decay-proof record scroll

I Blame You, Kim Kardashian!

2012-02-19T15:37:00.001-06:00

(Actually, no, that's as true to the topic on hand as it is fair to her.)

I rarely keep up with any reality shows. In fact, the only one I ever liked and watched consistently was the original Joe Millionaire. As for the others like Big Brother, Survivor, or anything with Celebrity in the title, I really couldn't care less. Then again, there are reality SHOWS, and there are reality SERIES, and the latter does hold a bit of interest for me. Bear in mind, this distinction is almost completely arbitrary, but I'll try and qualify it. A reality show like America's Next Top Model is essentially a game show where contestants compete for a grand prize, the "reality" aspect referring mostly to co-habitation during filming. Meanwhile, a reality series like The Osbournes is more straightforward, a condensed glimpse into the daily life of The Prince of Darkness, his wife Sharon, and two of their three kids. There's no prize, very little structure, and casting is irrelevant because it's about a family and their close friends, not some cross-section of living stereotypes hand-picked to appeal to various key demographics.
I loved The Osbournes, but just like Joe Millionaire, I thought I'd seen the best the format had to offer. Suddenly, along comes Keeping Up With The Kardashians, which, in a manner similar to The Osbournes, seems to have sprung from an episode of MTV's Cribs. I won't go into details about the show itself as most of you are probably more familiar than you want to be with this (in)famous family. Instead, I want to focus on a particular event involving the show's centerpiece (second, in my book, behind Bruce Jenner), Kim Kardashian, and her mother. I'm working from dead reckoning as it's been a good three years since I saw this episode and I don't feel like sifting back through the various seasons to try and find it again (Thank you, Netflix), so I may get most of the details and context wrong, but the meat and potatoes of the situation will be otherwise unseasoned.
The family Kardashian had gone up to the mountains for a family ski trip, with matriarch Kris strictly emphasizing the "family" aspect of the sojourn. This led to an incident in which bratty Kim's cell phone was taken away and potentially damaged in the process. This led Kim to take Kris' phone and throw it from the upstairs loft onto the living room floor, all under the premise of, in her own words, "Treat others as you want to be treated."

If your reaction to this is anything along the lines of, "That's not really what that phrase means." then congratulations are in order as you are officially in the other 10% of Sturgeon's Law. Granted, I don't expect Kim Kardashian to be any sort of sage authority on how to implement The Golden Rule in daily life, but there's a difference between Karl Popper's addendum (the Platinum Rule, as it's been called) or Kant's Categorical Imperative, and an outright contradiction. The justification for this petty squabble isn't just circular logic, it's outright bent, and it seems more people are walking that crooked road in defiance of all the situations wherein most of us probably heard that phrase (especially if you grew up with siblings).

Fast-forward a few years to a few days ago when I happen upon this comment from a YouTube user on her own profile:

"Treat others the way you want to be treated. I give back what people throw at me, negative or postive (sic)."

Let's forgo the formalities and just break this idiocy down mathematically:

If A = B and B = C, then A = C.

Let's make the first sentence A and the second sentence B, as the person who said this wants this phrase taken as one cohesive and equitable whole.

"Treat others the way you want to be treated." = "I give back what people throw at me, negative or positive."

However, what shall be C? How about we take B and use synonyms to make a new phrase that retains the same meaning, but with a different vocabulary. Actually, for the sake of fairness to this person, let's pattern the vocabulary for C after the one used for A, that of treating others. Since positive and negative have the same value, that won't need any qualifications, so let's focus on converting "giving and throwing" to "treating."

"Treat others as others treat you."

Sounds close enough, though it seems we're bypassing A's conceit of "how one WANTS to be treated" as opposed to "how one IS treated by others." Hold on, we may be on to something:

"Treat others as YOU WOULD HAVE others treat you." = "Treat others as others treat you."

Well, that doesn't sound right. Seems A actually has relative degree of self-sufficiency compared to our newfound C, given that C involves giving back what's thrown in the first place, whereas A simply needs an awareness of what one would prefer be thrown at them. This sounds more like Newton's third law of physics, where actions have equal but OPPOSITE reactions.

Given this, we can deduce that A does not equal C, or A ≠ C. If anything, A is the opposite of C, just as a positive 1 is the opposite of a negative 1, and 1 ≠ -1.

Wait, now, if that's the case, then how can B = C and, per our initially given statement, A = B? The answer is that it can't, and the only way A ≠ C and B = C is if A ≠ B.

"Treat others the way you want to be treated." ≠ "I give back what people throw at me, negative or positive."

Treating others as they treat you is not treating others as you want to be treated. It's modifying your own behavior to match the actions of another, adjusting your reaction to match another's action, effectively removing yourself and your autonomy from the social situation in favor of being another's mirror.

So can we please stop pretending that being mean or unkind to someone is not only giving them what you feel they deserve, but what they may actually want? If that's the case, then how do you expect them to treat you how you wanted to be treated in the first place? You don't have to be a doormat, but you don't have to be a shadow to someone else just to interact with them. Failing that, just be yourself.

Quartet of Qontent... Content.

2012-02-16T20:55:00.001-06:00

A curious thing happened this past week; not only did I produce a video, I produced four in about as many days. It all started with me getting ready for a sketchbook project that's nearing completion whereupon I'll film the final product as opposed to scanning it. Next, I came upon a video of Mike Matei demonstrating the painfully meticulous inking process for the title card of the Angry Video Game Nerd's Star Wars episode. Someone in the comments cheekily asked about the potential of making a mistake, and that led to me making the first video Ink is My Pal. It was the first time I'd ever filmed myself with my Sony Cybershot H55, and I realized just what a complete technical moron I can be at times*. As such, I turned the trials and tribulations into the next three videos so that not only will I not repeat the mistakes I made, but others can hopefully learn from them as well.
Fair warning/cop-out: These are rather "quick & dirty" as videos go; they're rushed, half-scripted/half-improvised, and edited entirely using YouTube's new built-in editor, which essentially stands somewhere between a typical Linux video editor and iMovie. Polish wasn't the point, however; it was making as many videos as I could in a short amount of time and getting past my usual meticulousness and perfectionism in favor of just making some damn content. My more fiction/narrative/abstract works, by contrast, I hope will be a little more refined and at least look like more effort's been put into them.

*See, I've made videos since at least high school, where I worked on the morning's televised announcements and produced a number of news stories and sketches. However, while that may sound like a robust regimen of working experience, the fact is that I left all the technical stuff to other people. Instead, I focused on scripting, storyboarding, and (minimally) editing. I ended up acting a little more than I wanted to (thankfully in Voiceover, with which I'm far more comfortable given my radio-face), and rarely operated the camera beyond simply pushing the record button every now and then.

"I'll Smack You Like A Little Girl!"

2012-02-11T22:31:00.000-06:00

Gender politics have been in the news lately, from a little boy dressing as Scooby-Doo's Daphne to a Swedish preschool that refers to their students as hens to little Sasha Laxton to a kid standing up to his own father in a GameStop on his little brother's behalf, there's no shortage of challenges to heteronormative biases that most of us would otherwise have thought went the way of witch burnings and segregation.

As someone who grew up with the knowledge that Samus Aran was a woman (before Other M turned her into Bella Swan in power armor), Lady Jaye could crack wise about being a human sacrifice (and kick a few heads in while strung up), Zelda didn't need Link half as bad as she might have insisted, Marion Ravenwood could drink any man under the table, and Karana could manage island life all on her own despite her people's traditions, I like to think I've a fairly liberal view of gender roles, and frankly find the idea of a little boy dressing up as Daphne as funny as it is cute.

I bring all this up because today I overheard something while eating at my local Steak 'n' Shake with my roommate, before going to see Phantom Menace in 3D. Across from our booth, a little boy of maybe five or six was... well, doing what little kids do in public places, running around yelling like he was on fire and grinning ear to ear as only little kids can do when they're testing their parents' limits. When said limit was finally tested to the point of breaking, the boy's mother (emphasis: MOTHER) looked him dead in the eye and said that if he didn't knock it off:

"I'll smack you like a little girl!"

In light of those aforementioned stories and female archetypes from my childhood, I'd like to say to that mother:

"YOU'RE... NOT... HELPING!"

Special Acknowledgement: Thanks to Desi, a very talented artist, for posting about the Sasha Laxton story, and Vanessa Hahn, one of the strongest women I know, for mentioning the Gamestop story.

2600 vs. NES: Honestly A Tough Call

2012-01-22T10:10:00.000-06:00

We had both an Atari 2600 and a Nintendo Entertainment System growing up. We got our Genesis in 1992 after we'd moved to Albuquerque, which was when I really stopped seeing games as toys and instead saw their potential for slightly more complex narrative. For about the first time since maybe Super Mario Bros. 3, I realized that what I was seeing on screen was genuinely what I was meant to see, not mere simplified representations like how the knight in chess looks more like the noble steed than the rider himself.
I don't think I'd ever heard of Pitfall 2 and I certainly know I didn't play it as a kid. On the whole, I'd say we really stopped buying 2600 games by the time we got the NES. Truth be told, though, as far as favoritism, I'd honestly say the 2600 got as much play time as the NES. When I'd heard about the 7800 being backward-compatible with 2600 games, my first thought was, "What a rip-off." as even the best 7800 games couldn't hold a candle graphically to even the worst NES game. Then again, I thought, even considering my first impression of the Genesis, graphics were never what impressed me, certainly not what kept me playing. Like I said, once in a while we'd still break out the 2600 for some Air Sea Battle or Keystone Kapers long after we'd reached what we thought was the peak of NES perfection with Mario 3.
Now, especially looking at Pitfall 2 and Secret Quest, I think if we'd never gotten the NES and maybe gotten a 7800 at best, I probably wouldn't have minded one bit. Sure, maybe I'd have jumped and down eagerly every time I saw a Nintendo commercial, but I'd have probably gotten over it. I did with the Super Nintendo.

Special thanks to Classic Game Room for making these awesome reviews. Without them, I'd never have known what I sometimes missed out on. If that sounds bitter and backhanded, it's not.

Why Can't More People Just Take Debit Cards?

2012-01-21T21:32:00.000-06:00

I got in the habit of using money orders to pay for important things after one of my checks bounced thanks to some bad timing that left me about 5 bucks short. It was a rent check, and while I don't believe it's left me on bad terms with the complex, I've just stuck to using money orders. Yeah, they're not quite as convenient as checks, and there's those little fees that they come attached with, but I only write twelve checks a year (guess what they're for) and rarely more. Plus, I don't have the situation I had before where someone doesn't cash a check right away (or sooner than I expect them to) and I'm slapped with a returned check fee.

Just recently, however, the yang to the yin of money orders has surfaced, and it all started with a movie called The Darkest Hour. Short review of the film: An intriguing premise and promising start gets marred by an almost unwatchable follow-through heralded by a man in a chainmail vest made from house keys on horseback. I bring this movie up because on my first trip to see the movie, I got pulled over on account of my license plate having expired the previous month. Things would have been left at that (as I said in detail on my DeviantART journal), except that I'd also forgotten to change out my insurance card, which expired, I kid you not, less than a week earlier. I was running late as was, and getting pulled over meant I would basically have to wait another day to see the film.

My court date was set to this week in the middle of the afternoon, which meant I had to take a half-day at work, which I hated doing just because it's apparently not enough to mail in a copy of my insurance card to dispute the second ticket. I stopped by my bank and took out two money orders. The reason for this is that, while the cop couldn't answer my questions about appealing the tickets, someone at the courthouse whom I spoke to by phone (to confirm whether or not I actually needed to come in or if this could be handled by more convenient means) told me that if I got my license plate updated within 30 days of the ticket, I could get the fine reduced to 55USD (down from 85). I was weary of this too-good-to-be-true info, so as a precaution, I got one order for 55 and one for 30, so I could just hand in both if they couldn't reduce the fine. If 55 was indeed the real fine, I'd just save the 30 for something else, namely combining it with another money order for my next month's rent.

Admittedly, this sounds tedious and complex, and it gets a little bit worse.

Despite stopping at my bank, I ended up at the courthouse about a good two hours earlier than I was set to, but thanks to a prosecutor and police officer not showing up on time, I got bumped up and got to hand over my paperwork within about 20 minutes of arriving. I handed them the insurance card, getting that ticket waived outright, and surprisingly they took my word on getting my license plate updated (I had a receipt in a folder, which I guess the judge spied as I was fishing for my other documents), but instead of reducing the fine to 55 (as I'd been told), it was reduced to 40.

Backing up a bit, while waiting, I'd filled out the money order for 55, complete with naming the payee.

I explained to the clerk sitting at the judge's side that I was told 55 when I'd called in earlier. The judge gave a puzzled look and the clerk said, "Um... this is a better deal." as if I was eager to pay more. I showed them the money order I'd already filled out, and the two of them traded (ironically) guilty looks and tried to work out if they could refund me the difference. In the end, they decided to just extend my payment deadline to 30 days so I could return the money order and get the proper amount. This all seemed well and good, until I actually started the process of getting the money order refunded.

I called my bank, who told me that any issue with refunds had to be handled with the issuer directly, which struck me as a bit of a bad sign. I called the 800 number on the back of the slip and learned that it can take at least 30 day to process a refund. Well, that was cutting it a bit close for my taste, so I had an idea: get another money order for 10USD and just mail that one along with the one for 30 into the court's office. That way, the refund on the one for 55 can take its sweet time and I don't have to worry about late fees or possible warrants. I got the other money order (along with one for my next month's rent, much to the bemusement of the bank teller, to whom I explained that the people I was sending money to didn't take checks), set them aside, and got to work refunding the 55.

It turns out that in addition to the 30 days, the issuer requires a 15 dollar processing fee.

Seriously? I could see 3 or 5, but 15 is just absurd, and I told them as much in a complaint e-mail. I think I'll wait to see what they have to say to that before I actually fill it out.

What's more, the return form I have to fill out to get my reduced-refund is rather vaguely worded about whether or not they'll deduct it from the refund amount or if I need to (ironically) write them a check. Also, I've somehow lost the little stub that attaches to the money order, albeit I've got the money order proper. The return form seems very insistent on having the stub. It's understandable seeing as how this form is meant for "lost or stolen" orders. Then again, the automated message at the 800 number mentioned "damaged" and there's even a small section on their website's FAQ about "wrong amounts" which all just refer me to the refund slip.

So, it's going to cost 15 dollars because I took a court clerk's word for something costing 55 dollars when in reality it turned out to be 40. The funny thing is, the court mentioned that the deduction was 25%, which even led the judge to give a questioning look to the clerk when she mentioned 40 seeing as how the math didn't work out. She explained that the original 85 is actually two fees combined, so the discount is applied to the different parts. I'd ask why one crime carries two fees if they're summed up into one on the ticket, but I just don't care anymore.

The moral of the story is, even if you don't write that many checks, order some anyway.

Memories of Artistic Integrity

2012-01-20T19:18:00.002-06:00

While I'll reserve my overall opinion of Channel Awesome for later (short preview: it's riddled with ambivalence and dusted with a thin layer of passive-aggressive indifference, particularly in light of their stance against SOPA/PIPA), the fact remains that I do follow a few of their content producers with a relative level of vested interest. One that fell off the radar of late, though, is Little Miss Gamer, who had taken a respite of her normal output in favor of other personal projects. Just a few days ago, however, she posted a video of a new puppet-themed series poking fun at the XBox360's Kinect device. The video is getting an almost perfect 50/50 split of likes and dislikes for a number of reasons too myriad to generalize, much less explore.
What caught my attention about this video, however, was something I don't think I'd ever seen before on any other video, which is the ability to take someone else's video, edit it in YouTube's browser-based video editor, and actually post it to one's own channel. My first honest thought was, "Why in God's name would anyone let other people do that?" Really, what's to stop someone taking a video, making only the most minor edit to it, and then posting it to their own channel wherein, by power of the editor's potentially built-in legion of subscribers, its views can exceed those of the original despite the lack of effort on the part of the editor? Consider the implications of this for a partnered channel, whether it's the original or the editor. The point is, someone stands to gain financially from someone else's work (or deprive financial gain) with little to no effort.
Most of you are probably saying, "It's YouTube, what do you expect?" in a tone of voice that not only can I not identify as sarcastic or sincere, but neither can you.
Way back in my college days, which ironically ended the year YouTube came out, I was in a video art class with a rather healthily eclectic group of students who ultimately fell into two camps. One camp felt that the more control the filmmaker had at his or her disposal, the better and definitive the final product is. The other camp felt that the best work was produced under restrictions, even matters of final cut (not to be confused with the software). After screening assignments to each other one weekend, the discussion of grading came up, as some felt simply getting letter grades from our professor was a little bit shortsighted and not the most solid form of constructive feedback. Having just read about the Phantom Editor's re-editing of George Lucas' The Phantom Menace, I genuinely put forth the idea of students critiquing each other by way of editing each other's videos. Some were on board, while others shrieked in horror. Truth be told, I was secretly in the latter camp, but I guess my thinking was twofold, first half being, "Well, what the Hell do I know?" and the second being, "I don't expect what I do in this class to have a life beyond this room, so who cares what some hack job wants to do with it?"
So, there I was today, sitting at my computer, visiting the YouTube page, and actually witnessing something I'd once suggested in a video art class coming to fruition.

Ironically, I've always been a big believer in the saying, "Better to be silent and thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

We Had A Talk

2012-01-19T19:40:00.000-06:00

This is a follow-up to My Trust Was Betrayed.

Texting between two rooms seems incredibly awkward, and even childish, but we seemed well past the point of petty spite. A short back and forth ended with me going into the kitchen and setting up two chairs, then sending a request. I couldn't sleep without getting some kind of resolve out of this.

We had a long talk, and things seem sorted, so we'll see where things go from here.

My Trust Was Betrayed

2012-01-18T18:30:00.001-06:00

UPDATE: Confrontation is always awkward, but it's better than just venting to everyone/no one. Deleting entries always feels dishonest, and I'd rather fix the present than erase the past.

This is one of those situations where the matter itself seems pedestrian, even inconsequential, but its implications and preceding events give it a gravitas that does not turn the molehill into the mountain by exaggeration, but reveals it as one by way of perspective.

I have a chocolate stash. It's a "stash" because my roommate has a weight problem and virtually no self control (the result of depression, among a handful of other issues). About three years ago, she even asked me to put a lock on the pantry door at our old apartment. I told her flat out that I would do no such thing as I didn't feel like locks and keys had to factor into my eating habits. Since then, things have not changed that much, and I've just about given up on trying to help her despite her asking me sometimes. The pattern breaks down like this:

*) She asks me for help.
*) I tell her to hold back (and sometimes take actions to that end).
*) She gets angry and carries on. I tell her I'm trying to help, just like she asked.
*) She says that she knows, but can't help feeling angry, and carries on out of spite.
*) I point out the absurdity of that way of thinking.
*) She says that she knows, and breaks down crying.
*) I tell her I'm not going to help her just for her to project onto.
*) She says she'll try, and I believe her a little less every time.

~~Irrational behavior that turns willful when help is offered upon request. Turn that over in your mind for a moment.~~

~~As a result of this, something of a compromise has been reached. I don't hide or restrict all our food, but I do keep a few things out of sight for reasons that will become abundantly clear.~~

Above our sink is a cabinet where I keep some of the liquor. On one side is a small cardboard box with my shotglass collection in it. On top of this box, I often keep a few Hershey bars and a jar of peanut butter. It wasn't until a few months ago that I even told her about it. The deal ultimately is that I don't dictate her diet, just as long as what's above the sink stays off-limits (she can barely reach it, anyway). The fact is that I work and she doesn't, so there's an eight-plus hour window of temptation.

Two days earlier, I'd stocked it with a pair of Hershey bars. When I was getting them at the store, I also picked up some potato chips. I told her about the chips, but not the bars (again, out of sight, out of mind). I do not touch the chips out of respect (after all, I've got the two great tastes that taste great together).

~~Yesterday, I noticed one of the bars was gone. I thought it just fell behind the cardboard box and left it at that.~~

~~Today, I get this text message, which I read on my break at work:~~

~~"Can of air, candy - heath, twizzler, favred starburst"~~

~~My reply:~~

~~"Air is in the closet in the office, top shelf immediately on your left."~~

~~Her reply:~~

~~"I dont like to tear my comp appart."~~

~~Not that I was telling her, "Do it yourself." but that's not the point, chalk it up to assumptions. She sends another message 2 hours later:~~

~~"Bread couple loaves, can go in freezer"~~

~~Admittedly rolling my eyes (planning ahead is not her strong suit), I reply:~~

~~"I'll pick them up tmw along w/ the candy since I already have to drive into Ellisville~~ ~~to get my tickets sorted out~~."

~~She says:~~

~~"Mk"~~

We live about a good 30 minutes from any grocery store. Needless to say, small trips are a little inconvenient. Also, I'd gone grocery shopping the previous day, which had me a little annoyed at her being so scatterbrained. So, with tomorrow's trip planned, I came home, made dinner, and, shortly thereafter, went to my stash. The last bar was gone, and I realized nothing had fallen behind the box.

~~I stormed into the office, seething. She asked what's wrong, and I said, "Hershey bar."~~
Her response is, "Well, that's why I was tellin' ya to get more candy." and I can't tell if she's jokingly apologizing or being defensive and willful. She told me to take some of her cash and go get some more, and I still can't tell if she's actually trying to make amends or acting tough to make me feel like the bad guy.
~~I'm too mad to say anything, as much as I wanted to say, "I had no intention of driving anywhere tonight, and I'm not going to renege on that because you've got no self-control."~~

~~I feel like I'm being manipulated. Things haven't been going well, and this is just one more matter.~~

Book of Secrets review

2012-01-15T12:58:00.000-06:00

I'm going to start embedding every new YouTube video of mine here, though I'm bound to skip over a few, like a random home movie of one of my cats or something along those lines. As for videos like this one or some of my short films, those will go right here.
With the new facelift to YouTube, it seems more and more like the site is shifting from a videosharing site to a videohosting site, a la Blip.tv or what Revver was. In essence, the "portal" of YouTube is shrinking, requiring its users (and even some of its partners) to do more self-promoting on their own sites.

Bolling for Armageddon

2011-12-04T01:35:00.001-06:00

I love movies that question reality. American Psycho seems just an ordinary slasher film on the surface, but it's actually a richly complex character study with the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, a sociopath who views himself as an abstraction of his own perceived image. In the end, though, Patrick Bateman may well be the only sane man in a crazy world despite his rather unorthodox coping mechanism. The way in which the film brings about this shift in perspective and the relative ambiguity in which it leaves the relationship between the conflicting views makes it a cinematic masterpiece.

The Final Storm, by contrast, can't seem to make up its mind about what its reality is and what its ultimate goal is in telling the audience whether or not its suspicions are right or wrong. The marketing describes the film as a biblical Armageddon piece, a story of survival in the final days of man. It centers around a young family on a small rural farm amidst a two-pronged assault on their sense of security in the form of pessimistic news reports on television and strange weather patterns out their own windows.

Into the fold walks (or rather stumbles) a stranger named Silas, played by Luke Perry, who is unable to recall his past at first, but slowly reveals a rather ominous connection to the farm's history, one unknown to its current residents until the third act. Said residents are a husband and wife with a teenage son, the wife a former bar hostess, the son a typical rebellious teen, and the husband a struggling farmhand with a drinking problem. What plays out prior to Silas acting out his hidden agenda is typical survivor fare, with trust at a premium, suspicions getting thrown about wildly, and a foreboding sense of dread as events begin to mirror those described in the Book of Revelation, quoted frequently through and out the film. Apart from the strange weather patterns such as snow in June and mass hysteria including looting and savagery, other telltale signs of the end times are less obvious until pointed out by Silas, namely the disappearance of all animals including crickets and birds as well as a blood moon in the night sky. All this would seem to be building up to a grand finale, with the stars being extinguished from the sky one by one like candles pinched by a pair of wet fingers.

The problem is, while this ending ultimately arrives as prophesied, it practically comes out of nowhere when the film shifts gears and turns the enigmatic Silas from a kindly and knowing stranger to a straight-up pious nutcase with a perverse sense of justice. This shift in character feels forced and clashes harshly with the film's more grandiose backdrop of the end of all existence. Imagine if the eponymous shark from Jaws disappeared toward the third act and was replaced by Billy Zane's character from Dead Calm, only for the shark to reappear at the end to sink the ship and kill everyone in one fell swoop. That's the problem with The Final Storm; it's really two movies in one, but one film is insubstantial on its own and the other can't quite cope with the cramped quarters it shares with its traveling companion. In the end, we're left with half of one movie and a fifth of another presented as a whole that starts things off well enough, but falls apart in the third act, attempting to make up for its bait-and-switch structure by harkening back to the impending doom mentioned at the start.

Normally, in films this pessimistic, the ultimate end is a kind of incentive for characters to complete their respective arcs, reconcile any differences, bury any hatchets, and free any otherwise closeted skeletons, with the deus ex machina of the apocalypse serving as a kind of final release that everyone (characters and audience alike) can feel humbled but strangely relieved by when the time comes. Here, it's a rush job, tacked on as if to distract the audience from the wayward pacing and uneven characterization. Needless to say, it doesn't quite work, and the end result is notably unsatisfying.

Rather Embarrassing, OR: how to expect the unexpected from the unpredictable

2011-11-13T19:54:00.001-06:00

Whenever I commission artists for projects or characters or simply to show my support for their work, I like to give them as little actual detail as possible, however developed the character of choice may be. There's a few reasons for this, namely that I hate being THAT client who nitpicks over every little detail to the point where the artist actually becomes the least important part of the equation. I've heard many a horror story about artists being essentially pushed not only outside their comfort zones, but also beyond their trademark skills and techniques, essentially reducing them to an impromptu ghost artist. When you commission someone, it should be because you like their style and believe it will work with your original vision, if not build on it. In other words, I want to be surprised at what they come up with just based on a concept. I mean, I could do all my own artwork for my written fiction and whatnot, but I'm a big believer in the notion that, "familiarity breeds contempt."

My brief to Kakumey regarding a recent commission was simply "Cel-shaded portrait of a woman with blue hair and a choker." She asked about other details such as eye color, and after a little thought, I said, "Well, maybe pale green or very dark blue, almost navy, but overall up to you. Surprise me." What I didn't quite tell her, and maybe should have, was that there was a little bit of an agenda in terms of usage.

For my DeviantART page, I was going to make another collection for my favorites, one specifically for women with blue hair, as I'd amassed quite the collection, and wanted to use it as the key thumbnail for the collection. Once at the collection's page, there would be a little description to the side, as is typical with collections and gallery folders, mentioning how one of my favorite reviews from Classic Game Room is YS I & II Chronicles for PSP leading to the following quote from that review:

"... a magical land whose main export is hot chicks with blue hair."

So, when Kaku sent me a tweet informing me that she was finished, I hopped onto Skype and saw the portrait, my reaction I think gave her the wrong impression. I was not offended or disappointed, just surprised (pleasantly, even), and then suddenly very, very embarrassed:

Black.
Collar.
Export.

Granted, the collection was tongue-in-cheek from the start and not meant to be at all misogynistic or objectifying, let alone racist... and objectifying. The lesson here is that, when commissioning an artist, there's nothing wrong with being brief and concise, but you may want to let the usage be known if you've got something in mind, just in case.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not racist... in fact, I maintain that it's physically impossible for me to be; I'm originally from Madison, WI, where we have a 3% black population. We don't even call them blacks or African-Americans, we call them the Green Bay Packers. I'm probably going to Hell for that joke, but if you've ever been to the midwest, it probably doesn't seem that funny for how largely true it is.

A Question for YouTube (quasi-s.978/copyright related)

2011-11-08T21:03:00.003-06:00

I'd never heard of this until a YouTube partner by the name of The Archfiend pointed it out. Apparently, a common (or once common) trend on YouTube was for people to post a comment, either on a video or a user's channel page, to the extent of "Sub4Sub" meaning, "If you subscribe to me, I shall return the favor."

For reasons that probably shouldn't have to be explained or explored in any great detail, this is really annoying, unfair, and, in the case of those asking, downright pathetic. Put simply, their channels are so bad, so borderline invisible, and so obnoxiously underwhelming that they have to ask people to subscribe to their channel in exchange for their pretend patronage.

Luckily, YouTube, in a moment of genuine interest in the goings-on of their site, decided this had to stop, and not only said as much, but literally found a way to prevent it. Now, if someone types "sub for sub" or anything along those lines, the comment does not post. The pathetic excuse for a human being begging for attention will get an error message that the comment cannot be posted due to an "internal error" which is a polite way of saying, "Get a damn life, you scum-sucking bottom-feeder." This technology isn't actually new, as many web-hosting services and a few online games have filters in place that seek out specific words and either erase them, or replace them with something else. It's typically reserved for obscenity and various foul terms, but YouTube has discovered it can also be used to keep people from mooching off of others. Again, genius.

