship, I was still disappointed by this news.
Giant mutated monster terrorizes a bunch of Asian people. A layabout father’s daughter is taken by the monster and he vows to rescue her. Seriously, there’s very little more to the movie than that - if you didn’t like the sound of “giant mutated monster”, there’s really not much more to this movie for you. Which is why I was so surprised to see this movie sold out. The movie itself is slick, and the monster effects are really well done (except towards the end, where rather than simulate fire, they seemed to hand-animate that sucker). The whole way through, I felt like I was watching some Charlie White (specifically “Fleming House”).
Swedish movie about vampires terrorising a town in Sweden where it’s night for months at a time. Great premise for a movie, and one of the movies I was most looking forward to on this year’s program. Unfortunately, it never lived up to its promise. The story was very much one of throwing everything into the screenplay and seeing what stuck. A lot didn’t stick. Still though, they stole the premise from 30 Days of Night, now they’re stealing it back - David Slade (Hard Candy) is set to direct a movie of that comic.
Andrew Deane (executive producer of Masters of Horror) came out and introduced these. He was a funny guy, and full of anecdotes about getting these made. ‘Sounds Like’ is familiar ground for Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Session 9): a man on the verge of collapse. Is there something “spooky” happening, or is he going insane? (he’s going insane). But it’s technically very impressive. They had the foley guy working overtime on this one. Before the screening of “Imprint”, Andrew Deane told us that “even people who worked on this episode have trouble watching it”. This was the episode that Showtime (the guys who produced the show) refused to screen. Now, confession time - I think Takashi Miike is horribly overrated. I grimace more during an episode of E.R. than most of his movies. My disappointment wasn’t helped by scenery-chewing Billy Drago.
I never fail to fall asleep during this movie. From when Ben throws the flaming chair outside to the moment when Barbara finally snaps out of her catatonic state, you’ll find me catching Zs. This was no different. Still though, I mostly just wanted to make sure I had good seats for the Surprise Movie. (More sacrilege: I think I prefer the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead).
This film’s title is also serves as a handy warning for anyone thinking of going to see this movie. It’s god-awful in a way that only WWF/WWE-produced movies can be.
The audience for Pan’s Labyrinth was roughly 50% typical arthouse nerds and 50% horrorthon nerds who had been there for almost three days straight and were fully charged on fizzy drinks and sugary sweets (and, in most cases, booze), so it was interesting to see the interplay between the two. When the movie started, all the horrorthon nerds starting whooping and clapping (because that’s what you do during horrorthon, whoop and clap), and the arthouse nerds sat in reverence. Still though - good film. A lot less fantasy than the trailers and previews made out. But still really good.
Wholesale cheapo ripoff of Jaws. And enjoyably so. This film was so stupid, it actually encouraged audience participation - chants of “Hogan! Hogan! Hogan!” when main character (and Hulk Hogan lookalike), Richard Dew appeared on screen.
Like Demons, I love this movie and it was great to see it on the big screen. The 70mm print was awesome - lots of details I missed from watching it on dirty VHS copies. A great way to end the festival.
After Poltergeist, we were told that they’ve already started organising Horrorthon 2007 and the word is that Dario Argento might be in attendance, which would mean a triple-bill of Suspiria, Inferno and Mother of Tears is looking likely.
Lik-Sang announced yesterday that they were shutting up shop because of the weight and volume of the lawsuits being thrown at them by Sony. Sony claimed that Lik-Sang weren’t offering consumers the kind of safe, quality hardware that the consumers were used to (read: Sony wanted complete control over each region’s retail channels). This is just the latest in a long line of dumb, half-assed or just plain mean-spirited moves that Sony has pulled that makes me hope that, for the good of the industry, Sony is no longer the market leader when we reach the next generation of videogames.
The Lik-Sang news bums me out for a whole bunch of reasons. Mainly because I really, really liked Lik-Sang. They’re one of the few online shops that I’ve had 100% satisfaction with, always going above and beyond the basics of shipping me out the things I want - usually throwing in free stickers, coupons off next purchases, lanyards etc. When I bought my DS Lite from them, they packed in so much extra stuff, it felt like all my Christmases had come at once. In May.
But I’m also bummed out because it means that it’s even more difficult for me to get a hold of decent games while they’re still relevant. For example: Okami is an awesome game. With a narrative similar to Zelda and a visual style all its own, it has been frequently used to support the idea that videogames can be art. But I wouldn’t know about that because, despite having been released in Japan in April of 2006, it won’t be hitting our shores until February 2007 (and given that its developers just folded, a European release might even be on the cards).
Today, when my copy of Daigasso! Band Brothers arrived from Lik-Sang, it hammered it home for me - this was the last time this wonderful shop would help me get my hands on some wonderful games.
For European gamers, the short end of the stick just got even shorter.
Picked up my tickets for this year’s Horrorthon. I’ve usually gone to one or two showings each year, but this is the first year I’ve been interested enough to buy a full festival ticket. Highlights for me are
It’s solid. Oh so solid. Stupid Bitrocket would crap out on me if I so much as looked at it funny
In-application searching and downloading. Which translates into: no more fucking around on dodgy sites with equally dodgy ads (“HORNY GIRLS IN ballyfermot ARE WAITING FOR YOU”) looking for the latest episode of Lost.
Upload and download rate limiting! You have no idea how much I’ve wanted this - it’s one thing limiting uploads, but when you’re sharing a network with a bunch of people, you don’t want to saturate the download connection.
It’s so freakin’ pretty
I swear, David Watanabe is like the Zinedine Zidane of the Mac software development world. Everything he does has beauty, elegance and style. And he’ll floor you with one headbutt if you say anything mean about his mother.
(note to self: link to the thing you’re blogging about, dummy)
Three days of Nintendo confrences, three days of non-stop Wii information. Here’s the bits we care about:
Wii will launch in Ireland on December 8th for EUR250. It will come with a Wii-mote, a nunchuck controller and a copy of Wii sports. Zelda will be available at launch, as well as the new Super Monkey Ball. The games are expected to cost between EUR49 and EUR59.
After hearing that the Wii will be launched in the US in November and Japan on December 8th, I was half expecting Nintendo to push the European release back to Q1 2007. So I’m thrilled about this - I’ve already cleared off a Gamecube-sized space under my telly in anticipation.
On a similar note, anyone want a well-used Gamecube?
I love the premise behind Breakdown. Its logline is deliciously appealing: A couple are driving across the country when their car breaks down, the wife gets a lift to the nearest town to call for help, the man eventually gets his car going again and follows his into town, except noone has seen the wife.
It’s then that the movie starts to go downhill.
And there’s a lot going for the movie. Kurt Russell gives one of his most underrated performances as an everyman in extreme circumstances, and the score by Basil Poledouris (who also did the killer score for Conan the Barbarian) is wonderfully Bernard Hermann-esque. But it’s… wait, what’s that moving in the corner of my eye?
And what’s that noise?
OH FUCK, IT’S A BEE.
AND NOT JUST ANY BEE. IT’S HUGE! LIKE SOME FUCKING UBERBEE. GOOD FUCKING CHRIST, IT’S COMING THIS WAY! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! RUN AWAY!
Okay, now I’ve got a glass door between me and the bee. Time to think this one out. Jesus, I can still hear it through this glass. That’s so big. Maybe H. will know what to do.
…
Well, that was no fucking help. Put it under a glass?! It’s bigger than every glass we have! I could maybe try putting it under a vase, except every vase we have is in the room with the bee. And what if he gets wind of what I’m up to? He’ll go spare and sting the shit out of me.
Hang on. He’s just hitting the patio door. He just wants out. Maybe I can just open the door and let him out! Okay, I’ll just go back into that room and… wait, what the shit am I doing? I need to arm myself here. Defend myself. Magazines! Aha! I knew reading on the toilet would come in useful one day. Now I’ve got a giant copy of Edge in case this little shitbag gets any ideas. H., did you just call me a ‘fucking pussy’? I’ll let you away with that because you’re still in bed and HAVEN’T SEEN THE SIZE OF THIS GODZILLA-BEE.
Here we go. Softly, softly. Oh no! He’s stopped buzzing around! He’s onto me! No, wait. He’s just resting. Keep going. Keep… going… COCKING HELL, HE’S THE SIZE OF MY FUCKING HAMSTER! And wait, don’t they say that bees are especially ornery this time of year because they’re all dying from the cold? That’s not good. Why did I even remind myself of that? Am I trying to sabotage myself? Okay, easy big fella, I’m here to help. Just a friendly guy with a friendly magazine, trying to help. This isn’t good. This isn’t good. Almost there! Hand is on the key now. Turning the key! OH SHIT HERE HE COMES, HE’S COMING TO KILL ME! OPEN THE DOOR! NOW RUN! DON’T STOP RUNNING!
Is he gone? Is he gone? I can’t tell if he’s gone, I’m sobbing too hard.
Here’s some things from the past couple of weeks. Get ready for some old news.
Steve Irwin dies - Boo! It’s been over a week and I’m still gutted about this. Steve Irwin was always, always entertaining and his unflinching upbeat outlook never once failed to cure me of whatever blues I had. I’m running out heroes.
MGM are making a sequel to Wargames - Yay! Some of my favourite films are sequels. Some of my favourite films are about nerdy things and have cute little bleepy soundtracks. It’s a marriage made in heaven! The news report also mentions a sequel to Into the Blue which, as big dumb movies go, is really rather good.
Entourage is fucking awesome - Yay! Okay, so this isn’t exactly news, but hey - you come here for news? Seriously, this show is fucking killer - I threw it onto my computer and we watched almost all of Season 1 on the flight home when we should have been sleeping to beat jetlag. You know a show is special when you’re willing to take a bullet like that for it.
My DVD inbox has grown to over 125 movies - Boo! This wasn’t helped by my visit to Newbury Comics in Boston. Their Criterion Collection section was both expansive and cheap. If I watch one movie a day, it will still take me over four months to get through them all. Thank fuck Big Brother is over and we can get our NTL disconnected.
…but not that great. I was talking to a couple of people about this game. It seems as if most people who downloaded the 15-minute demo from Xbox Live were pretty disappointed by the full game. This seems to be a combination of the developers’ decision to start you off with a basic set of stats (since an RPG stats-building feature seems to be required in all games these days), which means that your character is next to useless at the start of the game. The demo throws you in at the halfway mark, where he can do most things without much trouble.
Then there’s also the way the game starts. The zombies invade the mall and you have to escape with everyone else in that part of the mall. Except you can’t save them. And so the game throws up massive messages to tell you THIS PERSON DIED and then THAT PERSON DIED. So, within the first five minutes of starting play, you’ve got the videogame equivalent of
YOU FUCKED UP
YOU FUCKED UP
YOU FUCKED UP
YOU SHOULD REALLY PUT THE CONTROLLER DOWN BECAUSE YOU FUCKED UP AGAIN
Describing it as “disheartening” doesn’t even come close. And don’t get me started on the save system. Jeez.
Thank God then for Lego Star Wars II! So much fun in such a little box!
Well, I’ve got my pronunciation of “Chowdaaah” down pat, so I’m heading off to Cape Cod and Boston for the next couple of weeks. This means posting will be even patchier than usual around here. Providing my camera behaves (and I can find internet access in Cape Cod - the nearest Starbucks is 13 miles from where I’m staying), I’ll be updating my Flickr.
CORY DOCTOROW: Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod.
EMPLOYEE: What?
CORY DOCTOROW: I didn’t say anything. Now, about this cell phone…
The phrase “Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod” has been adopted as a convenient shorthand for when I make a simple problem more complicated by adding layer upon layer of technology. Take last night, for example.
“So I’ll put our itinerary into my Google Calendar, subscribe to it in my iCal and then synchronize that to my phone with Bluetooth”
The Xbox Live Gaming Centre up on South William Street will be running a competition to coincide with the European release of Dead Rising next month. Fittingly, the competition is to find the best-dressed zombie.
From their newsletter:
The Xbox Live Gaming Centre is running a best dressed zombie competition to celebrate the launch of Capcom's Dead Rising (rated 18's) which will be hitting the centre on Friday September 7th. On Saturday 8th September, at 3pm we will be holding the competition in-store. Prizes include €100 cash, "I Love Zombies" t-shirts and limited edition Dead Rising faceplates.
Note: their dates are a little funny - Saturday is actually the 9th of September.
The prizes aren’t awesome. Faceplates? No copies of the game? Still though, I’m happy with any excuse to dress like a zombie.
In January, I wrote about Sheldon Turner, one of the writers of Snakes on a Plane, and talked about how one of his next movies is about a serial killer who only kills people in the eye of a storm. Awesome idea, and I can guarantee that this guy will go far in Hollywood.
Except when I went to see Snakes on a Plane last night, Sheldon Turner’s name was nowhere to be found. And, sure enough, the IMDB page for SoaP doesn’t list Sheldon Turner any more. His Wikipedia entry still lists him as a writer on SoaP, and googling “Sheldon Turner” “Snakes on a Plane” gives enough results to confirm I’m not making shit up.
Why was his credit removed for this movie? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Let me start this off by saying that Snakes on a Plane is a great movie. A full year since I first wrote about it, a full year of anticipation has done nothing to harm this movie, it’s still everything we expected. In fact, it’s more than we expected, since we were expecting a cheesy, so-bad-it’s-good movie and Snakes on a Plane is anything but - it’s an enjoyable, light-hearted action/comedy/disaster movie, and I recommend you go see it now before the only people left to see it are the boring sort that will not clap and whoop their way through the movie.
Now I’ve got that out of the way, let’s change gears.
I left the movie last night (7.30pm, Cineworld) wondering what it was about this movie that appealed to nerds. The nerd quotient of this movie was unreal. Sitting in Eddie Rockets before the movie, I spotted a group of people going past, and just by the look of them, I knew they had just been to Snakes on a Plane (it turns out that one of them was a Googler who knew the Googler in our group and indeed, he had just been to Snakes on a Plane).
The internet is abuzz with this movie in a way that only the internet knows how. Livejournal is unreadable right now because of it. There are multi-page threads about it on every forum I read. And NewsFire tells me I have a terrifying 50 articles about it in my RSS feeds.
So why this movie? What makes it better than other light-hearted action/comedy/disaster movies? Sure, SoaP has a guy getting bitten on the cock by a snake after pissing on it (oops, spoilers!), but Deep Blue Sea has Samuel L. Jackson being eaten by a flying shark (kinda). SoaP may be high-concept, but then, so is Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous, whose similarly endearing concept is stratospheric and too bizarre to properly summarize here.
So why Snakes on a Plane? Answers on a postcard, please.
So we’ve all heard about the recent Mel Gibson debacle, right? You know, the one where he revealed himself to be a complete lunatic? Well, not to toot my own horn or nothing, I’d just like to point out that I called this in December of last year. My exact words were
Gibson has officially Lost It and is now certifiably batshit insane
See? It’s almost spooky. If Nostradamus had a blog, it would be lowbrowculture.com.
Download the Dead Rising demo from Xbox Marketplace
It’s time-limited to 15 minutes per game, but still. This is one of the games that finally convinced me to buy an Xbox 360. Let’s hope it was worth it.
Go see A Scanner Darkly on Monday
Get a coupon from today’s copy of The Ticket in the Irish Times. Bring it to UGC today and exchange the coupon for a ticket for two to see the preview of this amazing-looking movie.
Finish reading On Stranger Tides by Tim powers
I bought this because I’ve got such a boner for pirates right now, and this is the book that inspired Ron Gilbert to write the Secret of Monkey Island. It’s a huge story of pirates, voodoo and revenge. And lots of buckles being swashed, naturally. Also recommended: The Bumper Book of Pirate Stories, if only for the chapter entitled “How Half-Arsed Became Captain”. Half-arsed being a famous pirate who got half of his ass blown off by a cannon. They don’t make ’em like that any more.
Ellen Feiss, internet phenomenon and star of the most famous Mac “Switch” advert, is all growned up. She is making her film acting debut in a French movie called “Bed and Breakfast” alongside Ruardhi Conroy (“Tito” from Into the West).
And, y’know, now she’s no longer jailbait/completely mashed, she’s actually kinda hot.
“Hey H., you know what would be awesome? A service where you could register a group of friends’ phone numbers, then when you’re out and about, you text your location to a server and your friends could text the server and find out where all their friends are.”
My DVD inbox - movies I haven’t seen or whose DVDs special features I haven’t watched - has grown to 60 DVDs. I figure this is a good time to take a look through the list and see what’s going on. Maybe figure out why I’m having such trouble getting through them. If you’re interested, the full list is available on listal.com.
Genre
To be honest, I’m amazed that drama features so highly. From looking at my list, I’d have guessed Horror or Sci-Fi would be the most popular genre. I put this down to shoddy tagging on IMDB. Or a really bad personal definition of “horror”. Cutthroat Island is horrific, so that makes it horror… right?
Decade
For an eighties kid, the 1980s are seriously underrepresented here.
(This was the first bar-chart I’ve ever made in excel. I had to get H. to help me.)
Language
I couldn’t be bothered breaking this down any further. Although I’d say that the majority of the foreign-language movies were Japanese, from the large amount of J-Horror waiting to scare the pants off me.
TV Shows
I’ve all but given up watching TV now. I tend to do all my TV watching via bittorrent or DVD. This is probably lower than I would have guessed. Still haven’t gotten around to watching Six Feet Under yet. Is it wrong that I am completely unable to get excited about this show? Loving Carnivale though.
I finished reading Douglas Coupland’s JPod last night. Here are a couple of my theories regarding this book:
Douglas Coupland is completely out of ideas and is gently strolling down the David Sedaris route of desperately presenting the most mundane situations and ideas as innovative. Not only that, but he knows it. There’s a twinge of panic about JPod that completely sets it apart from the laid-back coolness of Microserfs.
He got so sick of people asking for a sequel to Microserfs that he decided to punish them by churning out something that takes the same style and formula but takes it to the point where it actually mocks the reader. Case in point: 40 pages of the first 100,000 numbers of Pi with one wrong digit. What is this? The Da Vinci Code for autistics?
Maybe he really has, once again, completely captured the zeitgeist and the world is actually full of the same kind of boring, selfish fuckholes that appear as characters in JPod.
Personally, I think it’s probably a combination of all three.
Someone in work pointed me to Freetar Hero - a free PC-based replacement for Guitar Hero. Nothing really new there, there’s been a few out there already. But what sets this apart is the awesome new Freetar Editor, which allows you to create your own levels from your MP3 collection.
As this video demonstrates, the upshot of this is that I might actually get a chance to rock out on my Guitar Hero to Journey!
Looks like Mackers won’t have to buy a TV to play this after all.
BURBANK, Calif. - Paul Gleason, who was in "Trading Places" and "The Breakfast Club," has died. He was 67.
Gleason died at a local hospital Saturday of mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer linked to asbestos, said his wife, Susan Gleason.
“Whenever you were with Paul, there was never a dull moment,” his wife said. “He was awesome.”
A native of Miami, Gleason was an avid athlete. Before becoming an actor, he played Triple-A minor league baseball for a handful of clubs in the late 1950s.
Gleason honed his acting skills with his mentor Lee Strasberg, whom he studied with at the Actors Studio beginning in the mid-1960s, family members said.
Through his career, Gleason appeared in over 60 movies that included “Die Hard,” “Johnny Be Good,” and “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder.” Most recently, Gleason made a handful of television appearances in hit shows such as “Friends” and “Seinfeld.”
Gleason’s passions went beyond acting. He had recently published a book of poetry.
“He was an athlete, an actor and a poet,” said his daughter, Shannon Gleason-Grossman. “He gave me and my sister a love that is beyond description that will be with us and keep us strong for the rest of our lives.”
Actor Jimmy Hawkins, a friend of Gleason’s since the 1960s, said he remembered Gleason for a sharp sense of humor.
“He just always had great stories to tell,” Hawkins said.
Gleason was survived by his wife, two daughters and a granddaughter. Funeral plans were pending.
He never really got any huge roles, but the few lines he got were often the standout moments in movies. The moment in Trading Places where he turns around and tells and old woman to Fuck Off counts, for me, as the most perfect delivery of a “fuck off” ever filmed.
For a while there, I was deeply in love with Dragon Quest VIII: The Journey of the Cursed King. Western RPGs like Fable and Jade Empire had made me soft, and I was itching for some stone cold dungeon crawling, the type made famous by the Dragon Quest series. Classic RPG gameplay, the likes of which I have rarely seen in this generation of video games. All this certainly isn’t hurt by it’s beautiful aesthetics: character design by Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball Z, and the most perfect cell-shading this side of Wind Waker. A beautiful, beautiful game, on many levels.
But having spent a few days away from the Playstation, I’m starting to wonder if I’m just experiencing a mild form of Stockholm syndrome.
I love the fact that it’s all stats. It’s a huge numbers game, knowing which monsters to battle and with what strategy. I love the fact that, if I was so inclined, I could bust out the graphing calculator and compute the outcome of any battle before I even start it. Guitar Hero it ain’t. Ikaruga it ain’t. But it’s still got this wicked, twisted appeal.
Unfortunately - and this is where I think I’ve been spoiled - I’m tired of spending 2 hours a night just running around outside a particular village leveling up. Once I’ve finally reached a level I think is acceptable, I can tackle the quest I’m supposed to be working on, and this might just take a half an hour to complete. But there’s still the 2 hours where I do nothing else in the game except repeat the battle-battle-battle-rest, battle-battle-battle-rest strategy. At least games like Oblivion present side-quests to take the grind out of “leveling up” and turn it into something vaguely entertaining. 8 hours into Dragon Quest, I haven’t seen one side-quest.
And that’s the worst part: if I didn’t have to see the look on my girlfriend’s face when I explain to her that I’m coming to bed at 2am because I’ve just spent the past two hours leveling up, I probably wouldn’t mind this at all.
E3 this week. Biggest, most draining week in the gaming calendar. Not a chance of getting any serious work done.
First up, Sony annoucing their PS3s. First up, the facts:
Two versions
20GB version - EUR499 / 60GB version - EUR599
20GB version will not have
Wireless
Memory Stick / SD Storage
HDMI out
Same controller as the PS2 except with Wireless, no rumble feature and - get this - a tilt sensor
Releasing two versions of the same console is a smart move. Especially when you choose to remove such non-essential features (the Xbox 360’s retardo Core pack didn’t include a Hard Drive, meaning developers couldn’t develop games using this feature.) Although the lack of HDMI output struck me as a little weird since this limits the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player. And let’s face it, half of the point of the PS3 is as a way to sell the Blu-Ray format to consumers.
But the news about the controller is just funny. With so much pre-E3 talk focusing on Nintendo’s new Wii-mote controller and how it would change the way we play games like Zelda, it’s not surprising to hear Sony announce something similar. But this is so obviously a knee-jerk reaction, it’s hard not to hear the collective groan rising up from bulletin boards across the internet. From 1up’s report of the Sony press conference:
Ken Kutaragi is out showing off the last PlayStation controller, and basically looks like a sliver version of the Dual Shock 2. What's different? Sony has basically taken Nintendo's idea of a movable controller, and introduced the gyroscope technology into the PlayStation 3 controller. Yes, you read that right.
For Nintendo, the name “Revolution” had always been a codename. People might say that it had caught on with the public and changing it now will confuse people, but Nintendo were very up-front about this: Revolution was just a codename, just like “Dolphin” (Gamecube) and “Project Reality” (Nintendo 64).
Yesterday, Nintendo announced the official name of their next-generation console.
Wii.
I’m on two minds here. Part of me thinks it’s a brilliant, bold move - “Revolution” was too western, and didn’t mean as much to its home market. Wii is a standard non-specific word bordering on onomatapaea. Whee!
The other part of me is wondering what names were rejected to come to this one. I’m reminded of an Eddie Izzard sketch, describing how Jerry Dorsey changed his name to Englebert Humperdink.
No updates because I’ve been too busy rocking out on Guitar Hero (which got its proper release today - hurry!)
Once I’ve played through a game, I rarely go back and play it again, unless it offers a significantly different experience the second time around. For example, when you finish Shadow of the Colossus, it unlocks a “hard” mode. Balls to that. I’ve got an ever-increasing list of games I have to play and an ever-decreasing amount of time to play them in. And especially not when it took a monumental effort to stop myself from smashing the controller to smithereens even on the “normal” difficulty.
