January 31, 2008 3:01
More Fun Than Playing Games: Listing Them!
Quick plug for the 2007 Game of the Year Critics poll, a first-of-its-kind (as far as I know) project where they made lots of game critics (including me) pick their favorite games of the year using a point-allotment system, then totaled up all the points, then made a kind of meta-list out of all that data. The results are here.
No huge surprises, but come on: as any magazine journalist will tell you, all lists are automatically interesting no matter what. The most interesting part for me was the bit where some of the judges revealed their voting ballots. Looks like there was major behind-the-scenes love for world-class time-suck Desktop Tower Defense. Who knew?
Also note that they didn't do that lame traffic-mongering thing that we do, putting each list item on a different page. One list, one page. Classy.
In other news, there will be more Portal. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
January 30, 2008 4:35
The Perfect Ender's Game Video Game
There are a few sticking points to making Ender's Game -- The Video Game a truly satisfying experience.
1) Hooking up the world's Xbox 360s, Playstation 3's and Wii's to an actual functioning robotic space armada which really slaughters billions of actual living alien beings for real as you play unknowingly from your home.
2) Hiding the above fact until the final cut scene, so players can feel the appropriate sense of cosmic irony and crushing genocidal remorse after wiping out an entire species in the final boss battle.
3) Finding enough wipe out-able real alien enemy species to ensure maximum replayability.
4) Determining how many gamer points are appropriate for wiping out an an entire alien species. (Xbox 360 only.)
Yep, it's a challenge to make a video game from a story about a video game that turns out not to be a video game but a real thing (but the player thought all along was a just a video game). But if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right.
January 30, 2008 10:55
Ender's Game: The Book That Cannot Be Adapted
Plenty of sources have been reporting that Ender's Game is going to be a video game. Which, you know, of course. It says 'game' right there in the title. But it kind of makes you wonder why it hasn't happened already. The book was published 23 years ago and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, as did (inexplicably) its (horrible) sequel Speaker for the Dead. But it's never been adapted in any medium: game, movie, mini-series, not even (I might be wrong about this) a comic book.
Why not? There's probably some legal stuff going on in the background, there always is. And you have to think Orson Scott Card controls the rights pretty tightly. And the movie would be damn hard to pull off: it's all child actors, all the time, and there's a hell of a lot of weightlessness going on in the battle room. That's a lot of CGI.
As for the game, well, I just hope they don't restrict it to the battle room. That seems like death to me. Like those Quidditch games, you'd run afoul of the fact that the core game mechanic just isn't that interesting. Sure, it's 3D combat, and you can make things a bit more interesting the way he does in the book, by varying the settings -- tweaking the lighting, adding "stars," having soldiers unfreeze after they've been hit, one army comes in early, change the victory conditions, etc. But bottom line, you've only got one kind of unit and one kind of weapon. Drag.
Plus, anybody playing the game already knows everything that Ender slowly figures out over the course of the novel. The enemy's gate already = down. Where do you go from there?
So I guess you embed it in the larger game-o-sphere of the full Battle School. Build in the mini-games that students play in their off-hours, especially that psychedelic adventure game with the giant's drink. (I remember picking Ender's Game up in a bookstore and thinking: oh my God, he's describing what it's like to play an adventure game! I bought it even though I couldn't afford it. I wonder if Card was the first to do that?) Build in occasional Bonzo-style naked shower-fights with rival captains! And the part that I really covet, a whole strategic player-trading eco-system whereby you swap students (who have different attributes? I guess?) with other teams. And I suppose if you really wanted to blow things out, you could have the alpha-types graduate to Command School and play out that whole sequence.
That's a lot to ask of one game. You'd need a package of Orange Box-level sophistication and diversity, which doesn't come along every day. Neh? Eh.
January 28, 2008 12:21
Post-Apocalyptic Good Times
Okay, everyone. Settle down. I know you're all bummed out about the recent series of planet-wide catastrophes. The plagues, the meteor, the tidal waves, the nuclear wars, the other, pointier meteor... What can I say? If you've never seen giant piles of corpses, now you have. Big time. Long story short, humanity is teetering on the edge of extinction. Hey -- all the movies said it would happen, so no surprises there. It's all bad, right? Wrong.
I'm here to tell you that there's a silver lining to global disaster. Here's an example. Yes, all the DVDs were erased by a massive electromagnetic pulse. However, VHS still works! And I, for one, have a huge collection of movies I taped off of HBO in the 1980s. We're watching Bull Durham tonight at my place, so come on over. (Fair warning, I taped it on Extended Play, so the quality isn't great.)
Okay, the hippie cult leaders who control ragged, desperate bands of mind-slaves? Not bad guys at all. Dr. Psychogroove, Sheriff Lovetrip and Brother Baron Goodtimes are actually smart, caring administrators who know that in times of hardship, people trust maniacal hippies in top hats. So go for it, join the Rainbow Rave-olution of Generation Omega.
Another upside: you know the Avian Flu Variant 433 pandemic? It seems to only have killed people with personalized licensed plates. We don't understand the science of it. Frankly, we don't want to understand. We're just glad they're gone. So, "TOP DOC," "USC HOOPS" and "BAD EWOK," it's "2 L8 4 U."
