In Search of an Audience

Companion blog

2009-01-16T13:02:00.000-08:00

Besides http://blog.vaheder.com, we also have http://vaheder.blogspot.com, which is there to give you (and me) a nice record of certain tech tips in regards to nearly everything under the sun, if the earth was covered in php, svn, Juniper firewalls, and CentOS isos. Oh also VMware machines.

Abandon ship!

2008-10-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

I have considered moving to Wordpress for some time, and now that I have a place to actually put the database and host the files for it, I finally moved over. Sad, I know. But hey, let's give it a try, said I.

Find me now at http://blog.vaheder.com.

Re: /Filmcast Episode 1

2008-08-12T19:51:00.000-07:00

I enjoy listening to podcasts in part because I see something of myself in some of the authors of podcasts; opinions waiting to be heard. One of the things that irritates me, on the flip side of things, regarding podcasts is when a podcaster, like the people they are trying to supplant (the same-old, same-old of the popular news media), become as arrogant, vapid, and self-centered when they become “big”. I find it ironic that the phrase “those who seek power often are the least-suited for it” so aptly describes so many in positions of power, however small their sphere of influence may be.

/Filmcast is a good example of this. I dropped the /Filmcast podcast in my list on the recommendation of a friend of mine. The first episode already gave me problems. The podcast is actually the second made by a group of people started when they were picked up by the /Film website, so they have some experience. My first issue with the podcast involves the number of people involved in the podcast. The first episode features five people plus a guest speaker as well. Irony made me smile when one of the complaints of the commentators, of a film having “too many cooks in the kitchen” so aptly applies to the podcast. With a hotly debated topic (in this case, the fourth Indiana Jones film), people continually interrupt each other. It might have helped had the arguments been of any substance whatsoever. Besides the moments of levity (I don’t count these as arguments), inane arguments as to particulars of what people liked or didn’t like makes up most of the conversation; essentially, nitpicking. Irony again rears its ugly head when members of the chat room, who are listening in, point out the nitpicky nature of most of the comments, despite the commentators denial of this possibility. Don’t get me wrong; nitpicking has its place. That place can be found at http://www.nitcentral.com, where the author has purposely removed the mean-spirited nature of nitpicking to make it something more fun. On /Filmcast, it merely consists of whiney bitching.

Besides the meeting of too many minds, the actual opinions held hardly extend past “I liked this because...” or “I didn’t like this because...” Whereas others (such as Ebert and Roper) have a legitimacy stemming from their experience and the positions they hold (not to say that their opinions are perfect, but at least you have an idea where they’re coming from), the /Filmcast members need to prove their worth. “Like” or “don’t like” does not an interesting podcast make. A little bit of analysis makes for a more nuanced and interesting discussion. Instead, we’re treated to conversations that most of us can get from any random crowd of moviegoers (though in this case, perhaps slightly better informed about certain details).

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want these people to be “students of film”. I’ve had quite enough of hearing the word “phallic” bandied about regarding anything from swords (um, duh) to skyscrapers (um, double duh?). If I hear it any more, it may become impossible to sit down comfortably ever again. But I hardly think that a lack of any but the most cursory of analyses makes for a good show. There are often very good reasons why one didn’t like something; part of what makes a good conversation on a topic is the ability to move beyond bias to come to a conclusion that others can agree or disagree with based on a given premise. If you think that all sequels should follow the same pattern as their predecessors, then that forms one set of opinions, whereas the opinion that sequels can grow to encompass other characters, other stories, and even other genres (as has happened rarely in the past) forms a different set of opinions.

In this case, a woeful misunderstanding of what makes a bad movie and what makes Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a mediocre movie makes the /Filmcast regarding the film an excruciating listening experience. As a test to make sure this was not biased towards a singular experience, however, I listened to the episode with Kevin Smith discussing The Dark Knight. This was a much better experience, since Smith is a much more likable personality than the other commentators, and it becomes quite clear what are his personal opinions and what are his professional analyses. Even better is that, due to the respect that the /Filmcast members give Kevin Smith is the lack of either whiney bitching or constant interrupting, partly due to the fact that they seem to want to hear what he has to say as an experienced member of the community.

Unfortunately, the next episode without a guest of import (Episode 10, The X-files: I Want to Believe) once again descends into whiney bitching (thought not without its well-taken points about this movie in particular). I think I’d enjoy /Filmcast if it showed a little more restraint, and I didn’t get the feeling that these were people sitting around lawn chairs with beers in their hands discussing the movies they saw in the last week. Point is, I can do that too. Bring something new to the table, please.

I See In Your Eyes (and I'm not flirting with you)

2008-08-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

Mentioned briefly in the last entry, my confusion remains regarding the choice of delivery for a speech given near the end of The Return of the King by Viggo Mortenson. The trailer version, which you can listen to here, is much much better, in my opinion, than the one used in the finished film.

A distinct possibility for this decision is that the lip-sync wouldn’t match the trailer audio recording (though you may not know this, these days a sizable portion of the audio for a movie is re-recorded in sound booths during ADR, or Additional Dialogue Recording, as opposed using the audio captured on set, which is contaminated with all sorts of on-set noises). Another possibility is that the second recording sounded a little less rehearsed, and therefore more natural, than the first recording.

I still like the first one (and there ain’t nuthin you can do about it).

Keep your old emails, it says something

2008-08-06T11:34:00.000-07:00

Blasting through some of my old emails (and when I say old, about 2000-2001 era), I see some funny stuff. In general, I think people like to keep journals because it a log of daily life that you will hardly remember several years from now (or in my case, several minutes). In the case of email, however, certain behaviors and such become apparent through the conversations and correspondences that we have made that wouldn’t show up in something akin to a journal entry. In short, keep your old emails; they’ll be funny someday.

Here’s an example of one of the emails I stumbled across from once-upon-a-time. It’s to author Phil Farrand, author of a series of books in the mid- to late-90s called The Nitpicker’s Guide, which went into detail regarding issues ranging from little mishaps and mistakes that happen on any TV show to full-blown story screwups that make a particular episode’s premise hogwash. There were several nitpicker’s guides, among them for the original Star Trek series, The Next Generation, and The X-files. Also completely unrelated is the author’s work on a great sheet music software called Finale (though, admittedly, he wrote the original version and probably little is left of his work in the current product).

Anyway. Joining the “Nitpicker’s Guild” basically involved finding a “nit” in a show or movie and sending it in for Phil to review. In the wonderful world of the Internets, this changed from a physical letter to the editor into an email. Here’s the email (slightly edited and annotated with comments in italics) below:

X-Files

In a sequence of a few episodes, beginning with "Young at Heart", the creators illuminate us with the ever-descriptive date: Present Day. Kinda reminds you of the dreaded log entry "supplemental", don't it?
(This is a joke in reference to Star Trek’s effort at a pseudo-calendar called “stardates” which they never seemed to be able to get right, or in the proper order. An entry labeled “supplemental” in the voiceovers of the log entries always begged the question, “Supplemental to what?” Basically, it was a cop-out for writers who weren’t able to do the simple math of 1000 units = 1 year.)

In "E.B.E.", I was amused at the creator of the recording device in Scully's pen. A quick freeze-frame will reveal the true electronic complexity of the Consortium. They will not only astonish you with their technical brilliance, but they will also take the time to hide their complex components within everyday electronics parts! The "recording device" consists of a few resistors soldered onto a normal, everyday metal rod (sloppily soldered, I might add). But hey, no one will notice, right?
(No one ever notices.)

In the nits of the episode "Eve", you discounted Scully's view that Mulder asked leading questions during the interview with Teena. While I do agree that the last two questions were not leading, the first one was a dead-on leading question. Obviously the girl had to have some springboard for her question to lead to alien involvement, and alien involvement is exactly what Mulder is trying to prove. I mean, what else could "strange lights and sounds" describe other than UFOs? Vampires? The Disco Killers? KISS in concert? (Now, if he had asked, "Did you see anything out of the ordinary that day," that would be less leading, though it does lead to the assumption that something strange or out of the ordinary was visible that day, but it is much more general than "strange lights and sounds.")
(Run of the mill, run of the mill. Especially with regard to my early attempts at humor.)

Minority Report

The following exposition, if you will, regards the recent sci-fi film, Minority Report. It's actually a film worth seeing, and I am sure you have already come to the same or similar conclusions as to its plot.
(In retrospect, I don’t think so, but flattery is the way to go.)

The premise of the film is this; Lemar Burgess, to protect himself and Precrime, sets up John Anderton by hiring Leo Crow to act like he killed John's son, Sean. The plot doesn't work for several different reasons. First, the only reason John Anderton knows where to be is because he sees the prevision of the murder of Leo Crow. However, the precognitives only see what is going to happen, not what one intends to do. So the only reason John saw the prevision was to end up in that situation. If he hadn't seen the prevision (which he should not have), he would not have ended up being chased to the apartment complex where the murder, which he did not premeditate, would occur.
(*Takes deep breath*)

Let us go now to Lemar Burgess, the man who pays Leo Crow to act like he is the kidnapper/murder of John's son. What exactly could he have done to arrange this sequence of events? Hire Leo, put him in the apartment, and hope the precogs would see a vision of John killing Leo? The only way for John to end up there is to see the prevision of a murder which will not happen, whose likelihood is astronomical without the vision. So the entire plot falls apart because there is no way for Anderton to have seen the prevision, and there is no way for Lemar to have orchestrated the entire thing.
(Now it is possible, though unlikely, that the vision is mocked up, but the system is supposed to be “infallible” in regard to making up predictions. Plus, the vision is pretty spot-on for a lot of tertiary details, like the sunglasses billboard going up that particular day.)

Also, several other things, assuming the plot works, fall apart. At one point, a character mentions that the precognitives have a limited range (about 200 to 300 miles). Also, the Precrime commercial implies this with the comment "The homicide rate dropped 90% in our nation's capitol." The investigation is taking place because Precrime is about to "go national." This implies that more Precrime stations will be constructed in every major city in the US. But where will all the precognitives to see the previsions come from? The woman who created the precognitives mentioned that the children were accidents from many varied experiments on children of neroin addicts. So where are these other precognitives coming from? Clones? Or are they going to put the precogs on a truck and drive them from town to town? ("Look out Jimmie, here comes the Precogmobile. Better kill that guy next week.")
(Best rule ever; add the word “mobile” on the end of anything. Try it. It works.)

The idea that the precogs even have a range is laughable. They see the future! What does it matter that they are 100 miles away or 1000 miles away? Besides the fact that Precrime would be woefully understaffed, and that the amount of murders seen a day would be immense, it can only make sense if the precogs must be in range of the person who will commit the murder. So why even consider murder in Washington D.C.? Just move to California and evade the police in the traditional serial murderer fashion.
(Don’t ask smart people to commit crimes. We’re much better at it than most criminals.)

With the range idea in mind, the murder of Ann Lively makes no sense either. Lemar would have no need to orchestrate the entire bait-and-switch process. He would just have to tell Lively to meet him in any city other than D.C., meet her, and kill her himself. Or, hire someone to kidnap her, with no intention of murder (so the precogs don't see), drive her out beyond the range of the precogs, and then kill her.
(Lamar Burgess is the man with the plan. No way he doesn’t see something like this as a possibility.)

There seems to be a bit of false advertising (well, more than a bit, considering the amount of media tie-ins in this film) during the precrime commercial in the beginning of the movie. During the part where the map is showing the number of homicides, the announcer states, "In its first month of operation, the number of homicides dropped by 90% in our nation's capitol." Later on, apparently in a press conference, Burgess states, "In the six years since we started out little experiment, there hasn't been a single murder." So, which is it? Not a single murder, or a 90% drop in homicide? What happened to the other ten percent? Did the record begin when the numbers were looking good for Precrime, or are a homicide and a murder not the same thing?
(Though I strongly doubt that the writer of the film knows this, this is technically correct. Wikipedia defines murder as the“unlawful killing of another human being” whereas homicide includes manslaughter and other “accidental” forms of killing. Thus, Washington D.C. probably just has a rash of people running over bicyclists with their Corvettes. Waitaminute...)

John Anderton is officially the worst time-related cop in the history of sci-fi temporal storyline history. When he arrives at the apartment complex, Agatha tells him to stop, while he says, "I have to see my destiny," or something like that. Why the heck (excuse me) are you going anywhere?!? All he has to do is not move for about 15 minutes! And he, the chief of Precrime, the one person who should be experienced in temporal theory, does exactly the thing that ends up fulfilling the precogs' vision. I nominate John Anderton as one of the most Tutti characters of all time.
(“Tutti” is a term coined in the Nitpicker’s Guides regarding a character that is criminally stupid for the sake of the story. It’s like the security guards who leave their post together so the main character can sneak by, or the android who just happens to “forget” despite the fact that he remembers everything to which he is exposed. Right.)

The scene where Agatha describes the possible future of John's son, Sean, is, while quite cute and all that, is absolutely, positively silly! What exactly is she doing here? Using her temporal powers? How? She only sees murders for the express reason that, according to the movie, "Nothing interferes with the metaphysical ties that bind us other than the murder of one human being by another." So all she is doing here is telling John what he wants to hear. Or, one could say that she is seeing a possible future. I suppose, but that would also violate the "metaphysical ties" idea that is purported by one of the Precrime officers, but it would back up the idea that the precogs do not always see the exact, correct future.
(It’s a soppy scene for the sake of soppy scenes, to put the audience off until the Precrime teams make their entrance. Still, this seems like one of those scenes where the writer and director stand on the set and say, “Well, what if we did this...” while gesticulating with their hands open wide, as if they’re doing hand paintings in the air. Typical artsy fartsy, with the angelic visual in mind but not the earthly logic.)

Why does the guy at the Precrime lock-up, the 'centurion', give in to Mrs. Anderton's demands that John be set free? The precogs are back in business, right? So, if she was going to kill him, the precrime police would already be there. So all he has to do is slap the alarm button and relax. I suppose she could threaten to torture him, but he certainly would not die, according to the precedent set in the beginning of the film. Also, as a man involved in precrime and as a citizen of the safest city on the planet, he should know this! (Though, if I had a gun pointed at my head, I might concur with his decision).
(He’s still an idiot, thought he admittedly doesn’t seem like the sharpest tool in the shed.)

I find it interesting that John Anderton, in this whole two-day ordeal consisting of running from the police, having his eyes swapped out, and kidnapping a precog has all the time in the world to shave! At the end of the film, John looks cleanly shaven, even though he should have a two-day stubble on his cheeks. (Yes, yes, I know that Tom Cruise isn't as sexy with a beard, but where did he get a razor? Does he habitually carry one around, or does he have one built into his gun? "Precrime: protecting you so often we even shave on the run!")
(My attempt at humor. In retrospect, perhaps laser hair removal?)

There, that's the end of my Minority Report Rant. I don't think I've seen a film with so many plot holes that I could move a 100-story ad through, but hey, no one will consider these things, right? I suppose one will always get into this sort of trouble when making a time-based movie, but Back to the Future wasn't quite this bad, either.
(BTTF rocks. ‘Nuff said.)

I have a confession to make. I nitpick so often that I was able to nitpick a movie before it came out! How, you say? By watching the trailer about 20 times! What movie? Star Wars: Episode II.
(I should preface this by saying that I like trailers a lot. Their entire object is to excite, and I love that you can get that feeling after watching for a couple minutes. However, this is tempered by the fact that many, many movie trailers are disingenuous or downright lying to you, using scenes that never show up in the movie. On a related note, why, oh why, do they use a really good rendition of Viggo’s “I See In Your Eyes” speech in The Return of the King trailer that they don’t use in the movie? The trailer version has better flow and ends on a more uplifting note than the one they use in the movie. I don’ts gets it.)

Here is the nit: in the fight between Dooku and Anakin, Obi-wan tosses his saber to Anakin so that he fights with two blades instead of one. There is a tiny mix-up as to which saber belongs in which hand. In the shot where Anakin catches the saber, one can see that it is obvious that his right hand his holding his green saber, while his left hand is catching Obi-wan's blue saber. However, in the next shot, the blue saber instantly transports to his right hand while the green saber switches to his left. There doesn't seem to be any time for the change, or any motion by Anakin to switch hands, and why would he? The obvious reason for such a switch occurs less than five seconds later, as the saber in his left hand is disabled by Dooku. Obviously, Lucas wanted a blue vs. red saber fight, but the way the film was edited led to the situation where the left-hand saber was disabled. So the post-production people just switched the colors on us! The situation could have had a very simple remedy, however. Why not flip the film when the saber is destroyed, where Anakin has the two sabers crossed above his head? Then it would appear that the destroyed saber, the green one, was in his right hand, where it is supposed to be. The people who edit the Star Wars films seem to have a propensity for flipping film to correct angle problems (check out Vader's chest computer in his lightsaber battle in ANH; it keeps switching). An interesting thing to note, however, is that the destroyed saber that rolls on the floor is actually not the one Obi-wan throws (the one he throws has gold plating near the business end, while the one chopped into two does not. Ahh, the magic of DVDs).
(First of all, if ever you get the chance to refer to the “business end” of anything, do so. Secondly, hire me movie makers. I work cheap.)

End Email.

I suppose not much has changed in the intervening years, but still, I like that I could write like this back in 2003. I just wish my sense of humor was better. It’s also hard, by the way, to do humor in writing. Not enough inflection, you see.

The World Ends With You

2008-07-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

In my experience games fall into several categories, the prominent ones being the games that are simply terrible, the games that could have been better (and are therefore bearable), games that are great experiences (which compromise most of my games, thankfully), then games that simply renew the feeling of wonder one gets when playing video games, the kind of feeling that you got the first time you tried something, then always hope to feel again. It is no coincidence that more often than not, this is because of games featured on the Nintendo DS or the Nintendo Wii; systems made by a company who makes games, as opposed to a company who is simply in the gaming business.

Unlike The Phantom Hourglass (which is firmly in the last category), The World Ends With You straddles the line between a great game and a wondrous game, which is still a satisfying experience. This means that the designers tried something new and different and were able to succeed ninety percent of the time. For Jupiter’s first foray on the DS, TWEWY (hey, that acronym worked out well without even trying) is quite an impressive feat.

This game has a somewhat narrow audience made up of Japanophiles and anime fans, as the story, as well as the art style, is firmly in the anime mold. The story deals with a group of teens playing a game set up by a powerful group called the Reapers. Like most translations from Japanese, the name “Reaper” doesn’t quite give the correct impression of who and what these people are. In this case, ironically, this makes the story somewhat more mysterious in the beginning, since the Japanese for the group (the Shinigami, or Death Gods) gives more clues as to what is going on. Much like Persona 3, the characters are dealing with a world “behind” their world, or a world parallel to their normal world. This affords the main character of the adventure Neku, or “Phones,” some unique powers through “pins” which grant powers such as pyrokinesis, telekinesis, and telepathy.

The main adversaries in the game are called “Noise,” or creatures that inhabit the other world, or the “underground” (UG), and cause havoc on the unknowing people in the real world. Entering combat is optional, unlike many classic JRPGs with their random encounter systems. Taking a cue from Blue Dragon among others, TWEWY allows you to chain together battles with enemies, the end result being better items and experience at the end of battles. Another unique addition is the option to lower your characters’ levels, which results in the same benefits as chaining battles, but at the cost of making battles harder with weaker attacks and less health.

An integral part of the game is partnering with another character who fights on the top screen while you fight on the touch screen. The touch screen attacks vary from pin to pin, a limited number of which you can carry at any time. Each pin has a unique effect and usage; for instance, there is a pin that, when you tap on an empty space, your character will shoot out a short range energy ball. Once the pin is exhausted, it takes a certain amount of time to recharge, giving you the opportunity to use another of your pins, such as the short range attack pin that requires you to slash across an enemy to attack. Thankfully the gesture detection is pretty good, with some occasional hiccups on gestures that require open space to be recognized; on some occasions, an enemy will wander across the path of your stylus, canceling your attack. This doesn’t cause much angst, as the fast pace of the battles give you ample opportunity to try again, and it adds a bit of strategy to the planning of which pins/powers you choose to use in a given situation. With over three hundred pins to collect, this gives some depth in the form of collection completion à la Pokemon or Monster Hunter. Artificial though it may be, collection completion games do give one the excuse of replaying the game at least once or twice after completing the main story for those of us that enjoy such pursuits.

The second character on the top screen fights against the same monsters as you, but in a parallel space. Thus the damage done to the monsters is shared across the screens, but the characters are in two different dimensions of the same space. The top character adds a bit of optional complexity to the game. Left to its own devices, the game will automatically control the top player and doing a decent job of doing some damage as well as keeping the top character alive, a good thing since the top and bottom characters share the same life bar. Should you choose (and you should choose) to control the top character with the cross pad (or the AXYB buttons for lefties), things start to get interesting. Above the top character is a set of three cards, each of which matches a pattern of attacks controlled by the cross pad. You try to match the attack sequence with the card faces in the proper order. Once you flip a set number of cards that net you stars, you gain a super attack that does some damage to all the enemies and also heals your characters slightly. While this may seem cheap in the beginning, the effect balances the difficulty of keeping two characters alive as well as balancing with the rewards gained for lowering your character level and chaining battles together.

If this sounds complicated, it is in the beginning. Given time, and the game’s nuances become easier to understand and deal with. Unlike most games, however, the automatic control of some of these complexities give players time to get used to each part as opposed to forcing the player to master the basics in the beginning. This creates a rather unique situation where the learning curve adjusts to the player’s ability and willingness to learn, as opposed to have a set shallow or steep learning curve to which all players must adjust.

The culture of the game, embodied by the music, art style, and translation, may make it something of a turnoff to some. Much of the culture reminds one of Jet Set Radio (or Jet Grind Radio on the Dreamcast), which is a graffiti-art-inspired, hip-hop-lite mashup. Anime characters are mixed with graffiti-inspired backgrounds (based on a real Japanese shopping district), the soundtrack is an even mix of J-pop and J-rap tunes which are passable for most, though I enjoyed the soundtrack. Occasional voice work, thankfully well above “bearable” unlike most games or anime, is embodied in choice phrases, like “Focus” when Neku begins to read peoples’ minds. Most of the characters speak somewhat plainly, though some do fall deeply into street slang, it rarely gets irritating or annoying.

Speaking of styles, they do play an important role in your success in the game. Each sector you visit have clothing brands that are preferred and disliked, which in turn has an effect on your items and pins. Pins and items that are branded either get bonuses or penalties depending on the sector. Shops in every sector sell clothing and pins of differing brands. As you buy more from a particular vendor, the salesperson will start to like you and give you some extra insight into some of your items or sell you new items that were not available before.

On top of this mechanic is the food mechanic. You can buy food from several vendors and eat a certain amount per day. Once you “digest” food by fighting in battles, you gain some extra bonuses, such as more health. Each character has their own food preferences which make the bonuses more or less effective depending on their tastes.

TWEWY reminds me very much of several modern JRPGs outside the realm of the CJRPG (the “classic” Japanese RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest), such as Persona 3, where the game is more about collection and relationships in the game in addition to solid gameplay mechanics, which makes it something of a MJRPG, or modern Japanese RPG. When well done and balanced, as this game is, it can provide many hours of entertainment. Several unique additions make you want to play this game even more, such as gaining some experience while the game is off (up to a limit of a week in realtime), much like World of Warcraft’s rest system for casual players. Another notable addition is the wireless meet mode, much like the “bark” mode from Nintendogs or searching for new recruits à la Portable Ops. Here, you can leave your DS on to communicate with other TWEWY players, or even just other people using their DSs wirelessly, to trade items and gain new ones automatically.

