pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity

Still alive.

2011-05-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

I'll just brush off a year and a half of dust from this, and note that I'm alive and well for that small number of readers who don't already know that in person.

I'll also point out that this week, the management over at the gaming community Quarter to Three has been kind enough to host some cheerful babbling I've done about the relatively-unknown video game "Clutch." Monday's entry is here and the rest will release scattered about each day after that.

Random bits from my brain

2008-09-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

In no particular order. I'm pretty sure I'm running a mild fever, but don't know if that's anything more than correlated to these.

-- Cloverfield is a decent giant monster movie. Generation Kill was a more-than-decent dramatized mini-series on soldiers in the field. Every single one of them was a more compelling character than the useless whining shrieking yuppie idiots that Cloverfield was saddled down by. I want a giant monster movie focusing on a particular company of soldiers trying to contain the entire situation as INSERT MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREA HERE gets trashed.

-- I had a dream this morning of having something or other to do at a generic-university's science building, said building not patterned after any actual location that I could tell. Whatever the original task, it was rapidly obsoleted by the realization that there was a rhino in it; this required moving slowly to get around it lest it get spooked and/or angry and charge, because even in this particular dream logic, in a contest between charging rhino and me, charging rhino is going to win. This was further complicated by the building next door suddenly getting pummeled by airstrikes--jets zooming by and unloading (apparently very wimpy) missiles into it.

I like to think that a giant monster was going to erupt through that building next, and I would've rejoined my unit after dealing with the rhino mission, but I woke up at that point.

The Anti-Olympics

2008-08-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

This is my idea, which I invented myself, it is my creation. I should really file a frivolous patent posthaste, but won't, so when the antigames start up in 2010 or 2014, I'll be the bitter drunk guy ranting again about how they stole my idea while all the friends and acquaintances who put up with my nonsense sigh and wait for it to pass again.

So, I was watching a bit of the Olympics, and it occurred to me that the main problem with them is that all the competitions are between people who are similarly massively skilled at whatever the event happens to be. (I'm aware that many people consider this a feature. I am not my brother's keeper.) Then it came to me, in an inspirational flash.

Every even-numbered off-Olympics year--so alternating 4 years sandwiched between the regular ones--there should be the other games. I haven't chosen what to call them yet, and should really just start trademarking every possiblity as it occurs to me. But, again, won't. (See above re: drunken complaining, too late.) These games will likewise involve particpants from all nations. But here's the important twist: whereas the regular Olympics all involve your standard qualifying competitions to winnow out the athletes, the alternate games will be filled by lotto, by pure random pick. It'll be brilliant. The stands will explode in excitement when the pasty stereotypical full-time internet cafe Starcraft-tournament playing Korean actually struggles across the entire length of the 100 meter pool, as opposed to cramping up and sinking to the bottom after floundering ten feet like the 300-pound trucker just did, and who knew that 70 year old grandmother could shoot skeet so well? Except for that one little misfire accident, but judges can be replaced.

I predict with full confidence that the viewership numbers would put the actual Olympics to shame.

Lesch-Nyhan

2008-06-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

So this will probably the most horrible thing I learn about today. The bit where in the linked pdf article that made me physically cringe is the mention of one person with the syndrome having, over time, ripped out the bones of his hard palate. So, that's a fun read that should be shared.

My God...that cat down there by the acid pool...

2008-06-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

...it ain't got NO FACE YYEEEARGH!

Miscellaneous

2008-04-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

I'm a big believer in having piles of neglected things gathering dust. Therefore, I'm nominally signed up on that Twitter thing. In practice, it'll get updated perhaps slightly more often than the blog, which is sort of like saying one midget is slightly taller than another.

I figure it'll still be handy to note things to follow up on later, and also to send coded messages using the agreed-upon ciphers, as I'll be able to update it via phone texting. For instance, if I find myself in a certain situation, I'll be able to thumb in "spleen" as an update, and certain parties--who know they are but not necessarily others who know who they themselves are, and vice versa--will know that it's a call to immediately activate their roles in the Omega Contingency Plan, with said order unable to be countermanded. And so on.

I'll follow up on one important note right now. I got pointed at the Muxtape site awhile back, which is probably one of those things the RIAA has some junior attack lawyers currently being starved in cages while being poked with sticks while effigies of it are waved just out of reach, in order to give them the proper motivation. It's a neat little thing, vaguely akin to something like Pandora or last.fm, only with a complete random walk model instead of any sort of recommendation engine. My piece of the effigy, which is an unsurprising random grab of metal and bulldada (if "Banging in the Nails" doesn't put a smile on your face, well, I'll miss you when I'm in Hell later, but not terribly because SubGenius Hell is that sort of place).

But what caught my attention about the place is in the Terms section. You have your usage restrictions--you shouldn't be able to put multiple songs from an artist or single album up on your mix--and "not in the face, not in the face!" CYA fictions like users agreeing to obtain permission to let muxtape use anything they upload. That's all expected and not noteworthy.

But the very last sentence of the terms is, "Muxtape is alive."

And I'm creeped out by this. It's not really the sentiment itself. I mean, sure, it's allegedly just your standard Web 2.0 The Machine Is Us/ing Us buzzwordy bullshit, which will look pretty quaint and staid right about...well, right about now, but also in a few years when that'll be the majority realization too, just like the belated realization that dotcoms weren't actually ushering in a totally different new kind of economy that's rewriting all the rules. (The attentive student of history will realize, from these kinds of belated realizations, that the popular portrayal of mankind as a sentient species is actually just a marketing lie.) That doesn't worry me. I expect to see such statements in "about us" sections and vision statements and whatnot.

But it's in the Terms. It's in there as a mandate. As a base given. It's like a EULA, that by reading you automatically accept, an oral contract. You agree that Muxtape is alive. But what kind of life is it? Have you seen the internet? Have you psmelled it?

Worrying.

Baby Got Back

2008-03-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

The original Shawshank Redemption scene, before it was altered due to usual Hollywood test audience lowest common denominator effect. Transcendent, moving, powerful.

Gilbert and Sullivan once covered the Earl of Mixalot's family anthem. The booty ripples backwards in time even unto the age of pirates.

Nerd music superstar Jonathon Coulton's heartfelt acoustic cover. Performance somewhat marred by the sort of thoughtless crass buffoons in the audience who insist on laughing at anything serious and beautiful.

Garfield minus Garfield

2008-03-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

While that may seem to be laying it on a little thick, I've gotta say--it's really onto something.

Dwarf Fortress: Boatmurdered

2008-03-02T13:47:00.000-08:00

Dwarf Fortress is one of those games I periodically mean to actually sit down and dedicate the time to learn to play. It has the benefit of being free, so that's less embarassing than being one of the games I've actually paid money for and haven't learned. It's absurdly, ambitiously complex, to the point where it's probably one of the few games which can use the term "emergent" as something other than an idiot marketing buzzword. (Sidenote: Saint Bill Hicks on marketing. He will rise again, one thousand feet tall and clothed in holy radioactive fire.)

Also, it led to the epic saga of "Boatmurdered", the grand story of a dwarven stronghold besieged by demonic elephants, miasmic rotting clouds, total all-consuming insanity, and engraved images of cheese. It's a lengthy read, a bit slow to start, uneven due to the authorship switching that's part of such things--but well worth it.

In space no one can...

2008-01-14T10:49:00.000-08:00

As previously mentioned, some time ago I spat out a short piece of warnography bulldada involving the grown-up Peanuts gang involved in a zombie apocalypse and time travel brought on by the Great Pumpkin (an otherworldy demonic horror, you see) with Linus as the corrupted evil sorcerous mastermind. It amused some people, and somewhere an angel got its wings.

I still think that was a fair characterization of a believable Linus path. Here's part of the reason why:

I've been buying the collected chronological sets of the strips as they've come out and as I remember (I imagine I'll stop when I find the point where they lost the undeniable edge it had in its earlier years; I'm curious as to when that may be. My suspicion is it's somewhere around the late 70s or very early 80s; it'll be awhile before the compilations reach that point), and just finished the '61-'62 compilation. One of the strips went like this:

Linus is standing out looking at a starry sky. He is silent for a few frames. One of the frames has the streak of a falling star in it. He goes back into the house. Lucy is sitting in a beanbag, watching television. "Guess what?" he says. "What?" she asks, one presumes, crabbily.

"Falling stars don't scream," he says.

In another strip, originally from December of 1962, he's bringing his own translation of bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls to show and tell.

I'm telling you: budding evil sorcerer.

EDIT: I knew I'd presented other evidence from earlier still, and found the relevant entry. These two posts really contain just a small representative sample, and are not exhaustive by any means. The picture they paint is truly damning.

Prophecy

2008-01-04T11:19:00.000-08:00

I do not claim that this makes any rational sense. As an eggheaded intellectual who, spiritually speaking, is close to dead inside, I have a difficult time giving it credence. You can, if you also fall into that taxonomy, probably explain it away as a minor sort of temporal lobe seizure that spread a bit to hit some random memory circuits.

All I know is, the vision came to me entire and whole, in a single flash, as in a flash of lightning in the night as the Dalai Lama said of a major mahayana Buddhist sutra put it. (Or possibly some apocryphal gnostic bit; I may have that phrase indexed wrong.) It came to me while visiting family recently over the holidays, and a commercial promo for something godawfully trite involving dance troupes battling out for AMERICA TO DECIDE who the best was. DanceWar or DanceFight, something like that. Sort of like the end of Blazing Saddles where the cast crashes through into another set, and the angry choreographer leads his troupes into battle, only instead of Slim Pickens it's just another bunch of dancers. On its lonesome, just one of those little byblows of the scorched-earth response to the WGA strike, I imagine--if they're not writing a fresh stream of godawful shit, well, the networks can make even more godawful shit without them. (I also hear American Gladiators is coming back. Mark my words; when the WGA strikes a third time, it will also return then. As it will for the fourth.)

But that's just me being uncharitable. I can trace the causes and conditions of all that. But it was then I saw what was to come. Flash of lightning, yo.

There will be the distant sound of a scream of rage, a voice pushed past all endurance. A burial plot in Mississippi will shudder--and the reanimated corpse of Bill Hicks will explode out of the ground. Swelling with righteous holy fury channeled from beyond the grave, where his spirit was denied rest until his work could truly be done, bones and remnants of flesh and burial clothing will sublimate into a searing white light of holy fire; no longer truly a "body," his zombie will grow to well over a thousand feet tall. The thousand foot tall reanimated corpse of Bill Hicks will stride across the nation, leaving burning footprints in his wake, and tear the network headquarters into something that cannot even be rightly called rubble; no stone will remain atop the other, and indeed there shall be no stones, nor even dust. There will only be craters, which will smolder for centuries to come like the Centralia coal mine fire.

I say this with all due holiday cheer, compassion, and charity.

2007-12-17T10:25:00.001-08:00

Dear old gray lady at the local Post Office's automated post center thingie: using it to bill up and ship packages is certainly a nice feature. I would humbly suggest, however, that using it to do so for a stack of a dozen such packages when you are averaging approximately five minutes for each package's transaction from weigh, pay, label print, and bin placement is, perhaps, not particularly indicated.

Engaging in such activity may, in fact, indicate that it is time to begin consideration of allowing yourself to drift away on an ice floe.

Sincerely,
Gar Drastic

P.S.: to the staff's credit, they processed the lines with unexpected efficiency. I noticed you still had approximately two-thirds of your package stack left when I exited the building. Again, I urge you to consider ice floe.

P.P.S.: "ice floe" can be construed to be metaphorical. There are other options.

P.P.P.S.: Merry Christmas!

reviews

2007-10-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

Movies:

Holy Mountain - A minibus full of hippie Rosicrucians tripping out of their collective gourd smashes headlong into a Road Warrior-esque jerryrigged armored dune buggy with spiky bits being driven by Carlos Castaneda on PCP, low blood sugar, and a high fever. They begin to exchange insurance information, but end up making a movie together instead. This is that movie.

Altered - Pissed-off crazy rednecks traumatized by being fucked with by aliens aim to get some payback, but don't really have a very well thought-out plan. This is one of the few movies to paint an accurate picture of the Grays, namely that they're vicious little fucked-up bastards with mouthfuls of flesh-eating bacteria and a penchant for playing with the lower GI tract.

Good movies both, in their own ways.

Ad slogan

2007-09-21T18:08:00.001-07:00

So I'm listening to Manowar's "Hail to England," specifically the 8 minute "Bridge of Death" metal epic that caps it at the end, and let me back up a bit.

Manowar is the kind of band that...no, wait, I'll try again.

Manowar's album covers all feature some sort of variant of berserker Conan knockoffs, all glistening and oiled rippling electrolyzed thews and more than a little homoerotic of the "FUCK YOU I'M NOT GAY!" overcompensating variety. These mesomorph warriors are howling their straight-as-Ted-Haggard at the sky, which is generally excitingly busy with lightning, while shaking various weapons at the sky ("I WAS JUST EXPERIMENTING!" they're berserker-raging), while various extremely top-heavy topless women fawn at their feet in a fruitless effort to gain their attention. But they're failing to gain the warriors' attention because, you know, they're tired and dammit woman, they already said they were at a late meeting at the office and no they didn't stop at the bathhouse again HAIL ODIN BLOOD AND WAR!

They also at one point held the record for the world's loudest band. Also for a drum solo with the highest sustained beats-per-minute sustained by a human drummer. And if that's not actually true, it should be.

Anyway, as I was saying. I was listening to this song, freshly downloaded from yonder emusic.com. Most of it is blending well into the established background. A lot of words about the fighting to die in the sky and why as eagles fly in the sky to fight and die (Manowar's book of rhymes has always been fairly limited), when this absolutely brilliant piece of lyrics catches my ear:

"ride out on Hell's hot wings!"

Which is awesome. Just think about it:
Ride Out on Hell's Hot Wings(tm)!

Now I ask you: is that a great ad slogan for a brand of hot wings, or is that the greatest ad slogan for a brand of hot wings? I'll just put you down for "greatest."

Ride out on Hell's Hot Wings!

Pickles the Drummer doodily doo ding dong doodily doodily doo

2007-09-15T08:32:00.000-07:00

I don't watch much television. I'm not one of the teeveetotalers who get smug about that fact and believe that it gives them mental superpowers, because I'd have mental superpowers no matter how I spent my free time, on account of the yeti blood. Or more properly, nental superpowers. But another reason I don't believe that is that it definitely leads to missing some good stuff when it's new.

For instance, I hadn't known of the awesome brutality, blacker than the blackest black times infinity, of DETHKLOK, whose adventures are featured in the documentary series Metalocalypse.

I was aware of some kind of emptiness where the sound of brutality should echo. I was aware that, as my blood flowed through my veins that I was not being aurally bloodtrocuted. I knew that my ears were starving, but I didn't quite know how.

But now I do know, and it's a better world.

Old Time Radio Shows

2007-09-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

Good collection of mp3s of classic old radio dramas. The Shadow, Lights Out, etc.--all kinds of good stuff there.

Related, the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, who did what is probably the only actually good Lovecraft movie (a period piece, silent movie adaptation of "The Call of Cthulhu" short story), also did the same schtick in an adaptation of "At the Mountains of Madness". That latter, of course, done as a period piece radio drama.

It's a genre I think is probably due for a niche comeback, what with the popularity of podcasts.