Alright, let's talk radioactive mutants. They are hardly the chalky, flesh-eating ghouls that were predicted. For some reason, most mutants look exactly like the cute blond girl from the Sprint calling plan commercials. You know, the one who says "Sprint -- It's Your World, Talk to It." So what if they have Stegosaurus dealies on their backs? Not a deal breaker.
Let's see... what else? The nuclear winter dropped about three feet of hard-packed snow covered with six inches of fine, dusty powder. So if you're in the Sahara, bring your skis. Currency is now pine cones, using acorns for change, so a lot of dudes are now loaded. The chunk of comet that crashed into Minnesota actually destroyed an army of homicidal robots just as they became self-aware, so that's some good news from the "land of 10,000 lakes," or as we now call it, "land of no lakes."
Radiation-wise, watermelons are now tiny and grapes are huge, monkeys have toucan noses, toucans have bigger toucan noses, and snails sing the songs of... what's that terrible group? Right, Maroon 5. All this stuff is changing pretty fast, so if you notice anything else, I started a list on the bulletin board outside the makecorpsesintofood-atorium.
All in all, I think we should all be feeling pretty darn good about the new, improved, Tsunami-cleaned planet earth. From what I hear, the aliens that just invaded are vulnerable to both water and the common cold, so I'm gonna go get me a mutant Sprint girl and grab some veggie chili at Dr. Psychogroove's. The end of days has never looked brighter.
January 28, 2008 10:52
Good Morning Nerdshine
I have not one but three horrific deadlines to meet today, which is why I was awake at one o'clock this morning exploring whether or not it's possible to read a book and shave your head at the same time. (It is! Sort of.) On the bright side, it's the 50th anniversary of the Lego brick today, the long-awaited international cyberagnarok has finally commenced, and -- according to Ain't It Cool, which reads the Hollywood Reporter so I don't have to -- Guillermo del Toro is up for the job of directing two Hobbit movies. Hate on me if you must, but I think he'd bring some much-needed humor and visual flair and emotional discipline to the Tolkien franchise. There I said it.
(This blog is not the only entry in the Google database for "cyberagnarok." So close though.)
January 25, 2008 3:18
The World Rejoices As One More Simpsons Writer Blogs!
Tim Long, a fellow writer on The Simpsons, has joined me in a desperate cause: slowing the rate at which soon-to-become-obsolete magazines become obsolete. That is, he also trying to prop up a dying medium with the miracle cure of ONLINE CONTENT. Here is Tim Long's witty, why-didn't-I-think-of-that piece for VanityFair.com.
It makes sense that Tim is writing for Vanity Fair, as he is a hilarious, charming bon vivant who hobnobs with the cultural elite. I write for Time, on the other hand, because I'm a workmanlike stiff who likes picking Men of the Year.
Having spent countless hours in the writers' room with Tim thinking of new ways for Homer to apologize to Marge, I vouch for the excellence of his comedic voice. And if you doubt his nerd credentials, ask him about the theme of his grade-school school eyeglasses. Here's a hint: the theme was Battlestar Galactica.
January 25, 2008 11:43
There's a New Get Smart Trailer
Steve Carell plays Michael Scott playing Agent 86! This is a much longer and more substantial trailer than the teaser that was already out there. It does not, however, resolve the question of whether the movie will actually be funny.
January 25, 2008 11:28
Design Guru Edward Tufte Pwns the iPhone
Well, pwns is a little strong. But watch this video in which Tufte -- who lectures and writes about information and design -- leads the audience through the major design achievements and failings of the Jesusphone. Sample nitpick: the persistence of a thick, opaque bottom bar in iPhone's web browser -- if it were transparent you could use more of the screen to view content.
No new information here, you just get to absorb the way his mind works: "If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information. Instead, fix the design." Plus his voice is really soothing.
January 23, 2008 12:50
Virgin Galactic Unveils Commercial Spacecraft SpaceShipTwo
Virgin Galactic is showing off its design for SpaceShipTwo, which a press release describes as "nearly 60% complete." No big surprises here -- it has the same basic profile and uses the same kind of launch vehicle as SpaceShipOne. I would've hoped they at least made some breakthroughs on the clever-ship-names front, but not yet, apparently. Maybe they could bring in Iain Banks as a consultant.
The site is getting hammered, but check out images of the spaceport, too. Not much hard info on that. The release just talks about its environmental sustainability. Which, you know, that's cool and all, but where are the life support facilities for incoming aliens?
The site has a lengthy info-mercial featuring Richard Branson, Burt Rutan, and some distinguished sub-orbital pilots, plus some really bad renderings and a guy who looks suspiciously like Michael Palin. The whole thing is very Total Recall. When you go Rekall, you get nothing but first class memories!
60% complete, huh. They better hurry if they're going to beat these guys.