Given all these features, well-implemented and thought out, most anime fans or RPG fans will find this a worthwhile experience. Other players less familiar with the themes or style of the game may be put off, but they should give it some consideration based on the merits of the gameplay. Unlike the Super Mario games, which (bafflingly) appeal to a large audience in terms of style and story, this game does target a particular cultural niche, which limits its approachability. Given a chance, however, this game will fall into your “great” category and, hopefully, tip over slightly into your “wondrous” category with its gameplay, style, and story. This one is worth the purchase.

A test of the emergency blogging system

2008-07-01T15:05:00.000-07:00

This is a test of the emergency blogging system. In the event of a water landing, please do not try to use your Macbook as a floatation device; it doesn’t nearly have enough hot air.

The device you’re looking for is a Macbook Pro. This isn’t the device you’re looking for.

Of Dreams and Hallucinating Fantasy

2008-05-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

I'm not a drug user myself; I just don't enjoy the experience very much. Also, I'm cheap. Maybe I have other things to be interested in, or perhaps I'm just an even-keel sort of person, with little need for ridiculous highs and the following (though often ignored) deep lows. This is not to say I don't enjoy excitement; rather, I seem to be able to induce it myself rather than using some external aids. Plus, life seems to have enough interesting complexities in it to suffice.

For example, let me relate an experience that made me sympathize with those hallucinogenic drug users out there. I had a fever some time ago (the temperature of which I didn't record, but high enough, apparently), and one evening while sleeping, I had the oddest experience. I woke every so often with this driving feeling that completely took over my whole being: something was wrong with the world. The universe. Only I could solve it. The solution to save the universe lay in the way I lay in bed; if I shifted to another position, all was right with the universe. The ether continued to flow. Joy had returned to life. The Cubs would win the World Series this year. If you've ever dealt with a complex idea, mathematical problem, or engineering problem and had that "Ah-HA!" moment, you have felt one one-millionth the satisfaction I did when I fell back asleep. This must have happened four or five times that night.

It's powerful stuff, and I can see where people want to come back to these powerful (though misguided) trains of thought. Even regular dreams can have this effect. For instance, last night. I had a dream where I was driving along in my car, and a small penguin (think young emperor penguins from Happy Feet) was in the road. He wouldn't move. Finally he jumps up on the car, at which point I grab him and hold him in my right arm. And he's super-cute, and he hangs there, holding on with his little arms and feet.

Anyway, this really isn't important, because apparently I'm going to meet Hillary and Bill Clinton in a parking garage. Obama shows up (as he always does, with the sound of trumpets heralding his arrival), and while she's making snarky comments about something or other (I don't really recall, but one of those related/unimportant issues like Wright). Obama steps up to the plate and says something quite profound regarding the fact that we really don't need this kind of crap.

What's the point of this post? First, dreams are cool. Second, if you can have fun without drugs, try it. Third, Obama can even inspire you in your dreams (talk about mindshare). And fourth, he is actively campaigning in your dreams. Somehow I think that is against the rules.
:)

He said it, not I

2008-05-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

This article attempts to defend GTA IV, and on one hand it succeeds, with the other hand it snatches away victory. The article is absolutely correct in pointing out that children should not be playing this game, that the target mature audience is the one for whom the game developers designed and built the game. On the other hand, however, it pulls the usual "I'm right you're wrong" antics by pointing to a Harvard study claiming that such content does not have an adverse effect on children. Common sense and my experience force me to disagree.

First of all, the book it the article speaks of, Grand Theft Childhood, on its own site claims a completely different (and far more common sense) attitude in regards to video games and children. I quote:

•The real risks are subtle, and aren’t just about violence, gore or sex.
•Video games don’t affect all children in the same way. Some children are at significantly greater risk. (You may be surprised to learn which ones!)

Now, this still doesn't mean that the study isn't worth the paper it's printed on, simply because we don't know the details of the study without reading the study itself. Unfortunately, the details of the study are published in a book as opposed to a respected medical journal, thus one has to buy the book to determine credibility. Slick.

Inevitably, this article points to two common issues in news media: the tendency to take quotes out of context, and the tendency to imply causation when only a correlation may exist.

Again, I haven't read the details of the study, but I'd like to bring up a question. Was this study done with the knowledge of the kids involved? (I'd assume so.) I ask because I think kids tend to want to please adults, and, if one is not careful in wording their questions, a child may answer in the direction you want your questioning to go; this is called asking "leading questions."

Another part of what makes me question this part of the study (as well as ask the sample size and sample geography) is that my experiences on Xbox Live! and PSN only point to kids who have not "incorporated their parents' fundamental values into their lives," unless their parents' fundamental values include calling me a "fag" or a "cocksucker." The previous two phrases, by the by, are not made up. Also, at least on Xbox Live! (since one can use the voice-changer on PSN, though it is usually noticeable if it is being used), I can only assume these are 10 to 14 year old children because that's what they sound like. Also, I can only assume that they are children because the more adult-sounding players rarely, if ever, in my experience ever use such epithets (usually, their insults are far more intelligent, and funny).

Also, what is the range of the study? Six months? A year? Ten years? And what other factors exist that may determine a child's development? What is the baseline for "normal" and "abnormal" behavior, as defined by the study? Does someone have to get beat up or shot for the "adverse effects" to manifest?

These are the questions that usually forge the gap between correlation and causation. We can't say the study is particularly valid because the range of the study is in question. Yet we can quote it endlessly despite not even knowing the study's standing in the scientific community.

Personally, I think violent and adult content can have an effect on children. I think that seeing violent and adult content doesn't necessarily make children into little killers. Instead, I think it influences them to follow certain behavioral patterns, such as apathy, narcissism, self-promotion, and depression. I believe that all these things stem from misinterpretations or misunderstandings by children made in regards to adult content, where they simply cannot put into context what they are seeing, so either they absorb it at face value, or they deny it altogether. This is my opinion only, based on no fact or study. This is simply what I think, given my experiences as a child and an adult.

Also, whomever says that children don't imitate what they see either didn't watch TV when they were a kid or doesn't remember being a child. I remember acting out TMNT with my friends when we were kids. Now, we didn't end up hurting each other or anyone else, but had we been using someone's older brother's knife or sword (something I happen to have on display in my room, by the way) as opposed to sticks, or had someone decided to take things a step further, well...

All I'm trying to say is that we cannot peg children into neat little holes and say that this affects them this way and that affects them that way. Parents looking for some kind of checklist of things that will make their children "good" and what will make their children "bad" are just lazy and bad parents. Let me give you my own, patented, guaranteed-to-work checklist for being a good parent.

Wasn't that simple?

Life and Liberty City

2008-05-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

Yay, GTA IV is out. Yay, children aren't safe. I think I've done enough on that topic (as has the rest of the world), so rather than harp on that, let's take a look at what makes this game worthy of the 10 ratings it has been getting in general, but focusing on the parts no one has yet mentioned, for some reason.

The GTA series has always followed the shotgun approach of doing many things kinda-sorta well, and that has yet to change in this iteration. However, it has gotten better since San Andreas, and I'm very happy about the possibility that some adjustments could be made through updates. In this case, all the big details, such as graphics, driving mechanics, combat mechanics, and gameplay have been gone over in great detail, but there are dozens of little details that are such great fun that make the entire experience worth having.

One little detail that's great is the sheer volume of cultural satire. It's always been prevalent on the talk radio stations in GTA, but here we have so much more fun at more peoples' expense. For instance, once you start to go online, you can check out Craplist, a play on Craigslist, all the way down to the "Men Seeking Women" section, which has that great mix of desperate real posts and joke or ad posts that the real Craigslist has. Also, you have a Youtube-equivalent site, but with a special twist that's a great design decision (I'll let you see that for yourself).

Another great feature is the cell phone, which really grabs you like real cell phones do. People will call you and text and want to get together, even in mid-mission. You can even set the phone to ring only, or vibrate and ring, which means your DS3 will function as another way to immerse yourself in the game. Even thunder (which happens several seconds after the lighting, a great touch) causes the controller to vibrate. Other great little things include paying for tolls on bridges, otherwise attracting police attention, or meeting random people on the street. A small person icon will show up on your radar when there is someone you can interact with. One guy I met was a coked-out rich kid who gave me a hundred dollars just because.

Effort has been put in odd places, like making a series of hilarious TV shows and commercials, the TV being something most players probably won't plop themselves down in front of ever (since we'd all rather be playing than anything else), but it's still a great thing to see. One slightly missed opportunity (though technically difficult for something so minor) would have been to emulate Gotham TV from PGR3, and show police chasing random other players playing on their consoles on your TV, say people with three, four, or five star ratings. Like real life.

And that's in part what makes this entry into the GTA series better than the last: everything is just that much closer to real life. Cars are much harder to handle, Nico jumps and runs in a more reasonable way (for a game character, that is), and everything feels that much more grounded. One of the best "grounding" features is getting drunk. When you hang out with a friend at a bar, you leave hammered. Badly. Which means you can't really walk (at best you stumble), you can't run (you just trip and fall), you can't drive (other cars are like magnets and attract you), and you can barely see. All of which is hilarious since we're just playing a game, instead of trying this out for real. We even get a nice PSA where Nico will comment on the fact that he really is too drunk to drive. Smart, and funny.

The only complaints I can honestly voice so far is that, first of all, not a single car has ABS, so, under heavy braking, you just lock tires and spin out. Would have been nice. And secondly, even the sports cars handle like boats, with very mushy suspension. Ah well. Also, one thing I wish the GTA series did better was handling which cars you wanted to keep. Cars are easy-come-easy-go in this game, but it still would be nice that if a mission makes you walk ten blocks away from your car, when you get back, it would be nice for the car to still be there, as opposed to disappearing because you got too far away from it.

So far, so good.

To borrow a phrase, O RLY?

2008-04-11T00:53:00.000-07:00

What's wrong with Dragon Ball Z. If you read a couple stories back about Anime: Drawing a Revolution, you should immediately start ROFL, LOL, WTFBBQ, or simply RTFM. This is like comparing a Model T to a new car. This is like comparing Windows 3.1 to Windows XP. Like comparing the atom bomb to hydrogen bomb. Like comparing a biplane to a fighter jet. Like comparing a fishing pole to a crane. Some similarities are there, sure. But, other than being the progenitor to the follower, there's nothing to see.

This article illustrates two points. The primary point is that anime in the United States remains a largely undeveloped, immature, and unknown property. The fact that the author of this piece can even discuss the topic with a straight face and expect people to read it and agree with it points to an alarming amount of ignorance. The secondary, and far less important, point is that ign.com's writing staff sucks. Badly. Their reviews are unbalanced and uncoordinated, they copy-paste from different reviews from different consoles (without proofreading mind you) even when the content doesn't apply, then add a small bit regarding the version they're talking about, and they rarely proofread their work. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the comments to their articles have better grammer and spelling (without common conjunction mistakes like their-they're, your-you're, its-it's etc), but I wouldn't be far off the mark if I did. But I digress.

Anime in Japan has been developing into its own art form for only the past 50 years in Japan since the socio-economic crash in Japan following World War II. Anime only came into the fore in the mid-to-late 70s in Japan, and was underground in the US until the late 90s. The point is that DBZ came at a time when anime was trying to develop its voice, and in DBZ's case, the voice that spoke to 8 to 14 year old boys, manga and anime for which has its own genre in Japan: Shōnen. The fact that DBZ was one of the more popular anime in the early 90s (i.e. - before Pokemon) was really a result of natural selection: it was the only show of its kind to be on television. No other anime, with its unique art style and storytelling, was brought to the US at the time, other than a smattering of 80s anime like Voltron or Robotech/Macross. It was the only thing of its kind to watch, thus it became popular. However it is important to note the timing of DBZ in its journey from Japan to the US.

DBZ ran on Japanese TV from 1989 to 1996. The US only got the episodes up to the midpoint of the Freeza saga (about 50-60 episodes, about 1989 to 1991 in the Japanese timeline) starting in 1996 and running on infinite loop (which is really irritating when you want the rest of a story, by the way) until 1999. In 2001, the series was finally popular enough to continue to dub the rest of the nearly 200 episodes waiting on the back burner in Japan. At this point, the anime had aged about ten years, and, as I stated before, this happened to be an anime targeted at young teen boys. As a young medium, anime had changed significantly in plots, art style, and a host of other changes that media goes through; simply compare films from the 70s, 80s, and 90s to see what a difference ten years can have.

Yet if one even compares DBZ to something shortly after its own era, such as Cowboy Bebop in 1998, one can see huge differences. One of the primary differences is that the audience for Cowboy Bebop is a slightly older audience, 14-18 year olds, the demographic for which is termed Shōjo. Thus story complexity and art style are bumped up a bit to suit the audience. Thus one can see DBZ in its proper context: something that young boys enjoy, then grow out of (mostly).

However, because choices for anime have been sparse in the US (until recently, that is), people latched on to DBZ because it was the first and only anime they ever watched. However, that doesn't elevate what is essentially a juvenile production into something more complex. It's akin to writing an article deriding the quality of writing in books by Dr. Seuss due to the large amount of repetition and rhyme, as in The Cat in the Hat, or the Amelia Bedilia books. Right.

I feel like articles like this are written for one of two reasons. One: the author remains ignorant of the history of the source material and writes an article without doing even the basic research required to speak authoritatively on a topic. Two: the author does have some knowledge of the topic, but in the interests of simply writing something at all, or perhaps to cause a sensation among the ignorant American audience and the more knowledgeable Japan-aware audience, writes it anyway. Either way you look at it, it's a sad state of affairs. Like the documentary Anime: Drawing the Revolution, it only hurts instead of helping.

Imagine this for a moment: say you bring your friend, who has broken his or her leg, their crutches. Then imagine you take those crutches away from your friend, then start beating him or her over the head with them. That's about what the article accomplishes. Even the sad part of stealing from and beating up a cripple. Even that.

Steve is psycho, but he's also my friend

2008-04-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

You know, I've not yet sat down and read a Steven King novel, which I really should do one of these days, though I've seen adaptations of his work and the effect of his influence on the horror genre. Now, I'm not a particular fan of the "gore porn" that is popular recently, and though Steven King does have some gory elements in his works (at least, that seems to be the case in the adaptations of his works, though that may be unique to the adaptations), it is far more important to unsettle you by seeing something disturbing or not-quite-right, as opposed to simply grossing you out. Not that grossing someone out is not a valid way to scare them; it's simply not my thing.

In any event, I give Steven King some respect, because I think he's good at communicating his ideas, odd though they may be. That is why when he wrote this article on the public's, or rather, politicians' attitudes, towards violence in the media and video games in particular, I took the time to read it.

I agree with King in that violence in video games does experience a double-standard, where movies are regarded as "okay" because, I suppose, once the moment has passed, it's done. Of course, with those fancy remotes we have these days ("Look Ma! I can turn off the TV from the couch! Wooooeeeee!") one could rewind the moment and enjoy, or revel, in it again. I don't think politicians have yet learned that movies can be viewed in the home, at equal or better quality than in the theater. It's just my guess, mind you. But with video games, one can repeat the violence or tackle it from many possible angles. Like any problem, the fun comes in solving it, but in different ways. Is it better to kill by pistol, machine gun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, moped, car, truck, airplane, helicopter, boat, bat, or your fists? GTA offers a playground in which to answer that question. No problems there.

However, I must disagree on the point that a law like HB 1423 should simply be decried because of its attack on First Amendment rights. While I deplore the description of video games as "...pornographic and have no redeeming social merit...", the general intent of the law, to lawfully keep violent video games out of the hands of children under the age of 17 or 18 (the nuance of this distinction between 17 and 18 is lost to me, by the way), makes some sense. We see content that we don't necessarily want children to indulge in because it may alter or retard their growth since they may not understand or put into correct context what they see.

For example, sex is a wonderful experience with equal parts biological and psychological importance. Still, we don't show porn to children, because adults know (at least, I think most of them know) that porn is about lust, not love. But if we show children porn, they may think that this is the way things are in the bedrooms of the adults they know: their parents, uncles, aunts, teachers, etc. And for a child to think that the people they trust (seemingly) act in a way that is contrary to the way they behave 99% of the time is a scary and confusing proposition, especially given some of the niches available in pornography.

Thus keeping certain content out of the hands of children by law is really not that bad of an idea, especially when compared to the idea of banning the title outright, which occurs in modern western cultures such as Australia, Germany, and the UK. Many adults have the maturity and intelligence to put beating the crap out of a hooker to get your money back in the proper context. Most children simply do not.

As a society we ask the adults in the matter, the parents of those children, to decide whether or not their children are ready for this sort of content. As a fail-safe for overprotective parents, we allow people over the age of 18 to make decisions for themselves in regards to this content. Thus there really shouldn't be any sort of problem with flashing your ID to the Gamestop employee (which I had to do anyway since I paid by credit card yesterday) when you preorder GTAIV.

I'm always amused at the reasons for this discussion in the first place. I believe it has become an argument because of the intersection of two oddly opposing forces: one moral, the other financial. On the one hand, you have lawmakers who use language such as "morally reprehensive" or "of no redeeming value" to make such laws. Since this is not held to be true by gamers in general, gamers don't want, as a social protection, games to be established in this way by law. Thus gamers will fight against any law that paints their entertainment as such.

The other side of the coin, the truly morally reprehensive part of this, is the gaming companies, or the "gaming lobby," if you will. Later, read the below and replace "gaming lobby" with "Big Tobacco" or "Big Oil" and see if you're not incensed at this behavior. The gaming lobby has fought against laws that prohibit the sale of violent video games to minors and has established several compromises, such as the ESRB, to continue to promote their agenda. The reason that the gaming lobby fights for their First Amendment rights is not for the sake of their First Amendment rights. Under many of these laws, the sale of a certain class of video games, rated by a board like the ESRB, would be prohibited to a minor under a certain age. It would not ban the sale of these products outright, thus not impinging on the game companies' First Amendment rights, much as the restricted sale of pornography does not impinge on the rights of people who produce that content. What this would begin to impinge on is the profits of gaming companies. Why?

Children are stupid. And they have free time. I'm not saying this to insult children; far from it. However, experience has shown us that having experience helps us make good decisions. Looking back on it, would you really have chosen to see The Wizard as an adult, knowing that it is a giant advertisement for Super Mario Brothers 3 and Nintendo? I don't believe so. Yet children ran to see that movie, because it had SMB3; it was soooo cool. As adults, we don't have much free time and usually some fiscal responsibility, thus we are more discerning in our purchasing. We won't get Halo 3, Prey, Crysis, Doom 3, Far Cry, Call of Duty 4, Quake 4, and any other FPS "just because." We'll probably pick one or two of these games and try to finish them. But companies are betting all their money on impulse buying, thus you see the hype machine in full force before the launch of a game. People buy the game on day one instead of waiting for reviews (many of which you can't trust anymore anyways, due to corporate influences - see ZDnet for an example). However, discerning (or poor, depending on your point of view) adults don't usually do this. Thus gaming companies lose out on a huge revenue stream if parents of children must suddenly qualify their children's purchases. The gaming companies don't want to protect your children; they want to sell to them. Given the rising costs of making games, the difficulty in making good games, and the fickle nature of the market (see Beyond Good and Evil for an example of a unappreciated "good" game), one can understand where this behavior comes from.

Some companies, like Nintendo, sidestep the issue entirely by making content that is accessible to both minors and adults. However, given the difficulty of that proposition, we see, in the history of Nintendo, the results of that decision. Nintendo was on the ropes for a while during the N64 and Gamecube era because those "kid" gamers they had before were growing up and looking for more age-appropriate content, as well as a certain kind of respect that goes along with that. Though Nintendo has rebounded with the Wii, it still holds onto this moral high ground by making most of its first-party titles accessible to everyone. It hasn't been the most fiscally responsible choice, though it has been, in my opinion, the more ethically responsible choice.

Movie-makers have fought this battle for nearly a century. Like Nintendo, they tried a strict form of self-censorship, embodied in the Production Code of the 1930s that lasted all the way up to the 1960s. Like video games, film had a constant battle against the Code, sometimes sidestepping it entirely by making films for the "other guy;" in the case of films, this was indie theaters not subject to the Code (read: Nintendo Seal of Quality), and for video games, this was the Sega Genesis. Thus the Code was abolished (and Nintendo was taken down a peg) and, for a time, people reveled in the idea that they had little or no control. For film, this was the 70s, and for video games, this was the Playstation era and the possibility of titles like Thrill Kill. However, things snapped back the other way in the 80s and 90s for film, as it is somewhat in the modern era for video games. Like any element of society, we must test the boundaries to find the center. Film has been doing it for a long time, and we should learn the lessons taught there and apply them to video games as well.

This way, we grow faster. That's the idea of history. Learn the mistakes of the past, so as to move into a better future. Of course, the blind among us refuse to do so, but we do our best with what we have.

I'd like to mention that I don't miss King's point as to the elephants in the room: pervasive violence and lack of gun control. However, I don't believe that restricting the sale of violence to a certain segment of our population will really affect that violence is appreciated in this country. I do completely agree on the gun control opinion though; it is far too easy in this country to get a weapon that can easily kill, that is really only meant to kill. But is it hypocritical to ask for the restriction of the sale of one item yet decry the restriction of sale of another? Given the lasting effects of both items, it's something of a question, is it not?

Metaphor - Power of the Future (Pissed Edition)

2008-04-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

Repeatedly throughout the internets and geekdom in general comes the arguments for or against Linux. In my experience people simply do not want to accept the fact that some things are simply meant for certain applications. You shouldn't buy a F-350 Ford to drive yourself to and from your office desk job every day, yet some people insist on doing so. Others will buy a BMW 5-series and fill it to the brim with 10-foot planks of wood from Home Depot. I'm not saying that these things can't happen, I'm just saying that the truck is not meant for personal transportation, nor is the luxury/sport sedan meant for hauling tools and freight.

A recent article I read tried to point out the applicability of Linux in the mainstream. The argument continues to roll around again and again that Linux is "better" for everything under the sun, and that it is the learning curve that comes with any operating system that causes any typical user to shy away from using Linux daily. I'm here to show, with repeated metaphor in future posts, that this is simply not the case.

First, however, for those of you familiar with this discussion, I'm going to break down why I believe Linux on the whole is good for certain things based upon its design philosophy as well as its state of progression. Future articles will be for the "end user," so to speak, though end users may want to return to this article later to make more sense of it. Let's start, as always, with the "bad" stuff.

1. Linux "just works"
The first point I wish to refute is that Linux "just works." Usually this statement is qualified with "on every system I've ever installed it on." The question is: exactly how many system installs is enough? 10? 20? 200? And are they unique system configurations? In my experience of installing four distributions of Linux (Slackware, Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat) on nearly 30 unique pieces of hardware, both laptop and desktop, the experience has yet to be a "just works" result.

An example. The fileserver I have running at work loads the kernel module r8169 for my gigabit Realtek ethernet card, which is a problem, because it's not the right driver, because what should be at least a 200Mbps transfer rate is actually, at peak, 12Mbps. Also, if I try to change resolutions in Gnome, the kernel throws a panic and halts, so obviously the video driver is a problem. Since I don't use Gnome much, I ignored the video driver problem (not an acceptable solution for a daily use desktop, I might add). To fix the network card problem, I had to install build-essential, the kernel headers, link the build directory properly (because the package doesn't), compile the driver, insert it into the kernel, remove the r8169.ko kernel module manually (because blacklist-network doesn't work under Debian), then make a new init ram disk that contains the proper r8168 kernel module. Now, tell me that end users wouldn't pee their pants at the word build-essential. I dare you.

