It wasn't long ago I didn't much care who won - I liked all the Democrats. Now I just want Clinton to go away, since the only way she'll win the nomination is
by subverting the popular vote or exploiting bad-faith cheats like Michigan and Florida.
Then there's the pissy factionalism: "If my candidate doesn't win the primary, I'll vote for McCain." I'd like to above all that, but if
Clinton wins by hook and crook, I'll be tempted to stay home. If, on the other hand, she's just trying to be an indispensable, inevitable VP pick, I guess...
sigh... I can respect that.
(At this moment on the teevee, she's pointing out that Obama outspent her 3-to-1 in Pennsylvania. She might as well be saying he outraised her 3-to-1, which doesn't make
her look good. After all, electability is about fundraising too; you'd think by now she'd be unbeatable at that particular game.)
That's where I'll be working next Monday. I never thought I'd be commuting to SF, but man o man it looks like a fun new adventure.
More later.
April 20, 2007
Defining Down 'Analysis'
If you want to understand how the war has been marketed from before it started and for the past five years,
this is a must read.
The first several paragraphs make it sound like an energetic spin machine - we're all used to that. But read further! The article describes a short-circuited
feedback system, in which the most 'credible' voices in the media discussion are just another PR arm of the Pentagon.
Scary stuff.
April 17, 2007
Things I Didn't Know #4: Titanic, Olympic, Gigantic
Perhaps I didn't know this because I ignored Titanic-mania when the movie came out. But I am curious whether this is new information to anyone else.
In brief, the Titanic had two sister ships:
Olympic - Over 20 years of service, the Olympic collided with no less than three ships, sinking two of them (one a German submarine).
Brittanic - Originally dubbed Gigantic, it was launched as a hospital ship during World War I. Less than a year later, it struck a mine and sank in the Aegean Sea.
I also didn't know that Harland and Wolff, the builders of all three ships, are still in business.
April 14, 2007
Spotless Mind
I happen to be playing three games right now in which the main character has amnesia.
Not really a complaint though - just an observation.
April 10, 2007
Get Lamp
For text adventure fans (or maybe any game developer) this looks like a must-see:
It's a shame. For a while there, I thought we had a chance to put the wheels back on the road and get out of the last-gen rut.
(On the bright side, I've been wanting to take a few days off. Just not so many days off.)
March 29, 2007
While I'm on the Subject...
Here's a Gary Gygax mention from George Stephanopoulos' show.
I'm actually posting this as a sample of the very moving In Memoriam segments that play every week on the show. Video obits are standard fare on TV, but something about these
leaves me fumbling for a kleenex every time.
Looking for more grief? There's a fellow on YouTube (canofwhoopass4u!) who collects
'em all.
Alignment: Chaotic Good
A chaotic good character acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He makes his own way, but he's kind and benevolent. He believes
in goodness and right but has little use for laws and regulations. He hates it when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do. He follows his own moral
compass, which, although good, may not agree with that of society. Chaotic good is the best alignment you can be because it combines a good heart with a free spirit.
However, chaotic good can be a dangerous alignment because it disrupts the order of society and punishes those who do well for themselves.
March 7, 2007
Who Knew?
Turns out, life just flies right along whether you're blogging about it or not.
February 7, 2007
And there's some guy with a bat too
From the Comcast On Demand schedule:
February 4, 2008
I'll Take Sports Matchups for the Win, Alex
I was in the checkout line on Sunday where a woman was talking to the cashier. He had apparently asked her about the Superbowl, but she disavowed any interest in sports.
She said "I know it's the Patriots vs. the Giants. but that's about it." That was news to me, of course; I didn't even know there was a game.
The cashier asked me what I thought, and I gamely tried to "guy up". I said my loyalties were torn because I was born in Boston, so I should root for the
Patriots but I've spent half my life in San Francisco, so I should also root for the Giants.
He gave me a vaguely indulgent smile and handed me a receipt. "OK, you have a good Sunday", he said.
After thinking about it on the way home, I decided that Boston should take home the pennant this year. Anyone know who won?
"Lies, Damned Lies, and a Searchable Database of Lies"
January 20, 2008
Look Who's Talking Trash
The Genevieve quote factory is in full production these days. Note in particular how she likes to seize on evidence of parental fallibility for comment:
You forgot!
You're going the wrong way!
How's that funny? (We think this is a variant on "Isn't that funny?" but it sounds to me like something Joe Pesci would say in Goodfellas:
"How's that funny? Do I amuse you?")
Mom's gonna play with me, and you do some clicking. (i.e. Do whatever the hell you're always doing on the computer.)
Livia: "Sometimes the trains will sit at a little dead end like this..." Gen: "And they're dead!"
You can tryyyy. (This started as a standard encouragement from us to her. Now it comes back at us when, for
instance, we say the Hobby Shop is probably closed at 9pm so we can't go. "You can tryyyy.")
Next year I go to the pumpkin patch. And papa not work so much. (Heh. Ahem.)
I'm gonna let my feet blow. (No, we don't know either.)
And my favorite:
Now I'm gonna get funny. (I don't know what this means either, but it sounds like a movie hero who's about
to deliver a beat-down.)
January 19, 2008
"You Can't Take the Law from me, since I found Theocracy..."
Mike Huckabee:
"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to
change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather
than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."