January 22, 2008 5:27
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons -- The Lost Modules
PRESS RELEASE: For Immediate Distribution
The game wizards at TSR will release "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons -- The Lost Modules" on January 28, 2008. These never-before-published role-playing adventures have finally been unearthed for D&D fans -- UNEDITED, IN THEIR ORIGINAL FORM! Recently discovered in the vaults of TSR, they were created by the greatest Dungeon Masters of the 1970s and 1980s, but were mysteriously never released -- UNTIL NOW! Play them now for the first time!
THE "LOST MODULES" INCLUDE:
Descent into the ParentLords' Half-converted Basement (1977)
The Keep on the Masturborderlands (1979)
Expedition to the Video Store of Shame (1979)
The Mysterious Robe Stains of Darkraven (1979)
Adventure at the Tavern of Suspiciously Tall, Deep-voiced Women (1983)
Discovery at the Tavern of Suspiciously Tall, Deep-voiced Women (1983)
Rejection at the Tavern of She-Men (1983)
Return to the Video Store of Shame for Tales of She-Men (1983)
The Skinny Leather Ties of the Chess King (1984)
BRING THEM HOME TODAY AND UNCOVER THE LONG LOST MAGIC OF THE ORIGINAL DUNGEON MASTERS!
January 22, 2008 5:04
Heath Ledger: Apparently No Longer Alive
From MSNBC (and I'm sure by now many other places) comes the astounding news that Heath Ledger has died at the age of 28 in an apartment in New York City. At this very sad and unexpected moment we should pause to salute his contributions to nerd cinema. While not even remotely nerdy himself, he did worthy service in the surprisingly watchable A Knight's Tale and the unfortunately almost totally unwatchable Brothers Grimm.
But he will mostly be remembered for his now-posthumous performance as the Joker in this summer's The Dark Knight, which I saw a few minutes of and which looks like it will be very good -- very gonzo, very out-there:
"It's all part of the plan." Cue fellow Australian Robin Gibb: I started a joke...
January 22, 2008 11:32
You Have to Register to Comment Now
Or you will shortly. We've been getting massive comment spam, so we're tightening up the borders. Once you register you'll be able to comment as before. Also, Matt and I will be able to see you through your computer screen.
January 19, 2008 12:09
This Is Quite Funny If You've Played Portal
January 18, 2008 10:38
We Didn't Start The Fire -- Nineteen Years Later
On the nineteenth anniversary of its release, Nerd World sat down with Billy Joel at his Sagaponack home to discuss the cultural impact of his classic song.
NERD WORLD: I just listened to the song again. It's amazing how well it's held up. All those things have still happened.
BILLY JOEL: Thanks, it's a really special song to me. You know, if I hadn't been a singer-songwriter, I probably would have been a history teacher.
NW: Well, the song certainly has a lot of history in it. Did you realize when you were writing it that it was just a big list of references, or did you stand back at the end and go, "Wow, it's all just some stuff that happened. Weird."
BJ: No, I pretty much intended that from the start.
NW: Why has Weird Al Yankovic never done a parody of "We Didn't Start The Fire"?
BJ: I really don't know. He did a version of "Piano Man" about Spider-Man, which I thought was quite clever. It was flattering, really.
NW: But it's so perfect for Weird Al. "Steve Couldn't Start The Chrysler" or "Pizza Didn't Hamburger The French Fries."
BJ: The lyrics for that second one don't really track.
NW: (SINGING) "PIZZA DIDN'T HAMBURGER THE FRENCH FRIES, LASAGNA'S ALMOST BURNING, SINCE THE SCHWARMA'S TURNING!"
BJ: Next question.
NW: Here's a quote from Boston WBZ-TV4's version of "We Didn't Start The Fire," which was about Boston sports in the 1980s: "CELTICS BRUINS SOX AND PATS / TO ALL THE FANS WE TIP OUR HATS" Which version is better, yours or WBZ-TV4'S?
BJ: Well, I did it first, so they could never be better. It's my song. At best, they could just imitate it.
NW: But what if you really liked Boston sports? Then what?
BJ: Boston WBZ-TV4's, I guess.
NW: Let's get deeper into the song. You mention both the "Cola Wars" and "Children of Thalidomide." Are those two things, malformed children and competing sugar drinks, equally bad?
BJ: It isn't that all these events are "bad," I was trying to make the point that history has always been fraught with turmoil and you can't blame--
NW: Got it. Cola Wars worse than Thalidomide. What's worse, "Peyton Place" or "Trouble in the Congo"?
BJ: It's "Belgians it the Congo." Belgians.
NW: I'm pretty sure it's not.
BJ: Look, this has been great. But you should probably go.
NW: Okay, fine. Hey, what's that in your garage? Oily rags? Gas cans? Road flares?
BJ: It's nothing. Just forget about it. Hey, do you want to hear me sing "Uptown Girl"?
NW: Oh my God. It all adds up. You did start the fire. YOU DID START THE FIRE.
BJ: I'm afraid I can't allow you to leave.
NW: It wasn't always burning since the world's been turning. It was you. It was always you. Hey -- what are you doing with that-- (THROAT SLIT BY GOLD RECORD NOISES) You... started.. it...
BJ: (SINGING TO SELF) "LASAGNA'S ALMOST BURNING, SINCE THE SCHWARMA'S TURNING, TURNING, TURNING..."