This is but the most recent in a long line of machines, usually laptops (whose wireless, video, and audio drivers are not usually picked up by the distribution of Linux I'm using), whose essential features, in the case of laptops being power management, suspend, and hibernate, don't work without extensive work. So Linux doesn't always "just work." It can be gotten to work with a bit of effort; I don't deny that.

2. Linux software is free, as all software should be

Linux software, for the most part (as far as I know), is quite free. There are packages like OpenOffice which prove that the open-source model for software development does, in fact, work. There are unique software creations, such as Beryl or Compiz-Fusion that do things that no Mac or PC has ever done with regards to 3D desktops. However, these are but the exceptions to the rule in Linux development.

OpenOffice is an anomaly.

First of all, it's a software package created, for the most part, using the machinery available to a large software company; namely, Sun Microsystems. This means that all proper development tactics, such as planning, developing, debugging, and patching is done with corporate efficiency, something scoffed at by the larger Linux community. This lies in stark contrast with typical development seen in Linux, repeated again and again on Sourceforge. Software projects that barely got out of beta that have one or two maintainers at most that updated their software less and less frequently until it either "dies," or is integrated into another software package that, more likely than not, will die the same death in turn. This often happens with productivity software in general, and this is not a trend one often sees with packages that deal with services on Linux, which, as it turns out, is actually a very, very good thing.

Secondly, OpenOffice is Sun Microsystems' probono effort. Sun sells servers (and, by extension, Solaris), so more than likely OpenOffice is just a tax break for them. Sun makes no money (that I can see, as there's no advertising or anything like that) since there doesn't seem to be any revenue stream from OpenOffice. How many purely software companies (like Microsoft, for instance?) could possibly survive given this business model?

3. Linux doesn't require restarts

One of the biggest complaints against Windows since the days of yore has been its requirement to restart often when installing drivers and the like. Personally, given the above experience installing the network driver, I think I can live with the restart as a cost of the ease of use of double-clicking an installer package. By the by? To load the new ramdisk, the easiest way to do it is to restart the machine. Yes, restart the Linux machine. After installing a driver. Impossible, you say? Pffft, says I.

4. Windows UI is monolithic and inflexible

The Windows UI has gone through some changes in the last 20-some-odd years, but, since the advent of the Start Menu with Windows 95, not much has changed in the general design of Windows. Details have changed, of course, but the general idea of how windows and icons act and react hasn't. There is a perfectly simple explanation for this. UI design is hard. If you ever have the opportunity to take a course that teaches the actual technical details of User Interface design, you'll know why. There are actual mathematics regarding the ease for a user to use a pointing device to home in on a spot on the screen given its size, color, position, and the number of objects surrounding the spot. Windows designers have been working for a long time designing something that works, and it really does, for the most part.

In the Linux world, however, there are options, which is the main reason for the existence of open source in general and Linux in particular. However, there is such a thing as too many options. Off the top of my head, these perfectly serviceable window managers come to mind: Gnome, KDE, CDE, and XFCE. Each of them is good for their own reasons, but mainly they cause problems for end users.

How? Well, the typical case, besides the lack of completeness and polish that most open-source GUI applications lack (read that again and make sure you understand: GUI applications), is that GUI software is designed for one or the other of these window managers, rarely both. And though there is a level of compatibility that can be reached by installing the other window manager and running the software in a sort of emulation mode, there are often too many hooks into the other window manager's API that causes the application to crash. Try any of the popular KDE applications (KNetworkManager, amaroK, or K9Copy) under Gnome. See if they work.

This complicates the general problem of GUI software development in Linux. One simply can't program for all possible window managers. Plus, remember that the developers we're talking about are not governed by interests other than themselves; if they pick a window manager to use for whatever reason (ease of use, preference), you are forced to use what they picked, not what you picked. Your only option is to find an equivalent program (doesn't happen often), switch window managers (unacceptable), or port the software yourself (a powerful option only available in Linux, but hardly trivial).

5. Any software Windows has, there exists an equivalent for Linux

I have one thing to say here: not all software is created equal. I will state these defining statements in clear words so that everyone can understand them.

There is no equivalent software for the ACT! contact manager in Linux.

There is no equivalent software for Quicken financial manager in Linux.

There is no equivalent software for Taxcut or TurboTax tax software in Linux.

These are three random personal and business-oriented pieces of software that I picked. While in some cases (such as Quicken), there are applications that kinda-sorta do what Quicken and Quickbooks do, none of them even claim to have 70% of the feature set of either of those programs.

Also, Crossover Office and Wine are not options either. Remember, we're talking about end users here. Anything I've ever tried in either of these Windows-emulation has not worked without severe configuration issues. Also, if we want to talk about the merits of Linux to do "everything," can we really rely on an emulation layer as opposed to a for-Linux software package we can just apt-get? I don't think it's quite fair.

6. People think they know best

Do you know why monolithic business practices work? Because they're based on years of trial-and-error and, while they are safe, they work. I want to give you an example of what I just did right now a moment ago that really, really pissed me off. I had installed Debian for my fileserver, and, like an idiot, thought having Gnome might help in the long run. It didn't.

I configured my network IPs using /etc/network/interfaces, and, after several /etc/init.d/network restart, it finally set. I started to transfer data back to it, and it fell off the network. I look at ipconfig and it has my IP set to a DHCP assigned address. What. The. HELL?

Turns out Gnome has a built-in network manager (network-manager, to be exact) that apparently disregards anything in /etc/networking/interfaces (the de-fucking-facto place for net configurations, excusing my French), and maintains its own control over network configurations. Obviously someone in Gnome development, instead of working with /etc/network/interfaces (i.e. - like Webmin or Shorewall, just acting as a frontend for text configuration and working with the standard) maintains its own autonomous actions. You know the term backseat driver? This is the kind of backseat driver that reaches between the seats and takes hold of the steering wheel, driving you into the wall.

How do we fix this problem? Search. Search, though, brings up nothing for this solution. My hazy recollection that gnome has this monolithic, ridiculous excuse for a network manager (more of a network-nazi, to be exact) resulted in my uninstalling of the thing and continuing on as normal. By the way? Apt-get should be smart enough to kill any running processes of the package you just uninstalled. Guess what? It doesn't do that. Thus either a ps aux | grep network-manager followed by a kill #### is required, or a restart. What? Linux doesn't restart? Right.

I'll continue the good things of Linux (as well as my masterful metaphors) at a later time. This really, really has not put me in a condusive mood to go into the good things of Linux in an even-handed fashion, or go into the bad things of Linux without swearing like a sailor. Until next time.

Black is the new Right

2008-03-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

Lewis Black was on Larry King yesterday talking about things he doesn't like (as per his persona) and the questions came to blogging on the internet and what he thought about it. His opinion is that, once upon a time, opinions came from sources that had an informed opinion because they had something to back it up, such as a degree. Bloggers just shoot off their collective mouths and there are people who listen. Lots of people. And it's stupid that they do.

On the whole, I can agree with Black. Naturally there is a nuance to writing on the internet that's lost in that blanket statement, but that is usually the case with making people laugh; you have to shoot for a common experience. I know what Black is talking about; bloggers that just write and write about their own opinions and gain readership because it so happens that a number of people agree with them and like to hear their own "good" ideas thrown back at them. Statistics back up the idea that there is some percentage of people somewhere out in the world that will share your opinion on almost any topic, or a number of topics, so finding someone to agree with you is just a matter of time. In this, several "successful" bloggers have found their audience. However, the very nature of blogs in general has thrown into question the validity of the relationship between these bloggers and their audiences.

By this I mean that on the internet, one takes some percentage of information from certain sources with a grain of salt, in that, unlike a textbook that has some sort of review process, information is posted on the internet largely by individuals representing themselves, not a large body such as the scientific community. Though this experience has been changing as professors and others in positions of intellectual integrity have begun adding their wealth of knowledge to the internet, much of the information on the internet is information people have learned from other sources then posted, without any sort of review. Thus information can be altered due to memory errors, mistakes, or misunderstanding of the topic. Of course, the tendency to lie, exaggerate, embellish, or see causality where only a tenuous relationship exists occurs frequently. Even me relating this idea (the causality of human nature on the anonymous nature of the internet) is subject to this possibility of alteration and lack of reinforcement with facts. However, because this is a blog, my opinion, mistaken as it may be, is understood to be the main source of information. The reader knows nothing of my background, education, prejudices, or anything that may make my words valid or invalid. There are sources on the internet that we have come to value over others: news sites, corporately-owned sites (such as hp.com, who would not, for example, misrepresent the specifications for their products), and "trusted" review sites, such as ign.com. This is because, as is the case with newspapers and news shows, there is a review process in the hiring and firing of writers for these institutions. Blogs, because they are rarely censured unless they contain illegal content, do not have this review process.

However, because people like to hear what they want to hear, (again, subject to a scientific study saying so :), these bloggers gain a foothold in the opinions of people. Thus, as Lewis Black points out, one must take into account the opinions of CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and the "blogosphere." The question is: why? It's like saying that one should care about what people write in their private journals; it is all opinion, without censure. Yet some voices are given credence, unwarranted and undeserved.

This stands in contrast, however, with blogs of another sort. http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/ is an example of another kind of blog; personal ruminations of an individual. This individual happens to be a "famous" person, thus perhaps more interest is given than would be otherwise. Despite this, Wheaton's blog is fun to read for me because it is written to be funny, as well as giving a glimpse into the life of someone else, experiencing life in places I'm familiar with (Southern California). However, Wheaton's opinion rarely tries to define what he wants you to think about a topic; he clearly states what is his personal opinion and that he doesn't wish to force it upon you. He's a writer who likes to write. And he loves to have readers. Thus I don't believe anyone out there advertising a movie will say to his team, "I wonder what Wil Wheaton will say about our movie? Maybe we should send him a copy."

In my case, I'm trying to discover if people like my writing style, as well as my opinions. Plus, I get to practice writing, which I don't do in any official capacity these days. Given the lack of any sort of commentary on this blog, I'd say my readership is at about...zero. But given that the blog really isn't advertised anywhere, I easily can see why that is the case. In any event, I'm no Demosthenes, nor Locke; I don't seek to shape the world based on my opinion of how things should be. I just want to see if people like what I'm doing, though I'm doing it primarily for myself. So if Lewis Black read my blog (and I would print it out for him), I don't think he'd necessarily dislike it. I do appreciate that he voiced the opinion that writing based on opinion shouldn't automatically be given credence. I doubt that voicing it did much beside resulting in a few angry rebuttals about the noble profession of blogging, but it is the voicing that is appreciated, even though it may not have convinced the people it needed to convince.

Also, I found a youtube link for that part of the show (after I wrote the bit above). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCBhQkKPfkU . The part I'm talking about starts at about 5:40.

That fuzzy feeling inside? That's innovation

2008-03-18T23:04:00.000-07:00

I don't see the PSP and the DS as direct competitors in the traditional sense in that they do the same thing, just in different ways. However, they do vie for one's attention in that, when one has a choice to drag something along in one's pocket, one must choose one or the other. The PSP has the most travel time so far, but only due to the fact that I read books more on the PSP than the DS.

The one thing that keeps happening though, again and again on the DS, is this occasion to feel completely and totally surprised at something they do. It happens often with Professor Layton and the Curious Villiage, in the unique and interesting puzzles presented, the fun writing challenges of Brain Age, or the unique ways to use the microphone in Warioware, but today, one thing completely floored me: The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass.

Already Zelda impressed me with the whole "write your own notes on your map" bit and the "blow into the microphone to blow out the candle" thing, but this takes the cake. There's a bit where a map you look at has a symbol on it that you must transfer to your map. The "key map" is on the top screen your "writable map" is on the bottom touch screen. The clue lies in that the top map is an inverted version of the bottom map. There I am trying to drag, write, outline, and anything else to get this symbol on my map, then I had a moment. CLOSE THE DS. The screens lie on top of each other and the maps line up, and the symbol transfers. Now what they've done in the game is simple: when this screen is up, and the DS goes into standby, succeed! The technical details are simple, but the idea, the idea is unique. The greatest part is that you could have discovered it by accident if you had to go away for a moment and closed the DS, or just gotten frustrated and closed it to come back to later.

Now that is innovative.

Point-of-view maybe; up your ass, definitely

2008-03-05T10:57:00.000-08:00

Documentaries tend to forgo telling a story in favor of making a point. This is my personal observation watching documentaries and seeing the response to them. There are documentaries I enjoyed very much, such as An Inconvenient Truth, which, instead of taking a more typical approach and trying to interview people that don't want to be interviewed (see Michael Moore et al) or make suppositions and hypotheses backed up by circumstantial evidence, follows a single person (Al Gore, who does want to be interviewed :) in his work to get the message out. The film doesn't try to be an Oscar-winner, nor does it try to be something more than it is. It makes itself into a good documentary. Unlike Farenhiet 9/11 or Loose Change, which both hit you over the head repeatedly with their obvious cynicism and their inspired guessing, An Inconvenient Truth does none of these things. It leaves you to question the integrity of the presentation Al Gore is giving, not the integrity of the documentary itself.

Anime: Drawing a Revolution takes another path that documentaries, as well as most mainstream media, does on occasion: sensationalism. Usually what happens in this case is that the more sensational aspects of a topic are exaggerated to misrepresent the idea as well as the people who are involved in the topic. The subject of anime in the United States is presented in such a way as to make it some sort of ignored property by fate, as opposed to what people who have been into anime know to be otherwise.

Anime in the United States has had something of a rocky history. Many different reasons have caused anime and manga to become regarded as it is today. Part of the regard comes from the nature of cartoons and comics created in the United States that almost always is created with children in mind. Another part comes from a lack of cultural transparency in much of early anime. Too many cultural cues, as well as a difference in mores and values, made anime difficult to translate. Plus, given that it was "only for children," the funds required to do such a translation would have been laughed at, and, to some extent, they still are.

An example of this, and something repeated throughout the documentary, is the sub-par voice acting in almost every anime produced until today. With rare exception, the voice acting is done in such a way as to reduce one's enjoyment of the show or movie one is watching. Even putting censorship concerns aside (since all anime is for children, right?) where the meaning of certain anime is either altered or destroyed entirely, the voices are insincere, inappropriate, forced, and are far too excitable. Part of this comes from the differences in language (I suppose yelling does sound better in Japanese than in English :) but mostly it comes from sub-par voice actors hired for budget reasons that do their "best," and because the anime translation community is somewhat small, they keep getting recycled through a bunch of anime. French translations of anime that I've seen are produced with far more care than they are in the United States.

What this leads to is a large problem with the documentary itself; nowhere is it mentioned, though any otaku (anime fanatic - sort of) worth his salt (by the by, I don't consider myself an otaku - I'm not crazy enough - sorry :) will tell you that watching anime in Japanese with subtitles is far more preferable to the alternative in most cases. However, the documentary continues to try and assert that anime is a valid entertainment medium while showing clips that no one in their right mind would want to listen to. See, yes. Listen to? No.

What the documentary tries fails for two reasons. First, it tries to legitimize anime as an accepted adult medium in Japan, then it tries to use Hollywood (such a great example of intellectuals and good analysis, yes?) to transfer the legitimacy to the US. Instead, we get such inspired comments from people like Hal Sparks telling us about the "weird," off-the-wall nature of demon sex in La Blue Girl, presenting that fare as if it is standard for anime watchers everywhere (maybe not everywhere, but definitely in parents' basements across America :). Assuming that Hollywood is some kind of golden standard for good media in the US is about as correct as assuming that the world is flat. Hollywood-types tend to be of a certain mold: surface impressions coupled with a healthy dose of pop psychology. That's about all we get in terms of commentary from the people interviewed for this documentary.

The second way that this documentary fails is in giving us some kind of feeling as to the value of anime. Instead of showing people the great art available in something like Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust or Cowboy Bebop, instead we get constant streams of 70s anime like Astro Boy or the cheaper 90s animes, such as Evangelion, all in badly dubbed English as opposed to the much better Japanese dub. The examples of stories are even worse. Instead of exemplifying unique fantasy worlds as those in Princess Mononoke, Kiki's Delivery Service, or Spirited Away, showing viewers the analysis of WWII Japan presented in Grave of the Fireflies, or the case study of corruption as in Death Note, instead we get inspired fare such as ninja fighting sex-crazed demons in La Blue Girl. This is supposed to appeal to US audiences? Try again. Also, showing naked and/or sexually promiscuous androids as in Ghost in the Shell without even giving any hint as to explaining what the point of the story is (the question of one's humanity) leaves viewers confused as to what the whole point is. It's akin to showing something like the pornographic version of Pirates of the Caribbean (how good could that have possibly been?) to foreign audiences as a shining example of films made in Hollywood (technically the San Fernando Valley, but close enough).

One of the suppositions of this documentary is that anime has been influencing Hollywood filmmaking for years. While this is obvious in the case of The Matrix, the documentary tries to make such a link between anime and the films 300 and Sin City. The mistake here is twofold. First it asserts the works of Frank Miller to be anime-inspired themselves. To any discerning otaku it is obvious that neither work has any of the hallmarks of anime: not in art style, story, or presentation other than all are hand-drawn works. The only way they are alike is in the level of violence all are allowed to portray. However, the way the stories are told is far different, and the art style is totally unique to Frank Miller, making it a wholly American creation. The second mistake lies in equating American graphic novels with manga and anime. American graphic novels come from a far different tradition of art and storytelling. The documentary makes the mistake of tying the two traditions together, falling into the trap it tries to dig its viewers out of (the mistake of the "cartoons are just for kids" assumption, thus all "cartoons" are the same). Just because they're both hand-drawn does not make them influenced by the other. No one purports that Miller is influenced by, say, Picasso or Escher as the art they draw is not at all alike.

At the end of the day what we have is a bad documentary misrepresenting a good branch of entertainment. Part of the reason this is bad is because anime exists in something of an artificial niche that is given very little funding for translation and even less respect. I'd love to go out and buy the "official" Initial D manga produced in the US if I didn't know that the translation is about as good as getting hit by a car - twice. Initial D went from a serious look into Japanese touge racing to a hip-hop inspired mishmash of crap. I'm forced to go the "illegal" route and get fan-translated manga instead. Not that fan-translated manga is bad by any means, nor does their work go unappreciated, but, by its very nature, the standard of quality is not there. I'd love to watch an anime in English, I really would. Pay some good voice actors, like Keith David, Katey Sagal, Billy West, Johnathan Frakes, or Marina Sirtis and you will get a good product. The watchability and success of Gargoyles and Futurama prove it.

I suppose that the secondary benefit of watching anime as I do is learning a little bit of Japanese. That's a good thing :)

I told you so

2008-02-25T12:44:00.000-08:00

The Call of Duty series, like the Medal of Honor series before it, has tried to gain some legitimacy (or, perhaps to stave off accusations of promoting violence and war) by using "authentic" elements, such as period footage, and pro/anti-war quotes when you die. Some are funny, some ironic, but mostly the quotes are quite interesting views on the topic. Here are some of my favorites.

"If the enemy is in range, so are you."
-Infantry Journal

"Aim towards the Enemy."
-Instruction printed on US Rocket Launcher

"War is delightful to those who have not yet experienced it."
-Erasmus

"Friendly fire - isn't."
-Unknown

"I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only
when we use them for good or evil that they become good or evil."
-William Gibson

"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard
part is doing it."
-Norman Schwarzkopf

"If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage, it's probably a
helicopter -- and therefore, unsafe." -Unknown

"Five second fuses only last three seconds."
-Infantry Journal

"If your attack is going too well, you're walking into an ambush."
-Infantry Journal

"When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend."
-U.S. Army Training Notice

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
-Colin Powell

I don't think you get it. I don't get it either.

2008-02-21T18:46:00.000-08:00

I was reading some of the negative reviews of the movie Beowulf, the CGI film by Robert Zemeckis. I was somewhat amused at the reasons for this dislike, but they really come down to two reasons: the visual style and the adaptation of the story.

As to the visual style, the common thread of complaint is that the visual style does not always hold to a consistent level of bridging the "digital divide," the term referring to the difference between footage of real life (which, by the way, is its own art style in of itself due to the specific frame rate used: 24 frames per second) and digital recreations of reality. Unfortunately, what most people fail to understand is that not every film attempts to bridge this gap; rather, like Cubism or Impressionism, CGI, whether mocap, hand-animated, or otherwise created, is a visual style, not always emulation of real life. Much like Picasso's art in his day, many people saw things like his Blue period or his Cubist phase as perversions of classical Realism in art, or at least "wrong" interpretations of reality. We see now that his aim was not reality, but creating his own language in communicating ideas. In using the color blue predominately, for example, he tried to point towards his message of sadness, not only in form, but in color and design as well.

Creating your own language of communication is one of the most rewarding elements of film and animation in general, though in film, it is more subtle. For instance, take anime. A grammar and a vocabulary surrounds this art style and, in many ways, defines it. Take for example, the following images.

The top picture is one of the elements of the vocabulary of anime, the nosebleed. The nosebleed is essentially the "more appropriate" equivalent of an erection for anime males attracted to females, and it is used as a comic element. The second picture, the sweat drop or tear drop, is a reference to a character's exasperation or embarrassment. These are parts of a uniquely anime vocabulary. The point is, however, that these are elements of an art style that allow for a different way of telling a story or being comic that has little or no basis in reality.

Much is the same with CGI. No one that I have heard has complained that the toys in Toy Story do not look like real toys, nor have I heard anyone complain that the cars in Cars don't look like real cars. Each of those films has a unique visual style, somewhat based in reality, but obviously not trying to emulate reality. The same applies for Beowulf. Though Beowulf is similar to reality in many respects, it is not trying to emulate reality at all. It utilizes its visual style as a tool, where motions are done in a certain way (much as they are in other animation styles that have differing levels of smoothness and detail) and, more importantly, camera angles and long shots, as well as extreme closeups, are possible and, in part, more interesting and visible, since, without the shading, coloring, and lighting that CGI offers versus traditional film and lighting techniques, one wouldn't be able to understand the scene. An example is the scene where Grendel attacks the hall. With only moonlight and magical light to light the closed hall, traditional film would make this entire sequence confusing and difficult to watch, as opposed to understandable with the more subtle ambient, though not realistic, lighting.

This concept of a complete CG film is in contrast to CG enhancement of films, where the imagery must be similar or equivalent to real life. An example is the car jump in the Matrix Reloaded. An agent jumps from car to car by using an intermediary car as a trampoline. However, the company that did the CG work on the agent in the scene did an unsatisfactory job with the integration, as one can see that the arms are way too stiff, and the coloring and shading on the agent's hair and suit are completely different from the closeups of the actor playing the character. One is welcome to criticize the CG work there, because it fails to be consistent. However, people try to use the same criteria to criticize a full CG film do it under the wrong assumptions.

The adaptation of the classical narrative is the second point of contention with this film. I have to preface this section by saying that I've not yet read the actual text of the poem, but with the help of Wikipedia's information on the poem, I yet have several points to make.

I will concede to those that say that part of the appeal of the original poem is the patterns of speech and meter that is used in the original wording. The film apparently does not follow this pattern of speech. My only small point here is that the work is originally in Old English, which is not as close to Modern English as people would like to think. I also want to point out that the meter and wording that most people are familiar with are the work of authors, translators, and professors who worked on making the poem Beowulf accessible to modern audiences. Though it somewhat marginalizes their work, it is important to note that some meaning of the original poem may have been lost, much as, in translations from Greek, Latin, and Aramaic, the Bible has gone through some changes until it has reached one of the several English translations available, thus losing some of its original nuance.