January 7, 2008
If Adventure has a Year, it's 2008
As an experiment, I was thinking I'd limit this year of gaming to the following genres:
The idea is, in general, to focus on games where content has more utility and is less of a polished backdrop for an unrelated activity (i.e. killing stuff). There are
a lot of games that invite you to skip the cutscenes, skim the writing, and ignore the art. I want to go in the opposite direction, playing games in which you have to - and
want to - focus on every crafted part of the experience.
Not quite sure why I'm doing this yet; it's like a call that I have to heed, back to the ancestral lands, my gaming origins. I'll post more on the rationale in a few days,
and report on what I discover over time. For now I just want to grab my walking stick and get started.
January 4, 2008
It Rhymes with "Wax Mutts for the Glitch"
CNBC says: "Bush May Propose Economic Stimulus Package"
Hmm, I wonder what he's got in mind?
January 2, 2008
"I Wanna Go to School"
That's what Gen said to us on the 3rd day of her 11-day break.
School is where she plays with her friends. Home is where the fusty parental units try to keep her entertained with old toys and not too much TV.
Then Christmas arrived, Santa brought her a bunch of new toys, and things got better. This morning, she was actually torn between playing with her new train set and
heading off to school, but she trotted happily to the car when it was time to go.
December 25, 2007
Merry Christmas
December 24, 2007
Xmas Wisdom
"Those who cannot remember who's naughty or nice are condemned to bring presents to everyone."
- Santayana Claus
December 23, 2007
We are sick, we are sick
We are sick, sick, sick...
December 21, 2007
The Contagious Spirit
Last year, when Genevieve was sick and miserable, it became a nightly routine to bundle her into blankets and roll around the neighborhood so she could see the lights,
Santas, and inflatable snowmen. She was fascinated and sometimes intimidated by the oversized displays, but she loved the nightly tour.
For a long time, I've looked at Christmas lights and thought they were nice, but I never caught the celebratory spirit, and never felt particulary moved to put them up
myself. After last Christmas, seeing how much they meant to Genevieve, I really felt thankful, and began to see these displays as a gift to the neighborhood.
Last night, I drove around to see where the action is this year, and to get a sense of where to point the stroller when we head out. A few things struck me about the
displays:
* Many more Christmas lights in general, and more elaborate displays on the houses that have them. It's Vegas out there.
* Fewer giant KMart inflatable snowglobes. It's a small victory for taste, but Genevieve likes these better than everything else, so it's a decided loss to a toddler
looking for cheap thrills.
* Not far from here, there's one house with a tall pine that's decorated all the way to the top. You can see it over the houses as you drive anywhere near
the area. The surrounding houses have some good displays too, perhaps inspired by the giant muse.
* There are live streets, and dead streets. An entire block will be dark, but take a left and then a right, and there's a block that has you digging for sunglasses.
The weird block next door to ours (Sarkesian, for you locals) has nothing on one side and an incredible glare on the other. There's a great sociological study in there
somewhere.
It seems like a spirit that catches on and inspires the neighborhood. Our street is pretty nicely lit this year, and we added to the festivities; nothing huge, just a
humble and cheery cluster of lights - getting our feet wet, I guess. Next year, we're thinking... don't tell anyone... electric reindeer. I never thought I'd put lighted,
nodding reindeer on my lawn, but I'm not the grinch I used to be.
December 6, 2007
Blueberry
November 4, 2007
Sunday in the Park with Mina
RetroGen: September 14, 2005
October 13, 2007
Look Out, World
Genevieve figured out how to use a mouse last night.
October 8, 2007
"Close the door, Reed."
It's startling, and a little disquieting, when your 2-1/2 year old uses your actual name.
Livia and I almost never use proper names around here, so she must have noticed how other people address us. Genevieve has used my name twice now, seemingly when "Papa"
isn't doing the job quickly enough, as in: "Close the door, Papa. Close the door, Papa. Close the door, Reed."
September 29, 2007
Lotro of Dumbath
My 7-day trial of Lord of the Rings Online expired today.
I had recognized the game, during the limited number of hours I had to play it, as something potentially better than World of Warcraft, and was interested in starting
a paid subscription. Instead, it appears I have to pay $30 for the game I had already downloaded. I can't justify the expense of buying the game without knowing
I'll have the time to play it, but I most likely would have kept paying $15/month for a few months. So they lost the sale for the price of two months subscription.
(To be clear, I'm not just picking on this particular game. In a competetive landscape dominated by WoW, any company that uses a retail model as a barrier of entry for
a subscription product is shooting themselves in the foot.)
September 27, 2007
Bored of Warcraft
(But this time I'm not deleting my characters...)
September 4, 2007
Conditional Democracy
Here's our elected president, talking about Iraq's elected president:
"He's learning to be a leader," Bush said a few weeks later. "And one of my jobs as the president and his ally is to help him be that leader without being patronizing.
At some point in time, if I come to the conclusion that he can't be the leader—he's unwilling to lead or he's deceptive—then we'll change course.
But I haven't come to that conclusion. As a matter of fact, his recent actions have inspired me."
Open to question, naturally, is what that change of course will be. Perhaps he'll just become patronizing.
August 15, 2007
Oh What a Beautiful Mooornin'
August 30, 2007
If You Can't Beat it, Eat it
In Microsoft Money, when you enter a name in the Pay To category, the program tries to guess at the spending category. Usually it's right.
This time, not so much.
August 24, 2007
The Language Ninny Never Sleeps
I heard a guy on NPR recently saying that after he posted a story about baseball fans, he got "spammed" by baseball fans.