January 18, 2008 10:31
R.I.P. Bobby Fischer (1943-2008): Smartest Idiot of All Time
I'm not old enough to remember Good Bobby Fischer. He beat Spassky in Iceland in 1972, when I was 3. I more got Bad Bobby Fischer -- you know, the guy who hated Jews (is that why CNN calls him a "world-class eccentric"? That's one way to put it) and periodically had passport problems.
I guess I should feel bad for him, since he almost certainly had some kind of undiagnosed medium-level mental illness. And he did do a lot to make nerdy people cool, back in the early 1970's before computers were a big deal. But he did just as much to prove how little being smart has to do with knowing anything that's actually worth knowing, and to confirm lots of stereotypes about nerds, i.e. that they're emotionally retarded, etc. Genius has never looked less hot.
Let's call it a wash. If anybody's in search of an epitaph, this isn't a bad one: "Chess is not something that drives people mad. Chess is something that keeps mad people sane." -- Bill Hartston.
January 17, 2008 9:12
Scrabulocalypse Now: The Scrapping of Scrabulous
It's being widely reported that Hasbro has asked Facebook to kill Scrabulous, a third-party app for playing Scrabble online.
Scrabulous is insanely popular -- it claims around half a million users daily. More important, Scrabulous is insanely popular with me: I never have fewer than 3 games going at once. (And I never, ever cheat.) It's a beautiful piece of widgetry -- I've watched the interface evolve over the past couple of months to the point where it's an almost frictionless experience. I first heard about the trouble with Hasbro a couple of days ago, and I was wondering why I hadn't gotten all indignant and blogged about it before now. Then I realized: waitaminnit, Hasbro doesn't make Scrabulous?
Turns out Scrabulous is made by two brothers in Calcutta who never even checked in with Hasbro before they started coding. Wow. I mean, they did a beautiful job and all, and I love free software as much as the next d00d, and yay for the little guy, but how long did they expect that to last? I can't work up a decent head of steam over that. I just hope Hasbro is smart enough to buy Scrabulous and resuscitate it on a firm legal footing. Because I've got a wicked bingo to put down.
January 16, 2008 1:33
J.J. Abrams: The Cloverfield Interview
I didn't do this interview with J.J. Abrams, producer of Cloverfield, creator or co-creator of Felicity, Alias, Lost and all the stars in the heavenly firmament. The exceptionally sharp interlocutor here is Rebecca Winters Keegan, Time's Hollywood correspondent. This is for a piece in the next issue of Time about end-of-the-world movies, which is why she's always after him about the end of the world and what that means. Abrams was talking from the set of the new Star Trek movie [makes excited noise!]
This is raw, mostly unedited transcript, by the way, so don't expect unearthly levels of eloquence. Do expect some interesting stuff about Iraq and YouTube and The Twilight Zone. Plus some token nerd love there at the end.
TIME: What’s behind the enduring popularity of apocalyptic tales?
JJ: Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time. The theory of attack became the reality of attack 7 years ago. It’s no coincidence that so many stories are being told that grapple in different ways with us vs. them.
TIME: What’s your version?
JJ: Cloverfield is fantasy. The movie is meant to be entertainment, to give people the sort of thrill I had as a kid watching monster movies. I hadn’t seen anything that felt that way for many years. I felt like there has to be a way to do a monster movie that’s updated and fresh. So we came up with the Youtubification of things, the ubiquity of video cameras, cell phones with cameras. The age of self-documentation felt like a wonderful prism through which to look at the monster movie. Our take is what if the absolutely preposterous would happen? How terrifying would that be? The video camera, we all have access to. There’s a certain odd and eerie intimacy that goes along with those videos. Our take is a classic B monster movie done in a way that makes it feel very real and relevant, allowing it to be simultaneously spectacular and incredibly intimate.
TIME: Movies that take themes of terrorism and war on head on don’t do very well at the box office. Is SF the best outlet for our societal fears about those things?
JJ: My favorite series was The Twilight Zone. Before that, Rod Serling was dealing with issues of politics and race and getting into a great deal of trouble with the censors and the advertisers. The feeling was that people watch TV to forget those things. When he did The Twilight Zone he made a conscious effort to do a show that could deal with those things and not get him into trouble. He was a brilliant social commentator. Everything you were looking at was incredibly resonant, even though you were talking about a guy with three eyes or a woman who was 90 feet tall.
With Cloverfield we were trying to create a film that would be entertaining and, as a by-product of the subject matter, perhaps be a catharsis. We wanted to let people live through their wildest fears but be in a safe place where the enemy is the size of a skyscraper instead of some stateless, unseen cowardly terrorist.
TIME: Did you fear cutting too close to the bone by setting it in New York City?
JJ: Certainly we could have set the film in Chicago or San Francisco, but there’s something about Manhattan that is for me the most powerful and iconic city in the world. When Godzilla came out, the idea of doing a movie about the destruction of a city because of a radioactive manmade thing, it must have had a similar feeling. It was very much a way to deal with in a social, communal way, everyone’s common fears. On the one hand it’s a silly man in a rubber suit, on the other hand it’s a way to process these fears that are mostly bottled up. Anyone who is upset about Cloverfield must have had the same reaction to the recent Spider-man films or I Am Legend or the King Kong remake.