YouTube also has a program that can "listen for" copyrighted music in videos and either mute the video or, as is more often the case, send you an e-mail asking if you'd like to allow a link to a legitimate download service (like iTunes or Amazon) to be posted alongside your video. Of course, it's not really a question, just a kind of gentle warning. They'll only post the link if they can actually get the rights to the song, otherwise they go with the muting option. In essence, they're trying to work with you, reach an agreement of sorts with the record labels so they don't take you to court for all you're worth plus interest. I've always felt the "free publicity" defense often used by people who use copyrighted music illegally in their videos is incredibly weak, tantamount to the spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum and screaming, "You never loved me!" but somehow YouTube has found a way to make it work. I may not approve of a compromise like this, but that's not the same as opposing it.

And yet, despite these capabilities at YouTube's disposal to help both its community and entertainment providers, I still see users posting full movies either in parts of around 10, or even, with the recent set of site changes of late, in single uploads. Granted, with the way the DMCA works, YouTube can't officially make a move against the offending user unless the original copyright holder files a formal complaint, a condition I consider akin to taking someone's car keys and throwing them in the river, insisting that it is not grand theft auto as the car is exactly where it was when the owner originally parked it and no one else has the keys. YouTube has created a kind of relatively safe haven for people to post videos that are not their own yet claims total immunity for what people do with it. Fair in principle, possibly, but jury's out on the practice. The point is, if they're willing to actively work and cooperate with record labels before any legal paperwork is filed, and set up parameters that flag comments for spam, why isn't there a means for automatically flagging videos that are of full-length feature films? Where's the misgiving about what exactly is going on with that user's channel? Sure, clips are tough to peg down as offending because they're only a short portion and often given at least a little context, such as hosting the video on a weblog for review or critique and putting a link to the journal in the description. Exhibiting the film in full, however, hardly counts as fair use, regardless of any attached analysis.

Copyright is far from a black and white issue, but it's not a complete gray area, either.

My Letter to Rep. Pete DeGraaf

2011-11-02T21:37:00.002-05:00

In regards to this article, I visited the website for Kansas Representative Pete DeGraaf and took advantage of the "contact" option to send this message:

Dear so-called "sir":

Regarding this article: http://jezebel.com/5804867/legislator-says-women-should-plan-for-post+rape-abortion-since-i-have-a-spare-tire

You have got to be the most ignorant, insensitive, and borderline-brain-damaged politician I've ever had the misfortune of reading about.

What kind of moral fiber considers an abortion a worse offense than the rape that led to it, such that women must plan for such a contingency? If men were the ones who carried the child instead of the women, how would you feel about that policy you voiced your support for?

For the record, I am not a resident of Kansas House District 81, and knowing that "things" like you can even exist in my lifetime makes me appreciative that I don't live within so much as the same zip code as you or anyone out in that state that might support you.

You are a born loser and you deserve nothing good in life, ever. I feel sorry for everyone that has even so much as heard your name.

Get stuffed, you cornholing buzzard.

Final Word On The Problem.

2011-10-29T13:57:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I can get the missing icons back if I just use the new interface, which I don't really have a problem with save that every time I open it, I get this banner up top telling me my browser isn't supported and I should try Chrome.
As I've said, I don't use Chrome because of a conflict that causes my PC to randomly restart. Evidence to prove this: Once I uninstalled Chrome, it never happened again. Correlation isn't causation, true, but a quick search in the forums showed I'm not alone in this; XP does not get along with Chrome, and random restarts are among the side effects.
Apart from that, though, why wouldn't the latest version of Opera be supported?

In any case, the time seems to have definitely come for me to do something about my PC situation. As of now, I'm still running XP on a rig I've had since 2005 with no real updates or upgrades beyond a new graphics card and a second disc drive. The biggest problem I'm having is that apart from Opera and Skype, no application that requires an internet connection will work, including other web browsers. I think that, with all the Linux distros I've experimented with, on top of everything else I've used this computer for, the hard drive has simply had enough and needs to be replaced. I get error messages, but any attempts to fix them turn up negative, so I think we're dealing with an outright hardware failing. The same thing happened to my iMac once upon a time. It was funny when I took it in to get repaired; it had a 10GB hard drive and the store said the smallest drive they could replace it with (and not charge me an upgrade fee) was 30GB.

Anyway, the plan now is that I'll be replacing my hard drive and maybe even upgrading to Windows 7, but since it will most likely be the starter edition, I'll also re-install Jolicloud and switch between the two as needed. For some strange reason (upsell, upsell, upsell) the starter edition of Windows 7 does not allow you to set your own desktop wallpaper, but Jolicloud can. I intend to only use Windows 7 for non-web related activities, such as editing audio (and maybe video) and using my scanner. Jolicloud will be used entirely for running Opera and maybe Chrome (in case Blogger decides it doesn't like Opera, the uncultured swine that it is). I may also be upgrading the motherboard with one I've had lying around for a while (long story, don't ask). I've been planning at least one aspect of this plan for some time, but I've never gotten around to it. Instead, I've just been cautious about saving things and backing up my data whenever I think to. In any case, if I do replace my hard drive, it'll just be for safety sake as I intend to store most of my stuff onto flash drives, as I've done for years. When I was using my little Linux computer Sophia (also a long story not worth asking about), I had an 8GB thumb drive in the USB port at all times, only using the onboard hard drive (which was actually a compactflash card with a special adapter, something I may employ for this upgrade) for applications.

In the end, for as mad as I was, it wasn't so much at Blogger or Google as much as it was the fact that I don't like being told to make upgrades that I already intend to do regardless. Speaking of journals, though, we'll end this on something slightly different:

DeviantART's new journal feature just annoys me. They've essentially turned journals into literature uploads, complete with being able to give favorites and share options. My question, what about all those losers (they know who they are) who just post song lyrics or other things like that? Journals aren't art, they're a means for artists to talk to their audience, whether to give them important updates or just to shoot the breeze, they're not things to be placed in frames and hung upon the wall. The point of journals was that DeviantART users could essentially say anything they wanted with no fear of getting taken down, suspended, or even banned because the journal was just a kind of soapbox for people to have their little say in whatever they were on about. Now, by putting them on the same level as works of art, they're going to take away that relative safety. Journals can now get popular the same way paintings can, and that's not a good thing.

I know whenever DeviantART makes a change, there's always some huffing and puffing and melodrama about getting used to the change, and in the end, we get used to them, but this time, I think they may seriously have done something wrong, and I don't think they can undo it. We'll see.

Good night, and good luck.

The problem, in a screenshot...

2011-10-29T08:38:00.004-05:00

There's a thread about this: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=6a5d6d17bab37a7e&hl=en

See, I can't even make a link out of that.

All But One Avenger... In A Way.

2011-10-28T22:56:00.003-05:00

Just saw Captain America: The First Avenger, technically the fourth feature-length outing for the captain, if you're keeping score and are up to date on your obscure/forgotten film trivia. I was never a big fan of the character; I only had one issue of the comic as a kid, and it ended on a cliffhanger with him being prepared for a gender-swap. I kind of always meant to pick back up on that, but eventually I stop and just ask myself, "Why?" I think he's just kind of uninteresting, the same way Superman can be. He's too powerful and just doesn't have that many flaws or inner conflicts.
However, I was willing to give the movie a chance for two reasons, first being that Joe Johnston has never made a bad movie and I just knew in my heart he would respect the source material. Second, it kind of reminded me of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but done just a little better (or so the trailers made it seem).
When all was said and done, I really wanted to like this movie, and while I don't hate it, I just found myself almost completely underwhelmed. at first, I thought it was just from being in something of a bad mood, but after letting it all sink in for a bit, I figured out the problem. It has the same overall fundamental flaw that Iron Man 2 had, that it was so busy setting up the next story that it took almost no time to tell its own. In Iron Man 2, this was just annoying because the story that we were left with once the setup was removed wasn't really any good. It was full of holes and gaps in logic bookended by a few semi-interesting action sequences. With Captain America, the story it told wasn't bad, but it was very straightforward and simple, but told at such a breakneck pace there was no time to really take anything in. Normally, I don't think a movie feeling too short is a bad thing; if anything, it means the movie has done its job by making me want to stay immersed in that world long after the credits roll. Here, though, it just felt rushed. This movie clocks in at about 2 solid hours, but there was more than enough content here for at least 2 and a half, and I would never have gotten bored or tired of what I was looking at. In short, I felt like I got shortchanged in favor of a franchise.
Thor, meanwhile, is my favorite of the lot. Everyone seemed to compare it right away to the Flash Gordon film, but I kept thinking of Masters of the Universe, especially with the way that much of the story is set on earth. There's a lot to dislike about the film, namely the fact that the small New Mexico town looked far too much like a set (and I'm from there, so I can tell you no small town looks like that nice), but that's hardly a dealbreaker and it's almost ironic that we're more willing to forgive and accept the fantastic settings than the "real" ones. It was also cool to see Colm Feore as Laufey, king of the frost giants, who were surprisingly scary. Most people may know Mr. Feore as the leader of the Necromongers of Riddick infamy, but, to me, he'll always be Glenn Gould.
I have not seen the newest Hulk, and frankly, nothing really makes me want to. I'm one of those weirdos who actually really likes the Ang Lee Hulk film, and not just because of my present-since-childhood crush on Jennifer Connelly. I was really disappointed that one wasn't better received. Sure, the ending was a bit weak, and Nick Nolte's anti-military speech seemed way more out of place than it should have, but it had a lot of good points. It embraced its comic book origins and did justice to the pathos of the main character. The new one, however, is a dull retread starring Edward Norton, possibly my least favorite actor in cinema, certainly in my bottom 5, alongside John Malkovich. I just don't get his appeal; nearly all of his movies have him playing a dual-natured character, which he only just about manages to pull off. There's also his off-screen antics, like constantly re-writing and ad-libbing his own lines as well as inviting himself into the editing suite to give himself more scenes, leading Tony Kaye to attempt replacing his director credit with "Humpty Dumpty" on American History X. Ego is a word that gets thrown about haphazardly when it comes to actors, but Norton seems to be one of the few actors to whom the term "egotist" actually applies.
So, am I excited about The Avengers in 2012? Honestly, not really. I think it's being built up too much and Marvel Studios is obsessing far too much with making a franchise that it's selling its setup films short.

A Dungeon Crawler On 2600 That's Not Dragonstomper?

2011-10-10T18:15:00.005-05:00

I can't believe this thing exists. It's an Atari 2600 game released in 1989, 5 years after the release of the Atari 7800* and the NES. It's not a homebrew game; it was made by a toy company called Axlon, which was actually owned by Nolan Bushnell, long after he'd left Atari in the hands of Warner Communications.

What's more surprising is how deep the game is. The last game to approach this level of complexity was Dragonsmasher from Starpath, and that required a special adapter to let the 2600 use cassette tapes instead of its typical cartridges. I wanted to bring this video here because it kind of gently ties into what I was talking about with derivative works. At first glance, this game made me think of the Swordquest games or Adventure or even Haunted House, which had rudimentary exploration elements. Mark Bussler of Classic Game Room made the comparison to Zelda, though I think the game has more in common with Namco's Tower of Druaga or Falcom's Ys series, especially the way the character runs into enemies with sword extended. All these comparisons may sound like I'm putting the game down, but I'm not. In fact, though I called it a dungeon crawler, Secret Quest is firmly in the science fiction genre, with space stations standing in for castles. The object of the game is to explore the station and collect symbols to enter into a command console in the center of each station. Then, a timer appears, giving the player only a scant few seconds to backtrack though the station and get to a teleporter and escape the detonation of the station. If you thought I was going to say, "Just like Metroid." I wouldn't blame you, but you'd be wrong; it's actually more like Major Havoc, an arcade game from Atari released in 1983.

*) Interestingly enough, the 7800 was backward compatible with 2600 games, which I think stands as a real testament to Nolan Bushnell's business genius. The 2600 was easy to develop for, and it still had a solid install base between people who still held onto their 2600s and people who had 7800s as well. Seriously, don't mess with this guy.

Fan =/= Collaborator =/= Publicist =/= Martyr

2011-10-08T22:17:00.009-05:00

I grew up in a Christian home. I not only went to church regularly and attended CCD (think Sunday School meets summer camp), but even volunteered as an altar server for many years. Of course, I'd be lying if those facts didn't come with the respective qualifiers: Whether I wanted to or not, which made up some of the worst social experiences of my childhood, and primarily because it looked like fun. Suffice it to say, I don't consider myself Catholic anymore. I still believe in God, but there were a few elements to the system (the Fan Club, as Marilyn Manson calls it) I could never quite get past, and not the typical "A-Ha! I'm on to you." ones like, "Why doesn't the Bible mention dinosaurs?" or, "Where did Cain find a wife?" Instead, they were more basic and fundamental.

The first is unconditional love. I mean, I get it, I guess, but I just find myself really uncomfortable with the idea. I would just rather earn it like anything else worth having. There's a little more to it than that, but we'll leave it there as the second item is the important one.

The second is martyrdom. There's nothing wrong with standing up for something you believe in, but expecting something in return to the point of demonizing people who don't reciprocate just doesn't sit well with me. Whatever happened to kindness being its own reward?

While this doubt had lingered in my mind for many years, it was a chain e-mail I got for Easter that, though meant to inspire and compel, really only served to highlight what I'd come to perceive as a self-deluded absurdity. You probably know the one, about the theology professor who offers donuts to his students and for each one he gives, whether they accept it or not, his star student has to do x number of push-ups, "So (name) can/not have a donut."

A better example is the opening scene of the Frank Oz film Housesitter, wherein architect Newton Davis (played by Steve Martin) presents an entire house as an engagement gift to his sweetheart, only for her to say, "No." This may or may not have been based on the tragic life story of Edward Leedskalnin, a Latvian sculptor who built Coral Castle to impress his betrothed after she left him at the altar.

It's all about expectations, and how your expectations of others should never play a role in your intentions.

When did "OMG, HOW I LOVE WHAT MY FANS DO FOR MEEEEE!" go from being a simple nicety to a litmus test for determining greed and authenticity? It's probably a little sad that the event that actually got me thinking about all this and digging up memories of my past and my religious views was Nintendo shutting down a fan-made, feature-length film based on the Legend of Zelda franchise (then again, I learned more about faith from Legend and Time Bandits than most any time spent in church, so it's not completely grabbing at straws). Called The Hero of Time, the film was produced entirely by volunteers over a period of four years. It was shown at a few film festivals and eventually uploaded to Dailymotion. Nintendo filed a cease & desist notice in 2009, but allowed the film to remain online until the end of the year.

As you might imagine, fans were outraged at Nintendo, with many forums and message boards bustling with outcries along the lines of, "How dare you! They're just fans who love the games so much. Who the Hell are you guys to crush their artistic spirit? George Lucas would never--" and so on and so forth. In all, the people the least bitter about the whole affair (at least, publicly) were the filmmakers themselves:

We understand Nintendo’s right to protect its characters and trademarks and understand how in order to keep their property unspoiled by fan’s interpretation of the franchise, Nintendo needs to protect itself — even from fan-works with good intentions.

In the time since, the group has developed two new projects, both of them original IPs. It begs the question of whether or not these new projects would be receiving as much attention as they are were it not for the icebreaker that was Hero of Time. It's a classic dilemma that artists face, how do they get noticed without risking alienating people with an unfamiliar property? On that note, if the team behind Hero of Time had approached Nintendo for permission in the first place, and Nintendo declined, what would they have done? Would they have simply gone ahead and only shown the film as a kind of demo reel to entice potential investors in their original projects? Follow up to that, would they have even considered carrying on with their original projects? I'd like to think they would, but somehow I can't fully subscribe to that notion.

The relationship between artists and their fans is a very complex one, existing in a kind of Schroedinger's Cat/Double Slit state of limbo where no one wants to peg down the barriers and limits of the relationship as doing so would undo it altogether. It's like that couple that has been together for years, but never talks about marriage, only to break up the moment the topic comes up and they realize they have different ideas about matrimony, even though they'd been living the dream fine and dandy up until then. It's as if the fans hate to be told that they're just fans in the eyes of their idols, albeit they'd be hard-pressed to lay down their credentials to the contrary. Even the "free advertising" or "good publicity" arguments don't hold up. On a satirical note, if you'd never heard of the Legend of Zelda and Hero of Time was not only your introduction, but the driving force that led you to give the games a try, then tell me, what's Mars like?

This sort of "Who's doing the bigger favor for who?" debate can really go on for days, even years (and have, in many circles), and while I'm all for keeping the debate open and giving equal consideration to all points from both parties, I wish we could get past the sticking points of expectations and entitlements as far as the fans go. To those fans who get riled up when some derived work they've invested in is shut down by the original creators, I understand your frustration, but what do you honestly expect? Lastly, to prove I'm not condemning your actions, I'll offer up an alternative in the form of an observation:

George Lucas is a fan of Akira Kurosawa, but Kurosawa never made a science fiction film.

Goodbye, Steve

2011-10-06T21:03:00.003-05:00

Top 5 Apple Products I Actually Like (reposted from Venusian Radio)

Steve Jobs passed away earlier this week, and for all the flak I give Apple for items like the iPad, iTunes, and the iPhone, I can't deny Apple's place in my life and in my heart. Believe it or not, there are actually some Apple products that I like, have owned, and genuinely wouldn't mind having. So, Steve, this one's for you.

Honorable Mention. Appleworks

Known today as iWork, Appleworks was Apple's answer to Microsoft Office as well as Microsoft Works, and it gave both of them a run for their money. It had far and away the best word processor I've ever worked with. I'm more familiar with its classic incarnation than its new style, but the omissions are more than made up for by what it offers in their place. Powerpoint may well be the best presentation software from a technical standpoint, but Keynote is a close second and offering a far more reasonable price point, plus it's far more user-friendly and intuitive than OpenOffice.org's Impress.

5. G4 Cube

Amidst the dull towers of Windows-based desktops and the goofy silicon heaps of iMacs, the G4 Cube rose up like a monolith and almost single-handedly re-wrote the rules for desktops. Taking a cue from its big brother, the NeXTcube, the G4 Cube not only made desktop towers more accommodating in terms of size and weight, but also made them fashionable. Usually, a tower is placed on the floor under a desk or immediately beside it like a dog. If towers ever got placed on a desk, it was tucked behind the monitor. The Cube, meanwhile, was not only small and lightweight enough to sit on top of a desk without any real problems, but it was also whisper-quiet so as not to add to the noise of an office space. In terms of design, it is quite literally a work of art; the Museum of Modern Art showcased an unmodified model complete with peripherals. It's really a shame the sales were so poor, and I really wish more desktops were designed as cubes.

4. iPod Nano (5th Gen.)

It really seems like Apple, following OSX, has been violently opposed toward people using their products creatively, at least not without throwing down a thousand dollars for Final Cut Pro. IPods by definition are media consumption devices, not meant for productivity on any level (except maybe for DJ's, but that requires additional hardware from third party manufacturers). However, with the 5th generation of the iPod Nano, Apple threw in not only a camera, but effects filters as well. In addition to the typical ones like monochrome, Apple threw in one that simulates the POV of the Terminator himself. Now that's the geeky kind of cool we expect from the original bad boys of personal computing.

3. Notebooks

Originally, I was going to put something like the original Quadra (the computer Myst was originally developed on) or one of the early PowerMacs, but after some thought, I realized I wasn't giving Apple its due credit in a very important area of personal computing.

Apple has never made a bad laptop.

I'd almost completely forgotten about the countless hours I spent playing Marathon and Marathon 2 on my dad's Powerbook. It was powerful and equally well-built. Even the Macbook Air has some great design elements; I like that it uses flash memory, giving it essentially few or no moving parts, an indispensable feature for any portable device.

2. Mac mini

This characterizes Apple's philosophy and attitude better than any other product in their lineup, for better or for worse. When the Mac mini was first introduced, sales of Dell computers were at an all-time high, thanks in no small part to a combination of the Home Shopping Network and a starting price point of around 400USD for a reasonably-equipped desktop. Apple's lowest priced desktop was at least twice that, and couldn't hold a candle in terms of performance. Put simply, Apple knew they were having trouble justifying their prices, regardless of their craftsmanship and quality of service, and were going to have to make a more budget-friendly computer. However, Apple is rarely one to give in, play nice, and follow the rules, so not only do they make a relatively inexpensive desktop computer, they make it one of the smallest, most compact, and downright cute desktops ever made.

1. Quicktime

Put simply, I owe my college education to Quicktime Pro. After struggling with some really annoying quirks in iMovie and not being able to afford Final Cut, I found out that Quicktime Pro was a surprisingly powerful editor for the price. Most people don't give it much credit for this, mostly because of the popularity of iMovie as well as the fact that nearly all editing functions of Quicktime Pro are handled through key commands, making it more like a kind of visual word processor than a non-linear video editor. It's only fault was not being able to actually capture footage from a camera, but that was only a problem if you were still using tapes and used FireWire for uploads. I had another editor that came free with a capture card, so I had that problem sorted from the start, leaving nothing between me and my short films. Every single one of them (except for one, which marked the last time I ever used iMovie) was edited using Quicktime Pro. The only reason I don't use it anymore is because I've used Windows XP since 2005 with occasional sojourns into the untamed wilderness of Linux, and Quicktime doesn't play too nice with others outside its comfort zone, even just for playback, which is the real icing on the cake. Still, you can be more than certain if I ever go back to Mac, it won't feel like I've returned home unless Pro is waiting there for me.

An Open Letter to Bethesda Software

2011-10-04T21:46:00.002-05:00

This is in response to the Mojang litigation, already in progress.
Okay, Bethesda, let's put things in perspective: You bought the Fallout property from Interplay instead of licensing it from them, released what basically amounted to Oblivion with a texture swap and a gimmicky aiming mechanic, sued Interplay for trying to spend the money you paid them, and now you're suing an independent developer over a trademark dispute that you now have no reason to sue over.

What the Hell am I missing here? I'm trying to give you guys the benefit of the doubt, but now I can't wish enough turmoil and misfortune upon you and everything you've built.

Seriously, I hope someone makes another point-and-click adventure using your game environments again; I'd call it Karma.

Writing To Do List (or Possible Death Warrant)

2011-08-13T00:01:00.004-05:00

Having completed CPU12F Is Missing in what is record time for me, I found myself looking back at all the other non-weblog writing projects that are currently in back burner status, all conceived long before CPU12F Is Missing (though not before the original musically-inspired daydream that led to it), and was rather surprised by how many there were. Normally, I'm of the mindset that the less time talking about intentions, the better, and that even listing the titles of these stories would effectively extinguish their little flames. However, because I'm rather depressed tonight for reasons I won't bore you with, I felt like just making a little list of them. Call it a mental exercise, a test of motivation, or simply a way for me to let off some "mopey mist" if you'll pardon the dopey metaphor, I'm not even sure which is really the case.

Castlemass not a sequel to Ladyhorse, but set in the same universe of The Broken Continent and an arbitrary fifty years after the events of that story. It is written as a pair of fragmented journal entries from a clergyman and a royal handmaiden exploring, with the aid of an elven guide, an old manor house set curiously in the middle of an archipelago. The structure would have an interactive angle, where one could choose which side of the story to read first, only being able to select the other half upon finishing the original selection (via a link at the bottom of the text page). It would only be after reading both that a third section would become visible, an epilogue sharing the fate of the two characters.

Mission of Thuele This is ultimately a more refined version of Castlemass that abandons the interactive aspect and focuses more on the "his and hers" (not he said/she said) element of the multiple perspectives device. This would be a more visual project than Castlemass in that the text of the story would be presented as handwriting on scraps of distressed parchment, each with a "chibi" of the speaking character set beside their respective journal fragments. I'm currently still hammering out the characters themselves, but the basic plotting is more or less done.

~~Horizons~~ (possibly canceled) This was originally meant to be written around November of 2010 with the intent of being finished by Thanksgiving.

It's listed as possibly canceled because of this movie's recent release. Granted, and at the risk of a bad pun, the distance between that film's plot and the plot of Horizons is astronomical, the only common thread between them being that they both deal with twin planets. However, Horizons (which is not set on earth, only an earth-like planet) deals with a somewhat primitive society lacking the sort of technology that would let them get a better idea of how closely their twin mirrors their own world whereas Another Earth is set on modern day earth and deals heavily with the implications of communicating with a global doppleganger. Also, Another Earth has a theme of second chances and the gravitas of difficult life choices, while Horizons is about an orphaned farm girl who hears something go bump in the night.
I haven't seen Another Earth, and I really don't care to (and early reviews I've heard have told me I'm missing nothing), but while I doubt many other people will, much less draw comparisons, even seeing posters for this film just feels like some kind of sign. It's not that I believe in fate, just that sometimes certain patterns and threads can become abundantly obvious and clear to us at opportune times and their message can often be, "Don't go there!" Stanley Kubrick had moments like that in his career, between his aborted biopic of Napoleon, fearing comparisons to the box office bomb Waterloo, and the canceled Aryan Papers, whose release would have coincided with Spielberg's Schindler's List, these are those missed opportunities that, on the whole, don't really result in much loss of sleep.
It's not giving up, it's just giving the floor over to that little voice in your head saying, "Oh, that's a terrible idea..." letting him get to and past, "... and here's why...." and finding that the little guy actually makes some really good points and isn't just a little contrarian out to ruin your day. It may sound defeatist, maybe even masochistic, but sometimes I don't mind being told, "You're wasting your time on this, go do something else." I even wonder just how many people on, say, American Idol, are genuinely relieved that Simon and Co. have told them they are not the next great musical sensation, how many just shrug their shoulders and say, "Ah, well, I guess I'll just have to do something else."

I'm not really sure where this is going, so for the sake of brevity, I'll end it here and see how I feel in the morning after I get some sleep.

Good night, and good luck.

Good Riddance (There, I said it)

2011-08-09T22:42:00.010-05:00

The Tweet
The Forum Thread

I'm on record saying I've never liked Extra Credits; I hated the way the show was produced, and I honestly hated that they were being paid for what they cobbled together and presented to us. Two hack writers and an overworked artist, and the best they could do was a five minute video, half of which was padded out with randomly-Googled images. At least when Yahtzee or Moviebob do that, they're at least integrated into their own personal art-styles and are far more relevant to the topic at hand. Also, Yahtzee and Bob are solo acts (and Bob makes two shows). I mean, think about that: Three people work on one show to produce what others do on their own and at best only match it in terms of production value.
My personal feelings about the show aside, here's two items of information that stick out for me:

On James: Using some of the fundraiser money (meant for Allison's Surgery and producing more episodes of Extra Credits) to start up a business. Dick move. That money was for Allison's surgery first, your personal projects... not even on the list.

On Alex: Granted, if I were in charge, I wouldn't pay Extra Credits a damn thing (see above), however, if you're having this much trouble keeping up with paying the people you choose to represent, it shouldn't surprise you that people are jumping ship. Pay people for their work, period. Turning around and asking them for money doesn't help things.

So, yes, I admit it: I'm glad Extra Credits is gone from The Escapist. I wish it were under better circumstances, I wish Allison (the artist for EC) wasn't in the middle of all this for something not her fault, and I wish it were as simple as EC doesn't like Escapist, but it isn't. So, to crib a phrase from John Stossel, "I want to say, 'Gimme a break!' but I don't know who to say it to."

UPDATE: Daniel Floyd, the co-hack of Extra Credits has said of people who donated to Allison's fundraiser and had their portions donated to starting the publishing company,

Yeah, if anyone approaches us saying they don't support the fund idea, I'm totally cool with the idea of returning their money. I don't know the logistics either at this point, having not received everything from Rockethub yet, but I totally agree with you.

The forum thread in question is here with the addendum that the Indie Gamer Fund is not a business, that "we won't take any money from the fund and any profits earned off titles published will go back into the fund to help kick start additional games"
So, they're not going to pocket the profits, they're going to use them to fund future projects... You know what, that's a business. Sure, it's not a "business" for the founders, since they're insisting they won't be profiting from it, but the developers of the games will, and while I want to say that's a good thing for independent game developers, I can't say I'm in great favor of the circumstances by which this operation has come to light. It's been established under false pretenses, that the money sent through the Rockethub event was to 1)Pay for Allison's surgery and 2)Produce more episodes of Extra Credits, effectively keeping Allison employed.