What he meant was that a whole lot of baseball fans mailed him to complain, which isn't spamming. Spamming is what happens when one person sends the same e-mail to a lot
of people; in this case, a lot of people independently sent unique e-mails to him.
I bring it up because this usage isn't uncommon, and it displeases the Language Ninny. The implication in the term "spam" is heedless abuse, but what this usage of
"spam" really describes is a functional feedback system. Is that so bad?
August 23, 2007
We're Always Winning, because We Can't Lose
I hear we're winning in Iraq, at last. I guess the surge is working; I knew we'd get it right some day.
Winning has taken quite a while, and some historical perspective is due. Try this: Type Iraq "We're Winning" into Google News, sort the results by date, then
click "Archives" on the left. Then click on the year entries to see how long we've been winning.
You can investigate our winning ways with these sample searches:
So let's keep winning! After all, losing isn't an option.
August 20, 2007
Hedge Wizard
You might not know who Jim Cramer is. Take a look a this and you probably won't forget.
Keep in mind that passion, overstatement, and the bearing of a harried floor trader is his shtick; he's a showman,
not a seer. So this link just serves as free advertising for Cramer, but I couldn't help myself, mainly because I wanted to provide context for this:
Of course, Cramer got his rate cut, which will have the short term effect of letting certain speculators bail out before the ceiling falls in. I think the long term
effect on the market is negligible and we're in for a slow slide, and I've
adjusted my investments to suit. But that's just me, I don't know anything.
August 15, 2007
Scaredy Cat
This is Little Sweet One.
She's a nervous cat by nature - she's afraid of a spinning overhead fans, for instance. But when we brought home Genevieve, Little Sweet One's peaceful
world was thrown into chaos. She spent most of the day hiding in hard-to-reach places, and she barfed a lot more, also in hard-to-reach places.
After a couple of months, Little Sweet One came to terms with the situation, recognizing that Genevieve slept a lot, couldn't move around very much when she was awake, and was
generally oblivious to cats anyways (too busy examining her own hands). LSO started spending time with us again, but kept an ear out for trouble, and made tracks when Gen
was in one of her moods.
Ever since Gen has been mobile - approaching two years now - poor LSO has been back in seclusion, spending most of her time behind the cat gate. She still apparently
keeps an ear out, though. She knows all the signs of Gen leaving the house or going to bed, and will stroll into view a minute or two later.
I've wondered what it's like from Genevieve's perspective to have this wraith in the house. Gen will catch a glimpse of her flitting past a doorway in a dash for the
cat box, or will hear meowing at the rear door, as LSO tries to get our attention to let her out before The Pink Monster catches on. Gen knows she's a cat, knows her
name, and has seen pictures, but she doesn't get to look at her for more than a few seconds a week.
Little Sweet One has a few more years in her, and I hope it's enough time to become friends with Genevieve, who really does love animals. Her brother Buster is starting
to assert his place on the couch again, absorbing Gen's overzealous affection with his ears flat, waiting for her to get bored and go away. He's stubborn, and it makes him
hard to protect. Little Sweet One is stubborn in a different way: She holds tightly to a grudge.
July 29, 2007
I Have No Idea Why the Caged Bird Sings
Gen had a little tantrum at the end of the hall the other day because we wouldn't let her in the bedroom to "pet" (i.e. bounce on, shriek at, or inadvertently
throttle) Buster, our cat.
As she cried, we told her she should come join us when she calmed down. After a minute, the crying slowed down, then a minute later it ramped up again.
We looked down the hall and she had somehow crawled under the cat gate, into the spare room, where the cats usually get to eat in peace. (We raise it off the floor so they can
squeeze under it.)
So basically, she had imprisoned herself and then decided that it was terribly unfair and we had to hear about it. She sat there, looking at us through the bars, bawling in
outrage.
Livia removed the gate and said she could come out when she was ready. Gen continued crying for a bit, then reached over and closed the door, and wailed even louder.
We'd open the door, she'd close it, etc. Ultimately, Livia found some distraction to break the cycle and Gen cheered up.
I bring up the story only to point out that kids are weird.
July 26, 2007
Full O'Crap
Hey, see that link to the left, the one that says "Daily Kos"? I've had that link for a long time because it's one of my favorite lefty blogs.
Bill O'Reilly says that
Daily Kos is like the Nazi Party, which I guess makes me, by extension, like a member of the Nazi Party. That would put me in the secular, pro-feminist, pro-union,
anti-torture, anti-imperialist, pro-Israel wing of the Nazi Party, just like those guys back in the 40's.
Gen had a tantrum in her sleep this morning, complete with kicking, moaning, lots of Nooooo, etc.
"I wanna go in the water! I wanna go in the water! I want... I want a vitamin!"
It's a bit of a puzzle, since I don't think we've ever had to stop her from going in the water.
July 20, 2005
Gen's best friend in the world is Mickey, and Geoff's birthday brought them together for a day at the beach.
It's amazing how much fun they had with nothing but sand, seaweed and limitless room to follow
each other around.
July 17, 2007
Begin Again
Archive time! And I'm happy about that.
Over the last few months, lacking time to write at length, I was experimenting with short links and topical snark. But nothing ages
more quickly and sadly than topical snark. By trying to keep the site going with minimal effort, I lost the soul of it.