TIME: But Cloverfield’s story-telling style looks to be much more intimate than a big-budget CGI movie, and therefore maybe scarier.
JJ: There are hundreds of incidents and images out of Iraq on handheld video that are horrifying. All of those images we considered in making the movie, because they show the way things actually look. A lot of the reality of this film is sold on you [because you] feel like this was not documented by a director or a photographer, but rather an everyman. In many of these Iraq videos, we felt like we were just missing the most terrifying thing.
TIME: Does the popularity of end-of the-world narratives suggest we’re secretly longing for it to happen?
JJ: Not for me. For me, it’s the idea of the bigger they come the harder they fall, the idea of seeing the Titanic, the unbreakable, unsinkable ship go down. Whenever a toddler sees a pile of blocks, he wants to tear it down. Cloverfield takes the incredibly familiar and relatable, and it adds an element of the absolutely fantastical. It’s like in Planet of the Apes: When you see the Statue of Liberty on the beach, you realize that this creepy and compelling story happened where I live.
TIME: Did you cast lesser-known actors in order for the story to be more relatable?
JJ: They’re for the most part more attractive people than you might find in your average home videotape, but we wanted to show you actors you wouldn’t remember from another movie or TV show, like this was found material.
TIME: Like you just got invited to the party with hot people?
JJ: Yes. A party I never got an invitation to, by the way.
January 15, 2008 11:34
Deadblogging MacWorld 2008!
I'm covering MacWorld from the relative safety of midtown Manhattan this year, which means compulsively reloading various livebloggers' websites. Glamorous! I gambled that CES would be dull this year and won. Let's see how I do with MacWorld.
As usual, the keynote started slow. Leopard, yay. iPhone updates, yay. Movie rentals, HD, yay, yay, yay. And I'm glad Apple is still plugging away at Apple TV, which I think is a great product whose time will come, oh lord. And it was big of Jobs to admit that it was a miss first time around. Boo: paying $20 for adding what should be basic functionality to my iPod Touch (weather widgets, etc.)
But yay for the MacBook Air, which is quite a beautiful piece of design, and adds an extra sector to Apple's notebook family, which is a good place for them to concentrate, given the hot year Leopard had, and the company's galloping expertise in miniaturization. Some numbers: 3 pounds, .76 inches at its thickest, 1.6 GHz, 2GBs of memory, an 80GB standard hard drive, 11 or 12 inch display, $1,799 price tag. Not enough to make me wish I'd gone to San Francisco, but pretty damn desirable.
Maybe the most exciting feature in there -- and Jobs soft-pedaled it, interestingly -- is that the trackpad supports MultiTouch, the touchscreen technology that's in the iPhone. Pinching, gesture recognition, that whole deal. I've been waiting to see that technology pollinate its way into Apple's computer lines, and here it is. So yay. I'm betting we'll see quite a bit more of that -- how long before the screen itself becomes the trackpad?
January 14, 2008 8:13
No Country For Old Men -- The Christmas Letter
Deck the halls and 'tis the season for that most wonderful time of year! It's me, Carla Jean Moss, and can you believe it's been a year since my last Christmas Letter? Where did the time go? It's been a crazy year, I tell you that. But I guess I say that every year.
First off, we had a lot of action the Terrell County Wal-Mart. We all worked real hard and moved our inventory push-through rate up to third in the region -- take that South Odessa! Sally Jessup finally got promoted to the makeup counter, but Joe Junior wanted another little one, so she's back off her feet in the tobacco and cough syrup cage again. Bless her little miracle, but it's hard to be a career woman these days!
Back at home, Momma finally finished the last square of her quilt of New England lighthouses, so look for that at the fair come autumn. And then there's my Llewelyn -- always up to something, that big cutie pie. First he takes in a stray cat what gave the whole trailer fleas, then he comes home with a satchel of money. I asked him where he got it, but you know men: rather drink beer than talk to their wives, as the apron says.
Things got crazy at the Wal-Mart again when Timmy Fred Buckner moved up to regional and we had to break in a new district manager, and meanwhile Llewelyn disappears then comes back all muddy and puts me on a bus to Momma's. I barely had time to pack my Gloss 'N' Go! Long story short, Llewelyn is Lord-knows-where for a couple days, probably living it up with Burl and Hutch Fraker, when he calls and tells me an Momma to head down to El Paso. I do like a take-charge man!
Well, I must have walked under a ladder or some such, because in El Paso, Llewelyn is gunned down, and then Momma went to meet her eternal reward. I like to think they're playing their harps together, Momma still nagging him to go to church. Do you still have to go to church up in Heaven? I hope so.
Things finally calmed down at the Wal-Mart -- once we got those darn Kenmores out of the warehouse! And then this crazy fella with a basset hound haircut shows up at Momma's, fixing to send me to the angels! And the most vexing thing -- other than those darn Kenmores -- is that now I don't know if I'm alive or dead! Poke me with a cactus needle!
