Sunday, July 31, 2005
Movie Review: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
I've got a bunch of reviews written, reviews for films and books, and I'm going to be running one a day for a while. I'll start off with this one, finally written up from the brief reaction
I posted the day I saw the film. Go go Charlie!
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a new film version of the classic children's story by Ronald Dahl. There was a previous film version, released in 1971 and starring Gene Wilder, but this film is based on the book, not that other film, and since I've never read the book or seen more than bits and pieces of the first film, my review is entirely based on this new film. I liked parts of it, I was sort of bored by the emotionless spectacle of other parts, and for me the performances and look of the film was what it was all about. The actual plot and events in it are absurd to the point that I felt no emotional connection to them at all.
To the scores:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 5
Humor: 5
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 4/8 (Adults/Children)
Overall: 6.5
I'll talk about what I liked first. Johnny Depp's performance has been
discussed a great deal, with some critics loving it, some hating it, and others saying they liked the film despite him. I thought his performance and the character were consistent and interesting, without being at all likeable or being anyone you could really identify with. He's weird, prickly, eccentric, childlike, and wacky, and he's consistent about it. It's not an act or an affectation; that's what Willy Wonka is like, in this film. I didn't particularly like him, and I certainly wouldn't want to get to know him, but he didn't make or ruin the film for me.
Charlie, the namesake young boy, was not at all realistic either; no child (or adult, I suspect) has ever been so selfless and kind and friendly and pure. He was consistently that way though, through the entire film, so you can't really criticize him for it either. I liked him and wanted good things for him and his interesting family, but I never believed in the reality of any of them for a minute. It's a fantasy though, and I don't think you're really supposed to believe in it. It was a bizarre Tim Burton world with anachronisms everywhere, impossible city and factory designs, and people who could never really exist, with the fantastic fun house madness of Willy Wonka's candy factory to cap it all off. I could nit pick about how Event X could never really happen or how Person Y wouldn't be that way, but what's the point? It did happen and they are that way, and that's just how things are in the film. You either go with it and get into the story or you sit there sniffing at everything and don't enjoy yourself at all.
And in the world of the film, I liked a lot of stuff. All of the Oompa Loompa songs were catchy and cute, the special effects and impossible theme rooms of Wonka's factory were creative and fun to look at, the child actors were good in their stereotype roles, their parents were likewise, and even the flashback scenes to Willy Wonka's childhood were useful, if no more believable in the real world than anything else in the film.
While I tried to suspend my disbelief, I wasn't entirely successful. I can go with a pure fantasy film, or one totally based in reality, but when the two combine oddly, as they did in this movie, it's a bit off putting. The movie was set in the modern day in the real world, and all of the children (other than Charlie) were very real people, if very cliche and stereotyped as well. Charlie, on the other hand, lived in some faux-medieval one-room home, on a rubble-strewn plot at the edge of a completely modern village.
Willy Wonka's factory was a complete fairy tale with no laws of physics or space or time, and that's okay, but the rest of the world was very modern and real, with modern electronics, media, television, video games, etc. Yet despite the fact that everyone on earth was dying to get inside and see what it was like, when the five winners and their parents went in none of them took along any sort of camera or recording device? And no billionaires offered millions of dollars to buy one of the golden tickets, and no one used modern technology (metal detectors, scales, etc) to try and find the golden tickets before actually opening up the bars of chocolate?
Charlie's dad worked in a toothpaste factory screwing the caps onto the bottles, at a very slow pace, until they modernized and bought a robot to screw caps onto the bottles. But it still did them just one at a time, with much excessive movement and wasted motion. So they bought a very expensive robot to do exactly what the human had done before, when they could have gotten one that screwed the lids onto 50 bottles at the same time?
The behavior of the winning kids was odd too. The basic theme of the story seems to be bad parenting, in the form of parents who either exercise no control over their kids by spoiling them rotten, or by not setting them any limits. That's fine, but with Willy Wonka announcing in advance that one of the five kids was set to win a super special prize beyond anything they could dream, and at least three of the other kid/parent teams being super competitive and scheming to win it, it was strange that they didn't actually make any effort to do so. All of the kids instead ran wild and did whatever stupid thing their character drove them to do, and thereby got themselves eliminated almost immediately.
True, it fits in with the basic theme of parental neglect that serves as the cautionary moral of the story, but it was strange that the parents watched their kids get (nearly) killed, and worse yet, get eliminated from the super grand prize competition, almost without objection. I'm okay with the parents not showing actual honest love, but they should have at least displayed some sort of twisted "How could you let me down like that!?" disappointment.