Notes: I played through Kingdom Hearts, and watched it commit all the crimes of design that I do my best to avoid, (exploitation of a bad
camera, mazelike level design, baffling side quests, enemies that look the same but get stronger to match your progress, lack of guideposts for the player, obscure button
commands introduced mid-game, and did I mention all the false finales?) and all I can think is: As a game designer, I'm trying too hard.
I never thought of myself as one of those tiresome Disney haters, but KH is a tour of Disney at it's shallowest. It's not that the source material was awful (Awful? No.
Tedious? Sometimes.) but when the characters arrive in KH, stand on their marks, and recite a handful of familiar lines with sound-alike voices, it's easy to forget what you ever
liked about them. With the exception of Goofy and Donald, who are fun to have around throughout, every character has a 'best public face' blandness. Exploring Kingdom Hearts
is more like scanning the box art on a shelf full of Disney DVDs than exploring the settings and characters themselves.
In the end, it feels less like a game than another PR venture; that strange Disney mix of marketing and entertainment that we all know and love.
Status: STILL just past the diner investigation. I'm saving this until I have a few vacation days to focus on it.
Mood: Really intrigued.
Notes: I'm only an hour into this, and I get the feeling I'm playing an "important" game, in terms of design. The tutorial is goofy, the art isn't grand, and
the writing is just ok. But there's serious vision behind this game.
If I could sum it up based on what little I've played, the goal is not to have you play a movie - a tiresome cliche when it comes to game design - but to play a novel.
You get an "omniscient" viewpoint by playing multiple characters, each with their own motivations and "mood", who wonder about the other characters you're playing: "Why did
he try to mop up the floor?". You can interact with lots of stuff, sometimes in trivial ways that just serve to illustrate your character.
Game designers consistently commit the crime of building stories around plot instead of character. Tim Schafer was one of the few to recognize early on that, just as
gameplay is about interesting player decisions, good fiction is about interesting character decisions: Raskolnikov's decision to murder, Sancho Panza's decision to keep
following Don Quixote, Manny's decision to find Mesche.
Indigo seems to be all about characters, their motivations and their decisions, but it puts you in their shoes. From what I can tell, you aren't defining the characters
with your actions (I agree with Bob Bates that a good story is best told by the storyteller.) so much as exploring their dimensions.
Anyhow, I just got started, so I can't say too much. Maybe it'll go off the rails soon or get tiresome. But right now I'm enthralled.
Considering I was a film major, the number of classic films I haven't seen is scandalous. On the other hand, as I get older, my take on any given film becomes
more sophisticated.
Take Bambi for instance. What a cutie! And little Thumper with his big eyes and one tooth? I just wanna hug him! The ice pond scene had me laughing,
and that lightning storm was so scary!
Aside from all that though, I had no idea going into it that I'd be watching an art film, sometimes an extremely self-conscious art film. This came out just two
years after Fantasia and the experimentation was fast and furious, and still carries a punch. So much of it is stylized that it becomes a trivia challenge -- name that
art inspiration. The forest fire alone seemed like a mix of Van Gogh and Edvard Munch, and I'm sure I missed a lot more references than I caught.
SPOILERS below!
The other big surprise is that everyone knows what happens in Bambi, and everyone is wrong. I always knew there was a forest fire, that it kills Bambi's mother,
and that a hunter kills his father. Wrong! The hunter actually kills Bambi's mother. The forest fire kills nobody, and aside from scaring the wits out of everyone, has pretty much
zero impact on idyllic forest life.
In fact, I was rather dreading two scenes of grief and loss packed into a 70 minute kids movie and I got... none! The scene where Bambi searches for his mother is
beautifully done, especially the inspired audio track, and then... cut to a sunny day, Bambi has horns, all these cute critters have creepily low voices and... what? Bambi's Mom?
That's sooo 2nd act, dude.
In general, the film starts out very strong and then gets very weak when it needs to return to its cycle of life outline, with some dated sexual politics for chuckles,
and -- sorry, Walt -- a laughable noble patriarch schtick that just kept coming back when I'd almost forgotten about it. The implication at the end is that Bambi
will now become a self-absorbed, distant sire, just like his dad.
But really, the plot is an afterthought. You can tell that for Disney, it was more important to find a barebones story
that he could adorn with cute animals and brilliant animation. For all the talk of how animation is "growing up" in the past decade, Disney appears to have been strenuously
rescuing it from the kiddie realm way back then. Sure, the kids will be absorbed, but it just happens to be a work of art too.
Mood: Too stressful to play for an hour at a shot.
Notes: It's been a very long time since I had the time to sink into an epic RPG like Xenosaga. Y'know, the ones where you get a save point every 2 or 3 hours,
so you have to leave the PS2 running while you go to work. But I couldn't wait any longer; it's been burning a hole in my bookshelf since before Gen was born.
Xenosaga is one of those anime titles where awkward lovelorn teens are in charge of military vehicles of impossible power, and the only people over 20 are the grizzled
drill sergeant and/or former general, and the kindly old woman with a kimono, pins in her white hair and a permanent squint (I haven't seen her in the game, but I know she's
there). Oops, I almost forgot the scarred-but-sexy, humorless, laconic veteran of war who's prematurely greying at 25. I haven't met him yet either, but he'll probably be
enjoying a rare moment of tranquility, eating rice at the old woman's house.
I'm repeatedly amazed at how complex Japanese RPGs are allowed to be. In American RPGs it's like: "Do you want this scrap of armor on your left arm or right arm? And you'll
have to choose between these three rings, because you only have two fingers."