Extreme in-joke

2007-09-09T12:51:00.001-07:00

Baby sea turtles.

quick reviews

2007-09-05T20:41:00.000-07:00

Movies:

Hot Fuzz: It's by the same folks who did Shaun of the Dead, and it shows, and in a good way. Slow-burn opening that's primarily to set up a machinegun series of joke moments later; tongue-in-cheek dry humor building to general insanity. Basically, what Shaun does for zombie flicks--being simultaneously a comedy version of them, and a damn fine zombie film in its own right--Hot Fuzz does for action cop movies.

Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon: This was one of those great occasional discoveries that justifies my netflix subscription above and beyond all the other justifications. Some hapless film school types are shooting a documentary on our hero Leslie Vernon, who's aiming to be the next big name in unstoppable supernatural slashers. His dream is to be referred to in the same breath as the greats like Voorhees and Myers and Krueger once were.

It's all very self-aware of its genre, poking fun of and fond of at the same time. It reminded me somewhat of Scream, only I liked it much, much more--"Scream" was, in effect, mugging at the camera and oh-so-very pleased with itself; "Behind the Mask" pretty much plays it poker-faced straight.

Game:

Bioshock: A good game, but somewhat overrated--not really worth the thundering praise it's getting elsewhere. Where it shines is its lovingly polished art direction, and narrative that's competently executed with decent voice-acting throughout--which of course puts it lightyears ahead of most videogames. It's no spoiler to note that the plot has its twists, and most of the weaknesses of it come about as a direct result of that, as pretty much all plots that get twisty don't bear too much scrutiny around them.

Of mice and awesome

2007-08-29T18:50:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a drafty oldish farmhouse. The sharp snap of the classic mousetrap design doing its thing was a common thing. Throwing out the bodies was one of the not-really-chores from time to time.

People are shaped by their experiences. To put it poetically, we are all the echoes of the ringing bells of our past. Splash. So, I'm fairly inured to things rodent, especially when said rodents are dead. This is an important thing to note.

I will change the names here, in order to protect the innocent. I will rename them according to the standards as established in many epic-fantasy writings, in order to add the appropriately mythic tone to this tale.

About a week back, I'm visiting with my friends. We'll call them F'fje, and D'ren'ak. I hear tell they recently had an adventure ridding themselves of a mouse. That's mouse, singular. Having disposed of likely a thousand-plus mice over the years of boyhood and adolescence back home, I'm thinking something like, how quaint. Especially when no-kill traps are mentioned. These no-kill traps, of course, did not have a very good success rate. Eventually, they achieved a mousefree home again. All is well.

It's early afternoon. Their youngest, L'ael, has been convinced to nap, and has--after suitable complaints and raging against the descent of the Big Darkness, the swallowing void that is sleep--surrendered to that void. Exhausted by the potent struggle of this phenom, F'fje collapses, as if felled.

I'm entertaining the other two, R'rta'teg and Ws'eyra in the basement playroom. As all such rooms should look at that age, it's mosly a space where the contents of various toy bins has exploded, and coated every available surface. The distribution of the plastic, fabric, and books is a microcosm of the universe's distribution of matter as a whole--overall, evenly distributed, but with just enough variation to cause localized clumps. The boys are entropic vectors who redistribute the overall structure. Like the universe, it would expand forever were it not bounded. The walls create an artificial omega > 1, for the cosmology fans out there.

"Uncle Drastic! What's this?" R'rta'teg queries, thrusting his find out at me.

The answer is pretty obvious as I take it from him. "Huh. Sure looks like a mouse to me." I do a quick bit of necessary taxonomy, though--it could well be fake.

"Is it a toy or real?" The kid's sharp. (Truly is. A couple years earlier, when he was barely older than three, he and I had, at his blindsiding initiation, a fairly in-depth conversation about death and potential causes of it. Which rocked.) Once in my hand I discard that hypothesis. It's been dead for awhile, and is fairly small. Young, or just not very well fed. It was just laying out in the open, the boy explains.

"Nope, this is real. You guys aren't as mousefree as you thought. I'm going to go throw this out and let your mom and dad know." Up the stairs I go to the ground floor. On the second, F'fje remains, like L'ael, gripped in the twilit little doom that is sleep. D'ren'ak is quietly eating lunch, basking in rare solitude. "Hey!" I announce cheerfully. "Check out what your son just found!" I'm holding out the find, dangling stiffly via its tail, without a second thought.

She turns, and the reflex obviously comes right from the brain stem. She shrieks, and doesn't so much leap as teleport about a yard straight back and ends up bolt upright on her feet. The chair, luckily, is wheeled, so it just skids away harmlessly.

It was awesome. It could only have been more awesome if she'd actually ended up standing on the table, on tiptoe.

In my defense, this was completely unintentional and unexpected. For a split second, as it was going on, I thought maybe she'd seen something behind me. Maybe I'm about to be stabbed from behind by some guy in a hockey mask, I think. (I actually think this a lot. Be prepared, is my motto.) But, no, it was the mouse.

Because part of me is made up of a good man, I do apologize. I hadn't actually meant to have taken a couple years off her life, and had I known this was going to be the reaction, I like to think I would have proceeded more carefully with breaking the news.

But I also recognize the existence of darkness in me. We all carry the potential forms of monsters in us, after all. And so I was also somewhat disappointed that I hadn't known this was going to happen.

If I had, I would've been powerfully tempted to arrange to have filmed it. And now, I'll never have the chance to.

A peaceful life is all about learning to live with such lost opportunities.

Neverwinter Nights campaign episode recap

2007-08-06T11:58:00.001-07:00

I was going to do this in-character, but that's a lot of work and I'm very lazy, even in the face of bonus XP and phat lewtz. But yet, by writing this in a way that maximizes my personal slack, aren't I even more in-character than being in-character? Think about it.

This is based off of my infallible memory, and is both wholly and holy accurate. In the places where your own memory and records, up to and including the in-game journal, disagree, it is you who are wrong. So it is written, in the Book of Gar's Recap, Chapter 1, Paragraph 2. This citation will prove it: "So it is written, in the Book of Gar's Recap, Chapter 1, Paragraph 2." – Book of Gar's Recap, Chapter 1, Paragraph 2.

Our heroes of the yet-unnamed party were sleeping it off after a month-long drunken (to put it legally) celebration of renovating the Caves of Chaos, slaughtering all the evil inhabitants, using their blood as primer, and repainting them and making them much more homey. The property value is increasing dramatically already, and the party's investments—shrewdly rolled over from initial nest eggs invested in grain and flour futures—promise to make them hundreds.

After everyone emerged from their blackouts and fugue states (except Stram, who could not be roused; everyone drew on him with markers, left his hand dipped into a bowl of warm water, and left him to catch up later), they found themselves in a well-irrigated field. Bob the Barkeep was there, selling various hangover cures and equipment upgrades for suspiciously fair profits. After everyone got some coffee in them, attention was turned to how to get Bob's galleon out of the irrigation ditch it was somehow parked in and out to open sea.

No one really remembers how they solved that problem, or much of the ocean voyage, again due to being drunk. To put it legally. But they finally came to their destination, some town which the citizens claimed was called Ulik, yet had some other name over the gates. It's hard to say who was right. The citizens were all fucked up, whining about having barely escaped slavers who were stampeding women and raping cattle up and down the coastlines and generally being evil dicks about it all.

The guy who nominally ran the place told them that it was unknown where the slavers were based, but there was a burnt-out temple up in the hills that sure had a lot of suspicious foot traffic in and out of. So the party headed up that way. Various half-orc normals kept shooting arrows into the party. The party calmly countered this argument by explaining that the half-orcs would be happier with swords stuck through them instead. In the end, the party won the argument. In the afterlife, the half-orc slavers agreed that they had been wrong, and asked if they could please repent, but it was too late for their sorry asses.

Also, quite a few of the party died, and had to be brought back to life by the Space Bankers, who had returned their business to the more accepted industry standard of streamlined service fees since the party's last outing. Upon discussion, everyone agreed that maybe next time they wouldn't react to combat by everyone running in separate directions.

The adventure nearly came to a halt when it was discovered the front door of the temple was locked. But then they found the slavers had left the back door unlocked. It was promptly kicked in on principle, and they descended into the basement, which had a serious ant infestation. An extermination bill was left, and the party pressed on, deeper, harder, yes, YES! No one had ever satisfied the evil temple like the party did. It had never been like that before. The slavers didn't treat it right, not like Orson and "Bob" could, baby. Sure, they had to slap the temple around some, especially when it got all lippy and let its mouth get smart like that, but it was for its own good.

The sub-sub-basement led into an underground complex which was infested with slavers who were very confused. They hadn't heard that they were supposed to be dead, so the party explained their error to them by killing them, and collected fees in XP and gold. The new plan of not running in different directions when fighting immediately paid dividends for everyone except Maximvs Vrsvs, who visited the Space Bankers of Resurrection several times, mostly because of the candy bowl in the lobby. The candy was worth the xp penalty, he later explained.

Soon, the party found trapped slaves, and freed them. "Holy shit," the imprisoned slaves said. "You guys are awesome!" "Yes," the party agreed. "Yes, we are awesome. Except for Stram, who didn't come with. He said you guys suck, and weren't worth saving. Are you going to let him say things like that about you? If you see him in town, you should totally fight him. You probably will, being 0th level commoners. Go back home and try to get better shops up and running."

They also found the slaver who ran the place. He was going to deliver this big evil monologue and introduce himself, but the party killed his ass before he could say his name. Saint Doktor Bastard was divinely inspired to cut out his eyeball and keep it. He spent some time waving the severed eyeball around over the corpse and saying "Hey, what do you see there? Oh, your body? Your DEAD BODY?! That must be because we KILLED YOU! You never paid "Bob" his tithes, and now you're BURNING IN HELL! HA HA!"

Back in town, everyone was suitably impressed. The eye was getting a little stinky and drippy, so Bastard let the mayor keep it. He also decreed that henceforth, the town should have an annual celebration, held monthly, in which they would tithe their profits to the Church, and thus avoid burning in Hell for failure to do so. Many souls were saved there, that day.

Back into the hills went the party, and found a garrison. Everyone climbed up a rope into an unsecured window, except Saint Doktor Bastard, who was deep into meditation and communion with the Space Bankers' Level Up Department. Finally, he rejoined them.

Things went well, until a serious bug was uncovered in the Saint Doktor's foul stinking zombie upgrade. Suddenly it threw an exception in memory address 00xx0000 and started slaughtering slaves just freed from cells. Previously, it had done the same to some oxen, but Bastard just assumed they were evil and unrighteous oxen. This warning sign was ignored at cost, and brought about a hard lockup and crash of his Paladin plugin. Fortunately, a reboot into safe mode and then system restore from a recent partial backup restored full functionality. The zombie won't be seeing use again until a service pack, which the Church currently has no ETA on.

Later, another slaver executive was discovered, this being some slut named Markessa. This was a pathetic figure, obviously trying to sound French, but then secondguessing the name and trying to spell it in some way that could give plausible deniability to being accused of sounding French. Whatever, she died like a dog, if a dog dies by getting shot full of crossbow bolts and stabbed with swords a lot. Bastard collected her hand and said, "Hey, Zen riddle for you. What's the sound of one hand dying? The answer is YOU!" Later still, St. Doktor and Maximvs got separated from the party, and found this perfect double of Markessa. While Max testified that they killed her normally, Saint Doktor insists that they beat her to death with the severed hand of the real one.

Also, someone found a letter to Icar, which might have said something important or not.

They also found a locked door leading even further underground, which had ominous subtle foreshadowing of leading to the next adventure, such as the signs glued to it that said "This door is currently out of order, but will work in the next adventure!"

"I wonder what that door's all about," wondered Dam Fackoo.

The victorious heroes returned town to much celebration and more XP. There commenced a shopping orgy which resulted in several major upgrades. In a fit of generosity, Saint Doktor Bastard offered the short sword taken from one of the slaver captains to Jackie "Ten Wolves of Multiple Characters All Named Jackie Chanette But With Quotations in the Middle" Chanette, since it looked light and speedy enough for even a woman to use. She declined the sword and insisted that Bastard sell it, but only if he gave her some love. After some wacky Three's Company hijinx from that misunderstanding was resolved, Doktor is even Saintlier, what with a new tool, the Holy "Some call it…The Avenger" sword, all glowy and big red straps and all. He then gave Jackie a golden shower with the remainder of the sale. "Oh no, not so much! That's too much of a golden shower, tee hee!" she said, and Mr. Furley gaped wide eyed at the camera, but it turned out they were only hanging a shower curtain or something like that.

"You guys are awesome! You're so cool! I wish we could be you!" said the town. "But what do we call you?"

"We are…the Party of Orson!"

And forever after in that town, whatever it's called, the Legend of POO will never die, amen.

Then monsters kept attacking the town, but it was only a dream. OR WAS IT?!

The bridge was looking California, but feeling Minnesota

2007-08-02T10:01:00.000-07:00

In case anyone in my vast readership (you are tiny but select percentile) I am unaffected by the Minnesota Death Bridge incident.

The uppermost grades of various occult organizations of the Rosicrucian variety have vows that amount to taking the outlook that everything the universe does is a personal sign directed at you, and by you, I mean me. Now, I'm no true Rosicrucian (although true ones are supposed to deny that they are, so ferreting out the truth of this matter would require a carefully-worded query to my identical twin who tells only the truth or only lies, and he's unavailable right now. Unless I'm lying about that, and without the twin, there's no way to know. Sorry), but this is a helpful attitude to take sometimes.

The lesson contained in this kind of infrastructure snafu can be summed up by me screaming at the sky, "You missed!" And pointing and laughing. (And shortly keeling over at my keyboard from a sudden freak cerebral hemorrhage, in which case you'll never get to properly query my identical mirror twin.)

miscellaneous bricabrac

2007-07-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

My Neighbor Samara, or Ringu 4: My Neighbor Totoro. I look in at Hitherby Dragon more rarely than I should, as this demonstrates.

If you're one of them there reader types, those intellectual elite pansies who are destroying America, www.goodreads.com is a pretty nice site, built around tracking books you've read, comparing ratings and reviews with friends (in the internet sense of "folks who happen to link to you"), presumably so you can see at a glance are inexplicably wrong their tastes are in their divergence from the rectitude of your own. By your own I mean mine.

This link will let you register and link you to my incomplete list, which I started by entering what I'd read thus far this year, then was crushed under a wave of laziness before getting more than a few titles in. It will also email me to inform me that I have a new friend named you, which is good for self-esteem. If I don't get self-esteem, how will I ever grow up?

A music video for I am Murloc, which probably makes more sense if you've ever played World of Warcraft--but really, only a little. Murlocs are a class of walking bags of XP and loot for player characters to explode by shooting them with spells, smacking them with swords, and so on; they are distinctive by having the most gloriously annoying sound effect in the game, featured prominently in said video.

Finally, drunken Jedi stabbing at a party. You know this kind of thing went down in the Old Republic all the time, and Dean Yoda just covered it up because they're really good kids from good alumni families.

Apocalypto

2007-06-28T19:10:00.001-07:00

The climactic moment of this movie in the dramatic sense, the point at which the rising action culminates, the point in which our hero Whats His Name jettisons his fear and fulfills his father's final request before his throat was cut by the Jews^H^H^H^HMayans, and stops merely running and begins fighting back, is this:

Standing tall and proud in a protective layer of mud, he hurls a hive full of angry hornets at his pursuers.

I really think that speaks for itself. Really, the film could have ended there.