Guitar Hero is so perfectly balanced, I can’t help myself. I’ve worked through “easy” and “medium” and now I’m halfway through “difficult.” Why? Because, unlike most games where luck has as much to do with your progress as actual skill, I can actually see myself getting better at Guitar Hero. When I first started playing through the game on “medium”, I thought it might be fun to see what “I Wanna Be Sedated” was like on “expert” difficulty. I found out: Scary. I was booed off stage before I’d even reached the first verse. Now that medium is a long-distant memory and “difficult” is making me its bitch, I went back to “I Wanna Be Sedated” on expert. And y’know what? I finished it. On my third attempt. But I finished it.
To make matters worse, I’m finding myself replaying songs on “easy” (and “Medium”), just so I can fill the scoreboard up with top marks.
The last time a game hooked me like this – improving my skill and beating my own scores, just for the fun of it – was Super Mario Kart on the SNES. An odd comparison, to be sure, but one that makes me happy. I really didn’t think people made games like this any more. Fun little games with no real narrative depth that can consume hours and still have you coming back for more.
One other thing I’ve noticed… playing this game has strengthened up my baby finger no end. It was always the runt of my fingers and even when I played normal guitar with it, it never really did what I wanted to when I wanted it to. Now, it’s kicking my other fingers’ asses. So, bonus!
This isn’t supposed to be out for another week or so. During the week, I was whinging that it had the same release date as the new Tomb Raider game. But hooray for Smyths, breaking the release date and selling Guitar Hero early.
Now I’m waking up at 9am on a Sunday morning just so I can rock out to Megadeth’s Symphony of Destruction.
Much as I love “survival horror” games, I have genuine trouble playing them. I like to think this is because I become so engrossed in the game and commit myself to it so completely that the scares are extremely effective on me. But others might say that it’s because I’m a complete pussy. I’ll let you decide which theory you want to subscribe to. When my girlfriend announced that she’d had enough of the “cutesy” games I’d been pushing on her (the risible “Hello Kitty” game being the proverbial straw) and wanted to try something meatier, I realised it was time to bit the bullet and bring out Silent Hill 2, a game that had been lying untouched since I bought it almost two years ago. The idea being that she would play most of the game, handing (read: throwing) the controller to me whenever the action got a bit much for her.
Throughout the course of the game, you realise how much the game loves to fuck with you. It’s true that most survival horror games like to fuck with you in some way - the cheap-but-fun parlour tricks of “Eternal Darkness” making you think your controller had become unplugged, or the twisted self-referential jokes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 - but Silent Hill turns this into an art form. The static on your character’s hand-held radio being a particularly good example. It warns the player that an enemy is close, but doesn’t give any indication of exactly where it is. And there’s only one thing scarier than something you can’t see: something you can’t see, but know is there.
By the middle of Silent Hill 2, you’ll have collected most weapons and found plenty of ammunition for your arsenal. Even on “normal” difficulty, the enemies aren’t particularly troublesome. The ones you can’t kill are easy to avoid. At this stage, even my girlfriend was taunting the enemies. I’m pretty sure I heard her smack-talking Pyramid Head.
And that’s when the game pounces.
Inside a hotel, you come across a lift. You have to go down a couple of floors and pick up some items. Unfortunately, when you step into the lift (the only way down), an alarm goes off. A helpful sign informs you that the lift, in true videogame logic, has a weight limit of exactly one person. I spent five minutes shouting at the TV. “You sneaky fuckers! There’s someone else in the lift with me! Someone on the roof! Someone I can’t see!? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?!!” Eventually, I discovered what it wanted me to do: my inventory was weighing me down, so I’d have to dump all of my guns and ammunition and go in unarmed. It wouldn’t even let me carry a stick to club potential enemies with.
And with that, my shouting went up a notch. I paused the game and shrieked at the TV for a good ten minutes. I knew that I would be in a cramped basement filled with the worst kinds of brain-spew this side of a Francis Bacon painting (see what I did there?). And I would be completely defenceless. In the end, I spent more time bitching and moaning about what I had to do than I spent actually doing it, but that’s entirely beside the point.
Not long after the game was finished, myself and my girlfriend went on a late-night tour of Kilmainham Jail, a special one-off tour as part of heritage week, given by a friend of ours. It was all about execution within the jail, taking us through some of the places not shown on the “normal” tour. I don’t think anyone was as freaked out as us - the whole thing was exactly like something out of Silent Hill, right down to the creepy map on the wall.
So now, if anyone asks me if Silent Hill 2 is a good game, I tell them about walking through Kilmainham Jail, constantly checking over my shoulder for zombie nurses. It takes a truly spectacular game to mess you up long after the computer is turned off.
My DVD collection has reached the point where I can no longer keep track of what I’ve got, what I’ve loaned to other people or what I haven’t yet watched. So for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly loading my entire collection into Delicious Library. A very pretty application, with a number of really nice features (easy to mark an item as “on loan”; export to iPod, so I almost always have a copy of my collection on-hand), but still had problems for me. Most importantly:
It’s Mac-only
Needs a powerful computer to run properly (which I don’t have at home)
Needs a fast internet connection to run properly (which I don’t have at home)
Last week, I stumbled across Listal. From the website:
Listal is a social website where you can list all the
movies, books, music and games you own and want!
Despite of the lack of a decent “import” feature (right now, you can only import from DVD Profiler), meaning I’m having to enter each one of my DVDs by hand, I’m moving my catalogue from Delicious Library into Listal. Why? Well, there’s a few reasons.
It’s internet-based
I can access (and edit) my catalogue from any computer on the internet, not just my Mac
Thin-client suits my crappy internet connection
The listal server does all the heavy lifting meaning my Clearwire connection remains relatively unruffled.
RSS feeds for every context
Besides the obvious applications of any kind of RSS feeds, it also means I can export my RSS feed to something like iDropper to dump the RSS feed onto my iPod, replicating the functionality of Delicious Library. This will probably get even easier when Listal finally has a “proper” export facility.
User-specified tags, ratings and lists
This is really what sold it for me - the ability to completely tag my collection as I want to. So I can have a whole bunch of movies listed as “hangover movies,” “Sunday matinees,” “Cheesy horror.” You get the idea.
And this is without even touching on the “social” part of the application - being able to see friends’ collections, recommend new films and easily arrange loans.
My listal profile is here. I’ve barely added 25% of my collection and even then, I’m going to have to go back and tag them all properly, so I’m going to be working on it a bit more. If you’re on there, add me as a friend!
I used to bitch and moan about how videogames have always been misrepresented on TV. And all it would take to make me happy was a bunch of likeable presenters to make a show entertaining even to people who don’t play videogames.
Hooray then, for Consolevania. An online video TV show so entertaining that even my non-videogame-playing girlfriend will sit down and watch.
Anyway, after seven months’ break, the new episode of Consolevania was released on Sunday. And it’s as funny as ever. If you like videogames, you should download it. Even if you don’t like videogames, you should download it. And if you’re the maker of a video podcast, you need to watch this and see how it’s done properly.
Six years of working professionally as a systems administrator and last week I realised that I really don’t know much about the “theory” behind the stuff I do. I couldn’t have told you what a “sticky bit” was, but I could tell you how to implement one. Making sense? Anyway, so I’ve spent the weekend getting re-acquainted with low-level Unix stuff. This has mostly involved installed FreeBSD on my laptop and reading man pages for almost every command I’ve run. Along the way, I wanted to install mackers’ o2sms and found out that FreeBSD’s default perl doesn’t have threading enabled. So I had to recompile perl - something I haven’t had to do since 1998.
Never mind OS X which has made my daily computing life a joy, even binary Linux distributions like Ubuntu have made me very lazy. Given a choice between downloading a pre-compiled binary and running that, and having my machine download the source code and waiting 30 minutes while it whittles the software out of 1s and 0s, I’ll choose the one that has me up and running as soon as possible.
I want out of computing completely. It’s not like I can’t do this stuff any more, I just don’t want to.
The world just got 35% more amazing. Uses persistence of vision to “draw” images on your bike wheels. Not only does it look amazing, but it’s functional as well - people can’t exactly say they didn’t see you when you’ve got 60 LEDs showing Pac-man chasing a ghost on your wheels. And the guy girl who created it has put the instructions on her website so you can make it yourself!
Unfortunately, you couldn’t have something like this in Dublin. From personal experience, I’ve learned that in this city, when people see something cool, they try and break it or take it for themselves.
(Still bitter about my bike being stolen.)
Remember the “Double Life” ad for the Playstation? A marvellous ad, full of the kind of lyrical braggadocio Sony brought to the word of videogames. In that one ad, I believe Sony did more for raising mainstream understanding of the appeal of videogames than all of Nintendo’s efforts throughout the previous ten years.
But the ad never really rang true for me. The creepy-cute kid with the lisp telling us how he’d “conequered worlds” seemed like a bit of a lie. The worlds I had conquered had been superficial, cartoon worlds. Even the largest maps in Command & Conquer never really struck me as anything more than an extended game of Cannon Fodder. A loose bit of fun that, ultimately, never made me feel even the least bit heroic. Certainly not as heroic as the games that creepy-cute kid seemed to be playing.
Shadow of the Colossus is the first game that has made me feel like I could be a part of that ad. I feel like I’m finally able to say, with no small amount of pride, that I have defeated giants. Armed with nothing more than a sword, a bow, and an unlimited supply of arrows (ahem), I have beaten… no, I have slain impossible goliaths. Did you hear that? I’ve actually slain something.
The sense of scale in this game is unbelievable. One level in God of War had you climbing a giant temple carried on the back of Kronos, the last titan. The scale of that one level sealed it for me - God of War was presenting familiar things in a way I had never experienced them and, as such, was one of the best games I’d ever played. Shadow of the Colossus does the same thing, over and over again. Each level (16 in all) has a different colossus, with a different way of defeating them. Some are more obvious than others. Some require more skill and/or dexterity and/or luck than others. But each one has a scope beyond any other videogame I’ve ever played. Quite simply, it’s staggering.
The Colossi themselves are strewn across a huge, empty game world. This in itself is a courageous move by the developers. Given the games relative brevity (in 3 hours, I had defeated 7 Colossi, almost half the total amount), it would have been easy to put incidental challenges in your way - the occasional enemy that will pop up out of nowhere and take 10 minutes to defeat (Hello Zelda: Wind Waker!) - thus artificially lengthening the game. Instead, they kept it barren, which only adds to the epic nature of the game.
(Incidentally, I’ve also noticed that the developers have thrown in cool little spot-details, like an ancient campfire near where you battle a colossus. Not entirely necessary, but adds the overall atmosphere of the game.)
After Shadow of the Colossus, I still don’t feel like I’ve conquered worlds. But I’ve conquered giants. And that’s close enough.
I’m convinced there’s a good war-themed horror out there somewhere. What started out as a general disappointment with Michael Mann’s The Keep has taken me through The Bunker (awful) and Deathwatch (starts out promising, quickly turns awful). From reading IMDB’s message boards, I thought Kong Su-Chang’s R-Point would answer my prayers.
It tells the story of a squad of Korean soldiers in the Vietnam war sent to investigate radio transmissions coming from a group of soldiers thought to have been killed six months previously. Which is the same setup as Deathwatch. And that’s the problem. Using the plot of Deathwatch as a foundation, R-Point tries to blend a mixture of Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project and The Shining, even going so far as to visually name-check some of these films. And among all these heavyweights, the few original things the filmmakers bring seem quite tame and undercooked.
On paper, it’s a recipe for magic: war-themed horror mixed with the nerve-shattering tension that Asian filmmakers seem able to tap into so well. In reality, R-Point is a disappointing anti-climax. Oh well, i still have high hopes for Worst Case Scenario
For me, Good Night, and Good Luck fell squarely into the same genre as Downfall: an important movie, but not necessarily a good movie. It ticks a lot of boxes and zipped along at a fair pace but never really engaged me any better than a documentary on the same subject could have. In fact, the chapter about the Murrow/McCarthy feud in John S. Friedman’s The Secret Histories did a better job of providing a context for the broadcasts than Clooney’s film and remains, for me, more entertaining.
Although perhaps that’s because I wasn’t being forced to chew down some paper-thin character development for paper-thin characters. I don’t know.
I spent 24 hours eating pizza, playing videogames and watching really, really bad movies. Around 2pm, I decideded to take a trip outside the house. Get some air (and some more really, really bad movies). At about 3, I got a text from my girlfriend to tell me about rioting and looting on O’Connell Street. So I took a look for myself.
Dublin is fucked.
Update (22.05)
First song the in-house band plays on Tubridy Tonight? “I Predict a Riot.” Surely I’m not alone in thinking that’s in poor taste?
Remember a few days ago, I wrote about the TV shows I love? Well. apart from Grand Designs and the Channel 4-led shame-fest of Supernanny, Brat Camp and It’s Me or the Dog, I don’t tend to watch much TV on er… TV. The ease of availability of just about any show I want to watch (thank you Uknova and Mininova) means that I find it easier to just download the shows I want to watch. If I wanted to be fancy, I could call this “time-shifting” or something, but let’s just call a spade a spade and say “laziness.”
This generally means watching them on my computer in work (during lunch, honestly!). I’m not particularly delighted with this. A dodgy CRT with a crappy set of speakers can’t really compete with my setup at home. And it also adds another layer of hassle with shows that my girlfriend also wants to watch, like Lost. In these cases, I’ve got a DVD player that will play DivXs, but is extremely fussy about what kinds of DivXs it wants to play. So I end up
Downloading the file
Using FfmpegX to convert the file (even on my dual G5, this takes 20 minutes)
Burn it to a CD
Bring it homeAnd this doesn’t take into account the loss of sync between the audio and visuals that FfmpegX tends to helpfully drop into its newly-converted files. Nor the amount of hassle involved in doing this for multiple episodes. It also means that once I’ve watched the episode, I’m left with a lovely new CD coaster taking up space on our already-overflowing shelves (visual evidence of overflowing shelves).
What I needed was a media centre. Something that would let me download episodes, bring them home on my iPod and watch them on my TV. Originally, I had planned to use a G4 Powermac with Front Row at home for the media centre but lack of a graphics card with decent TV-out put an end to this idea. I thought about buying myself a mod chip for my Xbox and installing Xbox Media Center (XBMC), but even this struck me as too much work (and in the couple of weeks it would take for my mod chip to arrive, I would probably be bored of this idea already).
I used a hacked save game for Splinter Cell which, when launched from within the game, ran a program from within Linux that did all of the hard work for me. Once I installed the softmod, installing XBMC was simple. Now, I can stream movies (I tried it against .avi, .mov, .wmv - all worked) off that same G4 Powermac and still play Xbox games - even play on-line with Live! And the cherry on top of all this is that these movies look absolutely beautiful on the TV. Way, way better than my converted DivXs ever did.
The total cost to me for doing all this was the princely sum of… nattin. I had all the tools lying around (Xbox, memory card, usb/memory card convertor, media server) and it only took a few minutes to complete. Next up: putting a new hard drive in the Xbox. Let’s see if that’s as easy.
When I was younger, I had such a major crush on Wendy Melvoin, Prince’s guitarist in The Revolution. And depending on when you catch me, Purple Rain could be my favourite album and movie of all time, but never anything less than “incredible” to me. Watching the Brit awards, on comes Prince to perform some songs. Random snippets of our conversation here.
“Do you think Prince should reinvent himself? He’s been playing the same music for years.” “He’s probably had a ton of work done.” “This song is okay. I could do without the Pan Pipes though.” “Hey, isn’t that his guitarist from Purple Rain?”
Wendy and Lisa were back! Looking a little older, sure. Minus their bad-ass hugh hairstyles, sure. But my crush kicked right back in immediately. Oh boy.
Oh, and after the Purple Rain medley: “No. Prince shouldn’t change his music. He should just keep playing this forever.”
ps - fuck the Kaiser Chiefs, Kasabien and Hard-Fi in their stupid fucking asses.
I’ll admit that I’ve never been drawn to 70s British police dramas. Then again, I don’t know that I’ve ever actually seen a full episode of any of them. But Life on Mars is just fantastic. This and Doctor Who have renewed my faith in BBC drama.
When I’m about to head off to bed after a hard day’s TV watching, I tend to go for one last flick through the channels. I remember crying whenever I’d stumble across CSI at midnight because it meant I was stuck for another hour without any way of wrenching myself away from the telly. Televisual crack. I was addicted.
I get the same thing with Prison Break, the TV show with the most idiotic setup I’ve ever seen. It makes me think of that episode of the X-Files where Mulder discovers the TV networks are putting subliminal messages between the frames of TV shows. I don’t know why else I can’t pull myself away from these breathtakingly stupid shows.
Actually, I don’t love Lost any more. I watched the entire first season over the course of a weekend and was completely hooked but since then, I think I mostly watch it out of some hope that they’ll finally start dishing out some answers. So far, they haven’t. And now there’s talk of dragging this into four seasons, with a feature film finale. I think it’s time I cut myself free.
Yes, they might be lowest-common-denominator TV, but these shows have saved my life on more than one occasion. However, this does not extend to anything presented by Gillian McKeith. She is the devil. A bitter, hump-backed devil
This has been mentioned before, but I still can’t get enough of it. I love everything about it, from the creepy Harry Potter-esque theme music to Kevin McCloud’s shameless baiting of the absolute cocks he’s showcasing. I wish it had its own channel.
Apparently, this isn’t being as well received as I would have expected, which is a shame because I think it’s one of the best-written, best-acted comedies on TV today (or at least since Black Books went shit). The fact that it’s about a bunch of socially inept geeks - thus mirroring my own existence - only makes me love it more.
TV Shows I just can’t get into
Battlestar Galactica
I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I just can’t get into this show. I think this means I have to hand in my nerd badge or something.
Veronica Mars
It’s nice to have a female-led teen-oriented drama show that doesn’t involve someone being a superhero or a total fucking flake. But I just couldn’t care less about this show.
ER
I used to love this show, but I’ve come to realise this was mostly down to my hetero boner for Noah Wyle. Now, not even John Leguizamo can save it.
As a film, Jarhead was as schizophrenic as the marine mentality it tried to convey. It swung wildly between occasional bursts of brilliant writing into lazy references to other war movies (oh yes, Apocolypse Now and the Deer Hunter, we get it). Sometime beautiful cinematography gave way to murky, uninspired, cliched imagery. Following the same template as countless movies before it, yet structurally, it was a complete mess.
But perhaps this is part of the point it’s trying to make and it’s done so subtlely as to be barely noticable. I’d like to think so, really I would. But the clunky, heavy-handed way in which it tried to make its other points leads me to believe that the word “subtle” does not exist for these filmmakers.
Okay, so I should be getting ready for Paris right now, but this is pretty big. After weeks of denying it, Nintendo finally announced that they will be launching a revamped version of the DS in late March. This new version will be two-thirds the size/80% of the weight of the original and the ability to set the LCD to four different levels of brightness (including the option to set it brighter than the original DS.)
My poor little Nintendo DS. We’ve been together a long time. You’ve seen me through some tough times, some God-awful transatlantic flights, and I’ve even grown to love your beauty-spot of a dead pixel. But I don’t know how much longer you have left.
Continuing this jet-setting lifestyle that I’m becoming so accustomed to, herself indoors and I are heading off to Paris tomorrow for a few days. This is mainly a way of making up for the fact that I was 5,000 miles away for her birthday earlier in the month, but also as a way of recharging our collective batteries (and it means I’m finally, FINALLY going to Disneyland, having been itching to go since it first opened).
If all goes according to plan, I won’t be anywhere near a computer until I come back. So things will be even quieter than usual around here. And it’s a shame, because I had so much to talk about. Like my favourite ascerbic journalist, Charlie Brooker, describing Adrien Brody as “a cross between Ross from Friends and a disappointed sundial.” Or the new trailer for the Silent Hill movie.
But all these will have to wait. I’ve got french people queueing up to be rude to me.
For a little while now, I’ve noticed that my netsource connection only sucks during the evening, when people are home from work, during which time it’s barely better than dialup. In the very late night and early in the morning, the connection is spectacular and actually comes close to approaching the “2MB DSL” it’s advertised as.
So, to put my theory to the test, I set up a cron job to wget a 1MB file from ftp.heanet.ie twice every hour. I calculated the average of the two hourly downloads and used that for my result.
And, well, the graph speaks for itself. The connection is best at 7AM, and worst at 6PM. At least this gives me some demonstratable proof of what I’m saying when I speak to Netsource about my connection.
A few months ago, I wrote about Snakes On A Plane, the high-concept thriller about uh… snakes. On a plane. The IMDB has recently updated its information about Sheldon Turner, the writer of SoaP. One of his upcoming projects is called The Breathtaker and its IMDB plot summary runs like this:
A small-town police chief pursues a serial killer who strikes only during tornadoes, brutally killing his victims in the eye of the storm.
Jesus. This guy is really working hard to redefine the term “High Concept”, bringing us into “Huge Concept”.
Also: I’ve started visiting Script Sales almost daily now. It always cheers me up to read about scripts whose log-lines describe them as “A monkey spy adventure in the vein of ‘The Bourne Identity.’”
I wish I could say it was more than just a coincidence that I’m in San Francisco at the same time as Macworld but unfortunately, I’m only here to help our company move its San Francisco office two blocks down the road. The move itself took place over the past weekend (and the few days before it), so for the last few days I’ve been running myself ragged trying to make the entire thing as seamless as possible. And, minor cable issue aside, the whole ordeal has been fine. We’re back up and running and I’ve got time to enjoy myself.
No gun issues this time. Actually, the whole trip has been rather subdued. Like I said, I’ve been pretty busy since I got here. Working 12-hour days has meant that I’m going hotel -> work -> hotel. Sleep -> work -> sleep. The jetlag hasn’t been given a chance to catch up with me.
Although it’s not all been work. I’ve still managed to find time to do some wandering. Being a huge nerd, I went hiking around San Francisco to find the offices of American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s production company. While I was out there, I took a trip towards North Beach, past the City Lights bookstore - the heart of the beat movement. And, naturally, also found time to do a little shopping. Current haul includes
But of course, the entire city has gone Mac crazy. Macworld is taking place just 10 minutes down the road from where I’m sitting. Today, as I’m sure you’re all aware, is keynote day. On the trip down Market Street, from Powell to First (roughly ten or so blocks) I passed 4 Starbucks, each one filled to overflowing with people on Powerbooks and iBooks, presumably waiting for Steve Jobs’ keynote to begin (sitting in one of the windows was that guy who laser-etched his powerbook).
Today I managed to defy the odds by surviving exactly 27 years. To congratulate me (or perhaps console me), people gave me some loot. Current haul includes
27 being the age of the Rock N’ Roll death, I’m starting to feel a bit bummed out by the increasingly long list of people who had completed their entire careers and went to that great gig in the sky by the same age as I am right now. I’ve got about another 11 months and 30 days left to make my mark on the world or else I’ll miss my window.
We’re almost finished in the office for the Christmas break. I’ve still got 15 days holidays to take this year. Except there’s only 3 working days left. See the problem here?
Every year, we spend forever deciding who takes the consoles home for the Christmas break. Since the “BAGSY THE DREAMCAST, DOUBLE STAMPSIES, NO REVERSIES” method isn’t particularly fair, and the stakes were particularly high this year, we held a Burnout 3 championship to see who would take the Xbox 360 home.
Well, I won.
To be very honest, I’m not interested in the Xbox 360. My TV isn’t nearly up to the task of making games like “Condemned” look pretty. But the title of “Burnout 3 Champion”? Oh boy. What a great Christmas present.
(Today, I also got crowned Mario Kart DS champion - sweet.)
The trailer for Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” has emerged from the ether with Kottke and others are pointing out how awful-looking it is. And true, at this early stage it’s like a heavy-handed mix of Terrence Malick and Baraka (but without any of the nice things such a mix would suggest).
He’s got a bit of reputation as a “prankster” director (on one of the making-of featurettes on the Braveheart DVD, you can see Gibson reading “Directing an Epic for Dummies”). But I’m going to say that this is just a ruse. Gibson has officially Lost It and is now certifiably batshit insane. As evidence for this, I present this image which you will find as a single frame cut into an intense part of the trailer. You’ll have to go through the trailer frame-by-frame to find it yourself.