Japanese RPGs have all these slots to hold theoretical items that nobody has ever used one day in their lives. "You can upgrade your Tech slot, your Ether slot, or your
Skill slot, and each turn will require two slots to have at least one point left over from the previous turn. When your slot becomes overpowered, you can interrupt the
command order to call in a Gaia entity relevant to the slot and the accumulated power of the items used to fill it. Don't let your Action Points fall below those of your
Gaia entity or it will turn against you!"
Uh-kay... What the hell do kids eat in Japan? I want my kids to eat that stuff too.
Notes: Now and then I wonder if my attention span is permanently damaged by a tight schedule, too much coffee, Genevieve-style play, pop culture, videogames... not
necessarily in that order. So I pick up something like this and take as long as I damn well please to finish it. If my mind isn't too restless and I'm able to get a few pages in,
my brain feels like its soaking in a spa, stretching out, letting all the trivia drain away.
Believe it or not, my interest in the book has nothing to do with the Taliban or the US invasion. I just wanted to read up on a region I know almost nothing about. It was
a solid read.
Mood: I probably played it too hard, but what a game!
Notes: There's not a lot I can add to all the reviews in the 90s and the O Face every gamer displays when playing or talking about the game.
But to give you a sense of how open ended the game is, I'll relate my best 'kill'. I own a magician's spire, far up in the snowy mountains. It just so happens that
one of my assassination contracts led me up there, to a campsite near the spire.
I shot an arrow at the tough Nord to get his attention and scurried towards my spire while he pursued. I ran inside and took teleportals to get up to the tiny platform
at the very top of the spire. A few seconds later he popped up there next to me. Before he could swing his huge axe, and I hit him with my paralyze wand. He stiffened up
and slooowly fell over backward, tumbling off the platform and bouncing an outcropping or two as he fell into the fog below. I saw the axe fall out of his hand, so I think
just before he fell out of sight, so I think the fall actually killed him.
I headed back down and sure enough, he was lying there on a snowdrift, his axe several feet away. I searched him, grabbed his axe, and whistled off to get my next mission.
Notes: I remember watching about halfway through the 1st season when this show started, and getting turned off by the weird blend of comic book plotting and
the grueling psychic pain of it all. Everyone is always pulling a gun on someone else and then finding an excuse not to shoot, and the unending daughter-in-peril thread
made me want to put my eyes out.
Turns out I had only seen the first four episodes, but it felt like half a season because so much was crammed into them. By 4am, Jack has pulled a gun on his supervisor,
watched two allies get killed, and broken agency protocol about 12 times, and that's just one out of four intertwined narrative threads.
I rented these to give them a second chance, and dammit, I'm hooked.
One third of the way through the season, at what appears to be the end of the First Act, I can't imagine what they'll be doing for 16 more hours, but I can begin to see
the broader arc in outline. For several hours, the heroes and their various victim friends just can't seem to catch a break. But the good guys are beginning to put
some pieces together and stop playing defense, and the every tiny victory becomes quite cheerworthy as a result.
In a way, the show is a continuous feat of pell mell shark jumping, and the shark manages to catch a bite now and then (amnesia? Please...) What keeps me interested, besides
the audacity of the circus act, are the characters. Sutherland and Haysbert are excellent, but the characters that flit into and out of each episode are themselves highly watchable.
Michael Massee as bad guy Gaines is fantastic, the random waitress that Bauer has to take as a hostage, the various co-workers at CTU, the scary brother of the thug from the
early episodes, all of these guys combine Central Casting origins with inspired ambiguity to keep us guessing. The destiny of our heroes usually depends on the motivations
of these characters, and scrutinizing each new encounter for clues becomes the driving force behind the show.
I've been curious to revisit the 1995 Johnny Depp film Nick of Time. It also features real-time plotting, and the main character trying to save his family while
being steered into assassinating a political figure. (And no, his name is not Nick.) I remember liking it more than the critics -- I wonder if it plays out as a pilot for a fun
TV series?
Maybe watching it at home on a rainy afternoon was the wrong way to go, or maybe the extended version really waters down the original, but man, Livia and I both thought
this flick was overrated.
We liked the amiable tone, most of the characters, Carell's performance, and I think Romany Malco pretty much ran away with every
scene he was in (Who is this guy? I've never seen him before.)
But aside from that? Well, it turns out there's a limit to how much sex talk and swearing I care to listen to over the course of two hours, and this one passed that limit about an hour in.
This is generally considered the weakest of Ghibli Studios films, but I was surprised at how weak it really was, especially in the dialogue.
The great thing about the Ghibli films (like Pixar films) is that there's no age group that they don't appeal to. Unlike Disney films, which might appeal to adults about half the time, even
the least complex Ghibli film (My Neighbor Totoro) engages both adults and kids by aiming high.
It's pretty instructive, in fact, to watch the American dub of a movie like Kiki's Delivery Service, and then watch it in the original Japanese with subtitles. The Japanese
dialogue is more complex and less inclined to snarky retorts and cheap gags. There are more half-thoughts and character details, and a little less emotional coddling.
But what's really instructive is to watch the feature on the DVD about the dubbing of The Cat Returns. The most important goal, apparently, was to match the words up to the
mouth animations, which meant the actors were rewriting as they went along, altering some writer's painstaking craft on the fly so the animations would match up.
To make matters worse, the subtitles for the movie are actually "dubtitles", transcribed from the dubbing session instead of translated from the original Japanese. For
a viewer who doesn't know Japanese, this puts the the original script entirely out of reach.