Well, I do go on! Have a merry, merry Christmas everyone! Look out for that mistletoe, and don't eat too much turkey!
Love and kisses y'all,
Carla Jean
One more thing: did you know all this happened in 1980? I had no idea. I thought it was now times.
January 14, 2008 10:55
Hobbit Rumors; Star Trek Non-Rumors, a.k.a. Facts
Elijah Wood said a thing or two to MTV News about what's going on with the Hobbit movie. Which it turned out means the Hobbit movies, plural. This is Wood describing his conversations with Peter Jackson:
I haven’t spoken to him directly about it [but] I’ve e-mailed him, and as far as I know the two films that they’re doing, one will be ‘The Hobbit’ and another will take place between the 60 years that happened between ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings,’” the once and future Frodo enthused to MTV News, possibly confirming rumors that the second planned film would not be a Part II, but instead a narrative bridge.
A narrative bridge? Somebody's going to write, like, the new adventures of old Bilbo? Or maybe it'll be a searing, Altmanesque indictment of the spiritual emptiness of suburban life in the Shire. Like Short Cuts. Yeah, maybe it'll be like that.
Also, Wil Wheaton is back in a Star Trek uniform. I'll let him explain it. His blog post includes an incredibly plangent detail about life on the set of The Next Generation.
“We all felt a salary increase was appropriate, because The Next Generation was a hit. It was making gobs of money for Paramount,” (I like that word – gobs) “and we felt that we should share in that bounty.
“Of course, Paramount felt otherwise, so a long and annoying negotiation process began.
“During that process, the producers’ first counteroffer was that, in lieu of a raise, they would give my character a promotion, to lieutenant.”
...
“I imagined this phone call to the bank,” I mime a phone, and hold it to my ear. “Hi . . . Uh, I'm not going to be able to make my house payment this month, but don't worry! I am a lieutenant now.” I pause, listening to the voice on the other end.
“Where? Oh, on the Starship Enterprise.”
I pause.
“Enterprise D, yeah, the new one. Feel free to drop by Ten Forward for lunch someday. We'll put it on my officer's tab!”
January 11, 2008 8:41
The Blob Report: The Environment
Hey there, it's me, the Blob. The thousand-pound guy in the unitard. Well, I'm here to stand up for an oppressed minority, of which I am one of them: Giant Fatsos.
Giant Fatsos get the blame for everything these days. First, it was the skyrocketin' costs a healthcare, then we was wreckin' the rainforest, and now they're blamin' high gas prices and -- that's right -- terrorism on us Giant Fatsos. Terrorism? Naw, but it's true I tells ya.
Da thinkin' goes like dis: 'cause it takes more gas to transport Giant Fatsos like myself on cars and planes, the world is runnin' out of energy all quicker like. And drivin' the price of fuel up the wazoo. And causin' big countries to invade small oil-diggin' ones and make the whole Middle East go all koo koo bananas. Basically, because I eat too many nachos, we got 9/11.
Nuts to that! Pencil-necks roll their eyes when Giant Fatsos say, "it's not my fault I'm big -- it's my genes." Well guess what? It IS my in genes? I'm a mu-tant. Homo Superior. (Or Homo Posterior, as the Toad always calls me. Good guy, wicked funny.) My POWER is being fat. It's not cause I eat a lot. Got it? It's enuff to make me spit out my cigar stub in rage, it is.
Just 'cause I got a big footprint, it don't mean I got a big carbon footprint. The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants has always been on the forefront of da environmental movement and what have you. We got a solar lair, a big composter in the back yard, water the lawn with grey water... heck, Magneto spends every Sunday magnetically grabbin' cans for da recyclin' center and things of that nature.
Look, when us evil mutants take over the world, we're gonna fix up the planet real nice. So you better help out and live green, OR YOU'RE GONNA GET A POUNDIN' FROM DA BLOB!!!
January 8, 2008 4:41
In Which I Read Some Manga
Not only did I read some manga, I got it from my mom. If I wasn't a nerd before I think that seals the deal.
I had always avoided manga till now. I would see the books lying around, but they're kind of off-putting. They've got all these symbols and icons on them, all that kanji, and the paper quality is so awful, and they have words like Shonen Jump on them. And they all look alike. Plus they're, you know, backwards. (It took me a few pages to figure out that you read the panels from right to left. Oops.) And I don't really know how to pronounce manga.
But then everybody in my family was suddenly tearing through these Death Note books, and as a matter of basic survival I had to take a look. The basic idea is as follows: bored super-genius high school student finds mysterious notebook. Notebook has been accidentally dropped by other-dimensional death god. If you write somebody's name in the notebook, that person automatically dies, at the exact time and in whatever manner you specify.
The high school student, whose name is Light, decides to help humanity by killing off evil criminals. Light is haunted by Ryuk, the death-god who dropped the notebook, who is mightily entertained by Light's project and hangs around to watch. The police figure out that somebody is killing off criminals by the hundreds and put a mysterious super-sleuth code-named L on the case, who quickly figures out that Light can kill from a distance. A cat-and-mouse game ensues. (My mom now wears an L pendant around her neck. Dork.)