However, a point that the adapters (Gaiman and Avery) apparently tried to make is that the poem is somewhat interesting in that the story is told from the viewpoint of Beowulf himself, as opposed to some more neutral third party. Thus the possibility for exaggeration exists. Also interestingly is the link made between Grendal's mother and the dragon that plagues Beowulf years after her death. The original poem makes no link, but the film purports a repeat of past sins and reaping what one sows. This makes the interpretation of the film something of a meta-interpretation, in that it does not simply take the story at face value and try to adapt it, but rather it tries to portray a possible meaning through the narrative structure of the piece. It makes sense. Homer's Odyssey is much the same way, in that Odysseus is the narrator of his sections of the plot, yet most of the time, through his own strength, a feat-of-arms, or craftiness, he emerges victorious. Modernity has impressed upon us a healthy amount of skepticism, and always doing well does seem like it leads to exaggeration, though it is the hallmark of the "classic hero." Again, the distinction here may be that the authors are not trying to adapt the story per se, but using the story as a framework, with its own grammar and vocabulary, as a way of telling their own story, much as the visual style is not a straight emulation of reality, but its own tool to tell make a point.

Is this too meta for you? Get used to it. As a society we work under many assumptions that come from a large body of art, music, and literature. It is the exciting reinterpretations of these works, or how they may fit together from our modern perspective, that makes things like The Davinci Code or Star Wars appealing to us; common archetypes and ideas presented in a new way or wrapped around a new setting. This effort also legitimizes and connects these works. Star Wars would have less relevance, I believe, if it wasn't a reinterpretation of the classic hero's journey, with all the classical trappings therein (the hero, the heroine, the wise sage/wizard, the powerful, more experienced warrior, the reliable sidekick, the muse/bard that offers commentary on the tale for the audience). As a discerning audience, we must be come aware of this nuance, otherwise we may find such works as Beowulf uninspired at face value, though they may be trying to tell a story that one cannot initially see. We must be cautious.

For a moment, let us think of the children

2008-02-19T15:54:00.000-08:00

Here's an fun thought; for a moment, let's assume that children, until they reach the age of eighteen, are completely incapable of reasoned thought, incapable of taking care of themselves. We assume this anyway when we give them things like driver's licenses, bank accounts, and the right to vote. Despite instances of maturity beyond one's years (as in the case for groups of youths pushing for the right to vote), I don't believe that this is an unreasonable assumption.

So, as adults, we do similar things with movies and video games. We apply ratings to movies and video games and ask, in some cases require, that the people who sell these items verify the age-appropriateness of a purchaser and the item being purchased. We do this because children, inevitably, cannot be accompanied by an adult at all times, thus the decisions of the parents, such as to what levels of violence and sex their children are exposed, would be rendered ineffective. As a society we ask members of the community, as well as the businesses among them, to help reinforce adults' roles as parents and help them in raising their children responsibly, ignoring, naturally, all the irresponsible parents out there who have no issues exposing their children to sex and violence. That is a whole other discussion, but that will have to wait.

The question becomes: where do we stop doing this? I ask because, once upon a time, the largest threats to American children, besides Barney and the gay Teletubbie, were the insidious effects of violence and sex on television, in video games, and on the internet. One of the growing problems for American children these days is obesity, in part given life due to the easy availability of fatty, salty, sugary foods that have few of the needed nutrients that most people need to sustain their bodies.

There is a question now of how many children, after school on their way home or for dinner in absence of their working parents, simply go for fast food nearly every day. Given the rhetoric being sold on the news networks these days, "an alarming number" of children are obese and overweight. How many of children's bad eating choices (since the medical community has agreed that being overweight is a "bad thing") is their responsibility, or that of their parents? How many parents simply feed their children fast food because it is the most convenient way to feed them, as opposed to the kids themselves feeding themselves this food?

This question is relevant because, if we, as adults, are trying to help parents enforce their choices as to what their children should be mentally ingesting, shouldn't we be helping parents decide what their children should physically ingest as well? Barring bad parents feeding their children inappropriate things, should we let children make these kinds of choices? Or, in lieu of kids making these choices, should we let bad parents continue to be the irresponsible parents they are by sending their children out and letting them get whatever they want?

Don't get me wrong. I realize that this idea does make children's lives different from those of our childhood, or that of our parents, or their parents before them in that children, given some money, could get all the candy and ice cream they wanted. Unfortunately, children's buying power is now extending to foods that fill them, yet provide few of the things they need, unlike the candy stores and ice cream parlors in the days of yore. Things are not the same, thus their choices should not simply be the same. In arcades of twenty years ago the worst a child could find would be a yellow circle munching on white circles and ghosts in drag, while arcades of today find children in the midst of bloody hand-to-hand fights or gun battles. The downtowns of today don't just have John's Cafe and the Sweet Store, but MacDonald's and Jack in the Box as well. When these are the choices children have, it makes it harder for children to make the right choices that we, the adults, can see, but they may not.

As a child, I really didn't see a problem with adults making choices such as what movies I could see, or which video games I could play. Part of it really came from the fact that games such as Mortal Kombat really didn't appeal to me at the time (though nor did Street Fighter, for that matter). I can say, however, that I played Doom quite a bit as a six-to-ten year-old, a game which really isn't very appropriate for a child that age. Then again, the violence was so cartoony that it didn't seem to have the same effect as Mortal Kombat's rotoscoped violence. So my own childhood was an experience of being "kept away," though not maliciously, from certain content that my parents thought was inappropriate. This didn't keep me from seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark as a child (though my parents did skip the whole melting faces part at the end) or National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (which, if I recall correctly, uses fuck once or twice and has shit as well). It really came from my parents deciding what they thought was best, and, in my opinion, it worked. Sure I missed out on Terminator, Rambo, Alien, and Hellraiser, but I'm not sure that I really should have seen those movies as a young child anyway, and I think most people would agree with that statement.

This discussion comes from the intersection of two sources. The first is a trip to Popeye's Chicken for some good, old-fashioned Bucket 'O Death, where, besides my friend and myself (for whom this was a silly what-the-hell-let's-have-some decision), many eating there were obese. The second source is a constant back-and-forth between the ESRB, game companies, and the news media in regards to sex and violence in games (mostly the sex, lately) in games like GTA: San Andreas and Mass Effect. The sad truth is that the whole argument comes from utter and total ignorance of the facts. They are as follows:

1. The ESRB rating of M is equivalent to an R rating for a movie. The MPAA has required that those under 17 cannot see R movies, and the recommendation from the ESRB is that an M game be played by persons over the age of 17. The key here is "required" verus "recommended", as retailers are under no obligation to enforce ESRB recommendations, though movie theaters, by movie distributors and by extension movie makers, are forced to follow the MPAA guidelines.

2. GTA: San Andreas does have interactive sex as part of the game. However, to access the minigame, the game must first be patched to do so, which means the software must be altered by a program to allow access. Thus a discussion of previously inaccessible content can only be applied to the computer version of GTA: SA. However, Rockstar, for some reason, was made to apologize and recall the PS2 version of GTA: SA, despite the fact that it is nearly impossible for a common PS2 player to unlock this content. In any event, as sold, the game does not allow access to this content. There have been mods for a long, long time in the PC world that will either show players nude characters or reveal them having sex (as is the case of the popular game The Sims), but EA has yet to be asked to pull The Sims 2 from shelves and rebadge it AO, since you can get characters to have sex or shower and watch them do so with a patch, the so-called "nude patch," which removes the pixelization that covers the characters when they usually engage in this kind of activity in the non-patched game.

3. In any event, as is the case in GTA: SA and Mass Effect, sex is part of the game. Why are people arguing as to whether or not these games are appropriate for children. THEY ARE NOT. People over the age of 17 should be playing these games, according to the guidelines posted on the box. Many want to ban the content entirely as opposed to seeing the content get to the proper audiences, in this case, people over the age of 17.

Did you enjoy that? Despite the lack of any sort of structure or proper flow, I liked it a lot :)

Commandments of good shooters:

2008-02-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

Most of these came about while playing Call of Duty 3. A decent looking game flawed by bad, bad design decisions and shortcuts.

1. Thy ammunition shalt work as ammunition does: with other weapons. If I pick up a Springfield rifle, I should be able to pull some ammo from it and stick it into my scoped Springfield rifle, and vice-versa. Artificial caps by limiting ammo on one’s sniper rifles are not solutions. Also, on the topic of ammo, if one comes across a discarded weapon, perhaps a reasonable limit on the amount of ammo that can be picked up might be the maximum amount that can be stuffed into a clip. Picking up an MP40 with 192 rounds of ammunition seems like a bit much.

2. Thy brothers-in-arms shalt be brothers, not dumb inbred hick cousins. The number of times that allies in games such as COD3 have simply rushed the enemy to be mowed down are far too numerous to count. This is important because only sound-minded idiots rush into enemy-infested rooms, giving you the false sense of security that the room might actually be clear. Also, the number of times that allies have used grenades effectively (that were not scripted) is not nearly often enough. Fire from allies should actually be effective based on their positions, not based upon your position. Which leads to…

3. Thou shalt not be the center of the universe. I know that most games try to make you out to be the hero, or, at least, some gifted member of the team. Unfortunately, a skill that apparently every PC has is providing the impetus at just the right moment so as to: a) open doors, b) signal the time for allies to start aiming correctly enough to kill the enemy, and c) cause the enemy to start firing exclusively at the player character. What this means is that, if you kinda know where you should be, you could run ahead, take cover, and wait till your allies show the enemy the way it should be done. However, if you decide to hang back and clear the way sniper-style, once you run through a box of ammo whist watching endless hordes of the enemy reinforcing emplacements, you will simply give up and walk away. I did. Then I came back and beat the section in less than two minutes by doing what I just mentioned above. Run. Hide. Rinse. Repeat.

4. Thy sound shalt come from a source that makes a modicum of sense. Starting with Elite Force (which had some severe limits as to which speaker sound comes out of based on position) to COD3 (where, for some reason, menu noises and reloads ONLY come from the surround left speaker), surround sound in shooters is just not well done. I hate to break it to you, but sound comes from rough quadrants in real life, not discrete point speakers. There might actually be a need for some mixing to be involved. Just maybe.

5. Thy enemies shalt be born of human women with 9-month pregnancies, not two-second turnarounds. With the exception of games where clones are involved, or swarms of little, rapidly evolving/birthing aliens, one’s enemies should come in reasonable numbers. Somehow, I don’t believe that fifty Nazis can a) fit into a two-story French farmhouse circa 1940 (nothing against French architecture, you understand) and b) need all be together in said house to man a single 88 artillery emplacement.

6. Thy environs shalt make physical sense. A small wooden fence that you could easily vault or jump over and won’t open until an NPC comes to open it shouldn’t arrest your forward progress, nor should a single box standing in the middle of a corridor as some sort of flimsy barrier designed to push you to the choke point around the corner. Either make our barriers believable or don’t give us the ability to sometimes bypass them and not other times. As everyone knows, white men can’t jump anyway.

7. Thy enemies shalt be encumbered by the same limitations as thee, especially in regards to line-of-sight. If I’m crouching or crawling on the ground, certain things, such as the pretty grass, obscures my vision. Since standing up will give away my position and paint a giant target in the middle of my forehead, I can’t see the enemy. So I can’t shoot him. However, guess what? He has absolutely no problem aiming directly at me while I’m lying in the tall, beautifully rendered grass. I know the AI probably doesn’t take grass into account when deciding to aim at an enemy, but, guess what? I do.

8. If thou decideth to use hitboxes, fuck thee. Hitboxes were once upon a time a great way to easily calculate if someone was hit, roughly where he or she was hit, and, more importantly most of the time, where to arrest one’s progress if he or she tried to become one with a table. However, we have great new technologies nowadays, like per-pixel rendering and such. If I’m hiding behind cover, and I can see the enemy in my sights, I should be hitting him, not the cover I’m crouching behind. As if to add insult to injury, there are times when he can still shoot me! Yeah, something is pretty broken there.

9. Grenades shalt be effective. Your average frag grenade has at least an effective blast radius of about six feet. Why is it that my grenades never seem to harm enemies standing on top of them, but their grenades give me a one-way ticket to Lala-Land?

10. Atmospheric effects shalt be encumbered by walls. One of the few things that will most quickly take you out of the experience is the sight of rain on the inside of a building while you are standing on the threshold, yet it stops the moment you step inside. Also, walls impede smoke. Tossing a smoke grenade into a building shouldn’t turn the entire house into a Half-Baked convention. Unless it’s a “special” grenade, that is…

Internets, as it turns out, NOT a necessity

2008-02-01T16:06:00.000-08:00

A month without the internet at home, in part caused by incessant rains that prevent the installation of the new method of online connectivity, has turned out to be a relatively painless experience, save for one or two unfortunate instances of online-only mishap. Thankfully, what this really means is that even one as myself who might seem to need to be very "connected" can, when circumstances dictate, be perfectly happy without using the internet for a time.

As I mentioned before, only two or three things keep me from being unhappy with my disconnected condition.

1) Undertow was offered as a free game on Xbox Live! for a week in January. I took my hard drive to a friend's house to download it during said week and downloaded it; however, upon returning home, Undertow shows up as a trial game, as opposed to a full game. Hopefully this will resolve when I get the internet back, as the promotional period is over for this game.

2) Naruto really doesn't work with English voice work. I can understand how anime importers are probably strapped for cash or they have such a low percentage of the profits that they can't afford to spend much, but damn. Is it so hard to press 'play' and listen to the crap you call a "performance" and find that maybe, just maybe, it doesn't sound good? At all? In any event, it turns out the Japanese voices only work on the Xbox they were downloaded on. This means that, unless I want to play on mute or endure hours of torture, Naruto: Rise of a Ninja will sit on the shelf for the foreseeable future. I know, what a travesty.

3) Windows Media Center is two steps away from useless when it can't download updates for the guide. Thus it sits alone, unpowered, waiting for the day that it can once again rise up amongst its peers, connected, powerful, useful. Cry. Cry for Stewie.

Like, or Love? There is a difference.

2008-01-06T00:48:00.000-08:00

There is a distinct difference between "liking" something (as in, enjoying it) and "loving" something (as in, doing everything and anything for something). For someone in my position, oft times when people say that they "love" something, for instance, a possession, I find myself reevaluating the person based on this statement. Are they saying this because, like all of us trapped in a language heavily influenced by pop culture, we customarily use phrases we don't think much about and never really give thought to their meaning? Or do they really, truly, like something so much that they're willing to give up something for that thing?

Someone who really does this is, in my opinion, shallow. Shallowness, thus, is a "bad thing." This comes from a rather enlightening (read: inane) discussion on, of all things, Apple products. After being referred to as, and I quote, not worthy of Christ's forgiveness, well, I laughed. Is the person who referred to me in that way not only shallow in regards to his feelings, but is he not also quite uninformed regarding the nuances of Christ's message? I'm not a technically a Christian myself, though I do know much about Christian doctrine and history, and, somehow, I'm not sure Christ wanted anyone, even one who thought that expressing undying love for "Macbook white" was not healthiest thing to be doing, to be unworthy of his forgiveness. Just a thought.

Perhaps it's not a question of shallow personality, but simply of experience. When you've really experienced the feeling that, despite anything, anything a person may have done to you, may do to you, no matter how bad or unfeeling, despite the silly things that people do, you would do almost anything for that person. And if you've ever felt that way about a person, and had the ability to walk away from them, yet still care deeply for them, and wish them happiness...well, perhaps then the word "love" would not be bandied about like a trinket, but as something full of meaning. Somehow feeling that way about a person pales in comparison to Macbook white.

Haha. Look. I made a funny.

We now return to our reguarly scheduled broadcast

2008-01-06T00:46:00.000-08:00

I will not let this disappear

2008-01-05T00:40:00.000-08:00

I will not let this disappear. I will not. It is too important. For those of you who skim, I will put this in giant text. THIS IS NOT ME, THIS IS SOMEONE ELSE. However, I don't think something like this should ever go unnoticed, or unread.

http://andrewolmsted.com/

Final Post

"I am leaving this message for you because it appears I must leave sooner than I intended. I would have preferred to say this in person, but since I cannot, let me say it here."
G'Kar, Babylon 5

"Only the dead have seen the end of war."
Plato*

This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits. And so, like G'Kar, I must say here what I would much prefer to say in person. I want to thank hilzoy for putting it up for me. It's not easy asking anyone to do something for you in the event of your death, and it is a testament to her quality that she didn't hesitate to accept the charge. As with many bloggers, I have a disgustingly large ego, and so I just couldn't bear the thought of not being able to have the last word if the need arose. Perhaps I take that further than most, I don't know. I hope so. It's frightening to think there are many people as neurotic as I am in the world. In any case, since I won't get another chance to say what I think, I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity. Such as it is.

"When some people die, it's time to be sad. But when other people die, like really evil people, or the Irish, it's time to celebrate."
Jimmy Bender, "Greg the Bunny"

"And maybe now it's your turn
To die kicking some ass."
Freedom Isn't Free, Team America

What I don't want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I'm dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren't going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) I had a pretty good life, as I noted above. Sure, all things being equal I would have preferred to have more time, but I have no business complaining with all the good fortune I've enjoyed in my life. So if you're up for that, put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984), grab a Coke and have a drink with me. If you have it, throw 'Freedom Isn't Free' from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can't laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I'm dead, but if you're reading this, you're not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

"Our thoughts form the universe. They always matter."
Citizen G'Kar, Babylon 5

Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer. The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who have read my writings haven't agreed with them. If there is any hope for the long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush them. While the blogosphere has its share of partisans, there are some awfully smart people making excellent arguments out there as well, and I know I have learned quite a bit since I began blogging. I flatter myself I may have made a good argument or two as well; if I didn't, please don't tell me. It has been a great five-plus years. I got to meet a lot of people who are way smarter than me, including such luminaries as Virginia Postrel and her husband Stephen (speaking strictly from a 'improving the species' perspective, it's tragic those two don't have kids, because they're both scary smart.), the estimable hilzoy and Sebastian of Obsidian Wings, Jeff Goldstein and Stephen Green, the men who consistently frustrated me with their mix of wit and wisdom I could never match, and I've no doubt left out a number of people to whom I apologize. Bottom line: if I got the chance to meet you through blogging, I enjoyed it. I'm only sorry I couldn't meet more of you. In particular I'd like to thank Jim Henley, who while we've never met has been a true comrade, whose words have taught me and whose support has been of great personal value to me. I would very much have enjoyed meeting Jim.

Blogging put me in touch with an inordinate number of smart people, an exhilarating if humbling experience. When I was young, I was smart, but the older I got, the more I realized just how dumb I was in comparison to truly smart people. But, to my credit, I think, I was at least smart enough to pay attention to the people with real brains and even occasionally learn something from them. It has been joy and a pleasure having the opportunity to do this.

"It's not fair."
"No. It's not. Death never is."
Captain John Sheridan and Dr. Stephen Franklin, Babylon 5

"They didn't even dig him a decent grave."
"Well, it's not how you're buried. It's how you're remembered."
Cimarron and Wil Andersen, The Cowboys

I suppose I should speak to the circumstances of my death. It would be nice to believe that I died leading men in battle, preferably saving their lives at the cost of my own. More likely I was caught by a marksman or an IED. But if there is an afterlife, I'm telling anyone who asks that I went down surrounded by hundreds of insurgents defending a village composed solely of innocent women and children. It'll be our little secret, ok?

I do ask (not that I'm in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don't drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don't cite my name as an example of someone's life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I'm not around to expound on them I'd prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn't support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I'd prefer that you did so.

On a similar note, while you're free to think whatever you like about my life and death, if you think I wasted my life, I'll tell you you're wrong. We're all going to die of something. I died doing a job I loved. When your time comes, I hope you are as fortunate as I was.

"What an idiot! What a loser!"
Chaz Reingold, Wedding Crashers

"Oh and I don't want to die for you, but if dying's asked of me;
I'll bear that cross with honor, 'cause freedom don't come free."
American Soldier, Toby Keith

Those who know me through my writings on the Internet over the past five-plus years probably have wondered at times about my chosen profession. While I am not a Libertarian, I certainly hold strongly individualistic beliefs. Yet I have spent my life in a profession that is not generally known for rugged individualism. Worse, I volunteered to return to active duty knowing that the choice would almost certainly lead me to Iraq. The simple explanation might be that I was simply stupid, and certainly I make no bones about having done some dumb things in my life, but I don't think this can be chalked up to stupidity. Maybe I was inconsistent in my beliefs; there are few people who adhere religiously to the doctrines of their chosen philosophy, whatever that may be. But I don't think that was the case in this instance either.

As passionate as I am about personal freedom, I don't buy the claims of anarchists that humanity would be just fine without any government at all. There are too many people in the world who believe that they know best how people should live their lives, and many of them are more than willing to use force to impose those beliefs on others. A world without government simply wouldn't last very long; as soon as it was established, strongmen would immediately spring up to establish their fiefdoms. So there is a need for government to protect the people's rights. And one of the fundamental tools to do that is an army that can prevent outside agencies from imposing their rules on a society. A lot of people will protest that argument by noting that the people we are fighting in Iraq are unlikely to threaten the rights of the average American. That's certainly true; while our enemies would certainly like to wreak great levels of havoc on our society, the fact is they're not likely to succeed. But that doesn't mean there isn't still a need for an army (setting aside debates regarding whether ours is the right size at the moment). Americans are fortunate that we don't have to worry too much about people coming to try and overthrow us, but part of the reason we don't have to worry about that is because we have an army that is stopping anyone who would try.

Soldiers cannot have the option of opting out of missions because they don't agree with them: that violates the social contract. The duly-elected American government decided to go to war in Iraq. (Even if you maintain President Bush was not properly elected, Congress voted for war as well.) As a soldier, I have a duty to obey the orders of the President of the United States as long as they are Constitutional. I can no more opt out of missions I disagree with than I can ignore laws I think are improper. I do not consider it a violation of my individual rights to have gone to Iraq on orders because I raised my right hand and volunteered to join the army. Whether or not this mission was a good one, my participation in it was an affirmation of something I consider quite necessary to society. So if nothing else, I gave my life for a pretty important principle; I can (if you'll pardon the pun) live with that.

"It's all so brief, isn't it? A typical human lifespan is almost a hundred years. But it's barely a second compared to what's out there. It wouldn't be so bad if life didn't take so long to figure out. Seems you just start to get it right, and then...it's over."
Dr. Stephen Franklin, Babylon 5

I wish I could say I'd at least started to get it right. Although, in my defense, I think I batted a solid .250 or so. Not a superstar, but at least able to play in the big leagues. I'm afraid I can't really offer any deep secrets or wisdom. I lived my life better than some, worse than others, and I like to think that the world was a little better off for my having been here. Not very much, but then, few of us are destined to make more than a tiny dent in history's Green Monster. I would be lying if I didn't admit I would have liked to have done more, but it's a bit too late for that now, eh? The bottom line, for me, is that I think I can look back at my life and at least see a few areas where I may have made a tiny difference, and massive ego aside, that's probably not too bad.

"The flame also reminds us that life is precious. As each flame is unique; when it goes out, it's gone forever. There will never be another quite like it."
Ambassador Delenn, Babylon 5

I write this in part, admittedly, because I would like to think that there's at least a little something out there to remember me by. Granted, this site will eventually vanish, being ephemeral in a very real sense of the word, but at least for a time it can serve as a tiny record of my contributions to the world. But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven't known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war. Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots. A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I'm facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn't have a sense of humor?

But for those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it's a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision. Because it is pretty clear that the average American would not have supported the Iraq War had they known the costs going in. I am far too cynical to believe that any future debate over war will be any less vitriolic or emotional, but perhaps a few more people will realize just what those costs can be the next time.