So kids will probably enjoy the movie, but parents should be prepared for that "I'm on an all-sugar diet" feeling that accompanies a lot of Disney animation.
Notes: This is the toy equivalent of a "button masher". Whomp your little hand on any big flower and it plays a note. Or at higher settings, it plays a short tune,
or a pretty long tune. As each note of the tune plays, one of the flowers lights up.
The notable thing about this toy is the quality of the music. Most kids toys have dreadful little speakers scratching out a tune as best they can. The more complex the song
-- especially if they have singing, like a Disney toy based on a movie -- the worse the sound. The Chime Garden sounds great, especially at the highest setting (if I can figure out
how to post audio, I'll try to have some comparative samples up soon).
Gen is least interested in the note-by-note play. Turns out she likes to put on some music and dance (kind of bumping up and down where she sits). Or turn towards another
toy while the music is playing, then when the tune ends, she turns around, whomps a flower with both hands to get it started again, then gets back to her other toy.
Just tonight, the tunes started warping, repeating, and cutting out early. She has to work extra hard to keep her soundtrack going, but it's also kind of hilarious. I'm hoping
to get a recording of that too.
Notes: Good old Katamari. I was very excited about this sequel, although I hadn't quite exhausted the original. I tumbled through it pretty quickly.
Turns out, I didn't need more Katamari. Replaying the original every couple of years would probably be have been enough. It had better music, better interface, the king's dialogue
was less annoying. In W♥KD, an added level of self-referential chatter with the common folk just delays me from rolling the Katamari.
This one's got some twists: underwater rolling, speedway rolling, rolling up clouds, etc. It's still all just rolling, which is fine. Ultimately, it's the same game with
different backdrops. If you wanted that wonderful final level of KD to get even bigger and grander, this is probably as good as it gets. If the Katamari got any larger, it
would become a replacement Earth with all stuff of humanity trapped in the middle. Heh.
Notes: I played this game with the nagging sense that I should enjoy it more than I do. It's great to solve puzzles again in an FPS, and the atmosphere and detail in some
levels (especially those low-tide river sections) is fantastic. So what's not to like?
It was interesting to look at these levels as an LD. The game could have leaned back on its physics and graphics engines, known license, the always crisp and responsive
weapon play, and the basic fun of shooting enemies. But the scenarios were thought through at a high-concept so each was distinct from the last, each a set
piece worthy of discussion: "That one where you go under the bridge", "the part that played like the movie Tremors", "running from the tripods", etc.
Ultimately, though, I didn't care much. There wasn't a lot to enjoy except the moment-to-moment impulse: Where you were pointed, what you were facing, what weapons you
had on hand. I didn't feel a story building. I didn't care about what's-her-name or her father. I didn't care about the goal. I felt like the game often treated me like a child,
valued primarily for his trigger finger: "You gotta go do this, Gordon". "Oh, here, I'll unlock this door, Gordon." "Wow, I can't believe I'm meeting Gordon Freeman."
This could be said of other games too, but here it came into sharp relief against the years-in-the-making sophistication of the graphics and engineering.
The original Half-Life felt like a brilliant lark: The funny characters, the delightful and credible enemy design, the audacity of the tram intro and of certain puzzles
like the giant tentacle in the rocket lab. Valve seems to have taken their invention too seriously and tried to make a tourable sci-fi epic, with none of the punch and humor
of the original. You can see every discipline polished to a high sheen -- the art, physics, facial animations, level design, combat balance -- a team working on each and fitting
them together like a giant puzzle, but I don't know if any one person had a sense of what it should look like when you stepped back and took it all in. The resulting game
falls short of the sum (or perhaps more accurately, concatenation) of its parts.
I've always thought that the conceit of being permanently behind the eyes of a non-speaking character has both a personalizing effect, and a distancing effect. It was more
effective in the original HL because you were a recognized character, but not a special one -- kind of an everyman. The character might as well be you. In HL2, you're now
notorious, no longer an everyman, and yet you never say a word, and minions look to your mute self and your ability to throw boards around as a sign of greatness.
It doesn't work.
A necessary corrolary of this design (apparently) is that the experience is continuous. No cuts, no objective views of your character, no cinematics that aren't part of
the character's direct experience. The first-person viewpoint of your average shooter is already a narrative liability (how many films adopt that viewpoint, and for how long?).
As you're forced to walk every step of the journey, you find yourself dead-reckoning your way through the story as well, which nearly snuffs the pacing of the narrative
altogether. It's a primitive form of storytelling, and I hope HL3 recognizes that and puts story in front where it belongs.
Notes: Couldn't stop thinking about this old favorite recently, and I hit several stores trying to find it, but the only thing to be found was a "Best of" album.
Amazon had it, of course. I never expected the internet to be the indispensible archive of all my lost teenage pursuits.
Listening to the album for the first time in 15 years, I was surprised at the muddy sound, like a live performance (not a complaint, really), and the huge amount of organ
work, which you just don't hear much of anymore. One thing hasn't changed for me though -- the storyline of Rael is still compelling and bewildering and impossible to
figure out. There are a few websites devoted to decoding the odyssey, but like Kubrick's 2001, it's an odyssey I'd rather try to figure out myself.
Notes: After my extended station at the altar of Star Wars, I've become curious about how other publishers mine an established license for gameplay. Specifically,
how do they use a non-violent license, since Star Wars, Terminator, and James Bond offer pretty clear options for gameplay.