Amazon wishlists have never really worked me. Too cumbersome to suit my way of doing things and too limited to suit the things I want a wishlist for. So last year, I began using the del.icio.us “wishlist” tag. If I saw something I wanted, it would get tagged under wishlist+$itemDescription, e.g. wishlist+dvds, wishlist+clothes and so on.
This means that I’m able to keep things out of my head while still keeping them in a central place, one I use every day. But more importantly, it gives me a quick list of everything my heart desires that I can access from any computer on the internet. On my recent, exciting trip to San Francisco, I was able to go into an internet cafe and print out entire shopping lists based on my wishlist tag, Unfortunately, this meant I came back with an armful of DVDs.
But around Christmas, this system really starts to show its strength because it has the advantage of giving people a quick overview of everything I’ve had my eye on. It paid off. My Livejournal Secret Santa bought me a book from the list - The Mafia Cookbook (Thanks Karena!).
I was in San Francisco less than 24 hours before a gun was pulled on me. I think that must be like some kind of record.
Yesterday, I took some time out from my aimless wandering to worship at the church of Apple. This place is scary-cool. It’s easy to see why people are so devoted to the Apple brand when you see this much care and love in one place.
I didn’t want to like this movie. Fifteen minutes in and I had made up my mind that this was just Spellbound meets The School Around the Corner by way of Come Dancing and I was too old and too cynical to be taken in by such a cheap ploy.
But then, around the thirty minute mark, something remarkable happened. These kids stopped being precocious little brats and started becoming likeable creatures. Watching Cyrus’ reaction to the results of the initial competition sealed the deal for me. Believe me when I say that we need to watch this kid closely because he is wise beyond his 10 years and almost certainly an evil genius in the making (the director says that when she first met him and discussed her movie with him, he asked if she had secured a production deal yet).
Against my will, I had become emotionally invested in these kids. Their different personalities began to shine through and, by the time of the dancing final, I felt like I was joinging their teachers on the emotional rollercoaster they were riding. And the swell of pride I began to feel watching the kids put in some amazing performances was almost embarassing. It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie.
Funny without lacking sincerity, sentimental without being po-faced. In spite of myself, I ended up liking this movie.
Found a copy of Ghostwatch lurking in Tower records the other day. 13 years since its first (and only) broadcast, it still manages to scare the pants off me.
I picked up a copy of Mario Kart for the DS over the weekend and have been having a great time ploughing through the 50cc and 100cc tournaments. How quickly my muscle memory has returned! Even cuter is the inclusion of some “retro” tracks - courses I haven’t played since my SNES packed it in almost 10 years ago.
One of the major draws of Mario Kart DS is the wireless multiplayer option. Mario Kart has always been about the multiplayer, and the idea of being able to race against people around the world (as well as DS-toting friends) is almost too much to handle. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get connected to the Nintendo Wifi service from home. Or I do get a connection, but it drops while searching for other players.
I’ve run a few checks on the traffic and it doesn’t seem to have a problem on my network. Now, I’ve heard rumours of Clearwire blocking a lot of stuff, mainly P2P and VoIP things, so this could be the problem. Anyone had any problems with Clearwire blocking stuff?
My girlfriend tells me that the reason she rarely wants to go to the cinema any more is because she’s become disillusioned with movies. This comes from sitting through the near-endless amount of dirge on show this summer. And you don’t register a domain like “low brow culture dot com” without being a fan of dirge, so I’m almost certainly to blame.
Apart from being extremely entertaining, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang assures us that there are people working in Hollywood with a genuine love for what they do. Shane Black has done an incredible job of creating something that will appeal to everyone: guns and car chases for the people that like that kind of thing, genuinely sharp and witty dialogue and a complex plot for the people who like that kind of thing.
And lots of beautiful people for the people who don’t like either of those things (including a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her appearance by the girl every guy I know has a crush on, Shannyn Sossamon).
My vote for film of the year.
Further reading:
Shane Black is a terrific screenwriter. For examples of this, you should check out his screenplays for Lethal Weapon and Long Kiss Goodnight. But the piece of resistance is his screenplay for The Last Boy Scout, which contains the following:
INT. DINGY DRESSING ROOM - NIGHT
>
> Cory and Jimmy are engaged in very hot sex.
> This is not a love scene; this is a sex scene.
> Sigh. I'm not even going to attempt to write this
> quote-unquote "steamy" scene here, for several good
> reasons:
> A) The things that I find steamy are none of your damn
> business, Jack, in addition to which --
> B) The two actors involved will no doubt have wonderful,
> highly athletic ideas which manage to elude most
> fat-assed writers anyhow, and finally --
> C) My mother reads this shit. So there.
> (P.S.: I think we lost her back at the Jacuzzi blowjob
> scene.)
>
>
I’m a huge fan of Gilliam, but I had heard enough about this movie to know what to expect - Gilliam at his most mediocre. But to be fair, the movie isn’t nearly as bad as people are making out. It’s got a lot of dud moments, far more than any other Gilliam movie I’ve seen, and it takes a long, long time to get going. But when it does (roughly around the third act), it is almost worth the previous hour or so of drudgery.
Think of it as a panto writ large and you’ll enjoy it a whole lot more.
Released under the Irish Film Board’s recent ‘microbudget movie’ scheme, Conor McMahon’s Dead Meat attempts to drag Ireland’s horror movie output from the ditch it was thrown in and left in to die by the insufferably bad Rawhead Rex. And although it was clearly lovingly crafted with a definite knowledge of the genre, it suffers greatly from its lack of understanding of the genre, or the techniques it attempts to mimic.
The premise, although just a rehash of countless previous zombie movies is still an effective way of presenting both a humourous and local view of the situation: BSE has mutated into something that first kills and subsequently zombifies anyone it infects. Having run into car trouble in the middle of farm country in Leitrim, Helena must escape and make her way back to safety while avoiding the hordes of undead (both human and bovine) roaming the countryside.
Somewhat unfortunately compared to Shaun of the Dead on release, Dead Meat is similar to Shaun in that it draws on its rich knowledge of horror movies to create a pastiche of the significant releases, such as Night of the Living Dead and Evil Dead. But unlike Shaun of the Dead, the makers of Dead Meat create their movie without any actual understanding of what made these movies so scary in the first place. As a result, they fumble many of the shots they are aping, sometimes missing by a hair’s breadth, but just as often they miss the point completely.
This would be forgivable if the movie had a solid story to support it, but this seems to be missing as well. The story stumbles from one situation to the next without any indication of a solid vision driving it forward. Without a compelling story, it’s left to the actors to bear the weight of the movie, and they’re just not up to it. It’s not until the final act, with the introduction of Eoin Whelan’s Cathal Ceaunt character that we’re given a something that is genuinely lively and entertaining.
The DVD also features a making-of documentary, which was actually more entertaining than the movie itself.
In the end, it’s hard to recommend this movie to people. Fans of the Zombie genre will certainly get something out of it, but what exactly, I’m not sure.
Smyths of Jervis Street have set up an Xbox 360 pod in their games section. The pod consists of an Xbox 360 in a perspex dome, a beautiful Samsung LCD screen and a couple of controllers. Altogether, these must cost a couple of grand a piece. Very nice pieces of kit.
But most interesting is the fact that they actually give you a chance to play some of the games. Right now, they’re only running the demo version of Ubisoft’s King Kong game, but I’ve been told that they’re hoping to get a copy of Perfect Dark Zero during the next week.
I stood in line for a while and finally got a chance to play a bit of King Kong, and I’m not all that impressed. Although the game looks very pretty with a lot of little graphical effects, and a really satisfying meat to the models, this game has actually got me worrying about the overall quality of the Xbox 360. There was a definite price to pay for this high-definition lushness: the frame rate was terrible, and the game frequently slowed down during particularly busy scenes (and let’s not even mention the questionable physics).
Running right next to the Xbox 360 running King Kong was an Xbox running… King Kong. This side-by-side comparison was most likely intended to show us all the things next-gen games have to offer over the current-gen, but had the opposite effect of highlighting all of the flaws: the Xbox version didn’t have the high-resolution textures, but ran well with a high frame rate and, most importantly, didn’t drop a single frame, meaning it looked nicer on the eyes and well, looked like a nicer game
There are still a couple of months left before King Kong releases on the 360, which means there is still time to tidy it up and fix these problems - let’s hope they do. In the meantime, roll on Perfect Dark Zero.
I’ve had a weekend or so to play with Clearwire. Here’s what I’ve noticed:
Speed
According to the Irish ISP speed test, I’m getting 2MB down, and approximately 300kb up. Sharing this among two computers isn’t much of a stretch: my girlfriend was able to comfortably run Software Update on her iBook (which hadn’t been updated in about 5 months) while I was able to maintain a 120kb/s download.
I’m not much of a PC gamer, but I’ve had no problems using Xbox live on Clearwire. Smooth, lagless gaming. Which means there’s no real excuse for me having my ass handed to me in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow except my lack of real skills. Dammit.
Setup
Setup was certainly simple. They just provide you with a little box, about the size of two DVD cases put together, that you just put near a window. It presents you with an RJ45 connection, and that’s it. No messing about with usernames or passwords. Usually my first instinct when you give me a closed black box is to crack it open and see how it works, but after three months of struggling to get broadband in our apartment, I’m really not going to push my luck with this one.
My only concern is at the user end of the RJ45 connection is a public IP, meaning your computer is connected directly to the internet. And I’ll be damned if I’ll ever put have a Windows machine directly on the internet. But no worries, the clearwire works perfectly with my Linksys WRT54G.
Issues?
Nothing too spectacular too far. The only thing I’ve noticed is a couple of DNS oddities - the DNS servers they give you seem to have trouble with a lot of hosts. For example, thefraudcast.com:
Reports are coming in of a working broadband installation in my apartment. Rumour has it that my girlfriend rang up the guys in Clearwire yesterday and they delivered the modem today - she just plugged it in and away she went.
(Incidentally, right now, her IRC conversation consists of “SO HAPPY”, “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE” and “THIS IS HOW LIFE SHOULD BE! EASY!” repeated again and again.)
Can’t wait to get home and get my hands on it. What will I download first?!!
Fatal Inertia will be one of the Playstation 3’s first titles. It’s being touted as a “futuristic racing game”, in which you whizz around canyons in super-fast aircraft blowing the other competitors out of the sky. So basically, a cross between WipeOut and the “pod racing” scene from Star Wars.
But what on earth were they thinking when they came up with that name? A while ago, myself and my friends came up with a “Random Shit Movie Generator” - take one ridiculous adjective, couple it with an absurd noun, throw on a couple of shit stars, and add a horrible tagline, and you’ve got the makings of a completely shit movie.
Example: Outlawed Fortunes“Ready or not, here he comes”
starring
Rutger Hauer & Beverly D’Angelo
Is that what the Playstation 3 is going to be about? The gaming equivalent of a straight-to-video movie?
More4 launched a few weeks ago, and already it’s become a major part of my TV-watching habits. Well, less than I’d probably like. My girlfriend doesn’t think Jon Stewart is particularly funny (and, Crossfire appearance aside, I tend to agree with her) so we tend to avoid that.
But the most surprising thing has been a massive addiction to Grand Designs. In just a couple of weeks, that show has become such a massive part of my TV viewing habits, I turn it on even if I’m in the middle of doing something else like cooking dinner.
I’ve thought long and hard about this. I think there are a couple of things going on here. First, obviously, is the actual building. Nine times out of ten, the people being showcased are the kinds of insufferable assholes that most likely had no other choice than to strike out on their own because no-one wanted these cunts for neighbours.
This works for me because I like shouting at the TV. And these episodes give me plenty of opportunities to turn the air blue from the amount of obscenities I’m hurling at these people with more money than taste. For example, Grand Designs Abroad recently a couple who built a god-awful wooden house in France because this the husband really wanted to become a writer and the only thing stopping him was the lack of a badly-designed house in the middle of a French valley. That episode gave me lots to shout about.
But it’s not always like this. As I said, this is only nine times out of ten. The other time is typically a really heartwarming, reassuring story about someone who really is chasing down their dream. Like the one last week of a guy who worked in a forest in England and spent ten years living in a leaky caravan while waiting for planning permission to build an organic house in the forest. The end result was something so pretty and beautiful that it absolutely brought a tear to my eye. That he built it all by himself, right down to the carving of the 16,000 wooden slates only added to the beauty of this episode.
But there’s another reason. And I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I think I’m developing a bit of a hetero crush on the presenter, Kevin McCloud. Don’t get me wrong - this isn’t a major thing. Certainly not like my hetero crush on Peter Gallagher (more specifically: Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows) or my full-on hetero boner for Noah Wyle. No, no. This is much simpler - I just like his little soliloquies. These are perfectly judged breaks from the chaos of the actual home-building, providing just the right balance of caution and hope.
I was thinking of dressing as Kevin McCloud for Halloween (other ideas included: Hellboy, Arthur Dent, Biff Tannen). There wouldn’t have to be much to the costume, but I would occasionally step aside and offer my own soliloquies about the party, pausing occasionally for emotional effect.
“People… Are the life and soul of every party… And this party certainly has people… But are they they right people? … And will it be enough?”
Shadow of the Colossus is the sequel to Ico, one of the most incredible games I’ve ever played. Ever. I can’t call Ico underrated, because everyone who played it agrees that it was, indeed, one of the best games they’d ever played. Ever. Instead, it suffered from woeful under-exposure and an apathetic market. Incredible word of mouth and a dedicated fanbase mean that pre-owned copies of Ico swap hands for approximately EUR50 on eBay. It still ranks as the only game I’ve ever played through more than three times.
And to say that I’ve been looking forward to its sequel would be an understatement. I’ve been poring over every video, awe-struck by the scale and enormity of the promise. [ has only made matters worse. From the review:
The game is being released today (October 18th 2005) in the US. Checking out when I can expect to get my grubby little paws on my own, European copy…
(Author’s own emphasis)
That’s two thousand and six. Might as well be two thousand and fifty. And this is why gaming in Europe sucks: all the localisation that needs to be done - manuals, box art, voices, interface - multiplied the 6 or so languages that Europe requires, means that we don’t usually get our games until much, much later than our American cousins. In some cases, like Animal Crossing, this can mean that we don’t to play the game for over a year and a half after its original release (even though there are typically perfectly good PAL releases in English for the Australian market).
Our office is reasonably thin, but quite long. It’s also broken up into three areas
Developer Room
Front office
Board room
The developer room is, obviously, where most of the action happens. It’s got an existing wireless connection, but since our office is so long, its range doesn’t quite extend to the front office. It would be nice if the people in the front office could also get access to the wireless network, since most of those people use laptops anyway. And since we’re kitting out the building, why not give the board room its own wireless access point too?
I didn’t think it would be unreasonable to assume that there existed a wireless access point that contained two “remote” APs, that weren’t actually APs at all, but simply extended the range of the main Access Point. This would mean that someone could connect in the developer room, walk the length of the building and enter the board room (where most of our meetings, both internal and external) are held, without having to disconnect and reconnect. Surely this would be a fairly common request?
Apparently not. I spoke to our supplier about this and he told me he never heard of such a solution. He said that most companies just make do with the disconnect - move - reconnect scenario.
There must be something out there like this. Has anyone heard of anything like it?
In the 18-odd hours between coming home from TechCamp and parking my bike in our building’s underground parking area and stepping out again to cycle into town, someone had managed to break into the underground parking area and run off with approximately five bikes (I’m guessing five because there were five mangled locks left where our bikes had been.)
I’m still pretty furious about the whole thing. But I can’t tell if I’m more furious at the guy (or girl!) who stole my bike, or our management company for recognising that there was a huge problem with theft and vandalism in our parking area and yet doing absolutely nothing to remedy the situation.
On Saturday, I jetted across to the Northside Civic Centre for the inaugural TechCamp. I gave a talk on “Getting Things Done” and moderated a discussion about “Using technology to improve our lives.”
So how did it go?
I thought my talk on Getting Things Done went okay, in spite of being time-limited to just giving a really brief introduction to the topic. The discussion didn’t go so well. I’d put this down to the fact that halfway through the thing, my mind started wandering down the more philosophical road of “What actually counts as an improvement, and what’s merely a convenience?” and just wouldn’t get back on-topic. Dammit.
The other talks were good. Tom Raftery’s discussion about blogs and marketing was quite interesting and eye-opening, even if I did come out with less of a clear idea of what “blogging” is all about than when I went in.
What went well?
Well, the casual, laid-back nature was nice. And it was really good to put a face (and a voice!) to many of the blogs I’d been reading. And some of the talks were really very interesting. The venue, in spite of its awkward location, was well-fitted out.
How could it have been better?
Well, one of the things that I thought that made (Foo|Bar)Camp so compelling was the participatory nature of the things. There didn’t seem to be as much of that at this one - although the talks were generally quite open and relaxed, it seemed to be pretty one way. Perhaps a communal project for the next one?
In the end, I think it was definitely worth getting up at 7.30 on a Saturday morning to cycle the 10-odd kilometers to get to. And a rollicking good start to something that I hope will continue for quite a while.
Stumbled across two articles about Steven Spielberg this morning.
The first comes from IGN, who discuss an interview he gave to the Hollywood Reporter, in which he says
A good movie will bring you inside of itself just by the sheer brilliance of the director/writer/production staff, but in the future, you will physically be inside the experience, which will surround you top, bottom, on all sides... I've invented it, but because patent is pending, I can't discuss it right now.
The second comes from the BBC, who report that Spielberg has signed a deal to work with EA on three games. From the article:
Steven Spielberg, who worked his magic with ET, is now looking do the same with games giant EA.
The acclaimed film director has agreed to develop three original games with EA’s Los Angeles studios.
Work has already started on the first of the three projects, which EA says will be a next generation game which appeals to a broad audience.
Perhaps the two are related, perhaps not. Anyway, let’s hope the results are a little more like The Dig, and a little less like The E.T. video game.
Positioning itself as a “true” marriage of narrative and interactivity, and promising a different experience each time it’s played, Fahrenheit has a lot to live up to. It’s a shame then that the game comes off something more like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” for the 21st century, except perhaps slightly clunkier.
Early on, the game seems to deliver on many of its promises. The initial flurry of interactivity appears impressive and leaves the player with high hopes for the rest of the game. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Regardless of what choices the player makes, the game remains largely unaffected. The game provides the illusion of a branching storyline where the players’ choices open new paths, but in truth there is just One True Path. This is most obviously demonstrated early on with the option to save a child who has just fallen into a frozen lake, with the police approaching. Choose to save the child and run away, the police find you - continue from last save. Save the child and run away in a different direction, and the police still find you (with the same cut-scene) - continue from last save. On my third attempt, I finally saw what the game wanted me to do. And it’s this distinction that holds the game back: it’s about what the game wants to do, not what the player wants to do.
In a recent interview, Ron Gilbert (creator of Monkey Island) condemned the idea of ‘interactive storytelling’, saying
...I don't believe stories should be interactive. I believe stories should be _participatory_... You're participating in my story, but you're not going to change it, because it's _my_ story. I have a story to tell you.
This makes a lot of sense, and Fahrenheit sits a lot better as a “participatory story.” Hackneyed script aside, it’s as immersive a game as I’ve ever played, and it’s quite capable of tearing away a few hours at a time, while comfortably providing plenty of opportunities to duck out of the game: a feature I wish more games provided.
But it’s not the looks that matter. If the DS has taught Nintendo nothing else, it’s taught them that they can sidestep the Xbox 360 vs Playstation 3 one-upmanship and make innovative, entertaining games by exploring other possibilities - shifting the emphasis from the “games” to “playing.” What’s more, it’s taught them that these games can be made for a fraction of the budget of games on other platforms.
This seems to be a lesson that they’ve learned well. Although the Revolution will certainly be powerful enough to churn out some staggering amount of polygons, it seems as if a lot of the emphasis will be on small ‘parlour games’, a la Wario Ware or Mario Party. Things like EyeToy and Singstar were great ideas and encouraged a lot of people to play games that wouldn’t normally because they were easy to pick-up-and-play - a quick burst of fun, rather than an epic challenge. But because these were niche accessories, they weren’t catered for to any great extent. Since this is the primary controller for the new Nintendo console, there’s no fear of it being relegated to that sort of niche status.
And this is the other important lesson here: games have, essentially, plateaued. Let me explain. My girlfriend is someone who has never played games, and she’s not going to start now. It’s not because she doesn’t like games, she does. She recently completed and enjoyed Silent Hill 2, but only through a system where she took on the puzzle/exploration parts, and threw the controller at me for action parts, or anything that required precise control. And that’s the lesson here: unfamiliarity with controllers is a major barrier to entry for new gamers. Once again, we can give the example of EyeToy as an example of something that worked because people could play it without requiring the type of muscle-memory that gamers have built up through years of practice.
But Nintendo aren’t just courting a new market with this idea. With this new controller, it opens a whole range of possibilities for people who are more familiar with games to engage them with new a new way to experience familiar games. For example, playing First Person Shooters like Doom 3 with the long, remote control-style stick acting as your gun or torch and direction controlled by the analog thumbstick. According to the IGN hands-on, this set-up is more intuitive than any currently-existing system.
But all this yapping won’t really do much good. For a much better glimpse of what Nintendo have in mind, you should check out their promo video, which gives you an idea of the various uses for the controller.
On Friday, I took off out to Wicklow for a wedding, and I come back today with a bruised liver, a slightly soiled suit, an ingrown toenail and mild constipation from the amount of rich food and drink I consumed over the past three days.
Three days kicking it around Greystones and Glendalough. Three days of sitting around Glendalough House, getting drunk on champagne and canapes, going for naps in the library. Three days of hanging out with people I only knew from their various neuroses. Three days of feeling like Uncle Monty.
It’s so nice to be back to normality. Don’t get me wrong, this was by far the most interesting party I’ve ever been to, never once veering towards “dull”, and I loved spending a few days feeling like a member of the landed gentry, but by 10pm on Saturday I was ready to kill someone for a Diet Coke that didn’t have alcohol in it.
I’m a huge Terry Gilliam fan. The Criterion edition of Brazil is one of the two DVDs I’m taking with me to the grave (the other being the Book of the Dead edition of Evil Dead). Even the stories of his glorious failures are more interesting than most people’s movies, as seen by Lost in La Mancha.
And that’s why his latest release, The Brothers Grimm, has me worried. So far, it has not been particularly well received by audiences in America, gathering an unimpressive 5.9/10 on IMDB - making this his lowest-ranking film yet. What’s more, it hasn’t been well received by critics either. Some of the reviews on Rottentomatoes paint a pretty grim (if you’ll excuse the pun) picture.
But what’s most worrying is Gilliam’s counter-reaction; he has labelled the film’s critics as “narrow minded”, even going so far as to say ““Everybody has their opinion - and some people are wrong.”
Of course, there’s no way I’m going to miss The Brothers Grimm when it opens here on November 4th, and I really hope I’m going to love it. But it certainly carries a certain amount of baggage, knowing that if I don’t like it, I’m “wrong.”
If you’re anything like me, and you’ve been feeling like your list of accomplishments has started looking a little sparse, and maybe you’ve been wondering when you’re going to finally get around to leaving your mark on the world (and if “stains” count as marks), then your day is about to get worse - the Moxie Cinema is finally opening on September 21st.
For over a year, Dan and Nicole have been struggling to open an independent cinema in their hometown of Springfield, MO. They’ve overcome financial and legal setbacks and worked their fingers to the bone - all of which has been excruciatingly and entertainingly documented by Dan on the Moxie Blog. Now finally, they’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
What makes all this slightly painful for me is that Dan is actually a year younger than I am. I have a year’s head start on him, but nothing to show for it.
Aw, just kidding. Best of luck to Dan and Nicole. If I’m ever near Springfield, I promise to drop by and show my support.
Regardless of how you try to justify it, Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D is a bad movie. Spy Kids 3D (the obvious comparison) was the weakest of that series and yet it still towers over Sharkboy in terms of plot and well… sense of fun. Even worse is that Sharkboy commits that cardinal sin of children’s movies: actually talking down to its audience.
And yes, I know it’s a kid’s movie and all, and I shouldn’t have high expectations but none of the kids in the cinema with me seemed particular engaged. In fact, most seemed bored by the story, although completely wowed by the 3D effect. The standout moment came for me when Lavagirl died (In children’s movies, all heroes are contractually obliged to die or appear to die) and some kid behind me shouted out “Deadgirl”.