This may be a contradiction of my above call to keep politics out of my death, but I hope not. Sometimes going to war is the right idea. I think we've drawn that line too far in the direction of war rather than peace, but I'm a soldier and I know that sometimes you have to fight if you're to hold onto what you hold dear. But in making that decision, I believe we understate the costs of war; when we make the decision to fight, we make the decision to kill, and that means lives and families destroyed. Mine now falls into that category; the next time the question of war or peace comes up, if you knew me at least you can understand a bit more just what it is you're deciding to do, and whether or not those costs are worth it.

"This is true love. You think this happens every day?"
Westley, The Princess Bride

"Good night, my love, the brightest star in my sky."
John Sheridan, Babylon 5

This is the hardest part. While I certainly have no desire to die, at this point I no longer have any worries. That is not true of the woman who made my life something to enjoy rather than something merely to survive. She put up with all of my faults, and they are myriad, she endured separations again and again...I cannot imagine being more fortunate in love than I have been with Amanda. Now she has to go on without me, and while a cynic might observe she's better off, I know that this is a terrible burden I have placed on her, and I would give almost anything if she would not have to bear it. It seems that is not an option. I cannot imagine anything more painful than that, and if there is an afterlife, this is a pain I'll bear forever.

I wasn't the greatest husband. I could have done so much more, a realization that, as it so often does, comes too late to matter. But I cherished every day I was married to Amanda. When everything else in my life seemed dark, she was always there to light the darkness. It is difficult to imagine my life being worth living without her having been in it. I hope and pray that she goes on without me and enjoys her life as much as she deserves. I can think of no one more deserving of happiness than her.

"I will see you again, in the place where no shadows fall."
Ambassador Delenn, Babylon 5

I don't know if there is an afterlife; I tend to doubt it, to be perfectly honest. But if there is any way possible, Amanda, then I will live up to Delenn's words, somehow, some way. I love you.

Posted at January 4, 2008 11:18 AM

Hail to thee, oh Logitech.

2008-01-04T09:45:00.000-08:00

As every unwashed, unintelligible, peaceloving, Republican-hating hippie will tell you, corporations are bad. Very bad. Like screw-your-mother-and-your-sister-and-your-dead-grandmother bad. And somehow they'll make money off that too.

For all the evil companies out there, there is an occasional ray of hope. Sadly, many of these rays of hope are wolves in sexy sheep clothing, where their "kindness" comes at a hefty price, usually the kind that costs them little and yet still makes money off your ass sitting on the couch with the AbMaster strapped to your head.

The one exception to this rule that I have found over the years is Logitech. Every time I deal with them, it's a joy. Now, when does one often "deal" with a company? When shit breaks. And how often has shit broken? Admittedly not very often, but every time it has, the people over at Logitech support (though so obviously a call center, it has very nice people, and it's not one of those "other" call centers) have been very helpful and understanding. As a ten-year old kid, I must have broken a Logitech joystick about four or five times (not my fault, mind you, just some silly internal plastic parts that kept breaking) and they replaced it, no problem. When my G7 wouldn't turn on, they replaced it, no problem. When my bluetooth headset's earpiece broke, and I called them to ask if they sold the part, they offered to replace the whole thing. When my friend's G15 developed a set of dead pixels, they offered to send him a replacement without expecting his keyboard in return. Unlike all other companies, which require a return for a replacement, then probably just burn it in a pit of hellfire, they just let him keep the keyboard, which he now uses at work. He can't use the screen, but the screen was broken anyway and he still got a usable keyboard out of it, which is, at least, now not taking up any space at a landfill or poisoning your childrens' children's groundwater. Ergo, happiness.

What else could make them an even more He-man-like company without the homoerotic undertones? They sell parts for their devices, directly on their web site. Not all the parts, mind you, but the ones most likely to fail/get lost, like AC adapters, batteries, and earpieces. And, they sell the parts for a reasonable amount. Actually, obscenely reasonable. Let me repeat that. Parts. Sell. Web site. Reasonable. You got that right.

An example. The G7 mouse uses small lithium-ion batteries (custom made for the G7, I might add). How much do you think it might cost? Lets take Nokia cell phone batteries as a comparison. A random choice (the first one that came up under searching for "battery" at the Nokia site) is the BP-6MT, a 3.7V 1200mAh battery. It sells for, direct from Nokia, $74.95. I thought it might be closer to about $20, but hey. Naturally, this is an obscene amount, but it's also true. In comparison, the G7's 600mAh battery (that's from memory, might be wrong, but probably isn't) sells for a whopping $5. I'll leave it to you to decide whether or not a mouse sells more often (thus needing more batteries) than a series of cell phones (as in, more than one phone can use this battery).

Logitech does make mistakes. Their products fail and are occasionally badly designed. But they stand by their products. Again, not perfect, but they've impressed me. It could just be that I've had a great experience with them, but it has been consistent for nearly ten years, so that be saying something.

Things that go bump in the night

2007-12-23T23:07:00.000-08:00

The Dualshock 3 is turning out to be quite the pleasant experience, in that it actually allows me to enjoy my PS2 and PS1 games again, as well as more fully enjoy the PS3 games that support it. However, in regards to the idea that I may have been "missing" something, the truth is that I missed the weight of the controller more than anything else. Rumble is a great interactive feature, but used too much and it becomes annoying. Sitting there and really trying to notice where a game uses it (since we were looking for if it was working or not), it turns out that it's not used as often as one would think. However, to punctuate a point or to give a different form of feedback, it is a feature that proves its worth. It's nice to have it back, despite the fact that it cost me $10 more than it should, but considering I got it about four months in advance of the North American launch, it makes it worth it. Plus, I got it in white, which more than likely will not be available here in North America, because only the Japanese seem to be able to appreciate a choice of colors. Americans are like dogs, I suppose. Stupid, and color-blind. And stinky. But in a nice way.

boolean rant = true; target movie = The Golden Compass;

2007-12-16T09:38:00.000-08:00

Lord of the Rings is the seminal fantasy film of our era, an era that began with the space opera Star Wars, which has defined the majority of high-profile films that have followed it. Not only is Lord of the Rings the seminal fantasy film of our era, it is also the seminal book of our era, which began a unified effort upon the part of most authors to create an established mythology within the fantasy world. This has reached such a state as to make it necessary for fantasy authors to try to adjust genre elements just to tell a "unique" story, forgoing the possibility that using genre elements in an actually interesting story might be a good thing. Science fiction has been going through this phase longer than the fantasy genre. The style pioneered by Jules Verne and Mark Twain has evolved from using fantastical elements to tell a story, though grounded in some science, to largely self-serving genre pieces that exist for their own sake.

An example of this behavior is Star Trek. In its original iteration, Star Trek existed primarily to tell relevant stories (for instance, the effects of bigotry, hate, and racism in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield") while using the setting of space explorers to tell the tale (personifying the two sides of racism using bi-chromatic aliens; creatures with one side of their bodies black and the other side white, and vice-versa). However, slowly but surely the later iterations of Star Trek after The Next Generation, such as Voyager and Deep Space 9, often focused on stories driven by technology and/or odd phenomena in the galaxy, thus taking away from human and relevant stories and plunging deep into technology heaven. At times it seemed that everything could be solved by an inverse beam or pulse of one sort or another that would right the wrongs of the universe. Thus Star Trek stopped appealing to the masses who could find stories to relate to (thus defining Star Trek as a "good thing"), though it continued to appeal to the hardcore fans and Trekkies with its mass of technobable (thus making it a "bad thing").

Fantasy is guilty of a similar problem; namely, a need to appeal to the masses, but the inability to come up with a good story. Thus fantasy authors resort to slightly modifying genre elements as a way to appeal again, though they often find themselves appealing to those same hardcore fans that liked them the first time around. For instance, take elves. In Tolkien's world, elves are ancient beings, magical and almost immortal, who work tirelessly against the forces of evil. Fantasy authors, from the basis of this definition, have created drow (the all-evil elves), the High elves (the all-magical elves), the Night elves (the all-natural elves), and so on. Admittedly, this is an attempt to draw attention away from the nature of the beast, that is to say, such genre elements are one-dimensional by definition, and these distinctions are a way to essentially stereotype characters into a certain mold. Drow are "bad guys." Night elves are "good guys." High elves are both "good guys" and "bad guys" depending on whether or not magic is involved.

This need to prop oneself up using genre mainstays, as opposed to using them as a framework, is but one of the reasons that The Golden Compass is a throughly disappointing film. The Golden Compass tries to be another Lord of the Rings in film: epic in scale, grand in execution. It succeeds in this attempt from a technical perspective, as the shots are framed well, the CG special effects are not glaringly obvious, the actors play their parts well enough, and an orchestral score is involved. However, the film fails completely in making you interested at all with the story, the characters, or anything at all that is going on onscreen.

I have to mention that I've yet to be so bored by a film in long time. Even the screening of "Black God, White Devil", a South American film whose quality was so poor one could rarely read the subtitles, was interesting in its completely alien story and style of presentation. From the start to the finish of The Golden Compass, I was completely uninterested in what happened to the characters. Conflicts that needed resolution were hardly of interest. Characters seemed to come out of nowhere, and even then they came in as one-dimensional caricatures or two-dimensional prop-ups that did nothing to interest me.

Let us begin with the premise. If this were presented as clearly as I am doing now as it should have been in the film, people might have been slightly more interested. The world of the Golden Compass is a parallel universe to our own, where things are slightly different (some kind of whirlygig is the predominant source of power), and the primary difference that we can see is that each human has a familiar, spelled daemon, but said as demon (which throughly confuses the issue and brings up the problem this film has with decent naming conventions), which is their soul manifest. Something called "dust" separates the worlds apart, and a device exists called an aletheometer that allows those who can interpret its meanings to get glimpses to answers to questions, somehow using the aforementioned "dust" to do so. Two groups are introduced in the course of the film: one group is the Magisterium, a Big Brother-like institution that has somehow gained prominence in the world and has pledged to make the "right" choices for the cringing, huddled masses eagerly waiting for their guidance (the former should be read with a heavy dose of sarcasm). The second group is the Scholars, who promote free thinking and exploration.

This premise is not particularly bad per se. Where it already starts to fail, however, is in creating any sort of drama and excitement. The "how" of something is usually only interesting to the players involved, whereas the "why" is the major entertaining factor for those being told the story. This story fails to leave any mystery for we the audience to solve. If it had been presented as a mystery of why the aletheometer works as it does (i.e.- the dust binding parallel worlds) and/or why the Magisterium wants to capture it, the film might have had some merit. Instead we are forced to watch something interesting only to the characters involved; namely, how their world works. We don't care how their world works. We care how it relates to us.

The pedantic nature of the allegorical elements of the story, the Magisterium and the Scholars, is so heavy-handed that we lose interest in the groups and the characters who represent them. The Scholars are the "good guys" working towards knowledge, while the Magisterium are the "bad guys" working towards...well, that is somewhat unclear. On the surface the organization is interested in the lofty goal of homogeneity and singular belief. No justification for this behavior is presented, though admittedly the Scholars offer no such explanation for their ideals, but, as homogeneity is considered a "bad thing" by most educated Westerners, we need to know why the bad guys think they are good. Some do it for the money. Others do it for the power. However, of the Magisterium, we know nothing as to why its members behave the way they do. They spend the entirety of their time in the film (with the exception of Ms. Coulter) being...evilish. All they do is giggle malevolently in the shadows (Malevolent Giggle™ courtesy of none other than Christopher Lee), poison people, and hatch their evil plans for, umm, trying to make people do what they do. Not remotely threatening.

If bland stories aren't your thing, maybe you'll appreciate giant plot holes and unsympathetic characters. First of all, Lyra, the main character, is completely unappealing. She tries to come off as the tomboyish leader-type, smart and clever. Instead, she just comes off as irritating, melding, and bitchy. She does nearly nothing for herself (she is a girl, after all, and girls, as we know, can't do anything by themselves) and ends up being the focus of attention though she really doesn't deserve it. I've yet to understand why the gyptians even defer to her at all. She is, after all, an eleven year-old child. Yet somehow she manages to be of interest of everyone she meets, despite the fact that her ability to use a device that many others (it seems) can use, and that she may be a child of prophecy, a prophecy to whose terms we are not privy.

Besides this, the other characters in the film are a joke, as they are merely placeholders for common character archetypes. The relationships between the characters is even more proof of this. Take, for example, the ice bear and the cowboy. Lyra meets the cowboy out of chance at the dock when she arrives in the North, talking to him for no evident reason, other than the remote chance he's just a pedophile. He points her, though she really never asks for it, to an ice bear that can be her protection, never mind that he's a drunk, armor-less exile. What's that? The cowboy happens to have a vehicle that flies? And he happens to know said ice bear from way back? That's convienient! Not to mention that this is a half-hearted attempt that any of these characters had lives before this charming little girl wormed her way into their lives. The same thing happens with the witch (played by Eva Gren) and the gyptian leader. The only reason any connection exists there at all is: a) the witches know the prophecy, so they need to present it to Lyra at some point, b) to justify why the witch even visits the boat when she does, and c) to provide more firepower in the laughably pathetic epic battle at the end of the film. The relationships between the characters are artificial, created only to shepherd to them to convenient places in which they may be used. These disparate people also somehow become trusted confidants without any mention to their intentions or goals.

As was the case with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, this film suffers from a lack of any mention of tertiary characters which flesh out the world and thus make the world seem empty but for the main characters and their allies. Save for the hordes of gun-toting cronies, the only people in the Magisterium seem to be Ms. Coulter, Evil Old Man #1, Evil Old Man #2, Christopher Lee, and sniveling crony #1. No impression is given that there are any people in this world other than the gyptians, the Scholars, the Magisterium, and the ice bears. There are people, sure, in the north especially, but they seem wholly disconnected from any of this Magisterium vs Scholar business, though the impression is given that these two forces are the main representatives for the entire world, and a small world it is. The "kingdom of the ice bears," basically a medium sized castle in the snow with one room, hardly qualifies as a kingdom, and it seems more like a large estate, given the handful of bears that spend any time near the castle. It is a problem of scale that every story suffers in one form or another (the example that comes to mind is the mono-biome plants of Star Wars, i.e.- the ice planet, the desert planet, the jungle planet, etc), but this film does little to diminish it.

One of the worst offenses authors make is trying to make the fantastical relate by simplifying names or basing them on names we commonly use in our world. Some time ago in the sci-fi world, this involved referring to coffee as "caf" (look, they drink sweetened bitter drinks in the morning just like we do!). This film does this badly. Dust? Not exactly the most original name for something. What the author is trying to do is leverage the power of well-pronounced dialog, but this only really works with words that already have some sort of positive or negative connotation, such as the Darkness, or the One Power, or the Giant Lawnmower. It doesn't really work with Dust. Or Trashbin. Or Automobile. Also, the gyptians. Like Egyptians. But without the E. And it kinda sounds like gypsies. And they kinda look like them too. That's convenient. And the Scholars. What do they do? Are they a group of professional hit men that customarily disguise themselves as librarians and college professors that kill while quoting Shakespeare and Plato, thus fostering a sense of irony? No. They're scholars. With a capital 'S'.

The motivations of most of the secondary characters is pretty murky as well, if you take murky to mean non-existent. The cowboy helps Lyra, but why? Was he hired to do so? Does he have some beef with the Magisterium? We really don't know (and don't care too much either, 'cause he's got the car). The witch comes to visit Lyra and helps her out at the end of the film. Why? To help fulfill a prophecy? Woopdee do. Ms. Coulter is one of the worst. Besides the Luke-I-am-your-father moment that she and Lyra share, her being Lyra's mother (did I ruin that for you? Oops) gives us little reason as to why she does what she does, besides the obvious (that she works for the Magisterium but she wants to protect her daughter). The particular scene I mentioning is the one where she's worried over Lyra, and she slaps her daemon in the face. Ummm...why? Plus, that's supposed to hurt her too, according to everything we've seen in the movie about the relationship between daemons and their humans, but this time, no dice.

The final element that makes this film oh-so-painful is the ten-ton story stuffed into the two-pound box. Every scene feels rushed, with little sense of space as to how far characters have traveled, or how much time they spent doing so. Lyra spends some time with Ms. Coulter at her home, going to dinner parties and the like. How much time have they spent together? It's mentioned at some point, if I recall correctly, that they've spent a week together, but no impression of that time is given. First they're together at the dirigible station, then they're at Coulter's home, then they're at dinner, then they're back at home. Could have been a day, could have been a month, but we're told that it's a week. Every bit of the editing seems like there was a lot more story there at one point or another, and we as the audience are just getting the Cliff's Notes version.

I was inspired to write this entry just from the sheer boredom I experienced from watching this movie, and that's saying something. What some may say is that I don't understand because I haven't read the books (I shouldn't have to) or that I'm not thinking enough. Don't get me wrong; I've read enough books and seen enough movies to tell you exactly what every character's motivation should be and explain nearly every bit of the story. My point is that I shouldn't have to. Things should be presented in a film, not placed there in hopes people can explain it using previous experience. That's what separates good movies from bad ones. The exception to this is when the puzzle is part of the work, as it is in something like, say, Jacob's Ladder or Apocalypse Now. However, this film is not trying to be a puzzle, it's trying to tell a story. And it fails. Utterly. I'm amazed that anyone gives this film a decent rating, but according to a 43% rating on rottentomatoes.com, someone's been doing just that. Yes New Line produced Lord of the Rings. That doesn't mean that everything they touch will turn into cinema gold. Yet I think some reviewers, holding out perhaps for the next film in the series, or filling in the blanks from the books, missed the point completely. This is a bad film, and a terrible adaptation. Don't be afraid to say it.

The caveat to all this is that the books, His Dark Materials, may in fact be a good book series and present a good story, given the hints of anti-dogmatic ideas that some reviewers reference when mentioning this film. I have nothing to say in regards to the books, because I haven't read them, thus there may be some redeeming quality to the work. Having not read the books, I just don't know. But again, I shouldn't have to have read the books to appreciate the film, either.

Finally....for the first and last time

2007-12-10T21:40:00.000-08:00

In the interests of being inordinately cheap, I have decided to try my luck (again) at a cheap laptop with ubuntu installed, so as to learn the OS, primarily, and to play the inevitable game of trying to get things to work. On the modestly priced ($399) Compaq C714NR, the LiveCD versions of 7.10 do not work, neither 32-bit nor 64-bit flavors. The alternate install cds are a better match, but it turns out that if you want common plugins and drivers, the 32-bit edition of 7.10 is what you want, as 64-bit editions of plugins like Flash Player don't exist. Also, it helps that the video driver, the Intel X3100 or 965 chipset, doesn't really have Linux drivers yet, and it's blacklisted as a video card under compiz, which means I shouldn't be able to use it. Also, standby works some of the time, as does hibernate. The Broadcom wifi really only works with ndiswrapper, which is not so bad, but, well, you're still playing the "I need FAQs and HOWTOs" game. I'll try to use it over the next couple days/weeks as a primary laptop; however, I really don't have high hopes in that regard. I always find some reason, mostly media or configuration based, to go back to Windows, though this machine should tide me over until after Macworld, which promises to give a new laptop (possibly) which I've been planning on getting. We shall see.

Order of the Stick: Not just for children (was it ever?)

2007-11-29T18:03:00.000-08:00

If you've seen any of a host of fantasy, comic, anime, and science-fiction related material over the past twenty years, then OOTS is the webcomic for you. Like all good artistic endeavors, including books and movies, OOTS only uses its framework, in this case, the Dungeons and Dragons mythos and rules, as a vehicle for a much more complete experience involving hilarious references to the aforementioned genres, as well as self-referential jokes and inside humor. Even the art reflects this sensibility; easily modified (yet humorously non-proportional) art style that serves as a vehicle for the humor, as opposed to hobbling the humor by grounding the characters in a world that may not allow for several jokes (i.e. - think of how different the comic would be if it were done in a realistic style, or even the exaggerated forms of manga or anime).

Order of the Stick can be found at www.giantitp.com.

UPDATE: The OOTS Rss feed is now available on the side of the blog. Click to see some of the newest entries in the series.

Dualshock 3: Others told you so

2007-11-29T17:40:00.000-08:00

So the Dualshock 3 approaches, offering rumble and Sixaxis control to the PS3. Considering the fact that a series of games that just came out had rumble built-in to them (Uncharted being one example, Motorstorm another) means that third-party developers had at least six months of advance warning about the inclusion of this feature to the PS3, assuming these additions are not included through patches (in the case of Uncharted, I don't believe that is the case). Considering the average maturity level of game testers, it is nothing short of a miracle that more conclusive news was not leaked out in the months preceding the announcement. Hats off to those companies that could keep this kind of stuff under wraps. Tazers and waterboarding have rarely been used to such great effect.

Me likes PS3....sorta!

2007-07-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

PS3 goodness came later than most; however, it has arrived, and I may speak as to the merits and suckyness of the machine, as well as things I have seen improve only over the last several months.

Things I like:
1. PS2 emulation
The emulation works quite well, and despite several upscaling issues, such as progressive scan needing to be enabled and widescreen not quite working, it plays all my old games quite well. The only thing missing is rumble support, of course, but with the new Sixaxis rumble coming, that should be taken care of soon.

2. Graphical prowess
I'm not sure if this has more to do with the SDKs that Sony gives out versus Microsoft, but I'm impressed with graphical prowess of the Ps3 over the 360. The 360 always seems to depend on structural simplicity with surface complexity given through bump mapping, while the Ps3 seems to work more on high-poly models. This leads to a somewhat bland look to 360 games versus the vibrant look of Ps3 games (and I speak of comparing exclusive titles designed for the system, not ported games that don't really take advantage of either system).

3. Folding@home
Nothing makes a geek squeal with glee more than the thought of helping someone else with technology, which usually means that they won't have to do much heavy lifting. Such it is with Folding@home, which means we can help cure cancer while wasting power and spending money. Seriously, if they made an app that had numbers that went up and status bars that filled up every couple hours, would we really be able to tell the difference? I think not.

4. XMB is fast
The XMB responds quite quickly to input, in contrast to the sluggishness of the Xbox blade system. When I press the Guide button on the 360, it takes a second to bring up the blade, and it comes up stuttering, usually since I'm playing a game. Also, any notifications that come up also stutter during gameplay, like it's not got enough resources to render the notification. It's a small thing, but it makes the 360 "seem" slow. The only thing the XMB does to appear slow is downloading stuff, but that's a general weakness with the PS3, not the XMB.

5. Bluetooth
Bluetooth means bluetooth devices usually work. This includes headsets, keyboards, and mice. Yay.

Things I don't like:
1. XMB
I've used the XMB with both the PSP and the PS3, and I still don't like it much. It's not a bad system, mind, but there's several situations, like when you're deep in menus, that pressing the wrong button (usually a directional button) knocks you back out to the start of the whole menu set, forcing you to start over. Also, finding any sort of setting usually requires running through all possible options under the "System" tab to find what you are looking for.

2. XMB clock
For Christ's sake, I need to know the time. When I'm in the XMB or playing a game and press that fancy-schmancy 'PS' button in the middle of my controller, I expect to be told the time. In fact, the only place that time (or date, for that matter) show up is in the settings menu for date and time! PSP knows what's up.

3. PS3 downloading
Thankfully they offered a queuing system for downloads from the Playstation store (to a limit of 16), much like the 360 system. The problem, even with the queuing, is that downloads come super-slow. Doesn't matter service provider or area (I'm Comcast, my friend is Pacbell down in SoCal). Ninja Gaiden Sigma took from nearly 1:30 to 7pm to download at a size of nearly 1 GB. In contrast, the longest I've had to wait for a 360 download could not have been longer than a half-hour, if not an hour at most. WTFBBQ?