Prince of Persia Classic

2007-06-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

A remake of the venerable original Prince of Persia game was released on the Xbox 360 Live Arcade bit this week. Swank graphical overhaul, mainly; it's pretty groovy.

There's just two things that downgrade my final rating of it from "great" to just "pretty good." These are:

1: They greatly reduced the amount of gore in the game. Chopping blade traps in the original made a terrific meaty thunk when you got caught in them, bisecting you and resulting in blood all over; spike traps left you impaled in a pool of crimson. Almost all of that effect is gone. My suspicion is that Microsoft (or M$, amirite?! From my parents' basement in Wyoming, I STAB AT THEE!) mandates that Live Arcade titles have to be T-rated at maximum.

2: One of the charms of the original Prince of Persia, PoP 2, and the Sands of Time revision, was that Jaffar wasn't your traditional videogame boss--he was mostly an afterthought. He was a frail evil old man, and the challenge lay in navigating the deathtraps and guards to get to him. So in the first game, fighting him at the end was only a bit more challenging than regular guards, and less so than one really fast fat guard (who the remake dubs the Gatekeeper); in the second, the trick was running his ass to getting cornered so you could immolate him with your own spiritual powers (shadow and flame, yo!), and in Sands it was just an emphatic easy takedown. He wasn't full of cheesy patterns to memorize, he didn't have multiple stages--you met him, you killed him. It was just to cement having kicked the game's ass prior to finally getting to him.

The developers of the remake apparently disagreed with that approach, instead believing that what the original's Jaffar fight really needed was just more bullshit to make him more of a traditional endgame boss. Therefore he's faster than any other enemy in the game, you have to fight him twice, etc.

But aside from that, it was a good remake.

Garfield

2007-06-07T20:11:00.001-07:00

http://www.dougshaw.com/garfield.html

It speaks for itself.

Photosynth

2007-06-07T08:10:00.001-07:00

I've got the feeling I'm behind the curve on this, but the Photosynth tech demo is really cool. It's a rough glimpse of the future, when such a thing is going to be hooked right into that Google Maps Streetview thing.

Two things

2007-06-01T10:17:00.001-07:00

1: I've been reading Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" fantasy series recently. It follows the post-Jordan evolutionary branch of fantasy that states that under no circumstances shall a series structure be planned to involve less than, say, ten books.

I'm enjoying it, though, for a variety of reasons. Three books in (so basically the equivalent of the prologue, in High Fantasy writing conventions), and there's been a blessed lack of massive chunks of world-exposition. For the most part, the reader's just dropped straight in to this alien place and left to get his bearings by context. That's a lesson fiction in general can be improved by.

Also, it's the kind of setting where the opening action to the very first book is a siege on a city that culminates in waves of sorcerous power killing tens of thousands of soldiers in an instant. This kind of thing is a relatively commonplace event. It's big on spectacle. With all the coruscating magical attacks happening, it reminds me to an extent of a (much, much, much, much wordier version of the Lensman series (which I need to track down copies of and reread to get pulp back in my diet).

Also, it's demented. Its general tone is of a recap of an epic ten-year-plus tabletop roleplaying game, set in a GM's homebrew setting, with hefty doses of game-balance-be-damned plot protection, abuses of "flaws-vs-merits" rulesets for minmax purposes, and so forth.

But the single most wearying aspect of them is the apostrophes. Apostrophes in names. Apostrophes in place names. Apostrophes in proper nouns. Apostrophe apostrophe a'po'str'phe. What the hell is it with fantasy and some science-fiction writing that demands apostrophe abuse? Do editors tack on an extra royalty percentage point for every hundred apostrophes?

It actually shatters my immersion far more than plot contrivances and deus ex machina character resurrections and whatnot. Because it disrupts reading--when used non-possessively, the only way to really read such things is as glottal pauses; now, yes, there can be languages that involve many more such pauses than English, but when everything else is in English, that's a problem. It's only slightly less distracting than writing in colloquial modern English, but your "fantasy" vocabulary involving lots of ! marks to inexplicably include aboriginal tongueclicks.

So when I write an epic fantasy series some day (I'll plan it to span twenty books), I'm going to use ! marks in place of apostrophes. Also, terms from the requisite Elder Languages will be written entirely in the Wingdings fonts.

Moving on!

2: I have no interest in the television show mentioned here. My interest might be non-zero, but current scientific instruments do not have the necessary precision in order to detect it. I gather that it's some sort of vague update of the Red Dawn premise ("WOLVERINES!!!") only with the Red Menace replaced with terrorists, or more properly, terrists. (Turban Menace? Allah Threat? Catchy category names are sadly lacking in this area, which is sad given that it's been over 5 years for PR arms to really work at them.) That's probably both an unfair and inaccurate characterization. Wolverines.

But that's not the point. The point is, this campaign to protest the show's cancellation is great in its own right. 34,000 pounds of nuts have been sent in at last view.

So I think CBS should hire a bunch of temps to eat them as they get delivered, and to work on that backlog. A friend offered a further refinement of this idea which I approve of, namely that they could make that a reality-tv show entitled "Eat My Nuts!"

I got my violence in high-def ultrarealism

2007-05-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

It's a rare podcast that I enjoy. Part of that is that most of them that I've heard are operating under the delusion that they're on the radio--they include bumpers and whatnot and feel like it's a required mandate to jabber on for a full hour. Most of the time I don't have the patience, and they certainly don't have the charisma, for that. I'm carrying around every album I own in digital form, and the choice between listening to people with delusions of being interesting and whatever latest music has sunk serious earworms into my brain (of late, NiN's "Year Zero") is no choice at all.

There are exceptions, of course. The Hour of Slack obviously gets a pass, for instance. But for the most part, no podcast should be longer than 30 minutes.

History According to Bob understands this. Each one is around 10-15 minutes, and is just a focused mini-lecture on various bits of history. It's the proper use of the format. For instance, now I know that Pancho Villa's widow made a tidy living after his death by continually selling "his" pistol to interested parties--simply replacing the pistol hanging in display after each one was bought, to sell to the next visitor to express interest and discover that she was on hard times without much savings and could be persuaded to part with it. I never would have known that if that was at, say, minute 47 of 60. But with it at minute 8 of 13, education has defeated laziness by allying itself with it. This is Slack.

Also, the dude's delivery reminds me a lot of The Professor Brothers: Bible History #1. Which is an added bonus.

Speaking of digital audio, I've recently discovered that emusic.com has at some point turned into a very solid option for buying mp3s. Good quality--vbr, usually right around 256kbps, as if they used their psychic astral energy vampires to scan my system and steal my own ripping settings for them--and the price is definitely acceptable, boiling down to around 30 cents a track as opposed to the dollar a tune of the inexplicable market leading store.

My Humps

2007-04-05T20:34:00.001-07:00

As covered by Alanis Morissette. I think it's her finest work.

Commentary

2007-04-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

I've largely fallen out of the habit of listening to DVD commentary tracks, but it's not like I have a firm stance about it. Exceptions happen both for films that I really enjoyed, as well as those on the opposite spectrum--the latter as a form of cinematic rubbernecking.

Incident at Loch Ness has one of the best commentary tracks I've heard, mostly because it's just another added layer of joke onto the film in general. It's possible generic-your enjoyment of it may be tied to how well you know Herzog's work in general, but I think it works regardless--all you really need to know is that Herzog is one of those directors who is really thought highly of by the kind of film buffs who refer to directors as auteurs. (Which shouldn't be a reason against knowing his work, because he's made great flicks regardless--and in a recursive sort of meta-commentary, his involvement in Loch Ness shows why he's not those people.)

That it was directed and penned by Zak Penn, whose every other piece of work would seem to plant him firmly in the shit side of the Hollywood axis (the man wrote the screenplay for "Behind Enemy Lines," which is one of those movies that strong-position atheists would be perfectly justified in citing as evidence for the non-existence of a loving God, or American-flavor evangelical fundamentalists as strong evidence for the existence and active interference in human affairs by Satan, either way) only adds to the funny.

It's also the sort of film that I initially rated highly, than on further reflection days after rate even more highly. That's rare, I usually go the other direction.

Morals

2007-04-01T15:08:00.001-07:00

Quick morals as taught by several recently-viewed horror movies:

Little Otik: Don't second-guess your first instinct to grab an ax when the quasi-infant you've carved out of a tree stump in an effort to cheer up your barren wife first comes to life.  Beware of inertia following, especially after it eats the cat.  Also, solemn-looking little girls are always evil--or at least, they will lead to more deaths in the end.  (This is as true in Prague as it is in Tokyo; it's a universal human truism.) When all else fails, always have access to a solidly-built scowling babushka protective of her garden.

Body Melt: health farms are always a scam, especially when they're built over condemned chemical plants. Also, it is an evolutionary mystery why teenagers ever try to make nice with mutant hillbillies.  (There are probably associated traits that provide survival benefits outweighing the negatives that also arise.)

Also, for those of you who may be tempted to use the firefox add-on ScribeFire, I have learned that the moral is: don't. Extraneous garbled formatting mess ahoy. Learning is fun.

Holy propaganda, Batman!

2007-03-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

This poster:

... is now one of my shordurpersavs. Or rather, the American Cultural Imperialism MechaMonster it depicts is. That thing kicks ass.

If we don't have a working battalion of real-life versions of exactly that in Area 51 or a similar locale, it's a crying shame.

Turkish Star Wars

2007-03-20T15:40:00.000-07:00

This is just one of those things I've heard about before, but never actually seen. Now I have...well, selected sampled minutes of it...and there's really nothing I can say.

Turkish Star Wars. That's all that can be said. The rest is silence.

The Probability Broach

2007-02-26T11:59:00.000-08:00

I've just discovered that L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach exists online in comic book form. This is nifty. I'd read "The Nagasaki Vector" ages ago (rough memory-indexing, I was maybe 12), and am sad that I seem to have lost my copy in one move or another.

It takes place in the same alternate universe, which just so happened to develop into a libertarian utopia for...some reason or other. There was this little episode in early American history known as the Whiskey Rebellion, and Gallatin sided with the farmers instead of the fledgling U.S., which led to the recognition of the sapience of chimpanzees and other great apes and giving them the right to bear arms. Really cool guns, too, since a libertarian society led to personal sidearm technology that's lightyears ahead of ours. One of the armed gorillas in the Nagasaki Vector had an honest-to-goodness railgun in pistol form. So obviously it's pretty serious stuff.

Don't ask me, dude, I didn't do it. But seriously, chimps with guns. I don't care what your political leanings are, I think chimps with guns is something we can all get behind.

Bible History

2007-02-24T09:51:00.000-08:00

Best bible history lecture ever. All of the shorts from this fellow are worthwhile.

I've also discovered Wizard People, Dear Reader, sort of a more-aggressive style of Rifftrax for the first Harry Potter flick. Listening to excerpts has made me readjust netflix queue accordingly to get the full effect in the near future.

That'll do, CPU. That'll do.

2007-02-12T11:36:00.000-08:00

Earlier today, I note that my computer seems to be running suspiciously sluggishly just websurfing. A few basic troubleshooting steps later, I end up firing up the motherboard utility program that includes CPU temperature readings.

105 degrees. That's Celsius. That's place a cup of water on the cpu and watch it boil.

After the lunge to turn it off (I think my exact spontaneous quote was "Holy Buddha Jesus Hell!"), I further determine that the filter on the case's front intake was caked with more dust than I'd expected, and turned a vacuum loose on it. I turn everything back on, and it's now running at around 80; this is for all purposes idle, with just desktop-and-browser load on it, and it's still running hotter than the chip's operational parameters call for. (The P4's upper limit is around 78ish.)

All told, it was an exciting discovery that's greatly accelerated my timetable for going to a new PC. I'm still internally debating between going the cheaper route of "get a pile of boxes from Newegg and see how much damage I do by attempting to build" versus the more expensive, but convenient, route of prebuilt premiums. I'm sure I could just get a better cpu fan/cooler of some type, but, no. It needs to be rewarded, not have its existence stretched out longer than strictly necessary.

I remain amazed the cpu was even able to throttle enough to stay operational, and that I didn't just hear a muffled bang from inside the case. When I do get a new PC up and running, I'm going to take the current CPU out and have it framed, perhaps with some sort of inspirational plaque. By all rights it should be dead now, probably should've been dead for some time, and it quietly, without complaint, simply refused to stop. Never give up! Never surrender!

What a tweest!

2007-02-01T20:15:00.000-08:00

Brief review of "Lady in the Water":

Inspiring.

Namely, it inspired me to, at approximately the one-quarter mark, begin repeatedly snarling "End! END, damn you! END!" at the screen. As the one-quarter mark became halfway became two-thirds became three-quarters became four-fifths became Zeno's Paradox instantiated in a hellish feedback loop of dysfunctional relationship between me and media, these snarls became hollow, empty prayers. Similar to the prayers of millions of paralyzed children to please God just let them walk and run again, these prayers were answered: "No."

To place things in relative perspective, a by-title review of M. Knight Etcetera's output:

The Sixth Sense: an enjoyable feature-length Twilight Zone episode, which received a spasm of admiration far beyond its merits. Still: enjoyable.

Unbreakable: one of the best superhero movies ever made. Also, his best work; this had much to do with M. restraining (or being restrained) from putting himself in front of the camera for no good goddamn reason, and that it's his only film that wasn't a feature-length Twilight Zone episode. An outlier, and I suspect it'll be his only one.

Signs: in some sort of karmic balancing, this received a spasm of negativity that far outsunk its flaws. Also, they're not aliens. Further, an enjoyable feature-length Twilight Zone episode.

The Village: a second-string feature-length Twilight Zone episode. Not a bad way to spend a couple hours relaxing and eating some popcorn.

Lady in the Water: the ultimate problem with...no, it is too much, let me sum up: What. The. Fuck.

2007-02-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

Fifteen-odd years ago, I wrote a deliberately silly little piece of warnography, "A Peanuts Halloween II." It involved time travel and Linus causing a global zombie apocalypse by magickally aligning with the demonic force of the Great Pumpkin. At the time, it got me a brief amount of fan mail from usenet readers from all over. An intended sequel has never occurred, as the stars haven't been right. (The last abortive attempt was going to be an even sillier tale of nanotechnology crashing headlong into quantum mysticism, technomagical reincarnation of Linus into Rerun, and so forth.

The entire body of Peanuts strips is slowly being republished in chronological order, roughly 2 years worth to a book. I've recently been reading through, I think, 1957. (I'm vaguely looking forward to being able to locate the point in time that the strip lost its spirit and became a tired retread; my current rough guess is the mid-late 70's.) And the evidence is piling up that among the many flaws, intentional and unintentional, was that Linus wasn't unnatural enough.

Examples: in the official canon, young Linus has performed the following wonders:

blown up cubical balloons, with which to make constructions. When allowed to suddenly deflate, said cubical balloons do not fly randomly about, but traverse a perfectly square path in the air.
assembled a jigsaw puzzle. Vertically, standing on its edge.
performed increasingly elaborate card-shuffles, culminating with making them orbit laterally around Charlie Brown. The latter clearly experienced some existential horror, forced to be at the epicenter of the violation of laws of nature, clearly foreshadowing the horror that would be visited upon the world later.

Spooky stuff.

2007-01-26T13:33:00.000-08:00

This is primarily a test of posting to the blog via Google Documents. We'll see how this goes.