It’s a really good idea, and it’s really encouraging to see people taking a pro-active stance with regards the things they’d like to see being done. Until now, the closest thing Irish geeks have to this kind of thing is the occasional LinuxWorld, which staggers between inaccessible to all but the most hardcore geeks and irrelevant to all but IT managers with huge budgets.
But, as it stands, TechCamp is suffering from an extremely blog-heavy proposal of events. Things like “How to blog”, “How to promote your blog” and “How to get others to blog” well… just aren’t of much interest to me. I’d rather see a more diverse agenda, one covering not only aspects of geek life, but of geek life in Ireland specifically.
Nearly four months after moving in, we’re nearing the end of our broadband saga. Smart sent us our modem and login details. So, I plugged the phone into the wall socket in our bedroom - no dialtone. There’s another wire coming up through the wall in our living room, presenting Cat 5 - I wired together a socket using the usual combination of blue -> red, white/blue -> green, but to no avail. In desperation, I yanked the face-plate off the wall socket in the bedroom and found that it wasn’t actually connected to anything.
Smart were very nice about the whole thing, merely remarking that the whole situation was “very unusual” (a very diplomatic way of saying “My word, you’re a moron for not checking this earlier”).
Either way, Eircom engineers are on their way out to us and we should be hooked up by next week.
Some spoilers included here. But since The Island is Michael Bay’s latest Big Dumb Action Movie, am I really spoiling much?
I don’t see how I could possibly run a blog called “low brow culture” and not like Michael Bay movies. Sure, he’s got all the subtlety of a jackhammer. And sure, his movies are based around explosive set-pieces, but you know what? I don’t care. He packs more visceral flourishes into two hours than most directors have managed in their entire careers. And since this is exactly what he’s going for, I say fair balls to him.
So, the Island.
I wanted to see this since I first read about it a few months ago. I mean, what’s not to love? It’s directly lifting pieces from a shedload of movies I love. Logan’s Run, THX-1138, the Matrix… Surely, with a bunch of explosions and car chases, The Island would be better than the sum of its parts.
It is. Barely. But what struck me more than anything else was the unrelenting stream of product placement in this movie. Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the brightest spark in the fire, and product placement typically whizzes over my head like a jet plane. So, the fact that I’m dedicating an entire blog entry to this just makes me think: Jesus, Michael. Couldn’t you have toned it down just a little?
These are all in roughly chronological order. If you spot any more, let me know and I’ll add them up here.
Puma
Barely three minutes into the movie, we’re greeted with an entire tray of Puma footwear. Lincoln Three-Echo appears to be missing a shoe. Now, this begs a couple of questions.
In a perfect society, where they can detect two people touching, how does a shoe go missing?
In a hermetically sealed world, why bother with branding at all?
Aquafina
Oh, how very droll. But this just brings up the issue of Question 2 again.
Xbox
Now, this is just baffling.
The movie is set in 2017 (or so). And yet they use the old Xbox logo. The one that got retired in 2004, and is being replaced by the new Xbox 360 one.
Within the story - Sean Bean proclaims how he keeps the products docile and without emotion. What possible purpose could there be for a game room that encourages fighting between fully 3D holographic representations of the characters? Don’t they know videogames are bad for you?
MSN
The nerd in me just wants to snort at the idea of MSN Search powering a city’s telephone system.
Microsoft
For me, this makes the least sense. If you look carefully, you can probably make out the Microsoft logo on the building in the background. I’m not sure if this building exists or not (I’m doubting it does), but either way, this is most certainly a deliberate inclusion. But it only appears on the screen for a fraction of a second - whizzing by far too fast for most people to notice.
Except those poring over every frame, looking for product placement, of course.
Johnny Rockets
Calvin Klien
This is either the most galling of the lot: having an actual ad play within the movie, or a really nifty post-modern idea using an actual Scarlett Johansson in a movie where she plays her clone. I’ll give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and say it’s the latter.
Michelob Light
Michelob recently launched “Michelob Light in an Aluminium Bottle.” Here it is. In the movie, it looks even more like a straight-out advertisment. The bottle provides the only colour in the scenes it’s featured in, as the camera reverentially zooms and pans its way around the bottle.
Samuel L. Jackson is one of the heroes of lowbrowculture, for the simple reason that he’s not too proud to take an awful job to pay some bills, or simply because he likes the sound of it.
In the next couple of years, he’s got two movies coming out that have grabbed my attention. The first is “Afrosamurai”, which tells the story of a Samurai who “seeks revenge on those who murdered hiss father in front of him when he was just a boy.” The other is “Pacific Air Flight 121.” Don’t let the dull title scare you off, it’s soon to be changed back to its much more impressive title of “Snakes on a Plane.” The plot outline reads “On board a flight over the Pacific Ocean, an assassin, bent on killing a passenger who’s a witness in protective custody, let loose a crate full of deadly snakes.”
Beaks: One of those films that you’re working on right now is… well, it’s called “Pacific Air 121” Jackson: Snakes on a Plane, man! Beaks: Exactly. Jackson: We’re totally changing that back. That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title. Beaks: Snakes on a Plane! That’s everything! Jackson: You either want to see that, or you don’t. Beaks: And how are those snakes? Besides being on a plane? Jackson: Some of them are aggressive, some of them are cool. They’re interesting to watch, and interesting to interact with. It depends on what kind of snake it is. One day, it took, like, four guys to bring in this 350 lb. Burmese Python. We were all like, “Where’s that goin’?“ And I watched an Albino Cobra strike airplane seats the other day. I watched it from another studio. It’s actually been a fun show. But we’re taking the name back!
In just under an hour, I’m leaving Dublin and heading to sunny Sligo for a weekend’s surfing and camping. According to Met Eireann, it’s going to be rainy and windy (42km/h). Perfect for the surfing part of the weekend, not so great for the camping part.
For the rain-delay parts, I’m bringing a few things to read:
Of course, there’s a very good chance I could die out there. Whether it’s from exposure, or at the hands of a crazed, knife-wielding maniac. Or maybe even in a really nonsensical, over-hyped way, Blair Witch-style. Or perhaps just from embarassment as I make a complete ass of myself on a surfboard.
Either way, if I don’t make it back, avenge my death.
There’s a discussion on Thumped about the merits of “visuals” at gigs/shows. Personally speaking, I’m all in favour of some sort of visual show to accompany the music, especially when the music of the particularly chin-stroking variety. Although I can see where many people’s complaints are coming from: it gets very tiring seeing the same handful of movies being chopped up to make a visual backdrop.
So that’s why I think something like EffecTV is such a good idea. Armed with a computer running Linux and a webcam, you can create some pretty interesting visuals in real-time, for a tiny, tiny budget. Installation (on Ubuntu, at least) was a snap. And it goes some way to providing a middle-ground for the people who don’t want to spend the night looking at a DJ nodding his head and people who don’t want to see the same old stock footage soaked in irony.
Here’s a shot of me playing with it earlier - not mind-blowing, but bear in mind that this was being displayed on my desktop in real time.
I recently bought another new DVD player - a Sony DVP-NS52. Both the Sony Store and Peats offer to make this player multi-region for an extra EUR20. I opted not to go for this and take my chances unlocking it myself (albeit safe in the knowledge that I could bring it into Peats and get them to unlock it at any time in the future for the EUR20).
Anyone with a region-locked Sony DVD player could do worse than to check out Selen.org’s Making the Sony DVP-NS705V multi-region before shelling out for a “chip” or anything like that. Although this didn’t list my model explicitly, it did say that it theoretically should work for the entire “NS” series, and has even worked across other models. I tried it on mine last night and success!
One note though - Windows 2000 and XP have nasty IR support. You’re much better grabbing a DOS boot disk from bootdisk.com and using that instead.
My girlfriend took off to Westport on Friday for a hen weekend, leaving me with an entire weekend to myself. By Friday evening, I had slipped back into the exact lifestyle I lived before I met her. Watching bad movies, eating food that would rot my teeth (and my gut) and playing games that would rot my brain.
Over the course of a single weekend, I watched nine movies (For the record: Children of the Corn I-III, House of the Dead, Jaws, the Incredibles w/animators commentary, Red Sonja, Exorcist III, Clerks). I also spent some time rearranging my DVDs. After trying a few standard organisational schemes (Alphabetical, chronological..), I decided to set myself a challenge and organise my 800+ DVDs by colour (and then by sub-colour, e.g. white background with red writing, white background with blue writing).
I’m not entirely thrilled with the results. Disappointingly, approximately 60% of my DVDs have either black or white sleeves, which means that our shelves look a whole lot more sterile than I’d hoped.
My favourite organisational scheme so far has been contextual - Robocop beside Total Recall beside Scanners (Paul Verhoeven directed Robocop, he also directed Total Recall, Total Recall has Michael Ironside who also starred in Scanners). Because the context is purely my own, it makes the whole thing more personal. This was fine when I had a couple of hundred DVDs, it could be done in an afternoon. At 800, I think I’ll need a week off work.
I also spent a while getting back into GTA: SA. Given the recent furor about the “Hot Coffee mod”, I’ve been shocked at the amount of stuff that people aren’t getting upset about. For example, a billboard with an image of a girl licking her lips suggestively and the words “A taste of what’s to come” that suddenly gets a hole ripped in it to change the words to “A taste of … come.”
Browsing around the cookery section in Chapters, I came across a book called “Potatoes: Mash and More.” Atkins be damned, I love potatoes and I’m always searching to make the perfect mash. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t reveal any previously-unknown tips, so my mash remains at “average”, but it does have a few other good ideas which suit my tasty-but-easy demeanor.
So last night, I decided to try out their “Potato Bravas”, with a few changes.
Ingredients:
(Serves 2)
10 small new potatoes
1 Chorizo, chopped into thin slices
1 medium onion chopped fine
4 tablespoons Olive Oil
2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoons Red Wine Vinegar
1 teaspoon chili powder
2 teaspoon “Cajun” seasoning
Salt
Preparation:
Preheat the oven to 220 degrees.
Chop the potatoes into 1cm slices and lay them in a baking tray, one row deep. Drizzle all over with olive oil and salt, and put it into the oven for 30 minutes, turning occasionally.
Make the sauce: put the olive oil, water, red wine vinegar, chili powder and cajun seasoning into a bowl and mix well. Add some salt to season.
In a pan, fry the onions until they’re opaque but not brown, then add the chorizo. Turn the heat down to a low simmer.
Pour the sauce into the pan and add the potatoes. Keep turning until the potatoes are completely covered and the sauce has reduced down.
Pour into bowls and serve with sour cream and salsa.
Now I have one less reason to go to the Market Bar.
A few things before I disappear for the weekend (still no broadband at home!)
BBBQ
The weather being unnaturally sunny and warm, and I being Irish and a slave to tradition, we’re having a barbeque tonight. As well as making tabbouleh, babaganoush, Moroccan pork chops and the old favourite: cheeseburgers, I’m hoping to approximate the taste of the chicken wings from Elephant and Castle, which are easily the best in Dublin (Magruder’s on Thomas Street taking second place).
Games
My copy of Everyone Loves Katamari arrived today, and I’m hoping to give it a good blast over the weekend. But my back-log has reached the point of panic. I’m also in the middle of playing:
God of War
Gameplay is fast and kinetic - you can literally tear your enemies apart in a shower of blood. “Contains Strong Bloody Violence” indeed. The sex mini-games are slightly embarassing, however.
Destroy all Humans
Bought cheap in Game. Not the most spectacular game ever, but worth the occasional look. Amazing physics though :)
Midway Arcade Classics 2
I bought this purely for Hard Drivin’_ and _NARC, two of my favourite games when I were a lad.
To top it all off, my girlfriend and I are playing Silent Hill 2 together (her: to prepare for the upcoming Roger Avary movie; me: because I just can’t play that game on my own).
Cycling
I bought a bike last weekend, and have been making the most of the freedom it has given me. It has broken the chains of lunchtime bondage - Spar/Centra/Mannings (virtually the only places to get lunch on Thomas Street). I’ve been zipping into Blazing Salads for lunch and eating it in Stephen’s Green, and have been gorging myself on their baked tofu and goat’s cheese pizza.
So far, I’m please to say that I haven’t really been in any major scrapes, touch wood (touches wood), but if you see someone on a grey bike whizzing past you and he looks like he’s not really paying any attention - watch out! And sorry!
Jason Kottkerecently changed his movie review system from a 100-point scale to a 5-star scale, claiming that a 5-star scale is easier for him to judge (he asks “How can there be a tangible difference between a 75 movie and a 76 movie?”).
This reminded me of something from Edge magazine a while ago. They did an issue where they got rid of the review score completely. At the time, they suggested that the score did not necessarily give an accurate representation of the nuances of the videogame they were reviewing.
As a reader, I found this issue especially interesting. One of my (many) bad habits is reading the review score first, then the body of the review. Without a score, I was forced to read the text to find out whether a game was particularly good or bad. This was definitely more challenging and informative than usual, since I tend to skip bad reviews completely, unless it’s a game I had high hopes for and wanted to see what the reviewer disliked about the game.
It seems Edge’s dislike of neat “scores” for games still continues. With their recent redesign (which has taken quite a bit of getting used to), they also revamped their “review policy”
Previously, it read:
Every issue, **Edge** evaluates the best, most interesting, hyped, innovative or promising games on a scale of ten, where five naturally represents the middle value. **Edge**'s rating system is fair, progressive and balanced. An average game deserves an average mark -- not, as many believe, seven out of ten. Scores broadly correspond to the following sentiments: zero: nothing, one: disastrous, two: appalling, three: severely flawed, four: disappointing, five: average, six: competent, seven: distinguished, eight: excellent, nine: astounding, ten: revolutionary
While I’m on the subject, I honestly don’t think Edge magazine gets enough praise. It was promoting “new games journalism” before anyone ever thought of giving it a name. Every month, it writes the most beautiful prose-poems about video games. It’s less a videogame magazine, and more a love-letter to video game culture.
A lot of people have started asking me “Do you have a blog?” I’ve been trying to play this down with responses like “Oh maybe, but you’ll never find it - try Googling for ‘John Kelly’” But people have been getting smarter: “Yeah, but what if I search for ‘john kelly’ and uh.. shit, cunt, prick dot com?”
I realised then that people are going to find this blog, whether I like it or not. They might spend a few minutes pumping the kind of obscenities into Google that would make a sailor blush, but they’ll eventually find it.
And my mother’s pretty well-read, she’s probably seen the recent piece about blogs in the Sunday Business Post. I’m sure she’s going to ask me if I have a blog soon. And when she does, well… I can’t lie to my mother, but then again, I can’t turn the air blue just by telling her my domain.
The third level of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, which takes place on board a moving train, is simulatenously one of the most thrilling and exciting and yet entirely frustrating levels of any game I have ever played. And as such, it is a perfect macrocosm of the game as a whole.
The level starts with your character, Sam Fisher, rappelling down from a helicopter onto the roof of a speeding train. From here, he has to get on board the train and locate one passenger, a suspected double agent named “Mortified_Penguin” (yes, the dumb name is even made fun of in the game). All this without killing anyone and, above all, without being seen - if your character is spotted by anyone other than Mortified_Penguin, it’s game over. Simple, right?
Since games tend to take their cues from Hollywood blockbusters, it’s fair to say that a lot of people playing Splinter Cell will be familiar with many of the settings, combat techniques and high-tech fuckery-foo featured in this game from watching James Bond and Mission Impossible movies. And although the Splinter Cell series had always aped its influences to a very high standard, it really hadn’t shown me anything I hadn’t seen elsewhere.
And that’s why this level took me completely by surprise.
Let me explain. Very few games have ever really attempted to do anything involving trains. The few that stand out in my mind are the train from GoldenEye (although that was just like being in any really long, narrow corridor and never once felt like an actual train). There was also a train level in Red Dead Revolver that attempted to recreate the atmosphere of the trainride shootouts from old Westerns. But on the whole, there are very few games that can support a “train”.
So kudos to Ubisoft for trying to actually give us something that behaved like a real train. When you first drop down on the train roof, your character automatically crouches against the wind. Pushing the stick forward, your character visibly struggles; straight movement is difficult, and he staggers around against the force of the wind. Stand up for an instant, and he’s blown back a bit. Jump and he’s blown off the train entirely, although why anyone would want to do something so obviously stupid is beyond me. Ahem.
Once inside the train, things get no more simple - each compartment is well lit and populated. When your goal is to remain completely unnoticed, both of these are immediate show-stoppers.
The first trolley is the storage area, patrolled by an inspector. There are a couple of lights here, and a locked door at the far end, blocking your exit there. Fortunately, there is a trap in the floor which allows you to crawl out and under to the next compartment.
So here’s where things get tricky. Shooting out the lights gives you an extra few feet of darkness to crouch in, unseen. But there is virtually no way to reach the trap in the floor without being seen by the guard. I know: I’ve tried. I tried again and again. I must have retried this one particular compartment roughly a dozen times before I discovered what I was supposed to do: knock out the guard.
But I didn’t know that I could do this. In the previous level, your character meets up with an informant in a locked room with no obvious exits apart from an air vent, which brings you to another locked room. After 10 minutes of running around, trying a few things, I started to get frustrated. I spoke to the informant again, my character asking him if there was any way out. “Do you think I’d still be in here if there was?” I asked again. And the game started repeating this one conversation again: “Is there a way out?” “Do you think I’d still be here if there was?” “Is there a way out?”
So I hit the informer.
Just a quick punch, that’s all. After I did this, I crawled around for a while and finally spotted the gas-vent I was supposed to shoot to open up the way to the extraction point. At the end of the level, my character’s boss gave out to me for killing the informant. But wait a minute - I just punched him?! Obviously, my punches are lethal!
So, it was in a similiar burst of frustration that I hit the guard. This time, no boss giving out to me for killing him. How come my punches only knock this guy out? Is he made of sterner stuff than the informant?
Through the floor-trap and onto the next compartment, and there are similar issues. I wait until the guards finish their conversation and run for the door - I’m spotted. I try again, doing the exact same thing as before, and this time I’m not spotted.
From there, I climb outside the train and inch my way along the side of the compartment, trying not to be spotted by anyone and also trying to avoid being knocked off by a passing train.
And so on, and so on, until finally I meet mortified_penguin. He tells me he has to make a phone call, and I’m my orders come in to follow him and listen to his conversation using my “Laser Mic” - a telescopic microphone which the manual tells me “works by picking up microscopic vibrations, especially from glass.” So I stand outside the door of the compartment where the conversation is taking place and point the laser mic through the glass, but I get nothing. I’m told I failed the mission, try again. Only when I go through the door and use the laser mic from close-range do I complete this part of the level.
This lack of consistency is apparent in virtually all areas of this game - from the videogame tradition of only having some doors that can open, there are also some lights that you can shoot out while others can take a grenade and still shine. And it’s this lack of consistency that ruins the game’s ultimate objective of completely free-form gameplay.
Anyway, back to the train.
The level ends with a brief firefight on the train followed by your character climbing onto the roof again and running down the full length of the train to climb onto a rope hanging from a helicopter, all this while an enemy helicopter is shooting at you. Thrilling stuff - arguably better and more innovative than anything Hollywood has given us.
But I reckon, in all, I must have restarted this level 20 times, because each time I was forced to use trial-and-error rather than a consistent set of rules to complete each section. When restarting a level becomes second-nature, it’s time to start asking questions.
Koyaanisqatsi has no plot. Nor does it have any characters or dialogue. Apart from the credits and a translation of the Hopi prophecies from which the film takes its name, it includes no text nor attempts at explanation. By all accounts, it’s not a movie at all.
But it’s the most extraordinary movie I’ve ever seen.
My first experience with Koyaanisqatsi came when I was about 14. My art teacher in school – a lovely guy whose heart was in the right place, but just could not control a bunch of teenagers – spent an entire class raving about this movie, and eventually brought in a book of stills to “inspire” us, but these didn’t do any justice to the movie so my imagination remained unsparked. But when I began to see its name used as an adjective, I knew it was something I had to check out.
I never did. In days before DVD, it was just too hard to get a hold of. I could have imported it with no small amount of trouble, but it was so costly and the quality of my VCR was so awful from years of abuse, it never seemed worth it. So when I got my first DVD player (first generation, baby!), this was the first thing I imported. When it arrived, I called up a friend of mine who was also interested in seeing it and we made an evening of it.
We giggled at the beginning. Uncomfortable giggles: Is this it? Pictures and music? What’s the big deal? But the film just starts off slow; fifteen minutes in, it started building up to an acceptable pace, and our jaws started inching towards the floor.
I’ve since noticed how much of Koyaanisqatsi’s images and visual techniques have been repeated by other movie makers, but none have managed to achieve such amazing results. The visuals are, at worst, stunning. At best, they are absolutely breathtaking. Filmed by some of the best cinematographers in the world, everything is in such a way to add extra gravitas or a new layer of meaning to the subject matter. For example, a long panning shot of a waterfall gives you an extremely effective sense of the scale involved - likewise, a time-lapse shot of people getting on and off an escalator demands that you view this everyday activity in a completely new way.
Likewise, Philip Glass’ score is equally incredible. It is easily the best and most accessible of all his works, and stands apart from the visuals as a beautiful piece of music in its own right. The story goes that director Godfrey Reggio presented the movie to Glass for scoring. Glass composed a score to fit the movie, and sent it back to Reggio. Then Reggio re-cut the movie to fit the score a little better. Then Glass changed his score slightly to fit this new cut of the movie. And so on. I can’t think of another movie where this has happened on such a grand scale
By the time the film finished, myself and my buddy looked at each other and realised our jaws were still on the floor. We’d experienced something completely new to us: a movie as art. Art as a movie, beyond the casual lip-service thrown thrown about for “experimental” movies like Warhol’s 8-hour film about the outside of the Empire State Building.
I fell in love with Koyaanisqatsi that day. I think I watched it three times that week, never once getting bored and each time discovering something new. I still come back to it every few months, especially when I’m drunk - there’s something especially fascinating about this movie when my brain isn’t going at full speed. I remember saying that I don’t take hard drugs, but Koyaanisqatsi made me want to start, just so I could take advantage of a fucked-up view of the world to see this movie in a whole new light. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey’s “Stargate” sequence on a whole bunch of new drugs, and you’re in the right ballpark.
The comparison to 2001: A Space Odyssey is useful because besides both movies presenting a really strong case for recreational drug use, there is a message at the core of both movies. Both are, essentially, social allegories. Koyaanisqatsi has a very deep message telling us about our past, our present and our future. On one of the DVD extras, Reggio explains that he didn’t want to hit people over the head with his message - he dislikes movies that attempt to force a particular message or opinion on its viewers, so he doesn’t mind that, sometimes, people miss Koyaanisqatsi’s central message completely.
And that’s okay, because they’ll still have experienced one of the most beautiful films ever made.
The Arisocrats is a movie about one joke, breaking the record for “Least amount of jokes in a movie”, previously held by Team America.
Wikipedia explains the joke well, but here’s the basics: it’s a non-joke. An in-joke among comedians. The start is always the same, the punchline is always the same, so the joke is all about the creativity put into the depraved, obscene stuff in the middle (I’m no expert, but I’d say that the South Park guys currently hold the record for obscenity).
And so to the movie - a documentary featuring 100 comedians explaining their own personal version of the joke, as well as the history of the joke, and the relevance in a society at odds with the “limits of free speech”. The movie was co-produced by Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame) and features, among other things the amazingly obscene George Carlin, the amazingly funny Eddie Izzard and uh… Carrot Top.
In other documentary news: I know my birthday is months away, but there’s an Errol Morris DVD Collection coming out that would look fabulous in my house, don’t you think?
We had a vegetarian friend coming over for dinner, so I had to quickly throw some stuff together. This is a variation of a Salsa Verde. If I was making it again (and not catering for a vegetarian), I would probably include the more traditional ingredient of a few anchovies.
Bag of new/baby potatoes (6 potatoes per person)
Jar of Pickled Gherkins (3 gherkins or so)
Handful of Parsley
Jar of capers (a small handful of capers)
Zest & Juice of 1 Lemon
Salt & Pepper
Olive oil
Red wine vinegar
Preparation:
Bring a pot of salted water to the boil.
Cut the new potatoes into reasonably small chunks, about the thickness of your thumb, put them into the water.