It's pretty slender, as premises go, but it's unbelievably compelling. Light is super-smart and totally amoral, to the point where you have no real idea what he's going to do from panel to panel, and Ryuk, the death-god, makes an entertaining jester -- he's curious about what Light is doing, but you never forget that he doesn't really give a damn about humans. The writer, Tsugumi Ohba, has clearly put a lot of practical thought into what owning a death-notebook would actually be like -- how you'd test the limits of the book's powers, how you'd cover your tracks, how you'd inevitably slip up. Light is always experimenting by killing criminals in fancy new ways. The whole project is just morally ambiguous enough that you both do and don't want Light to keep going.
Plus it's all extremely plot-driven. If this were an American comic you'd have to sit through all these scenes of Light clutching his forehead and agonizing about how he's committing mass murder, and do the ends justify the means, sob? But nah. Light just keeps on killing. Doesn't bother him much.
At least so far. Keep goin' buddy, I have 11 more volumes to get through. And then what? Recommendations?
January 7, 2008 1:44
Nerd World: Not at CES, Not Feeling Bad About It
I'm not like Matt. I don't sit around watching movies and striking for causes I believe in. I work for a living. Or I do now that I'm back from leave.
One thing I don't do anymore is go to a lot of tech trade shows. Used to. Used to be I'd haul-ass off to Las Vegas for a week of vaporware and mini-bar booze and bad air and jolie-laide booth babes at a moment's notice. No longer. Hence my sitting out the Consumer Electronics Show this week.
It's partly because I'm older and lazier and more complacent than the irritating Horatio Alger-type I once was. I'm not as thrilled as I once was about filling plastic tote bags with swag, and being the first to rewrite a press release about an incremental update to some prosumer camcorder. That's what CNET's for. God bless those brave lads.
Partly it's because there just isn't as much heat around consumer hardware launches as there once was. And partly they're just so much damn work: it's a good chance to get contact with executives, but you have to kiss a lot of frogs, and some even less appealing amphibians, before you come up with anything useful. There's too much stuff being hyped, and you're too close to it. When you're on the ground at CES it's like being caught on a Napoleonic battlefield: the fog of war is thick, everybody's running around, there's all this musket smoke, you can't tell who's winning. Plus my gout always flares up.
Plus nobody announces anything cool at CES anymore anyway. Apple hasn't shown up for years, they just do MacWorld a week later. Watch Gates's keynote: there are some good moments -- what do you suppose Slash's appearance fees are like these days? -- but it's hard to imagine a less surprising, visionary presentation. Mobile this, personalized that, hi-def the other thing. I'm not saying this stuff ain't useful. It just doesn't soothe my tech jones. And Las Vegas is a long way to go to have my tech jones not soothed. I can do that right there in New York.
January 6, 2008 10:38
End Trailer Profiling Now!
I went to see The Golden Compass recently, and before the movie they showed the trailers for the following upcoming films: The Spiderwick Chronicles, Inkheart, and The Forbidden Kingdom. Wait a minute... oh, I get it. Because I go to a fantasy movie, I only get ads for other fantasy movies? There's a word for that: bigotry. And bigotry hurts. In this case, the three trailers were all about kids discovering a magic book, then arguing about who should wield it. ("Get the book! Don't let him get the book! If Lord Darkpage gets the book, he'll rule the Biblio-verse!") After these inane, repetitive fantasy trailers, who would want to sit through a two-hour fantasy film? Compass ruined.
Same thing at Walk Hard. The trailers were: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Drillbit Taylor and Harold and Kumar 2. So because I like goofy comedies, I only get trailers for other goofy comedies? More bigotry. Seeing trailers for three goofy comedies (all "From the Guys Who Brought You" some other goofy comedy) made me NOT WANT TO SEE A GOOFY COMEDY.
The thinking is this: because a dude goes to see certain genre of film, then that's the ONLY GENRE HE LIKES. Not only is that bigotry -- that's profiling. I feel like Cat Stevens at Delta security check-in. Trailer Profiling taints the movie-going experience. It's like serving three plates of sliders before a hamburger entree. Too many little hamburgers ruins the big hamburger! Stop ruining the big hamburger!
To The Big Theater Chains, I say: End Trailer Profiling Now. A diverse mix of appetizers will make the main course more enjoyable. And if something doesn't change, before you know it, people will figure out a way to put movies on a data storage device, say, a disc -- and watch movies on some sort of "player" at home -- skipping the trailers with, I don't know, a magic gun that fires trailer-skipping bullets. Then who will buy your syrupy soda, oily popcorn and Sno-covered Caps? Who?
(There's probably marketing people who'll tell you that Trailer Profiling works. And to those people, I say: nice job. You figured out an effective way to increase theater attendance in an increasingly competitive environment. Well done.)
January 4, 2008 12:20
Anti-Hero of the British Empire
George MacDonald Fraser, author of The Flashman Papers, and Master of my historical fiction Universe, died this week at 82. Reading Fraser's twelve Flashman books is one of the great joys of possessing eyes. (And listening to David Case, also dead, read the Flashman books-on-tape is a decent benefit of having ears.)