I'm not completely sure why I'd want to compose documents over the web, but it should be handy for backing things up that I do write locally. To this day, I still have bad lack-of-backup habits, so a bulwark against my own foolishness is always welcome.

Up to yesterdayish, I primarily used Bloglines as my rss reader, due to its being free and good enough. I was aware that Google had its own beta reader going on, and was powerfully underwhelmed by it. Its default view consisted of a large unsorted list of every single feed item, ordered only by newest-to-oldest. I much preferred the bloglines sorting of by feed source/blog title, clicking upon which brought up the unread entries since last viewed--I still don't understand why Google initially sorted the way they did.

But yesterday, I found out that they've revised Reader in accordance with sanity. Sanity (I shouldn't have to explain this, but the world at large just doesn't seem to have really internalized it yet. So much to do, so many targets for my army of atomic supermen) is that which is in accordance with my own preferences. So it's looking like goodbye Bloglines.

Speaking of singular supermen--dig that segue; I have high verbal scores, which translates into baby-smooth changes of subject--I watched the first two Superman flicks via netflix last weekish. Random observations that occurred to me, in no particular order:

So that's why I kept having such deja vu when I'd watched Superman Returns even earlier. I'd already seen it in a movie called Superman.
Early-80's Hollywood had no good goddamn idea how to hang people from wires in a way that didn't make them look awkwardly stiff.

Sub-observation from this: I think this is why Christopher Reeve's tragic accident struck such a deep chord in America. His real-life transition to awkward stiffness, you see.

(Yes, I know. I'm not a good man.)

However, what early-80's Hollywood by good Wotan did know how to do well is smash the hell out of cars. Movies don't spend enough time these days putting cars on off-screen steam catapults and just hurling them into each other. It's something that we've largely lost, and it's a loss to us all.

Charlie! We're going to candy mountain, Charlie!

2007-01-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

In a similar vein to my last post, which provided the means to never need to watch The Wicker Man 2: Not the Bees, Aaaiiee My Eyes, I have also found the means to never need to watch CSI: Miami: Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhh!. I will grant that there's far less risk of that anyway, but it never hurts to be prepared.

Also, Charlie.

Step away from the bike!

2007-01-10T10:19:00.000-08:00

If you're like me, you've been tempted to rent the relatively-recent unnecessary remake of "The Wicker Man," because you've heard that it's awful. One of the prime problems with bad movies is that, all too frequently, the really enjoyable bad bits are just sunk in an otherwise featureless plain of tedium.

Now I don't have to rent it any more, because I've seen the highlights. Now you can, too. Nic Cage is the Witchpuncher General!

And now a couple brief review blurbs of non-expurgated films:

Idiocracy - it's a shame this didn't get a wider theatrical run. It's from the fellow who did "Office Space," and lives up to that. Similar to Office Space, the best bits are mostly concentrated in the first two-thirds or so, and are lost when they start clearly angling for a happy(ish) ending. Misanthropic comedy doesn't need such things.

Children of Men - the best serious dystopian flick I've seen in a long while. About as subtle as, say, Oliver Stone's output, but with much more sober directorial talent behind it, instead of the goofy coke-fiend energy vibe Stone's "best" has struck me as having. Excellent use of digital effects to seamlessly blend into and enhance the action, rather than gosh-wow displays; it's also got some of the best continuous/pseudo-continuous shots I've ever seen--and like the cgi, they're used to enhance, rather than being an end in and of themselves.

Test Drive: Anasses Unlimited

2006-12-14T15:33:00.000-08:00

And while I'm on a posting roll, one more 360 game review.

But before I get to that, some explication of personal slang that will apply a bit later down. Wayback machine for, I don't know, thirteenish years back, give or take. It's probably about a year after a little game called 'Magic: the Gathering' sent shockwaves through the dead-trees games market, and a great ongoing spasm of other collectible card games began stampeding out the door, frequently with only one shoe on, shirt inside-out, and hopping on one leg while still trying to pull on pants, if you follow the analogy here. Some friends and I were playing something called "Jyhad" which is something White Wolf put out, a ccg related to whatever version of their Vampire rpg was out at the time.

Therefore the deck of course included various vampires who would attack each other by angsting, reciting bad poetry, and presumably biting instead of snapping their fingers in applause. They're broken into various tribes--you have your deformed ugly tribe, your mentally-unbalanced crazy tribe, your dark-with-an-umlaut-over-the-a tribe, etc. There's also an aristocratic tribe--old money, royalty, that sort of thing. They all have immensely snooty sneering portraits; no jury in the world would convict you for randomly punching them in the face. It'd be justifiable assault. I'm looking through the vampires of this particular branch, in a mix between incredulous and giggling at how each one looked more sneeringly snooty than the last. I explain to friends, "Just look at these guys. This one, he's an ass. This guy's also an ass. This woman's an ass. They're all anasses!"

Thus, personal neologism of "anasses" was born. I give free permission for its spread.

Now, review:

Test Drive Unlimited - This is either a yuppie jerk simulator or a partial midlife crisis simulator, depending. As you start a new game, the camera's looking at a few people waiting in an airport gate area. These people represent the basic look of your character avatar, and you pick one. They are all, without exception, anasses. The basic unspoken backstory, it turns out, is that you're an ass who up and flies off to Oahu with two hundred grand in your pocket to begin buying houses and fast cars, with which to make more money by participating in street races and the like. In between racing, your character lounges around their spacious pad, sneeringly smug with how much square footage they have.

All in all, it's pretty funny.

It's a very nice looking game, and it is pretty much hundreds of miles of roads over the island. Umpty race events, time trials, car delivery missions where you're given a very high end car and have to deliver it in one piece, passenger-ferrying missions (time trials by another name, basically; you give lifts to 'models' who are frighteningly deep in the Uncanny Valley) and so on. The game integrates into Live seamlessly, so you see other Live players driving around--which adds that extra element of realism to traffic behaving stupidly. The singleplayer race events and so forth are instanced, however, so you don't get messed with while actually accomplishing anything, just while driving around between events.

I'm not a huge fan of racing games, but I'm digging it so far. Even with the sneering.

Killography (and pinatography) roundup

2006-12-11T15:29:00.000-08:00

For my own part in the War on Christmas, my non-denominatinoal holiday gifts to myself were finally getting a decent television (32" widescreen LCD HDTV--compared to what I had before it, namely nothing, it's infinitely better) and an Xbox 360 to take advantage of that HD part, since cable just ain't on the agenda.

I'm also not clear on how this constituted a blow in the War, but I figure it's the intention that counts.

For those in my vast readership who now, or someday might have, a Live membership as well, my 'gamertag' is "Gar Drastic" and if you need to be told "...but without the quotes" then telling you probably won't help.

Various related ramblings follow right about...now:

The console itself is more impressive than I expected it to be in and of itself. The ability to turn the whole shebang off and on via the wireless controller is one of those little things that I knew about beforehand, but only in use saw the full genius of. Now, freed of having to get up from the couch, I can start working on joining that obesity epidemic I've heard so much about!

Although that doesn't help for changing games about. Which brings me to one of my big dislikes about the hardware: the eject button is metal. This might be fine in a humidified room with no carpet whose occupant never wears clothes, but otherwise, can you say zap, boys and girls? I might have to start using a finglonger.

Aside from that, though, it's pretty slick. Having never seen Live on the original Xbox, perhaps it's making it all the more impressive, but I'm impressed by it. Being able to download demos at will in the background is nifty. Live Arcade has some neat games on there; Geometry Wars in particular is a standout as a trippy, chaotic abstract arcade shooter. Also, Uno has become my just-before-bedtime game of choice, inasmuch as it's very relaxing, what with the almost no thought or reaction time or coordination required.

You can stream media to it from your pc. Videowise is officially limited to wmv files, and furthermore, they're now desperately trying to flog their doomed Zune player thing ("I've got an idea! Let's compete with the iPod by making something that doesn't cost any less, has just as many restrictions, and has less ease of use! It'll FLY OFF THE SHELVES!" Then that executive got a huge bonus. Such is the way of the world, fallen from a state of grace as it is.) by "requiring" that you install the Zune software in order to stream stuff. Nevermind that you can do the same with Windows Media Player 11 simply by turning on sharing.

Or, if you're like me, you find a program called TVersity that promises to--when it's fully cooked--stream absolutely anything, by transcoding things on the fly. Most useful for me is the ability to stream divx files. I've also tracked down the directshow filter needed to enable it to stream ogg vorbis, which most of my music library is ripped to, so I effectively have all my own music available in-game without ripping anything separately to the 360's own hard drive.

TVersity itself, as mentioned, isn't fully cooked; there's a known bug that causes divx video files to sometimes prematurely end about a minute before they should. That's slated for the next build.

Mind you, if Microsoft was smart, they'd have made their own stuff able to do this kind of thing from the get-go, thus torpedoing such projects from ever being. But then again, in that better world, the Zune itself would be a DRM-less, multi-codec device, so there you go. But I'm digressing.

Actual games:

Dead Rising: A brawler, set in a mall infested with thousands and thousands of the hungry living dead. Almost everything can be used as a weapon, from your straightforward baseball bats and 2x4's to your stacks of CDs, soccer balls, and park benches. The boss fights are sometimes irritating interruptions in the general zombie-smashing mayhem (due in large part that the first one requires gunplay, and the aim controls are very much inferior to the brawling controls), and the save system is annoying (one slot only, widely-spaced save points), but the zombie carnage makes all such sins forgivable. The save system is further somewhat softened by retaining experience and levels gained--more attack power, greater health and inventory, more melee feats, and so on--when you die and don't choose to reload, and carrying them over to a new game.

Viva Pinata - Pinata Island is (I'm theorizing on this part) fairly close to Monster Island, only with animated paper-machie instead of latex kaiju. There, wild pinatas are tamed by properly landscaped gardens, breed and live with the dream of being sent round the world to parties. They get to these parties by being shot out of a huge cannon whose ballistics can propel the shipping crates to suborbital paths.

I submit that this kind of backstory is more horrific than any zombie apocalypse ever could be, when you really stop and think about it.

The game itself is a surprisingly deep strategic juggling act that's falsely masquerading as a kids' game. A lot of variables to balance against each other, for all that they're kept masked by colorful fleco instead of put outright on the screen. Trying to describe it briefly is pretty much impossible beyond saying the Sims crashes headlong into Harvest Moon without all the rpg bits. Oddly bizarre and charming, and good for tone-whiplash in switching between games. In the 360's library as a whole, it really nails the "one of these things is not like the others" award.

Rainbow Six: Vegas - the success of Halo left me baffled, and even moreso after I played it on a friend's console back when it was the new hotness. It was okay, sure, and the controls worked again okay, but it still cried out plaintively for mouselook. It cemented my opinion that I just wasn't much interested in shooters on console.

Two-three years two after that, a little title named Mercenaries softened that opinion to, "well, first-person shooters, then. Third works okay." (Incidentally, it's one of the titles that is apparently not backwards-compatible on the 360, which is irritating, as I think it was one of the top ones on the platform.)

Well, Rainbow Six Vegas has changed my opinion. Part of the reason is that it's not really a run-and-gun style shooter--of the sort demanding a lot of circle-strafing and bunnyhopping and rocketjumping and assorted other crazy moon-language references to in-game maneuvering tactics that, frankly, look utterly retarded to anyone watching and not actively playing at the time. Instead, the game's very much about intense firefights that make use of cover, and brilliantly so. Move up to a wall, a car, whatever, squeeze the left trigger, and you flatten up against it, freely able to blindfire past it, or quickly popping up to get bearings, squeeze off a few return shots, etc.

Your computer-controlled squadmates in the singleplayer are generally not completely brain-dead, too. Directing them is quick and easy; they take cover surprisingly intelligently, and they're also effective. Their covering fire actually covers, and frequently they'll drop tangos faster than I can acquire them.

The cover isn't a hundred-percent effective, like the implementation in something like Full Spectrum Warrior, to pick something it's somewhat reminded me of--it feels more dynamic, in that sometimes the angles of protection aren't the best. Enemies will often try to flank, even ducked behind will sometimes leave you exposed to lines of fire, and there will be times when you need to make a dash for other, better-located pieces. It does a great job of making it not have the more puzzle-solving feel that FSW has to it.

The only knocks I really have against it so far is that checkpoints could be more generous. Also, I find it nailbitingly tense to play. That's really not a negative, though, just emphatically not a relax-with choice.

Saints Row - Grand Theft Auto 3, and elements of San Andreas, polished till it shines. It has the expected goofy "street" vibe, played so earnestly straight-faced it crosses over into comedy even more effectively than San Andreas' own me-so-gangsta thing (which really only got tolerable there as the plot unfolded and then spasmed into an out-of-control sprawling silly crime-spree unfocused mess)--the intro, included in the demo, sets the tone as three gangs cross each others path and they take patient, orderly turns killing each other. Witnessing this in the crossfire, your own character avatar does the sensible thing, namely joining the Saints, the fourth gang and city underdog. For now.

So the plot is dumb, but the gameplay itself was seriously tightened. The developers clearly looked closely at GTA and asked themselves "okay...what are the really annoying clumsy bits?" and focused on that (instead of Rockstar, who mostly just seemed to ask, "Good enough! Now what additional stuff can we add?"). Lots of slick little touches.

For instance: the map. You can set a destination waypoint on it, and the minimap will give you route guidance all the way there, so high-speed chases and basic getting here-to-there aren't interrupted by constantly pausing to bring up the overall map till you memorize the layouts. A little but brilliant thing--you're still rewarded for learning shortcuts and such, but aren't actively punished up to the point that you do. More carrot, less stick.

Part of the pause menu is your cellphone. Need an ambulance? Dial 911 and one zips right to you. Apparently you can also dial other numbers in game, from billboards and such. You unlock helpers you can also summon to you--thus far I can call upon a pimp I helped out, as well as a driver who'll drive for me--nice if you want to just cross the city while getting a sandwich.

Shooting was a big part of the GTA3's, which was a pity as it was also deeply annoying on the console versions--the PC ports with the helpfulness of mouse made it tolerable. But on the playstation 2, it was mostly a lot of toggling lock-ons and blasting away while staying mostly stationary. The control scheme in Saints Row reminds me most of Mercenaries, mentioned up yonder--responsive with just the right amount of forgiving autoaim tweaking, and rewarding staying mobile.

There's umpty side-missions scattered around. Again, like GTA, but polished with much of the annoying sanded away. Street races, special driving challenges, and so forth. Stealing ho's from abusive pimps for friendly ones, evading vanfuls of paparazzi as they chase you and the VIP you're chauferring, getting in horrible-appearing car crashes and diving through the windshield in order to commit insurance fraud. You know, the usual. (I love the Insurance Fraud side missions, by the way. Just something highly amusing about ragdolling through shattering windshields to the strains of classical music. Plus, completing the whole set gives you resistance to all damage types!) These occur in levels--level one is a cakewalk, and growing more and more difficult as you progress.

In GTA, say you're doing the firefighter side-mission to get its little reward benny (you turned fireproof once you completed the highest level of it; handy, especially as the last mission in San Andreas took place in large part in a building filled with fire). You could get to the very last difficulty level, then suffer an accident--take a corner wrong and get your vehicle stuck, accidentally get a wanted level and have a cop ram you off a cliff, whatever. Start over at the very beginning, after resisting the urge to throw your controller through the screen.

Not so in the Row. Once you complete, say, level 5 of Insurance Fraud, even if you get flattened by a runaway truck immediately upon starting level 6, when you return to try the activity again, you start at level 6. I can't tell you how much blood pressure this has saved.