Chop the parsley really fine
Chop the gherkins really fine
Put the parsley, gherkins and lemon into a bowl and mash them (use a pestle and mortar or even food processor if you want)
Pour in a good dash of red wine vinegar
Pour in enough olive oil to make the paste runny but still thick
When the potatoes are cooked, drain most of the water (leaving a little bit in there to be soaked up). Keep the potatoes in the pot with the leftover water.
Pour in the paste and shake the pot, making the potatoes slightly fluffy at the edges. This helps the potatoes collect and absorb the sauce.
Since moving apartment, I’ve had to change my route to work. Now, I walk down the road beside the Guinness Brewery - Watling Street, which takes me onto Thomas Street.
In a city full of foul-smelling streets, I would like to nominate Watling Street as the foulest. Imagine the smell of a pub at closing time. That smell of spilled beer starting to congeal and sour. Now imagine that condensed to the point where it causes you to gag. And throw in some sewage gas for good measure. That’s what Watling Street smells like.
It’s so bad that I’m considering changing my route to work - going five minutes out of the way just to avoid going down this street. I just can’t put up with the flash headaches and nausea caused by that awful smell.
Or am I wrong? Could there possibly be a worse-smelling street?
I crossed a humped bridge and came into an abandoned carnival which was being dismantled. As I wandered around checking everything out, I came across a second-hand book stall and sitting there, selling books by some guy called Eugene Stanford1 (who looked remarkably like Jerry Garcia) was Steve Jobs.
I was overwhelmed, and shook his hand enthusiastically. He was polite and chatted for a bit. I decided to press a little further, beyond the normal smalltalk of a starstruck fan.
‘“How did you do it, Steve? You were 20 when you started Apple. You were in the prime of your life, and you were devoting 18 hours a day to your dream. How did you maintain that focus? How did you maintain relationships with those around you?2 I mean… I’m spending my time worrying about shelves and varnishing and things like that. I’m not pursuing any of my dreams. I haven’t accomplished anything. How did you do it?”
of course, having read The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, I know that he didn’t really manage to maintain relationships with those around him during the start of Apple ↩︎
There’s an old saying in software development that says that “Every application expands to the point where it can read mail” - even if the software started as a way to get away from reading mail.
When it was first introduced by Merlin Mann, the Hipster PDA was a bit of an anomoly. Its analog, low-tech approach to task management and organisation was something unexpected and interesting. It ditched all of the fancy padding we put around our personal productivity and stripped it right down to the bare minimum. Perhaps that’s why it caught on so well.
For the uninitiated, the Hipster PDA is simply a stack of 3"x5" index cards held together with a binder clip which functions as a notebook, to-do list, calendar, shopping list, whatever you need. Breathtakingly simple.
Over at a million monkeys typing, Douglas Johnson has released a “Hipster PDA edition” of his popular “DIY Planner” pages. In this, he includes
GTD quick reference card
Covey Planning quick reference card
calendar of the next two years
few month planner cards
weekly planner card
a few “day keeper” card
“GTD all-in-one” card
next actions/agendas/waiting for
a shopping list
a “finances” list
and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Now, maybe I’m completely missing the point (and let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be the first time), but this is looking more like my packed, hardback diary/planner than the Hipster PDA as Merlin originally described it. It has, in effect, returned a lot of the padding that the Hipster PDA took away. It has, in effect, expanded to be able to read mail.
I’m not trying to say that the DIY Planner isn’t a good idea, because it most certainly is. All of its blank lines and empty tickboxes made me shiver with excitement at being able to fill them in. But it lacks the beautiful simplicity of the Hipster PDA – the very thing that, for me, made the Hipster PDA unique.
Talking Heads were the first band I was can remember being “aware” of.
I mean, I understood music in a general sense. I understood “songs”. I understood that there were songs that scared the crap out of me (I used to challenge myself to listen to Ray Parker Jnr’s theme from “Ghostbusters” in the dark, alone. I don’t think I’ve managed to do it yet) and I understood that there songs whose videos made me laugh (Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life”). But I really didn’t understand the concept of “bands” until quite late.
When I was about four or five, my sister - ten years older than me and a die-hard Prince/Adam Ant fan - challenged me to name the bands I liked. So I named “Talking Heads”, the only band I was aware of.
“Arty wanker.”
(I was five)
It wasn’t until much, much later that I understood what she meant. Talking Heads did their best to skirt the line between art and commercialism, occasionally pushing one more than the other. Sometimes this produced something difficult and awkward (like the deliberate nonsense-language of “I Zimbra” on “Fear of Music”). But sometimes, it produced something beautiful. Like “Stop Making Sense”.
The few concert videos that stand out as something special do so because the artist and the director have a clear definition of what they want to achieve (and both have the talent to support it). Other examples, such as Prince’s Sign O’ The Times and Scorsese’s The Last Waltz are both as entertaining to watch as movies as they are to listen to. Stop Making Sense represents a band at the peak of their abilities with enough of a vision to, if nothing else, produce something completely unique.
I’ve always been just a casual fan of Talking Heads. I’d never seen Stop Making Sense, but I thought I’d gotten everything I could out of their music. Until a few weeks ago. I was at a Skinny Wolves night in Bodkins. At these things, they usually accompany the music with movies projected on a big screen without the sound - things like the Clash’s Rude Boy and Devo Live. This particular week, they were showing Stop Making Sense.
Now, it may have been the copious amounts of booze sloshing around my system, but I was completely mesmerized. I must have come across as a rude sumbitch because I think I spent most of the night ignoring all attempts at conversation. I was completely transfixed by these bunch of complete… well, there’s no other way to put this… geeks doing the coolest things I’d ever seen on stage.
Throughout the entire thing, David Byrne moves his gangly body in strange, hypnotic ways. And the entire band puts out enough energy to power the show themselves. For example, the entire band jogs its way through Life During Wartime. During the guitar solo, David Byrne jogs around the entire stage, again and again and at the end, goes back to singing without being even slightly out of breath.
There are set changes, costume changes, instrument changes, but none of it seems forced. It seems progressive. It gradually, sensibly builds up. Rather than blowing its load right at the very start (like U2’s technically impressive Zooropa and Popmart tours), Stop Making Sense has a structure. It starts off with David Byrne coming out to a bare stage in a suit, with an acoustic guitar and boombox, and announcing to the crowd that he’d like to play a song. He launches into a version of Psycho Killer that is so different from the album version as to be almost unrecognisable.
For the next song, part of the band comes out. For the next, the backing singers come out. And so on. By the end of the show, there’s a small country on the stage.
And, like Psycho Killer, each song on Stop Making Sense is radically different from the album versions which makes them instantly compelling. And more significantly, they’re arguably better than the album version. When it came to producing a “Best of”, Talking Heads chose to present two songs from Stop Making Sense instead of their album versions, that’s the kind of quality we’re talking here.
It’s easy to understate just how amazing this movie is. Even if you’re only a casual fan of Talking Heads, I’d encourage you to hunt down this movie and be won over for yourself.
Reading an article about how Europe is falling behind on open-source, I can’t help but think of the recent ICT Expo, which took it on itself to dish out “Industry Excellence” awards. Except it got so much wrong, it wasn’t even funny. It looked more like a bunch of old boys meeting together to congratulate each other than an actual representation of the Irish IT industry.
Ignoring all of the other categories and just focusing on the “Open Source Project of the Year”, we can instantly see that there’s something very wrong here. The two nominations were
Soft Telecom
Enovation
Soft Telecom
I have no idea what these guys do. Or did, since currently their website redirects to their Ensim administrator page. So, regardless of exactly what kind of open-source project they’re undertaking, this hardly reflects any kind of “Industry Excellence” so far.
Enovation
When the winners were first announced, I looked very hard, but couldn’t see what exactly Enovation actually did. If they provided open-source software, their site certainly didn’t mention it. Now they’ve got a large banner which explains exactly what they did to win the award - they set up Moodle for a college.
That’s it.
I mean, Jesus. This is frightening.
But thinking about it, what else is there? ILUG is a useful resource, but not particularly pro-active. Likewise, BUGI has been spluttering its way into actual usefulness for the past few years. OpenEir has potential, but is still in its infancy.
Are there any significant Irish Open Source projects?
Nintendo Revolution’s classic Nintendo games will be free
Nintendo, who have been keeping quiet in this round of “Our console will have hi-def” “Ours will massage your feet while you play!” have dropped a bombshell in the form of massive amount of backward-compatibility for free! They will be releasing almost every game they published for their previous consoles as a free download, available from the launch of their new console, the Revolution. This includes things like Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Zelda II and one of my favourite games, Uniracers (Unirally over here). Miyamoto (the creator of Mario and Zelda) has said that he’s tired of sprawling epic games and is appealing to developers to create something unique and fun (but not neccessarily huge or big-budget) for the Revolution. I guess this is Nintendo paying attention.
Update: Full list of games available for download
My copy of Difficult Questions about Videogames was waiting for me when I arrived in work today. This should give me plenty to chew through for the next couple of days, at least until GTA:SA and God of War arrive and start soaking up all my free time.
Update: A few pages in, and I’m convinced of something that I’d always suspected - Kieron Gillen needs to find himself an editor.
I’m almost finished moving to my new apartment. It’s not quite time to crack open a beer and relax, but almost. In the meantime, I’ve taken my pastimes out of their temporary hiatus and once again started playing games (the beautiful, memorable Cruise for a Corpse via the wonders of Dosbox) and reading (Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You). Although I’ll probably end up writing something about Cruise for a Corpse later, I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to say about Everything Bad is Good for You.
The last book I read before the move was Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City, a book about the theory of town planning. Most of that book is spent teaching us new ways to look at cities and helping us develop a new vocabulary for describing cities and town planning - most memorably, it introduces the idea of a city’s imageability. Dan Hill took this concept and applied it to videogames in his amazing essay Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality - I would encourage everyone to read this, regardless of whether or not you are interested in videogames.
Stephen Johnson does something similar in Everything Bad is Good for You (EBIGFY). Like Lynch, Johnson also tries to teach us to look at videogames in a new way and give us the vocabulary to describe video game concepts. Johnson accurately and eloquently sums up the positive aspects of videogames beyond the oft-repeated “improves hand/eye co-ordination” nonsense, such as teaching us the art of making sense of chaos in order to achieve a game’s objectives (he calls this practice “telescoping”). He also describes, on a physiological level, why we enjoy playing games in spite of the fact that they tend to frustrate us for 90% of the time.
Although his section on videogames is barely 35 pages long, it provides a more succinct and lucid essay about the merits of video games than I’ve yet seen from actual videogamecommentators.
My girlfriend and I have been apartment-hunting for the past couple of weeks. We saw a fantastic apartment yesterday up in Stoneybatter that ticked all of our boxes (and a few we didn’t even know we had, like a Smeg fridge). Possibly the only thing I didn’t like about the apartment was the lack of a phone line.
We just got word today that the landlord is offering the apartment to us. Hooray! There’s a two-week overlap between our current place and the new place, so this gives us plenty of time to move our stuff up there and get everything ready. Since my girlfriend and I are both nerds, I figure it might be a clever idea to use these two weeks to arrange for some form of internet connection to be installed.
I was thinking of checking out Irish Broadband first, because it elimates the need for a phone line. But does anyone know what IBB’s service is like? Any horror stories?
When we moved into our current place, I asking IBB if they could provide service for us. The guy actually laughed down the phone as he gleefully told us “We’re not taking any more customers on that node! We’ve got enough! haha!” So, if IBB isn’t a goer, we’ll just have to bite the bullet; get a new phone line installed and go with one of the “traditional” providers. Any recommendations? Smart? Esat?
There is something intrinsically fun about playing with your food. Children understand this. And we tell them not to do it because.. well.. we were taught not to do it and, goddammit, if we can’t do it, we won’t let anyone else do it either. So there.
This is why I love meal-making with mince. Making mince mushy. Alliteration aside, when I’m preparing a meal out of paste that was once recognisable as meat, I’m instantly transported back to my youth: I’m 5 years old again, creating a mess with mala. Except my meat creations taste marginally better than my mala ones.
I’ve made a couple of batches of meatballs now, but the ones I made during the week were the first ones where the ingredients felt right. And best of all, it was thrown together in less than a half an hour when I got home late and wasn’t really in the mood for anything too complicated.
450g pork mince
kielbasa sausage (or any smoked/spicy meat)
clove garlic
wholegrain mustard
half an onion
1 teaspoon tabasco sauce
lime leaves
salt & pepper
Chop the onion really, really, really fine. It doesn’t have to be evenly chopped, a few larger bits here and there add to the texture. But it still needs to be thin.
Similarly, chop the sausage into really, really, really small cubes. As small as you can. A good handful should do you.
Crush the garlic with the side of your knife and then chop it fine.
Throw the onion, sausage and garlic into a bowl with the pork mince along with two teaspons of the wholegrain mustard and about a teaspoon of the tabasco sauce.
Roll the lime leaves in your fingers to crush it, then chop it to make sure it’s extra-fine and add it to the bowl. Season the mix generously.
Now the fun part - mush the whole thing around until you get a consistent paste. All the ingredients should be roughly spread throughout the entire thing. Roll the whole thing up into little balls. There’s no rule as to the size of these, but I’ve found that they should fit in the palm of my hand, not on the palm of my hand. Does this make sense? Bear in mind, the size of the balls will affect the cooking time.
Pour a good amount of oil (olive oil won’t splash, vegetable oil will) into a decent non-stick pan and get it good and hot. When it’s ready, start adding the meatballs. You’ll never have a completely round ball, so I’ve found it’s best to cook these on one side, until they’re on the point of burning, then flip them onto another side. When they’re a dark brown on most sides, you can start turning them more regularly, to cook the inside.
Serve in some noodles with some chicken stock (Knorr do my favourite store-bought chicken stock right now).
This is still very much beta - use at your own risk
Today, I set about teaching myself the basics of web scraping, with the intention of putting it to some good use. Coincidence or providence, I read Kottke’s post about creating an ical for summer movie releases, and immediately thought of a personal itch I could scratch.
The Irish Film and Television Network provide a list of Irish Theatrical Releases, but this is just one big flat HTML file that is only marginally helpful. It still relies on me to remember to go to their page and see what’s out and when. It would be much more useful if this information was somewhere I tend to spend a lot of my day looking - say, my calendar program - and even more helpful if it was somewhere I could carry it around with me - say, my phone.
Well, now I can. Using various combinations of bash, sgrep, awk and sed, I created a script that will automatically grab the “releases” page of IFTN.ie and export it as an .ics file, which can be read through iCal/Sunbird, and from there, synched to my phone.
IFTN’s listing page is braindead. I can’t help this, and my script can’t predict its unusual behaviour. For example, why does it have two release dates for “Kicking and Screaming”, one on June 3rd, the second on July 29th? And why does it randomly have two “2005"s after “Fever Pitch”?
This is my first real time creating a .ics file. I ploughed through RFC 2445 for pointers, but I might have commited some mortal vcalendar sin without knowing it.
Tim O’Reilly suggests that at least part of the reason for Amazon and Google’s success comes from their open API. This allows people to access their information in ways that fit people’s individual needs (“rip, mix, burn”), giving them a massive advantage over monolithic proprietary apps. He gives the example of their own use in O’Reilly - they monitor the “technology” section of Amazon’s books for how well their books are doing, their prices vs. their competitor’s prices, what new books have been released and so on. With Google, we’re seeing this as it happens as people continue to extend maps.google.com to tie in with other services, such as Flickr, producing Geotagging.
Well, the BBC must have been listening. Yesterday, they launched BBC Backstage, which is set to provide a one-stop-shop for all of the BBC’s web content, from their RSS feeds to their Search API (not available yet). Most interestingly for the casual user (read: non-developer), they’re also using this as a way to track the ways in which people are using the BBC website, such as providing a way for people to provide their own “external links” for stories, or giving stories del.icio.us-style tags.
I look forward to seeing what sorts of things people come up with.
There are, perhaps, a handful of “hard” science fiction movies in the world. By this, I mean movies whose primary goal is to challenge the viewer rather than to entertain. Movies like Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” ask more questions than they answer, and this is part of their appeal. Strange, then, that one of the finest examples of a “hard” science fiction movie should come from the same man who defined the family-friendly summer sci-fi blockbuster extravaganza - George Lucas.
The history of THX-1138 is a fascinating one, but one which I’m not going to go into detail about here (for a concise history, check out the THX-1138 DVD or Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”). But a quick summary: THX-1138 started life as a studen film, becomes the first finished piece of Francis Ford Coppola’s “American Zoetrope” hippy commune/production company - other films on their “to do” list included “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now”. Warners, the distributors took a look at it and balked, yanking all of American Zoetrope’s funding, re-editing THX-1138 to make it more audience-friendly ("Put the freaks up front" was their suggestion for improving this movie). Lucas bought the rights back and re-released it the way he wanted it.
Phew.
I first saw THX-1138 when I was a teenager on a dodgy VHS copy that got passed around my nerd friends like a holy relic. And to be honest, I didn’t know what to make of it. I could understand the dystopian themes, but couldn’t understand why there wasn’t an actual story - where was the needless exposition? The convenient explanations for viewers? To tell the truth, I wasn’t all that impressed. Things like “Brazil” and, of course, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, were much much more my cup of tea. Dystopian world-views with bleak endings. THX-1138’s ending was so vague as to be unintelligible.
So I completely forgot about THX-1138, except for spotting the references in other Lucas movies. To me, the film itself was more a curio for fans of Star Wars than an enjoyable movie in its own right.
When it was released on DVD last year, I decided to check it out again. This time, it was the version Lucas originally wanted to see, and more. Lucas, master of revisionism, had decided to add more bits to this movie. After killing a lot of what made Star Wars enjoyable, I wasn’t hopeful. But still, one Saturday morning, I decided to watch it.
And it started to make sense.
First of all, 99% of Lucas’ digital additions are worthwhile. They serve to enhance the movie, flawlessly working their way into the background, where you barely notice them, but help give the entire film a greater sense of scale. The major changes, for the most part, also work well. For example, they turn the completely underwhelming “corridor of people” into a truly terrifying “tsunami of people”. So, in terms of not completely ruining the film with his boner for extraneous CGI, I think Lucas deserves a little respect.
But as well as these cosmetic changes to the movie, something changed within me. I finally “got” the movie. I remember a similar experience with “2001”; years of seeing it and thinking “What’s all the fuss about?” finally gave way to “Holy shit! This is amazing!” I could finally look at THX-1138 and see exactly why there’s no actual story. Why there is no needless exposition. I’m completely enamoured with this film. I love the look of the movie, the style of the movie. The sound design is incredible and unrelenting.
And now, the ending makes perfect sense to me. And it’s easily as sinister and bleak as Brazil or Nineteen Eighty-Four. Perhaps more so: he finally does escape, but to what?
It seems that THX-1138 will never really get out of Star Wars’ enormous shadow but for me, I’m glad I finally found that it is an enjoyable movie in its own right.
Cleaning out some old books, I came across something I’d completely forgotten I’d bought. “Manners for Men” by Mrs. Humphry, published 1897.
From the chapter “In the Street”:
In meeting acquaintences a nod is sufficient for a male friend, unless his age or position is such as to render it advisable to raise the hat. Should a lady be with the acquaintance, any man meeting them must raise his hat. So must the individual walking with the lady. The etiquette of bowing is a simple one. Male acquaintances always wait for acknowledgement on the part of the female, as well as from those men who are their superiors in age or position. But this does not mean that they are shyly to look away from them and to ignore them. On the contrary, they must show clearly by their manner that they are on the look-out for some sign of recognition and are ready to reply to it. Shyness often interferes with this and makes a young man look away, and this is occasionally misconstrued as indifference and resented as such. The calm, quiet, collected expression of face that suits the occasion is not achieved at once. Sometimes the over-anxiety to make a good impression defeats itself, producing a blushing eagerness better suited to a girlish than a manly countenance. This, however, is a youthful fault that is not without its ingratiating side, though young men view it in themselves and each other with unbounded scorn. This sentiment of self-contempt is a frequent one in young people of both sexes. Their valuation of themselves varies as much as the barometer and is as much affected by outward causes. After a “snub”, real or fancied, it goes down to zero, but as a rule it speedily recovers itself and in most young men enjoys an agreeable thermometer of 85° or so in the shade!
The Digital Hub is once again throwing an elaborate, extravagant exhibition, and once again, they’re focusing on video games. Ordinarily, the Digital Hub’s exhibitions are of little interest to me. They remind me of the time during the the dot-com boom when the company I worked for threw large cocktail parties every week, inviting all their friends around to come and get drunk for free. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves as much as they can without drawing attention to the fact that the emperor is stark bollock naked.
However, their talk about censorship caught my eye for a number of reasons, not least of which the fact that I was invited along by one of the panelists. The first, and hopefully last time I’ll ever be on an email distribution list with Ryan Tubridy.
The talk was actually quite interesting, in spite of the fact that not a whole lot was actually said. Well, there were a lot of words thrown about, but not a lot of points were actually made. This is especially true of the speaker from Trinity College who spoke for ten minutes without saying anything that hadn’t already been said. There was a lot of roundabout talk about self-regulation and the importance of classification, but one of the key issues – the one of “what have we got to protect the children from” – seemed to get lost in the discussion.
Most astounding were the comparisons being made. Karlin Lillington, a fairly tech-savvy young lady, made the comparison between parents letting kids play violent video games and parents letting kids drink alcohol. Likewise, someone else made a comparison to physical/sexual abuse of children.
I mean, let’s not get carried away here, guys.
Although, in the case of alcohol, it seems like an obvious link (giving children access to something they’re not supposed to have), neither of these comparisons hold up to any kind of critical thinking, and only serve to further confuse an already-complicated and emotionally charged issue.
Another thing that came up was America’s Army, one of the most-quoted examples of the dangers of videogames because of its primary use as a ‘recruiting tool’ for the U.S. Army. Although it certainly is a recruiting tool, it is not used to help show people how much fun it is to kill things in the army - if you weren’t already inclined towards joining the army, this game would most certainly not persuade you. Instead, the U.S. Army hope that people who are already predisposed towards this kind of behaviour will play the game, and when they finally do sign up, the recruitment office can instantly call up the player’s stats, to see how well their potential recruit did.
Towards the end, I think everyone was in agreement that censorship was the wrong way to approach this issue, and that classification and education were the way to go. A particularly funny moment came when one of the organisers found out that GTA gives you the ability to have sex with prostitutes, then beat them up and get your money back. “My teenage boys play that game, and I never knew about that.” Cue many sheepish looks when it was pointed out that this game was rated “18”, and her boys shouldn’t have been playing it in the first place. But how does one classify a game like Spore, for example, which is so completely open-ended that virtually anything is possible?
The debate about regulation raised an interesting question, and one that I’ll be thinking about for quite a while… how exactly does one educate parents? Point of sale education isn’t good enough. Part of the problem comes from the perception that “games” are the same as “toys” and, as such, all acceptable for kids. How do we convince parents that there are games made explicitly for adults?
Since we’ve got broadband again, I’m finally getting to play with all the nifty things I’d had ideas about, but no way of executing. The first of these is a local Instiki server at home.
I use this all the time in work for note keeping and simple project management. At home, I’m finding a hundred different ways to use it.
Like keeping track of recipes.
I like to try out a whole bunch of different recipes. Nothing too fancy - I don’t make my own chicken stock or anything like that - but I do try to go beyond the simple food strategy of meat-and-a-tin-of-sauce. This doesn’t always go to plan. The most recent food-related disaster was my attempt at making a chicken maryland, which turned out squishy and odd-tasting. Live and learn.
Using instiki, I threw together a “web” called “FoodWeLike”, where I’m keeping track of the ingredients of the recipes that work for us, as well as simple cooking instructions. This is mainly useful because we have a central repository of ingredients and recipes (instead of trying to remember which cookery book had what), but any web server (or file server) could do this. Instikis is particularly useful because as well as a way to easily edit these, it gives us the ability to easily categorise the recipes any way we like - for example, “We really like”, “We occasionally like”, and “We don’t like”. We’re also able to organise these into weekly meal plans. And, most usefully, plan our weekly shopping run using a page called “ShoppingList” where we can just paste the ingredients from other pages, or update as we run out of something.
And this is just one a hundred ways Instiki is useful in a domestic environment. Well, our domestic environment.