4. Installing demos
I like demos, in part because I get bored easily, so demos work in that they keep me from spending money. But why do I have to "install" demos? The 360 doesn't need to install anything to get a demo running (or, at least, they don't tell us that). Plus, what is the PS3 "installing" anyway? Unpacking, maybe, but install? Hmmmm...

5. Sixaxis
The new R2 and L2 buttons don't really add too much, though I'm happy to see them get a larger range of motion to justify analog control on a pad that never really utilized it (short of MGS or GT). However, without rumble, it feels way too light, besides missing that now-essential feedback, and it doesn't take controller design forward with it's look. The color sucks (a kind of dark transparent grey) that doesn't let you see much of the insides of the controller (then why make it transparent?) and makes the controller just look bland. Go with the black on the original Dualshock for the Sixaxis rumble; it looked much better. And, the Sixaxis tilt? It's hard to describe exactly why it doesn't work. It's not that it isn't accurate: it is. But, unlike the Wii, it feels like you're committing too much energy to do the tilt activity, since you're forced to use both hands together to tilt the thing, and you have to keep your hands straight in the interim, say for a racing game so you'll go straight. For some reason, having your hands be independent yet tilt sensitive works much better, as in the Wii. Blah.

6. Needing to trick the XMB for 720p
I want to run in 720p, in part because I believe that running the TV in its natural resolution is better as opposed to running a progressive TV in interlaced mode, and, for some reason, the PS2 emulation tries to push the TV into 1080p (despite the fact that the TV clearly cannot support this mode, and the system is not "allowed" to use 1080p) when I run the PS3 in 1080i mode. Dur. So I have to remove 1080i as an option for resolution manually from the XMB setup menu. Blah.

7. Remote Play
Remote play requires you to select that option to get it running. It should be automatic, like remote desktop for Windows XP.

8. UPDATE - Controller Auto-off
If the controller is left alone for about five minutes on the 360, it turns itself off. This is great when you pause and then get distracted by something else, or want to let a download complete and don't want to turn off the controller. With the PS3 however, unless the machine is shut off or the controller turned off manually, the controller will keep going until the batteries run dry. This especially blows when you consider that some people keep their PS3s on after they stop playing so it can start Folding@Home on its own. I doubt Sony can update firmwares of the current Sixaxis, but the upcoming rumored Sixaxis Rumble should definitely include this feature.

39 Ways to Live, and Not Merely Exist

2007-06-19T20:25:00.001-07:00

39 Ways to Live, and Not Merely Exist

"The proper function of man is to live - not to exist." -- Jack London

Too often we go through life on autopilot, going through the motions and having each day pass like the one before it.

That's fine, and comfortable, until you have gone through another year without having done anything, without having really lived life.

That's fine, until you have reached old age and look back on life with regrets.

That's fine, until you see your kids go off to college and realize that you missed their childhoods.

It's not fine. If you want to truly live life, to really experience it, to enjoy it to the fullest, instead of barely scraping by and only living a life of existence, then you need to find ways to break free from the mold and drink from life.

What follows is just a list of ideas, obvious ones mostly that you could have thought of yourself, but that I hope are useful reminders. We all need reminders sometimes. If you find this useful, print it out, and start using it. Today.

1. Love. Perhaps the most important. Fall in love, if you aren't already. If you have, fall in love with your partner all over again. Abandon caution and let your heart be broken. Or love family members, friends, anyone -- it doesn't have to be romantic love. Love all of humanity, one person at a time.

2. Get outside. Don't let yourself be shut indoors. Go out when it's raining. Walk on the beach. Hike through the woods. Swim in a freezing lake. Bask in the sun. Play sports, or walk barefoot through grass. Pay close attention to nature.

3. Savor food. Don't just eat your food, but really enjoy it. Feel the texture, the bursts of flavors. Savor every bite. If you limit your intake of sweets, it will make the small treats you give yourself (berries or dark chocolate are my favorites) even more enjoyable. And when you do have them, really, really savor them. Slowly.

4. Create a morning ritual. Wake early and greet the day. Watch the sun rise. Out loud, tell yourself that you will not waste this day, which is a gift. You will be compassionate to your fellow human beings, and live every moment to its fullest. Stretch or meditate or exercise as part of your ritual. Enjoy some coffee.

5. Take chances. We often live our lives too cautiously, worried about what might go wrong. Be bold, risk it all. Quit your job and go to business for yourself (plan it out first!), or go up to that girl you've liked for a long time and ask her out. What do you have to lose?

6. Follow excitement. Try to find the things in life that excite you, and then go after them. Make life one exciting adventure after another (with perhaps some quiet times in between).

7. Find your passion. Similar to the above tip, this one asks you to find your calling. Make your living by doing the thing you love to do. First, think about what you really love to do. There may be many things. Find out how you can make a living doing it. It may be difficult, but you only live once.

8. Get out of your cubicle. Do you sit all day in front of computer, shuffling papers and taking phone calls and chatting on the Internet? Don't waste your days like this. Break free from the cubicle environment, and do your work on a laptop, in a coffee shop, or on a boat, or in a log cabin. This may require a change of jobs, or becoming a freelancer. It's worth it.

9. Turn off the TV. How many hours will we waste away in front of the boob tube? How many hours do we have to live? Do the math, then unplug the TV. Only plug it back in when you have a DVD of a movie you love. Otherwise, keep it off and find other stuff to do. Don't know what to do? Read further.

10. Pull away from Internet. You're reading something on the Internet right now. And, with the exception of this article, it is just more wasting away of your precious time. You cannot get these minutes back. Unplug the Internet, then get out of your office or house. Right now! And go and do something.

11. Travel. Sure, you want to travel some day. When you have vacation time, or when you're older. Well, what are you waiting for? Find a way to take a trip, if not this month, then sometime soon. You may need to sell your car or stop your cable bill and stop eating out to do it, but make it happen. You are too young to not see the world. If need be, find a way to make a living by freelancing, then work while you travel. Only work an hour or two a day. Don't check email but once a week. Then use the rest of the time to see the world.

12. Rediscover what's important. Take an hour and make a list of everything that's important to you. Add to it everything that you want to do in life. Now cut that list down to 4-5 things. Just the most important things in your life. This is your core list. This is what matters. Focus your life on these things. Make time for them.

13. Eliminate everything else. What's going on in your life that's not on that short list? All that stuff is wasting your time, pulling your attention from what's important. As much as possible, simplify your life by eliminating the stuff that's not on your short list, or minimizing it.

14. Exercise. Get off the couch and go for a walk. Eventually try running. Or do some push ups and crunches. Or swim or bike or row. Or go for a hike. Whatever you do, get active, and you'll love it. And life will be more alive.

15. Be positive. Learn to recognize the negative thoughts you have. These are the self-doubts, the criticisms of others, the complaints, the reasons you can't do something. Then stop yourself when you have these thoughts, and replace them with positive thoughts. Solutions. You can do this!

16. Open your heart. Is your heart a closed bundle of scar tissue? Learn to open it, have it ready to receive love, to give love unconditionally. If you have a problem with this, talk to someone about it. And practice makes perfect.

17. Kiss in the rain. Seize the moment and be romantic. Raining outside? Grab your lover and give her a passionate kiss. Driving home? Stop the car and pick some wildflowers. Send her a love note. Dress sexy for him.

18. Face your fears. What are you most afraid of? What is holding you back? Whatever it is, recognize it, and face it. Do what you are most afraid of. Afraid of heights? Go to the tallest building, and look down over the edge. Only by facing our fears can we be free of them.

19. When you suffer, suffer. Life isn't all about fun and games. Suffering is an inevitable part of life. We lose our jobs. We lose our lovers. We lose our pets. We get physically injured or sick. A loved one becomes sick. A parent dies. Learn to feel the pain intensely, and really grieve. This is a part of life -- really feel the pain. And when you're done, move on, and find joy.

20. Slow down. Life moves along at such a rapid pace these days. It's not healthy, and it's not conducive to living. Practice doing everything slowly -- everything, from eating to walking to driving to working to reading. Enjoy what you do. Learn to move at a snail's pace.

21. Touch humanity. Get out of your house and manicured neighborhoods, and find those who live in worse conditions. Meet them, talk to them, understand them. Live among them. Be one of them. Give up your materialistic lifestyle.

22. Volunteer. Help at homeless soup kitchens. Learn compassion, and learn to help ease the suffering of others. Help the sick, those with disabilities, those who are dying.

23. Play with children. Children, more than anyone else, know how to live. They experience everything in the moment, fully. When they get hurt, they really cry. When they play, they really have fun. Learn from them, instead of thinking you know so much more than them. Play with them, and learn to be joyful like them.

24. Talk to old people. There is no one wiser, more experienced, more learned, than those who have lived through life. They can tell you amazing stories. Give you advice on making a marriage last or staying out of debt. Tell you about their regrets, so you can learn from them and avoid the same mistakes. They are the wisdom of our society -- take advantage of their existence while they're still around.

25. Learn new skills. Constantly improve yourself instead of standing still -- not because you're so imperfect now, but because it is gratifying and satisfying. You should accept yourself as you are, and learn to love who you are, but still try to improve -- if only because the process of improvement is life itself.

26. Find spirituality. For some, this means finding God or Jesus or Allah or Buddha. For others, this means becoming in tune with the spirits of our ancestors, or with nature. For still others, this just means an inner energy. Whatever spirituality means for you, rediscover it, and its power.

27. Take mini-retirements. Don't leave the joy of retirement until you are too old to enjoy it. Do it now, while you're young. It makes working that much more worth it. Find ways to take a year off every few years. Save up, sell your home, your possessions, and travel. Live simply, but live, without having to work. Enjoy life, then go back to work and save up enough money to do it again in a couple of years.

28. Do nothing. Despite the tip above that we should find excitement, there is value in doing nothing as well. Not doing nothing as in reading, or taking a nap, or watching TV, or meditating. Doing nothing as in sitting there, doing nothing. Just learning to be still, in silence, to hear our inner voice, to be in tune with life. Do this daily if possible.

29. Stop playing video games. They might be fun, but they can take up way too much time. If you spend a lot of time playing online games, or computer solitaire, or Wii or Gameboy or whatever, consider going a week without it. Then find something else to do, outside.

30. Watch sunsets, daily. One of the most beautiful times of day. Make it a daily ritual to find a good spot to watch the sunset, perhaps having a light dinner while you do so.

31. Stop reading magazines. They're basically crap. And they waste your time and money. Cancel your subscriptions and walk past them at the news stands. If you have to read something, read a trashy novel or even better, read Dumb Little Man once a day and be done.

32. Break out from ruts. Do you do things the same way every day? Change it up. Try something new. Take a different route to work. Start your day out differently. Approach work from a new angle. Look at things from new perspectives.

33. Stop watching the news. It's depressing and useless. If you're a news junky, this may be difficult. I haven't watch TV news or read a newspaper regularly in about two years. It hasn't hurt me a bit. Anything important, my mom tells me about.

34. Laugh till you cry. Laughing is one of the best ways to live. Tell jokes and laugh your head off. Watch an awesome comedy. Learn to laugh at anything. Roll on the ground laughing. You'll love it.

35. Lose control. Not only control over yourself, but control over others. It's a bad habit to try to control others -- it will only lead to stress and unhappiness for yourself and those you try to control. Let others live, and live for yourself. And lose control of yourself now and then too.

36. Cry. Men, especially, tend to hold in our tears, but crying is an amazing release. Cry at sad movies. Cry at a funeral. Cry when you are hurt, or when somebody you love is hurt. It releases these emotions and allows us to cleanse ourselves.

37. Make an awesome dessert. I like to make warm, soft chocolate cake. But even berries dipped in chocolate, or crepes with ice cream and fruit, or fresh apple pie, or homemade chocolate chip cookies or brownies, are great. This isn't an every day thing, but an occasional treat thing. But it's wonderful.

38. Try something new, every week. Ask yourself: "What new thing shall I try this week?" Then be sure to do it. You don't have to learn a new language in one week, but seek new experiences. Give it a try. You might decide you want to keep it in your life.

39. Be in the moment. Instead of thinking about things you need to do, or things that have happened to you, or worrying or planning or regretting, think about what you are doing, right now. What is around you? What smells and sounds and sights and feelings are you experiencing? Learn to do this as much as possible through meditation, but also through bringing your focus back to the present as much as you can in everything you do.

- Leo Babuata

Happiness

2007-04-25T01:28:00.000-07:00

Happiness is playing Final Fantasy VII on your PSP. Don't let anyone tell you any different.

I'm not sure what makes FFVII so appealing to me, other than it was the second PS1 game I ever played and the first real full-blown swords-and-magic RPG I'd ever played.

Here's to nostalgia; may you always be there for us.

Give up; it's over

2007-03-26T15:12:00.001-07:00

The age of making people pay for something they don't like is over.

Consumers and providers have been accustomed to the same economic model for over four thousand years: give me the money, I give you the product. The provider does his best to get a product for less and sell it for more; when this tactic fails, the provider attempts to make a consumer want what he or she is selling, no matter the lack of quality of the product, or the cost. With the rise of information commodities in the last fifty years, such as movies, music, software, and games, we have a glut of non-consumable consumables. A creator works on a product, makes it, then the provider copies it and sells copies of it to as many people as possible. The creator gets a cut and the provider gets their cut. Everyone is happy. Right?

Except for the fact that in most cases, it appears that the creator gets very little percentage for their work. In part this is understandable, since a record company needs to commit to a certain amount of risk promoting a band, arranging concerts, appearances, advertising, and the other things that have to go on to make a creator profitable. The popular perception is that the creator gets little to nothing despite doing most of the work and the record company profits. I can't say, having not seen the numbers, whether this is true or not (probably not, considering the number of musicians out there with an extravagant lifestyle, but it probably depends on the artist and record company in question), but I can say that record companies' methods in promoting their old model of business smells of deceit. They try to make you feel bad for "the little guy" (i.e. - the artist, or in the case of the movie industry, the set painter). This behavior exposes the hypocrisy of both industries; instead of balancing the pay between the high-paid star and the typical average working Joe in the industry, the executives would rather screw the little guy. There's an ad (I'm referring to the one that they used to show in theaters with the set painter in the hat with a goatee) exposes the hypocritical behavior right in its message.

How so? The ad explicitly claims that the set painter will be out of a job (or paid less) should people pirate more movies. The truth of the matter is that if movie companies want to make movies that sell, they still have to maintain a standard of quality, and they will not be firing a $60,000 a year set painter to do it. The other idea the ad purports is that everyone is working towards making a movie. If that were the case, the movie stars would not be making 7-figure salaries a project while their colleagues make 5-figure salaries. The other insinuation is that the set painter may be fired to put his salary towards that of the star, since the loss of profits from pirating don't allow the movie company to cover that employee. I doubt that $50,000 out of a $2-million dollar contract would make that much of a difference to most people.

Speaking of a standard of quality, movie, music, and games creators regularly complain about the lack of interest in their products, citing piracy as the root cause. They are unwilling (or perhaps, unwilling to show in public) their opinion on the fact that most of their work is derivative. It is an unfortunate consequence of two things: being creative is hard, and there is so much content out there that it is difficult not to be influenced by and, in cases, to build a project along the same idea independently. Even worse is the behavior of emulation between industries, where games attempt to create a "movie-like" experience and movies try to make a "game-like" experience or, at least, try to develop a game-property into a movie, inevitably unsuccessfully. Not only that, the problem occurs where there is so much content of so many types that the best any company can do is shoot for the lowest common denominator in the hopes that enough people will get the content to make some money. Even worse for the companies is that there is so much content that the companies have to compete outside their industry for the support of the common consumer.

The end result is that the movie and music industries are lashing out at the consumers for something that is really not the consumers' fault. The end result of the current path of adding DRM to content and limiting the use of the content will only result in a lack of sales due to a lack of interest in dealing with all the restrictions that come along with, in its basic form, the unrestricted content. One solution? Change the dynamic.

The argument has been presented to me that most people who pirate copywritten materials would not have paid the creator anyway, so there's little to no loss to the creator in that the pirated material would not have been paid for if it were unavailable for free anyway. While I do agree to some degree, I believe there is also a large population who could have gotten by without this content but use it anyway because it's free - i.e. freeloaders. Of these people, there may be a number who would be willing to pay for the content given that it was at a reasonable cost and that most of the profit would actually go to the creator, as opposed to the producer, who copies, packages, and profits. Thus, what content creators should do is offer high-quality, full-featured products for free. That's right. Free. Online. Then, if people like it, they pay for it.

Why would this model work? In the first case, it would take away from the argument that the money is going to a corrupt middleman (by the way, middlemen need to make money too:). Also, it takes away from the argument that the only reason one should be getting something for free is that the content lacks in quality so much that it is not worth paying for, thus one should be getting it for free. Secondly, it would essentially drop the bottom out of the piracy market; why bother trying to get something pirated at low quality (and possibly dangerous virus/trojan-wise) when I can get it better and faster direct from the content provider?

The disadvantage to this model is that three critical things would have to happen that would change these industries drastically.
1. Content would actually have to be good content. You can't get money for something that is fundamentally bad, and you can't fool people into getting something they don't like when they can see the whole thing upfront, not a montage of all the exciting bits set to music that isn't even in the movie itself.
2. Pay structure would have to be changed in both industries. Stars would have to make closer salaries to the support staff in the industry, since they are a part of the machine. Of course, they would still make more, but not the disproportionate amount as seen today. This would also force two changes: people who actually care about the reception of their product, and creators to actually return to working, as opposed to basking. An actor works for three months and gets a couple million, then basks for the next nine months. A musician works for a year on a project, then basks for two years after, maybe going on tour (which is so much work for them, since they have to travel for awhile, show up at a location, play music they love for two hours, then move on: so hard!).
3. Middlemen would have to change or die. This means all the DVD, Blueray, videogame, and music sellers, such as Best Buy, Borders, and Tower Records, would have to adjust, or go out of business. And if content providers switched to this model, the retailers, instead of finding new avenues to sell items, would take the easy way out and complain. High, loud, and repeatedly. Not that it would help them in the end. Also, movie theaters would have to find a new way to appeal to consumers, as much as overpriced food and sticky floors have worked for the past several years:).

We've seen some cases where this model has worked. In the book industry, where sales really have plummeted due to a glut of content, some authors have gone this way by offering their books for free online, then allowing consumers to pay them directly. And people have been paying.

The only thing that would really keep people paying is an internal sense of decency (which some people lack, I admit) and a culture that would emerge of people who make sure others are paying creators what they are owed. As naive as that sounds, it might actually work. Since people would know that more of this good content would be directly financed by themselves, they would be more willing to support it. I think. Well, at least, I hope.

This is going somewhere

2007-03-20T12:20:00.001-07:00

This discussion reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend of mine on this topic. Next post, I'll talk about it. I promise :)

Also, while it's up, read the comments section. That's where the discussion proves its worth.

Downloading Pirated Anything Is NOT Illegal

I had an interesting discussion in an article thread on Plime about downloading pirated music that didn’t start out that way. The other person said that he knew that downloading pirated music was illegal and that got me started.

In 2001, I spent hours and hours reading and researching this very topic, but for software. I had copies of the copyright acts and publications mailed to me from the Library of Congress (I couldn’t find them on the Internet). I had a software program that I wanted to distribute and I wanted to find out what kind of legal protections I had from someone just taking the software and using it without paying for it.

I read every bit of information I could find, including case law. I studied the DMCA. Since then I have studied the NET Act. I have studied everything I could find. Guess what? I could not find a single line in any act that said that downloading anything was illegal, or even anything that could be construed to mean it.

There are organizations with websites that bluntly state that downloading pirated files is illegal but fail to cite a reference of any kind. I found one this evening and my discussion partner found another. They confuse the issues of file sharing and fair use with downloading as well as uploading.

I submit that there’s a legitimate reason there is no law covering the downloads. I believe it’s because you cannot know for certain that a file is pirated until it is in your possession. File names mean nothing. Fake music files planted on Kazaa prove it. Fake video files planted on torrent sites prove it. Even non-pirated files get named with titles that could be misconstrued as being pirated. I also believe that intent is insufficient to come to the conclusion that a person is attempting to download a pirated file.

I also submit that the videos preceding certain movies and other texts that state that “downloading pirated movies is stealing” are lies intended to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). If a lie is repeated enough and in enough places, it can become the truth for a lot of people (or sheeple).

I am not a perfect person and I never claim to be. If you can cite a reference to an actual law that says anything to the effect that downloading a pirated file of any kind is illegal, you will be my blogging buddy for life (or until I don’t blog anymore, whichever comes first).

Addendum: I have a few simple questions because everyone knows how sue happy the RIAA is: There are many, many more downloaders of pirated music than there are uploaders. Wouldn’t it be more profitable and send a stronger signal if they were suing the downloaders for copyright infringement as well as the uploaders (file sharers)? Have you heard of a case yet? Can you point me to it?

I am happy/sad to report

2007-03-16T16:56:00.001-07:00

I was patting myself on the back as I was reading my old posts in which I copied the text of the article/statement in question as opposed to only linking it, as several links have gone down in the intervening months. In the one instance I did not do so (the entry referring to the author of deservingonly.blogspot.com) I realized that the site no longer exists. In searching for where it is or what happened to it (giant paper shredder FTW!) I discovered other people who were not quite as happy about the author's position on things as well. I had a laugh at his expense. I'm so horrible.

I am writing in a slightly quick-and-quippy style in tribute to one of my favorite bloggers (I take it back, he's the only blogger I do read), Wil Wheaton, whose blog can be found at http://wilwheaton.typepad.com. If that names sounds familiar to you, think Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation. That's where he's from, and I'm continuously amused at his quips, his articles over at suicidegirls.com (like WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER), and his reviews of old TNG episodes at TV Squad. And he's actually funny. Like ha-ha funny.

Of course I'm 250...

2007-03-16T16:37:00.001-07:00

I poked into my profile, and apparently I'm 250 years old, based on the date put in for the year of my birth. I checked, and Blogger thinks I was born in 1756. As much as I wish I could live for 250 years (and hey, maybe I will :), I thought it best to change it back to my real birth year. That got rid of a good opening line. "Hey baby, I'm 250 years old, and I'm not getting any younger!" Right.

A New Post!?!? Where's the fire?

2007-03-16T16:26:00.001-07:00

So.

I didn't intend to buy an Xbox 360, based on the fact that I didn't buy an Xbox. I purchase consoles based on the games I want to play on them, and, despite some excellent titles, such as Knights of the Old Republic, I never felt the need for an Xbox (availability on the PC was also a contributing factor). I was happy enough puttering along with my PS2 (many happy games here) and my Gamecube (it's all about Smash Brothers Melee and Zelda, unfortunately). However, two things changed my mind.

First, an HDTV. I was looking for a new TV, and getting an HDTV now made sense, considering the plummeting prices of the last holiday season. However, despite the big TV with the small price tag, the TV made one thing very clear; SD content on HD TV = big no-no. So, I was hankering for some HD content.

Second, a deal. One of my coworkers (who is always trying to get you to turn to his side of an issue, be it Blueray vs HD-DVD, PS3 vs Xbox 360, or toast landing butter-side down) keyed me into a deal from Toys 'R Us; namely, buy a Premium pack of the 360 and get a $100 gift certificate. This means that one effectively gets a 360 for $300, which is the price I was willing to pay for it. Sweetness. Also sweetness was that the local store had only one left, so I didn't have to go hunting, and I got the last one.