The same kind of forgiveness applies to play in general. While you enter the gameworld at only specified map locations, you don't have to trek out to them to save--you can save your progress at any point. When you die or get arrested, you only lose a percentage of your money as hospital/legal fees--but you keep your hard-earned arsenal, especially important at the beginning phases before the money starts rolling in. Again, that's one of those simple little polishings that stands in stark contrast to GTA's "lose everything" consequence--it was really only a bad consequence at the start of the game, and little more than a brief blip of annoyance later on due to cashflow. It's as if Volition had the brainflash, why make the beginning punishing?

Health regenerates on its own if you manage to stay clear of incoming bullets/cars/etc. for a few moments of breathing space. Further, you can carry up to four healing items with you to use if you can't get that breathing space. (Fast food from the gloriously-named "Freckle Bitch's," you see.) Also, when your helpers die, you can revive them by pouring a 40 oz over their corpse, which is one of those great Venn Diagram intersections between "genius," "totally retarded," and "insane." (It's a tiny area of the graph that many games aim at and miss.)

The game also returns to Grand Theft Auto 3's mode of your character being a totally mute cipher instead of an actual character--which I preferred far more than Vice City's and San Andreas' insistence on making you play some dude with his own story going on. I think it's pretty clear I'm guiding a Jason Voorhees-style retarded and practically-unkillable sociopath around, don't try to cutscene me otherwise.

As unrepentantly slavish clones go, it outdoes what it's copying. I take it for granted that Rockstar has a GTA 4 in development; if they're smart they'll sit up and take notice of just how much Volition polished and tightened.

It also makes me hope that the same team next slavishly copies Dead Rising.

Jesus is F'ing Metal

2006-12-10T07:12:00.000-08:00

While concrete proof of course goes against the entire nature of faith, nonetheless there are signs. O Come All Ye Faithful. When the sanhedrin did question Jesus, spittle spraying "What kind of man are you?! What is it you want to do with your life?!" Jesus spake, "I wanna rock!"

Upon this rock I stand. Or leap off to crowd-surf, either one.

Grindhouse trailer

2006-10-11T19:23:00.000-07:00

Yup. That's all I've got to say, really. Yup.

Global Thermonuclear War, giant ape, and zombies.

2006-10-01T17:26:00.000-07:00

Actually, just some media.

Games: Defcon is pretty nice--when it works. It's been having some launch-weekend woes, of the sort that arise from apparently not expecting that people might like to play; the authentication server periodically chokes on itself, and insists that you're playing the demo version, which is irritating. Also, the game browser is just terribly rudimentary--no sorting, no filtering, only catches a subset of games going on at any particular time. The best way to get into specific games is by going directly to IP.

But for all that, it's nifty. It's technically an RTS, but pace is leisurely enough, and it's a great example of complexity arising from simplicity. It very much is a game of losing the least. Factors such as launch silos taking time to switch between ICBM and air-defense mode, and launches identifying the silo on everyone's map, can make for a lot of tension as everyone waits for the first to hit the button. Massive first strikes can net impressive point totals, but so can careful hoarding and timing of your launches in return. Once they get their online functionality ironed out, it's well worth the fifteen bucks Steam charges for it now that's released, or more directly from the website up yonder, if you've got something against Steam itself.

Movies: I got around to watching Peter Jackson's remake of "King Kong" the other night. Meh. It was entertaining enough, but...well, okay, look. In many works, be it print or screen, the services of a skilled and aggressive editor would make for a better product. King Kong's one of those cases--there was absolutely no reason for the flick to be over three hours long. Just about every single scene rang as too long, too loud, too busy, too much. I pretty much blame the full-blown versions of the Lord of the Rings films; in many cases, the extra length when they hit the special-edition DVD releases was justified and made for a better film. Unlike King Kong, there was actually enough story going on there to support that (I mean, aside from things like Aragorn pulling a Wile E. Coyote, Supergenius off cliffs whenever the fellowship wasn't keeping a close eye on him, but that goes without saying--although, again, a good forewarning that an aggressive editor is often needed). Something I'm glad I waited to simply rent; the bloatedness would've drove me batty in a theater.

"Undead." Great little zombie flick, that reminded me in several ways of Peter Jackson's pre-fame, tighter work, especially Dead Alive. It's nowhere near as gory as that luminary piece of walking-dead cinema--then again, what is?--but in its sheer goofiness. Unlike Dead Alive, however, Undead plays itself entirely straight, with a kind of intensely expressionless poker-face, even when one of the characters is having a flashback to having a fistfight with hostile zombie fish. And if that last clause doesn't recommend the movie enough, you may be alive but, my friend, you are dead inside.

What are your crimes? WHAT ARE YOUR CRIMES?!

2006-09-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

So many engrams, so little time.

Also, the entire first season of "Look Around You!" is also present. It's the best science show that's ever been on television.

Shall we play a game?

2006-08-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

I'm looking forward to [url=http://www.everyone-dies.com/]Defcon[/url]. I'd been vaguely aware of it before, as the newest project from the makers of Uplink and Darwinia (both very nifty stylish little games), but hadn't watched the gameplay videos till just now.

Also, their domain name choice is inspired.

AOL searches

2006-08-17T17:56:00.000-07:00

Ah, people. As the saying goes, can't live with 'em, can't call down a holy rain of cleansing radioactive fire because "Bob" got the Xists completely lost and refuses to ask for directions.

Darth Vader is a smartass

2006-08-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

Comscan has det...

The OFFS system.

2006-07-10T16:46:00.000-07:00

I view this system as tangentially related to the Time To Crate mechanic. Whereas TTC is scientific and objective, OFFS is more subjective by nature.

It came to me recently, as I read a discussion thread about Half-Life 2 and its "Episode 1" expansion chapter thingie. I enjoyed the latter a lot--it was very much Half-Life 2 again, but sort of concentrated--tighter setpiece battles, with less dull bits in betwee, whereas Half-Life 2 had setpieces that tended to go on at least a little longer than they should have (or a lot longer, in the case of a certain airboat chapter), with longer sections of rail between them. And it hit me what the difference was--Episode 1 took a much longer percentage of the experience before I thought, "Oh, for fuck's sake" and either quit, or was strongly tempted to. That reaction is, of course, OFFS.

OFFS is rarely about actual difficulty--it's much more often about tedium, the unenjoyable moments you, as a gamer, need to slog through to get the box to dispense another sweet, sweet food pellet. Pace isn't necessarily a good predictor--there are deliberately slow-paced games that avoid tedium, and frantic ones that don't. OFFS is all about those moments of deep mental sigh that accompanies, again, Oh, For Fuck's Sake. Get on with it. Or, yes, yes, I know already. Or, stop talking and let me play!

Unskippable cutscenes have a high rate of correlation with OFFS. This is predictable by considering the steady-state of the rest of shiny entertainment media--movies and television. Think of how mediocre and unentertaining most of it is. Most of that has more directing talent put behind it than videogame equivalents.

I hope to God for me and you that the Russians love their mecha IA IA!

2006-07-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

"For reasons Reuters calls "not clear," 8,600 Russians want to know if Putin plans to employ "giant, humanoid war robots" and 7,300 people want him to be questioned about the Cthulhu, a cosmic cephalopod invented by author H.P. Lovecraft that sleeps beneath the Pacific Ocean.

Learning is fun.

2006-05-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

No, seriously this time, it is.

I've noticed a few times before that using bittorrent applications would occasionally, and apparently randomly, simply kill my internet connection. Or, check those assumptions, internet connectivity simply dying to the point that a reboot was required seemed to be correlated with such programs running.

Then it hit me: you know, Gar, you're allegedly technically savvy. Why are you just accepting that kind of behavior? And I replied: I've got a point!

Anyway, research commenced. What I found led me to this link. Actually, it also led me to others so I could get second and third and fourth opinions on the broken English (I'm not being mean; my German is surely far, far more broken, and there's days where my English is a good old rafter in my eye, so). The gist is, when there's more than ten simultaneous connections, as a "security" feature, Windows reacts by barfing all over its connectivity. Apparently, SP1 didn't have any limits on it whatsoever, so for SP2 Microsoft (or should I say MICRO$OFT, amirite, lolz! (kill me)) seriously overcompensated. Linked page contains a utility to change tcpip.sys to use a more reasonable 50, or user-defined--I slapped a hundred in there. Obviously backup the file before doing anything, and when you run it Windows panics and throws a warning message which you can ignore, and things still work swimmingly after that--and no more torrent-related connection losses.

Poodle Fitness

2006-05-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

If anyone needs me, I'll just be in the corner, hugging myself rocking in the fetal position and repeatedly banging my head into the wall in a futile attempt to make the images stop.

The last time I felt like this was the first time, over ten years ago, when I channel-surfed into something called "The Xuxa Show" after being up for something like 36 hours. It involved a simultaneously angry and perky-looking woman hosting a kids show with a soundstage packed beyond fire code with screaming children, who were being herded and corraled by ~13 year olds in quasi-showgirl outfits. It most memorably involved two teams of kids wearing helmets with large bowls mounted on top, in which they had to try to catch fish that were catapulted from seesaws being stomped on, while the near-riot of other children were led in chants of "CATCH THE FISH!"

That was somewhat more intense, but I've found that Poodle Fitness has brought back a strong enough echo of that kind of unnatural stress to bring the Xuxa memories back. Goddamn you, Japan.

Further interesting product names

2006-05-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

Earlier tonight, I took a stroll down to the grocery store for a few items. Its liquor store branch is built right into the same building, and on the way I pass right by its main corner window. In that window is this big display stack of plastic buckets, I'd say about half-gallon ones. The banner hung on the table they're on states, in big bright bold font, BIG BUCKET BIG FUN.

I'm sure that if I'd looked closer at it, it's probably a very innocuous product, much like the Fondue Fountain. But I avoid temptations like that, because not looking closer at such products really keeps a certain sense of magic and wonder in the world. I'm going to believe that it was really just a stack of buckets filled to the lid with fresh-distilled ethyl alcohol, and on clearance to get rid of the inventory before the plastic got eaten away from inside. It's better that way.

Take the Death Tunnel straight to the pretty, pretty Pain Cave.

2006-05-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

...then hang a right up through the Agony Grotto, take a left at Misery Stump, and Suffering Meadow is about a mile further on, on your right. You can't miss it!

So Dave and I were at The Source (one of the more impressive comics, games, & crap hobby stores I've ever seen) about a week back. I was initially looking for a copy of Delta Green (Call of Cthulhu setting, modern day, the titular organization being a sort of non-retarded version of X-Files; a secret government branch tasked with containing Mythos threats; in my opinion a much stronger setting than the default CoC approach which is basically Scooby Doo, only with insanity and it's Nyarlathotep under the mask instead of Old Man Jenkins, but I digress), because I'd had a kickass dream a few days before that about a couple operatives in one of their cells who reported to Art Bell. Art's radio show is apparently just a cover on the side, you see.

They didn't have it, which surprised me at the time. I'd had the memory from last year that Eos Press was issuing a reprint of it, dual-statted for D20 and the original Chaosium BRP system--both of which I find pretty irrelevant, I mostly just wanted the setting stuff. (If I ever did chance to run it in whatever venue, I'd want to use Nemesis, which combines a streamlined and generally tuned-up version of ORE, a much slicker dicepool system than you usually see; appeared originally in "Godlike," which is a pretty nifty low-power superhero rpg set in an alternate WW2). I found out later that they didn't have it because the reprint still hasn't happened. They're now claiming by summer this year--however, that's what they claimed last year, so who knows if it'll ever happen. But I picked up alternate products (second edition of Exalted; nice setting, horrible system; and a Paranoia supplement. Other games aren't fun; Paranoia is fun. The Computer says so), so that was fine.

However, we passed the small section of non-anime DVDs, and the title "DEATH TUNNEL" leapt right out for obvious reasons. Obviously I had to rent it later, and viewed it the other night.

It's not very good, by the way. I have a vague recollection of the opening credits of "Seven" (also not very good, but I find myself in an inexplicable minority in that opinion). I don't claim it's an eidetic recall, but: discordant music, lots of really quick jump-cuts and jittery camera and static effects and oversampled feedbacked screams and whatnot. Now picture ninety minutes of that. Also, no one could really act, but they did have big titties, so there's that--you have expect casting to perform triage for this kind of movie.

Which was sort of a shame, because an abandoned hospital is a great location to shoot such things in, if you hold the camera still for takes that last longer than ten seconds. I recommend "Session 9" for a similar location and altogether better flick.

Why I should never hit publish post too soon

2006-05-04T11:49:00.000-07:00

Because it only occurs to me afterwards that I should have helpfully pointed out that, if you've got a worm-treatment-friendly disease, you can pay the dude for a custom course. Five hundred bucks and he'll hook you up.

This kicks ass

2006-05-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

Not literally. Literally, it just sucks ass, or more correctly, sucks guts. I've said it before: nature is truly beautiful!

...Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars...

2006-05-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

This is my shocked face at this news. I realize you can't see it, but trust me, I'm shocked. I'm even more shocked that it's a "limited" release so it can be done again in a few more years. Doubleplusshocked even. Reeling, really. I need to collect myself.

Seriously though, good news. I'll finally own the original trilogy in any form. While I'm definitely not a fan of the prequels, I'm also not in the "George Lucas raped my childhood" camp. At worst, he inappropriately fondled my childhood, but I've long since worked through that in therapy. (I'm not sure about that analogy, but I think the spirit of it holds true.)

snootchie bootchies?

2006-05-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

Recently stumbled across good-natured schlub-director Kevin Smith's blog. The title link goes to the first of a nine-part roughly-novella-length telling of his side of his friend's career-length addict time and adventures in rehab and dehab. I found it a pretty entertaining read, in the sense of gawking at a really nasty-looking car wreck that it turns out everyone's pretty much okay at the end due to German engineering of crumple zones.

So now you listen, 'cause I'm omniscient

2006-05-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

So after months of basically gathering dust, I picked up my Nintendo DS again the other night and started playing Ossu! Tatakae! Ouendan! again. It was easy to do, it hadn't left the system since the last time it'd been powered on. This time, I'm slowly working on beating the thing on the normal difficulty--I'd done so previously on easy, which for me...wasn't.

The thing is, I'm terrible at rhythm games, always have been. The pat answer is of course that I have no rhythm--which is undeniably true. I already knew and accepted that. But it struck me, as my brain seized up the nth time on seeing and reacting to the proper sequence of contracting number circles to the beat, that there was a further neurological thing going on here, at least as regards games of the electronic variety.

The bulk of games I ever play are basically the polar opposite of rhythm. Rhythm games involve reacting to stimuli--that's the primary focus. The gamestate simply is what it is, and the player conforms his input to it. My brain handles the opposite much better--in which the gamestate is plastic by design, and the player's input conforms the gamestate to his will. There isn't a tempo to hold to, no beats to click to or lose life, other than a minimal needed to maintain the gamestate in an ongoing fashion. There's a chicken-and-egg situation here, inasmuch as obviously someone without rhythm will be drawn to that kind of thing more strongly anyway. But the taxonomical split hadn't really occurred to me before.

I think one of the reasons Rez is considered a classic by many is that it's one of those very few games that attempt, with varying success, to bridge the two types Rail shooters in general have arguably always done that, but I think Rez stands apart mainly because it does it deliberately rather than accidentally. (I know this because I'm telepathic, yes.)