A Fabricated Encounter (from Facebook)

2011-08-03T23:31:00.003-05:00

The Facebook status message that started this:
PAY VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THESE INSTRUCTIONS: I would like my Facebook friends to comment on this status, sharing how you met me. But I want you to LIE. That's right, just make it up. After you comment, copy this to your status, so I can do the same. I bet HALF of you won't read the instructions.

to which I replied:
I was sabotaging a cruise ship with the intention of stranding the passengers to die a slow and painful death of starvation as a sacrifice to the ancient god Dagan. I was setting the detonator in the boiler room when you walked in on me, mistaking the room for the sauna. I thought you were going to try and stop me, but while I was explaining my evil plan (as all bombastic villains do) before silencing you, it turned out we actually worshiped the same evil deity and you'd even poisoned the entire food supply and were simply sticking around for a celebratory sauna. So, we fired up the jet skis and left that band of wayward travelers to their doom.

and in return:
The obelisk stood dusty in the dunes as I brush at them... frustrated at my situation. "Oh Lord DAGAN. Why must I unearth this damned monument?!" I yelled to nothing in particular. "Because he wishes it so," a voice from behind me called out startling me causing me to drop my brush. I looked back and spotted you setting down your backpack and breaking out a brush of your own. "The name's Matthew Joseph of the Great Dark Deepness, yourself?" I picked up my brush and returned to the delicate dusting of what looks like Dagan sitting atop a massive throne with men and women weeping at his feet and replied without looking at you, "Desiree of the Deep Weeping." The conversation went from Dagan to darker topics as the sun sank behind the larger dunes of the endless desert. The chittering of the hellflies dying on our buzz zapper makes us laugh as we continue our dark duty in the light of our new friendship.

This is seriously my new favorite thing right now. Thanks, Desi :)

A Question for Game Developers (also asked on Y!Answers)

2011-07-28T18:28:00.006-05:00

Developers' Thoughts on Let's Play Videos (S.978)?
So this S.978 bill is causing a lot of fervor among people on the web, mostly in terms of Let's Play videos. For those of you who don't know, a Let's Play (LP) is a largely unedited recording and streaming of a complete playthrough of a videogame. They're not exactly reviews as, well, movie reviews don't show you the whole entire film (they don't need to) while the critic reads their review. Basically, they're free shows instead of free samples.
Yet, I've been having arguments with people insisting that these playthrough videos HELP the industry, as in LPs are more effective (if not equally) as marketing tools than demos or rentals (wherein you'd actually play the game yourself) or reviews (which at most show brief clips). Someone told me they could furnish reports showing how they increase sales, but I'd rather hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
My question is, have any developers talked about LPs? Have any of them openly and explicitly praised LPs as a superior means to generating interest and getting word about their games out there than normal advertising methods? Basically, find me a quote from (let's say for the sake of argument) Dennis Dyack or one of the Bioware founders saying anything along the lines of, "if it weren't for those Let's Plays, we'd never see the kinds of sales figures we do now."

For me, I just can't see how watching someone play an entire game without paying anything to developers is a more effective marketing tool than seeing brief clips in a review or renting or downloading a demo of the game itself. How long does your test drive have to be before you decide whether or not you want to buy the car?

ADDED QUALIFIER: Avatar is the highest grossing film of 2010 and also the most pirated. Correlation is not causation, and I'll maintain that as the fallacy of that kind of defense until I hear it from a developer. Also, as a minor announcement: as much as I'd rather not do this, I've disabled Anonymous comments from this weblog. Say what you mean, mean what you say, and stand by it. If you really take issue with this bill, and can prove that LPs are essential to the point that making their production and distribution a felony will cripple the industry, stand and be counted.

Something of an update: Notch's adding of a gameplay video clause to the TOS of Minecraft doesn't count. Why? Because Minecraft relies on user-generated content; it's more of a virtual building tool than a game. Similarly, I wonder where Sony stands on gameplay videos for user-created levels in Little Big Planet?

S.978: What it is, what it isn't (culled from DevART Journal)

2011-07-09T19:55:00.007-05:00

This is just going to be a quick summation of random thoughts of mine regarding this bill that's circulating through Congress that may well be put into law in the coming weeks.

It's an amendment to existing copyright laws that includes digital streaming and distribution of copyrighted material.

*) It goes so far as to lay down a time frequency and monetary damage table, which lend the bill its nickname "The Ten Strikes Bill" referring to the frequency of 10 performances in a 180 day period, which not only applies to content "users" uploading the materials for viewing, but also to the viewers themselves. As for the monetary aspect, each of those "strikes" beyond the first ten is compared to legitimate and legal costs of the materials (say, buying the DVD, for example) is tallied and exceeds 2500USD (or 5000USD if compared to licensing fees, such as those a third-party content distributor such as some operation like Crunchyroll or Hulu).

*) The significance of laying down the figures for monetary damages goes all the way back to an old copyright case wherein some moron (I'm not going to bother looking up its specifics; the verdict is never used properly as a defense, anyway) got his sentence for copyright infringement reduced from a criminal charge to a civil charge because in the language of the law at the time, an illegal copy distributed at any price (even free) did not constitute theft because the number of unsold legal copies remained the same.

*) When I first read that defense, my first thought was: Okay, so it's not theft, it's counterfeiting. People who use that case as a defense to insist that piracy is not theft are missing the finer detail that getting a criminal charge reduced to a civil charge is a moral victory at best and a Pyrrhic victory at worst. I said once in another comment that this turn of events is akin to getting an attempted murder charge reduced to assault and battery because the victim was only rendered comatose from the gunshot wounds instead of dead. "I wasn't trying to kill him, I just wanted to beat the crap out of him... with bullets."

*) The reason why this bill is causing a fervor in the videogame community is that the bill supposedly has some vague wording regarding what constitutes copyrighted materials (though it doesn't look that way to me, based on those amendments I read). Here's the problem (according to them): The uploading and "broadcasting" of videogame footage falls under these stipulations, meaning that all gaming videos may well carry criminal penalties. What they're most upset about are Let's Play videos....

*) And here's where I roll my eyes, shake my head, point and laugh, call them all ignorant sluts... you get the idea.

*) The fear is that Fair Use as we know it is going to be rendered null and void by this bill, as the redistribution of ANY copyrighted material will carry criminal penalties regardless of the DMCA's rather lenient stance on copyright in the information age. Any and all videogame reviews and LPs, the paranoia continues, will become things of the past, and nothing will ever be reviewed, ever, unless permission is given by the copyright holder, effectively allowing corporations to control what people can and cannot say about their products. OH, HORROR OF HORRORS (insert backward question mark to stand in for irony mark as that character is not available to me to use here).

*) And to that anxiety and those who champion it, I say: Bullshit! and here's why:

*) I made this comment (approximately, I couldn't fit it all on YouTube due to character limits) on The Archfiend's video about this bill, about the whole "gatekeeping" portion of the fear-stricken goons' defense against s.978: There is a world of difference between something like an Angry VideoGame Nerd episode which uses brief clips from a game as part of an overall review, critique, and retrospective and a Let's Play video that shows Noah Antwiler playing through the entire single-player campaign of SWAT 4. An episode of Escape to the Movies with MovieBob showing clips of a film accompanied by a voiceover giving a brief synopsis and review of the film is far different than someone simply uploading Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon wholesale and unedited to a torrent for anyone to download for free.

*) In the end, the point is that I'm not worried at all about this bill, and don't feel one iota of pity for the people who will probably be affected by this. Reviews and critiques are not going anywhere, and I'm not going to shed a single tear for the potential passing of the Let's Play video as a format. Sure, I've watched a few, and even made a video entitled Let's Play Rampart (which, by the way, was a ten minute clip, presented as part of a longer review and retrospective, analyzing the game's historical significance, hence only being a Let's Play in name only), but do I think they qualify as fair use and are therefore entitled to the same protections reviews get under Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press?

Nope. Not at all.

Just because games are interactive doesn't make them any different from movies, books, television shows, or music. To say (as I've heard from certain idiots on YouTube) that a Let's Play video is not a form of piracy entirely because of the interactive nature of the game is effectively a contradiction and double-standard. Gamers had been saying for years that games did not deserve more strict regulation or censorship than books or movies, with the proponents of said strict censorships insisting that games being interactive set them above mere ratings or disclaimers like those of the MPAA or RIAA.

So, think about it, the people who were fighting for games to be treated equally with other media are now making the exact same arguments that the people they were rallying against were making in the first place, this time as a defense to lawmakers wanting games treated as any other media. You can't have it both ways. Either games get special treatment or they get treated like any other art/entertainment medium, simple as that.

*) I'll end with a declaration: People who unironically defend Let's Plays (of the complete walkthrough variety, especially) as legitimate forms of fair use are idiotic hypocrites, and deserve to be called as such.

Deleted bit from a DevART journal

2011-06-19T17:17:00.004-05:00

One of the key problems with epistolary literature (or really most anything told in the first person) is the simple fact that eventually what you're reading has to be written down. What you're reading is not only an account of an occurrence, but its an account given ex post facto. If you want a good example of the problem that this paradigm creates, read The Pit and the Pendulum by Poe. Tension in horror stories comes from us identifying with the main character, or otherwise relating to or feeling sorry for them, and being ultimately uncertain as to what will happen to them. So, unless the writer does that lame cliche of cutting off the narrator in mid-sentence (as even I've done), or leaving things on a cliffhanger promising a future account that will never be (something I've also done), the story is spoiled because you know they survive, at least intact enough to dictate the preceding memoir.

Epistolary Rough by *533497 on deviant ART

Two Things I've Just Learned from the IRS

2011-06-04T18:49:00.002-05:00

I got some bad financial news yesterday. Actually, it's not that terrible, but I do have to give about 75% of my tax refund back to the IRS because of some oversights they found in my return from 2 years ago (a return I've asked three times in six months for the transcript of yet haven't received).

(*) When I was fired from T-Mobile and went on unemployment, I cashed out my 401(k), something I'd been told was about the dumbest thing anyone can do. I understood this, but I didn't understand the extent to which this was a bad idea; I knew I would get less than if I'd waited, obviously, and that there would be deductions, but I didn't understand that I would be paying those deductions out of the final amount I'd receive. In short, I thought the deductions incurred when cashing out would effectively not be my problem. It turns out that when I was filling out the appropriate tax form for the 401(k) I was actually supposed to pay in 10% of the amount received, regardless of what the form's instructions said and calculations yielded. In other words, I thought the 10% for taxes was already taken out by the firm and paid for me as part of the transaction. After all, they spoke of the taxes in the same context as the deductions and final figure I'd receive, so I didn't have any reason to believe that more would be asked of me, especially when I filled out the tax forms (on which I even had help). Now that I think about it, here's a question: when I have taxes taken out of my paychecks, is the amount of the tax based on the gross or the adjusted gross after the money for the 401(k) is set aside? I think it's the latter, but I suddenly find myself unsure.

(*) Just prior to cashing out the 401(k) I'd gone through some debt consolidation. I had two cards through Chase bank, who had refused to let me merge the two accounts into one so I'd only have to pay one bill. So, I tried my best, but in my moving out to Missouri from New Mexico and adjusting to my new life with my then-girlfriend, I missed a payment. As a result of missing that one payment by a week, my minimum payment had now nearly doubled. It was more than my rent. Between that increase and the amount my other card's monthly payments came out to, it was practically double. I called Chase again to see if there was anything that could be done, to which they said no. I felt trapped and had no idea what to do, so my girlfriend suggested I call a credit counselor, something I'd been avoiding on a matter of pride. With said pride swallowed, I contacted a law firm, told them the situation, and they set to work talking the bank's amount down to something more reasonable that could be paid in smaller installments. Much of the balance by then were finance charges, so it turned out to be relatively easy to get those taken out. The problem is that the bank takes that difference between what you originally owed and what you agreed upon for a settlement, and reports it to the IRS as taxable income.

And there you have it, two financial matters I got schooled on in a single afternoon. It's a real torrent of emotions, but the only part of this whole issue that really has me mad is that this information comes from a tax form I've been repeatedly requesting for months. The only thing keeping me from sorting this all out sooner is that I have to wait for a document I'd already been waiting on and may well have to wait on further so I have all the information I need to make sure that I actually have to pay back the IRS. Hell, they even encourage me to wait on it as long as possible and give me multiple avenues for inquiring and contesting this adjustment. If they want a challenge, I'll happily give them one, regardless of who's in the right.

RIP Nokia E73 Mode (the autopsy)

2011-05-26T19:48:00.003-05:00

I wrote one of these about my Blackberry a long time ago, and now it's time to talk about what happened to my Mode.
I won't go into the full details of what led to the E73 going through the wash, except to say that it has to do with my leg surgery, the open incision I was left to manage, and the reasons for leaving the incision open after surgery. Suffice to say, things got a little gory one night, I had to take a shower, and threw my slacks in the wash in a slight panic. The sad thing is, I even checked my pockets. I just didn't check them thoroughly enough and even thought I'd already taken my phone out of my pocket.
It wasn't until I heard a repeated and loud "thump" coming from the dryer that I realized my phone wasn't on the bathroom counter where I thought I'd placed it.

Surprisingly, the phone actually worked after it dried... but only mostly. Here's where the story gets rather odd. I put my SIM card back in the phone and turned it on, only to find that it would turn itself off the moment I got to the main screen... then turn itself on all on its own, get to the main screen, and power off all over again. This cycle would repeat until the battery ran down. With the SIM card out, the story is very different; the phone turns on and stays on, but absolutely cannot and will not allow itself to be turned off. The only way to turn it off was to either wait for the battery to die, or remove it altogether.

I sat on the phone, debating what to do. I didn't have insurance on it (though I can't remember whenever I canceled that part of my phone plan), and I hadn't had it long enough to do another upgrade. At that point, it seemed the best option would be to contact Nokia about an Out-Of-Warranty repair. I went to their support site, found what I needed to do, and printed and filled out the form that would need to be enclosed with the phone on its journey back to Nokia for service. I checked the little box that noted the liquid damage, which made it an out-of-warranty issue. What was supposed to happen was that once they'd received the phone and inspected it, I would be contacted with an estimate for repairing the phone, and the operation would proceed from there. If it was too expensive, I'd just get an upgrade at less of a discount or simply keep the temporary phone I'd been using in the interim.

Nokia doesn't seem to get very many OOW service requests, as evidenced by what happened after I sent the phone out.

I was not contacted with an estimate. Instead, I found a small package in my mailbox with my phone inside and a note from Nokia stating that liquid damage invalidated the warranty and they could not repair the phone.

Obvious question: Then why is there an option to check "out-of-warranty" on the service request form, and instructions stating that I would be contacted if this turned out to be the case?

At first, I was furious, it seemed that Nokia basically ignored exactly what I'd told them on their own paperwork after following their instructions completely and to the letter. I called them in a mad huff, expecting to be confronted with full-on denial about their being able to do OOW repairs at all. Somewhat luckily, it turned out that they had abided by their own policy and procedure, but simply didn't tell me prior to returning the phone that it was simply beyond repair for them, regardless of any price that could be paid. They couldn't fix whatever was wrong with the power switch, but simply wrote it off as "not covered by warranty" despite that being established from the start, making me think they hadn't looked at the service request form in the first place.

In short, the Nokia E73 Mode, despite technically surviving a round in the wash, is considered totaled in the eyes of Nokia despite its ability to turn on and run all of its offline applications without a SIM card in it.

Democracy is Not My Friend

2011-05-26T19:29:00.001-05:00

Well, when I checked on the survey I posted to DevART regarding the film that needs defending, I found that nearly each item has one vote. Granted, I don't have that many followers (or at least followers who care to hear my awful voice), but I was kind of hoping it'd spark a little more interest. As a result, I've had to take a slightly unscientific approach to choosing. In addition to the survey results, I've gotten a comment essentially voting against two of the titles, which I'm counting to cancel out two of the votes on the survey.

Of probably more importance is the fact that I hate my template. It looked cool, but I hate that I can't actually see replies on the page. I see them in my dashboard, but that just strikes me as pointless. I also hate that I can't see when replies are posted, but that may just be how tumblr is. Anyway, the point is that I need a new template and can't be bothered to learn CSS (I don't even know how I modified my Blogger page's template), so please suggest one to me.

I prefer minimalism, but I love data. I like light text against dark backgrounds, and want to see replies to my posts on the page instead of just my dashboard.

Those are my stipulations.

Here, there, everywhere...

2011-05-18T21:38:00.004-05:00

It's been a long time since the last post because I've been focusing on my art instead of my writing, which it should be known by now, is how I've operated creatively for years (don't ask about my Flickr stream, that's gathered enough dust to cut off the robot empire's power supply were it kicked up into the air).
However, more recently a number of my friends from DeviantART have all gotten Tumblr pages and have been asking me to jump on the bandwagon.
Technically speaking, there's virtually nothing that separates Tumblr from Blogger from LiveJournal from (you get the idea) except for a slightly slicker user interface and a few more options as far as just what exactly can be posted. As such, when I finally gave in and decided to get an account, I set a rule for myself that I would only post things there that I couldn't do just as well here on Blogger or DeviantART or Flickr. If anything, I might only consider something like that if I have to abandon one of those accounts for some reason, like getting hacked or banned. After a brief survey on my DeviantART page that yielded neither a definite yes or definite no on any of the ideas listed, I kind of did the dictator thing and went with what I kind of half-had in mind all along, which was a podcast.
Without going into the long and technical details of why that's never really an easy thing to set up on a weblog or why Tumblr is better suited for the task than Blogger, the reason for choosing it is that, apart from a regular webcomic, it's the one thing I've never really tried. The show would be irregularly updated, would cover a wind range of topics, and be mercifully short at about 5-6 minutes in length (I'm really not up for the stream-of-consciousness banter of something like Fast Karate for the Gentleman or the erudite panel discussions of The Greatest Movie EVER! podcast, and I don't think anyone else really is either). Also, as the show would progress, I'd start to include 1-2 minute pre-recorded guest segments, which could either be pre-arranged for upcoming topics and/or rebuttals for previous episodes' contents.

LIFE UPDATE:
I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon for Albuquerque and will be back Saturday afternoon. My brother is graduating from Med School, and this will be the first time I get to see my niece Fiona apart from photos on my brother's and sister-in-law's Facebook pages.

The truth is I'm actually really ambivalent about the trip, and the stress feels like it's giving me ulcers. Without getting into the whole tension-and-drama business that's effectively gone on in my family for at least the past 10 years following my parents' divorce (which will reach the 11-year mark this June), there's a distinct possibility I'll spend a large part of the trip repeating the phrase, "I don't care."
Okay, here's a little detail: My dad and my brother are, at present, not speaking. Am I surprised? No, not really Do I care? Again, no. Trouble is, in this family (chiefly my mom and at times my brother, which is a whole other matter I won't go into), having no opinion means I'm a blank slate that can have written endlessly upon it all the details of the transgression that I really couldn't care less about. If I sound like I'm overreacting, it's entirely possible that I am, but I'm working from a premise of this happening in the past. At its core, it's a lot of trust issues, hearsay, paranoia, cognitive dissonance, and even retcons, all of it completely baseless and unwarranted, yet persisting regardless. Having a difference of opinion or viewpoint is seen as having something horribly wrong with you, and there is no such thing as irreconcilable differences. In other words, half of the family has been able to adapt and cope in the wake of the divorce, the other half hasn't. That's not to say one side is right and one side is wrong, simply that they are fundamentally incompatible and have difficulty co-existing.

Then there's the flight: I can't stand flying. it's not so much a fear, per se, just that it's hardly my preferred method of travel:
1) Driving
2) Train
3) Bus (maybe, I haven't been, personally)
Also, I hate the Goddamn TSA. Once upon a time, I was one of those saying with full confidence and a straight face, "a little loss of privacy is fine for the sake of security." Now, however, I can't say that anymore, because it's gone too far. The enhanced pat-downs and strip-ray machines are as invasive as they are completely and utterly ineffective.
What's really funny about the whole thing is that when these machines (and gropings) were introduced, the proponents kept mentioning the Underwear Bomber as part of their case.

Here's the punchline: neither of these methods would have spotted him.

Amidst that, the "Don't touch my junk" phenomenon, and a story I'd read about a rather embarrassing incident involving the urinary apparatus of a cancer survivor, the TSA is a total failure on nearly every level that a government organization can. This is no longer security, this is paranoia (though I'll admit it's not comforting hearing of potential retaliatory attacks in the wake of Bin Laden's death when you're planning a flight).

That's it, I'm done, I need sleep.

Let's try something a little different...

2011-02-11T22:30:00.000-06:00

"Polaroid PoGo CZA-05300B Instant Digital Camera | Overstock.com"

Two Random Thoughts About Batman

2010-12-25T23:24:00.007-06:00

Not much of a Christmas present, I know, but I've got half an hour, and there's a distinct possibility I've had too much to drink, so while this entry is significantly less refined than previous, I won't even request that you take it with a grain of salt due to the circumstances. After all, the first thought is just something I've noticed now re-watching Batman, and the second is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a few weeks.

1. Stairs seem to be a rather crucial motif in the first Batman film. Consider, for instance, the gunfight at Axis Chemicals at the beginning. Napier keeps climbing higher and higher, only to fall that much farther when he's scarred and disoriented I(symbolic of his rise to power, maybe?). There's also the odd, though clearly intentional, parallel of the "after dinner" segment of Vicki Vale's date with Bruce Wayne and her eventual abduction by the Joker, him leading her up the stairs of the cathedral. In the first case, she's clearly on the offensive, actively pursuing Wayne, just shy of outright seducing him. In the second instance, the roles are reversed and given a distinctly darker twist, and with Bruce replaced by the Joker, previously shown to be clearly obsessed with Vicki. One could probably write a book or two on the gender-role subtext of this motif, but it makes for a far more interesting meditation on the notion and dangers of obsession.

2. I won't go into it full-force here, but my biggest problem with The Dark Knight is that the overall plot feels like it's a string of loosely-connected vignettes whose only common thread is that they're all schemes by the Joker to cause chaos. Granted, that's the idea, and there's obviously still plenty to like in the film in spite of this, but cohesiveness is an essential strength to any movie, regardless of the volumes of established lore behind its source material.
Put simply, if I were in charge of making The Dark Knight, entailing that I'd have to tackle getting The Clown Prince of Crime onto the big screen with all the menace he's thus far conveyed on the small screen and comic book page, I would essentially reduce the Joker to his core concept and spread it as thinly as I could. In essence, I'd take a cue from Batman Beyond and make the Joker a "Gang" of sorts. Actually, it would be more a "successive collection," but in a more abstract sense than something literal like the film Fallen where a consciousness is transferred physically from person to person.
The pitch, in a nutshell, is thus: by the time the film opens, the Joker is already either dead and buried, or incarcerated with absolutely no chance of escape. However, the whole rest of the film would boil down to Batman dealing with copycats, all very different from one another in terms of M.O.s and patterns, but all sporting the same makeup and reckless abandon for life and morality. The resolution of Batman's character arc would therefore be the realization that he will never truly defeat his longtime foe or crime in general for that matter. Of course, he'll decide to fight in spite of the attrition, but the agony could still surely be felt.
To put it in another and even smaller nutshell: I'd have multiple actors playing the Joker.
If the whole notion sounds silly and far-fetched to the point of completely straying from the path, it really isn't. The concept of a "foe of many faces" has been done before; the villain known as The Red Hood historically was comprised of only one Real McCoy, with a series of copycats following thereafter, the Joker and even a former Robin ironically among them.

TRON LEGACY (culled from DevART Journal)

2010-12-21T23:02:00.005-06:00

As long as it's on my DevART journal, I might as well post this portion of that entry here:

TRON LEGACY... Awesome. Simply Awesome. Whatever definition you attach to the word "awesome," throw it out and build up a new one, remembering that "awe" is the first syllable and you'll have an inkling of an idea of what seeing this movie was like for me. Sure, I have a few nitpicks and complaints, but it's kind of like when I saw the H2G2 movie; given everything that stood in that movie's way, that it exists at all is about as fulfilling a feeling of vindication as any success it endured thereafter.
If I do have one regret, it's honestly that I saw it in 3D.
The 3D is fine... for 3D scenes. Everywhere else (namely the real world), the glasses just put a yellow-green haze over everything. The worst part is the movie seems to be aware of this, but won't quite own up to it; at the beginning, we're treated to a rather odd title card (this isn't a direct quote, it's just the best I can recall):

The following 3D presentation has scenes that were shot in 2D. This is intentional and how the film was produced.

Please do not remove your 3D glasses for these segments.

In other words, unlike Avatar, which was fully shot in 3D or How to Train Your Dragon, which was fully CG and could therefore be easily switched between 2D and 3D, Tron was only partially shot in 3D, the remainder being 2D and only partly converted later. At one point, I ignored the title card's demand to leave the glasses on and slipped them off for one of the early scenes to find not even so much as a ghosting effect around anything or anyone, a tell-tale sign of the conversion process in any 3D film. I shouldn't be mad, as I guess the alternative would be an immersion-breaking interjection cuing the audience to put on or take off the glasses. Still, I wouldn't have been disappointed if I never saw it in 3D. When it hits the second-run theaters, and if it does so in a 2D format, it's definitely getting at least one more re-visit from me. Hell, I'm wrestling with seeing it again now. The last film to have that kind of effect on me was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which I did see twice in theaters*.

Yes, I'm generally that hard to impress and my taste in films is that hard to place and predict.

*(How to Train Your Dragon was close, but not quite there).

Work Ethic Quick Notes

2010-11-07T00:55:00.005-05:00

I don't know how long I spent writing Ladyhorse.

My re-write of The Sacrifice was done in a sitting, a rather arduous one. The original 1999 (98?) version was written in a single session as well, and I remember it coming to me very easily.

The story I'm writing now, which is not part of NaNoWriMo since it's only a short, began around November 1st, maybe earlier, with a deadline of Thanksgiving (so it's earlier than NaNoWriMo), and that's turning out to be one of the most difficult things I've ever written. I'm quite literally not happy with any of it. I think the problem is that while I stand behind the idea itself, the story requires too much simile and metaphor to work at conveying its imagery, and that can get a little too flowery for me.

The closest thing to a novel I've written was a five-act play written around 1998. It took me 2 years to write, longer if you count the 50-plus scraps that were eventually consolidated into the work, making for its 75-plus main characters. I'm never posting it or showing it to anybody. I'd rather tell the story of how I got the idea to consolidate the stories, because it is kind of hilarious (and I can say that because it wasn't my idea):

These stories were all set in relatively the same universe, and I had envisioned a kind of crossover culminating in a singular ending (I'll just say one word about it: Dallas), but only thought of that ending, nothing about the interaction of the separate characters. One day, I was in the school library, writing a story of a soldier becoming a doctor. A friend (of sorts) walked by and asked what I was doing. I told him I was writing. He asked, "Fiction?"
"Yeah," I replied, "And it's going about as well as the other stuff I've written." He looked interested, and said as much, with the prospect of being able to offer me advice since he'd written much himself. I told him that the problem with how I write is that I always have an idea of a beginning, and I more or less know how I want the story to end, but it's making the connection between the start and stop that gets to me. Believing he knew where I was going, he nodded and finished my sentence:
"Because you always want to introduce new characters, new situations."
I shook my head, "No, it's not so much that...." I stopped that sentence dead in its tracks after realizing that his complaint made for really good advice. I asked, "What did you just say?" like one of those Mel Brooks moments where you first dismiss or even laugh at an idea, but the moment you speak your dissent is the same moment you realize it's complete genius:
"Maybe we should send the dummies into battle."
"Ha!" One one-thousand, "Hmm...."

The best advice I ever got about writing came from my Western Civilization professor during my freshman year at UNM. He said that the first sentence of your essay (or anything you're writing, for that matter) should sound like it has absolutely nothing to do with what the paper is about. It's kind of hard to elaborate on what exactly that means or entails, but here's the best example I can think of, the opening sentence to John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids:

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

The novel, for those of you who don't know, is about ambulatory, carnivorous plants with venomous tongues that have a ten-foot reach and target the eyes, yet those are not the worst thing going on in the world when the story starts.

Civilization by Committee (Metropolis Tezuka/Rintaro)

2010-11-06T22:21:00.003-05:00

I never thought the time would come when I'd actually get to use the following analogy to describe a film.

Take the DeLorean, the DMC-12, arguably the most famous (if not most recognizable) car in film history. Despite its place in pop culture and history, in terms of automotive design, it's something of a spectacular failure. The fact is, no single element of this car's design is uncool or ill-conceived, but putting them all together on the same car simply doesn't work. The Double-Y chassis designed by Lotus gave the car's mid-engine layout fantastic handling, but the stylish gull-wing doors gave it too high a center of gravity to take advantage of it. The stainless steel body looked striking enough, but was almost impossible to maintain. The engine was a collaboration of three great automakers, yet their combined efforts were staggered by changes made to comply with United States emissions standards.

Rintaro's Metropolis is a DeLorean.