The one aspect (besides the HD quality of the image, which makes gameplay oh-so-nice) that I appreciated of the 360 most was the Xbox Live! service. The ability to play with friends and family, as well as chatting with them, makes the experience well worth it. What's also good about the 360, unlike other consoles (though this feature is something of a detriment to Microsoft) is the lack of truly "Great" games. This means that I'll sit down and finish one game before moving on to the next. As of yet (since December), I only own one game: Gears of War. And I play it. And play it. And play it.

I've turned into a casual gamer. I have work. I have school. I don't have time for World of Warcraft. With these things in mind, the Xbox 360 has fit in perfectly. The Wii has it's merits, and the PS3 some as well (believe it or not), but the 360 just works for me. Also, demos are a great way of having fun without buying a game: short, sweet gameplay moments that make it clear to you to buy a game or not. And the 360 has demos for download for most games. Again, good for me, not good for Microsoft. I feel badly about that aspect, as I think Microsoft is a company mostly like any other, with good employees (maybe not a good PR or OS department, however :) that deserves to be paid for good work, unlike the recent trend of getting great work for free, which, while unfortunate, is a byproduct of the transformation of information into a commodity, and the ease of sharing such information with others quickly, easily, and without penalty (with few notable exceptions).

Why not to WoW

2006-10-17T23:51:00.000-07:00

Another post from another blog, I know, but another I think some should read. My play in WoW (which I will explain one of these days) is a very "extractable" situation, so to speak. In some cases, my friends and family among them, this is not quite the case. Read on, fair reader.

By the by, go to YouTube and type in "world of warcraft south park" and watch parts (or the complete version if they haven't taken it down already) of "Make Love, Not Warcraft." I'm not much of a South Park fan, but besides the defecation joke while playing, I really enjoyed this episode.

The View From the Top

The top of what you ask? The height of World of Warcraft greatness.

A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine quit playing Warcraft. He was a council member on what is now one of the oldest guilds in the world, the type of position coveted by many of the 7 million people who play the game today, but which only a few ever get.

When he quit, I asked him if he would write a guest blog post about the experience. What follows is a cautionary tale about the pull an escape from reality can have on you.

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60 levels, 30+ epics, a few really good "real life" friends, a seat on the oldest and largest guild on our server's council, 70+ days "/played," and one "real" year later...

Mr. Yeager asked me to write this "guest blog" for him. I figured I should oblige him this request - it was none other than Mr. Yeager who first introduced me to (begged for me to buy, actually :-p) the World of Warcraft. It was the "perfect storm" for me; a time in my life when I was unemployed, living at my family's house far from my friends, and had just finished my engineering degree and was taking a little time to find a job. I had a lot of free time on my hands and WoW gave me a place to spend it.

This could be a many page epic tale, but I figure I'd give you the brief history and pertinent information. The guild Mr. Yeager got me into and with which I became an officer is the oldest and largest on the server I played on. It is around 18 months old and extremely well-versed in endgame instances. I was both the "mage class lead" and an officer. I have many very good friends I met through WoW (in real life - no kidding) and even have been "involved" with another councilor in real life (yes, I know, I'm weird for meeting girls through an online video game but honestly, ask Mr. Yeager, she's head and shoulders better than all the girls I met DJing, waiting tables, in college, and bartending at clubs in Philly). But I digress...

I just left WoW permanently. I was a leader in one of the largest and most respected guilds in the world, a well-equipped and well-versed mage, and considered myself to have many close friends in my guild. Why did I leave? Simple: Blizzard has created an alternate universe where we don't have to be ourselves when we don't want to be. From my vantage point as a guild decision maker, I've seen it destroy more families and friendships and take a huge toll on individuals than any drug on the market today, and that means a lot coming from an ex-club DJ.

It took a huge personal toll on me. To illustrate the impact it had, let's look at me one year later. When I started playing, I was working towards getting into the best shape of my life (and making good progress, too). Now a year later, I'm about 30 pounds heavier that I was back then, and it is not muscle. I had a lot of hobbies including DJing (which I was pretty accomplished at) and music as well as writing and martial arts. I haven't touched a record or my guitar for over a year and I think if I tried any Kung Fu my gut would throw my back out. Finally, and most significantly, I had a very satisfying social life before. My friends and I would go out and there were things to do every night of the week. Now a year later, I realize my true friends are the greatest people in the world because the fact I came out of my room, turned the lights on, and watched a movie with them still means something. They still are having a great time teasing me at my expense, however, which shows they still love me and they haven't changed.

These changes are miniscule, however, compared to what has happened in quite a few other people's lives. Some background... Blizzard created a game that you simply can not win. Not only that, the only way to "get better" is to play more and more. In order to progress, you have to farm your little heart out in one way or another: either weeks at a time PvPing to make your rank or weeks at a time getting materials for and "conquering" raid instances, or dungeons where you get "epic loot" (pixilated things that increase your abilities, therefore making you "better"). And what do you do after these mighty dungeons fall before you and your friend's wrath? Go back the next week (not sooner, Blizzard made sure you can only raid the best instances once a week) and do it again (imagine if Alexander the Great had to push across the Middle East every damn week).

What does this mean? Well, to our average "serious" player this equates to anywhere between 12 hours (for the casual and usually "useless" player) to honestly 10 hours a day, seven days a week for those "hardcore" gamers. During my stint, I was playing about 30 hours a week (and still finding it hard to keep up with my farming) and logging on during my work day in order to keep up with all the guild happenings and to do my scheduling and tracking for the raids. A lot of time went into the development of new policies which took our friendly and family-oriented guild further and further away from its roots but closer to the end goal. Honestly, what that end goal is I'm not totally sure - there is truly no end to the game and every time you feel like you're satisfied with your progress, another aspect of the game is revealed and, well, you just aren't as cool as you can be again.

There are three problems that arise from WoW: the time it requires to do anything "important" is astounding, it gives people a false sense of accomplishment, and when you're a leader, and get wrapped up in it, no matter how much you care or want people to care, you're doing the wrong thing.

First off, let's go back to the time it takes to accomplish anything in the game. To really be successful, you need to at least invest 12 hours a week, and that is bare minimum. From a leadership perspective, that 12 hours would be laughed at. That's the guy who comes unprepared to raid and has to leave half way through because he has work in the morning or is going out or some other thing that shows "lack of commitment". To the extreme there is the guildie who is always on and ready to help. The "good guildie" who plays about 10 hours a day and seven days a week. Yes, that's almost two full-time jobs. Funny, no one ever asks any questions, though.

The worst though are the people you know have time commitments. People with families and significant others. I am not one to judge a person's situation, but when a father/husband plays a video game all night long, seven days a week, after getting home from work, very involved instances that soak up hours and require concentration, it makes me queasy that I encouraged that. Others include the kids you know aren't doing their homework and confide in you they are failing out of high school or college but don't want to miss their chance at loot, the long-term girl/boyfriend who is skipping out on a date (or their anniversary - I've seen it) to play (and in some cases flirt constantly), the professional taking yet another day off from work to farm mats or grind their reputations up with in-game factions to get "valuable" quest rewards, etc... I'm not one to tell people how to spend their time, but it gets ridiculous when you take a step back.

The game also provides people with a false sense of security, accomplishment, and purpose. Anyone can be a superhero here if they have the time to put in. Not only that, a few times I've seen this breed the "rockstar" personality in people who have no confidence at all in real life. Don't get me wrong, building confidence is a good thing and something, if honed appropriately, the game can do very right. But in more than a few cases, very immature people with bad attitudes are catered to (even after insulting or degrading others "in public") because they are "better" than the rest. Usually this means they played a lot more and have better gear. I'd really hate to see how this "I'm better than you attitude" plays out in real life where it means jack how epic your loot is - when you say the wrong thing to the wrong person it's going to have repercussions and you can't just log out to avoid the effects of your actions.

And people put everything on the line for these accomplishments with which they associate much value. I know of children and spouses being forced to play and grind for their parents, threats of divorce, rampant neglect, failing grades in school, and thousands of dollars spent on "outsourcing" foreign help. For what, you ask? Honor. The desire to be the best for at least one week. To get the best loot in the game. What do these "heroes" receive? Why, cheers and accolades of course as they parade along in their new shiny gear... which is obsolete the first time they step into one of the premier instances. The accomplishment and sacrifice itself are meaningless a few days later. Then it's usually off to the races again.

Finally, when you're a leader there is a call (or more appropriately a demand) for success. Usually those you represent want to keep progressing. They want to keep improving. They want more access to the best things. It is on you to provide it. In my experience, when you fail to progress fast enough, waves ripple throughout the guild and people become dissatisfied. It's your fault, no matter what. Everything you've done to keep things fair and provide for everyone does not mean a damn thing. A few will stand up for you, but when you have 150 people who all want 150 different things, you end up listening to 150 voices complaining about the job you're doing. This volunteer job usually takes at least 10 extra hours a week (on top of regular playing). Towards the end of my year of service, I apparently couldn't do anything right with my class. I had to rotate people to make sure everyone was getting a fair shot. I wrote actual mathematical proofs the allowed for fair and effective (yes, both) raid distribution according to efficiency, speed, and guild class population. I even rotated myself more than any other class member. People still took it upon themselves to tell me what I was doing wrong (constantly) and how their way was more fair (usually for them).

The thing that kicked me in the ass more than anything else was I really cared if my guildies were getting what they wanted out of the experience. I truly thought my efforts would make them happy. I wanted to make a difference to them. The greedy and socially phobic high school kid I thought I could help through the game, all of the couples (both married and not) who were falling apart because of the game I thought I could rescue, the girl who was deeply wounded by a guy who left her for the game but was herself addicted I thought I could save, not to mention a host of others, I thought my efforts were helping. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: I was providing them with an escape from their problems and nurturing the very thing that was holding them back. Oh yeah, it hit me like a ton of bricks after I had changed so much and lost enough of myself that the most wonderful girl I ever met broke up with me.

I remember clearly after fumbling around life for a few weeks that I dragged myself into the bathroom to get ready for work. I was tired because I was up until close to 2 AM raiding. Every week I read though email or I would run into one of my "real" friends and I'd hear "Andy, what's up, I haven't seen you in a while." I looked in the mirror and in a cinemaesque turn of events and a biblical moment of clarity, told myself "I haven't seen me in a while either."

That did it. I wanted to do the things I wanted to do again and be with the people who appreciated me even if I abandoned them for a year and sucked to high heaven as a friend. The prodigal son returned and my friends were happy. The best advice I got was from the girl who dumped me for being a jackass (and after I decided to really quit and be "myself again" became one of, if not my best friend in the entire world), who said "your real friends like you even when you screw up." It's true.

Funny side note was the reaction I got from the guild that I spent a year pouring my heart and soul into. I made my post in the guild forums saying I was leaving (half of it RPing - something that doesn't happen after you start raiding) and that it was time for me to move on. Three days later I didn't exist any more. The machine kept on moving without this gear. A few people asked me over email (and when I logged on to clean out the old bank) when I was coming back (I'm not going to). There are a few others I keep in contact with and am planning on going to visit sooner or later so I can hang out in person and they can finally meet me. But in the end being forgotten about so soon after still left a bittersweet taste. But one that was a lot easier to swallow than the one I chugged down every day for the better part of a year.

Don't get me wrong, WoW did a lot of things right. At times it was a fun game that allowed me to keep in contact with friends who lived far away. More importantly it introduced me to some of the best real life friends I've ever met. However, it did take an undeniable toll on me and is taking a far greater one on many, many people when taken too far.

Atheists are not monsters

2006-08-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a list I come across that I believe is a great message (mostly) to people who follow a religion about those who don't, or even people who believe in other religions. I decided to copy-paste as opposed to linking, since certain things sometimes disappear off the Internet sometimes.

16 Common Myths About Atheists

1. Atheists hate Christians and Christianity. No, we don’t. Personally, I do hate the atrocities that have been committed in the name of religion, the dishonesty of most religions, and the way that they encourage people not to think or question, and not to trust or use their minds. But I don’t dislike someone just because of their religion.

2. Most atheists started out as Christians, and stopped believing because of some bad experience with other Christians. Or maybe we simply started to question, to wonder what happened when we applied the standards of logic, reason and burden of proof to religion, as we already did to everything in our lives. Or, perhaps, we were never believers at all. It happens, you know.

3. Atheists have no sense of morality, since morality comes from God. Ah, the old “without fear of hell, there would be nothing to stop people from being bloodthirsty monsters” argument. It may come as a surprise to most Christians, but there are reasons for being “good” other than fear of punishment - which isn’t really a reason, anyway, and only shows Christians in a very bad light. Reasons like human empathy, genuine feelings for others, and, most importantly, rational principles. Behaving yourself just because daddy will spank you otherwise does not make you a nice child.

4. Atheists are a unified group, like a church. Are we? I must have missed the memo, then. :) If anything, I’d say atheists are more diverse than Christians, because we’re less “sheep-like”, and don’t accept things on faith, or from authority.

5. Atheists actually know, deep inside, that there’s a God, as that’s perfectly obvious; they are simply too proud and arrogant to admit the existence of something greater than themselves. Not exactly. You see, the existence of a god is only “obvious” if you’ve been brainwashed (either by others, or by your own irrationality) into believing it. We are truly convinced that there’s no god, and are not in denial. Really. I’m serious. :)

6. Atheists don’t really know anything about Christianity. Again, it depends. Some certainly know more than others. However, religion is so ubiquitous that, like it or not, we’ve all had varying degrees of contact with it, with its teachings, and with believers. Besides, a lot of atheists are naturally curious. I, myself, have read the Christian Bible - more than once, in fact. Now, dear believer, ask yourself how many atheist books, magazines or essays you have read. Oh, I forgot, they’re all the work of Satan.

7. Atheists’ lives are cold and empty, as they can’t feel the joy and love that comes only from God. Really? I’d never call my life “cold” or “empty” - I have the joys of friendship, love, family, and doing the things I love to do. And, what’s more, I’m self-sufficient, unlike anyone who says “I don’t know how anyone could live without God in their lives” - as many Christians do.

8. Atheists are depressive and nihilistic, since they believe there’s nothing after death, and therefore there’s no point to anything. On the contrary, we, unlike you, know how precious life is, because we’re aware that it’s our only one. And, this may come as a shock to you, but we can love our lives, we can feel the joy of being alive, because we don’t believe that “this is the devil’s world”, or that “this is just a test before the real thing”. Life is precious, and it’s our own - not any god’s.

9. Atheists are cold and uncaring. No, we are not. Having delusions doesn’t make anyone more “caring”. And, again, we treat life as precious, and do what we can to improve it, both ours and that of our loved ones. On the other hand, many Christians believe life is suffering, and that there’s nothing we can do about it.

10. Atheists are arrogant. What, because we dare to use our minds instead of asking “who are we to know”? No, we’re not.

11. Atheists want to forbid religious worship. Wrong. We just don’t want to be harmed by it. Want to believe in God, Jesus, Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy? Be my guest. Want to teach your kids to do the same? I feel sorry for them, but it will still take many years until people realize how crippling one’s reason in childhood is like a bird crippling its offspring’s wings. (*) Want to give all your money to a guy with a Lexus and a bad haircut? Fine. But don’t try to “save” me, don’t harass me in the street or at my home, don’t get politicians to enact laws to give power to you, don’t try to teach your religion in science classes by dishonestly giving it a new name and disguising it as “science”, and don’t use my tax money to write your idiocies in public places. In short, do as you want, as long as you keep it to yourself - just like I don’t go to your place trying to un-convert you.

12. Atheists are incapable of feeling awe at simple things, like a beautiful sunset, as they see everything in terms of cold science, instead of miracles. Ah, unweaving the rainbow - the idea that beauty and poetry only exist if we know little to nothing about how things work. But I ask you: does the fact that you know about astronomy, physics and light make the sunset any less beautiful? Was it beautiful only because it seemed “magical” - or “an act of god” - to you?

13. Atheists live their lives in constant fear of death. Few people actually want to die - those that do are either depressed and suicidal, or are Christians who believe that the world is evil, “please, Lord Jesus, take me”, and all that. A reasonable fear of death is perfectly natural. Also, we may believe that this life “is it”, which makes us treat it as precious, but, at least, we don’t think that there’s a chance of going to a place where you burn and are tortured for eternity…

14. Most criminals are atheists (or, alternatively, the percentage of atheists among criminals is higher than among the general populace). Oddly enough, the opposite is true.

15. Atheists are stubborn and closed-minded. Not unless you define “closed-minded” like this. But, as Ebon said, Ask any believer what would convince him he was mistaken and persuade him to leave his religion and become an atheist, and if you get a response, it will almost invariably be, “Nothing - I have faith in my god.” Although such people may well exist, I personally have yet to meet a theist who would acknowledge even the possibility that his belief was in error. Many theists, by their own admission, structure their beliefs so that no evidence could possibly disprove them. Atheists, on the other hand, are easy to convince - all it requires is for God to show himself in some unfakeable way - say, for instance, by doing any of the many things he supposedly did in the Old Testament…

16. Atheists make bad parents. Again, there are good and bad atheist parents, and good and bad Christian parents. Atheist parents, however, would never do what Abraham was about to do to his son Isaac (and Christians see Abraham’s behavior as laudable!), because, to most atheists, our lives are our own. In fact, even if there was a God, it would not follow that our lives are his.

Note: There’s already a list, The Top 10 Atheist Myths, by Dave Silverman, but mine isn’t inspired by that one. I agree with what Silverman writes, but I don’t think all of those are necessarily the top myths. Not to say my list is better, but these are what I think are the top myths… and a couple of them are actually in both lists. Besides, my list has more myths than his, which obviously makes it better. :D

(*) There used to be something harsher there, where I seemed to (but didn’t) compare teaching religion to children to sexual abuse. I just meant to say that it was crippling, and should be seen as we see parents who refuse their kids medical treatment because they’d rather put their faith in god: bad parents who aren’t capable of being parents. As it was misunderstood, I edited it. Any (pre-edit) comments about it are still below, though.

Ah, and the link is http://wayofthemind.dehumanizer.com/2006/08/15/16-common-myths-about-atheists/

I don't believe this

2006-07-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

http://deservingonly.blogspot.com/

Go read it. Be amazed at the ignorance, self-promotion, and unfounded assumptions of this gentleman.

I don't particularly enjoy ragging on another blogger. Bloggers are supposed to be opinionated, so I really shouldn't be bothered by someone voicing their unique opinion. However, I find, more and more, that I would like limits to be placed upon freedoms. Freedom of speech needs to be tempered by the idea that something you say may cause harm to another, physically or emotionally. Voicing your opinion needs to be tempered by an informed opinion. I wouldn't call the opinion of a racist valid (at least, in regards to a question of race) because, as I understand it, that opinion is uninformed because it is biased by ignorance about the people's race. In this case, this gentleman seems to take ideas and facts at first glance, form and opinion, make a generalizing and obtuse statement, then continue upon his merry way. An example.

http://deservingonly.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_deservingonly_archive.html

Read the portions about the middle of the page, about the French issue with hijabs and the results of the Steam hardware poll. The whole bit about the deaths of millions at the hands of Communism, which, at least in the opinions of history professors I've asked about the subject, has never truly existed on this planet, is really golden. A frank generalization making a poke at the regime of Stalin that is backed up with no evidence, and attempts to reflect badly upon anyone on the left. Rather petty. The Steam hardware poll is the one that amuses me the most. He assumes that his personal situation should determine the results of the poll. He also assumes that, because his opinion is correct, it must be Valve, the company collecting this information, has somehow edited the results. First of all, why? What purpose would Valve have in editing this information? Second, I took part in this poll myself. Instead of scanning the computer's specifications, a source of unbiased (unless you really wanted to fool the program) and infallible information, it asked the user what these specifications were. The user might be mistaken. The user might just want to play with the results and give specifications which he or she does not have. Lastly, the poll was done at a time before the release of HL2, not after. At the time, the best Steam had to offer was Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Day of Defeat. These are games which, at the time, ran on an engine nearly seven years old. This means that even the most basic PCs in 2004 could run HL as easily as anything, including those with Geforce 2 cards and processors less than 2Ghz. For reference, the recommended specifications for the original Half-Life are:

800 mhz processor, 128mb ram, 32mb+ video card, Windows 2000/XP, Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection

Instead, he takes this data and says it is not possible, since none of these machines could possibly use the Steam service, despite having broadband. Okay then.

Anyway, read the rest of the blog, if you choose. I really dislike it, and I believe I have respect for other peoples' opinions. I have come to modify that respect to what I believe to be an informed opinion. Just as one may dismiss the yelling of a person of the street claiming the end of the world will come tomorrow, I dismiss this man's opinion, because everything I read from him, despite espousing an unbiased and informed opinion, is anything but, especially when he calls himself "...the only serious student of videogaming," because he is right 75% of the time. I'd say I have a higher than 75% success rate in my studies in computer science. I must be the only serious student of computer science, then.

I was shown this blog by a coworker of mine, who held this blog in high esteem. I believed it to be fundamentally flawed because of the reason he liked it most; this man holds Half-Life 2 to be the best game of all time, and holds many other games to be simply derivative. Never mind that HL2 is just as derivative, by definition, as any FPS that came after the first FPS, Wolfenstein 3D (at least, the first to my knowledge). I think that if this man's uninformed opinion can affect the opinions of others, it's rather sad.

By the way, to hold anything as "the best" is a fundamentally flawed opinion simply because "the best" cannot, at least in videogaming, cover and appeal to fans of every genre. It's just as flawed as any other "best" title as, for instance, the one given to a film every year. It's especially disconcerting that a game which covers such a small slice of the genre pie should be held in high esteem. I like HL2, but I don't think it's the best game ever. If anyone comes up to me and asks me that question, I simply reply with, "What kind of game are you asking about?" It's like asking what's the best vehicle on this planet. A tank? A car? A plane? A Ferrari? A 747? Obviously one of these is not what most people would like to be piloting into the office every morning. Each is appropriate for a purpose. Thus the question of "the best" simply does not apply.

I love thee, I love thee not, I love thee...

2006-07-03T02:03:00.000-07:00

I am a Windows user primarily by convenience. My father owns and operates a computer repair store with a focus on Windows machines. Thus, all my computer hardware and software comes essentially for free (well, not counting the work I put in as a technician there). Also thusly, it makes no logical sense for me to purchase a Macintosh computer. Why buy something (especially an overpriced something) that I can get for free anyway? Let's not even talk about free. Let's just talk about your average Joe. Average Joe could do what I did; wait until Black Friday (a day of sales after the Thanksgiving holidays and the first day of Christmas shopping) and get a deal. The deal I got was for a Toshiba Satellite M35X-S149 (look up the specs) for $599 (after rebate, of course) about two years ago. This laptop has served me quite well in that time. However, I've always wanted a Mac. Why?

I can barely answer the question myself. Perhaps it is true what they say about wanting what you don't have. But one of the main reasons I can find is I enjoy using it. Odd as it may sound I enjoy using the Powerbook G4 (12" Aluminum) that I recently acquired from a friend of mine for a nominal fee (he upgraded to a MacBook). I enjoy the brushed aluminum construction. I enjoy the feel of the keys as I type. I enjoy the feel of the clicker as I use the touchpad. I giggle like a schoolgirl on the inside every time I use Expose to order my windows or Virtue to switch desktops (using the cube animation, of course). The simplicity of the OS X interface appeals to me for some reason, despite my repeated protestations that Macs need a second mouse button, and the fact that OS X hides quite a bit from the user and keeps him or her from doing too much, really. I still stand by those assertions. By the way, biggest pet peeve? The fact that no one calls out Apple on essentially building an operating system, one that crashed quite often in the beginning, by the way (I know, I was forced to use 10.0.0; ghastly stuff), on another operating system, namely FreeBSD. The fact that Apple used an existing, free operating system as the basis for it's new operating system instead of creating their own basis, like Microsoft, is, while inspired, cheating, and all the fanboys
conveniently overlook this fact. Also, Apple doesn't have to deal with almost any hardware configuration on the planet and still work well, as Windows does. Since Apple makes the hardware, they know exactly what they are working with. Again, cheaters. And they make it look like they do everything better. Yeah right.