Ouendan is pretty much the only rhythm game I keep playing and returning to even though by any objective measure I'm terrible at it. I think because it serves as a sanity test in that classic definition of insanity, you know, the one about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Yeah! See ya!

2006-05-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

Great fight scene. And by "great" I mean...well, just watch it.

Also, welcome to Best Buy. You're instigating our shirts!

The latest version of Inform just came out, and it sure looks neat. It's one of the major languages used today in the niche field of what's being called Interactive Fiction these days, and what the rest of us call text adventures. You know, like Zork and the other Infocom games back in the day. Inform's evolved into something of a quasi-natural-language syntax, built around rules and relations rather than the object-oriented approach of something like TADS. It's an interesting approach to making programming them a bit more appealing to non-programmers, plus the toolset it's built into has some really neat features as well--on-the-fly editting, a "skein" showing the narrative branches of things for testing purposes that's intended to automatically generate walkthroughs when it's out of beta, etc.

I've fond memories of text adventures because one of the formative experiences that brought me into computers was being at a 4-H meeting as a tyke (it's one of those memories that's infuriatingly non-age-indexed) and having that classic Adventure that's been around since mainframe days in various iterations demonstrated on someone's Vic 20. "look in tree" and by God, you looked in the tree! Blew my mind at the time, and probably thermoset some important neural paths. Years later when the family got a computer, I even got respectably far into a BASIC spaghetti-code mess of arrays and lookup rules and tangled nested IF-THEN-ELSEs that was very nearly a functional, if retarded and simple, parser, before getting distracted.

I expect to do the same thing with Inform that I've done with TADS before--muck around a bit with it and then forget about it. I will still marvel at its neatness.

Correction to the set design metaphor!

2006-04-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

Wes Anderson, not the other one. The other Anderson is the Boogie Nights guy. I don't know why I got those confused. Then there's Paul W.S. Anderson, who's the Mortal Kombat, Soldier, etc. guy. W.S. could be pronounced Wes, so maybe that's the source of the memory misfire.

Hell, I don't know. I only pretend to understand how my brain references things.

Survive Style 5+ review

2006-04-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

During the first half or so of the film, I was pretty sure that my review was going to echo a two-word review I once wrote about "Shaolin Soccer." That review was, and I quote: "Holy. Shit." Among other things, it featured a breakfast scene between one of the main characters and his wife (the one he'd killed in the opening scene, by the way) that's one of the funniest things I've seen in quite awhile.

The entire thing's exceptionally visually busy. Primary colors everywhere, all very bright, and just packed full of an enormous amount of bric-a-brac and just plain stuff. It's sort of like Paul Thomas Anderson's (dude behind Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums, etc.) set design ran headlong into a Fisher-Price paint factory and exploded and then was reconstructed from the colorful debris by schizotypal interior decorators. It's glorious.

The latter half of the movie gets more mellow overall, even bittersweet in places; not in a way that really damaged the flick in my view, but changed the initial review from two words to many. Good stuff.

Supercar videos

2006-04-23T10:27:00.000-07:00

Wonderword is a wacky Japanese answer to the animated bit in Pink Floyd's The Wall with the flowers committing Biblical knowledge of each other, until the pistil suddenly gets all floral dentata and chews up the stamen. Or maybe it's vice versa. I'm no botanist. But the overall theme's a miror--oddly sweet at first, in the way that exchanging mouth-launched ping pong balls can be, then getting sort of creepy at the end. Empathy breaking down into projection until the relationship explodes.

Be is on the one hand sort of like the flick "Series 7: the Contenders" (worth a rental, by the way). Whereas the latter is an extrapolation of American "reality tv" to the frankly logical next level, the video's sort of the same thing done to those wacky Japanese game shows where contestants go through goofy tortures for, I don't know, a month's supply of ramen or something. It's also a reductio ad bang-bang about why most performance anxiety and stage fright is rather silly, since most of the time a yakuza gangster isn't getting all gat-gat and bustin' caps in everyone you know (and your pet turtle) when you mess up. It's multilayered! (The comments also have a translated list of the captions identifying who everyone is.)

Then there's Aoharu Youth. (Babelfish informs me that "aoharu" translates to "aoharu," which is helpful.) Behold the disaffection of deeply creepy mannequin youth, lashing out against the system with eyebeams! But even rebellion is part of the system, man, it's everywhere, it's all around us. As demonstrated that those creepy ass mannequin people you think are your friends just because they're also creepy only want to suck you into their little suicide cult. There's a lesson in there for us all.

Oh yeah, and White Surf Style 5. I'm informed it's a shout-out to something called Tranzor Z, so your guess is as good as mine, and quite possibly better. It's a good study of what domestic violence situations will be like in a world where everyone has anime powers. Chilling.

I'm also told that the director of the videos apparently made a movie name of Survive Style 5+. The trailers confirm that it sure is the same director. I'm expecting someone to have to fight the bear. I'll have to see if I can track it down via some form of...oh, let's say import.

Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006

2006-04-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

Yes. Just yes.

Also, Google video link if the direct download link goes bye-bye.

Luckily I have enough energy drink!

2006-04-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

These recordings are well worth listening to.

To translate from the crazy moonspeak both engaged in and implicitly assumed: there's this multiplayer game called World of Warcraft. It's your standard computer rpg model--you have characters that you gain levels with, getting little numbers representing power to climb upwards by killing everything in sight and taking their stuff to use if it's better than the stuff you've already taken, or sell in order to buy new powers, etc. Like all crpgs, you can only level so far, eventually you hit a level cap.

World addresses this by shifting the game's gears to a different kind of leveling-up, namely, the pursuit of more and more uber equipment; the process of getting said uber equipment moves from the solo-to-small-group adventuring (i.e., murdering and thieving) to what's called "raids", which are parties of twenty-to-forty people. Raid content takes those kinds of numbers in order to bring enough firepower and general character oomph to bear to best the challenges. Each character class generally has their own task to do in such things, and crisis points in the dungeons take some coordination to get through, lest a "wipe" result--namely, every last one of the characters getting killed. The coordination needed is apparently high enough on the upper-end stuff that it doesn't take much for a wipe to happen here and there.

MMOs live and die by player retention, and WoW is living very well. Part of their retention design for all the folks at level cap is that getting those more and more uber raid items involves running lots of raids--item drops are probabilistic rather than guaranteed. And any item that may drop may have quite a few people within the group who would really like it. Guilds--organizations of players that group up together and help each other out--often use a system called "dkp" to fairly distribute loot; it's based on some arcane factors involving numbers of raids attended and phases of the moon combined with astrological houses for all I know. (While I do play World of Warcraft, I've never actually raided. It's one of those things I think I'd like to give a shot at some point, but expect to get bored with very quickly and then quit. I'm not the kind of person that MMO retention designs are really targetted at--they're targetted at people who don't quit even when they're bored.) But the more DKP someone may have, the better shot they have at getting one of those pieces of nice gear is the upshot.

To maintain a level of coordination, groups that raid usually set up a teamspeak or similar server that allows voice chat while the game's running, and the raid leader acts as officer to keep people on task and working well.

And THAT is where that link way up there ties into.

"Luckily I have enough energy drink to keep me very fucking hyperactive and screaming at your lazy fucking asses for fucking it up!"

Another short observation

2006-04-14T14:48:00.000-07:00

Tissue engineering is very neat. In coming years, I expect it to get even neater. Give it a few decades, and I fully expect it to blow my freaking mind--and then print me a new one.

Covert Operatives

2006-04-12T00:03:00.000-07:00

Yeah, pretty much. Covert Operatives.

It's a Horrible Life

2006-03-30T14:04:00.000-08:00

...is what "The Butterfly Effect" should have been titled. It also should have included a guardian angel who explains to our hero why the world's better off without him. As a brief review: mediocre, with a good ending. Certain people I know would likely describe it as not precisely life-affirming, though.

Now, I watch a lot of mediocre flicks, and most barely rate a flicker of consciousness, much less written words. But I need to give the authors of the DVD some credit for their choices. You see, when you go to play the flick, you appear to have the choice between the director's cut, and the theatrical release. I gather the theatrical release has an ending that's not such an unrelenting downer, which isn't surprising--the ending's the only bit of the film that really rises above, so it's no surprise test audiences would react badly to it. This is all only theoretical, however, because when I tried to play the theatrical version, intending to skip right to last chapter and see the approved ending, there's a message that pops up, "please flip disc to view this."

The punchline? The disc only has one side.

Granted, they ripped that off from "Arise", but it was good to see some rogue yeti in the dvd authoring center had slipped a little nugget of Slack into the design. It was surely lacking everywhere else. To sum up with an imdb-appropriate review: worst movie ever.

The other reason I mention it is because the whole film made me desperately eager to watch "Primer" again--another story involving time travel rapidly spiralling out of control, but with the important exception that the script actually cares about internal consistency, and not being retarded. It's one of those somewhat rare "indie" films that isn't about gay cowboys eating pudding, but instead of a pair of would-be entrepeneurial gearhead types accidentally inventing a time machine while trying to make something else. As time machines in movies go, it was well thought-out, with equally well thought-out constraints as to its uses and limitations. The structure of the flick in general leads to the good kind of brainhurt, as it gets increasingly fragmentary, leading the viewer to reconstruct the larger plot from incomplete glimpses--which suits the subject matter of increasingly bad, and maliciously intended, temporal fugues. In imdb terms, not the worst movie ever.

It's sheer coincidence that I've watched a couple time travel movies recently when Dave just posted a link to this guy the other night. Coincidence...or TIME CONTROL?!

The world's best cellphone

2006-03-28T17:59:00.000-08:00

I learned of this through the Quarter to Three forums, and had to test it. Sure enough. This is what happens if you search Amazon for "razr", minus the helpful arrow added by my L33T photoshop skills. Behold!

Skydiving. Also, brainspeed.

2006-03-26T14:00:00.000-08:00

I just learned about this piece of history today. Nineteen miles. Apparently, he damn near broke the sound barrier before atmosphere cranked things back down to terminal velocity.

Shockwave toy demonstrating that errors of a few seconds at a couple points in the dive would have made him a smear. All in all, the story reminds me that I would really like to go skydiving someday, albeit from an order of magnitude less altitude. That's just how my brain works.

Also about how brains work: Brain speed test. I of course scored quite a bit faster than average, which I think a videogame habit can take credit for. I think my score probably suffered because I got really bored a third of the way into the test. Ironically, that's also probably the fault of a videogame habit! If the test really impresses you, you can pay them FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS to buy software to get even better at quickly and accurately processing bloops and bleeps up and down octaves.

I'd just like to repeat that, because it's better than any punchline I can come up with: FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

Documentaries and agitprop

2006-03-26T00:03:00.000-08:00

So I was watching "The God Who Wasn't There" the other night, and it was an entertaining thing. It gets filed under "documentary" as genre, which isn't quite right--the factual points in it (that it's pretty funny that the canonical gospels were only written decades after Christ said, "Dudes, you guys just chill out, I'll be right back. I gotta get some bondo for these holes" etcetera) are really nothing new to anyone with a modicum of interest in religious history, and not particularly devastating to anyone other than fundamentalist Biblical inerrantists--or, you know, morons. Mostly it's a sort of laid-back rant from someone still fresh and stinging from deconverting under enough cognitive dissonance, building up to a cheerful act of blasphemy in his former fundie high-school's church (vocally denying the Holy Spirit, the one unforgivable sin dontcha know), leading to a bold titlecard of "I am not afraid" and credits. It was a pretty good rant, if an easygoing one; the affect didn't lower the rant-scale for me because it was very clearly affected to piss fundies off by being so smilingly amiable about the whole affair. (The penultimate act of the flick is the interview with his ex-principal and the same's slow-burn realization that he'd come to make him look like an idiot--which isn't that difficult to do with a fundamentalist, but dammit, if a fish is in a barrel, you might as well shoot it, because what else is it good for?)

Things like this continue to get classified as documentaries, which is silly. It'd be more honest if we just officially call them what they are, agitprop, and rate them accordingly.

Speaking of documentaries, Pure Pwnage recently released the tenth episode of the hard-hitting expose of the world's most pwnful pro-gamer's trials, tribulations, triumphs, and brief musical numbers. There is always a way to pwn. A thousand years from now, Pwnianity will be one of the dominant religions.

2006-03-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

Roomba Monkey Head.

I think that really does speak for itself. It is the kind of aftermarket modifications that the Roomba people should really take a good hard look at. I've been tempted by the Roomba thing as it really appeals to being horribly lazy by nature, but research (casual research--see horribly lazy modifer previous) seems to indicate that they a) vacuum not very well and b) tend to break after a few months. Thus, I'm still holding out for the furniture that transforms into robots to do household chores when you're not sitting on them. Opportunity costs, you understand.

Still, Robot Monkey Vacuums that weren't aftermarket mods could sway that decision. Roomba take note!

Those cats were fast as lightning

2006-02-25T13:59:00.000-08:00

I've been on a kung fu flick kick (insert cymbal shots as appropriate) lately. Much of this is due to having read through Eos Press' Weapons of the Gods roleplaying game all about wuxia stories. Plus it was an easy thing to read, as the main author, Rebecca Borgstrom, wrote Nobilis and the ongoing not-really-blog Hitherby Dragons. (Of the recent entries, I enjoy the condensed epic heroe's journey of one woman traveling beyond the world with the aid of a speak-and-spell and somewhat damaged Fisher-Price construction toy set to facedown the prototype Fisher-Price Ultimate Evil who was responsible for its destruction. Which answers better than I could why I enjoy the way she writes.)

Some quick reviews of the more recent ones I've seen, both via Netflix and, for those without official Region 1 dvd releases as yet, via...er...let's just say import, shall we?

House of Flying Daggers - same director as the Jet Li vehicle Hero and on balance, I like it much more than the latter. The same ultra-stylized sort of wire fu, oft involving using, well, flying daggers in ways that just casually and beautifully brutalize laws of physics, but it's a far more character-focused film. Exaggerated loves and betrayals and passions. I suppose it's something like opera, only instead of tying all that together with large people caterwauling at each other in Italian, they yell at each other in Mandarin or Catonese while kicking each other in the head. I for damn sure know which style I prefer to watch.

Bride with White Hair - I dug it. Production values at the basement level of the kind of analogical structure that Flying Daggers is the very attic's peak of, if you follow. A lot of the film techniques reminded me of Evil Dead, actually--same sort of odd herky-jerky lowcranked nigh-stop-motion kind of things going on. Also far more cartoonish and downright manic. Plus, featuring aforementioned hair as a deadly weapon, not to mention evil sorcerous Siamese fraternal twins.

Tom Yum Goong - Tony Jaa's latest. I didn't like it as much as I dug Ong Bak, as I found it needlessly darker and a bit more incoherent--in the sense of just not coming together, not in the sense of being at all difficult to follow. One of those flicks that make up for its failings in moments, such as the near-ultimate sequence of Jaa's character muay-thai'ing an endless horde of business-suited stods to beautifully-foleyed snapped bone after destroyed joint, in one of the most unintentionally comic realizations of the "remember, only fight him one at a time, people!" fight rule that martial arts flicks all tend to have at least instances of. But he kicks their asses in a display of sheer ferocity and rage that's lacking in the more heavily-produced and slick numbers.