Perhaps it's a matter of expectations being too high, but I was really disappointed by this film. Of course, when your story is patterned after one of the most influential and iconic films of all time, it can be a heavy and cumbersome premise to run with. Imagine if Disney decided to start making films based on the works of William Shakespeare rather than classic fairy tales. There would be no denying the visual craftsmanship, but Disney's usual vibrantly charming animation style and art direction would undoubtedly clash with the dark and subversive tone of something like Titus Andronicus. Dark twists on Disney characters have worked in past instances such as the Gargoyles television series, the Kingdom Hearts games, or some of the lesser-known Mickey Mouse comics like The Throg Ray Wars, but a tragedy about a roman general whose daughter is physically mutilated and takes his revenge by making a meal of her attackers served to their own mother would simply be going too far. Metropolis has this same issue of tonal conflict in that the themes it deals with are done a massive disservice by its presentation. Maybe if the character designs were a little less cartoonish and cuddly, or if the backgrounds were less busy and realistic. Maybe if the score were either a more traditional orchestra or a full-on jazz ensemble throughout instead of jarringly flip-flopping between them at rather inappropriate times. Maybe if there had been a little more clarity of vision to the art direction and design, perhaps there would be fewer distractions that break the immersion into an otherwise beautifully-crafted world. Sadly, however, they distract only from deeper flaws. Beneath the visuals and sounds lay the plots and characters. This is where substance has a chance to step forward and let style save face. Sadly, it doesn't fare much better.

The plot of Metropolis is rather cluttered and scatterbrained, littered with false starts and half-baked ideas, but it's ultimately linear enough that a decent summation can be given before addressing its flaws. The film begins with the celebration of the finished construction of a building called The Ziggurat, a massive tower in the center of the city. There is some unrest surrounding the building's construction because of suspicions that its purpose is completely military and not at all civil. These suspicions are correct as the ziggurat's crowning feature is a device capable of generating sunspots, which causes chaotic interference with all electromechanical devices, namely robots. The weapon is controlled from a single room adorned with an ominous-looking throne. As for who sits in the literal seat of power, Duke Red, the lead military authority in Metropolis, hires the mad scientist Dr. Laughton to construct a new kind of android not only indistinguishable from a normal human, but also modeled after his deceased daughter. The duke's intention is for Tima to take the throne and be the main controlling component of the weapon. Rock, Duke Red's adopted son, feels this plan is all wrong and that it should be the Duke himself who takes the seat. The conflict stems from Rock's resolve to seek out Dr. Laughton's secret lab and stop him from completing construction of Tima. Coincidentally, Laughton is being pursued by Detective Shunsaku and his nephew Kenichi, who rescues Tima from the wreckage of the lab following its destruction by Rock.

The first and most obvious problem that arises from this premise is a question of motivation on Duke Red's part. Why would he want a robot in control? Is it some kind of stalemate tactic, with a robot not recklessly using a weapon that affects other robots? If that's the case, why would the robot be made in the image and given the impression of being the duke's own daughter? If she thinks she's human, wouldn't she then make human decisions? On the other hand, if we look at it from the superhuman angle (as Duke Red and Dr. Laughton insist Tima is), why would a superior being be concerned with or have a better viewpoint of the petty affairs of lesser beings, let alone be in charge of the arsenal? There are just too many factors to see the logic in this plan.

Speaking of multiple factors, the second glaring flaw this film has is that it has no singularly apparent protagonist. At first, we might think Kenichi is the hero and, for all intents and purposes, he is despite being notably absent if not literally unconscious for nearly one-third of his total screen time. More often than not, he serves as a kind of bargaining chip to lure Tima out of hiding; Rock uses a forged letter from him to lure her out of Duke Red's home, and Duke Red himself keeps Kenichi captive in the ziggurat, knowing that his detective uncle will have Tima use her superhuman powers to search for him, thus bringing her to her potential seat of power at the ziggurat. It's an ironic (even cute) twist on the damsel-in-distress trappings of an adventure story, but Tima is too underdeveloped as a character to make it a full role-reversal.
Later on, we're introduced to Rock, whom we almost are led to believe is the real lead (especially if you knew going in that he's an original character created for the film, which I didn't). His should be the most interesting character arc, desperately trying to gain his adopted father's approval yet not being able to keep silent about his father's irrational and immoral decisions. That he doesn't understand his father's plan should make him the audience-identification character given that we don't understand the plan, either. However, he's just too unlikeable to relate to; normally, we can forgive an arrogant anti-hero's antics because of the faults of his personal life or because he eventually commits some redeeming act of selflessness or kindness (Save the Cat, as screenwriters say), but this latter action never comes to pass. He enters as a dastardly antagonist, and exits as one as well, leaving only a body count in his wake.
Detective Shunsaku could have also made a good lead, but he only comes center stage and into his element after Kenichi is taken by Duke Red. When introduced, he comes across as comedy relief, second fiddle to his nephew (again, the one we first believe to be the hero). Even during his separation from Kenichi following the destruction of Laughton's lab, he only offers occasional points of insight before resorting to his usual pratfalls and farcical misadventures. All this just makes his taking the wheel toward the finale that much more unprecedented and difficult to take seriously. Playing the fool in act one only to come out on top before the final curtain is a difficult trait to have in a hero because it throws the audience for a loop and breaks their relationship to the character, which is why more often than not it's reserved for villains or other traitorous denizens of fiction. The only other surefire way it works on heroic terms is when the narrative turns its focus to how the supporting cast reacts to these seemingly out-of-character moments by the lead(*), but this doesn't happen as no one is surprised by or ever doubts his actual competence.
As for the supporting cast, two of the characters who could have made decent contributions to the plot are rendered virtually ineffectual by the same revolving-door narrative structure that marginalizes the main cast. Pero, Detective Shunsaku's city-appointed android assistant, for example, serves the Red Dwarf's Kryten-esque role of "Exposition on Legs" minus any actual personality or relevance, making his death as pointless as that of the man who caused it. That man is Atlas, whose name is an unsubtle reference to objectivism(**), our second-most useless character. Between his late entry and hasty exit, coupled with the fact that the most interesting part of his character arc is his staring match with Pero at the onset of his workers' revolution, he's only one rung on the ladder above Pero in terms of importance to the story. Furthermore, the very revolution he's essentially the face of is by far the least important subplot of the film, which is a shame given how central the workers' revolt was in the original Metropolis. They speak out against the upper class, but their violence is directed at the machines they insist took their jobs, one of which is described as being too dangerous for humans to do in the first place. Overall, the revolt just comes across as incompetent and misguided; One scene a pair of Zone 1 citizens can be seen curb-stomping a robot, and the next scene an entire crowd of them are standing in awe of a firefighting robot putting out a burning building in their zone. For them to then take to the streets and massacre every robot they come across only emphasizes how misdirected the revolt is. Of course, it is entirely possible that the robot massacre is merely a prelude to what should be their real and proper objective of storming the ziggurat, which ends in a slaughter before they get to the front gate, but that just raises more questions about their motives. If the ziggurat was their real target, and the robots were not hindering them (except for Pero to stand in the middle of a very wide street and calmly advise that their demonstration disperse), why the massacre? Sure, the workers' revolt in Lang's Metropolis was equally misguided and needlessly violent, but that's because it was deliberately misguided by a plant in their own ranks. Atlas is no plant, so our only conclusion about him is that he's just an idiot leading a herd of sheep through a minefield. That's not sympathetic, that's suicide.
It's entirely possible that these casualties of characterization and plot development are redeemed by having more fleshed-out backstories and exposition in the original manga. This, however, I cannot accept as a saving grace to the film, or any film adaptation for that matter. An adaptation should do justice to its source material but ultimately stand alone. If the film can't be bothered to tell us enough about Atlas to make him an important character, then the film shouldn't have him in it. If a point made in the source can't be expanded upon or at least done justice in the film, it needs to be omitted and worked around. It's the same problem I have with The Last Airbender and every Harry Potter film since the third one, with them feeling less like adaptations and more like ancillaries. Lastly, even if one were to try and take the source material into consideration as a way of making up for all the film's shortcomings, it would do no good because not only is Rock an original character created for the film (and thus has no excuse), but much of the remaining cast members are actually borrowed from Tezuka's other works, so it's practically impossible to judge them in terms of the source material because they were quite literally never there to begin with.
As it stands, Rintaro's direction of Tezuka's Metropolis fails as a film, on both the style and substance fronts. It's a spectacular failure, true, but a failure nonetheless.

(*)The Irresponsible Captain Tylor is a textbook example of this formula and how it can work effectively as a narrative structure.

(**)Which has absolutely nothing to do with any of the themes explored in any version of Metropolis. In fact, if any character in Metropolis (2001/1927) exemplifies objectivism, it's Laughton/Rotwang (respectively), and they rank among the villains, so it's either a misnomer or a condemnation. Take your pick.

F--- Hughesnet

2010-11-04T16:50:00.004-05:00

Hopefully, I can get through writing this. When I got my new job back in July, the new income permitted me to move to a place where I could get high speed internet through a cable provider. The old place was too rural and couldn't have cable, leaving dial-up and satellite the only options. Enter Hughesnet, with their limited data connnection of 200MB/day, mediocre customer service, 80USD/month bills for so-called service, and 400USD early termination fees (despite only being an internet provider. Until the day of cancellation, I actually thought the ETF was 200, like a cell provider or most cable services; they offer more than web services, yet the web-only provider charges more. Still, I cancelled, resolving to pay the final 400 over time.
Today, I just get home from work and find a letter from Hughesnet showing a final balance 300USD over the previous one of 400. The extra was a returned equipment fee, because in the move I'd managed to leave the modem in the trunk of my car well past the 45 day return window. I called in to see about waiving the fee if I sent it in this week, only to find out from them that I don't even have all the equipment. It turns out, in addition to the modem and power supply, which I confirmed with them by phone the day I cancelled the service, I have to include something called the Radio Assembly, part of the receiving dish outside in the front yard of a house I moved out of 3 months ago. I have no idea if it's still there. Customer service insisted they not only told me about the Radio Assembly, but also e-mailed me instructions on how to disassemble the dish. I didn't read this e-mail because, as I told them today, I was only told of the modem's return. Why would I need/read directions in identifying a modem and its power supply? Their notes on that call I made back on the 14th are vague, saying only that the "equipment" must be returned, with no details beyond that. So, nearly 1000 is owed to an internet provider because of a 100USD modem (that can be returned right away) and a 200USD dish component that may or mat not be there after all this time.
I'm literally having trouble breathing, and I feel like I'm about to pass out as I can't seem to take a deep enough breath. I'm taking breaks as I write this to catch my breath to quell the dizzy sensation, and I don't even have asthma.
I found out just after the call to Hughesnet that I became an uncle for the third time this morning, and now I can barely stand up because of a stress attack over some stupid bill.

EDIT: It's been about four hours, and I'm a little better (and adding tags). I drove by my old house on my way to get food, and luckily the dish is still there, so I'll come by tomorrow, meet the new owner, and get to work disassembling the dish. I wonder, though, if someone moves into a house and gets the same satellite service, would Hughesnet get them a new Radio Assembly? If so, what happens to the old one, given that while it doesn't technically get sent back by the previous owner, it does get handled by a professional installer with connections to the company?

vii Favorite Movies With Numbers in the Titles That Are Not Sequels

2010-10-29T22:01:00.006-05:00

2001: A Space Odyssey
32 Short Films About Glenn Gould
THX-1138
7 Samurai
District 9
The 10 Commandments
Plan 9 from Outer Space

Honorable Mention:
Godzilla 2000 , technically speaking, none of the Godzilla films are exactly sequels, more like episodes, akin to James Bond films or the works of Kevin Smith. There may be ties (especially if it involves Mechagodzilla), but each film, by its very nature, stands alone. If nothing else, Godzilla 2000 has the weakest ties to the other films in the series.

10 of My Favorite Movies With One-Word Titles:

2010-10-29T21:36:00.008-05:00

Labyrinth
Hero
Rashomon
Powaqqatsi
Unbreakable
Casshern
Strike
L'atalante
Solaris
Metropolis

You know what I hate about Stephen King?

2010-10-22T17:36:00.004-05:00

The damned colloquialisms.

Whether it's:

"F--- me, Freddy" in Dreamcatcher,

"Shoot a Pickle" in The Tommyknockers,

"Doodly-Damn" in Cycle of the Werewolf (thankfully excised from Silver Bullet),

or any other that I can't remember, they're omnipresent and annoying. They grind the story to a screeching halt and never sound natural coming out of anybody. Maybe the problem is simply that I've never in my entire life actually heard anyone say any of these things. Whenever I hear someone in the story say them, they never seem to be in the right context, and even READ like they were afterthoughts. As dialogue in film or television adaptations, they sound even more clunky and forced. It completely kills the immersion and utterly deflates the terror.
Of all the criticisms I can level at King's work, this is the only one I can never forgive and move on from (except maybe the name-branding and pop-culture references).

Okay, this could pose a problem...

2010-10-20T21:14:00.000-05:00

I just found out that when I post a weblog entry, the date it sets is not actually the date it gets published, but the day the draft was created (or last saved, I can't quite tell). This made my horror movies for non-horror movie fans list show up as being posted on the 15th of October rather than the 18th, making the whole "13 days until..." motif rather embarrassingly erroneous, if only in appearance.

This strikes me as very odd. I mean, why would I want the "post" date to be based on when I wrote the draft as opposed to when I actually publish the post? After all, when a film is copyrighted, it's copyrighted the year of its theatrical release, not the moment post-production concludes or principal photography wraps or the script is approved. Many films have been sidelined by distributors (would-be or otherwise) for years following post-production. Video games have a similar problem, especially considering the games that are imported from Japan. I recently heard about a game called Hydlide, an RPG released back in 1985 in Japan but not released in the US until some four or five years later. In terms of technology, even back then, that was practically a generation gap, akin to comparing Phantasy Star II (1989) to Final Fantasy VIII (1999) or even The Tower of Druaga (1984) to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (2000).

Of course, that's overstating the situation as we're only talking about a few days or maybe weeks, but it's not as if I wrote the entry out in full and then let it sit in the posts list for weeks before publishing it. Even if that were the case, I'd still give it a once-over, and I know there would be changes to make, whether they were needed or not.
It's a problem I've had since maybe even high school; no matter how much preliminary writing I'd do, I'd end up doing a first-page rewrite the night before. I wouldn't even look at that first draft for guidance. Of course, that had as much to do with me having already internalized my notes on the given subject as any sort of dissatisfaction or disassociation with that early draft. This habit reached its apex in college and at one point I was very overwhelmed with something like four papers in three consecutive days.
The truly ironic part, though, was that I'd always get better grades on those rushed essays than the few essays that I'd write early on and finish weeks before the due date, as though they were the control factor in an experiment. At worst, I'd get a B on a hasty and agonizing re-write.
People tell me this is a great ability, and sometimes that they even envy me for it. The fact is, I hate it. I hated that my last-minute forehead-bleeding sessions got better results than works I'd planned out in advance and got done early. It cheapened the accomplishment and left me feeling like I'd put a gun to my head as some sick means of self-motivation. It's like when you start nodding off on a long drive and, instead of doing the sensible thing and pulling over, slap yourself as hard as you can. Sure, you've made great time, but the stinging sensation on your palm and cheek doesn't go away as quickly as it should and you feel like a tool for hitting yourself. It's like how I imagine Bruce Banner feels when he makes himself get angry and reluctantly unleash The Hulk.
It never helps that I already sweat over every word I write, regardless of time, even if it's a reply to a comment on something I've written or a thank-you note for a birthday card. I worry over everything and find myself playing out every possible outcome of the scenario, from jovial conversation to excruciating fall out. Maybe it's some subconscious fear of dying and the inevitable reality that ultimately my words survive me, as they ultimately do for everyone.

So, yeah, Blogger turned out to have a weird set-up with drafts and publishing dates. Good thing I caught it now before I finished a few other time-sensitive journal entries.

Lastly, random fact about me: I hate saying goodbye. Hearing it is somewhat tolerable, but overall it just depresses me. I think I can cite the moment when it began getting to me, but it would only be a supposition and giving that event far too much credit. So, if you're the first to say goodbye, and there's a pause before I reply (with anything BUT goodbye), that's the reason.

Good night, and good luck. (Haven't closed a journal with that phrase in years. I like it, even if my theater background makes me averse to wishing good luck. Come to think of it, I should really see that movie again; the last time I saw it was in the theater.)

Horror For All!

2010-10-18T19:17:00.000-05:00

As Stephen King pointed out in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, horror comes in three flavors: Terrify, Horrify, and Gross-out. Gross-out is self-explanatory, best represented by films like the Saw series (which will plague us for, hopefully, the last time with this year's installment), Turistas, and anything made by Herschell Gordon Lewis, the Godfather of Gore. Horrify is less obvious, but just as straightforward in concept; it refers to what's commonly called the jump scare, anything that's only really scary because it startles us with its abruptness and unexpectedness, playing on our flight-or-fight response hardwired into our very being by evolution itself. Terrify, lastly, is the hardest to describe as it relies neither on visual stimuli or instinctive reactions to make itself known. Rather, it works by what it doesn't do but makes you think it will.
One might think, then, that this makes for three different types of horror movies, one for each form of fright. However, in terms of horror movies, there's more like two, with Terrify serving as a kind of guiding principle for the other two to follow. In fact, Terrify is so vague as a principle that some of its best cinematic examples are not even horror movies. Films of the Gross-Out variety, on the other hand, tend to "preach to the choir" so to speak, while those of the Horrify ilk rise above the one-trick pony quality of their gory kin and tend to draw the bigger crowds.
What follows, in honor of having only 13 days until Halloween, is a list of films that favor the Terrify variety of horror, and only occasionally employ the Horrify strategy, but all generally steer clear of the Gross-Out ideology. In other words, these are horror movies that really anyone can enjoy; not many people like to get grossed out, but deep down, almost everyone likes to get scared on some level, even if only at one particular time, like a certain holiday.

KAIDAN:
This Oscar-nominated anthology based on Japanese legends collected and published by Lafcadio Hearn is as eerie as it is beautiful. Japan as a nation was something of a Johnny-come-lately when it came to color in its cinema, having been completely left out of the Technicolor era. That said, when they came on the scene, they hit the ground running, hitting their full stride by the time Kaidan (sometimes spelled "Kwaidan" due to the translational sensibilities of the time) reached screens. The sets look like sets, it's true, but what sets they are. Admittedly, I've only seen two of the four segments that comprise the film, but even just one of them is worth the price of admission and I'll probably be celebrating Halloween by checking out the other two. The two parts I saw were "The Woman of the Snow," where a happily-married woodsman admits a terrible secret to his wife, only for her to have one for him as well, and "Hoichi the Earless," where a blind musician is asked by a mysterious visitor to play for a most uncanny audience.

SOLARIS:
Not many would consider Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to be a horror film, nevermind that most of the story involves a group of astronauts trapped on a claustrophobic ship run by a sentient computer with full control of the airlocks, life support, and (most importantly) any and all communications with anyone who might be able to do anything to help in case, say, said computer were driven homicidal by a small oversight in teaching it the difference between being asleep and being dead. In Andrei Tarkovsky's "Anti-2001" film Solaris, it's not the computer onboard that one should be weary of, nor even the enigmatic and alien ocean below, but of one's own demons within, or rather, what the aforementioned ocean makes of those inner demons. For reasons never fully explained, the ocean of the eponymous planet is able to make physical representations of people from the crew members' respective pasts. The trouble is, the ocean doesn't quite get many of the details right. It's not its fault, though; it's working from their memories... and consciences.

THE FORGOTTEN:
There's quite a bit of hate out there for this film, and, for the life of me, I don't understand exactly why. In a way, it's the perfect kind of horror movie; it takes a simple premise (in horror terms, a common fear) and runs with it. In the case of The Forgotten, the base fear that makes up the premise has to do with paranoia, the feeling that some unseen force has an agenda against you and you are completely powerless against it, coupled with the possibility that the whole thing may be merely self-delusion. In the film, Julianne Moore plays Telly, a mother grieving the loss of her son, the exact circumstances of which are not only mysterious, but ever-changing, from a plane crash at the age of nine to a miscarriage that many years earlier. Admittedly, the execution of the film's "What's real and what isn't?" motif is fundamentally flawed, but the performances keep you invested in spite of that.
My only beef with the film is that I've somewhat already seen it before, albeit in a rather unlikely place, the 5th episode of the 4th season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Entitled "Remember Me," the story centers on Dr. Beverly Crusher unknowingly trapped in a failed warp bubble experiment wherein members of the ship's crew sporadically disappear without anyone giving any notice or having any memory of them ever existing. It aired on the 22nd of October in 1990, fourteen years before the release of The Forgotten. The two share a similar premise, and both feature a strong female lead (both redheads, oddly enough). They even share a subtext in the form of romantic tensions between the leads and their male counterparts, Crusher and Picard in the case of Star Trek, and Telly and Ash in The Forgotten. I wonder if screenwriter Gerald Di Pego is a Trekkie?

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY:
I feel like I've talked endlessly about these "faux first-person footage" films and, for those of you that have endured reading those reviews of mine, it may seem a bit strange that I'd recommend one in any favorable light. Put simply, of all the Blair films out there, this is one of the best. Most of the scenes in the film are locked-off shots. That is, the camera is mounted on a tripod and left "unmanned" by any sort of camera operator. The angles favor function over flattery and certainly aren't intended to hide or obscure anything. Though seen as a weakness in comparison to other Blair films, this lack of ambiguity works in the film's favor and while we may never see the entity in question, there's certainly no question about what it is, what it wants, and how far it's willing to go to get it.

FLATLINERS:
The fear of dying is arguably the most common and universal fear that plagues humanity. Almost all of our actions are dictated, driven, and motivated by the singular principle that we are mortal, and that mortality is fickle and unpredictable. Flatliners centers around a group of medical students obsessed with death, namely patients who have actually experienced it or situations not far removed from it, with one patient having once been declared legally dead for four-and-a-half minutes. The students, using their medical knowledge, endeavor to "explore" the great unknown by way of inducing near-death states of being. They each are revived, luckily and in the nick of time, each having a different and unique experience of "the other side." The trouble is, they don't leave those experiences behind when they come back. What's great about this film is that, because the fear it centers upon is essentially that of the unknown, it really doesn't matter what your personal beliefs are going in. I don't personally believe in the afterlife, but that didn't make the film any less terrifying. For me, the real moments of fear and tension are in the CPR sessions where the students bring each other back their states of near-death.

THE SHINING:
Part of the reason why this film seems to have such a wide appeal beyond the normal crop of horror fans is that it's really so unlike any other horror film to come before or since. Stanley Kubrick has never been one to work within the confines of genres, ignoring their far-too familiar tropes and cliches yet still staying respectful to them and not straying too far from the path. The Shining stands as a kind of horror psychology test, with different people seeing the film in different lights. For some, it's a ghostly, haunted house story of the most supernatural variety. For others, it's a psychological thriller about the effects of isolation, where . For others still, it may be both of these things, or neither. Whatever the overall interpretation, it's a textbook example of the best kind of horror movie, taking a simple premise and running with it.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES:
I actually debated whether or not to include this one, and I'm not going to have that much to say about it, and what I do say will be the result of a mental strain to find the right words. Don't get me wrong, The Mothman Prophecies is an effective horror movie, but the way its horror works is so different from the other entries on this list that it stands as having an unfair advantage over them. Whereas the other films are ultimately works of fiction, though some more thoroughly researched than others, this film is only a slight dramatization of a book that chronicles and collects the accounts of residents of the otherwise-sleepy little town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, of a series of seemingly unconnected events culminating in an unquestionably tragic event not forgotten today. The film is well-made enough on its own merits, but having the backlog of lore, skepticism, and facts sets it above any other attempt in cinema to capture the essence of human fear. The fears are real because the people are real. Say what you will about what they believe they saw, but that makes it no less real to them, their fear of it no less real.

QuikTek

2010-10-12T21:20:00.000-05:00

I mentioned Twitter last time, and writing about how I appreciated its versatility made me remember something. The first weblog I ever had was on Yahoo!360. I knew well of (and hated) MySpace, but hadn't heard of Facebook. I always preferred 360 to MySpace because it seemed that 360, by virtue of being a Yahoo! service, attracted a wider and more eclectic audience, whereas MySpace was almost exclusively a teen phenomenon. Call it ageism or technophobia, but it's probably safe to assume that more people have an e-mail address than a MySpace account, therefore that older and/or less tech-savvy generation still "ooh"-ing and "ah"-ing over Electronic Mail will be more likely to start up a weblog if that service is offered as part of the "packaged deal" that came with their e-mail account as opposed to seeking out an external, self-contained site that requires separate registration. In other words, on Y!360, you got more people who would probably not have otherwise started a weblog because they wouldn't want to leave their comfort zone.

Yahoo!360 is gone now, crushed underfoot by practically every other social networking site in existence, the key problem being a few unresolved technical issues (which led to my friend Vanessa tragically losing her entire account), the others being a deliberate dismantling by Yahoo! in light of a proposed buy-out of Facebook and an attempt by Yahoo! to make the networking tools of 360 a more integrated part of one's Yahoo! profile. I've archived those entries to a site called Multiply, a rather shameless MySpace knock-off. I won't link them here; they're not much to look at. Most of them recount my obsessions over my own personal pet peeve about 360 in light of other weblog sites like Multiply or Blogger, which was mobile-friendliness. I prided myself on "breaking the system" by using my PSP's built-in web-browser and wi-fi to write entries in clear defiance of desktops. It probably went a little too far; every time I got a new device, my readers would know it, evidenced by my "Hey, guess what I'm writing this on!" style of entry.

There was something I don't think I ever said on 360 and I think I never said it because I wasn't actually sure how well it would translate to text, so here goes:

The very best thing about 360 is that WE'RE ALL DIFFERENT, COMING FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE, ALL OVER THE WORLD, and yet, at the end of the day, we're all just sitting at home in front of our computers, talking to one another.

the very worst thing about 360 is that we're all different, coming from all walks of life, all over the world, and yet, at the end of the day, WE'RE ALL JUST SITTING AT HOME IN FRONT OF OUR COMPUTERS TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER.

The point is, while I may have been seemingly singing the praises of Twitter last entry, my adoration is almost entirely conceptual; the first social networking site made with mobile networks distinctly in mind. By its very nature, it encourages people to go out into the world and not feel tethered to their undoubtedly uncomfortable desk chairs in front of their undoubtedly cluttered and cumbersome desks upon which rest their undoubtedly ghastly laptops and monolithic desktops.

To crib a saying by filmmaker Jean Cocteau: Weblogs will never truly achieve anything until they can be taken to all the same places ordinary notebooks and pens can go.

Twitter was a good start.

Tumblr appears to be the next step.

Evernote is the long stride between them.

Do It To It, Dammit!

2010-10-10T12:00:00.000-05:00

I should have known this would happen; I make a To-Do list and all it makes me want "to do" is anything but what's on the damned To-Do list. In my defense, some of the journal entries proposed are technically "here" on Blogger, just in draft form. So, they aren't NOT being worked on. The only one that may be abandoned is a review of Jim Starlin's Cosmic Odyssey, a mini-series featuring Jack Kirby's New Gods with art by the indomitable Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy. I may still make the accompanying primer video giving an historical overview of Jack Kirby's The New Gods. In keeping with my desire to write reviews of items that don't fit proper categories or are otherwise heavily-marginalized, the video would discuss how originally Kirby's Fourth World series of monthly comics were never meant to be part of the DC Universe proper. That is, we'd never see crossovers with or guest appearances by DC denizens such as Superman or Batman. Tragically, though, the books would be abruptly canceled (the notably ironic exception being Mister Miracle, Super Escape Artist) and many of the characters would be scattered to the winds, settling upon the larger DC Universe in an oddly intriguing kind of "separate, yet joined" status. There's a long-running tradition of superheroes (or other comic book characters) that lack the following to sustain their own title, but are popular enough that guest appearances in other books meet with little to no dissent or disinterest.
As for Cosmic Odyssey, I don't think I'll be reviewing it simply because it's a tad on the unremarkable side. It was far from disappointing; with Starlin's fearless approach to storytelling and Mignola's dramatic lighting and shading, it truly is a match made in heaven, one that I wish would have been repeated prior to Starlin's solo project The Death of the New Gods. Suffice it to say, if Starlin and Mignola do work together again, it won't be on The Fourth World.

Changing gears to old business, there's no update on Jolicloud's "Windows Refund" program as they've yet to answer my inquiry and I've found no other information on it specifically. There was, however, something tangentially related: an article sourcing the Novell Boycott's information about Dell's "Windows Tax Credit." I won't go into too much detail because it's actually going to help me round out the story regarding Jolicloud's refund program, but the long and short of the matter is that Microsoft has essentially pressured Dell into selling PCs with Windows pre-installed exclusively, with prices actually favoring Windows-equipped PCs versus ones with a Linux OS on it.