I believe Windows XP offers more in the realms of customization, software, ease of use (that's right, ease of use), ease of administration, and sane users (for more on this, read below). I maintain that the only reason Windows machines catch flack anymore are because of two unavoidable reasons (at least, from Microsoft's perspective): over 90% market share, and the ignorance of the common computer user, who continues to click on any window and button placed under their hot little cursors. That's partly why I really think the new Mac ads really should be banned for the same reason their G5 ad was banned: false and misleading advertising. Once upon a time Apple had the audacity to state that the new G5 was "the fastest processor on the planet." Obviously Mr. Steve Jobs, god among men, does not hold Mr. Cray in high esteem, or the hardworking development teams at Intel and AMD, which the same Mr. Steve Jobs, god among men, is now catering to for his new line of Macintosh computers. As to the assertion that Macs are somehow better because less people use them (this is a direct extension of the assertion that Macs don't have spyware or get viruses, which is a direct and practical result of a lack of market share, since no one would write them if no one were to get them), it's like saying that people should move back to the country because cities are bad, what with the crime, overcrowding, and decadence that cities intrinsically have. Well, guess what? The more city people that move to the country, the more the country becomes overcrowded and less appealing. More crime begins to seep into the lush and verdant land of the country. And guess what? Jack's Gentlemen's Club is opening soon, near the laundromat. Never mind that the country doesn't provide some of the valuable services that the city people depended on, such as rapid public transit, or close proximity of, well, almost everything.

I am of the opinion that the only reason that Apple really survives is because of two reasons: great design (which appeals to me, I admit) and a certain attitude that I can sum up in two words: ignorant asshole. Steve Jobs is an ignorant asshole (or at least he plays one, I don't know him personally) and other ignorant assholes flock to his banner. Those ignorant assholes are know popularly as the Mac User. I can cite several examples in recent memory that puts at least some Mac Users firmly in the ignorant asshole category. One that you can check out? All the people cheering in the last keynote speech made by Steve Jobs at MacWorld? Ignorant assholes.

One of my favorite experiences happened two days ago. I went with one of my best friends (the one who sold me the Powerbook and switched up to a MacBook) to the Apple Store in the Grove in Beverly Hills so as to charge the aforementioned Powerbook since his charger wasn't working (luckily, I had an extra at home for me to use later). Long story short, we're alone in the theater for awhile, playing around, when a seminar starts about using a Mac in the business world (the fact that even such a thing is needed, let alone done for free, considering the fact that system admins really make the computing choices in most businesses, paints a rather desperate picture of Apple, but I digress). The gentleman giving the presentation, artfully including jibes against any and every PC during a presentation about using a computer for business applications (har, har, if you don't hear the sarcasm and notice the inappropriateness of that), is speaking using the aid of a microphone. So he's loud. Really loud. Of course, we're not paying attention to him because we're not there for that, and, in our defense, we were there first. I was making some comment to my friend, below normal speaking volume, since we were in that environment, and, as a student, I usually try to respect the speaker and the listeners in a lecture by moderating the volume of my voice. Then, the guy in front of us turns around and says, "Excuse me, I'm trying to pay attention!", quite a bit louder than I was speaking. So he's distracted by my quiet tone and can't hear the guy yelling in front of him who is mic-assisted. Ignorant asshole. Or, at least, ignorant asshole packing a sensitive set of ears.

Of course, this is a subset of Mac Users. Not all people who own Macs are ignorant assholes. My boss is not an ignorant asshole. Friends of mine, who are Unix and Linux sysadmins who need native terminal and X11 environments on a laptop with a minimum of fuss are not ignorant assholes. By the way, getting any Linux distro to work well on your laptop = pain in the ass. I'm not an ignorant asshole (I hope). By the way, great t-shirt idea. "I'm not a Mac User" on the front. "I'm not an ignorant asshole" on the back.

Despite all this, I still enjoy using my Mac. It "unleashes my muse," which I'm happy to say does not play the key-tar (scary instrument, that). I am of the school of thought that no thing is universally better than it's competition, but rather that one is good for some things, and the other good for other things. Windows machines are good for certain things (uniformity, gaming, customizability, selection of software, bang for buck) while Macs are good for others (style, appeal of use, simplicity, good first-party software). Since I don't need a great selection of software on the road, and I shouldn't be playing games anyway, my main laptop is now a Mac, but my desktop will always be a Windows machine.

What I'm trying to go for is that you can be both a Windows user and a Mac user. You can respect the strengths and weaknesses of both. I personally wish that people would just get of their high horses and admit that they're talking about something that they don't even have a vested interest in defending (unless they work for Microsoft or Apple). I wish that Windows users would get off their superiority horses. I wish Mac users would get off their "we're the underdog" horses. I wish, I wish, I wish. If wishes were horses...I'm not sure exactly what would happen. Something about getting where we really should be going, I guess :)

Harry Potter and the Questionable Directing Job

2006-06-22T14:38:00.000-07:00

This is a discussion that has been bouncing around in my head since I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in theaters.

I've been a Harry Potter fan for some time. I'm a sucker for a good epic series, like Lord of the Rings or The Wheel of Time. Harry Potter works on many levels, but one thing I like that it always tries to do is excite and amaze. There are always new things to learn in each book about the nature of the magical world in which Harry is growing up, and, as readers, we follow in his path. It is, perhaps, for this very reason that I was so disappointed with the latest entry into the Harry Potter movie series. Worse, the people making the decisions managed to make the job of whomever takes the helm for the next film, and the film after, much, much harder, unless they decide to simply ignore the events of the fourth film.

I will be the first to admit that blaming the director is, perhaps, a convenience, as well as my being uninformed about who actually makes the decisions regarding the storyline of the films. However, considering the vast differences in style, story, and physical design of Hogwarts in Chris Columbus' tenure on the first two films versus Alfonso Cuaron's work on the third film, I can only conclude that Mike Newell had decisions to make as to what storylines and what events were to be filmed for the movie, and he was responsible for some of the changes that I am very disappointed that he made.

Stylistically, Hogwarts has always evoked the feeling of a old medieval castle, but with it's own quirks. The characters of the paintings that cover many of the walls of Hogwarts move of their own accord, sometimes going into neighboring paintings. Ghosts roam the halls, and, if you happen to be so unlucky, they pass right through you. Stairs tend to change or drop out from under you. These are facts of life at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I will admit that Chris Columbus spent quite a bit of time highlighting these features of the castle in his two films, but this worked well with the positioning of the films as well, since they were an introduction for Harry, as well as the viewers. What I liked about what Cuaron did in the third film is that while he may have changed the physical layout of Hogwarts (the giant clock tower, Hagrid's cabin, and Trelawney's tower), he kept in line with the style of living at Hogwarts, which included glimpses of moving paintings or ghosts roaming the halls, as well as the design of the classrooms in Hogwarts. The most jarring change was the inclusion of "real" clothes on many of the characters in their free time, but this change was logical, as Rowling never mentions too much about the characters' clothes besides the initial intro, and most boarding schools I'm familiar with don't require their students to be in uniform all the time.

Newell, however, doesn't go through the effort of keeping with the style of the castle. As a result, Hogwarts feels empty and barren, whereas in the first three, it had a life of it's own, without having to have many extras milling through the halls. I can understand from a filmmaking perspective why these details were omitted. It does take some effort for the director and the actors to add or allow the addition for CG elements (blue/green screens, eyelines, and the like). This omission takes away too much of the magic and fantasy from the film, and instead leaves us with an empty caricature of the world, rather than a full-blooded embodiment of it.

On a related note, the omission of certain characters, as well as a general feel of emptiness in this film, is quite odd. My prime example of a character that was omitted that added to the feel of the previous films was Mrs. Weasley. Admittedly, she couldn't have appeared in the beginning of the film when the main characters were on their way to the Quiddich World Cup, but she had a larger role showing up during the four tasks in the Triwizard Tournament as Harry's surrogate mother. Instead, the character is simply written out of the story completely. An example of the relative emptiness of the school occurs at each of the main events of the tournament. The size of the seating for the events, especially the last, appears to hold far too few people considering the number that should be at Hogwarts. Here's another one for you. How many third years do you remember seeing? Second years? First years? There are almost no students besides the fourth years and the important Gryffindor students, like Fred and George. It almost seems like they're trying to save money by not hiring more actors and not spending money on CG work besides the main set pieces. But why? Weren't the previous films a success? Aren't the books a success? What conceivable reason, besides the possibility that the producer spent $20 million on his personal estate, (I am being sarcastic here, by the way) could the makers of the film need to save money?

The lack of commitment to detail, previously constrained to the visual style of the environment and characters, now effects important story points that extend into the next film and the following one. No mention is made of the winnings from the Triwizard Tournament. This is significant because there is also no mention of Fred and George's experiments with new wares for their up-and-coming joke shop. This is significant because, in the next film, Fred and George leave the school because, using the Triwizard winnings that Harry gave them, they will "graduate" prematurely from Hogwarts and go start their joke shop. This is significant because several of Fred and George's joke shop creations move important story points along in the next two films. Even small mentions of these ongoing events of Fred and George's would have served to establish these story points such that the next film's director, whomever he or she may be, would expand on these events in that film. However, the new director is put into a somewhat unenviable position of playing catch-up. Should he or she simply assume these events occurred outside camera range? Should he or she make reference to these events in the context of, "Yeah, that's what we were doing when we weren't onscreen"? Should he or she spend some of his or her precious screen time where Harry does plop the bag of gold at Fred and George's feet, and where they say, "Oh, thanks for this money that it makes no sense to be giving us in the first place"? Or how will the director of the film after that justify how the boys can leave the school and simply start up their joke shop with next to no money? Magic?

The work on the fourth film in the Harry Potter series feels like it's trimming the fat. Characters are dropped, details are omitted, and story elements that prepare for events in the subsequent films are gone. I will admit that the running time for the film is justified given the book that is being adapted for the film is long as well. But these are details that could easily (and I have checked) be slipped in here or there, and extend the running time by no more than five minutes. Instead, somebody got a little trigger happy with the white-out and omitted some important story points. It was short-sighted. It was irresponsible. When compared to the other films in the series, this will probably be the weakest adaptation of all the novels.

P.S. - Please understand, I am not a Harry Potter fanboy, nor do I miss the fact that, in the adaptation of a novel, some things must be omitted. However, this is no Tom Bombadil moment here. Worse, these are changes that someone other than the current director must make up for. The worst part is that I can see these rather obvious mistakes, but no one else seems to care. The other thing that I find frustrating is that they made these decisions knowing that a large number of people will have read the books already. They also knew that there was going to be a subsequent film, and they would have to make up for this later. The very worst thing about this whole thing is that the director abused his responsibility to the story and the people that enjoy it. The very very worst thing about all this is if I were doing it, I believe I could have done it better. But, of course, I'm not a Hollywood director, so I can't do this sort of thing. But it's this kind of behavior, the decisions of the Uwe Boll's out there that corrupt and destroy good stories, that really frustrates me. It's also the idea that seems to be going around Hollywood that anything committed to celluloid is worth putting out there and merchandising the crap out of it. I still believe film has a spirit and a soul. I think the current crop of filmmakers, for the most part, have misplaced it.

Askmen.com 2006 Top 99 Women Poll .... Getting cheap, are we?

2006-06-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

Ok, we're back in the saddle.

I just stopped by askmen.com by way of ign.com, since they were advertising the "Top 99 Women of 2006." I was bored; what can I say. I was rather surprised and amused. If there is a worse (or better, depending on your perspective) collection of pictures of these women making a bad smile, caught in a bad pose, wishing they never saw that dress, or just having a bad hair day, I've yet to see it. Almost every picture of every woman there (with rare exception) is rather unflattering. It's a hot day in LA, and they're sweating (or "glowing," which is the female version of sweating, apparently). It was a moment of indescision, and they chose the set of clothes that just don't go together. It's a runway show, and they're wearing something (which is the kind way to describe it), or close to nothing, which is the way guys are supposed to prefer it. Almost every picture there makes you think, "I used to think these women were beautiful? Where was my brain that day?"

I must admit, it's a good collection of pictures in the sense that people who tend make a fuss about these women get to see that they're just people too. However, for a collection of the "most desirable," I'd like to think the pictures in the article should probably reflect that. Call me crazy, I know. My personal guess is that the people over at askmen.com got cheap and bought all the Paparazzi's B-rolls of film. Click the link and check it out for yourself.

http://www.askmen.com/specials/2006_top_99/anna-kournikova-99.html

Ch-Ch-Changes!

2006-03-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

I realized that some changes were in order, since I was starting to get into this blogging thing. First and foremost: I had to change the colors. I liked the original black coloring, but it made the blog seem somewhat dark and dreary compared to other blogs I've been seeing, so I decided to pick something more soothing. Second: the "mission statement" of sorts for this blog was really somewhat silly. Here it is, in its entirety: This is a totally random blog. You will find computer information. You will find car information. You will find movie information. You will find personal ruminations. That is what you will find. Expect no more, expect no less. There are many things wrong with this statement, but the most obvious things are:

1. The fact that most blogs really are random. I don't need to reiterate it here.

2. The information that this blog will contain is actually expanded somewhat from the original listing. Also I realized that the original listing was somewhat silly since, like above, some of it is redundant (blogs are supposed to be for personal rumination).

3. Expect no more, expect no less. My attempt to be silly, yet ironic. NOT. Again, a reiteration. Third, I will commit to working on this blog consistently. Others can do it. I should be able to as well.

Rogan's Heroes is down...

2006-03-30T15:23:00.000-08:00

Relating to my post before last, the web site for Rogan's Heroes, a good Day of Defeat guild, seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. It's too bad, since the people who played on that server held similar beliefs in regards to how to play a game: don't play like you don't mean it, don't take advantage of exploits (i.e. - you can shoot through a barrel though you "shouldn't" be able to do that), keep your comments clean, stay friendly to newbies and enemies, and a host of others. The forums are down and I can't find the main site. If anyone knows about this (since hundreds of people are reading this and all of them play DOD :) ), please comment.

This reminds me of the demise of Z95.7, a radio station that was popular in the Bay Area from about '97 to '02. Just one day, disappeared off the face of the earth. Web site gone, no word from the station now broadcasting on the same frequency. I surmise that they said or played something the budding ferocity of the "new FCC" heard, and the "new FCC" fined them into oblivion.

Or maybe two people in Kentucky wrote a letter. The "new FCC" was so amazed that someone put pen to paper, licked an envelope, and put the letter in the mail that they decided to honor this person's request and shut down the station for good. Or maybe they got shut down for not having enough music and too many commercials. It's possible.

So after deciding to stop being lazy, I decided to research the issue again. Though it may be just many people spreading the same rumor (since all I found were forum posts and unofficial web sites), apparently the station management fired the entire staff and took the station from being a pop/rock/teen station to being a country/classic rock station. Some surmise this was because the management also owned Alice 97.3, who has now filled the shoes of Z95.7 in the area, and didn't want the station to compete. I suppose that's what you get for selling almost every radio station except the student radio at Berkeley to Clear Channel. (But you gotta be impressed that I guessed those dates right, eh?)

In an effort to promote truth in blogging (not), I will provide several links so you can see what I read. I will, in fact, cite my sources. (Good God! Can he do that? How will he survive?)

http://globalguest.com/gb/957/guestbook12.html
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,3244445~mode=flat~start=0
http://www2.local2me.com/readMsg/796002130?refd=

Note in the second link: see how people make stuff up? "The station went bankrupt!" Well, the truth was a bit hard to swallow compared to something more pedestrian, like bankruptcy, I admit. But di'ja notice? I just did the same thing! In my own defense, however, I did preface it with "I surmise". But I couldn't help poking fun at the "new FCC" and their heavyhanded policies towards broadcasters. "Sometimes artists must use lies to tell the truth." That line (or something close to it) from a good movie I saw recently, "V for Vendetta". Good stuff.

So soon? Yes, indeedy!

2005-12-15T00:49:00.000-08:00

Quick follow-up: I was just browsing through some blogs using the "Next Blog" button you see in the upper-right corner of the browser window. I saw some of the most random things people had to say: favorite poems, favorite pictures, what they had for breakfast today, what was going on in their lives, etc, etc, etc.

The utter variety of blogs is quite nice, for otherwise one may never see these glimpses into other peoples' lives.

I just had this great feeling of, this is their space. They don't do it for anyone but themselves. No need to watch every word, no need to be in fear of pressing the "New Post" or "Reply" buttons, waiting for the inevitiable response that you don't know what you're talking about (despite others' opinions to the contrary, I must point out). It almost makes me want to abandon all forum hopping. However, the interaction, the feedback, and the practice of saying what you want to say in the most concise and meaningful way possible is why I go back. Check out the MBworld forums, linked on the right side here. Some good people there, along with some fuckwits (I picked up that term in my blog hunts) who don't get it. It's a place to share. So share. Don't be so fricking confrontational all the time.

You are not the center of the universe.

Just keep repeating that to yourself, and you just might learn something about the world you inhabit. Maybe.

Did I? Did I really?

2005-12-14T23:59:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I have the tendency to "talk out of my ass", as it has been put to me. I've been caught saying things that aren't fact, but opinion, and trying to pass them off as fact. I think more people are guilty of this then they themselves realize. (I think I'm trying to pass off some bad grammar here, but I'm not sure... :)

I'm not sure if that excuses the behavior of a person I'd easily describe as a forum troll. I referenced epilepsy in a discussion about a girl whose mother found her in convulsions on the floor after playing video games for four hours straight. I mentioned that epileptic attacks are somewhat uncommon. He took my meaning to be that epilepsy is an uncommon condition, and that I was somehow disrespectful to people with this condition. He referred to epilepsy as a disease, to which I promptly stated that it was a physiological condition. Turns out the distinction between "disease" and "physical condition" are not as well defined as I thought.

NEWAY, my point on this is that I like to post on forums to share opinions and get others' as well. If one is incorrect, I should have no problem in correcting them, nor should I have a problem with others correcting me.

Unfortunately, there are people who seem to have issues with personal space. Either it's their room, their car, their desk at work, or the place they love to sit in while in lecture, but these people take personal offense to any affront to their property. Of course, in some of these places, namely work and a lecture hall, these people have no control (as it's not their property) yet they feel this need to assert control. My favorite experience was when a girl asked me to get up and move because I was blocking her view from her seat. Never mind that she came in late to lecture. Never mind that other seats were available, with no one in front of them. I guess those new-fangled seats on the end of the row have built-in massage or something.

Now this behavior has spread to online forums, where users (thankfully rarely the moderators) feel that these spaces are their personal domain, and anything counter to what they say or do will be met with harsh responses. It's a big, wide, web world out there. Some people just don't seem to get that. If you want to show, vent, crap, whatever (as I am doing now), you get a blog, which some may see, some may follow, and most will never find. You don't take over a forum with repeated posts about the news of the day, new film trailers, and any other little thing that pops in to your head.

That's called trolling. If you've got someone whose made 634 posts in the last 324 days, you know there might be an issue. One day hopefully the term "common decency" will cease to mean the type of opinion you think others around you share, but will, in fact, bethe opinions of others around you. In this case, I don't care to make an issue out of this. I was mistaken, he was harsh, end of story. If he begins to retaliate on posts I make, we'll see how long he lasts. I could just as easily leave the forum and never again return, but I happen to like the other people there. Plus my ego would never let it go if I ran away with my tail between my legs! (Just kidding.) We'll see. End Rant.

Me? Paying attention? HA!

2005-12-06T00:59:00.000-08:00

So I haven't been keeping up. I know, I know. Since Christmas is around the corner, school is ending, so I'll be putting up my input on some more topics as the days roll by. Enjoy!

Sins of Sin City

2005-05-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

Films such as Sin City motivate discussion because of what is done without peer, and what is done that is less than excellent. Visually, no other film matches so loyally its source material's visual style. In a colored world, it's an interesting foray into black and white imagery, something that I've not seen on a large scale since Schindler's List. The script follows the comic book stories faithfully, with few rare (and understandable) exceptions. It's amazing to read the written word on the page and hear those words said exactly as they are on film.

Two elements about this film, elements that have more to do with the comic story background, admittedly, bothered me much about this film. So much so, that I couldn't figure out what it was; I couldn't put my finger on it. I realized that the story was one part (at least, what it was trying to say), and the treatment of the women in this film (next time).

The story was difficult to pin down, in terms of explicating it. Most literature and film tries to say something, yet not say it. For example, in the books and films of Harry Potter, the issue of those of high, purebred magic stock versus those of mixed blood, referred to by the derogatory term "Mudblud", is brought up several times during the series. The author not only creates a story point and a source of tension, but it is also commentary by the author on the kinds of discrimination that continues in modern society. People should not be defined by their family trees, the author says, but the quality of their character.

Thus, finding such a similar situation in Sin City was difficult. There are several obvious critiques, such as that of religion and the Catholic church in particular, embodied by Kevin and the cardinal. The corruption of government is also embodied by Senator Rourke. These are obvious commentaries, but the main characters are harder to define in such a way. Hartigan's character has very little depth; he is a determine cop obsessed with his job and protecting the innocent. Marv is a hopeless madman who has found his purpose in life, then he dies because he has nothing better to do, so to speak. Dwight is a killer who believes his way of making himself worthwhile is protecting what friends he has. I've seen these characters described by some as mere caricatures, by others as strongly moral characters. I agree more with the second assessment; these are characters whose morals, though not healthy from our society's point of view, define their very existence. Haritgan believes in protecting others at all costs. Marv believes in avenging his Goldie at all costs, in lieu of protecting her. Dwight believes in the protection of his friends at all costs. Seeing a pattern here?

It's also difficult to describe the situations that the main characters are in and the actions they commit as having any meaning beyond the moment. Hartigan shooting Rouke's son in the crotch, while ironic, probably is not Frank Miller saying sexual offenders should be castrated. Marv torturing Kevin is probably not Frank Miller saying that this is acceptable behavior. None of Dwight's actions stand out as particularly interesting in the way Hartigan and Marv do.

I believe these characters and what they do are what they are because they describe the town, Sin City. The characters are transient; their stories barely fill out one-third of the film. This is even more obvious with the bookends with the Assassin; he is not there to be an interesting character, he is there to define something about Sin City. These extreme events take place in Sin City: castration, torture, cannibalism, murder, mass prostitution, corruption, and rape of children, but what do the occurrence of these events say of the story? Of our lives, the readers?

The answer is: not much. Sin City provides an escape to decadence. What better fantasy (for males, at least) of a town where people rule with violence, protect their friends, mete out vengeance as they see fit, and have a Red Light district full of beautiful women that will do anything ... for a price. Go down a back alley in Sin City and you can find almost anything. Maybe so. At the very least, you won't find a woman who isn't something a guy would love to see: naked, beautiful, or a lesbian. More on that another time.

In the beginning...

2005-05-03T20:20:00.000-07:00

Here we begin. As a first post, I'd like to re-iterate this blog's description:

This is a totally random blog. You will find computer information. You will find car information. You will find movie information. You will find personal ruminations. That is what you will find. Expect no more, expect no less.

There's not much else to say, really. I'm in the throes of two projects, studying for a final that I hardly think I will enjoy, and homework up the wazoo. Such is my life, until school ends on May 20th. Until then, I leave you waiting. Not for long, I hope.

V