(By the way, I know this could probably be achieved using any wiki software, but I’m specifically choosing Instiki because of its simplicity of installation and also because, right now, I have a major boner for apps built with Ruby on Rails)
I’m putting it down to a momentary lapse in concentration.
Esat told us our line went “live” on Friday, so I spent a while trying to remember what my username and password was. I must have spent a good half hour trying various combinations (It turns out the username goes in the form of $username@iolbb, not @iolbb.ie as the salesman told me).
So when I finally did get the right combination, I was so thrilled at having broadband at home again that I left the laptop for a few minutes to go bop around the room. I must have bopped for less than 10 minutes before I realised I’d left a Windows machine connected directly to the internet.
Too late.
And so, my first few hours of broadband are being spent de-fucking my laptop. It must have five different types of spyware on there, and no one tool is catching it all. Although, loathe as I am to admit it, Microsoft’s Antispyware has, so far, been the best, having already caught four things. There are still a couple of other things left on there, if I’m reading windump and ’netstat -ao’ right.
I’ve been playing with Blender on and off for a couple of years now, and have only recently become confident enough to use it for showing things to other people. I’ve found it’s an amazingly useful tool to have around, if only for the amount of design work I get asked to do. Recently, I used it to create a pretty swish rocket ship logo, which was eventually scrapped because it was too similar to something a competitor used. (As a side-note, I often wonder if our competitor’s rocket was also created as a result of an over-indulgence in Tintin. I guess we’ll never know).
Here’s the first things I’ve posted over on Blender’s community website elysiun. It’s part of a series I’ve been working on, rendering NES characters in 3D pixels.
Eidos recently unveiled the ’new look’ Lara Croft, which was greeted with a mixed response in the gaming community. Some cried “WHERE ARE HER BIG TITS GONE?!!” while others said “Okay, we like where you’re going with this. You’ve got our attention.” I think I was somewhere in the latter camp.
My interest in the Tomb Raider Franchise dropped off around the time they made the move to the Playstation 2. The games had lost their way, moving from a ‘Tomb Raider’ to ‘Generic Action Girl’. “Run around the streets of Paris!” the press-release for Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness cried, “Chase across roofs!”, “Use stealth!”. Well, yes. That’s all well and good, but there are a hundred games out there, doing the running-shooting action and stealth thing a whole lot better than a game that was famously rushed by the publisher.
I first played Tomb Raider on the Saturn. One of the few advantages to owning a European Saturn (since we missed out on all the hundreds of fantastic 2D shoot-em-ups released in Japan) was the release of Tomb Raider a full six months before the Playstation version. And it was breathtaking. Even without a lot of the graphical lushness of other platforms, it was still jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Vast levels gave a fantastic feeling of space. The action was spot-on (even if the story wasn’t), and the music was unlike anything else in video games at the time.
The recent iterations have been either a diluted mix of the things that made the first game so magical or an unmitigated disaster stemming from the developers try to “re-invent” the “brand”. Ultimately, the original developers’ complete failure to do anything spectacular with the franchise led to the publisher (Eidos) yanking the game from them and giving the task of developing Tomb Raider 7 to Crystal Dynamics - previously known for Project Snowblind and uh.. uh.. The videogame of 102 Dalmations?
Thankfully Crystal Dynamics seem to understand what went wrong with recent Tomb Raider games and are bringing the franchise ‘back to its roots’ in Tomb Raider Legend by taking the focus off Lara and putting it back on the gameplay. So, Lara’s tits are smaller and the levels (looking suitable Tomb-y) are apparently huge and magnificent, and very reminiscent of the early games. And even more reassuringly, they have brought back the music from the original game (if the background music on tombraider.com is anything to go by).
She won’t be making the cover of The Face again (because the magazine is gone, but that’s beside the point), but there’s definitely still life in the old girl yet.
According to Yahoo!, GameStop are buying Electronics Boutique, for “only” $1.44 billion (compared to Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia for $3 billion, this doesn’t seem like a lot).
I can’t say I’m thrilled at this. The level of competition in Dublin’s retail video game market is already virtually nil. GameStop’s arrival last year through the purchaseof Gamezone killed one of the few independent retailers left in the country. Now, since Electronics Boutique own Game, and now GameStop owns Electronics Boutique, it means that GameStop has control of 95% of retail video game outlets in Dublin.
The few places left to buy games (with some value - meaning Dixons and Argos are out) are:
Smyths
Xtravision
GameXchange on Talbot Street (mainly second hand stuff - snes/megadrive)
??
I generally don’t like buying games over the internet. I’d like to say it’s because of the hassle of sorting out returns if the game is damaged in any way, but the truth is that it’s just because I’m an impatient little shit who can’t wait a week for delivery when he could pay just a couple of euro more to get it today.
But with GameStop’s mark-up fast reaching epic proportions, it’s looking like there’ll be no choice soon.
UPDATE
After a bit of hunting around, I found this on Yahoo:
“On January 30, 2004, [Electronics Boutique] terminated our services agreement with Game Group initially established in fiscal 1996”
So it looks like there is still a little bit of competition left after all.
Every couple of days, the hard drive of the G4 I use in work starts “clicking”. Well, more like ‘ke-CHUNK’ing. If I’m lucky, my computer freezes for a few minutes and comes back to life. If I’m not, I spend the next half hour or so rebooting until it goes away.
Finally, I’m facing up to the fact that my hard disk is dying and until I can get a replacement, I’m without a Mac to work on. So I’m giving Ubuntu a whirl.
One of the biggest complains thrown around about “free” software is that it’s only free if your time is worthless. The hours wasted getting things configured just the way you like them do add up. It’s very easy to spend an entire day tweaking your desktop instead of just acccepting what you have and getting on with your job.
The guys in Ubuntu seem to understand this - they’ve packed Debian (the smart choice of a Linux distribution) in such a way that they take all the pain out of the installation and day-to-day administration.
My personal experience is that Ubuntu has detected almost everything I’ve thrown at it - sound and video were auto-configured (and in a nice way too, any previous attempt at auto-configuring my video in the past has left me with a headache-inducing 60hz refresh rate and no obvious way to change it). Bluetooth setup was relatively painless (gnome-bluetooth and gnome-phone-manager took care of this). Today, it even auto-detected my USB keyring and auto-mounted it, putting a link to it on my desktop.
But there are also some things I dislike about Ubuntu. For example, the default behaviour for nautilus (the file manager) is a variation on the new “spatial” nautilus. When you go into a child directory, nautilus closes the parent window automatically. I love spatial nautilus, but hate this behaviour. After a little bit of playing around, I found that it could be changed with the following:
evolution has some really nice new features aimed at increasing productivity, including an ability to create a task from a message with one click
liferea has a ‘condensed view’ option for feeds, a feature I’d previously praised in Pheeder. Even better, this is feed-configurable, so you can set only certain feeds to use the ‘condensed view’. Liferea is still my favourite RSS reader on any platform.
beagle is amazing - I know that something similar is going to be available in Tiger, but… wow.
But I still miss Quicksilver. Gnome Launch Box just doesn’t cut it.
A couple of weeks ago, on the recommendation of a couple of food blogs (101 cookbooks being the big one), I picked up a copy of Nigel Slater’s Appetite.
I think I’m in love.
I already own a few cookbooks. Standard fare like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. Then things like 1000 Quick and Easy Recipes. And Good Mood Food. And they have all, without exception, bored me rigid.
You see, I’m not much for following instructions. I was brought up by people who were quite happy to boil/roast the shit out of every meal. This taught me that not everyone’s palette was the same. And from this, it taught me that slavishly following recipes is no way to create a meal. Especially when you’re just cooking for yourself - how do I know my tastes are going to be the same as Jamie’s? (For the record, they’re not. His recipe for Chicken Maryland made me quite ill).
In comes Nigel Slater.
His book explains everything I knew instictively about cooking but had never heard from someone who actually knew how to cook: recipes are not gospel and should be used only as a guide. He reminds us that recipes were originally used by chefs to keep track of where the housekeeping money was spent. And as he so correctly points out, being told to “put it in the oven for 35 minutes” will not give the same result for everyone, since everyone’s setup is different, everyone’s meal is different. Everyone’s palette is different.
Another thing I love about Nigel Slater’s book is the straightforward way he presents his food. There is no trace of snobbery in his writing. In fact, he writes as elegantly about the delights of a Big Mac as he does of any of his other recipes. Lines like “there is nothing wrong with using a stock cube, not all stock has to be home-made” have led my girlfriend to refer to the book as “vidication” for all the frilly “domestic goddess” nonsense being thrown about by other food writers that make us normal people who can’t spend all day reducing stock feel slightly boorish for turning to Knorr for some help.
Also unusual about Nigel Slater’s book is the way the writing lends itself to casual reading. Unlike the other cookbooks in my collection which have a brief introduction and go straight to the recipies, Slater’s book has a conversational tone, and almost half the book is given over to best practices - how to best cook a steak, how to best store food, and how to best enjoy your food. This leads to Appetite being the kind of book you can pick up and read at any time, not just when you’re looking for ideas for something to cook.
I also can’t argue with anyone who extols the beauty of a simple sausage and mash done well.
And with that, my first attempt at a homemade ragu.
A Simple Ragu
(“Simple” in this case meaning “made with things we had lying around in our kitchen”)
If you’re like me, you probably buy a load of ingredients with good intentions and never get around to using them before they go off. The three main culprits for me are tomatoes, mushrooms and cheese. So last night, I decided to do something about this. I decided to make my own ragu.
For this, you will need
Plenty of tomatoes (12 or so small ones)
A large onion (or a couple of small ones)
Balsamic Vinegar
Garlic
Basil
Dijon Mustard
Dried Chillis
Get a few cloves of garlic (I’m fond of garlic and used 3 large cloves, which didn’t overpower the flavour of the rest of the ingredients), and slice them very thin. As thin as you can.
Then cut the onion, as thin as you can. If you’re no good at cutting onions, or want to improve your onion-cutting skills, you could do a whole lot worse than checking out Peter Hertzmann’s article on “How to cut…”.
Finally, cut the tomatoes into small chunks about the size of a jellybean. Keep every part of the tomato, don’t try getting all fancy and de-seeding it. We’ll need everything.
Warm a good, solid non-stick pan and in it, melt some butter with a little olive oil to keep the butter from burning. When it starts to warm up, throw in the garlic and fry until it starts to brown. Then add the tomatoes and onions.
You’ll need to keep stirring the tomatoes until they start to get really mushy. This should take about 20 minutes. Then season well with plenty of salt and black pepper.
Right now, you have a very basic ragu. From here, it’s up to your individual taste. Personally, I was in the mood for something with a little kick, so I put in a bit of balsamic vinegar, basil and a heap of dijon mustard. I also put in a good helping of red wine. To spice it up, I crushed some dried chillies and put them in too. Once you’ve added your last incredients, you should leave it for another 10 minutes or so before it gets really sticky.
This is perfect for putting over your favourite pasta. If you want to mix in some mince, you should put your ragu through a blender first, and cook it with the meat for about 20 minutes until the meat soaks up all of the flavour.
If you do decide to try this, comment and let me know how you got on. Although don’t worry, I’m under no illusions as to how many people are going to try cooking something they found on a random website.
Right now, the Wordpress site is unavailable, and I’ll bet cash money it has a lot to do the recent kerfluffle over the seedy business practices Wordpress has begun engaging in.
Since my blog is powered by Wordpress, I’m slightly disappointed in this. I chose Wordpress as much for the quality of their politics as the quality of their software. Even more disappointing is Wordpress’ unconvincing response to the criticism.
A couple of months ago, I posted that our DSL went kablooie. And now, a couple of months later, it’s still down. Here’s the story of what happened.
Early February - Get home to discover that although our DSL modem is connecting and giving solid green lights all the way, when we try to actually log into UTV, we get a “remote host not responding”. Phoned UTV immediately, and they reckoned it was a modem problem, and that I should try out a few things and then report the modem as “broken” to receive a replacement
next day - modem can’t even connect any more. Permanent state of flashing green lights. Phone UTV support and they tell me that it’s something more than that. I should ring back in a couple of days.
A couple of days later - I phone back and they say they’re going to get Eircom to test our line. This should take 5-8 working days.
two weeks later, around the end of February - I phone UTV back, and they say that the line check revealed that Eircom had disconnected our DSL line. Why? I don’t know. UTV support guy says that this sometimes happens by accident, and sometimes it’s an accounts issue. Our account was fine, so it wasn’t that. Advises me that I should ring Eircom to find out why we were disconnected.
Next day - Phone Eircom to find out why we were disconnected. Person on the other end was most unhelpful and wouldn’t tell me why. I asked if I could speak to someone else to find out why. They assure me that noone would be able to tell me why I was disconnected.
So I phone UTV and tell them that Eircom won’t tell me why. They say they won’t arrange a reconnection until they know why we were disconnected, so that they can be sure it won’t happen again. I explain that Eircom won’t tell me why. UTV’s response (paraphrasing here): “Not my problem.”
A couple of days later - Phone UTV again. No movement. Told that even if UTV were to reconnect me, it would take fully 10-14 working days to reconnect me.
A week later - I flip out at the lack of help from either side and email sales@u.tv to ask them to sort this mess out (if you’re wondering why I emailed sales@u.tv - I was informed that the UTV accounts department is the exact same as the support department. Since they were spectacularly unhelpful, I thought sales might be more interested).
5 days later - No response at all, so I have a minor panic attack and tell UTV that their lack of cooperation or understanding on this matter was completely unacceptable and that they should cancel my account immediately. I get a reply within the hour telling me my account was disconnected.
yesterday - Since Smart aren’t going to be launching their broadband in my area until early may, I’ve signed up for Esat’s three-month broadband trial. This is initially 1MB, but will be increased to 2MB come April 4th (with no increase in the cap - but we’re only going to be using this for a month or so). I botched my application and decided to try again some other time.
today - Got a phone call from Esat saying they saw that I’d been trying to apply for their broadband, and if I’d like to go through the application over the phone with them. After all the fucking around with UTV, I was genuinely taken aback by the friendly, helpful service from Esat.
Hopefully, we should have broadband in the next 8-10 working days.
A while ago, someone asked me who my favourite actors were. I started rattling off some names – Ron Perlman, Bruce Campbell, William H. Macy – and I was stopped, and asked who my favourite big name actors were.
And I don’t really have any. I love character actors.
I think I love them because they can pop up in all sorts of unsuspecting places. Rather than watching a movie almost exclusively because it has Johnny Depp in it, it’s nice to watch a movie and suddenly have a bunch of people go “Hey, no way! It’s that guy from… oh, what was it?”
An unsung hero among character actors is Stephen Tobolowsky. A “hero” because he is so incredibly prolific: I believe he holds the record for starring in the most movies in the 1990s. Unsung because almost noone remembers his name, and he’s doomed to be forever known as “that guy from.. uh.. Groundhog Day!”.
Hopefully, Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party will change that. The trailer makes light of his relative anonymity - Stephen Tobolowsky asking various punters who they think “Stephen Tobolowsky” is. The answers range from “A Russian Scientist” to “Serial Killer” by way of “Porn Star”.
It was completely unlike all of the other Pixar movies - it was grown up, had something resembling an original plot (Watchmen comparisons aside) and its production design was beautiful.
I picked up the DVD over the weekend. I still haven’t gotten around to watching the movie, because I’ve been spending my time over on the second disk, watching the ‘making of’ featurettes.
Even these are completely unlike the other Pixar ‘making of’ featurettes. ‘Finding Nemo’ gave us fluff - people like Lee Unkrich and Andrew Stanton telling us how fantastic it was to make this movie, and gee whizz, isn’t Pixar just great? On The Incredibles DVD, Brad Bird and various other Pixarians explaining how hard it was to make this movie. At one stage, they even show a fight between Brad Bird fighting with a producer to justify the cost of a particular scene: something I’d never seen on a DVD, let alone a Pixar DVD.
It’s a fascinating set of featurettes, but the highlight for me came in the form of a closeup of their tools. The idea of building a rampantly successful motion pictures using Makefiles makes my tiny nerd heart flutter.
The BBC are reporting that Irish cinema is set to go digital with the announcement that all cinemas in Ireland are to have their traditional film projectors replaced with digital projectors.
I would love to have some dates on the rollout of these kinds of things. Major directors like Michael Mann and George Lucas aside, ‘digital filmmaking’ has been relatively slow on the uptake. Perhaps this is the kind of kick in the ass it needs.
Personally, I’m thrilled at this. Aside from the technical issues, such as flickering and scratches and disjointed sound (which happened at the screening of Hotel Rwanda I saw in UGC - completely jarred me out of the movie), the major improvement I’m hoping this will bring is a quicker turnaround on movie releases here. Ireland traditionally has to wait in line to receive film reels as they do the rounds. For large films, such as the recent Hellboy or Incredibles, this wait can be as long as six months.
With digital filmmaking eliminating the needs for individual reels to be printed up, it eliminates that excuse.
Although I’m sure we’ll still have to wait in line to download the 1TB that will make up the movie.
Two years of sitting on a shelf with a mental note of “must complete, someday”, I finally got around to playing Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. And for two weeks, every spare half hour was spent playing that game, beating various bosses, sailing the seas digging up treasure, talking to everyone I met, amassing a veritable horde of spoils.
Now, after a long day in work, I’ve turned on the Gamecube and dragged my favourite chair closer to the TV only to find the game asking me “yes” or “no”?
It didn’t say what the question was. What could it be? Load the game?
I choose “yes”.
“Please wait…”
Hmm. My muscle memory spasms a little, telling me that this isn’t the way I load my game in Wind Waker. Flash of panic. What have I done?!
“Done!”
And I’m taken to the quest screen.
Three empty slots. Three “New quest” buttons, empty as the day they left the Nintendo factory.
My game is gone. All my hard work. All my emotional attachment is gone. As if to pour some salt on the wounds, I checked gamefaqs, to see how far I had to go to the end of the game. Not far. A couple more shards of the Triforce and I’d be fighting Ganondorf once and for all. All gone.
Now.. I don’t know what to do. I tried launching straight back into it, but there’s so much to do. My sea chart is empty, my spoils bag is.. hang on, I don’t even have a spoils bag yet. I resent every conversation with every character, so I don’t talk to anyone. Even more, I resent conversations that I must have to progress in the game. The unskippable nature of them grates over me. Things that were beautiful and magical, even the cute little cut-scene where you change the direction of the wind and Link whips his head around - all these things are like nails across a blackboard.
And so it’s going back on the shelf for another two years.
“Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer” and my question is, what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from, and how often do they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo HQ?” – Greg Castikyan
Greg Costikyan recently posted a transcript of a rant he gave at a GDC roundtable talk on the topic of game production. The panel were speaking about how the cost of game production has risen to the stage where it is actually prohibitory for publishers to fund developers that aren’t working on licensed or recognisable IP. In it, Greg talks about how J Allard’s GDC keynote filled him with dread - the idea of welcoming in an era of HD video games with massive production costs, increased workload for developers and no additional profit for anyone but the games publishers?
He’s right to be afraid.
But there seems to be a bit of hope, from an unlikely source.
Flash gaming.
No, hear me out.
Although it’s never going to take over the world, we’ve reached the stage where people have had enough of creating silly games based around hitting/pissing on/killing celebrities and have begun exploring the medium’s creative possibilities. And although they’re just short, 5-minute bursts of gaming, they’ve been creating a bit of a buzz on among the internet community.
This was the first truly addictive flash game I can think of. Although it’s almost 4 years old at this stage, it’s still a lot of fun to play. Simple premise - fly your helicopter, don’t crash. I doubt a lot of people would pay a lot of money for this, but just think how many hours were lost to this game in offices around the world.
Beautifully introduced by Metafilter as “If Rube Goldberg and Terry Gilliam made flash games, they might go like this”, Treasure Box showed that Flash games didn’t have to just simple affairs. Although there isn’t actually much gameplay in this to keep people entertained, there’s enough eccentric beauty to keep people fascinated.
Skills to pay the bills
Okay, so we’ve got some good flash games out there, so what? Well, some bright sparks out there have figured out a way to make money out of very good flash games and because of this, we’re seeing the beginnings of a resurgence in the shareware games scene.
Gish is a platform game where you control a ball of tar. Using Newtonian physics (and some physics-cheating constructs), you guide your ball of tar through various obstacles to reach the end of the level. Because of its unique and superbly crafted nature, it has won all sorts of praise. But here’s the rub - the developers of this game are actually making money from it because of its shareware nature (play the basic levels online, pay $20 for the full game). I don’t know how much, but I’m sure it’s nothing to be sneezed at.
What started out as a flash “tribute” to Half Life 2 (or a way to stave off the boredom until the game was actually released, depending on who you ask) is now available for purchase through Steam. Codename Gordon: Half Life 2D is a beautiful thing - embracing the limitations of flash gaming and turning them into a feature.
Like Codename Gordon, Alien Hominid started off as a way for a group of friends to create a simple game and hopefully sell it. It started off as one of a hundred games on popular flash site Newgrounds (play the original) is now being released on the Xbox, PS2 and Gamecube. And what’s more, it hasn’t been significantly changed during the transition - it still retains the same look and play mechanics.
Of course, none of these are ever likely to compete with the likes of Resident Evil 4 or Gran Turismo 4 in the battle for the hearts and minds of the casual gamer, but they do go some way to showing that there is a distribution channel for these simple flash games and, providing your game is good enough, that money can be made from them.
How much money? Well, that remains to be seen. Certainly not enough to retire and live the rest of your life with cocaine and champagne enemas. But enough to keep your games sustainable?
Maybe.
Like these flash games? Want to get some more examples? Do yourself a favour and check out gotoAndPlay.it
Update
Ren Reynolds posts a rebuttal to the GDC roundtable. His conclusions are similar to mine - for all of those who are bemoaning the death of innovation in games, there are other options.
Too busy in work to find time to write anything of substance, so here’s a quick list of the most nerdy things I’ve been doing over the past couple of days
Installed GeekTool
After hearing so many people praise GeekTool, I finally installed it last week. Then I configured the MySQL access list on our RT database in work. Now I have a list of my open issues on my desktop - cool! I wonder if there’s any (easy) way of colour-coding this list.
New DVD Player
Dixons are selling a Philips DVP630 for a measly EUR99. This is a fantastic player that will play just about anything you throw at it (VCD, SVCD, MP3s, JPGs, DivX and DVDs). It comes locked to Region 2, but Amazon kindly provide a guide to unlocking this player.
GDC 2005
Interesting things from GDC this year include
A trailer for the new Zelda (link goes to HD version), sporting a heavy Lord of the Rings influence.
Microsoft’s announcement of “pay-for-download-able content” on the next Xbox. Puerile armchair opinion: Fuck that.
Episode III
Went to see the preview of Constantine over the weekend. I thought the film itself was a disgrace to the big-dumb-blockbuster name, but never mind that. During the trailers, they showed the trailer for Episode III. This trailer has me salivating, and seeing it on the big screen had me giddy for hours.
Okay, so maybe the title of this post is just a little melodramatic. I could certainly live without them. In my fits of whimsy, I sometimes imagine a life where I got rid of all my software and all my computers and went to live in a cabin in the woods with a typewriter, only peeking my head out long enough to release some bone-crunchingly beautiful prose like Annie Dillard or something.
Until that day, here’s the five pieces of software I couldn’t live without
I don’t like Word documents because they’re mean and nasty and hard to access and I tend to get so bogged down in making my documents look pretty, I never get anything actually written. At the same time, I don’t like text files because they’re so plain and isolated and static. Yet I need some way to keep track of a lot of things.
Enter Instiki.
Just a small personal wiki site that lets you keep all of your documents together. It has all of the advantages of a full website such as links to other places and documents, and the ability to view it from anywhere but with more like an easier markup language (I am fluent in MarkDown) and an easier management interface.
I use my Instiki to keep track of work projects, personal tasks (e.g. “Move bank account”) and various other notes that I want to keep in a local place, such as my personal “wishlist” of all the fancy stuff I want to buy myself.
Quicksilver is like a remote control for my Mac. It has cut the amount of time I spend doing noddy things like finding the application I want to launch or browsing to files to append a word to the end of them.
And I’m constantly finding out new cool things to do with Quicksilver. Browse over to Merlin Mann’s 43 folders if you want some real Quicksilver evangelism.