In the broader scheme of things, there have been a few minor changes to the format of Decay-Proof Record Scroll. I've overcome my fear of tinkering with CSS or, for that matter, any HTML document I didn't write from the ground up myself, and proceeded to tweak the template I selected when I first opened this Blogger account. While I do like the format overall, a few minor problems came up that were fast becoming persistent nuisances, chief among them the width of the main text column. For text, it wasn't an issue, and admittedly seemed to help the words flow, being neither an intimidating, monolithic wall of text nor a thin, whispy news ticker. For videos, however, it turned problematic. Even with videos in the 1.33:1 ratio, the results of refitting them to fit inside the column were less than satisfactory, with videos in 16:9 even more so. Granted, I remember the days when 160 x 120 was the norm and formats like 320 x 240 were "cinematic," but after more than ten years following those days, even I don't feel regret thumbing my nose at videos smaller than 320 x 240. Put simply, it's been long enough, we can expect more. The highest quality Youtube HD video may still only just hold a candle to a DVD, but they're still leaps and bounds above the Cinepak cut-scenes of the early CD-ROM era.

I've also added a Twitter module, which probably gets more updates than any other site I frequent. Then again, that's supposed to be the appeal of Twitter, that you can update it from practically anywhere with any reasonably-equipped electronic device, mobile or otherwise. In a sense, it's what I've always wanted from a weblog tool, a journal anyone can see that's as accessible to me as pen and paper.

Speaking of which, I've also removed Atop the 4th Wall from the Better Reads module. Don't get me wrong, I still watch each new update and hold no ill will against it, it's just that Better Reads seems better suited for weblogs that update irregularly as opposed to AT4W's "Every Monday" model. It also lets me give top billing to my friend Karla Thomas' new Tumblr page Bloggity Blog, which sadly doesn't seem to get half as many followers as her original DeviantART page. It's understandable as, typically, people who "live" on a particular site don't like to be told to go "somewhere else," even if it's only for a brief visit. This is probably the worst part of the whole "Web 2.0" side of the internet; no longer one vast, open country, but a scattering of walled city-states that insist on their own self-sufficiency.
It reminds me of something my brother told me when he went to Canada. On the plane, the in-flight magazine was full of ads promoting tourism in countries all over the world, including Poland and Japan. At first, he didn't think much of it until, when he landed and got settled in, he still kept seeing the same foreign travel ads all over, with the same ubiquity there that "What happens in Vegas..." has in the States. He said it really put the concept of "international" in perspective, noting how the US seems to have this "we have everything right here" mentality when it comes to tourism. It's genuinely sad that we went from services like Geocities to ones like MySpace; sure, it makes networking far easier, but it would seem to do so at the cost of diversity. Perhaps it's just an inevitable social phenomenon.

Last update: I'm also working on a short story, and hopefully I haven't jeopardized its completion by mentioning it here. Like the act of making the To-Do list, I find the less I spend talking about something is more time I can spend doing something, hence not displaying the list here. As such, I'm not going to delve into the plot apart from little hints I've divulged on my Twitter feed, such as doing research on Orbital Resonance despite not technically being a sci-fi story.

Now, we move onward to more regular updates, and less updates about updates.

Not Every Jolicloud Has A Silver Lining

2010-09-25T21:26:00.000-05:00

Platform Agnostic is what's written on the "Operating System of Choice" line of my DeviantART profile as well as any other profile or bio that asks. It means that, officially, I couldn't care less what OS something has installed on it because, apart from a few and fairly reasonable strength/weakness debates, they're all alike. The only factor that truly differentiates Microsoft from Apple from Linux is market share; Windows is the 500-pound "Any color, as long as it's black" Gorilla, Mac is the Cocky "Well, you win some, you lose some" Upstart, and Linux is the Grassroots "None of the above" Rebel. I grew up in a Mac household up until OSX, became a Windows convert of sorts with XP after college, and dabbled in Linux (specifically, Ubuntu and Mint) the last two years. I've seen the best each has to offer, and I've witnessed their stumbles. Most recently, I gave a little OS called Jolicloud a try, after hearing it briefly mentioned on a podcast called Dumpstertech. I thanked them for letting me know about it via Twitter:

Matsugawa: I'm about to try out that #Jolicloud OS that I heard about on @dumpstertech some time back. We'll see how it stacks up in Linux terms...

This leads me to what is probably my favorite part of Jolicloud's design, the installation and demo design. Normally, if you want to install a Linux operating system on your PC, you have to download the .iso file to create an install disc with a CD or DVD burner. ISO files are between 650MB and 1.5GB in size, so this requires a relatively substantial internet connection, not to mention a modest degree of patience. In short, it's more of an investment than an impulse. Jolicloud, however, seems to understand the weariness many of its potential users may feel toward trying a new and substantially-simplified operating system, so they came up with a solution in the form of Express, something that could only be described as a demo of the full version of the OS. Demos are usually reserved for applications, namely games, and consist of a pared-down version of the full program intended to take up less room on one's hard drive and be relatively easy to install and, if necessary or desired, removed or upgraded to its full capabilities. While Jolicloud Express cannot be upgraded-to-full per se, it does not require an install disc to be made, and is instead simply downloaded and installed like any other application.
Jolicloud is designed for netbooks and favors touchscreens, giving it more than a passing resemblance to the iPad operating system. While it has folders for user-created documents such as text files, photos, and videos, applications are hidden except for desktop shortcuts, which are large icons arranged in a grid on the main screen. When there are more apps than there is room to display, or you want to organize your apps according to their function or something, a small row of white dots appears along the bottom of the screen, each representing a new "page" of applications.
While this setup would only prove slightly problematic as my test drive proceeded, there was something of a false start that nearly put the whole trial on indefinite hold. When an operating system is installed on a computer as a partition (that is, keeping the original OS with the new one installed alongside it), the option is presented upon boot-up which one is to be used until the next shutdown or restart. Unfortunately, after installing Express and restarting, no such option appeared. I found out Jolicloud's support department had a Twitter page:

Matsugawa: @Jolisupport I used the Express version, but it won't let me choose between it and XP on boot, only #Jolicloud. What gives?

Expecting an automated "please visit our full site" response, I was rather relieved to get a real response from a real person with whom I could have an actual (if somewhat limited) dialogue:

Zak Kaufmar: @matsugawa Did the installation complete correctly? Maybe try reinstalling. ^ZK

Looking back over JoliSupport's other messages to users, this was the catch-all solution offered at least once during the conversation, regardless of the situation. To be fair, back when I worked in customer service for a cellular provider, whenever a customer was having a technical issue with their phone, our first step was always to have them turn the phone off and back on again and, surprisingly, that solved the issue nine times out of ten, at least. At worst, the issue would recur and do so frequently to the point of no longer being simply a glitch, but this was rather rare. The point is, this solution was not by any means inappropriate, but its preceding question assumes that a first-time user would know the difference between a successful install and one that was otherwise.
Furthermore, the problem was that I couldn't actually reinstall if I wanted to, because I would have to go back into the Windows XP environment to remove Jolicloud, but I couldn't get there to do so. The only thing that kept my next message from being one of complete verbal abuse was a great sense of smug satisfaction that I'd listened to my prior instinct and backed up all my files onto an external disk before installing Jolicloud. Past experiences with computers have included some close calls in terms of data loss, but while I've made archiving a habit, it begs pondering how many otherwise-lucky people trying Jolicloud will fill Jolisupport's inbox with pure textual hatred.
On a whim, I went to Jolicloud's official page and clicked on their support link, arriving at their community forums named "Get Satisfaction" (which always makes me think of Barry Lyndon, for better or for worse). It seemed more than likely my problem wasn't unique, so I typed in a brief description of the issue, something along the lines of "Jolicloud dual boot XP issue," and got about a half-dozen forum threads whose respective headers noted that at least two or three people each had this exact same problem. It turned out, luckily, that XP had not been supplanted so much as upstaged by Jolicloud. To fix this issue, all I had to do was find a file called boot.ini and open it in a text editor. To Jolicloud's credit, a user can access all their original Windows files (like documents, photos, and the like) while in the Jolicloud environment, and this was where I found the mystical INI file. The document, a script less than 20 lines in length that effectively told the computer how long to leave the dual-boot option visible for, with the "timer" set to zero. All one had to do was change that value to something like 10 or 30, click on save, and restart. Sure enough, there was the dual-boot screen. It sounds weird to speak of how the sight of some white text on a black background can invoke such a warm feeling of relief. Still, I wondered how many other users would be as patient and, more importantly, persistent as I in finding this solution, and concluded that just because a problem has a simple solution is no reason for it to not have preventative measures taken against it. I told as much to Jolisupport:

M: @Jolisupport found a solved thread regarding XP bootup issue. Thanks, just wish boot.ini's timeout defaulted to 30 instead of 0.

Of course, had this been a full install, there would have been no XP, Vista, or 7 to choose, so there would have been no reason for the INI script to be set to a value higher than zero. Similarly, if this had been a partition installed, the ability to still access Windows files might well have, for most users, made the whole dual-boot option borderline redundant. The problem is, though, this was neither a full install nor a partition, this was a demo, essentially an application running in Windows. In other words, it's a completely different entity from its more "permanent" kin, so why not have the default dual-boot timer set to 30 or 15? From what I came to understand, this issue is somehow exclusive to XP users, so it might have more to do with Windows than Jolicloud, but it still just strikes me as this glaring flaw that will ultimately break more deals than make them.
With that rough start out of the way, my second session with Jolicloud resulted in what could best be described as the OS having a nervous breakdown. After installing a few apps (namely Opera, as I didn't care for the default browser, Chromium), I tried to rearrange them into something a little more intuitive and streamlined. I found it a bit frustrating that I was limited to two horizontal rows of icons, thereafter I had to go to the little white dots underlining the screen to see the rest; my monitor was tall enough, and there was a tantalizing gray space between the second row and the white dots. This ended up not being the worst of it, as suddenly I found I could no longer rearrange the icons and the white dots at the bottom of the screen did not respond to being clicked on, limiting my view to one screen and with only a fraction of my apps accessible. The most troubling part of all was that, every time I clicked on an icon or tried to drag and drop it to elsewhere on the screen, a white dot would appear on the bottom of the screen; where once were two, now came to be three and counting. Every failed attempt at moving an icon made for a dot, until they numbered at least twelve. Jolicloud had crashed, but it was completely oblivious to it. I tried the old standby countermeasure Ctrl+Alt+Del only to find that Jolicloud didn't work that way. I used my phone to bug Jolisupport on Twitter again:

M: @Jolisupport cannot rearrange apps, white dots at bottom of screen multiply if I try to move an app, and stuck on one screen. What now?

Z: @matsugawa You're dragging and dropping? Can you maybe provide a screen shot? ^ZK

M: @jolisupport yes, I drag and drop the icon only to have it stay and a dot appears at the bottom of the screen, as if it's been moved

Impatient for a reply, I used the next oldest remedy and physically restarted the PC. It regained its senses; I could rearrange the icons, but they now left lingering transparencies of themselves where they once stood, overlapping with whatever application would fall into its place.

Z: @matsugawa Have you tried reloading the launcher with F5? ^ZK

M: @jolisupport actually, I'd tried restarting altogether, which fixed the issue, but F5 has helped a new issue of icons overlapping.

So, with that second ordeal sorted, there was now a chance to do some tweaking of the system's general settings. In particular, I wanted to change the desktop background to a customized image. As this can be done with any and many a number of devices, including cellular phones and even my PSP, it didn't seem like it would be utterly out of the question to do this with a netbook OS. Sure enough, there was a way to customize the desktop's appearance, but it was rather unorthodox to the point of enigmatic. On Windows and OSX, these features are managed using the Control Panel. On Jolicloud, however, there's a button on the upper-left corner of the screen (resembling a gear) that takes one to a sort of profile page, which displays the user's profile information and a device manager. Here, there's a tab labeled "Legacy Apps" containing a set of App icons which cannot be removed, rearranged, or placed on the desktop proper, the first of which is "Local Settings." This is the control panel where the desktop's appearance is managed, including desktop wallpapers. In any other operating system, the Control Panel for customization is an integrated part of the OS, so having it as an application (not to mention, one that is held in place compared to its more mobile counterparts) made the option seem like an afterthought of the design process. To deepen the mystery, the entire application seemed ineffectual as I could not actually see any image I picked as the desktop wallpaper. It was only visible for a brief second during startup and shutdown.

M: @Jolicloud why is Local Settings a Legacy App instead of a more integrated part of the system?

Z: @matsugawa Because it's part of the legacy system of Ubuntu/Gnome, I believe. ^ZK

Fair enough, I suppose, though I don't remember any such setup in Ubuntu or Mint. A return visit to Get Satisfaction revealed that the inability for the custom desktop image to appear was, in fact, not a bug, not a feature (the oldest spin in the history of technology), but rather a solution to a bug. Affecting only dual-boot installs, switching between the two operating systems creates conflicts in the graphics cards of most netbooks, so the option to make the desktop transparent to show the customized background image was simply left out.
So, the rough start was simply a growing pain, the nervous breakdown was a temporary insanity solvable by a simple keystroke, and the lack of customization was limited to the trial version. All these things could be forgiven, but when everything else had been solved, one problem remained: there was no sound. I went back to the forums, found a few relevant threads, and followed all steps to no avail. This, for me, was the deal-breaker. The next day, I turned on the computer with the intent of starting up Jolicloud to try a few new apps, only to select Windows by reflex and take that as a sign that this was not going to work out.

M: I think I'm officially done with #Jolicloud ; I switched back to XP and don't miss it. Write-up to follow soon.

Z: @matsugawa Did you have any trouble with it? ^ZK

Yes, lots of trouble, more than 140 characters in a tweet can express, hence this write-up. To Jolicloud's credit, I probably wasn't the target audience, given my relative expertise with most operating systems and the fact that my computer needs tend more toward the productivity side of things than basic browsing or networking options. Also, the computer this was installed on was my Compaq Presario, bought on a tax-free day in 2005 and, except for a graphics card and additional disc drive, left virtually untouched in terms of its specifications. Needless to say, there have been many changes in the market since then, so compatibility issues are practically unavoidable and not technically anyone's fault. This was intended for newer netbooks, and I used it on an older desktop, so, from the start, Tech Support went above and beyond the call of duty to make sure I was happy with their product.

In the end, I can't truly recommend Jolicloud, but take that condemnation with a grain of salt and consider my experience an example of the worst possible scenario, which consisted of a brief scare followed by a few petty annoyances. I highly doubt you'll have a worse experience than what I just detailed.

To end on a positive note, one thing that intrigues me above all else about Jolicloud as a company is a note at the bottom of their main page. It promises that if you purchase a computer and perform a full install of Jolicloud, you can have the cost of Windows refunded to you. Between OEM versions of Windows ranging in cost from 90 to 150USD, depending on the version, and netbooks costing as little as 250USD, that sounds like a damn good price to pay for an iPad clone. This is exactly the sort of step Linux needs to take in order to be taken seriously as an alternative to Microsoft and Apple. This offer is not without conditions, of course, but they're unspecified beyond "Applies in certain countries." Still, I'm going to e-mail them through their media inquiry channels for more details and write a follow-up of it with their reply.

Yeah, but it's the WAY you said it... (from Gamespot)

2010-09-05T22:46:00.000-05:00

Here's where, despite not actually doing this for any sort of living, I betray my own sense of professionalism by not doing proper research before discussing a topic. During perusals of Hulu's fine selection of animation, I happened upon Magic Knight Rayearth, at one point one of the most difficult anime series to find on either disc or tape, almost as rare and hard to find as the Saturn game. In fact, the only consistently available iteration of the property is in the various printings of the original manga. I absolutely adore the manga, and even have the original Viz prints before Americanized versions of manga went to the original Japanese formats, leaving the books "unflipped" in smaller sizes and printed on cheaper paper.

For the record, I hate the change.

Granted, the publishers' reasons for doing this are understandable. At least, I understand that they wanted to preserve the original page orientations (with the spine of the book on the right-hand side instead of the left), but the smaller format and distinctly inferior (as in, one step above newsprint) paper just rub me the wrong way. Sure, these printing methods allow a volume to be sold at around 10USD instead of the typical 15 or even 18, but at least I felt like I got what I was paying for. Where once I thought 13USD for each volume of Rayearth was a good deal, I now find 10 overpriced. It's one thing for a monthly comic to be printed on cheap paper, since eventually the respective story arcs would be compiled into trade paperbacks, but with manga, the volumes are essentially the final product.

Anyway, here's the aforementioned betrayal: I know the anime series ultimately came ex post facto, but as for the relationship between the manga and the Saturn game, I'm just going to chalk it up to probably being one of those weird, circular relationships like 2001: A Space Odyssey's book and film counterparts. There's probably a Wikipedia page on it, or at least an article somewhere, but I just don't feel like looking it up to confirm chicken/egg conundrum that is Magic Knight Rayearth. In any case, I'll let someone else fill in that little missing piece of information.

As for the anime, I'd forgotten a pet peeve of mine until I started watching. On the whole, between dubs and subs, I had no real preference. In the VHS days, I generally bought dubs because video cassettes didn't technically give you the option to turn off the subtitles, so you always had irritating text genlocked onto the screen. There was also that paradoxical price hike that never made sense to anybody, wherein subtitled versions of anime series were generally about 10USD higher than dubs, despite dubs obviously being more expensive to produce. I'm sure the sales figures justified the difference, but it was still wildly unfair to those who preferred the subtitles; why not make them the same price? Fortunately, DVD seems to have completely nullified the argument, if only on the economic level. Still, there is a situation in which I would genuinely prefer to watch an anime series subtitled, and that's if I'd read the manga first.

This goes all the way back to when, even as a little kid, I dreaded the thought of there ever possibly being an animated version of Calvin & Hobbes. Don't get me wrong, I love Calvin & Hobbes; I still consider it the best newspaper-style comic strip series ever conceived. The problem is, I had my own idea of what Calvin sounded like (I never pegged down a consistent idea as to how Hobbes would sound; for some reason, Calvin just seemed more obvious to me.) and I knew that whoever would be selected to voice the little schizoid sociopath (let's face it, he was one, just look at the Transmogrifier story arc) would "get it wrong" and completely ruin my enjoyment of the comic. The same thing happened with Sonic the Hedgehog; I'd read a little promotional comic in Disney Adventures magazine prior to the game coming out, had my own idea of how the little blue blur sounded, and had that voice in my head (NOT in the schizophrenic sense, mind you) completely shattered when the animated series came out and Sonic was voiced by actor Jaleel White (Yes, THAT Jaleel White).

To be fair, I did warm up to White as well as the voice actor in Sonic Adventure for Dreamcast and all subsequent iterations following. Furthermore, when I think back to that voice I'd heard in my head reading the comic, it actually makes me laugh (Imagine one of the Chipmunks trying to do a Michael Ironside impression, and you'll have a vague idea of what popped into my head all those years ago). With anime, however, it's different, especially since the voice acting business is so small that many actors and actresses so frequently re-appear, typically voicing several characters. It was one thing when Urkel lent his voice to the world's most famous hedgehog; Like Luke Skywalker voicing the Joker, there's enough of a difference in how the actor approaches the character you more often than not don't recognize the voice (I wish I had a camera for some of the times I've told people that Mark Hamill has spent over 10 years playing the Clown Prince of Crime to capture the looks on their faces). When I recognize the voice actor (and if it's "off the mark" on how I think the character would sound), it's jarringly distracting and takes me right out of the experience. At that point, without the immersion and enjoyment, I'm left with critique and analysis of the character (I guess it's me trying to justify or otherwise deduce the casting decision), which can lead to some pleasant surprises.

Something I find interesting with dubs, from a filmmaking standpoint, is how the dubbing can actually change the entire demeanor of a character. If a name were to be given to this phenom, my vote would go to The Madison Effect. Granted, this concept has been present in dubs from day one. In fact, it goes all the way back to the silent era, when silent films had narrators (called Benshi in Japan) who would often embellish or re-interpret the events on screen. Suddenly, a love triangle becomes an overbearing brother protecting his sister from a would-be suitor, a grudge between two gunslingers centers around impressing a woman instead of a past betrayal at a bank heist, and a coded message sought by spies the world over goes from being a geographical record of missile silos to being a recipe for an egg salad sandwich (on a related note, when I first talked about Benshi for a Japanese class, my professor mentioned What's Up, Tiger Lily?, so maybe Tiger Lily Effect is more appropriate?). You get the idea. Anyway, the reason for the name Madison Effect refers to the American localization of CLAMP's own Cardcaptor Sakura (apt since we're talking about Rayearth), specifically the character of Tomoyo, renamed Madison in the English version. In the course of the show, Sakura's efforts to recapture the creatures of the mysterious book The Clow are recorded on video by Tomoyo, who even goes to the trouble of providing stylish outfits for Sakura to wear during her escapades. While this gimmick is consistent between the two versions, the motivations behind it are not. In the US version, Madison is portrayed as opportunistic and self-confident to a fault easily mistakable for callous, even, with her interest firmly rooted in the spectacle of rampaging monsters being defeated and subsequently tamed. In the original version, Tomoyo is practically a polar opposite, shy and soft-spoken, and somewhat creepily-loyal to her friend Sakura, whose costuming and video sessions were a staple of their relationship long before any of the magical creature hunting went down. Call it cynicism about Conservative America, but while this change in the character probably had to do more with cultural differences and attitudes about feminism (borderline Tomboy vs. obvious Wilting Lily) than anything else, it seems more likely the change was motivated by the simple fact that the original portrayal of Tomoyo was just downright creepy.

In the end, I don't think I'll be watching the rest of the series. I can't get past the dub, and the overall presentation, look, and feel of the show simply falls short of the energy and craftsmanship of the manga. Instead, I'm going to turn by attention toward Hulu's presentation of The Mysterious Cities of Gold, a show I have literally not seen in over 15 years.

Should I Feel Flattered?

2010-08-29T17:13:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, I decided to share my terrible acting skills with the world and create a series of bogus audio recordings of the (possibly) lone crewman of a spaceship overcome by a terrible calamity. I have to give credit where credit is due and point out the article Snap, Crackle, Plot by Graeme Virtue as well as his Science Officer's Log Blogger page. Additionally, there's Jason Killingsworth's Start Press: The Spirit of Radio. They all deal with these little items of video game fame known as audiologs:

So, in short, I made a few of my own, bogus audiologs for a game that never was. I uploaded the videos to my YouTube channel, but I'd also uploaded them to Revver where, after taking a surprisingly short amount of time in showing them live, the videos were given maturity ratings, effectively on the power of words despite there being no foul language and no innuendo. Heck, there isn't even any music or sound effects.

Part One:

This received a 13+ rating from Revver's internal review board. I wasn't disappointed or upset or anything, as I had no idea what sort of "rating" my content would warrant. After all, the fact that novels lack a sort of rating system compared to theatrical motion pictures would imply that simply describing a gruesome act (either via printed text or even spoken, as with an audiobook) is not half as objectionable as a movie showing it to us. In the case of Part One, the act in question is the hysterical aftermath of some sort of outbreak or invasion, wherein frantic and paranoid crew members begin indiscriminately killing one another.

Part Two:

Part Two received no rating, implying a general appeal and lacking in any overly objectionable material. This seemed rather odd to me; I mean, it was obvious I was making episodic content, so why wouldn't they just stick with the "13+" designation as the default rating? It's not uncommon for a film series to have ratings go up, as was the case for Revenge of the Sith and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which received PG-13 and PG ratings respectively while their prior chapters were rated PG and G, but it's quite a different issue when the ratings go down. This was the case for Conan the Destroyer and Weekend at Bernie's II, both PG-rated sequels to R-Rated films as well as Be Cool, the PG-13 sequel to the R-Rated Get Shorty. To give further perspective on how ratings going up for a film series is more common than going down, consider the James Bond films, which had all been rated PG up until Licence to Kill in 1989, which was originally rated R upon release but later re-rated PG-13, which ended up being the typical rating for a Bond film henceforth despite retaining relatively consistent levels of violence, suggestive dialogue, and sexual scenarios throughout. Granted, the PG-13 rating didn't exist until the late 1980s, so the shift ultimately had more to do with social standards than the actual content of the films.

Part Three:

Here is where I apparently cross the line, or at least come as close as is possible to it without actually crossing it since that would probably just lead to the video being taken down. As for what tripped the alarm and got me the "17+" rating:

Decomposition

That's the only thing that might be considered objectionable in the whole recording. I mean, I doubt anyone's offended by vending machines or the continued use of coined currency in the distant future. So, apparently discussing and describing mass hysteria and homicide is worthy of "13+" but taking the extra step to mention that those victims of said hysteria and homicide will start to reek a bit when no one's around to clean up takes us straight into adult territory. It's like in old westerns and, probably more noticeably, the jailbreak scene in Star Wars where people just seem to vaporize after they fall out of frame, clutching their fatal shot wound. It's something we can probably find examples of everywhere, but the fallacy of the logic behind it: showing humorous or inaccurate results of violence is all right for children, but once you start showing the real consequences (like in a public service announcement against drugs, gangs, guns, and the like) suddenly the material is objectionable.

Part Four:

Like part two, it received no mature rating, implying mass appeal. This is just baffling since the plot ultimately leads to my character requesting what basically amounts to a mercy killing (possibly in the idiom of self sacrifice, if there was indeed any sort of calamity) and begging his wife for forgiveness about not being able to come home.

At the risk of turning this into a catch-phrase: Am I missing something here?

The Fourth Kind... of Worst Movie of All Time

2010-08-15T12:41:00.000-05:00

As stated in the Paranormal Activity review, one of the biggest criticisms against these "Faux-Archival Recordings" films like The Last Broadcast or Cloverfield is their use of cinema-verite shooting and editing styles to disguise a low budget and/or inexperienced crew. It's akin to the criticism that most video recordings made of UFOs take advantage of low resolution and shakiness to hide what could otherwise be either a very obvious model or a perfectly normal and natural aerial phenomenon. To that end, The Fourth Kind tries to dispel these potential accusations by taking the bogus amateur footage and juxtaposing it with polished and highly dramatized re-enactments in the tradition of Unsolved Mysteries or America's Most Wanted. This merging of styles should have been the strength of the film. Instead, it tears at the very fabric of cinematic reality itself and exposes the utter incompetence of the director.

The plot of the film centers around a widowed psychologist named Abby Tyler, who's studying the sleeping habits of some of her patients in Nome, Alaska. She's carrying on the research of her husband, who was murdered several years ago while they slept. The good doctor has vague and distorted memories of the event and finds herself unable to clearly recall the killer's face. To further add to her anguish, her daughter is rendered blind shortly after the murder and her son becomes withdrawn and resentful of his mother. Unable to deal with him, Dr. Tyler buries herself in her late husband's work and begins to notice strange similarities in the testimonies of some of her patients. They all seem to have been woken in the middle of the night (around 3am) by a white owl. This owl becomes the last thing these patients clearly remember before they experience memory loss and blackouts. Attempts at using hypnotherapy to uncover these missing hours often results in fanatical panic attacks. Things take a turn for the worse when one of these patients becomes completely unhinged and murders his family before taking his own life, hysterically referencing an enigmatic "them." If you think you can see where the rest of the movie is going from here, there's at least a 75% chance you're absolutely right on the money. After all, when dealing with entities like ghosts or aliens, there aren't many directions the narrative can go; either you keep it vague and bank on the audience projecting their own fears over the gaps, or you come right out with it and turn the whole thing into a creature film. That's not a bad thing, and it's certainly not the low point of the film.

Where the movie fails is almost entirely in the presentation. The film has such a confused sense of its own reality yet tries desperately in spite of this to suspend the audiences' collective disbelief. This is what I like to call an Imperial Failure, which refers to a film that tries to be something more than what it is but has nothing to back up its endeavors with, much like The Emperor's New Clothes, where dignity and royalty are thrust upon the seemingly simple-minded masses in the hopes none of them will notice that the big kahuna's new threads are a birthday suit. Thus, when someone does point out the obvious, er, shortcomings, the whole exhibition falls apart and becomes a laughingstock. In short, there's nothing wrong with trying something new or different, but don't expect the path less traveled to be beyond criticism compared to the path well-worn.
Right from the start, we get our sense of reality thrown into question when Milla Jovovich emerges from a shadowy and out-of-focus forest, approaches the camera, looks the audience dead in the eye, and introduces herself as... herself. She goes onto say that what we are about to witness is based on reported events. She explains how the film will essentially be structured, with archival footage mixed with reenactments, either side-by-side on screen, juxtaposed, or even overlaid (in the case of some of the audio recordings).
If this all sounds like it would be jarringly distracting, completely ruining any sense of immersion, it is. The movie takes great pains to continually remind you that you're watching a reenactment; whenever a new character is introduced, however late into the narrative that may be, a caption appears beneath them giving the actor's name, their character's name, and, where applicable, a notation stating that the character's name is actually a pseudonym to protect the identity of the supposedly real individual.
This double-identity run-around reaches its epitome when the director himself appears in the film as the head of the psychology department at Chapman University, using his real name, which is Olatunde Osunsanmi. This situation is two-thirds true; Chapman University is a real establishment, and Olatunde Osunsanmi is an alumni, but he's not the head of the psychology department, now nor ever. Normally, I'd say, "fair enough" and even call the move subtle to the point of being masterfully crafted. After all, the director is not particularly well-known, certainly not as well known as someone like Milla Jovovich, so appearing to us in the supposed archival footage interviewing the allegedly real Abby Tyler would stand as a kind of subtle, yet finalizing, clue as to the film's insisted authenticity. Unfortunately, subtlety gets thrown out the window when he shows up at the end, in the shadowy and out-of-focus forest alongside Milla Jovovich, and delivers a would-be cryptic message to the audience along the lines of, "believe what you will."