The answer, with regards to Harry Potter, is to throw in a bunch of puzzles... and a bunch of violence. As befits the perilous Hogwarts environment, there's always
something trying to attack you, from garden gnomes, to animated books, to older student prefects. While I can't exactly recommend the game, there are surprising moments of
wonderfulness that redeem the grueling moments inbetween. The stealth mechanism is frustrating, the framerate is shockingly bad, the dialogue more juvenile than it needs to be.
But flying around the fully detailed Hogwarts castle on a broom is really cool, as is exploring the gigantic place on foot, and several puzzles are nicely done.
Notes: Fifteen CDs covering 100 years, this audio documentary has to breeze over a lot of detail. It's still a fun ride though, and I'm learning about my weakest subject,
everything prior to 1930. The very best part is interviews with people who lived through the time. Hearing people talk first hand about WWI trench warfare, or the farmgirl
who witnessed the Wright Brothers' flight, nothing quite matches it. Great voices telling great stories.
The 7th disc of the series is called "Civilians at War", and speaks of how all sides specifically targeted civilians, for purposes of terror, demoralization, or sheer hatred
and revenge. It's very, very grim stuff, and I admire the series for devoting an entire disc to such a depressing, unrelenting narrative. Needless to say, it seriously blurs
the line between the concepts of terrorism and 'total war'.
Mood: Glad there aren't any more to get hooked on, at the moment.
Notes: After finishing R&C2, I felt I'd had enough for a while. But I mentioned it to Gresko and he brought in R&C3 for me, and I thought I'd check out the opening,
and now I'm hooked all over again. Funnier than the previous two, and with various tweaks to make the gameplay a little sleeker. Once again, I broke my usual rule and
replayed this one to find the better weapons, etc.
Notes: I've always wanted to avoid falling into the TV trap of just watching because there's nothing else to do, or because everything else takes too much energy.
Just about any artform, of course, can produce something engaging enough to keep the eyes open the lull the brain to sleep, but TV is so utterly passive that it becomes an
easy scapegoat, and makes your personal choice of brain-candy look good by comparison: "Well at least I'm not watching TV".
Revenge of the Sith is one of those well-tailored, slickly diverting games that makes TV look relatively healthy. Which isn't to say I'm not enjoying it. It's fun,
it's got sound and fury, clips from the movie, experience points, combos, sound-alike actors with a few good lines, and non-stop action. And Star Wars, woo! I'm not sure my
brain is any more engaged than it would be watching the average episode of Law & Order. But the game is more addictive, takes a hell of a lot longer to finish, and costs
$50 more.
Not to single out ROTS here; most videogames on the market (including some I've reviewed here) might fit this description. The trick is to recognize when they're putting me
into the "alpha glow" state of TV and stop playing. Wow... harsh.
Status: Done, but I can imagine firing it up again one day
Verdict: Ingenious and addictive
Notes: I think Insomniac has a better track record than Blizzard in terms of keeping their franchises intact and making each installment better than the last.
R&C capitalizes on one of the things that made the Spyro series so much fun: The pleasure of watching scads of sparkly stuff (Spyro's gems, Ratchet's bolts) jingling into your
inventory. Not to mention beautiful artwork, just enough puzzles to keep the brain alive, and a breezy sense of action that's all but unique to Insomniac.
I admire the game for making complex strategic choices seem like mindless fun. My enemy is through a doorway and around the corner; I can't use the straight-shooting machine
gun, the guided missile is has too wide of a turning radius, I'm out of ammo for the HK220 smart missiles, my bomb-gun is too short-range, and a gap in the ground swallows my
roving spiderbot. Aha! I'll toss my decoy puppet into the doorway and draw them into view for my sniper gun! Hmm, only 4 rounds left. I'd better make them count...
Normally, I never replay games. But R&C has a very neat Challenge mode, which adds multipliers to the bolts you can collect. The longer you remain untouched by the
enemies, the more each bolt is worth (up to 20x). This lets you afford the high-powered weaponry which you can only dream about during the first playthrough. Brilliant!
Notes: The first arrival from Simply Audiobooks; I decided to enjoy the audio version of a book that Livia is
reading, and I put it into the queue before I realized it was abridged (as a rule, I avoid unabridged stuff unless it's throwaway fiction of the Dan Brown variety).
A few years ago I read The Gnostic Gospels, by the same author. For some reason, historical Christianity is fascinating to me and these books don't disappoint.
Notes: I found this for $5 at Target, a hard bargain for me to pass up. I like these investigation/courtroom games; they're a very small sub-category
of adventure games, with a deliberate attention to detail that most games lack. After the first L&O game, I had low expectations for this one, but I was surprised. The interview characters are very distinct personalities, and a lot of care went into to
the interview animations.
The story ain't bad, there are some decent puzzles (easy enough not to kill the momentum) and no time limits or other nonsense. It's fun to interview
the kindly next-door neighbor, a helpful old lady, then order research into her background, tail her around town, and drag her in for a psych profile just for the hell of it.
The best thing about this game is the characters, their faces and voices. You can "recognize" them, they seem familiar, but not quite from central casting. In fact, the
bit players have a lot more personality than the show regulars. There are so few games with an interesting cast of characters, (or the time to get to know them) that this
is a real achievement, pretty special in the world of games.
Notes: Let me sing, yet again, the praises of Jim Dale. If you've seen the Potter movies on DVD, you've heard his voice in the interactive sections.