Like many people working in the IT community, I need to have a Windows machine on my desktop in work for all the proprietary applications that we use and that I can’t get a Mac version of. Using Synergy, I am able to control both my PC and my Mac from the same keyboard and mouse. Without it, my desktop would be a mess of cables, keyboards and mice. With it, my desktop is empty and zen-like beautiful.
Coming from Linux, I learned the amount of joy that virtual desktops can bring. Now, it’s hard for me to imagine working without them. You might as well ask me to work with one hand tied behind my back: they’re that essential* to me (Microsoft has finally picked up on the importance of Virtual Desktops and included it as part of the ‘Power Tools’ for Windows XP and then went on to try and patent the idea).
Both Virtue and Desktop Manager are fine, free Virtual Desktop managers. I have yet to see someone fail to be impressed by Virtue’s window-switching animations (if you’ve seen Panther’s fast user switching in action then you know what I’m talking about), but it doesn’t seem to be written as well as Desktop Manager, so you will end up fighting with it a little bit more.
I’ve tried a lot of RSS readers on the Mac, and until Pheeder, I wasn’t blown away by any of them. They either try out some fancy interface tricks and end up looking just plain dumb, or else they just lack basic features (how can we have an RSS reader in 2005 without a “Mark all as read” button?!).
Pheeder is by far the best RSS reader I’ve found on the Mac.
I love its simplicity and its power and even the elegant choice of colours and fonts. What I especially like is the ability to click on a feed name and get a one-page overview of all the articles in that feed. This way, when I’m in a rush, I can scan over a feed quickly without lots of clicking.
I only have two complaints. It is expensive, for what it is. At $25, it’s roughly a quarter of the price of Panther but with only a fraction of the functionality. And I don’t know how relevant it will be after Tiger launches with its built-in RSS support.
I still say that the bottom dropping out of advertising revenues at the end of the dot-com “bubble” was the best thing to ever happen to Wired Magazine. It gave them a kick up the ass and forced them to go back to producing material that was both relevant and interesting to their readers.
For example, before christmas they gave away a CD with every copy of their magazine. The CD was filled with tracks from artists like David Byrne, the Beastie Boys and Le Tigre. Nothing unusual there - magazines give away CDs of music all the time. The major difference being that this was all music licensed under a Creative Commons license. Titled “The Wired CD – Rip. Mix. Sample. Mash. Share.”, they (the artists and Wired) not only allowed people to do whatever they wanted with these tunes, they positively encouraged it. As part of this encouragement, Wired ran a competition where people would send in their mixes of the songs on this CD and the best ones would be put on another Wired cover CD, which they are going to title “The Wired CD – Ripped. Mixed. Sampled. Mashed. Shared.” (which is such a fantastic idea, it actually sends shivers down my spine).
Well, the winners were announced, and some of them are really good. I’ve got the original CD in my pc in work (although it barely touched, what with the amount of Philip Glass I end up playing during work) and it’s impressive to listen to the amount of variation, epsecially when you consider that they’re all coming from the same set of source tracks.
A remarkable response to the “sampling is not creating” argument.
The first one is easy: I didn’t like Halo. I finished it and all, but that was mostly just because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The first couple of hours were exciting and new and the sense of adventure was enormous, but everything beyond that felt dull and monotonous. I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
Yet, for all its comparisons to Halo, I’m enjoying Star Wars: Republic Commando immensely.
This is mostly because of the Star Wars connection, I suppose. The thought of being a no-name clone in charge of a troop of no-name clones is slightly appealing. It’s welcoming after years of Star Wars games where you play Some New Hero, set to single-handedly save the universe. And especially so seeing the clone troopers kick oh so much ass in the Clone Wars cartoon.
But it’s more than this. It addresses so many problems I have with these types of games, and this makes me love it beyond simple fanboyism.
It plays like Halo. But a better Halo. Like Halo taking place in a familiar universe. Instead of running down a generic corridor blasting generic alien enemies, I’m running down a corridor on a Star Destroyer, blasting characters I’ve seen in movies. It’s a minor, cosmetic difference, but one that provides enough of a hook to keep me entertained for hours.
And the squad-based action enhances the differences. Makes it slightly better. I loved Full Spectrum Warrior. In my mind, the only way you could top FSW is by throwing it into the Star Wars universe and putting me in direct control of one of the guys. Just like Republic Commando.
You’re no longer one man against an empire - you’ve got a bunch of squaddies behind you. And, when things get tough, in front of you too. At first it can feel a little unintuitive, giving orders in the heat of battle, but it as you grow more familiar with the controls, it becomes second nature, and you start taking a back seat in the action. You start dishing out orders and watching your men obey you completely.
Which brings me to my other confession. This is a little more shameful, seeing as how I’ve been playing video games for years: I can’t stand losing lives in video games.
I know that noone particularly likes this. It’s a demeaning, yet integral part of videogames. But I can’t stand it. If I start getting “killed” in a game I’m playing, it takes something spectacular in the game to stop me turning it off and never playing it again.
And this is another thing that Star Wars: Republic Commando addresses.
As I said, I loved Full Spectrum Warrior. Mostly because of the forgiving way it dished out death. If one of your men died, you could carry him the rest of the way, to get him patched up at the nearest medical station. Not only did this help appease my particular problem, it also made the game feel more “real”; rather than presenting you with an overpowering “GAME OVER (ps - you suck)” screen, it let you continue on, slightly weakened. Never leave a man behind - isn’t that what all those war films taught us? Republic Commando does something similar. When a comrade dies, you can “revive” him, providing him with a couple of bars of energy, enough to reach the next medical station. Likewise, when you die yourself, your visor blurs over in a red hue, and you can issue one last order to your men: “Continue fighting, then come revive me”, “Revive me now” or something else. I say “Something else” because I really haven’t been paying much attention to any option other than “Revive me now”.
There are a couple of complaints, of course. A few graphical glitches, for one. Why implement shadows at all, if you’re only going to half-implement them? Your men cast shadows, moving platforms do not, making lift sequences slightly alarming. The shortness of the game is another. I’ve played it for about a weekend-and-a-bit and I’m apparently more than half way through the game already. On games that are dependent on story (Like Resident Evil 4), this is forgivable, but in an action-based FPS, this is just plain lazy.
But then again, as Ico taught us, it’s not the quality of the destination, it’s the quality of the journey, right?
Yahoo is 10 years old this year, and is celebrating with a Netrospective - 100 moments from the past 10 years on the internet. For shits and giggles, they also put up their front page from 10 years ago. Like everyone else, I’m sure, this is making me feel very, very old. I can remember when I first saw Yahoo like that. And yet, at the same time, it feels like it must have been very, very long ago - surely things weren’t that shitty in 1995? Surely we’ve always had flash and animated gifs, and Jakob Nielsen telling us these things were bad?
But this isn’t the only 10-year birthday we’ve got this year. Public Enemy’s ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ is 10 years old in July. And it still sounds fantastic.
Happy Birthday, Fear of a Black Planet (and Yahoo).
This probably isn’t a particularly popular opinion, but I’ll state it anyway. I love Spielberg’s movies. I think that they’ve got a wonderful magical quality few directors have managed to recreate (although Shyamalan comes close). And besides, how could I not love the person responsible for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
And so I’m tickled pink by the prospect of his remake of War of the Worlds. If it’s even half as good as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I’m still going to be blown away.
But there’s so much more going on. Pendragon Pictures have been working on a more faithful, low-budget version of War of the Worlds. They recently made a ’theatrical trailer’ available on their website. This is the first time they’ve revealed any of their effects. And oh.. oh dear. But regardless of the quality of the final picture, it will be a refreshing companion to Spielberg’s blockbuster.
But we’re so lucky, there’s still more. Jeff Wayne is working on a CGI version of his Musical of War of the Worlds, intended for a release in 2007. They recently released some animation tests of this movie - clip one, clip 2. Being a huge fan of the musical and a 3D animation dork, I think this is the version I’m looking to the most.
Our DSL has been on the fritz since Wednesday. This is probably a good thing, since it’s giving me a good reason to ditch our current provider and take advantage of the Smart Telecom Offer of 2MB for EUR35/mon.
Updates will probably be more sporadic than usual until we’re back up and running.
I don’t know if it was out of morbid curiosity, or if it was simply because the trailer makes it look so cheesy, but I went to see Assault on Precinct 13 over the weekend. At one point during the show, my companion turned to me and said “It’s like a cop Counter-Strike!”. Which was pretty much spot-on. Games had been feeding off movies for so long that they’ve gotten pretty good at copying the look and style of exactly this kind of film - the big, raucous, no-brainer, filled-with-explosions kind of film.
Alone in the Dark (2005) Bloodrayne (2005) Crazy Taxi (2005) Deus Ex (2006) Doom (2005) Driver (2006) Far Cry (2006) Metroid (2006) Mortal Kombat: Devastation (2005) Silent Hill (2006) Spy Hunter (2005) Tekken (2006)
As well as this, we have already had the mediocre Resident Evil: Apocapyse and the truly abysmal Alien Versus Predator.
As I said before, games have been copying off Hollywood for years. Some of the first games were based on themes that were very popular around that time. The interstellar dogfighting of Star Wars came to life in Space Invaders. As games got more sophisticated, they began using other, slightly different films for their inspiration. Games such as Rolling Thunder imitated the spy movies of James Bond. Chase HQ came along roughly around the time cop “buddy” action-thrillers came into vogue. For a while, the videogame tie-in – invariably a platform/shooter-by-the-numbers – was an inevitable part of every movie’s marketing strategy.
But now things are different. It seems that now games are getting their movie tie-in. If we compare the business done by both the film and videogame versions of “Chronicles of Riddick”, it’s hard to see which was the main feature and which was the tie-in (although, if were to use ‘critical acclaim’ as our metric, there would be a clear winner).
Some of these are absolutely dreadful ideas for movies, and really make me worry. Crazy Taxi? Doom? Driver? Tekken? But Deus Ex and Silent Hill on that list give me hope. And this Hope is further strengthened by the fact that Rogery Avery is set to direct Silent Hill. I’ve been saying for the longest time that I’ve been waiting for a movie to deliver the same kind of visceral scares provided by Silent Hill.
For the most part, there’s a hidden ‘sophistication ratio’ when we look at games to movies. It goes like this:
sophistication of the movie: sophistication of game = a constant
This used to say that the more sophisticated a movie is, the more unsophisticated the game would be. Take, for example, the Mario Brothers movie - an extremely unsophisticated idea which the filmmakers ruined by trying to make it something it’s not: sophisticated. But with this shift toward games being the dominant media, we’re seeing that these very sophisticated games (Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil) are given extremely crude and unsophisticated movies.
Having said all this, things are looking up, at least in the short term. I could probably sleep a whole lot better if I knew that Paul W. S. Anderson and Ube Boll had given up directing altogether, but until that day comes, I’ll take a lot of comfort in knowing that games have become so sophisticated and compelling that they’re beginning to surpass movies in the stories that they tell and the way in which they tell them.
After sitting in my del.icio.us inbox for a couple of weeks, I finally found the time to start playing about with Ruby on Rails. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Rails-based applications, and I’ve started using them heavily (notable del.icio.us and 43 things). However, the real reason I wanted to check out Rails was so I could understand But She’s A Girl’s Tracks.
I first gave Tracks a go a couple of weeks ago, but found that it was missing too many things that I rely on from a task-list planner, such as an ability to view completed tasks on a day-to-day basis (essential for my morning meetings) and the ability to output the task list as an iCal feed (I use iCal to sync with my phone, which doubles as my PDA). I took a look at the source for Tracks, but having absolutely no knowledge of Ruby whatsoever, I couldn’t really understand it (Where on earth is this being called from? Are all these files really necessary?), so immediately set about re-implementing it in PHP, the language I’m more familiar with. I got bored with that project after a couple of hours.
After reading the excellent O’Reilly article (and David Allen’s superb “Getting Things Done”, whose methods Tracks seeks to enhance), I decided it was time to revisit the source of Tracks. Now it makes much more sense, and I’ve already hacked together the “report view” that I needed, and I’m working on the iCal exporter as we speak.
There wasn’t one thing mentioned at Macworld that wasn’t already revealed on the internet already. By way of “punishment”, Apple decided not to show the webcast live, but rather only offer it after a couple of hours. This is completely understandable, since there were a couple of major announcements which had been completely ruined by over-zealous fans who have now crossed the line into breaking the law to find out what the announcements would be ahead of time.
Having watched the Macworld speech, I’m fully convinced that Apple are one of the few technology companies in the world that “get it”. I remember someone describing Tim O’Reilly as a visionary, because since it takes 18 months to write and publish a book, he has to be constantly thinking “What will people want to read about in 18 months time?”. I think the same could be said of Apple - they are thinking ahead of time, to think “What will people want to be doing with their computers in 18 months?” rather than reacting to current fads.
Introducing the Mac Mini
I’ve taken to using our G4 in work as my main workstation. Initially, I just wanted it because it looked neat and would finally make my desktop look classy. But recently, I’ve fallen in love with the power and the flexibility it provides. To make matters worse for my bank account, I’ve started toying with the idea of buying myself a Mac for home.
Previously, the two offerings I could afford (eMac and iMac) have been, well, slightly out of my taste range. The previous generation of the iMac was beautiful, and I would gladly have bought one of those, but the current version hasn’t blown me away.
I don’t think that my situation is that uncommon. Which is why the Mac Mini is the smartest move I’ve ever seen Apple make.
The Mac Mini retails for EUR519 (but you can get it for EUR378 if you know someone who works for Apple who will help you out with their massive 27% discount). Let’s just think about this for a second: EUR519 for a powerful, small, quiet computer? Before Christmas, I paid over that for an iPod and iSkin for my girlfriend. An iPod with the exact same amount of storage! This alone is an amazing feat, but there’s more.
##Beauty is not caused. It is.
No other technology makes people coo quite like Apple products. And not just engineers or techies either - ordinary people. My mom took a look at an iPod and understood the intrinsic value of the design that went into it. If my mom can appreciate the design and craftsmanship, that they can work so hard to create something that looks so simple, then you know they’ve won out.
And there’s not a single person I’ve spoken to that hasn’t been absolutely bowled over by the Mac Mini.
First, there’s the size of the thing. I think Apple invented a new size rating: “Bewilderingly tiny”. Add to this Apple’s traditional clean lines and uncluttered interface, and you’ve got something to leave people impressed and design aficionados breathless.
Add to this the power of that little box - more powerful than my main workstation, a silver G4.
But the really amazing part is the versatility. At that kind of price range, it’s become less a case of “Can I really justify buying a Mac” to “Where in my life could I use this Mac I just bought?”
A Mac for the Living Room, a Mac for the kitchen…
Personally speaking, I’m most interested in using the Mac Mini in the Living Room - as a Home Entertainment Centre, and – providing I can find the right kind of Firewire/USB TV-in card – PVR. And I find it hard to believe that Apple didn’t have this use specifically in mind for the Mac Mini. The size comparisons are right: roughly around the same height as a video or DVD player.
I had been thinking about doing something similar with my XBox, chipping it to allow it to run one of the many homebrew Media Centre solutions, which would allow it to play DVDs of any region, DivXs, all my MP3s and so on. My main reluctance to this comes because of two important factors:
I have real trouble with the idea of an XBox as anything other than a “games station”
As much as Sony and Microsoft try to reposition their products as the all-in-one home entertainment solution, I have real trouble accepting this. The idea of navigating my files with a controller seems completely alien to me. This probably reveals more of my rapidly-oncoming middle-age than I’d like.
The XBox is too damn noisy for anything other than playing games
Enter the Mac Mini.
It’s small, “Whisper quiet” and doesn’t look out of place beside my video and DVD player, and offers an array of features unmatched by any of the other offerings.
Okay, so maybe I was a tad harsh in my dismissal of the Nintendo DS. Both have been launched recently and of the two, the DS appears to be doing better. There are a couple of factors relating to this.
First is that Sony have only launched the DS in Japan while Nintendo have launched in Japan and the US. When Nintendo started selling their DS in Japan, Sony – bold as you like – teased gamers by taking over Subway stations and having functioning PSPs presented behind reinforced plastic with armed guards. When Nintendo furiously churned out DSes for sale in the US, Sony sat on their Laurels and insisted that they were manufacturing 500,000 units, no more, no less. This number barely managed to cover all of the internet pre-orders, with retail units barely getting a slice of the action.
Then of course, you have the battle of the launch titles. In this case, Nintendo have Sony licked. They launched with an update of their most successful and most celebrated titles to date, Mario 64, as well as numerous other first-party titles. To further pile on the pressure, they even resorted to giving out a “demo cartridge” of what was coming with the new Metroid Prime (which immediatley conjured memories of the Kenner Star Wars “Early Bird” certificate). Sony could merely present people with a handful of games.
Finally, there are the other factors, such as the much-reported battery status of the PSP. Apparently, despite all best promises, the PSP can still only manage roughly 45 minutes of battery power when playing Ridge Racers, whereas Nintendo with its years of experience of creating handheld gaming hardware, can squeeze something ridiculous out of the DS.
Any or all of these could lead to keeping people away from the PSP.
I recently had the opportunity to play with a DS brought back from the US. I had a mixed bag of first impressions. First was the aesthetics of the thing – it’s big, and ugly. And I mean really big and really ugly. Close enough to two Gameboy Advances sellotaped together to make me want to open it quickly to find something to like. Opening it up, it feels plasticky, but the interface is nice. Starting up Metroid, I got to see what the touchscreen was all about. It works well in Metroid. It feels natural to move your thumb to the place you want to look. It also makes for some logical, intuitive menu options.
But I really wanted to try out Mario 64 in it.
Let me just say this… I play a lot of videogames. Right now, I’m switching between four different games. In spite of this, or rather because of this, I rarely finish games. I finished Mario 64, and it remains the largest game I’ve ever finished. This is because, more than any other game, Mario 64 was able to hold my attention for all the time it took for me to want to finish it. So the DS’s Mario 64 had a lot to live up to.
It’s playful and interesting to use the touchscreen to control it, but ultimately frustrating. I immediately went swimming and found that this wasn’t as obvious or as well-thought-out as the N64 version. Controlling Mario in general had an air of concentration about it, whereas with the N64 controller, it was something that came naturally. I didn’t play much of Mario 64, but from what I saw, it seemed more frustrating than I would have liked.
It might seem like I’m still bad-mouthing the DS, and I’m sorry if it comes across that way. There’s a lot to like about the DS, and most impressively, the forthcoming titles look fun. Who couldn’t love a game where you have to shout “I LOVE YOU” as loud as you can to win the level? (The microphone is another feature I’m sure many games developers will have a lot of fun developing with). I’ll buy one, because they’re cheap and I have a special place in my heart for Nintendo games. I’ll wait until its European release in March 2005.
Note: This was originally posted in my Livejournal, but should probably appear here as well
A lot has been said about the new Sony PSP since the launch was announced yesterday. So I thought I’d throw my own hat into the ring here.
I’m thrilled to hear the final launch specs of the PSP. Sony have been pushing grown-up gaming since they entered the videogame market with the PlayStation. And they seem to have a firm understanding of what adults want from videogames. Compare this to Nintendo, whose new DS reeks of “Well, uh.. we’ve got a successful platform in the Gameboy Advance.. let’s add another screen! And make it a touch screen! Who wouldn’t want one of them? And uh.. uh.. ah, we’ll just figure it out as we go along”. [In fact, it would seem this feature was added purely to give Nintendo something to use as the cornerstone of their new “adult” marketing campaign - “touchingisgood” (which, quite frankly, is a little embarassing)].
Adults want:
Something Pretty
The PSP is an incredibly pretty piece of consumer technology. It’s small, has sleek lines and stands out from all other handhelds on the market (although sometimes smacks of the Atari Lynx, depending on the light). Sony demonstrated the kind of peerage they’re placing the PSP with in their decision to provide white headphones with the PSP.
Something Functional
The PSP will be able to play games, music, and videos, as well as connect to wireless networks (whether you’ll be able to browse the internet or collect email from it remains to be seen). On the music side, they had originally planned not to support .mp3 in favour of their own proprietary ATRAC3 format, but finally gave in to consumer pressure.
Something Entertaining
Sony aren’t taking any chances and have encouraged developers to port their biggest-selling Playstation games to the PSP. Within the first year, we will have titles from the following series on the PSP:
Burnout
Bust-a-move
Dynasty Warriors
Formula 1
Gran Turismo
Metal Gear Solid
Ridge Racer
Tony Hawk Underground 2
Wipeout
Each of these will be of a quality roughly equivalent to their PS2 counterparts.
On a personal level, I’m looking forward to the PSP for two reasons.
First is the wireless connectivity. There was some debate as to whether or not this would make it into the final specs of the machine, and I’m glad to see it has. This means that content can be downloaded directly to the machine, as we’re beginning to see with XBox Live. It also provides the means for true opportunistic gaming. For example, say I’m playing with a PSP on a bus, and I see that someone else is also playing with a PSP, we can instantly join our games and play against each other. A beautifully simple idea that, if you’ll excuse the gushing hyperbole, could revolutionise the way the general public views multi-player games*.
The second reason I’m looking forward to the PSP stems from my sense of self-preservation. I live in a house of non-gamers who, I feel, sometimes resent my occasional gaming and accompanying misappropriation of the TV. There was once a threat that my XBox could go out the window if I didn’t turn it off. A PSP could be the answer to this, or at least a happy medium - a non-intrusive way for me to play games without having to lock myself away in my room.
Right now, the Japanese launch price is 20,790 yen (approximately EUR150). MCV are reporting that the European launch price could be around the EUR300 mark.
Yes, I know the n-gage already has wireless gaming just like the PSP is proposing, but I have yet to meet one person who will even admit to wanting an n-gage, let alone meet someone who actually owns one. Compare this to everyone I’ve spoken to saying how they’re lusting after a PSP
Yesterday, my housemate was on Newstalk 106, a national radio station, to talk about Ladyfest Dublin, which she’s involved in. Being the naive-yet-helpful type, I offered to record this for her and mp3 it, so Ladyfest could offer it as a download on their website. In the process of doing this, I downloaded 16 different pieces of software, most of which were completely useless for the job I was trying to do. That’s why I’ve written this, to help anyone else trying to do something similar.
By the way, if anyone has a simpler way, please let me know.
Once bitten, twice shy
My previous experience of mp3’ing a radio show involved recording it to tape (yes, I still use tapes), connecting from the headphone jack on my stereo to the ’line in’ jack on my laptop, and recording that. Unfortunately, this resulted in a really crackly mp3, full of static. So I figured, this is the 21st Century, there has to be an easier way to do this.
And being cheap, the easier way had better be free.
A thoroughly modern, convoluted solution
Newstalk offer a Windows Media stream of their live broadcasts. I used the shareware Net Transport to record the stream. I believe the shareware version will only record 15 minutes of a stream, but I didn’t check this out. Once it had recorded the stream, I exported it as a 2.14MB .asf file.
Next, I used asftools to create a .wav of the stream. However, the .wav it created was only 2.12MB, while the actual recording was approximately 14 minutes long. Clearly asftools uses some weird codec that, despite downloading 20MBs of codec packs, I just couldn’t find. Their website wasn’t much help either. It addressed the problems with the .wav files asftools creates, but suggests it’s “a codec problem”. So I’d have to find something else.
After searching for a good hour or so, I finally stumbled across [http://www.dbpoweramp.com/](DB Power Amp Music Converter). This was able to read the busted wav, and export it as whatever I liked; a .wav or a .mp3. I was finally getting somewhere. Since I still had some editing to do on the source before I put it up as an mp3, I exported it as a “proper”, 145MB .wav.
I opened the .wav file in audacity and from there, was able to trim off the useless bit I’d recorded at the beginning. I also added a nice little fade-out, for good measure. Audacity was able to export this as either a .ogg or a .mp3 file. As much as my nerd side wanted to put this out as a .ogg file, my sensible side told me that we were going for as much cross-compatibility as possible, so I exported it as a 12MB .mp3 file.
For the past few months, I’ve become increasingly fond of del.icio.us. Plugged into any half-decent RSS reader (liferea being my RSS-reader of choice), it becomes an invaluable tool to help me stay on top of my game, exposing me to tools and advice I probably wouldn’t normally have stumbled upon.
But until recently, I never saw the point of signing up for an account. To me, it was a link exchange - whoop-di-doo. I don’t really have enough to contribute to something like this, I don’t tend to come across things by chance that other people would find interesting. Finally, in the depths of last night, I realised its true purpose and how I could help make it better whilst simultaneously scratching many of my own personal itches.