This is the part that speaks to the director's incompetence. Milla can break character because she's part of the reenactment side of the equation, so she doesn't interfere with the archival footage's feigned authenticity. Olatunde, however, is part of the authentic side of the story, the part we're supposed to be fooled by, so when he breaks character (even if it's not that much of a character), he takes half his own movie down with him, leaving the other half twisting in the wind. This makes his pretentious statement of "believe what you will" utterly laughable because his very presence removes all doubt about what we're supposed to believe. People often talk of directors sabotaging their own movies, but few do it in person.

And another thing...

To put it another way, "twisting in the wind" is a charitable assessment of how the film's other half fares on its own.

Because I'm an Audiolog Fanatic

2010-08-06T18:59:00.000-05:00

Since moving into a new place where we actually get a cell signal, I've been shopping around for a new phone as well as a new carrier. I was looking in the AT&T store and found myself trying out an iPhone. It's not the first time I tried one, but I only felt compelled to give it another go because I was waiting for a sales rep to finish with another customer. Without this turning into an anti-mac rant, I'll sum up my sentiments toward Apple in a single sentence: I've always maintained that Apple is a fitting name for the company because if there's one thing it excels at above all, it's polish.
Anyway...
I tried out the voice recorder application, the default one that comes with the device, as opposed to a third-party one like Night Recorder (which is actually kind of cute), so I wasn't expecting anything beyond what my current phone has. The interface consisted of an image of an old studio microphone, complete with a VU meter. On other side of the meter were two buttons, one for recording and pausing, the other to stop. When I first tried to make a recording, I wondered if the needle on the VU meter would move along with my voice. It didn't, but here's the part I don't get: when I tap the screen, the needle jumps.

The programmer made the VU meter touch-sensitive, but not sound-sensitive.

Why?

I mean, sure, the "Oscilloscope" image that appears on my phone when I press record is just a looped animation, but at least it only plays when I press record; it's not linked to another function or other part of the interface. However, making the VU meter only respond to tapping really just made me think at first that I wasn't being loud enough to get a rise out of the needle, which was preposterous given the noise level of the store in general.

It just strikes me as bad programming (not lazy programming, wherein the needle wouldn't have done anything at all) to go to the length of programming a VU meter's needle to respond to tapping a microphone (an image of a microphone, but one nonetheless) but be unaffected by the sound said "microphone" would hear.

Return of the Tech Weblog

2010-07-21T22:07:00.000-05:00

A recent incident involving a hacker on Deviantart (and the journal entry I wrote regarding that matter) has got me thinking about computers, so I just want to give a brief overview of computers as they pertain to me, my daily life, and my various creative activities.

*I hate computers. I really do. I'm not even being ironic. It may seem ironic given I use one near-daily, I've built at least two and performed upgrades on at least two others, not to mention also learning the three main operating systems of Mac, Windows, and Debian-based Linux. My favorite line from the Patrick Troughton era of Doctor Who is always, "I hate computers and refuse to be bullied by them!" hence my apparent immersion and relatively extensive know-how of them.

*I do not own a laptop, and I probably never will. The biggest reason for this is essentially two-fold: the cost and what I get for said cost. Desktops can be upgraded essentially forever; every component can be swapped out and upgraded, the only major headache being either the processor (which typically requires swapping out the whole motherboard) or the case (in which everything gets moved around). In the end, laptops sacrifice viability for portability, which is a bit detrimental to me because of the video and audio editing I like to do. I have edited a few short films on my Dad's old Vaio in the past, but it doesn't exactly suit them all the same.

*Another reason I won't get a laptop is, because of said lack of versatility and viability, the things I would do with a laptop can (and have been) approximated by the various mobile devices I've used, especially my old Blackberry. Reading e-mails, Instant Messaging, simple web-browsing, and updating weblogs can all be done with any decent smartphone capable of running a mobile version of Opera. Hell, I even used to use my PSP's wi-fi to update my old Yahoo!360 page once upon a time. I get a little sickened by people's dependency on their laptops, the way they take them virtually everywhere and ask it to do damn near everything for them. I figure, "I've already got an assortment of devices like a cell phone, a few cameras, and quite a few digital voice recorders that a laptop would be bulky and inefficient versus a few dedicated devices." It's a meditation on the whole philosophy of never doing two things at once because one will never do justice to either. Why learn Audacity or Pro Tools when Tascam makes the PortaStudio?

*The cost thing is a bit of a lie because I currently have two desktops with a third in a kind of limbo. It's a bit of a long story, the short version of which is I have a computer I bought when I graduated college in 2005 (named Pres), a computer I built last year as a project to build a small, cheap computer (named Sophia), and a computer a friend of the family gave to my roommate to use while I built her a gaming rig. The temporary computer (named Big Black) used while I selected parts for the gaming rig (named Big Blue) is presently in pieces on an entertainment center's lower shelf due to what can best be described as a "cursed case," one that ventilates poorly and holds up to being turned off and on about half as well. Still, it's light-years ahead of Pres (which has recently developed a weird habit of randomly resetting itself for no apparent reason), and all it really needs is a good case, which I'm still shopping for. I've got a thing against towers and wanted to get one of those Home Theater PC cases that lies flat and looks like something you put on an entertainment center next to your various game consoles. The one I got, unfortunately, did not allow me to use the original power supply and the graphics card at the same time, which went totally against my intention, so the case had to be sent back and the parts returned to the shelf.

*I am platform agnostic, though I predominantly use Windows. I grew up in a Mac household, however, and used an iMac all through college. I learned to use Windows machines through school and my Dad's office. I got used to how both systems work and learned Linux about a year ago by dual-booting Ubuntu on Pres and equipping Sophia with Linux Mint exclusively. Despite these various exposures, I have ultimately found myself leaning towards the Windows side of things for a small handful of reasons:
1) Windows XP fixed every complaint I ever had about 95/98.
2) Mac OS is a good operating system with a lot of really good applications. The problem is it's wedded to the hardware and the hardware is overpriced, over-engineered, and borderline inaccessible to even the most skilled modder.
3) Linux is good, but fundamentally flawed in that, because everything is produced gratis by volunteers outside the big businesses, there's no quality assurance of any kind and, despite Linux being around for over 20 years, it has yet to offer a video editing application that can rise to the level of iMovie or MovieMaker.
Of course, there have been a few changes, but nothing particularly optimistic:
A) Vista and 7 are a joke and unnecessary, respectively, and I'm almost convinced Microsoft is sabotaging XP through updates as part of some planned obsolescence paradigm.
B) I've been reading more and more about Hackintoshes and companies like Psystar, but everything is a gamble and Apple is defending its "hardware/software" marriage with a rabid fervor that betrays their otherwise friendly image.
C) I did learn recently that Blender, a 3D animation program, actually has a rather good video editing component that's gone strangely unheralded by Linux users who otherwise insist on programs like KinoDV or KDEnLive.

I've probably re-tread more old ground than new, but hopefully it's shed some light on some of my computer habits, especially regarding laptops, which quite a few people like to ask me about as they think it's rather strange I've never owned one and don't care all that much for them.

Okay, now it's time for bed. I'm not going to bother reading over this again, so it's probably full of typos and run-on sentences and maybe even a few fragments.

Old YouTube Wound Re-Opened... and then some

2010-07-11T00:52:00.000-05:00

So, apparently America's Got Talent is in season. I don't watch television and I'm not really one to keep up with trends, but I know the show is on because YouTube is once again flooded with everyone and their dog's favorite clips, nevermind that NBC has a YouTube channel in addition to streaming available through NBC.com and Hulu. I've always found this very annoying, and for a time I thought it was simply because it leads to my roommate tapping me on the shoulder every few minutes to get me to look at something. However, I've come to realize this time around that my problem with the whole affair isn't so much with people reposting clips, effectively wasting bandwidth with redundant data, but with the show's format. Reality television, in general, is well-known for hardly living up to its name; between casting and editing, the producers of the show are showing the audience exactly what they are intended to see, regardless of the entrants' actual talents. It's almost a perfect echo of the old MTV criticism of having to look good without necessarily sounding good. Finding talent and creating an entertaining television show are not always one in the same goal. Bad acts get to go on to further performances for their audacity and good acts get the ax for their banality.

*Prince Poppycock is a very good opera singer (in fact, he's probably my favorite act), but I can't help but feel like he wouldn't have even gotten past the cattle calls (the auditions that take place before they get to perform for the celebrity judges) without his flamboyancy.

*At times, it feels like the judges want the contestants to beg for their own audition. Q: Why should we give you a place? A: (through tears) This means everything to us.

*The show sidelines its own contestants by occasionally cutting to their host in the wings. Showing the other contestants at least offers something of interest. Either way, it's upstaging, whether the contestants-in-the-wings are the type or not.

*I know these performers aren't necessarily actors, but between their pre-show interviews and backstage chatter, I'm convinced they couldn't sound more rehearsed if they had a dialogue coach who specialized in "Ham."

Conclusion: Cruelty. The entire show is a grand, epic-scale lesson, study, experiment, and meditation on cruelty. I don't want to elaborate on what exactly I mean by cruelty, except to say that I feel like a lofty and pretentious wastrel for every critical thought that passes through my mind as I watch these people be manipulated for the vague promise of fame that is just as likely to backfire as it is to bear no fruit. I really and truly hope each and every one of those contestants thinks it is all worth it, because I don't think I would.

A Fiction Revisited (from Gamespot weblog)

2010-06-13T02:16:00.001-05:00

Back in the eighth grade (circa 1995), my favorite part of English class was "sensory imagery." Best described as "Tell, don't show" sensory imagery is an exercise in presenting the visceral entirely by way of text, that is embellishing the plot with all the tedious little details that actually tend to get in the way of most otherwise good reads. Being an angst-and-hormone-ridden boy of early teens, I had a rather dark imagination, and took this new section of the course as a chance to "tell all." What followed were about ten little short pieces I ended up calling "nameless beast stories." They were drivel, but they were fun to write and they always got a positive response (except from my teacher, but only after the first two). A typical structure for one of these stories is 1)present main character and describe what they're doing, 2)introduce monster and describe its physical appearance down to the points on its teeth (if it had them, that is), and 3)describe monster eating, or otherwise dispatching, aforementioned human character. This wasn't always the pattern, but it was typical. I did eventually grow tired of it, and left the concept alone for nearly four years. Then, I found myself wondering if I was afraid of "letting the humans triumph" because it would make me seem soft or gushy. It can be rather unnerving to create a character and then try to convince a classroom full of people to care about them, so killing them off always seemed like an easy way out. I decided to confront this frivolous inner demon by writing what would be, in effect, the last nameless beast story. I only ever showed the story to two people, and they both liked it. I liked it at first, but looking back at it now over ten years later just makes me cringe. Quite a few of my writings have that effect on me. Every once in a while, I find the resolve to do something about it, for better or for worse.

That story's rewrite is presented here:

The Sacrifice:

The girl saw no logic or reason in the glorification of death that had been made an integral part of her township's daily life. In the years following the war's end, the people began to doubt the very leaders they had themselves elected, leading to the spiritual guides taking the place of the previous authority. Their stories of guilt and indemnity painted the grim future that was to beset every man, woman, and child in the town unless various acts of expiation were performed. These acts took the form of human sacrifices to the priests' newfound god, a dark yet fair entity, who would spare the masses pain and punishment as reward for their noble offerings. It seemed to the girl that nearly everyone except her own family had succumbed to the propaganda concerning what an honor it was to offer a sacrifice to the god and what an even greater honor it was to actually be the sacrifice. All of her friends would not stop talking about how envious they were of those girls carted off to the shrines to be offered to the new god. She, however, did not envy them, saw no honor in these acts, and hoped her parents felt the same as she.

They did not.

One fateful morning, the girl awoke to the sound of the priests rapping on her family's door. After hastily dressing and entering the main room of the house, she came upon her parents sitting at the dinner table with the priests, all smiles and laughter while the head priest told them that they would be rewarded and honored with fame and gifts beyond their wildest dreams for their "contribution," as he put it. She learned, to her horror, that they had made arrangements the previous night for her to be taken as the next offering. She begged and pleaded with her parents to reconsider their decision as she was dragged away and hoisted into a cart, urgently reaching out her hands to them. They only waved and smiled.

As the cart proceeded through the village, the girl endured the envious looks of her friends as they watched from the doorways and windows of their homes. She called out to them, imploring them to help her, only for her pleas to be answered with the same waves and smiles her parents had given her. The cart reached the shrine by midday, and the girl was taken to a small chamber beside of the main hall, where preparations would be made for the night's activities.

In the hours that passed from midday to night, the girl underwent a transformation. She had been cleansed and anointed by the shrine's priestesses. Peasant rags had been replaced with flowing white robes and brass bangles about her ankles and wrists. Lulled into a tired daze by the perfumes and various nonsensical mantras chanted by the priestesses, the girl was led into the main hall, where the head priest was reciting the final verses of the litany that signaled the start of the ritual. When finished, he turned to her and placed upon her gently bowed head a lavishly decorated tiara which seemed to glow in the light of the torches. He then looked to two priests standing at a stone slab behind the altar. He clapped his hands, his signal to them snapping the girl to attention and out of her daze. She looked up to see the slab being pushed aside with great effort and she found herself being suddenly and forcefully pushed forward into the opening behind it. Once through, the slab was replaced. She did not turn around. She only heard the grinding of stone and saw the light around her fade away, followed by silence and darkness.

She sat with her back against the stone slab, letting her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. When the imprints of the torches finally left her sight, she rose slowly and put out her arms, feeling for a wall along which to guide herself forward, the only direction open to her now. After a few twists and turns, the girl's tiring endeavor was rewarded with a simple sensation, that of a gentle breeze on her face. She stopped for a moment, as if struck; she never thought that something as subtle and mundane as a breeze would cut through the deprivation which had been eating away at her spirit and serve as a new source of strength to keep moving despite uncertainty. Pressing onward, the girl saw a light up ahead, and ran towards it. She came at last to the end of the tunnel, which opened into a large room that appeared to be a colosseum, sunken and dilapidated. The light was coming from a small opening in the roof, from which a long length of chain reached all the way down to the colosseum's floor. The girl slowed her pace, taking in her surroundings, suddenly suspicious of this seemingly good fortune. She saw that the chain dangled over a large, circular pit covered by an iron grating. She stopped at its edge and looked down, the pit revealing nothing but absolute darkness. The bars of the grating were flat and just wide enough for her to walk along. She would have to be careful, lest she fall into that vast abyss below. Holding out her arms for balance and carefully placing one foot in front of the other, the girl began walking toward the chain that would serve as her means of escape. The iron was cold against her feet, but the girl kept the cold as far from her mind as she could, focusing only on the chain directly in front of her. Halfway across, she heard a sound that seemed to originate from the pit below. She dared not look down for fear of losing her balance, but found herself trying to decipher the noise. It sounded like wind, but seemed to have almost a rhythm to it. It reminded her of breathing.

She at last reached the chain and clasped it in relief with both hands. When she pulled herself up enough to lift her feet off the grating, there was a moment of panic as the chain gave slightly. The girl heard the clanking of metal and noticed out the corner of her eye that the grating was sliding out from over the pit. She resumed her upward climb, ignoring the goings-on beneath her. She was halfway up the chain when the grating had completely uncovered the pit and the clanking stopped. The rhythmic wind from before returned, only this time it seemed to be faster and louder than before. She would have thought it only her imagination playing upon her fear if the noise had not just then risen briefly into a piercing roar. She stopped and dared a glance downward.

The god was beneath her.

The thing was enormous enough to nearly fill the pit. Its skin was solid black, making it blend perfectly with the darkness of the pit. The only parts of its form that set it apart from the darkness were its large, purple, reptilian eyes and huge, gaping maw. She felt its hot breath against her body as it lifted its head and began to close its mouth around the chain. She froze as its teeth closed on the chain, missing her feet by inches.The creature pulled down on the chain and the girl feared it giving way completely, sending her falling into the huge mouth. Fortunately, the bite had severed the chain completely and the beast fell awkwardly onto the edge of the pit. Sense returned to the girl in this moment and she frantically made her way to the top. She pulled herself up and was just over the edge when she suddenly felt the ground beneath her rise up and send her tumbling forward. The monster had lunged upward, its snout punching through the narrow opening, again narrowly missing the girl. The snout disappeared from sight, and she could hear the beast once again falling against the edge of the pit below. As she rose to her feet, she realized the beast had taken the rest of the chain down with it, and knew it would leap again. She turned to run and saw, at the edge of the newly widened hole, a statue resembling the creature, in front of which was a heavy, wooden lever with the last few feet of the chain attached to it. She ran over to it and noticed a series of gears and pulleys behind the statue that seemed to lead down into the ground to the colosseum below. The lever was leaning forward, and she realized that, when she put her weight on the chain, it activated the mechanism which pulled away the grating. An angry roar from behind her snapped her out of her thoughts and, summoning up all her strength, the girl threw herself against the lever, pushing it back toward the statue. The gears began to turn and the pulleys paid out and pulled in lengths of chain and rope. She heard the clanking of metal, and imagined the grate should be moving back into place. The gears then stopped briefly and the sound of the grate moving was replaced with a shrill cry from the colosseum below. The gears and pulleys slowed to almost a complete stop until the cry died out and they resumed their turning. When the sound of the grate stopped, the girl cautiously walked back toward the edge of the hole and looked down into the colosseum. The grate had completely severed the beast's head from its body. Its eyes were wide open, as was the maw, suggesting the incredible pain it endured as the grating closed on it.

As relief washed over her in a warm wave, the girl slumped to the floor, breathing heavily. She looked down at her hands, which lay limp with exhaustion in her lap, still adorned with the brass bangles. She lifted her hands to get a better look at their curious designs and realized that, in spite of all that happened, the tiara the priest had given her was still on her head. She removed the tiara and looked at it. She had not been able to examine it before, and only now noticed that, like the statue, it had been made in the image of the god, complete with two purple gems for its eyes. She stood up, holding the tiara in both hands. She looked down into the colosseum at the head of the fallen god and threw the tiara down into the hole.She watched it fall through the grating and into the abyss below.

:The End

(c)1998, 2010

No such thing as invisible thread (Legion)

2010-06-02T05:33:00.001-05:00

Just a little thought on sophistication.

My roommate and I just finished watching Legion. I didn't have much desire to see it, but she did because she likes Christian imagery and films that pertain to the Biblical apocalypse. I like Dogma, which she's never seen, and she likes Gabriel, which I haven't seen, so those are our viewpoints going into this thing.

She likes it. I hate it.

I hate it to such a degree that it now has a place in the number three slot of worst movies ever made (second is Wanted and third is Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li). It has the exact same problem that Wanted has, it's a moronic, dumb-as-a-brick action roller-coaster that tries desperately to convince you otherwise but has absolutely nothing with which to back its claims.
I don't have any problem with action movies, and I certainly don't hold something like Shanghai Noon or Indiana Jones to the same standards as I do something like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Rashomon. However, the makers of action movies have to learn to either be content with being what they are, or rise to the challenge that comes from trying to be more sophisticated. Imagine a scale of action movies and their level of relative sophistication. On one end of the spectrum is something like Rumble in the Bronx, by no means a bad movie (it's one of my favorites, really), it's just slightly silly and doesn't hold up to much scrutiny in the way of physics, logic, depth, or anything along those lines. It never takes itself seriously, but doesn't try to get you to, either, because it knows it has nothing to offer apart from a spectacle. On the other end of the spectrum is True Lies, also by no means a bad movie (a favorite, as well), but it's a very clever and deep movie with multi-layered characters and a tonally-consistent approach to its own plot. It takes itself seriously when it needs to, and laughs at itself when it wants to, and makes it very clear when the audience is supposed to laugh along and when they're supposed to care.

More movies on the Rumble in the Bronx side:
Shanghai Noon
Enter the Dragon
Street Fighter

More movies on the True Lies side:
Hero
Watchmen
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

These two relative extremes work, they're not outside of the gray area, but they're not dead center, which is where movies like Wanted and Legion are. They'd be outclassed at the sports bar with Watchmen, Kingdom of Heaven, and Curse of the Golden Flower, but they think too highly of themselves to kick back on the couch with 300, Temple of Doom, and Enter the Dragon.
The chief reason why Legion is in the dead zone, its key failing, is its plot and story. At the end of the day, Legion is half a movie, and not just because of its "cliffhanger" ending (this movie makes the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie look self-contained); half of the plot points and concepts it introduces are never followed through with or resolved. Furthermore, many of these concepts and plot points are introduced very late in the film's progression. This is also quite possibly the first film I've ever seen to employ both Chekov's Gun and a Deus Ex Machina (a very literal Deus Ex Machina).

My roommate says my problem is that I was putting more thought into the film than the average viewer. Granted, that's probably true, but like I said, I would never apply the same level of cerebration to this film as I do to American Psycho or 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. Apparently, even my most average of criteria is too much for this film to handle. It's entirely possible for an action film to have a deep narrative and well-rounded characters. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples to go by, so even if you just want to sell a lot of theater seats, you don't have to insult your audience's collective intelligence to do so. Legion bombards you with Christian imagery and lore in the vain hope that people's general ignorance of some of the deeper meanings presented in the Bible will earn the film some kind of revere.

The emperor isn't wearing new clothes, though, he's just naked.

Psst! Sensei, it's the kettle.... (The Sensei)

2010-05-30T01:05:00.001-05:00

There are many factors to a film which help determine its genre: action sequences, romantic elements, humor, adult situations, suggestive dialogue, and innumerable others. Genres in general bother me because films (like any other sort of media) can be very difficult to classify and run the risk of being pigeonholed unfairly. Should a martial arts drama be classified (by Netflix, among others) under "Gay and Lesbian" because one of its central characters is homosexual? Granted, I'm not saying "Gay and Lesbian" is any sort of stigma for a film, or anyone the film might appeal to or be targeted at for that matter.

I love women too much to be gay, and I lack the necessary anatomy to be considered lesbian, but I'm not homophobic, either. On the whole, my only real "issue" with those films filed under "Gay & Lesbian" is that they tend to be a bit preachy, but preachiness is as much a common theme of those films as gunfights are for Westerns or spaceflight is for Science Fiction or farce is for Romantic Comedies. So, when I say that I'm not a fan of those films, it's only because I'm neither the choir nor the heretic; I'm more the Good Samaritan. Speaking of which...

The story of 2008's The Sensei (a film my roommate got from Netflix and recommended to me after viewing) centers around McClain, a homosexual teenager who recently lost his lover to a lynch mob in a small, rural town in Colorado. Afraid for his life, he frequently tries to enlist in martial arts classes at a local dojo, only to have his applications mysteriously (read: deliberately) vanish. To further matters, the local minister turns the sermon at an Easter mass from the passion and resurrection of Christ to matters of Sodom and Gomorrah at the very sight of McClain and his mother entering the church to join in the ceremony.
In the dojo's defense, they turn young McClain away not directly because of his sexual orientation, but because they fear losing their students over the matter. In fact, the family that runs the dojo has had some acceptance issues of their own to deal with, not just because of being Asian, but actually because of being multi-ethnic, with Irish, Asian, and even Filipino members and relatives. They're also of mixed faiths, with the grandparents devout Buddhists and one of their sons a Christian actively involved with the local church. The family has a very proud tradition of teaching the martial arts throughout the generations, a tradition that sadly is not open to the women of the family, as we learn when we are introduced to Karen O'Neil (played by the film's director D. Lee Inosanto), a black sheep of the family who returns to town to settle a small matter which is revealed later on in the film.
McClain is cornered in the locker room after gym class and savagely beaten by the school bully, recently suspended from the football team (a move that lost him his scholarship, and the respect of his ex-convict brother). Desperate, McClain's mother approaches Karen and asks him to teach her son some fighting moves, in the hope he might have a fighting chance at defending himself. Karen is reluctant at first, but agrees to private lessons (emphasis on private, as Karen was denied her black belt thanks to the family's proud traditions), wherein she forms a strong and lasting bond with McClain. The lessons are put to the test when a fight breaks out in the school cafeteria, instigated by the bully (out on bail and awaiting a court hearing). McClain is able to subdue the attack, only to earn the scorn of the bully's older brother, who blames McClain for his brother's now-repeated incarceration. Things go south for Karen when her family finds out she's been teaching McClain, with her older brother the most (and, it turns out, only) disapproving, and she considers leaving town. McClain is devastated by her decision, and his attempts to outrun the pain sets him in the sights of the bully's intoxicated brother and his motley crew of hicks and hillbillies. Karen manages to come to the rescue in time, and the two just barely manage to hold their own against the brutes. As a result, everyone is hospitalized, but a small misunderstanding about bleeding wounds drives a wedge between McClain and Karen, leading him to think she's just as homophobic as everyone else. Karen's family arrives (even her disapproving older brother, now mellowed a bit) and Karen reveals the reason she came back has to do with her husband's death. She tells McClain that her husband, a boxer she'd previously said died of cancer, in reality had AIDS and passed it on to her (hence her concern over getting too close to McClain after she's severely wounded in the fight).
What follows in the rest of the film is the reconciling of all these revelations and the effects they have on the community as a whole. It's preachy in places and doesn't leave all loose threads tied up, but still offers strong and powerful dramatics and lots of poignant moments to hit home the reality of the film's message.

On the whole, there's only one real point of contention with this film, but it's a rather large and noticeable one. Following McClain's release from the hospital, he and his mother are visited by Karen's grandmother at an unusual hour of the night. The grandmother explains that she's there to ask a favor of McClain's mom to help Karen. After assurance by the mother that nothing is unreasonable, the grandmother utters a single word:

Pot.

There is, as one might expect, a moment of uncomfortable silence, followed by a hurried explanation that they are, in fact, referring to "the kind of pot that gets you high and not the kind you cook in."

Obvious question: What the Hell?
Obvious follow-up questions: Why would they think McClain's mother would have any or know where to get some? When did we ever have an indication that McClain's mother had access to marijuana? Why do they think this will help Karen's condition where years of medical treatment and a healthy, pro-active lifestyle have failed?
Obvious and appropriate summation of previous questions: What the Hell?

The scene that follows (and undertows the fielding of the aforementioned question, follow-ups, and summation) is two of Karen's brothers arguing how to prepare a joint, with the grandmother (the one who asked for it in the first place and even knew the gesture to indicate it) asking how they know to do this in the first place. The camera then cuts away to McClain sitting next to Karen in bed looking through some old books (with nary a doobie in sight), technically ending the joint-rolling sequence. For that matter, it ends any further mention or discussion of the sudden appearance of cannabis.

It truly is an enigma as to why a film that has so far tackled issues of homosexuality, racial diversity, misguided religious piety, AIDS awareness, and sexism would suddenly throw in a recreational drug reference without stating any kind of viewpoint on it. My roommate offered the explanation that, being an Asian family, they would try to find something equivalent to opium to ease the pain of the illness. Admittedly, she still thought the sequence was weak at best and out of place at worst, not to mention racist. In the end, the only real explanation that works is one of comedy. Put simply, the makers of the film thought it would be funny to have pot jokes because they needed to inject some comedic elements to lighten the mood following the film's dramatic climax. One can just imagine the conversation leading to its inclusion:

1: We need something to lighten the mood of the film a bit after all those deep revelations and intense characterization.
2: But what's funny? What kind of joke could we throw in?
1: I don't know, what's a good comedy out there?
2: Um, well, there's those Harold and Kumar movies, they're pretty funny.
1: Oh, what are they about?
2: They're about two pot smokers who go on a series of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby-inspired misadventures on their way to a fast food restaurant, among them an escaped zoo animal, a nymphomaniacal Christian couple, a pesky raccoon, a racist police officer, and a sexually ravenous Neil Patrick Harris.
1: ... what was that about pot?

Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this, and I certainly wouldn't go so far as to say that scene is the reason why this film hasn't achieved a widespread release or much critical attention, but when questions like that come up, every facet of a film's content and character must be considered. For all the good this film does, and all the positive messages it teaches, it practically shoots itself in the foot because of a moment of sheer ineptitude regarding humor.