Seven Swords - kickass. Evil general slaughters villages for their heads, due to some dodgy imperial edict outlawing martial arts knowledge, and there's good money to be made with the bounties. Guess what fate awaits Martial Village? Aforementioned seven swords are received in aid from five warrior-monks from Heaven Mountain, plus the two villagers, unexpectedly deemed worthy by the resident sifu there to get their own freaky impractical blades. Do they deserve them? What a stupid question! The master knows what he's doing! Great movie all around.

Shaolin Master Killer - I very very dimly remember seeing at least bits of this during some late-night Kung Fu Theater watched during formative years. Apparently it's one of the best remembered flicks from the endless stream of badly-dubbed output that Shaw Bros spit out after Bruce Lee made American audiences sit up and realized fight scenes could be more than people trading right hooks at each other while occasionally crashing through pre-sawn tables. Evil general (wuxia staple!) slaughters villagers for merely being suspected of rebellious, one survivor of the pogrom manages to get into Shaolin monastery and learns all their kung-fu over the course of training montages spanning years. He's then booted out for the audacity of suggesting that he'd like to teach outsiders Shaolin kung-fu so they could protected themselves--and of course, exiling him allows him to teach outsiders Shaolin kung-fu so they can protect themselves, while allowing the monastery itself to maintain an appearance of propriety. (Again, a master who knows what he's doing.) He also invents the three-section staff in the apotheosis of his kung-fu. Anyway, I could see why it's the best-remembered of them. Production values and dodgy dubbing and choppy fight editting aside, it was a genuinely good flick.

ACROSS THIS LINE YOU DO NOT...also, dude, the preferred term...

2006-02-14T20:26:00.000-08:00

This is perhaps the best response I've yet seen to the general manipulated insanity of that whole Mohammed cartoon fatwa frenzy kerfuffle. "You call THAT anti-Semitic? Let us show you how it's done!" It's an idea whose platonic form is touched by Slack.

I've said it before, and I expect I'll be cheyne stoking it out on my deathbed five hundred years hence (or, you know, five years hence as poisonous radioactive Damnation Alley-style cockroaches nibble at me. All depends on which way the probabilities collapse, if you can dig it), that the world would be less of a right fucking mess if people weren't so godawful self-serious all the time.

On that topic, there's this. You know it's a perfectly accurate summation of whatever the actual research says, as Wired is one of those bastions of solid journalism whose quality has in no way plummeted over the past few years, and whose high point could in no way be fairly described as "a weird sort of magazine written with the tone of gearheads on crank." (It's one of the quotes I lost the source for, one of my memory's more longstanding flaws. I remember entertaining quotes but not who said them.) The main problem with egocentrism isn't egoism itself per se (don't make me stop the engine of the world! I will if you don't settle down! I'll pull the world right over and stop its engine and we'll just SIT here so you can think about what you've done!), but how it's generally formulated. People tend to narrate themselves (and thus see themselves) as a sort of inner homunculus in what some cognitive philosophists (like cognitive science, but without the troublesome bother of needing more than anecdotal data) have called "the cartesian theater."

Which is a problem. The way people should conceive of themselves is as a luminous pipe, through which the pattern of the self ever combusts and rises, prabob.

2006-02-09T18:08:00.000-08:00

More than meets the eye.

A prototype, to be sure, but troubling. What this country needs is the political will to back a concerted research push, on the level of the Apollo program, to gain immediate and conclusive leadership in the upcoming mecha race, both transforming and non. We must not allow a mecha gap!

MMO hopping

2006-01-13T01:43:00.000-08:00

My attention in City of Villains recently plummeted sharply, after lasting longer than I actually expected it to at the beginning. I actually got my main character to level 33 before it ceased to be fun. Now, MMOGs are built on a model that assumes that the majority of their playerbase aren't the type to actually stop playing once it ceases to be fun; that assumption is apparently dead-on correct. I don't pretend to understand that, but there it is. It's why every MMO's home forums are a cesspit of people complaining and whining.

Anyway, I've recently started playing World of Warcraft again, and at precisely the right time apparently; a guild of folks from the RPGnet forums started up on the Kirin-Tor server, and I was very loosely involved in a previous stab at such a guild last summer that never really got off the ground. This one's slightly more successful thus far, to understate things. I've been involved in two instance runs in as many nights--now, this is of course gibberish to anyone who doesn't know the game, but Jeff at least should dig how unusual that is. Also, the guild in general has this kind of crazy self-supporting debtweb of aggressive generosity that's made me understand for the first time the true appeal of such an organization.

Also, I wanted to link this video. Pointless Waste of Time definitely has its moments. Also (in one of the very rare links from my blog that I think Kendra would appreciate, mark the calendar, it won't happen often) GNOMES! That last's a pretty large chunk of download, but amusing.

For those of my vast readership curious about the whole WoW thing, apparently you no longer need to actually buy anything to try it out for ten days or so. At least, I'm pretty sure this free trial is still active, no guarantees expressed or implied in this unspoken oral contract. There's the usual free-registration hoops to jump through, but beats paying for discs if curiosity would only confirm it's not the game for you after all.

Speaking of kooks

2006-01-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

A motherlode.

So far, I've learned that the sun is solid, that body modification may be our only hope in the coming robot-human apocalypse, that there's intensive research ongoing in antigravitational effects of biological systems, and just all kinds of knowledge. Glory be.

Da Bears

2005-12-28T16:37:00.000-08:00

So I've now seen both Grizzly Man and Project Grizzly, which makes a great themed double feature. The theme, of course, being "kooks with grizzly fixations."

I've got more to say about them both, but it's still simmering; my muse just shoots me a withering glare and tells me to stay the hell out of the kitchen till it's done. But they're both really good flicks in their own way, and, in my head at least, actually mesh together really well, all poetical-like.

Nope, not done yet. Maybe in awhile.

You can call us Aaron Burr from the way we're dropping Hamiltons

2005-12-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

Lazy Sunday.

Yeah. Pretty much.

the evil of the thriller

2005-12-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

I watched the original "Manchurian Candidate" flick a couple months back, and really enjoyed it. It was deeply and fundamentally stupid, of course, but more importantly, it was funny and clever in a way that modern films simply tend not to be.

More recently, I saw the remake which comparatively was--to get all high-falutin' film critic vocabulary about it--shit. It was just as deepy and fundamentally stupid, mind you--this is inherent in the "thriller" genre. It's as much an integral part of the laws of reality in thrillers as people behaving grotesquely stupidly is in run-of-the-mill horror, or fiery explosion shockwaves always traveling just slightly slower than protagonist-running speed is in action. Occasional entries in the genre may bend the rules, but they are exceptions, not the norm.

Mind you, I did have to pause the dvd to quietly scream during the portion when dude drops the implant he just dug out of his shoulder down the drain, thus losing the evidence FOREVER! (He later gets its twin back by chewing it out of the other fellow's back, and there's probably a paper there on a strained analogy on racial themes for some aspiring undergrad to write.) But that had less to do with the inherent stupidity of thrillers in general, and more with the fact that it's one of those minor movie moments that really brings home that your average Hollywood script writer has apparently never in his life actually looked underneath a sink. Those magical pipes under there, guys? They have that U bend specifically to catch things like rings and, oh, shoulder implants that get accidentally dropped down the drain. You morons. But I digress.

The aside about the drain thing is simply a sort of idiocy-spike (not quite ice-9 level, unfortunately), but not the problem. Yes, dumbness abounds--at the most abstract level of, if I'm running an evil corporation that intends to have a de facto coup, and I have a highly reliable mind-control technology, the plan as put forth in the film is perhaps among the ten worst I could conceive of. But again, that's not the problem. The problem was that the remake is painfully unfunny. It's all heavy on the angst of "but is my mind my own?" that the original treated much more playfully. And yes, actual mind control would be--will be--a goddamn horror, but merely having Denzel Washington look stricken isn't how to explore that. The thriller in general is not the place to explore that horror because when it actually happens? It won't be soaked in stupidity. Let me rephrase that: it won't be soaked in thriller stupidity. It'll have real life stupidity, thus the horror. The dialogue all has very modern bland stricken quality to it, which I of course immediately compared to the much snappier, frequently nigh-screwball conversations in the Red Scare Candidate version.

What I'm saying is, see the original. It has Frank Sinatra in one of the first kung-fu fights in American film history and the titular Candidate taking up his programmed sniper post through a door prominently labeled NO. And at one point, a drunken conversation that involves a literary reference to Orestes and Clytemnestra. It's a better flick for all of that.

I wish I'd watched them in the opposite order, actually.

Videogame review, X3: Reunion

2005-12-23T00:20:00.000-08:00

I'm going to tentatively declare that my earlier predictions that the game would hit what was, practically speaking, version 1.0 after being patched to 1.3, partially correct. Partially because at the time, I figured they'd take until late January to reach 1.3. They got faster!

I ordered the game awhile back when it popped up on one of Gogamer's sale deals. Ordinarily I would have popped for the dvd version because obviously, but a) cheap, and b) I didn't expect it to work till some unspecified later time. (Sure, Egosoft claimed 1.3 before Christmas, but recall they first said 1.3 by mid-November. It's not that I suspected them of being liars, you understand, just, you know, caveat emptor.)

I'll be charitable for this next part, and simply assume that US Enlight is staffed by microcephalic monkeys who are paid in bananas coated in lead-based paint in offices who have a confused view of aromatherapy as meaning that pumping epoxy fumes to a higher percentage of atmosphere than nitrogen increases productivity. Anyway, when's the last time you heard about an actual badly-printed CD? (This is the point where you industry types chime in and say, "Actually it's well known in our circles (you plebian) that the first printing of F.E.A.R. only barely avoided being sent out with a medley of Japanese tentacleschoolgirlscat porn," and I refuse to back down and have a class five forum meltdown--I think I'd like to post a few thousand words in a gibberish I'll claim is Iroquois or something, but I might reconsider when I get there, but I digress). Well, disc #2 of the US cd print had a relatively common run of bad discs--at least common enough that I was able to find five posts on Egosoft's tech support forums within as many minutes of searching--and that's manually searching, mind you, since they don't have actual search search enabled there--all on my exact install problem. Luckily it was only a bad disc as preventing getting at a whopping total of two mp3s, which could be skipped and copied in later. Still, weird to see.

Also, Egosoft claims the reason the manual sucks is because Enlight accidentally was given some month-and-a-half draft version instead of the actual real manual. They were going to figure out how to put up a pdf version of the real final manual. This was over a month ago. Now, a cynical sort might be tempted to claim that seems a little fishy, inasmuch as they could just make a pdf of it and slap it in their downloads section. I'm not a cynical sort, I'm a doe-eyed trusting believer in the innate goodness and honesty of the human spirit, so I'm sure there's some other explanation. So there's that aspect.

Oh, the game! Well thus far compared to a couple hours under 1.2.01 (practically speaking a sort of 0.9beta2, but I think version numbers are different when using the metric system), and now several more with 1.3, 1.3 (metric) is indeed 1.0 (imperial). The interface is, believe it or not, not quite as chilly user-neutral as X2's was. It's still in no way interested in being the user's friend, but it's now sort of in the state of your friend's psycho possibly de-corticated cat who, after many years and visits, will now tolerate your touch instead of randomly trying to fillet your arm--not out of any sort of active hostility, but simply because of a some sort of vestigial brain-stem twitch. Indeed, if you're following my entirely serious and well thought-out analogy here, X2's interface would, after suddenly freaking out, just sort of blink at you wondering what happened. X3's a step up; someone at Egosoft had a eureka moment, exploded out of their bathtub one evening and screamed "Mein Gott! Ze mouse! It can be used IN GAMES!" and actually convinced the other folks that pointing devices could be used to point at more things than the menus in their compilers, even for end-users. I don't know which person on the team had that thought, but I salute him. (Elbow bent hand-to-forehead sort of salute though; I respect their heritage and all, but, you know.)

It's also even prettier than X2. The planets loom most impressively, and I'm okay with all action usually happening in barely-extra-atmospheric altitude.

The cutscenes are still laughably bad thus far, but have lost a certain charm. X2 didn't realize that they actually had no idea of how to animate people, perhaps never having seen any, I don't know, so they motion-captured rotoscoped amateur films of clumsy stop-motion mannequins instead. And they did it with the innocent shameless unawareness of an only barely autistic child. I can respect that--like I said, it has a certain charm.

Sadly, the age of innocence passed at least in that respect, and they seem to have avoided the full-body-lurching film style in favor of more talking-heads while panning about the (again, very pretty) backdrops and models. There's still some charm in the atrocious voice acting, and of course there's some entertainment in the firebrand speeches of Madam President exhorting jihad against the threat of the untamed cock, so not all is lost.

I give it a three and a half out of five.

Yes, Virginia, there is a "Bob"

2005-12-22T22:47:00.000-08:00

The Women's Petition Against Coffee.

The Men's Answer.

One of those great demonstrations that not only was the past far from sanitized (and that the moral decline you hear so much of these days is more of a slow painful clawing of the way back to Truth, a struggle for liberation that, for the crime of opposing it, our self-appointed moral watchdogs shall perish forever in the sea of fire), it also had some SubGenii in it to carry the torches of Slack ever forward against the darkness of the Dark Ages--which have never ended, simply been reshuffled to new configurations as time goes on.

Amen.

Fever Benefits

2005-12-21T21:11:00.000-08:00

One of the best benefits of a day or so of low-grade fever and general shaky-blehs (that's a medical term) is recognizing the precise moment when the brain shimmies through a phase transition and realizes, hey, that's actual appetite again. It's not quite as cool as the equivalent benefit of a high-grade fever, that being sometimes being able to recognize the exact moment when it breaks, but you take what you can get.

I don't care if it rains or freezes

2005-12-20T10:58:00.000-08:00

As conclusions to court decisions go, Kitzmiller vs Dover is a beautiful portrait of a judge gloriously weary of idiots who just spent six weeks wasting his time, yet channeling that weariness into righteousness. Lots of money-shot quote material in that. I liked the bit about the "breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision."

It just adds to the holiday cheeriness that, indeed, the response from the ID folks natter about "activist judge! activist judge!" when the dude was appointed by W. I suspect they won't get much traction there outside their own echo chamber, but you never know.

I mess with the Jesus on a fairly regular basis, to satisfy future contractural requirements should it be determined that I'm the Antichrist as previously explored in this space. But I'm pretty sure he bought Judge Jones a beer after that last session was adjourned.

Diagnosis, Prognosis, and a SubGenius allegory for lack of a better ending.

2005-12-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

The Atomic Revolution! Which kicks ass, by the way.

I'm not a huge poetry fan, but have always enjoyed T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" a lot. There's a section of "The Dry Salvages" that's stuck with me since the first time:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

...which showed me right there that Eliot may or may not have understood evolution itself--but he sure did understand one of the (deliberate, I suspect, even if not consciously understood as deliberate) misconceptions of it. Namely that it's purpose-driven, that it's upward progress--that now is always, as a given, better than before. Disowning the past.

That nifty comic up yonder brought that sharply back into my head. I came across the link on Metafilter, which is pretty good at throwing up the occasional really neat link (an earlier thing about an unofficial 1900 sequel to War of the Worlds involving Edison kicking Mars's ass with his steampunk genius, same provenance), but like most internet fora with delusions of community, it's packed full of precious twitterpated "personalities" who are just convinced they're very clever. This isn't a Metafilter-specific slam by any means; it's an inherent weakness in online fora in general. Many of the comments are driven by a largely-unstated "isn't that just quaint!" chortling. It's a part of kitsch, part of a past that's mere sequence, a development that we, much more more advanced now, have developed beyond. Disowned.