When I browse around on the internet at home, there’s a lot of stuff that I just don’t have time to check out on anything but a “high” level. I’m generally up until 1am, winding down by chewing email for a while and seeing what’s happening in the world, but it’s absolutely impossible for me to keep my concentration levels high for some of the things I come across. For instance, last night I came across a link that explains the Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do), but it being almost 1am, I couldn’t really digest the information. Since it’s nigh-on impossible (or at least, a whole bunch of work) to synchronise my bookmarks list at home with my workstation in the office, I began the process of emailing the URL to myself, to check it when I got into work today.
I stopped before hitting the “send” button as it finally dawned on me. I realised that I was completely ignoring the fact that I’d just gotten this link from del.icio.us - it would always be there. If only some bright spark could come up with a way for me to keep a track of all the stuff I liked on del.icio.us – one giant all-encompassing bookmark – where I wouldn’t need to maintain a file on a number of seperate machines.
But wait! Some bright spark already set this up! If I set up my own del.icio.u] account, I could add the link to it, and have it available no matter where it was. I’m almost certainly pointing out the obvious to some of you here, but to me, it was like someone had finally removed the forest and I was able to say “Oh, there are the trees”.
This also has a number of other knock-on effects. Now, when I want to show someone something cool I’d seen that they might be interested, I don’t have to go digging through all the various machines I use, I can just point them at my del.icio.us account.
It also has the added advantage of making my bookmarks infinitely sortable. In Firefox, I have a “useful stuff” folder, where I dump, well.. useful stuff. This is to stop me getting confused “hmm.. where is that useful linux drum sequencer program I found? Is it in “linux” or “music”?”. Now I can have it appear in a filter for “useful”, “linux” and “sound”.
Like I said, this might all just sound like the most obvious thing in the world to you all, but I’m glad I finally caught up.
Inspired by Merlin Mann’s amazing 43 folders, I’ve recently become more and more obsessed with Getting Things Done. This is at least partly due to the fact that circumstances have changed, leaving me with an increased workload and the increased possibility of spreading myself too thin. Using the basic principles of Getting Things Done (or at least, the ones I can pick up from around the place, because it’s absolutely impossible to get my hands on this book in Dublin), I’ve managed to ensure that I’m consistently more productive. And even times when I’m not so productive, I’m still completely focused on what needs to be done.
To this end, I’ve found some pieces of software very useful. First is the Vim Outliner (nice, but too basic for my needs - I feel as if I’m wasting a small-but-significant amount of time wrestling with the software), then there’s TomBoy (will be an indispensible piece of software (especially now that it’s been hooked into Gnome’s new finder-lite), but is still too early a release to be useful for me), and now finally, Ecco.
I read about Ecco on various posts about Getting Things Done. People were saying that they still can’t live without it, despite the fact that it hasn’t been updated in enough years for it to fall into the “ancient history” category, in internet-years. I downloaded it and gave it a go, and found that it almost perfectly suited my needs.
It manages to present the things I like about the Vim Outliner (the ability to “outline” my goals, obviously) in an well-structured way. You can easily throw a goal together, give it a “todo” date (which combines with its built-in calendar to give you a quick overview of your day’s tasks) and easily mark things as done. Once something has been marked as done, it then moves into your “completed tasks” tab, so you can take it out of your TODO list.
It could almost be the perfect piece of software for my needs.
Almost.
My setup here is strange. My primary workstation is a Debian Linux machine, but since a large part of my job includes supporting Windows clients, I also have a Windows 2000 machine on my desk. I have a monitor for each, and thanks to Synergy, I can control both using one keyboard (stolen from an old iMac, because I love the action of the keys) and mouse (a Logitech optical mouse). And this causes problems with Ecc
Because Ecco is quite old, and isn’t quite optimised for today’s operating systems (and kick-ass TCP keyboard/mouse controllers), it barfs every so often. When I give it a date for the TODO, the mouse and keyboard go unresponsive for a couple of seconds. When I click somewhere I shouldn’t, same deal. It’s like Ecco prevents my Windows machine from accessing the network while it’s performing some task. And perhaps that’s the problem - a misconfiguration somewhere that’s causing Ecco to try and access a network share or something.. I’ll try to look into it.
For now, it’s a nasty problem that’s driving me away from Ecco.
Today, as a last resort (and maybe some over-optimism), I tried running Ecco on Linux using Wine. It went well, despite missing some of the features I liked about Ecco on Windows (like the ability to pull in highlighted text from any application), and I would have been happy to live with it, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Ecco crashes each time I try to access the address book in Linux. Since my Inbox is my address book, I rarely use this feature. It’s just knowing that simply clicking on that link would be enough to crash the application I’d rely on most.
Like Chinese Water Torture, it’s enough to drive a man insane.
If you want to try out Ecco, it’s available for free download from compusol
Following on from my previous post about the principle of dorks Getting Things Done (and hoping, desperately hoping that this doesn’t turn into yet another self-help website), comes TomBoy, a simple note-taking application that combines elements of post-it notes and a Wiki.
Although this description belies the power underneath such an application. Simply highlight a portion of text, right-click, and you can create a new note about that particular piece of information.
How well it will fare in the long term remains to be seen. Of all the proposed changes, the only one I can actually see being of any actual use to me would be the plugging into Evolution (even though I’m edging more and more towards Thunderbird and Enigmail as my primary mail client – something I hope to touch on at a later date).
For anyone that cares, TomBoy compiles cleanly on Debian Unstable providing you have the following packages: gcc libstdc++6-dev g++-3.3 libgtk2.0-dev libgtkspell-dev make mono-mcs
Listening to Tim O’Reilly’s talk on Alpha Geeks, he mentions something that I found very interesting: he says he got started on his long, strange journey by simply documenting something that was largely an oral tradition - what it meant to be “root” on a Unix system. By simply writing down what had been passed on verbally from one admin to the next, he started the ball rolling on what has become one of the largest, most successful and best-respected tech publishing houses in the world.
It’s hard to read Merlin Mann’s 43 folders and not think of the same thing. Here, Merlin is simply writing down what others have taken for granted – their productivity habits – and sharing them with others. In most cases, people don’t really appreciate just how effective their habits can be. Or perhaps they just don’t see them as significant enough to share with others. Whatever the case, I can only voice my support for 43 folders (and Danny O’Brien’s slow-coming life hacks), and hope that my self-discipline allows at least some of these habits they are suggesting to seep into my daily routine.
Right now, my routine in work is this:
Each day, we have a team “huddle” which, as sexual as it sounds, is remarkably useful, we remind each other of what we were supposed to do yesterday, and announce our plans for today
Once the huddle is over, I immediately open up ~/work/TODO.otl in Vim
.otl files are Outline files, which work well with the Vim Outliner.
I give each actionable item a topic by itself, and each sub-action gets another sub-topic
I try to give each action at least one line of a description as to what is involved
Once an action is completed, I update it with what was done (e.g. text from an email I sent, a snippet of code I wrote), and “collapse” that item. Because I’ve set Vim to give “collapsed” items a different background, I can quickly scan over it and see what still needs to be done.
Within the Vim Outliner, this is displayed in a easy-to-follow, colour-coordinated format, and makes a lot more sense.
This still needs a lot of work, but thanks to people like Merlin Mann and Danny O’Brien actually writing down all these things most people take for granted, I’m coming up with all sorts of new ideas as to how I can make myself more productive.
Update October 4th
Okay, so it’s been a couple of weeks. And in those couple of weeks, I’ve been playing about with a few different systems for Getting Things Done. Things like TomBoy and Ecco have both grabbed my attention in a big way (Ecco is so nice, I’m thinking of writing a post about it). But still I keep coming back to my Vim Outliner.
What I’ve discovered
I really only started using Vim since I started my current job. Before then, I used nano, because I mainly wrote text instead of config files and large, unweildy shell scripts. So I’m starting to discover and harness some of its power.
Linking files
My TODO.otl still follows the same format (although I’ve written a shell script to “archive” off the top few entries, so I’m not left with a gigantic text file. However, I’ve found that I can link to external files by wrapping them in square brackets. This has proved remarkably useful for larger projects, ones that go on for a while, with a set of tasks so long that I can’t really keep importing them into my current day’s worklist.
So now, it looks something like this
2004-09-22
Finish Asset Register [AssetRegister.otl]
Install laptop for John Doe [JohnDoeLaptop.otl]
Remove machines from domain
| use PHPLdapAdmin - http://xxxxx
Investigate LDAP password policies
To get to the external documents, I simply place the cursor between the square brackets and press Ctrl+], which opens it. Once inside the new external document, I put a [TODO.otl] at the top, so I’ve got an easy route back to my TODO list. This way, I never really have to leave my task list.
A couple of weeks ago, my main workstation went insane. I put this down to the fact that I was running Debian unstable, which made it, well… unstable. I’d always had a lot of trouble with it. Occasionally, files would become corrupt (mostly apt’s status file), or programs would randomly segfault. The most hilarious instance being where fsck segfaulted on startup. Finally, after putting it off for too long and an hour or two of repeated crashes, I decided to force a full fsck.
I wish I hadn’t.
There were so many tragic errors. My /bin directory got wiped and replaced with a single shell script I’d written myself. My /home directory also got wiped and replaced with a 415-bit text file.
I wept and wept. And then went about the process of getting it back on-line.
The reason I chose to run Debian Unstable as opposed to, say, Debian Stable is because I liked the better choice of packages. Debian Stable is stuck with Gnome 2.4, whereas Debian Unstable is up to Gnome 2.6 (2.7 if you include the stuff from Experimental). But not wanting to risk killing my machine again, I decided to look elsewhere. The first thing that came to mind was [fedora][1]. I grabbed the isos from bittorrent and started installing.
Initially, I loved Fedora. Its crisp interface (much nicer than Debian thanks to the improvements in the Xorg that Fedora use) was very easy on the eyes, and the fact that everything just worked really scored big points with me. Between you and me, even the graphical boot screen made me go “Ooh”. For a while, I was pretty happy.
Until, that is, I tried to get it working the way I was comfortable, with the software I like.
It was then that I realised the simple beauty of Debian. For example, I compose my entries into this blog using BloGTK. To install it on Fedora was a matter of
Fire up a web browser
go to google
search for fedora blogtk
check a few false-hits
download the package
rpm -Uvh fedora_package.rpm
find out it was missing a few depencies
go to google
search for fedora dependcyname
download the package
…
Here’s me installing BloGTK on Debian:
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libzvt2.0-0 python-glade2 python-gnome2 python2.3-glade2 python2.3-gnome2
python2.3-pyorbit
Recommended packages:
aspell
The following NEW packages will be installed:
blogtk libzvt2.0-0 python-glade2 python-gnome2 python2.3-glade2
python2.3-gnome2 python2.3-pyorbit
0 upgraded, 7 newly installed, 0 to remove and 10 not upgraded.
Need to get 477kB of archives.
After unpacking 2048kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? \[Y/n] y```
Do you see how simple that is?
I read somewhere that Fedora has its own apt-alike, called Yum, but I disliked this intensely. I asked it to install a particular piece of software, something trivial and without too many dependencies, and I watched as the machine sat there for a good ten minutes, calculating its depencies. Clearly this would not do.
So on Monday, I decided to switch back to Debian. This time, I swore I would be more careful, I would stay on _stable_ for as long as I could. I think I lasted an hour or two before I was upgrading to _unstable_. And almost immediately, I was back to where I began - my `apt` was crashing randomly, programs were segfaulting for no reason. I went home on Monday night an unhappy bunny.
Yesterday, before I did anything else, I made sure I had all the latest packages, especially `e2fsprogs` and forced a full fsck on reboot with
`shutdown -F now`
It took a while (full fsck on a 120GB disk is about 10 minutes). But since then, I haven't had an ounce of trouble. Of course, I'm touching wood with every part of me that isn't needed for working right now, but I'm pretty hopeful about the stability of my _unstable_ box.
I'm not much for morals, but I'd say that if there had to be a moral to this story, it would be: fsck regularly. Especially if you've just upgraded from _stable_ to \_unstable.
[1]: http://fedora.redhat.com/
For the last two years, our IT helpdesk has been “powerered” by Zope’s “Tracker” Product. I laughingly refer to it as “powered” because it’s anything but. Right now, we’ve managed to create an ad-hoc system based around Tracker but at the same which tries to avoid it at every step, because Tracker is just plain nasty.
We’re trying to make things better, so for the past couple of weeks, we’ve been trying out a few different products, such as Footprints (good, fully-featured, very expensive) and Auscomp’s IT Commander (cheap, bizarre feature-set). We still haven’t had success finding something that’s suited to our needs, but we’re still looking.
Since I had nothing better to do all weekend, I went looking for other replacement candidates. I stumbled across eventum. Eventum is currently in use by the boys in MySQL AB to handle their technical support. I liked the look of the screenshots, so I installed it on a linux machine at home and tried it out. Here’s what I learned:
Very simple install
Just unpack the .tar.gz file into a web-accessibly directory on a server with Apache and MySQL
Very fast
It’s doing a lot, but seems to be pulling the data out pretty quick. And the server I’m running it on isn’t beefy.
Intuitive workflow
No faffing about trying to figure out how to do certain things.
Powerful report generator
Provides many different views of your data, which is useful for say, weekly summaries.
Multiple projects
Create a different eventum tracker for different tasks (IT Helpdesk, Mail Server Upgrade Project etc.)
Role-based accounts
Unlike ITCommander, these roles are actually useful and tied into your account, so you’re never confused as to what you can do.
Anonymous posting
No need to sign in to report a problem.
Email integration
Didn’t get this working at home (because.. well.. I really don’t have a mail server set up at home), but this is tied heavily into the issues. You have the option to notify the person who opened the issue at every change (and also change the list of people who get notified)
Time tracking
Complete time-tracking integration for proper project management.
Phone call tracking
There’s an option to update an issue with details of phone calls you’ve made/received regarding this issue. I really like this idea. No more (“Hey, did you ring John Doe about buying that software?”). This is also nicely tied into the time tracking system.
Easy to configure/tinker with
It provides a powerful administration interface, but it’s also written in really simple PHP. I was able to get my head around the code in an hour or so.
Here are the things I didn’t get to configure and play with, but sounded really bloody nifty from the INSTALL file:
Reminder System
The reminder system was designed with the objective as serving as a safe net for issues that need attention.
Heartbeat Monitor
The heartbeat monitor is a feature designed for the administrator that wants to be alerted whenever a common problem in Eventum is detected, like the database server not being available anymore.
Command-line interface
The Eventum command-line interface allows you to access most of the features of the web interface straight from your command shell. From a personal perspective, this means I can easily automate many things without having to write some custom web-scraping script.
Now, it’s not all roses. Here are the problems I’ve noticed:
Possible bugs
When I go to close an issue, it will sometimes not budge, and look like it’s not done anything. But it has, it just hasn’t told me. Similarly, when I put in an anonymous issue, it didn’t move. I hit submit five or six times, then finally checked the issue list, and there were five or six anonymous issues. Although this COULD just be the fact that I’ve configured email integration without a working email setup. I’ll have to check this out.
Very developer-centric
Out of the box, it looks as if it’s geared towards software developers rather than IT helpdesk. However, after an hour or so of changing options in the Admin interface, I managed to make it look and feel more like what we’d need.
Open source project
As an open-source project, you’re pretty much on your own with very little documentation to guide you. Although there is an active eventum-users mailing list, which could be a pretty good source of support for.
We’re switching our network provider. Before we did, we decided to do some speed tests, to find out which was faster. We did this by pinging ireland.com. Strangely, we found that our old provider was faster, in spite of the fact they’re supposed to be a slower link, with antiquated technology.
So, we dug about a bit more. Using our old provider:
[johnke@oasis johnke]$ traceroute www.ireland.com
traceroute to www.ireland.com (195.7.33.37), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 www.ireland.com (195.7.33.37) 256.913 ms 4.886 ms 9.690 ms
No wonder we it was faster. We’re on the same subnet.
Anyway, I was just amused by this. I’ve never seen a one-hop traceroute to a major site before.
Strip the flashy graphics, DTS surround sound and heavy production costs from most of today’s best-selling video games. Strip them right down to their bare-bones essentials and what are you left with? A truly interesting game will manage to maintain its element of “fun” without these things. Nintendo understand this and this is why, pound for pound, they’re producing the most fun of the next-generation giants.
Wario Ware Inc. is a perfect demonstration of this understanding. There are no flashy graphics. The few glimpses of 3D come in the form of static menu screens or non-interactive FMV. What they have produced is stripped-down, bare-bones fun in the form of 200 mini-games. Since most of the first video games were also stripped-down, bare-bones fun, Nintendo have decided to emulate this for their graphical style. Many of the mini-games achieve a visual aesthetic similar to classic Atari games. With a knowing grin, Nintendo acknowledge this, having you play all of these games through an on-screen GameBoy Advance.
In keeping with the faux-GBA interface, this is perfect opportunity gaming. Waiting for a kettle to boil? No problem. Turn on your GameCube and bash about for a couple of minutes - if you can put it down, that is. As well as being opportunity gaming, it’s also a perfect example of just-one-more-go gaming. You fly through the mini-games at such a furious rate that it’s hard to put down. And as your gaming pride kicks in at being beaten by something so simple as glorified “wack-a-mole”, it becomes even more difficult to say no at the “play again” screen.
Also entertaining is watching its effect on non-gamers. I live in a house of non-gamers, and each of my housemates’ reactions to the game has been the same:
“What’s this?” “Haha, this looks insane” “Wow, they’re really going for the old-school graphics”
At this point, I usually step out for a cup of coffee or something to keep me twitching like a ten-year old who ate too much sugar (the essential state of being for many of the mini-games) and come back in to find them playing my game.
When our CEO came to me and told me that I had two weeks to design and implement a new website, I knew I was in trouble. In the years since our site first went live, it had grown a lot of “cruft”, information that was now completely useless. I started by going to our head of marketing and discussing what didn’t need to be transitioned across to the new website.
Although the CEO was happy with the look of the new site and liked the way we’d trimmed it down, he still insisted that all content be available. So I cheated a little.
I moved the old website to another directory (called “oldsite”), and set up a new virtualhost for “oldsite.ourdomain.com”. I gave this its own 404 page saying “Your page could not be found”. In the new site, I also gave it a custom 404 page - actually, a PHP script, which would redirect to oldsite.ourdomain.com
So, someone requesting a document we hadn’t transitioned to the new site:
I was recently sent an email from one of our users, evidently impressed by a challenge/response mechanism set up by one of our clients on their mail server (even more impressed by the client’s claim that he received “no spam, ever”). He asked us why we didn’t implement something like this.
Hi Luke,
We’ve been keeping an eye on the challenge/response (C-R) debate for quite some time now. I remember we spent a good while debating over whether we should include it in our anti-spam arsenal. After a lot of consideration, I think we’re going to leave it alone for now, and treat it as a “last line of defense”.
A few of the reasons we are choosing not to roll out a C-R solution:
Increases the amount of non-legitimate mail traffic. This is actually contrary to the goals of an anti-spam solution.
Doesn’t provide as much protection as you’d think. I doubt Eric’s claim of “no junk mail ever”, especially since we regularly get spam emails that are “spoofed” to be from @ourdomain.com addresses.
Trivial to work around. Spammers, for all their misdeeds, are inventive, creative little sods. For example, there was a story recently about spammers getting around Yahoo’s automated-account-creation-prevention tool. When you try to create a Yahoo account, you’re given an image with a word on it, which is hard for machines to easily guess. So what the Spammers redirected this image onto their pornography sites. People joining these sites would type in the word they saw, and this would be fed directly into Yahoo. Sneaky, but impressively so.
Any kind of automated response will just lead to the auto-responding address being added to the spammer’s list of “active” emails. This results in more spam hitting the address.
This, in turn, results in heavier burden on the system.
Speaking of which, most spam comes from non-working or false email addresses. A C-R response to each of these could easily result in a DOS attack on our system.
I could go on, but I think you should see by now that there’s a lot to be said AGAINST C-R systems.
However, one of the things we’re keeping a very close eye on for our anti-spam toolkit is the idea of “greylisting” (<www.greylisting.org>). A brief rundown on the greylisting method:
Unknown person (john.doe@unknowndomain.com) sends an email to myaddress@ourdomain.com
ourdomain’s mail server responds with “oops, temporarily unavailable, try again in a minute”
ourdomain’s mail server notes that it’s got unknowndomain.com’s mail server in its queue of mails
if unknowndomain.com is a proper mail server, it will wait a couple of minutes and try again
if unkowndomain.com is using spam software, it will just barf
unknowndomain.com’s mail server tries sending the mail again, ourdomain.com’s mail server notes that it passed verification, and “whitelists” @unknowndomain.com
It’s like C-R, but without any of the nasty downsides I listed above. One thing I particularly like about this system is that it doesn’t involve any human interaction. My Grandmother could email me and not get confused by the Challenge-Response mechanism.
We’ll probably be testing out greylisting on our secondary mail server soon, and if all goes well, we’ll roll it out onto our primary mail server.
Something that’s come up quite a bit in work recently has been the idea that we need groupware. What we specifically need is:
shared address book
shared calendar
shared mail directories
The third of these, we’ve managed to hack together using courier-imap. Unfortunately for us, most of our users are very reluctant to move away from POP3, so they’re largely unaware of the availability of this really cool technology.
The second of these, we’ve… well… sort of managed to hack together. Using Outlook 2000/XP/2003’s Free-Busy publishing tool, our users publish to a shared folder which they can all read from. I even wrote a nifty little hack for our “resources” (meeting room, projector, etc.). But one of the limitations of the free-busy information is that it doesn’t list the reason for being busy. It wil just say “John is busy from 10am until 11pm tomorrow”, not “John is in a meeting with Jane and Bob from 10am until 11pm in Meeting Room 1”. So again, this gets underused.
Playing about with Mozilla’s Calendar, we have a tool that does what we want, and allows us to share calendars amongst a team. And it does it all using open standards, so we can get in there and hack around it, if we want. Unfortunately, Sunbird (the codename for the calendar software) is still at a very early stage (0.0.2?), and is barely-usable. Definitely not usable within a production environment.
Shared address books?
Nightmare.
We have a company-wide address book, with all our email addresses in LDAP (one of these days I’ll get around to integrating this with Sendmail, I promise). But we can’t add to this remotely. Perhaps we can, and I just haven’t figured out how yet. Either way, we need something better.
Yesterday, a crazy thought entered my head. Bear with me, because it sounds a little ‘out there’. Would it be possible to remove Outlook completely, and have everyone work through a “thin-client” (read: browser-based) solution? We already provide a much-loved web interface to mail (using the horde application framework), so would it be possible to extend this some more? Horde offer a module that lets people browse CVS, which I’m sure will appeal to developers. It also allows them to set up filtering rules and vacation notices and, and, and…
Well, this is useless. Of course I can see the advantages of it. I’m already sold on it. Based on their reluctance to give up POP3, I’m worried about how reluctant they’d be to give up their Outlook. People get remarkably attached to their email.
Finally got around to watching Danny O’Brien’s Life Hacks talk from NotCon (video). This talk is essentially a “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” for dorks - Habits of Highly Prolific Geeks. It’s terrifying how many of these habits I seem to have formed myself, and yet am nowhere near being what you would call “prolific” (I sometimes stick a mirror under my nose to make sure I haven’t died).
One of the figures that stood out for me from this talk was that “7% of all posts to livejournal are marked as “private””. These are the posts that are visible to noone but the poster. I use these a lot on my own livejournal to keep track of important memories, or even nuggets of code that I might use a lot (the most-used being wget -r -l1 -H -t1 -nd -N -np -A.mp3 http://www.site.com). There are also countless nerd-related thoughts that run through my head on any given day that I’d love to expand upon, but don’t want to do it through livejournal. I’ve got everyone thinking I’m some kind of puerile semi-moron, and I like that. I wouldn’t want to spoil that by posting something that’s actually slightly useful.
So that’s the purpose of this blog. Hopefully I won’t get bored too quickly.
johnke.me
I know everyone expects them to be really energetic and be a real handful, but if they can get just a couple of decent 20-30 minute walks a day where they can get off the lead and run fast, they’re super-happy.
I’m pretty sure this is old news, but 
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