So, what do we have? We have a solid, well-made, and inspirational drama with a singular blemish that is tragically the size of the moon and twice as heavy.

Space Marines in Japan? (Halo Legends)

2010-05-23T06:59:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time, there was a little game called Marathon. It was a first-person shooter available for the Apple Macintosh, of all things. I absolutely adored it, mostly because Vectorman on the Genesis can only entertain for so long and I'd played through Myst about three times. By the time Marathon 2 came out, though, I was beginning to get a little weary of the FPS to the point that I stopped playing them until Maken X came out for Dreamcast. I was, however, intrigued when Bungie first started showing off stuff from Halo, but when they announced that Halo was going to be an XBox/PC exclusive, I was one of those arrogant little jerks who cried, "Traitor!" and swore off all things Bungie for the next several years. So, I never gave Halo a chance, even after I bought a PC in 2005. In fact, what drew me to Red vs. Blue was that it poked fun at the game (and I couldn't tell you for the life of me why I bought the Halo Graphic Novel). I didn't actually play Halo until about 2008, when a friend gave me his old XBox so I could show Fable to my roommate. As it turned out, I couldn't really get into the first game, but I loved Halo 2, albeit I've still never really gotten back my taste for first-person shooters. On the whole, though, I'm only a Halo fan in a vicarious manner. The "canon proper" as it might be called (what's in the games) is virtually inconsequential to me, but its ancillary items of lore (Red Vs. Blue, the comics, art books, marketing websites) I find myself hopelessly drawn to, almost to the point of compulsive hoarding. That's not to say all these items are good; if anything, I actually feel kind of bad for Halo fans that they have to settle for such mediocre merchandise. I've got drafts of a review for some of the Halo comics in the works, namely the original Graphic Novel anthology and Uprising by Bendis and Maleev, but for now I'm going to be focusing on the recent DVD release Halo Legends. I was initially reluctant to pick it up because I was first going to rent it from Red Box, but found out that Warner Bros. was boycotting Red Box because, according to them, overly-convenience rental options like Red Box are hurting their DVD sales.

Granted, I was going to probably buy it anyway, but if there's one thing I truly hate, it's being played. Of course, it's not fair to take out my frustrations on a movie because the studio backing it is run by howler monkeys with brain damage (seriously, that's like blaming Hertz for GM's current financial state), so I relented, but I'd still really love to see the proof Time Warner can offer proving that rentals hurt sales. Anyway...

Legends completes a kind of unofficial trilogy of Warner-produced anthologies of animated shorts based on major franchises. It began with The Animatrix back in 2003 and Batman: Gotham Knight in 2008. They're worth checking out, but ultimately suffer the same basic problem that all anthologies do, which is the simple fact that "you can't please everyone all the time."

In other words, there are some shorts you're going to love:
Beyond (Animatrix)
Working Through Pain (Batman: Gotham Knight)

others, you'll think are rather good:
Detective Story (Matrix)
World Record (Matrix)
Field Test (Batman)
Have I Got A Story for You (Batman)

and others, well, you'll hate:
Matriculated (Ani)

Origins I Batman: Gotham Knight never really had an "origin" piece (unless you count Working Through Pain) because that part of his story is not only well-known, but infinitely interpretable. That is, his origin has been told and re-told so many times that putting forth that kind of exposition would be pointless. For The Matrix, however, the backstory was only vaguely hinted at in the first film, so there were still quite a few gaps to fill in, hence Second Renaissance. For Halo, the backstory is fully fleshed-out, but not actually that well-known to people who haven't played through the games. Over 100 hours of gameplay, across 3 main titles and a handful of spin-offs get condensed into two pithy chapters. Helmed by the same crew that put together Second Renaissance for The Animatrix, fans of that little collection will feel a distinct sensation of deja vu, right down to the fact that the story is being told by an intelligent computer program. In this case, it's the ever-lovely Cortana who fills us in on the epic mystery of the Forerunners and the events that led them to the construction of the Halo ringworlds. The visual style is patterned after the story "Second Sunrise Over New Mombasa" from the Halo Graphic Novel, illustrated by the iconic sci-fi artist Moebius. In my draft of the review of the Halo Graphic Novel, I make the statement that the only people I feel more sorry for in terms of product quality than Halo fans are Moebius fans. I mean, everyone keeps going on and on about what a great artist Jean Giraud is, but when I look over his work, there's a lot to be disappointment to be found (the manga Icaro and the game Samurai 20XX, for starters). These two shorts I find almost beyond criticism; they're equally competent in their premise, direction, and execution. They ultimately serve more as primers than standalone pieces meant to be appreciated on the same level as the subsequent stories in the anthology. That said, this is ultimately the stronger of the two (by a small margin, both earn serious kudos with me for prominently featuring the wonderful aforementioned Cortana) with its striking art style.

Origins II Copy and Paste previous, minus all that stuff about Moebius. The art direction takes a turn for the less stylized and goes for a more realistic style and focuses on the progression of humanity in the Halo Universe instead of focusing on the Forerunners and their battle with the parasitic Flood. Did I mention I've got a major geek-crush on Cortana ?

Homecoming I'm not going to rank these shorts or anything like that, but while this one may not be my favorite, it's practically a close second. Sadly, this one doesn't seem to get the appreciation it deserves, mostly because a lot of the hardcore Halo fans have deemed it the metaphorical "Castration" of the Halo franchise, as evidenced by their summary of the piece as "the lame-ass one with the f***ing teddy bears." The reality is that the teddy bear is featured only once or twice and is hardly central to the plot, as you might be otherwise led to believe. Furthermore, the bear stands as a great counterpoint to the surprisingly dark and ominous tone that underpins the whole work. The story centers around the Spartan super-soldier program's more dubious protocols, chiefly the kidnapping of six year-old children from their homes who are then hastily replaced with "flash clones," duplicates in every way like their natural-born counterparts, save for a weaker constitution and ultimately shorter lifespan (hence answering the question, "why don't they just send the clones into battle?").

The Duel As much as I'm an odd one out (no pun intended) amongst Halo fans for not avidly following the games as much as the comics and various videos, I seem equally alienated by fans of Halo Legends because I seem to dislike all the shorts on this collection that others absolutely adore. Many reviews have cited this as being the strongest piece, mostly for its unusual art style and unique approach to the inner workings of an alien society. The art direction claims to be based on that of Japanese inkwash paintings, though I'd seriously contest that it looks more like gouache or wet-on-wet acrylic or at least watercolor more than sumi-e. At least, it doesn't look like any inkwash paintings I've ever seen. On the whole, there's not much to say about this one apart from that it's a Japanese animation studio reinterpreting an American science fiction franchise as a Japanese legend, and it works about as well as you might imagine.

Odd One Out just as Odd One Out goes off on a tangent from proper Halo continuity, I'm going to go on a tangent to talk about Dragonball for a bit, to help clear up any confusion regarding my stance on all things Toriyama. The fact is, he's got a solid design philosophy and I do like his work. Back in teh day, I even followed DBZ, but I'm not going to pretend every second was pure gold. DBZ had a lot of issues as a television series, namely in the pacing and length departments. Officially, Toriyama is not involved with Halo Legends, but Daisuke Nishio is, and between him and Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru, it's the next best thing. Nishio is a known pacifist and has very strong feelings against guns (yet strangely has no problem with people beating the tar out of each other), so space marines might not seem like a great subject for him to tackle, so he doesn't. Instead of focusing on the UNSC's war with the Covenant, his story centers on a small family of orphans descended from the survivors of a ship crash. For an off-canon story meant to explore the bounds of just what will and won't fly in the Halo universe, it's strangely respectful to the franchise. If there's ever a second volume of Halo Legends, I'd really like Frank O'Connor (project supervisor and the man with the final word on all that has to do with Halo) to go forth with his idea to expand on the daily life and history of this family that has managed to fight off everything from bird-headed space pirates to a genetically-enhanced Brute.

The Babysitter this story centers around the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, stars of the recent Halo 3: ODST game for the XBox 360 and the Helljumper comic by Peter David and Eric Nguyen. The ODST game has gotten quite a bit of buzz from both ends of the spectrum, though with most of the criticism centering on the game's release and marketing than the content itself. Along with Homecoming, this is the most visually straightforward with traditional, hand-drawn 2D animation only barely supplemented by CGI, mostly for the vehicles and a few of the backgrounds. The story revolves around a young Helljumper named O'Brien, who's just been demoted to "back-up" on a sniper mission. The task of pulling the trigger is given to a Spartan, who ends up saving his bacon at least twice on the mission, much to his chagrin. It's a bit predictable, but overall one of the strongest chapters in the collection.

The Prototype or, as I like to call it and to crib a phrase from The Simpsons, Battling Seizure Robots. There are two very important words to bear in mind before you go watching this: Muzzle Flash. There are honestly times when I had to look away because I thought I was going to be sick, and I'm not even epileptic. Strobe lights notwithstanding, this really is the weakest short of the bunch, not as much for what it is or even what it lacks as much as what it fails to do, which is let its own premise breathe. The dialogue is simple and straightforward (as is the premise), but repeated ad nauseum, pounding the premise into our heads, as though we'll lose sight of the theme amidst all the gunfire, explosions, and flickering computer displays. This could have been a brilliant one, maybe even my favorite, but it just fails on so many levels.

The Package I really cannot understand why they couldn't get Steve Downes in to voice Master Chief in this or Odd One Out. It doesn't help matters that the voice-over work in this piece is the weakest by leaps and bounds. It's as if no one in the cast (or the ADR director, for that matter) could make up their minds as to whether these characters should be portrayed as cold, calculating marines or as real, relatable people and then phoned the whole thing in at the last minute. As for the animation style (and the short, in general), I'm totally on the fence about it. I neither love it nor totally despise it. If I hate anything about it, I hate what it represents. It's got what I hate most about CGI in spades: the overdone fluidity and weightlessness of movements and objects. It's got what nearly everyone hates about modern action films in equal spades: shaky camera work and staccato editing. In short, imagine if George Lucas let Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay handle the opening sequence to Revenge of the Sith.

Voices of a Virtual Career Fair

2010-05-11T13:23:00.000-05:00

I just had what may quite possibly be the worst online experience of my entire life. It was a virtual job fair for USCellular. I heard about it from a friend and went to register that very day on the company's job site. I'd been to USCellular's site to look for jobs before, but I liked the idea of this virtual job fair, since it allowed the opportunity to talk with members of the staff and administration. The whole site was set up to look like a convention center, with sections like "Exhibitors' Booths," "Career Resources," and "Networking Lounge." All you have to do is fill out a profile (which includes a resume and cover letter), go to the right booth for your location, and then you'll initiate chats with members of staff.

In the exhibitor's booth for the MO/STL Metro area, I got invited to a chat with one of the staff members right off the bat.

V******* M***** has joined the chat.
V******* M*****: Hey Matthew --what position are you looking for?
Matthew Andrews: Well, my most recent experience was in customer service, but in total the bulk of my work life has been in retail, and I do kind of miss meeting customers
V******* M*****: We have Retail Wireles Consultant positions open in the St. Louis/Metro area and you can apply at USCellular.Jobs and a recruiter will review your resume and reach out. Thx!
Matthew Andrews: USCellular.Jobs here in the career fair? Or is that a different website?
Matthew Andrews: I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I don't understand where you're directing me to; USCellular.Jobs isn't a URL and I don't see a section here called that. Can you be more specific?

Total chat time, 13 minutes, with ten of it devoted to waiting for an answer to what I thought was an honest question.

Later, at the "Networking Lounge" a kind of general chat area for staff and guests, I posted this:

Matthew Andrews (05/11/2010 12:47:01 PM):After meeting with a representative V******* M***** regarding retail positions in the STL area, she told me to go to USCelluar.Jobs ... but I don't understand where she's referring to as it is not a proper URL and I can't find a section anywhere at this fair that looks like that. I asked her for more information, but she did not answer.

L****** S******* (05/11/2010 12:53:48 PM):Hi Matthew, the site is www.uscellular.jobs. If you follow this link it should guide you there.

Matthew Andrews (05/11/2010 12:55:18 PM):L******, my browser simply says BAD REQUEST (invalid hostname) when I click on that link.

Matthew Andrews (05/11/2010 1:06:09 PM):I still keep getting BAD REQUEST (Invalid Hostname) when I click on www.uscellular.jobs . Also, I didn't even get to ask anyone at the exhibit booth any other questions, they simply left the chat session after giving me the URL. She didn't even stick around to let me ask about the work environment or the clientele or anything else along those lines.
D***** W******* (05/11/2010 1:07:09 PM):Please join a private chat with me....

Promptly then, in a new chat window:

D***** W******* has joined the chat.
D***** W*******: Matt I am sorry this happened.I am not sure I can answer the questions that you had but I can try ... what were they..
Matthew Andrews: Well, I was just curious about the retail positions in the STL area, namely what sort of clientele or demographic that location tends to get.

Total chat time, 23 minutes, with less than three of those minutes devoted to the actual discussion. Suddenly, I get an invite from one of the other guests. A****** P***** has been unable to login to the career site that each of us keeps getting referred to. Eventually, she is able to login, and I realize why I'm getting the "Bad Request" error message. The link that L****** gave me was at the end of a sentence, so it counted the "." as part of the URL, throwing off the browser. So, I remove the offending punctuation mark, only to find it's just their default career search page. In other words, the company set up this huge website and real-time chat server all so they could refer us back to the site where we first registered found out about this fair in the first place.

Am I missing something here?

Faux Audiolog Finale

2010-04-04T04:22:00.000-05:00

Part The Last of this series of bogus audiologs for a game that never was.

Ugh, don't get me started on this one. I did so many re-takes I lost count. The biggest problem of all was fitting my own arbitrary time-length. Originally, when I thought this would be three parts, each one was going to be successively longer, 30 seconds for the first, 60 for the second, and 90 on the third. That ended up not really working out, so now it's four parts, each approximately 30 seconds with the last being just below 90. I couldn't let it go over because, in addition to DevART, YouTube, DailyMotion, and others, I've been uploading these to Flickr, which has a very strict 90-second limit.

In terms of the story, now that it's essentially finished (I did have an idea for a sort of "side-story" centering around the loader going haywire, just as a little throwaway), I wanted to give a few more details about what happened, but still leave it relatively ambiguous.

In terms of the technical side of these four little productions, they were all recorded the same way: on a cell-phone, specifically a Motorola ZN5, which, it turns out, has a really good little voice notes feature, with alarmingly good quality. Unfortunately, the format this little wonder records in is AMR, which is okay for playing back on phones, but it has to be converted into something else if you're going to do anything else with it. Luckily, I found a little freeware program that converts AMR to either WAV or MP3. What's funny about the AMR format is that its sampling rate is around 8kHz (to give you an idea, your voice on the phone is about 11kHz, and a CD is 44kHz) with heavy compression, but the artifacts created as a result are barely noticeable. Compared to an MP3 recording (on one of my more sophisticated devices) at 11kHz, the 8kHz AMR recording sounds leaps and bounds better.

There you have it: simple and readily-available recording devices and as little editing as possible. Hopefully, that "less is more" approach has paid off.

Faux Audiolog 3

2010-03-27T08:01:00.000-05:00

The third (but not final) installment in a series of faux audiologs for a game that never was.

I'm not all that happy with this one, and it may be as good a time as any to delve a bit into my "methods" for acting.

I'd been planning on doing something like this for a while, so the idea was always mulling about in my head, but never fully sure when to start. Then, one day, I woke up and decided that now (operative word: now) was as good a time as any, so I recorded, right then and there, the first episode. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how I made myself sound like I'd been hiding in a storage locker for three days with absolute hell breaking loose outside; by the simple virtue of not being a morning person. At first, I was worried about being able to recreate those circumstances for episode two, but I realized there would be a sort of natural progression in terms of composure anyway, hence the line in part two, "I'm a little better now." In any case, I recorded part two lying down, just like before. For the third one, I just did a dry read-through to determine the length. I re-recorded a few times, but albeit it was rough, the first take really sounded the best. That is to say, I disliked it the least. I knew as well that if I kept re-recording, 1) I'd never be happy with it and 2) I'd get far too comfortable with the lines so it would lose its naturalistic quality.

I don't know if the fourth one will be the last (for this particular character/story arc), but if it is, it'll probably be the longest. At first, when I thought this would be exactly three parts, they were going to be increasingly longer with the first being around 30 seconds, the second around 60, and the final nearly a full 90 seconds.

Nope, just a demon.... (Paranormal Activity)

2010-03-24T22:13:00.001-05:00

First things first, I hate the word "mockumentary." In fact, let that be the only time the word is mentioned forthwith. The problem is that the term implies connotations of humor and parody (This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, et al), which gives other and especially more recent films of this style (Faux Amateurism?) a very debilitating handicap right out the gate. Luckily, The Blair Witch Project came out like a bolt from the blue and breathed fresh life into the style (Diegetic Archive Footage?) by applying its stylistic principles to the horror genre, where it's made itself surprisingly at home with works such as:

The Last Broadcast
REC
Quarantine
The Poughkeepsie Tapes
The Blair Witch Project
Amateur Porn Star Killer
Cloverfield
Paranormal Activity
The Fourth Kind

As a filmmaker, I'm naturally attracted to the concept; I appreciate its grassroots, guerilla sensibility married perfectly to lofty goals and a wide vision. At the same time, it's got this fragility, a kind of precariously teetering insecurity best analogized to The Emperor's New Clothes. Basically, once you acknowledge the "realism" as "frugality," disbelief becomes unsuspended and suddenly you realize that you're watching a talented filmmaker stretch a budget in ways that seem more underhanded than clever. Whichever intention rings true, it's being given more attention than necessary. If you can manage to avoid the pessimistic outlook of "cheap and dirty," the outlook we're left with is that it's just another way to tell a story, like first vs. third-person perspective in a novel.

To that end, the best way to think of these films (whatever name we decide upon for them) is as the visual equivalent of the epistolary novel. It has all the strengths: a more relatable perspective, a more naturalistic approach to characterization, and a heightened sense of realism. Sadly, while it may not exactly have all the weaknesses as well, it's got a whole new set of them to overcome.

The biggest point of contention that's probably going to arise during a viewing of Paranormal Activity is one of scale and subtlety.

This leads to the inevitable comparison to The Blair Witch Project. Yes, it seems unfair to hold every "Found, First-Person Film" to Blair Witch, but that's because there's a lot of things that Blair Witch does right, and a lot to admire as well. Chief among these is its ambiguity. While the film ultimately speaks for itself, so to, er... speak, it really doesn't have a lot to say. Is it a witch? Is it a cult? Is it an elaborate hoax? Is it a conspiracy to commit murder motivated by a sexual power struggle? The point is, it's open to interpretation, and we're really not sure just what it is we've seen.
With Paranormal Activity, there's no question about what's happening. I won't spoil it, but I'll tell you the exact moment in the film when several things happen, among them getting a clear and solid sense of this movie's "reality," and myself nearly bursting out laughing, ready to dismiss the film as cheap and gimmicky.

The scene in two words: Ouija Board.

That'll be the extent of the description, but you'll know the moment when you come to it, and hopefully you'll see what I mean when I'm talking about subtlety and a sense of scope. At first, I honestly found myself fighting back a laugh, along with an overwhelming sense of disappointment. It's my own fault for expecting ambiguity and instead getting something that very clearly and blatantly spells out just what type of horror movie this is. It is not, in fact, a psychological thriller as these "Discovered Video Diaries (Hmm, DVD...?)" might lend themselves to, but something more straightforward. Don't let that deter you; again, we won't spoil it, but just because we know what is causing the hauntings doesn't make it any less effective.

To sum up, the best way to describe just what kind of horror movie Paranormal Activity is in relation to other horror films you might have seen is this: on one end of the spectrum is Poltergeist with The Blair Witch Project on the other, and Paranormal Activity is exactly halfway between them.

NOTE: If you rent this movie on disc, you're presented with two menu options at the start, one being to see the film with its original, theatrical ending, the other to see an alternative ending, which, in the film's complex production and distribution history, is more akin to the director's original cut of the film. While you're probably going to watch both endings anyway, I strongly recommend seeing the theatrical cut first before checking out the alternative ending.

Faux Audiolog 2

2010-03-22T04:34:00.000-05:00

Second installment of my bogus audiologs for a game that never was.
Also, on a quick note, I'm re-watching Krapp's last tape for about the third time; it's really good, and I'm trying to work out an analysis. I've also been watching a few of the other adaptations, namely "What Where," which is this wonderfully bizarre sort of tone-poem in line with "Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread" or something like that.

Faux Audiolog

2010-03-17T13:14:00.000-05:00

Bad attempt at acting by yours truly. Everyone's probably done these by now (especially The Science Officer), but I still thought I'd give it a try.

Today, and on a related note, Netflix is supposed to deliver disc 2 of Beckett on Film, which contains Krapp's Last Tape (recommended by Missy Tannenbaum of Dork Stitch), so I'll definitely be writing something on that one, even if it spends more time dwelling on my personal connection to Samuel Beckett.

Weblogs, V-logs, A-logs?

2010-03-13T06:05:00.002-06:00

this is reposted from my Gamespot weblog. I decided to post it here as well for two reasons: 1)It involves a weblog I found here on Blogger and 2)The topic actually harkens back to an entry I wrote all the way back on Yahoo!360 (archived on Multiply), where the awesome phenomena of Cryptomnesia struck me and caused me to re-discover podcasts (which I called "A-Logs" in my ignorance of the obvious).

I have my PSP.

I still have my PS2.

There's also my roommate's Gamecube and the XBox a friend of mine gave me.

The only next-gen console I have is my roommate's Wii, to which I've contributed over half the games.

Suffice to say, I'm a little behind.

Don't get me wrong, I like the Wii, but I'm not totally in love with the motion control scheme (though I can't wait to play Dead Space: Extraction). At the end of the day, I'm all about kicking back on the couch with a controller in my lap, an experience the Wii makes me feel guilty for indulging in, especially considering most of the games I play the most on it are available for other consoles like the XBox360.

My present financial situation prevents me from buying an XBox360 (The only thing that makes me interested in the PS3 are Linger in Shadow, The Last Guardian, and Valkyria Chronicles... and that last one's getting a sequel for PSP anyway). There's a shortlist of games I'd want for 360, but the more I find out about them, the less inclined I am to make that wanting justify indulging myself. It's not that I find the games disappointing (not in each case, at least) but I definitely look upon this new generation of game consoles and think, "what am I really missing out on?"

The worst part of the answer I get, really, is that what I'm missing out on isn't even all that innovative. In fact, it's incredibly primitive to such a point that I've experienced them before in PC games, Myst and Marathon to be precise. To be more precise, the "missing element" I'm referring to are audiologs. In Myst, they took the form of little holograms or pieces of correspondence left on desks or bookshelves. In Marathon, they took the form of the on-screen text of the computer terminals scattered throughout each level. Similarly, Final Fantasy X-2 had you gathering spheres, which showed little video clips of bygone times and places. Metal Gear Solid had Snake's video briefings (which made me fall in video static and grainy video images in a way I didn't think was possible). Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has you cataloging various alien species you encounter and collecting logbooks and journals from past explorers long since passed on, survived only by their... er, echoes.

Some time ago, on The Escapist, I thought I'd started the perfect forum thread: "What was your first gadget?" I shared my first gadget to get the ball rolling, an RCA microcassette recorder. I did all the typical things that kids do with tape recorders: sing silly songs, do interviews or impressions, divulge thoughts and rants, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't start at least one recording with "Captain's log, stardate..." and so on. Anyway, time went on, my little handheld studio faded from memory, and I ended up giving it to my parents to help them get some recordings for a little legal trouble they were having. Suddenly, a few years ago, I was in a computer store when I suddenly started to miss my little RCA and found myself buying a Sony IC Recorder (ICD-P320). Now, I've got a small collection of digital voice recorders, at least five. I keep them scattered about and in different pockets of different jackets. I use them for everything and anything imaginable from grocery lists to driving directions to rough drafts of stories that float around in my head.

More recently, after the release of Bioshock, and all its subsequent discussions and reminisces of System Shock, made me aware of these funny little things called Audiologs. I'd never heard this term before, even though the items themselves have existed since the beginning of gaming, right down to the books on library shelves in any a number of RPGs. At first, I thought it was just referring to audio recordings. Under that narrow definition, the only past-gen experience I'd had with the things were the various audio cassettes scattered about the house in Fatal Frame. Of course, now I've learned that audiolog need not refer specifically to audio recordings, though those do seem the most interesting, the most recent to fully develop, and, in a way, the easiest to produce. Obviously, written text is the easiest in technical terms, but given that CD-ROM technology got its start back in the early 1990s, it's surprising that only a scant few games released in that era (namely System Shock) employed audio recordings as part of the game's atmosphere. Sure, Myst had sound-based puzzles, but they didn't aid the narrative backstory in any way.

Audiologs also seem like they'd just be flat out fun to make. They don't need to be long, they can be fragmented, and they needn't even be of the highest fidelity as, even in the far future, crackly static gives that extra added layer of authenticity to the game's atmosphere.

Although my forum thread didn't get many replies, The Escapist did lead me to an article written by Graeme Virtue, who I found out is the author (and principal actor) of a series of "sketches" for the One Life Left podcast, entitled "Science Officer Logs." Taking a cue from Dave Hollins, Space Cadet (the Son of Cliche radio sketches by Red Dwarf's Rob Grant and Doug Naylor), the Science Officer's Logs parody not only the concept of an audiolog, but also several gaming conventions, from ice and lava levels, to even damned escort missions. They can be found here.

In addition to that, I've just spent the past few minutes watching YouTube videos of people collecting the audiologs from Halo: ODST. I stopped out of guilt, thinking, "No, no, I should play the game, or at least own it before I go cheating like this."

So, here I am, an audiolog junky with no real way to satisfy my habit. I really hope I can afford an XBox 360 soon.

Back in front of a camera

2010-03-07T14:38:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm still sick and I'm sick of being sick. So, I decided to make a video whether I felt like it or not, just to give myself a boost and help win a little moral victory over this damn cold. The results are slightly better than I thought they'd turn out. In any case, I don't have to look at that "time since last" counter on my YouTube channel continually adding up as I kept waiting to get well enough to sit in front of a camera or record a voiceover. If I want that YouTube partnership, I have to stick to my promise of a consistent output, even if the format changes slightly. I like doing the reviews, but I don't want to get stuck doing them. DeviantART and Flickr Video will still be my main jumping-off point for my more artistic pieces, whereas YouTube will always be a little more candid and personal, with video-logs and opinion pieces.

Well, THAT happened... (Elektra: The Hand & The Devil)

2010-03-06T04:17:00.001-06:00

I was a rather avid comic reader in the early 1990s, an era now known in comic book enthusiast circles as "The Dark Ages," a time when exaggerated anatomy, darker stories, morally ambiguous new heroes, and unwelcome overhauls to heroes of yore were the norm. In short, I wasn't seeing the medium at its best. As such, from 1995 onward, my two longboxes of polybagged publications saw no new additions and about as much time outside of my closet. In fact, it wasn't until at least the year 2006, when the special features on the DVD for the Daredevil movie introduced me to David Mack, who would become my favorite comic artist. Also, I rather liked the Daredevil movie (enough to buy up anything with Mack's name on it, from Parts of a Hole through Echo: Vision Quest). I can't say the same for Elektra, and it seemed neither could aspiring director Chris Notarile; In searching for information on Frank Miller's Xerxes, a purported prequel to 300, I came across this short film, presented in full on IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/rg/VIDEO_PLAY/LINK//video/wab/vi2180842521/

Chris Notarile, on his own time, with his own money, created (almost singlehandedly) this 11-minute short film dramatizing the death, past, and resurrection of Frank Miller's red-clad assassin.

Rather than do a full, scene-by-scene breakdown (which short films tend to lend themselves to) I want to go into detail on what is quite possibly the weakest scene in the film, which is saying quite a bit given that the film is only 11 minutes in length. After Elektra is killed by Bullseye, there is a flashback to Matt Murdock's days at Columbia University, where he meets the lovely Elektra Natchios and becomes entranced by her. After trying to get her attention by dropping some of his books near her as he walks past, Matt realizes that he's not going to have a chance unless he does something about Elektra's omnipresent bodyguard. He takes out a multi-colored hackey-sack (which, it should be pointed out, is not made of rubbery materials and is therefore not bouncy in any way) which he then ricochets off two railings before knocking the bodyguard unconscious. What follows the shot of him putting this plan into motion by hurtling the ball off-screen are three long and drawn-out shots that no small budget and no brief filming schedule can excuse. The first shot is the first ricochet, the hackey-sack bouncing off a railing. Of course, not being a rubber ball at all, it doesn't so much "bounce" off the railing as much as it hits it and then falls to the ground. The exact same thing happens in the next shot, which is meant to be the ball bouncing off another railing, but since the ball didn't bounce off the first railing (instead, falling to the ground) the subconscious mental connection that's supposed to form ultimately fails to do so and causes a jarring break in the immersion. At first, I thought he just threw a second ball, as if working on his aim before launching a third ball at the security guard. is that however poorly constructed and edited the previous two shots were, they don't hold a candle to the debacle that is the shot of the supposedly-ricocheting hackey-sack "soaring" in front of Matt's face, depicted by the camera slowly panning left to right, with the hackey-sack resting at the bottom of the frame. The last shot is the sack hitting the security guard on the back of the head, thankfully bringing the sequence to its much-delayed conclusion.