The Flashman Papers are the "memoirs" of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the ultimate Victorian coward and horn-dog. Flashy flees and humps his way from Jotunberg to Jallalabad, always emerging somehow with another medal on his broad chest. Harry meets historical figures along the way (Lords Cardigan, Raglan and Palmerston!), but you've never heard of most of them because you're not George MacDonald Fraser. Sure, Fraser wasn't the first writer to use this trick (Napoleon pops up in War and Peace, I'm told), but did anyone ever do it with such saucy gusto?
But the best thing about Fraser, other than his supreme gift for describing bosoms and body parts ("marriage mutton"), was the unsentimental clarity of his protagonist's world view. Flashman seems to speak for Fraser, and their blunt observer's take on the FUBAR carnage of the nineteenth century is darkly compelling.
Flashy's clear-eyed synthesis of Imperial calamities are what makes Flashman in the Great Game (1857's Sepoy Mutiny) and Flashman and the Dragon my two favorite in the series. In Dragon, Fraser gives a harrowing description of the British Army's methodical, vase-by-vase destruction of the Chinese Summer Palace in 1860. Flashman sums up by saying:
That's the great thing about policy, and why the world is such an infernal place: the man who makes the policy don't have to carry it out, and the man who carries it out aint responsible for the policy.
A crazy hypothesis: isn't Sir Harry Flashman a post-modern hero, of sorts? The notion of post-modernism (or as we call it today, "everything") was probably anathema to Mr. Fraser. The man consumed real Victorian military histories like they were Skittles -- not a lot of literary theory on his bookshelf. But, after all, Fraser did pluck Flashman from Tom Brown's School Days and masterfully subvert the stock bully. Sneaking around in the background of history, like a non-boring Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Flashy delighted in poking holes in the myths of greatness. Kinda post-modern, right? (If I'd dared suggest this while Fraser were alive, he'd have me crammed into a lit Congreve rocket.)
You love Flashy because, no matter his faults, he is a truth-teller. And with George MacDonald Fraser gone, we're one more honest man short.
January 2, 2008 12:50
Don't Read This Unless You 1) Have Children and 2) Play Video Games
I promise you, it will bore and annoy you, just as it would have bored and annoyed me before I became a parent. But now I am one, and I'm wondering if anybody out there is dealing with a toddler on the cusp of becoming a junior gamer.
I say this because my daughter, who's 3 and a half, just played her first game. She's always been fascinated with the Web, especially sites with Flash games, and for about a year she's been insisting on sitting on my lap and directing me while I played various games on her behalf. It's a treat that I ration extremely sparingly, but over the months I have helped her, by proxy, harrow the hellish dungeons of quite a few Elmo and Boohbah and Teletubbies games. (I am a frickin' master of Teletubby gaming: if you want to help Po slide down a snowy hill, or if Dipsy has lost her hat again, believe me, I am the dude that you want to know.) It was all strictly a vicarious experience for her: we were working off a laptop, and she just didn't have the hand-eye to deal with a trackpad.
But this weekend we were kicking it at the PBS Teletubbies site when we encountered a dire situation: five bunnies who needed to be clicked on and placed in their bunny-shaped holes. Normally this is the kind of emergency that daddy deals with himself, but the rookie showed some interest in getting actively involved with the case, so I handed her the controls. Slowly, agonizingly, but determinedly, she clicked on each bunny in turn (she does a weird two-handed click, holding the button down for a good 5 seconds, because her mom's laptop's trackpad doesn't give good tactile feedback), then nudged it toward the appropriate burrow. This is quite uncanny for a parent to watch for the first time -- you're so used to your child being incapable of gaming that it's like watching some beloved pet suddenly walk upright and eat with a knife and fork. When the fifth bunny hit home, an unseen Tinky Winky (who had been doing color commentary throughout) shouted 'Yaaaaaay!' and you could almost see every neuron in my daughter's brain fire at once. Her skull practically glowed: she was alive with a kind of pleasure I'd never seen her experience. Dancing ensued, and I blush to say that she did not dance alone.
Then two things happened. One, she climbed back up in the chair and started playing again (the game had restarted automatically, natch). Clearly she wanted another taste of that good stuff. And two, she looked at me over her tiny shoulder and said something that she's never said before: "Daddy, you can go now."
My feelings about this watershed were mixed. I'm happy because she's happy. And God knows, I am not bummed that she's learning how to entertain herself, because I've been entertaining her for 3 and a half years, and I could use a break in which to perform some basic personal hygiene. But I have no idea how this works -- which or how many games to let her play, etc. etc. There's no way I'm letting her near a console yet. In the past I've steered her to a site called Poisson Rouge, which I love because it's elegant and semi-educational and has no licensed characters (I'm not just a gamer, I'm also a psychotic neo-Marxist), but she has to be nudged there: it's not really her first choice. Is anybody else dealing with this stuff? I want to look to my own experience as a guide, but there basically weren't any games when I was 3. There are no maps for these territories.