During one sequence here, he plays about a million characters in chattering conversation, and manages to keep them distinct, serious, and funny by turns. His standout performance
on this set is the muttering house-elf named Creature.
This is my favorite in the series. The politics of the school and ministry are fascinating, darkness lurks at the margins, and everyone's fate seems to hang by a thread. I never dreamed the series could get this involving.
Notes: Fun book, and if you've never heard Jim Dale voice all the characters in the Harry Potter series, this is possibly his best work yet. A huge cast of characters to deal
with, and differentiate, and he does justice to every one. Madame Maxine saying "Dum-bel-y-dore..." had me cracking up. He even has to sing this time! Rowling is increasingly
clever about introducing plot points that don't look like plot points, to explain some quirk of plotting far down the road. This more than anything, I think, makes her books
increasingly long. But I'm not complaining, cuz my commute can get pretty long too.
Notes: There's no game in recent memory that's been such a start-and-stop affair. Travel a ways, get into a long-winded discussion, initiate a fight
that's over in about 20 seconds, travel a ways longer, load a new map, repeat. The load times are excruciating,
especially when you're just shuttling between two locations over and over (as in the Imperial fighting arena). The dialogues are fairly standard stuff,
but using about twice as many words as necessary, making this one of the first games in which I habitually skip voicelines before the characters finish.
So I applaud Bioware for the milieu, the artwork, and the engaging combat engine, but please, let me play!
Mood: Enthusiastic! But distracted by different unfinished games
Notes: This is the silliest game I've ever played, possibly the simplest, and one of the most fun. You roll a big ball around and pick up objects -- that's it!
In the beginning, your ball can only pick up ants and thumbtacks. As it gets bigger, you work your way up to crayons, then batteries, then balls of yarn, then
gita (Japanese sandals), then small animals and upward from there. Part of the fun is the absurdity of laying waste to a household, then a small town as you roll everything up
into your ball. I can't recommend it enough. And it's only 20 bucks!
Status: It's all over but the invincibility, and who needs that anymore?
Mood: At 30 hours, this game is about 10 times too short.
Notes: This rivals Katamari Damacy for silliness, but only because deflates the self-serious Star Wars into LEGO icons. The minute I saw Qui-Gon's
arched little eyebrows and ponytail on a LEGO head, I was hooked. In terms of design, it feels like a variant on Ratchet and Clank. Run around,
kill enemies, get "bolts" (aka LEGO studs). Use the studs to buy things (in this case, new characters and cheatcodes). It doesn't have the serious
stunting of R&C, but there are several puzzles, and that wonderful circular structure where you revisit earlier levels with capabilities that you find
in later ones. In this case, the capabilities you pick up are innate to the characters you uncover. So in essence, it's a collecting game, and you don't
want to stop until you've seen LEGO Anakin fighting LEGO Obi-wan while LEGO Palpatine snickers in the background (Does this actually happen? I'm not telling...)
Mood: Ready to learn; anticipating bouts of depression.
Notes: Globalization is one of those trendy subjects I've been planning to learn about for some time, like Chaos Theory and Genetic Engineering.
I wanted to get to it before it became entirely passe, so picked up this book by Nobel Laureate Stiglitz. He lets on early that he considers globalization
a necessary evolution of the economic world, but also recognizes that it's hurting a lot of the people it's usually touted as helping. Now I just have to keep
reading and find out why.
This is one of those subjects I got used to while working at KPFA. There's no hope in the world of stopping the engine of commerce that feeds
globalization, but I like to think a discussion this will make a few well-intentioned bureaucrats work towards containing the damage.
Notes: When I first got hooked on World of Warcraft, I became interested in the lore of the game. I thought I'd be excited somewhat more about
visiting places and meeting people if I knew their backgrounds. The histories on the WoW webpages are a great place to start, but there are still a lot of unanswered
questions.
There are significant barriers at work for me here. Given limited time, I vastly prefer non-fiction to fiction. And fantasy is probably the hardest fiction
for me to get into. AND, my interest in WoW itself is flagging. So, about halfway in, I'm getting pretty much what I expected. A bit of lore, a few uninteresting characters, a narrative that feels
tailored step-by-step to provide thrills and no real sense of risk for the reader. Writers often talk about characters that begin to write themselves,
resisting the writer's manipulations. But readers get the same feeling as characters come alive. They develop a faith in the characters' independence,
and a parallel trust that the writer isn't just fudging events to progress the characters toward a predetermined fate. So far, events and characters appear too "scripted"
to make me care.
I just checked the Amazon reviews, however, which say it starts poorly but gets much better. I guess I'll keep at it.
A few years ago I assembled a list of "desert island" films, movies with enough variety and depth to keep me interested on the proverbial desert island.
This was one of my choices, based on a viewing from 1982 or so. I watched it again recently, on the Criterion Collection DVD and I'm not so sure anymore.
I still like it a lot, but what came across well in a repertory theater with an admiring crowd was more quaint and dated on a TV screen 20 years later.
The humor is broader than I remember (like the old "everyone gets pulled into the swimming pool one by one" schtick) and the banter doesn't spark
the way it once did. Some movies inspire a nostalgic forgiveness for the gaffes and missteps, but this one offers up a little to much to forgive
sometimes. Still, the setup, the opening road scene, lots of the dialogue, the fascinating mood shift, and that beautiful church scene still make this
a worthwhile rental.