It may not seem fair to say an entire film, however short, is brought down by a singularly weak scene, and that's not the case. This is overall a very bad short film, with the rent-a-cop knockdown just one of several examples of poor editing, mismanaged production values, and a total lacking of clarity of vision by its director.

If I had to say something nice about the movie, I could only point to a single frame, a shot of Daredevil crouched upon a ledge surveying the streets below. It's a brilliant image, but it's not cinematic in any way. It's certainly a far cry from the shot of Batman leering down on an alleyway in Sandy Collora's much-acclaimed fan film Batman: Dead End. Granted, that director's demo reel had a bigger budget, and Mr. Collora had far more experience in filmmaking than Mr. Notarile, but both directors take a more down-to-earth approach and give iconic heroes costumes that don't look like they came out of Stan Winston's studio yet rise above the look of cheap Halloween costumes.

The costumes look rushed and try way too hard to resemble their print-media predecessors. To top it off, Bullseye's costume is this ludicrous compromise between his original blue bodysuit and the trenchcoat-over-tanktop ensemble from the movie. It just begs the question: why pattern 2 of the 3 total costumes after the comics, but pull back on the third? The only upshot to these costumes is that they probably make it much easier for the actors to move around in during the fight scenes.

The fight choreography was horrendous and the camera seemed to wrestle with the dilemma of either zooming in tighter and risk looking like it's trying to disguise the actors' relative inexperience or keeping the shot wide and expose all the pauses and breaks that out the fight as staged. Instead, the camera stays at this odd middle distance that cuts off heads and legs and tries to center square on people's backs.

This is where I field defenses of not what film is so much as what it is trying to be:

"It's not trying to be Citizen Kane."
"They're just students."
"They had no money and barely enough time."
"No one told them to do this."
"It's a labor of love."

True, but despite these shortcomings this film can't even rise to the level of mediocrity.

Yeah, I should probably read fully the interview where Chris Notarile details the 40USD budget (spent on "materials, metrocards, and hot chocolate") so I can potentially get a better appreciation for what this film is and what it's trying to do, but this ignores something fundamental about filmmaking and perhaps about art in general: The end result must stand on its own.

I may not be an executive for a major studio, and my own skills as a director may be questionable at best, but I don't think I have to be in order to make a sound prediction for Mr. Notarile. Much like his Maniac Cop short (which I haven't seen, but don't feel all that enthusiastic about remedying), he's exhibiting his skills to try and land himself a major directing gig. If I were looking through demo reels, trying to handpick a director to helm my latest project, this wouldn't even make it into a "maybe" pile.

I'm not going to say "I could make a better film" because it's a bit of a faux pas for directors (aspiring or otherwise) to bash each other's work. That said, I do feel like I should re-enact the hackey-sack scene and present the video as a sort of critique-in-motion. Maybe that's mean, but I just can't overlook the shortcomings of this piece, low budget or not. The bar on fan films was raised years ago, long before Batman: Dead End, and Elektra: The Hand & The Devil misses it by a mile.

Talking Art Deco Vase

2010-03-04T06:19:00.001-06:00

I just had the worst fit of sleep since I got sick just before my return from Albuquerque.

It really hasn't been a great past few days. I won't go into all of it, except it's more than just being sick.

Anyway, I realized it's not going to help my application for a YouTube partnership if I'm not delivering on my promise of a consistent output of about one video per week, so on my way back from a quick drive across state today, I got a little idea for a kind of "filler" video that would, once again, take advantage of my new favorite little distraction: video annotations. I'd thought about doing an entire video made up of them, but this idea of doing a completely silent video (as opposed to a kind of annotated podcast) just kind of came to me, so I ran with it (after a restless bout of half-sleep).

An Updated Video

2010-03-03T03:38:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure if this shows up in embedded videos, but I've recently added annotations to my 2004: Digital Backlot Cycle video. Because of the ten-minute time limit, I had to make a few cuts to preserve what I had, including full and proper credits, which I'm normally really good about making for all of my videos. Like I've said before, YouTube might be growing on me, and while I neither confirm nor deny this, I maintain that the annotations and notes are the best feature of video hosting on YouTube.

Oh, and an update on Revver. Revver has finally made my videos live after sitting on them for over 3 weeks. However, they might as well be inaccessible like they were before. Every time I try to access each video's respective page to get the "embed" code to post them in my various weblogs, I get their painfully annoying "500 error, or something broke" message. Maybe it's because of my connection, but that website is so clunky, buggy, and unruly that I can't access my videos to make changes like preview thumbnails (if I manage to select one, I get that stupid "500 error" message when I click "save"). I can't even enable comments because it won't let me check the box to say so. I'm starting to see why Channel Awesome (producers of That Guy With The Glasses) moved their content from Revver to Blip.tv. I mean, I really can't believe this site was ever popular. Maybe it's just current events and goings-on that have led to the site's current state, but really they can't even rise to the level of YouTube or Vimeo despite their claims to be superior services. The only reason I even gave them a chance was because a tutorial video about the Creative Commons mentioned them and I found out they have a Shared Revenue program for the advertisements they attach to videos. By contrast, Youtube has a Shared Revenue program, but it's only following an application process, whereby your channel is arbitrarily judged as worthy or otherwise, depending on how many views you receive as well as a number of non-specific criteria. Anyway, I think I'll just hold out for that instead of trying to get Revver to work for me. There's always Blip.tv, but I had such a problem figuring out that site's tools it just didn't seem worth it. I'm all for Open Source, but would it have killed them to streamline their interface? Maybe I'm just too dumb for it, but I really can't believe anyone uses that service with any proficiency.

Back

2010-03-01T21:37:00.000-06:00

Okay, so I took down the Twitter module upon my return, but I didn't offer an update right away. Granted, I did write a rather long journal entry on my DeviantART page wherein--I think I overuse that word--I detailed my return trip (recently-caught cold and all), which I didn't feel like simply copying-and-pasting into Blogger (albeit I transferred part of it to my Gamespot weblog, which sees even fewer updates than Blogger). Anyway, I'm back and I thought I'd do a little "return to form" and give a few quick movie reviews. Granted, I'd already seen Watchmen, but my Dad hadn't, which I knew would make for an interesting experience. Movies by their very nature are meant to be self-contained and not requiring prior knowledge of certain subject matters, so it's nice to see how well adaptations fare on this front.

As it happens, he really liked it despite no prior knowledge of Watchmen whatsoever. Then again, I think that's the appeal; the characters of Watchmen, as many know, are essentially parodies of Golden Age-era Charlton comics characters, among them The Blue Beetle, a noted inspiration for Batman. I think Zack Snyder is a really under-appreciated director (previous film 300 is, without question, my personal favorite of the post-2004 Digital Backlot films). If it sounds like I'm pigeonholing or demeaning him by describing him as a "poor man's Paul Verhoeven" (extreme gore, social commentary, sensational sex scenes) believe me, I'm not; I'm genuinely looking forward to his next film, even if it's an animated feature about owls. I mean, even if that one turns out bad, at least I can look forward to Xerxes, the supposed prequel that Frank Miller is currently writing.

We also watched District 9, which had a few editing issues that make me question its nomination in that Oscar category, but otherwise was thoroughly enjoyable. Some people might be turned away by its seemingly light-hearted tone, but those people are missing the point. The film is very ambiguous, in that we're not sure who we're supposed to want to see win, and we're never sure if we're supposed to laugh at something or not. It's kind of like American Psycho; you'll laugh, but you'll feel guilty for it because every shred of decency and humanity in you will be crying out in horrified protest. The violence and gore in the film is on the level with something like a cartoon or a comic book, but the subtexts and social commentaries they frame are on the level with the likes of Good Night And Good Luck, Munich, Hotel Rwanda, or Three Kings. In short, it's a schizophrenic mess of excitement and intelligence... and it's beautiful. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a flawed diamond. It may not have much in the way of luster or clarity, but it'll still cut glass.
To expand on what I said about having problems with the editing, I mean the way in which the movie presents its own "reality" via various camera techniques. For starters, let me get it out of the way that I absolutely hate and despise the word "Mockumentary." It's just such a hideous word, and was so before it became dreadfully overused. What strikes me as strange about it is that I'd never heard the term before The Blair Witch Project and I honestly don't think anyone ever used it to describe Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, so I feel safe in chalking its origin up to the same modern yet ignorant newspeak that gave us "blog" "lawl" and even "pwn." District 9 ultimately presents itself as a documentary, filmed in typical "cinema verite" style with unsteady camera work and talking head interviews. In film, there are essentially three styles of narration, much like in books:
1st person. Films like Russian Ark, Cloverfield, or even Blair Witch Project fit this category, wherein what the audience is seeing is essentially what its main characters see. As such, the cinematography is distinctly "amateurish" and the narrative is ultimately of a limited perspective as we're only, at best, over the shoulders of our protagonists. This exemplifies what's known in literary circles as "metafiction," that is, fiction that is self-aware. The characters are aware that they're being recorded, and are in full control over what does and does not get seen, whether they turn the camera off voluntarily, lose power, or get eaten by some hideous monster attacking them.
3rd person limited. This one's a little tough to peg down because it's extremely broad and describes a great many films. In District 9, we don't so much get Third Person Limited in the sense of a disembodied film crew that follows the protagonist yet never interferes with the goings-on as much as we get a real live film crew that interviews various characters and even follows our "hero" (at the risk of spoilers, I'll just say that the "hero" is "anything but" one most of the time, and characters you wouldn't think to have any merit or values end up showing more humanity than 99% of the humans in the film) around on his little "errand" to evict a group of aliens from a slum that's risen up around their derelict ship. Think of it like the show Cops; there's a film crew but, while the officers occasionally break the fourth wall and talk to the camera, they go largely unnoticed but can only see as far as the officers they follow around.
3rd person omniscient. This throws out the distinctly "meta" qualities of the first two. No film crews following the characters around, no personal video records, no "found footage" or anything to indicate that what you're seeing is any kind of firsthand account of an event. The best way to think of this is "God's-Eye-View" in that the "camera" is invisible to the characters and unaffected by events unfolding around them, as well as being able to move anywhere and even to any point in time in the film's progression. Dramatic irony is basically gone as any event or occurrence is front-and-center, setting the audience a comfortable distance from our lead characters.
The problem I have with District 9 is that it is not very good at distinguishing between these different perspectives. It breaks the immersion when we have to stop and think, "Okay, is the FILM CREW shooting this, or is this just what WE'RE seeing as it happens now?" Given that the film starts off showing interview and archival footage, we'd expect more of a break when the "prerecorded" footage stops and the "presently happening" footage begins. Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows may not have been a great film, but it had a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek sensibility when it came to its own internal logic of truth and reality when it comes to film and video. It was not distracting or heavy-handed in its delivery, but not subtle enough to be missed or overlooked on even the most casual viewing.
I really hope District 9 doesn't get the Oscar for Editing, but I hope it wins the other categories. I doubt it'll win Best Picture; it's just not the kind of film that Hollywood goes for, it's all over the map in terms of its tone and message, and while that ambiguity is what I love about it, it's not what the Academy generally looks for.

Okay, that turned out longer than I thought it would, and now I've got to try and get some sleep despite not only still being a bit sick, but also getting a rather disturbing bill from the electric company which basically says that they did not receive my most recent payment. I'm going to call my bank later and see if that withdrawal was ever made. If it wasn't, then shame on the Post Office for losing track of an envelope mailed the last week of January. If it was withdrawn, then the electric company will be shown no mercy. Anyway, my roommate has forbade me from even thinking about it anymore, and to just give the bills to her mom for her to handle. This isn't the first time the company has royally messed things up for us. First, a ridiculous deposit they never tell you the amount of up front, followed by a surprise bill from my roommate's previous account that they basically sat on for four years and six months before making the connection between that old account and our new one. Ugh. Anyway, I've had enough of it; I'm seriously going to start looking into solar panels.

Housekeeping

2010-02-20T13:48:00.001-06:00

First, as my old Video Art professor would say, some housekeeping: tomorrow I leave for Albuquerque. As such, my Twitter page will be my only means of making updates. I'm going by train, and that's for three reasons:
1. The FAA is run by lemurs who take turns driving nails into each other's heads.
2. Said nails are apparently made of gold, hence the absurd ticket prices and fees.
3. It takes as long, and costs at least the same as driving (if not less on both counts).
In any case, I'll have a lot of free time. Thankfully, I've got my unabridged audiobooks of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fountainhead to pass the time, along with my PSP. I've got Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, and I'm going to try my damnedest to get some enjoyment out of it this time.

After a little soul-searching, I decided to renew my pro account over at Flickr. At first, I was apprehensive for three reasons:
1. I'm not really making that many photographs right now.
2. I'm broke.
3. I was spending more and more time on DeviantART.

Now, however, I'm still going to be spending most of my free-time on DeviantART, but since I'm not going to renew my premium membership (unless substantiated third-party "permission issue" reports are given the same validity and treatment as DMCA reports), that resolve did give me a little financial leeway (enough for 24 months instead of 12). In short, I'm going to support Flickr because they know how to run their site and listen to their users.

Also, I found out that a non-pro account with Flickr is a little more restrictive than I'd thought; instead of just limiting the number of sets you can display and photos/videos you can upload within a month, they also limit your photostream to your 200 most recent photos. That was a real shocker to me; in fact, there was an honest moment of panic that over 400 of my pictures had been lost. Luckily, they are stored, and by pruning a few of my more recent images, the older ones take their place.

Flickr was sort of my first love before Becca-chan persuaded me to join DeviantART. My Nikon s50c came with 3 months of FlickrPRO, and I was hooked for the next two years. It's a good and strong community, if spread a little thin, and I really love how in touch the site's creators are with their users. I've harped about this before, I know, but I still consider the way they handled introducing video uploads to be an act of pure genius. It's just clear they put a lot of thought into it before going public, and were very receptive to feedback both before and after launch.

That's another reason I reinstated my FlickrPRO account; I want to help get the Video community more recognition. Although it's a nice video community, I feel like no one's really given it a chance and people are very slow to warm up to it. Most videos are lucky if they get more than 100 views, and I don't think I've ever seen a video with views counting over 1,000. So, I want to do what I can by uploading a few more videos (I posted my Pattern 158 animation there first before posting it and the rest of the trilogy here) to my photostream. I haven't decided what they'll be just yet. I'm just fascinated by the 90-second time limit; I take it as a challenge. It makes me think of how, in my video art classes at UNM, we'd have assignments with one, three, or five-minute time limits, and yet despite repeated emphases on length, someone would always have a ten or even thirty-minute "magnum opus" on the due date. Sure, we would still watch it and maybe even give a fair critique at the end, but it was obvious that, despite any praise or comment, what most of us really wanted to say was "Really? You couldn't keep THIS under 5 minutes? Are you THAT in love with yourself?" In our defense, it wasn't out of complete impatience; one of my really good friends always delivered these technical and artistic masterworks that were, by contrast, criminally short, like 10 or 15 seconds (including titles and credits). I swear, one time at least five of us simultaneously let out variations of "damn it" when one of his pieces ended. I can appreciate that a project can start as a small idea and then grow over time into something bigger, but when that happens, you're really supposed to put that project on the backburner or produce it in parallel to a new, but shorter, project.

Anyway, that's the news for now. I've got a few more journal entries waiting in the wings that I'll post once I get back around next Sunday.

How I found a song against all odds today

2010-02-06T19:57:00.000-06:00

About 4pm today, I got hungry and decided to make some pasta. Nothing special, mind you, just some orzo with sun-dried tomato cheese sauce mixed with vodka sauce. I got the pot full of water and turned the oven on when I realized that we were completely and utterly out of soda.
"This will not do," I thought, remembering Thomas Pynchon's college diet of Spaghetti and Soda and being hard-pressed to think of a better combination of flavors than cola and pasta. I turned the oven off, and ran out to Walgreens to remedy this situation.

There was this song playing on the overhead speakers. While normally I tune this stuff out, this one particular song caught my attention as I really just wasn't quite sure of what I was hearing. It was entirely instrumental, and sounded bizarrely electronic. If I had to guess an era, I'd say circa 1970 given that the synthesizer being used sounded like a cross between a Stylophone and a reed organ. It reminded me of an old video game, like something that plays over the end credits when you beat the final boss. I just pictured this little starfighter flying over an ocean while credits rolled over it, all in beautiful 16-bit graphics.

I had to know what this song was.

Asking around would be pointless; I mean, it's not anyone's job to know what plays over the speakers in a convenience store, and I know I'd have hated to be asked that if I'd worked there (no way to know and even less of a way to find out). I pulled out my cell phone and started up the voice recorder function. It was notably inferior to my other dedicated voice recorders, but I didn't have any of them with me, so I'd have to make do. Luckily, the song had only just begun when I remembered that there was a surefire way to find out what the song was as long as I had a recording of it. I got a full minute before the next song started. When I got back home, I moved the file onto my computer. Strangely, instead of a .wma or even maybe a .wav file, it was something called .amr, which I could play back just fine in RealPlayer, but I wasn't able to convert it to anything else. Anyway, I went to Yahoo! Answers, a place known for the "What's this song?" question. I uploaded the .amr file to my website and put the file's link in the question. I pressed 'publish' and went about my normal browsing business while my question gathered answers. About four hours later, I checked back on my question, very surprised to find four answers in so little time.

Sadly, it seemed .amr is a file type that cannot be stored. All four answers said the link was bad. I clicked on it and instead of getting a "Download now" prompt or something, I got an error message that .amr is a file type that is not supported by Freeservers. I thought, "What does that matter? It's just data. I'm not trying to play it in the webpage, I'm just trying to download it." I deleted the question and sulked. It was really disappointing because I'd have this little sound file on my phone that I could only share with people I met in person. One thought that occurred to me was playing the sound back on my phone and recording it with one of my voice recorders. The problem is, because the cell phone's voice memo function was barely an afterthought to its construction, the song was way too faint to be heard, and thus re-recorded properly. Playing back to human ears was manageable, but to another microphone would be impossible.

So, in desperation, I went to wikipedia and just looked up "instrumental." At first, I wasn't expecting anything beyond a simple description, "songs without vocals" or something pedestrian like that. Instead, what I got was a list of instrumentals that made Billboard's Top 100. The thought occurred: "if an instrumental was popular enough to be on the overhead speakers of a Walgreens, it must be popular enough to have been on the Billboard Top 100." There were only about 20, and after the first one proved to not be the one, I skimmed the list and came across:

Telstar, by the Tornados.

"Just sounds right, somehow," I thought. I clicked on the link to the article and within two paragraphs, my certainty rose: "This novelty record was intended to evoke the dawn of the space age, complete with sound effects that were meant to sound 'space-like'." Again, more enthusiasm of being completely on the money rose, and that's when I saw the sample button.

It was the song.

So, what did I do? I hopped right over to Amazon, dropped a Lincoln shy of a Washington and within seconds, I had the song that I'd heard over the PA system of a Walgreens four hours ago, a song with no distinct or recognizable lyrics, and an indescribable instrumentation.

It's funny how things work out like that.

Rampart in 3 Parts Has Gone Live

2010-02-05T04:26:00.000-06:00

If there's a single positive thing I would ever have to say about YouTube, it's that I actually really like the annotation and interactivity features. Some people use them to append factual updates to their v-logs, which is very useful given the time it can take to edit and upload a video, not to mention what can transpire after it goes live. One of my favorite YouTube videos is an interactive game that uses stop-motion animation of Street Fighter action figures. It's simplistic, but it's beautiful for it. I'm using the middle-of-the-road feature of annotations where I simply put links to the subsequent and previous entries in the series at the beginnings and endings of the videos. That said, I'd really love to do more stuff that takes advantage of the interactivity features. What gets me is, despite the influence of YouTube, no other video-sharing site has anything close to this. DeviantART has a feature for their videos where you can pause the video and leave a comment at that particular point in the timeline, but that's the closest thing I can find. I would have thought blip.tv would try to trump YouTube, but they don't seem interested.

I really don't know what to think. It's like I said in one of my Twitter posts: Could YouTube be growing on me? O_o

Honest Theft

2010-02-04T07:11:00.000-06:00

You know what really gets under my skin?
The notion that to admit to a wrongdoing is to be absolved from its consequences.

Here's what I'm on about:
My roommate tells me she found this really cool piece of World of Warcraft machinima on Youtube. I watched it, and admittedly, it was pretty damn good, very nicely crafted with the sole blemish being its horrendous soundtrack (I honestly paused the video just to make sure it was really the video's sound and not just Windows Media Player running in the background). Normally, the only machinima I've really liked is Red Vs. Blue, otherwise I consider machinima a pretty low art form, especially when it just uses existing game graphics instead of modified or otherwise re-skinned ones. That's not what bothers me: what bothers me is the person who posted it. Not only were they not the video's original creator, but they actually provided links to the original author's YouTube channel (which is here).

Think about that:
Someone created and uploaded a video to their channel.
Someone else downloaded or captured the video and repost it to their own channel.
They then post a link in the info box to the original video in the original author's channel.

Now I know what some of you might be thinking: "But they're giving credit, at least. They're not claiming it as their own." Okay, granted, they're admitting to what they're doing, but consider this:
1) Why re-upload it when it's still available and live on its original creator's channel?
2) They may not be profiting, or getting any real undue attention, from the video, but those view-counters are going up and up. Each and every one of those views really belongs on the original author's page.

If you want to spread word about the video, there are dozens of better ways to do it besides downloading it and re-uploading it in your channel. Grant a favorite to the video; it'll appear in your channel. Put the video in a playlist. Write a journal entry about it. E-Mail the link to your friends.

That's what irks me. People take something that's not theirs, copy it, present it, then shout from the rooftops that it's not theirs, as if they're doing the original creator a favor.

"I don't own this." Then why do you have it?
"I didn't make this." Then let the person who did decide where it goes.
"I own nothing." Could have fooled me.
"Give him creds." While you take his page views?

Page views may not have a real monetary value, but they are meant to be EARNED, nonetheless.

Just glasses and utensils now

2010-02-01T11:21:00.000-06:00

This has not been a good day, and it's only been morning for about four hours.

I'll leave out the goings-on with my roommate's irritability due to a mishap at her doctor's office resulting in a lapse in receiving her medication. That's been going on a few days and it's mostly tolerable.

This morning I received some equipment I ordered to help with recording my videos, including a Behringer USB mic. I've officially had it installed for about 40 minutes and I'm already thinking about sending it back.

Here's the problem: when I use my webcam to record one of my v-logs or newer reviews, I use Windows Media Encoder as capture software. The main reason for this is that it lets me configure audio and video separately; I can use one device for video, and one for audio (That way, I'm not at the mercy of the webcam's awful built-in mic). Everything seems fine, I set the audio settings to the USB mic, and the video settings to the Ipevo, and set the recording format. Once I hit start, however, I get an error message:

no specified device driver is present 0xC00D0072

This is just impossible as I've installed all necessary drivers and, prior to starting the recording session, the program acknowledged the device's presence and allowed it to be configured. I went to Behringer's site to verify that I did indeed have the most recent driver. I found little to no support articles about the C-1U and ended up having to send an e-mail detailing the issue with WME. I've gotten the obligatory auto-response that it's been received, but a full reply is going to take about one business day. So, that's up in the air.

Then there's the mic itself. It may not work with WME, but it does work with Sound Recorder and Photo Story 3 (though the latter gives me error messages to the contrary despite recordings). I figured that while I'm waiting on a response from Behringer, I'll see how the mic sounds and get a feel for its sensitivity. Ideally, I'd like to have it sitting on my desk next to my webcam so it's not visible in the frame. As a sort of control for the experiment, I just put held it like a Karaoke mic and recorded that way. It sounded brilliant; one of the best microphones I've had. However, when I tried recording again with it on the desk and next to the webcam, it's a whole new story. I should have guessed this might be the case given that putting it on the desk makes a distance of about 2 or 3 feet between me and the mic. That said, it's still really disheartening that I basically have to lean into the mic in order to get the best sound. I'd have to hold it almost directly in front of my mouth while I'm recording, which also means I won't have a free hand if I have to do a review. Me holding a microphone while recording with a webcam would just look horrendous, and it's just not what I got this mic for at all.

So, after days of waiting, and on top of everything else, I finally get my equipment to find that, even if I can get it to interface with my software and recording system, it's completely useless and impractical.

At least I got some of the dishes done before the UPS guy showed up, so the day hasn't started off to a fully-rotten start.

Watch Batteries While You Wait

2010-01-29T06:53:00.000-06:00

I'm trying to break away from YouTube and move video operations to Revver. One reason for this is that Blip.tv makes me want to learn latin because that would be easier than working with Blip. Another reason is the possibility of supplemental income through ad revenue. Granted, I won't become stinking rich, and it probably won't pay any of my bills (I just got a 300USD heating bill, so there goes this week's unemployment check), but it'll be something. Similarly, when I applied for a partnership on YouTube, I was preemptively told I would be wasting my time.

Anyway, I'm writing this as a kind of filler until the videos I uploaded to Revver go live, which leads me to a small problem I'm having with Revver right off the bat. Revver, partly because of their ad-revenue model, is very concerned about people uploading copyrighted material to their site, as opposed to YouTube, which is so unbearably lax that it would rather bring huge lawsuits from Viacom down upon themselves than risk losing half of their user-base, people who just want to see clips of TV shows and segmented movies put up by a gaggle of couch potatoes with capture cards instead of actual content produced by a genuine community. Like I was saying, because of not wanting to be like YouTube, Revver has a very stringent uploading policy wherein once a video is uploaded and transcoded, it has to be reviewed by a member of staff to make sure it complies with standards before going live. According to the FAQ, this process is supposed to take 24 hours, but generally less.

It has been at least three times that and counting since I uploaded my videos. I'm wondering if I should say something, but I figure that by the time I get a response, they'll have gone live and I'll end up looking the fool. Sure, there'll still be the issue of the overall turnaround time, but eventually going live at any stage would make the matter mostly academic. If they're rejected or turned away, then I'm definitely going to speak up; I go very far out of my way to abide by copyright statutes, especially the limitations of fair use.

I thought about uploading a quick webcam video where I'm screaming and ranting about the iPad, but my roommate's trying to sleep so I have to be semi-quiet. My big problem with it is that it's not running Mac OS X (or Leopard or whatever big cat they're up to by now), but instead running the iPhone's OS. So, not only does it fail as a tablet PC, but it fails as a netbook, too. Most netbooks have abandoned using Linux distributions in favor of Windows (albeit it drives the cost up a considerable bit). Furthermore, the great thing about tablet PCs (and why I secretly really, really, really want one) is that, when using the stylus, you've effectively got a digital sketchbook. If I'm forced to use my fingers on the iPad, then it means finger-painting. Who knows, maybe with the zoom function, one could effectively make different-sized "brushes" out of their digits, but it's just not as precise as holding a stylus.

Last thing I'll say about Apple: Apple is a very good name for the company because they are nothing if they're not great polishers.

Back to Revver; I could rant against Apple all day (I don't hate them, mind you, I just find them painfully overrated and equally guilty of being as greedy a monopoly as Microsoft). As for why Revver doesn't have a big market share of video-hosting sites (in fact, no one does unless you're YouTube, it's a really hideous pie-chart), I think a big part of it goes to this review process. I mean, once you upload a video to YouTube or Yahoo!Video or even Gamespot, there's a turnaround time of transcoding lasting maybe five minutes at the worst. With Revver, your video will not go live for nearly a full day, so even the most laid-back v-loggers might find the delay a little difficult to work with. Then again, maybe it gets quicker as time moves on and what I'm going through really is just an aberration. Maybe this overly-long wait time is reserved for first-timers; maybe the review process is faster for regular and established posters.

Well, now we play the waiting game....

A Skinned Mole's Elaborate Remains

2010-01-21T07:16:00.000-06:00

I learned what an Exquisite Corpse is in one of my video art classes. Apparently, it's a very well-known type of collaborative art project. However, when I put "exquisite corpse" in a search on DeviantART, I think I only got one result that was an actual Exquisite Corpse, and it wasn't even finished, only the start. That's very disappointing.