But there's an attitude in it that somewhere along the line, "the" culture's lost. Not just a clumsy sort of "optimism" that greasy politicians (or rather, their speechwriters, following suggestions from their handlers, the best of which are at least still bipeds) use as part of rhetorical arsenal. A determination that the world was going to be remade because that's what humanity was for--because that's what we can decide to be, decide that that's humanity's story.

"Human hate and ignorance, or human love and knowledge are the masters. The atom will serve either." Decide to be.

Certainly the positive promises of nuclear energy was happily whitewashed--atomic airplanes in particular seem a bit overreaching, and the nastier longer-term side-effects of radiation were a bit slow in coming to general realization. Actual fusion power as opposed to fusion BOOM! never materialized, due to pretty sizable engineering difficulties and also, I suspect, a certain amount of simple losing of the necessary will.

As a confirmed misanthrope, I understand very well the appeal of fatalism--I of course understand better the humanistic variety of it (see Vonnegut's early works, when his muse still had fire instead of ashes) far more than the religious, but I understand it. Matter of fact, I'd say it's the diagnosis; it is what is. Pithy little saying that pops up, I understand, in cancer wards as well as church signs: "Accept the diagnosis. Defy the prognosis." That defiance is the true essence of X-Day, for the Elect who have ears to hear and understand that particular analogy.

We need more defiance of that sort. It needs to stop seeming quaint.

Mind you, we don't necessarily need a fission pile in every back yard; MWOWM stones will serve that purpose better. But the defiance grounded in realism, yes.

Fondue Fountainhead

2005-12-15T12:04:00.000-08:00

List price: $8.99
Price: $9.99 and eligible for Free Super Saver Shipping (click here)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Fondue Fountainhead has become an enduring piece of literature, more popular now than when first published. On the surface, it is a story of one man, Howie Roark, and his struggles as an unconventional fondue set and accessory engineer in the face of a successful rival, Peter Eating, and a newspaper columnist, Hellswort Gooey. But the book addresses a number of universal themes: the strength of the individual, the tug between good and evil, the threat of fascism, and the enduring appeal of cubes of bread and meat dipped into hot oils. The confrontation of those themes, along with the amazing stroke of Ein Brand's writing, combine to give this book its enduring influence.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

***** The Second-Best Book Ever Written!
Reviewer: Brandon J. Galty Galt (Sign of the Dollar, CO, USA) - (see all my reviews)

The best book is of course Ein's Daedalus Cooked, in which the amazing ideas of Fondue Fountainhead found their full flowering. This book changed my life, and can change the lives of anyone prepared to think objectively!

* overinflated selfrighteous evil
Reviewer: Chairman Moone Batt (Berkeley, CA, CA) - (see all my reviews)

This "book" is pure trash, the product of a shrill evil harpy of a woman desperate to justify and rationalize her pattern of adultery, secondhand smoke, and drinking the blood of babies.

Hey, man, is that NES Rock?

2005-12-15T11:39:00.000-08:00

Yeah, man!

Well then TURN IT UP, MAN!"

Originating (of course) by various freaks at Something Awful, who are very much like a living embodiment of that old probability theorem of n monkeys hammering at computer keyboards and occasionally kicking out pieces of brilliant bulldada.

The playlist in question, as covered by the emulated sounds of NES's hardcore sound chip:

1. REM - Losing My Religion
2. Europe - Final Countdown
3. Radiohead - Karma Police
4. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
5. Survivor - Eye of the Tiger
6. Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven
7. Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama
8. Led Zeppelin - Kashmir
9. Slayer - Angel of Death
10. David Pomeranz - Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now
11. Coldplay - Yellow
12. Rick James - Superfreak
13. Semisonic - Closing Time
14. (Silence)
15. Hidden NESmix Intro
16. Zero Wing (Opening Theme) (4x4 Remix)

Interesting product names.

2005-12-15T09:59:00.000-08:00

So I was at the store the other day, passing through the usual traffic. Bellringers out front in full fireman-getup to add versimillitude to the cold wait for someone to inevitably, somewhere in the country, drop a krugerand into the kettle. The stop-and-stutter human traffic intermittently stopping dead and staring at the aisles, confounded, in that storm's-eye pause before jumping up and down and shrieking at the monolith before being given the gift of murder, space stations, and the Blue Danube (or baked goods, meat, and produce, whichever). An infant staring huge-eyed at the ceiling, clearly anticipating the space station part.

There's a big stand of Fondue Fountains in an open area. That's the product in question here, the Fondue Fountain.

Now, if you're like me--and I realize many aren't, unique and beautiful snowflake that I am--words tend to cause certain images to arise in your consciousness. Furthermore, if you're especially like me, the images that arise involve something spewing a spray of molten magma-like mixture of oil, cheese, and possibly chocolate depending on the exact nature of the fountain's use that night; children screaming in terror as sizzling scalding oily doom spatters over the room, adults clawing at their eyes and screaming, unoriginally (many adults aren't very original), "My eyes! My eyes!"; and family dogs running around in circles and barking while family cats sensibly hide as many rooms away as the house will allow.

What I'm saying here is that Fondue Fountain is not a reassuring product name for me. I acknowledge this may be just me.

Merry War on Christmas!

2005-12-14T18:51:00.000-08:00

Stille Nocht, Heilige KRIEG!

Modern American Christmas makes Michael Jackson look positively organic.

Largely because the only time most American Christians get on their knees is to adjust the fucking television set. Sure, you get the occasional God Warrior, but if you ask me? The defenders of Christmas are pussies. Not one stone shall be left unturned, their high places shall be knocked down, and when it's done, the ghosts of the Amalakites will say, "Huh. Yeah, we had it easy. Sure, they dashed our heads on walls, but the walls were soft."

Ah yeah.

Also, the spirit moving within me didn't really have any good suggestions on where to link 2pac Versus Barney, but was adamant that it should be linked anyway. Think of it as a stocking stuffer!

Homeopathic Cancer Remedy

2005-12-11T14:08:00.000-08:00

This idea hit me the other night during the course of some discussion or other, and it deserved to be preserved.

Even-handed and level-headed sources such as Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me have been sure to let us know that your average fast food hamburger consists of meat from upwards of a dozen cows, due to the realities of how the mass-meat industry works. They leave out the positive medicinal benefits of this, probably because the conspiracy of the New Inquisition of the AMA shouting down and censoring all opposition to expensive Western medicine. And that is, of course, the homeopathic cancer-preventing properties of including meat from several dozen animals at once.

By sheer probability, it's likely that some of the animals fed through an industrial slaughterhouse have some cancer cells, if not actual growths, somewhere within their bodies. The process of chopping up the carcasses and grinding it serves to dilute that cancer factor many hundreds and thousands of times--until each and every ground-beef patty resulting from the output end of the meat processing plant is, in and of itself, a homeopathic cancer cure.

The fact that the major franchises don't play up this fact is a chilling testament to the fascistic control of opinions that the AMA and Western Doctors enjoy. As a matter of fact, it might be a good idea to mirror this page in case it's "disappeared" for the apostasy of it all.

Dichotomies

2005-12-10T07:34:00.000-08:00

The truest and deepest cleft in our society must be between those who notice -- and smell something’s too convenient, too suspiciously tidy -- when we see only evidence that makes us feel superior... versus those who never catch or notice this irony. That the universe seems always to confirm just what we want it to. People on one side of this psychological divide are able to say the words that underlie all of science and democracy, as well as true-creativity. The words: I might be wrong. People on the other side -- even very learned and intelligent people -- could read this paragraph a hundred times, without ever truly grasping what it means.

Passages like that are why I've recently discovered David Brin's blog--said fellow being an author whose general output I can both take (Earth, Kiln People) and leave (the Uplift War stuff). The quote's from the latest entry on idealism and pragmatism as being a knowingly false dichotomy, that tend to actually work together for the benefit of those on either "side" to gain, maintain, and increase power. It's not so much a real polarity as it is a stalking horse, a handy package to distract the polis.

Now, of course that interests me because I largely agree with it--the unvierse tends to confirm what we want it to, natch--in that I've suspected for awhile that many of the pat dualities that are so very sound-bite-friendly are simply packaged that way. In holy SubGenius terms, it's part of the perpetuation of The Conspiracy; in a more serious misanthropic framing, the "boundless human stupidity" (a line which singlehandedly redeemed the otherwise simply enjoyably silly deathtrap-themed flick Cube--but unfortunately not its sequels); in Buddhist jargon its the ignorance and nescience, avidya, that drives the engine of suffering and troubles that is the world. (Whoa.)

It also makes skimming his comment sections interesting to me in a more meta sense. The blog obviously attracts a good chunk of those who identify on "the left" because superficially, he spends some sentences speaking badly of "the neocons". (Likewise, it automatically dives away a good chunk of those who identify on "the right" due to conditioned reflexes to roll eyes at every occurrence of the phrase. Echo chambers, like all fortresses, have lots of ways they reinforce themselves in little ways like this.) But once there, a lot of them are clearly baffled, which is already beginning int he first half-dozen or so comments that are there in that idealism-pragmatism entry--people who were right there with you, man...until he starts pointing out the left's got nothing to go on in pursuing its own (recently hilariously badly-managed) packaging of the false dilemma, at which point they're concerned and confused that someone so reasonable could just fly off on a tangent and talk such nonsense, oh my goodness!

I don't think it's a matter of "the" true cleft up yonder--it's a true divide, certainly, and I've yammered here and elsewhere to various degrees of (in)coherence about awareness-vs-nescience being a far more meaningful polarity in human affairs than good-vs-evil or right-vs-left ever shall. For that matter, I'd call it more meaningful than Brin's own past-vs-modernism/future focus--and of course, the universe seems to confirm that I'm right in that more often than not, so there you go.

Dark with an umlaut!

2005-12-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Wacky Russian street-acrobatics. It lacks subtitles for the phone conversation at the end, but I think that's probably for the best, as you can insert funnier lines of your choosing.

Such things of course remind me of the Prince of Persia games. The first two were, of course, classics in their own right, as they were an evolution ofKarateka on supersoldier serum. I never played the third, a stab at a 3-d version, but I'm assured it was forgettable.

Sands of Time was a very good modern version which I played through multiple times--one of those titles I hit a sort of Zen groove with after awhile. A separate dev team under the same publisher then made a sequel, Warrior Within, which was...not so good, inasmuch as they decided the thing that it really needed was a generic faux-heavy metal guitar-rockin' soundtrack, an early-game mini-boss who was an absurdly volutuous hellslut in stainless steel lingerie buttfloss getup, and enemies that included spastic s&m ninja chicks who would exhort you to spank them in the midst of combat. This was to make the title more "dark" and "gritty" you understand.

Now, as game design sins go, those are more silly than anything else; the worse flaw was that it betrayed a simple lack of polish, both in itself and especially compared to Sands. Audio samples that, in addition to being rather stupid ("YOU SHOULD BE HONORED TO DIE BY MY SWORD!!!1one1!" and the like), also didn't really synch up with the action happening at the time. What really defined my brief play experience with it was that the hero would periodically utter manly battle grunts that, while have the plus of not actually being idiotic lines of dialogue ("I AM THE PRINCE OF PERSIA AND THE KING OF BLADES!", I shit you not, some genius, or rather a committee of geniuses, had meetings about that and okayed it, probably enthusiastically), had the highly-polished knack of lasting, oh, two seconds or so. For a basic attack that might only involve a half-second of animation. It was the kind of thing that just oozed a "aw, fuck it, it's good enough" half-assed quality.

"Dark" in games, as in more passive entertainment, can certainly be done well. It's trickiest to do it well played straight-up serious, especially in games--not the fault of the medium itself, but mostly the unfortunate reality that writing in games rarely rises above the early-adolescent level. A grim, humorless early-adolescent level, at that. Still, there are exceptions. Planescape: Torment, for one. And...well, that's about it, really.

The more successful route is doing "dark" but with self-awareness of the silliness of it all. The best examples of that approach I find are the Grand Theft Auto games. Mind you, it's a quality that flies right over the pointy little scowly heads of its more outspoken critics as they whine about the harmful effects of such realistic adult violence. It's a whine that shall always baffle me, because the GTA series' violence is about as "realistic" as Looney Tunes cartoons. As I've stated elsewhere, the big you-versus-the-entire-law-enforcement-world police chases that occur could switch the soundtrack to playing the Benny Hill theme song and it'd fit perfectly--it's part of the charm, really.

Anyway, I've started to hear that the latest Prince of Persia title, Two Thrones or something like that, has recovered from Warrior Within's headlong plunge into Humorlessly Dumb. Here's hoping.

Nature's beauty

2005-11-30T19:27:00.000-08:00

This is a great story. You should read it, probably right after a big meal. It's good for you!

This entry's theme: neat things, pretentiously named

2005-11-23T05:40:00.000-08:00

Dreamlines is a graphical web toy that apparently works by hooking into the Google Images api and trippifying it. It's nifty.

Really Slick Screensavers are even heavier on the trippy factor. While the homepage is not pretentiously named (although one could make a case about lack of modesty), some of the individual screensaver names are sufficiently so that I can include it in this entry. Hyperspace is the first screensaver other than "blank screen" I've enabled for a long while.

I've recently discovered and become a big fan of the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor (yeah, the exclamation point's where it usually should be, apparently. Like I said...). Purely instrumental barring spoken-word samples, layered, complex, and damnably good sounding. I was vaguely aware of them before as having done one of the nicer parts of the score to Fast Zombie flick 28 Days Later, where whatshisname is wandering around a deserted London, and clearly should have actually listened without distraction to them sooner.

One thousand words.

2005-11-22T18:37:00.000-08:00

Silent Night, Seizure Night

2005-11-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

It's pretty much in the time of year where various pundits will--being busy with holiday plans as they are--start phoning it in with pretty standard Christmas Under Attack! babble. You know, the general conspiracy to remove the X from Christmas, and you can tell how far advanced the conspiracy already is because it's not there even now! Very compelling stuff, of course.

Regardless of the outcome of that incredibly important cyclical argument, we all can take comfort in knowing people like the owners of this property are fighting the good fight to keep the "mas!" in Xmas.

Edison's Conquest of Mars

2005-11-17T21:22:00.000-08:00

Thomas Edison and Lord Kelvin counterattack Mars, one year after the original 1898 invasion. It occurs to me that Spielberg should have made a movie from this instead, and left poor Wells alone.

A Feast for Crows, short review, less spoil-y

2005-11-15T23:05:00.000-08:00

Well, every series has a weak link; I've faith Martin will pull things together again by book 6, if not five (given that book 5 is sort of the other half of AFFC).

The main problem is it largely loses narrative velocity. There's a lot of words, but there's not so much with the actual happening, if you grok it. Brienne spends most of the book in a sort of Lippert-esque Walking Scene (MST3K reference, for those not plugged into that particular geek current), which could easily have been trimmed down to just the highlights of it. There wasn't nearly enough of Arya's interesting new vocational training. Some tantalizing hints about the Cleganes. Cersei continuing to display her, um, genius at scheming. Sam the Slayer's starting to get stronger hints of a spine forming from actual bone and cartilage instead of taffy.

All in all, I'd rate it only decent, but nowhere near the quality of the first three. If the series had started off with it, I wouldn't be much interested in finding out where it went from there. In the brief afterword, Martin claims the next one will be out next year; we'll see about that.