My last complaint isn't about the film, and I tried not to let it influence my score. All the same, we've got to remember to never again attend a children's movie during the day on opening weekend. The
Charlie audience had more young kids than a Snickers has nuts, and they did what children usually do in movies -- talked all through it. Not intentionally trying to be annoying; they were 8, not 13, but they were noisy all the same. I suppose it's a nice parallel to the film, seeing spoiled kids got ironic punishment for their bad behavior while the film was being spoiled for us by the noisy children of over-indulgent parents, but I wasn't there for the irony. And the constant loud voices asking, "What did he say then, Mommy?" and "I bet he's the bad guy!" and "Oooh, he's going to get in trouble now!" and so on were troubling. It was like being trapped in a crowd of really bad play-by-play announcers, with several kids pronouncing on every obvious plot twist several few seconds after it occurred.
Overall, I suppose my middling score is based on the lack of any sort of narrative pull or sense of building action or conflict, and the fact that none of the good stuff was so great that it overcame the overall "watching events occur and waiting for them to end" feeling I had during the film. The movie doesn't suck and it's not boring, but it's never emotionally-involving (other than in the opening when Charlie's parents are trying so hard to make him happy in their miserable lives), nor is the conclusion ever in any real doubt, and this was despite the fact that I'd never read the book or seen the end of the 1971 film version.
I suspect I'll see it again on DVD someday, and when that happens I'll add a comment on my reaction to it then. I doubt I'll like it anymore then, but maybe watching it without constant childish interruptions would improve the viewing experience? Or maybe I'll just appreciate it more for what it is rather than disliking it for what it isn't, on a second viewing?
What Do Bicycle Teams Do?
This is a week or two late, with the Tour de Lance already over, but if you're like me and you've always sort of wondered what the strategy of a bicycle team is over a long race,
here you go. The article doesn't go into very much depth, and about 90% of it seems to involve the conservation of energy you get by "drafting" closely behind another rider, but at least it didn't take very long to read.
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Google Pedometer Hack
Lanth mailed me this clever and very useful URL the other day, and I've been meaning to share it.
The site is here, and what they've done is write an application that loads maps and satellite images from the glorious
maps.google.com site, and then allows you to plot distances on it. You just get a map you like, at any magnification, start recording, and double click your way around it, putting in a little marker at every click and drawing a blue line that traces your path. The program calculates the distance travelled as you click.
The
example URL Lanth sent me is a trek around the Lafayette Reservoir, where I used to go jogging regularly before I joined the gym to save my knees. (
See photos of it here.) I like that one since it tells me the program is largely accurate; it says 2.6506221430230603 miles (It might be
just a teensy bit more precise than humans require to plan their walks.) for the route, and the painted lines on the ground around that paved path say 2.7 miles. That's well within the margin for error, considering how many tiny curves and twists the path makes.
While I was there I ha to try mapping the upper reservoir trail, a path that's as steep as any you'll ever walk without a sherpa. It worked nicely and you can
see it here, and learn that it's about 5 miles around, though that doesn't give you any hint of the incredible hills you'll have to travel.
The greatest weakness of the program is that it does not measure elevation, but until Google does some magical thing to transform their 2D maps into 3D charts, we'll have to live without it. The program also seems to break when you try to chart very long distances, since the blue lines and markers stop showing up, though it does keep plotting the distance. I measured down the freeways from here to San Diego and got very accurate mileage, even though the lines I'd drawn wouldn't show up in the window. It's still a lot of fun to play with though, and you can map distances "as the crow flies" as well, to surprise yourself with just how close you live to X, once you don't have to follow the roads to get there.
Be Prepared.
I wasn't going to comment on the Boy Scout deaths and disasters, except that there's such a good quote in
today's recap article that I couldn't resist.
On Monday, four Scout leaders were electrocuted in front of several Scouts after they lost control of the towering metal pole at the center of a large, white dining tent, sending it toppling into nearby power lines. The day before, a volunteer was taken to a hospital where he died of an apparent heart attack.
On Wednesday, 40,000 Scouting enthusiasts waited hours in the stifling heat for an appearance by President Bush, who ended up postponing his visit due to the threat of severe thunderstorms. Sun-sick Scouts began collapsing and more than 300 people were treated for heat-related illnesses.
"I don't think it's wise to make judgment on things that could've, should've, would've been done," Jamboree spokeswoman Renee Fairrer said.
Well Renee, that would pretty well rule out making any judgments, on anything, ever again, now wouldn't it? No wonder Bush was going to visit them -- hell, he might have to hire this woman to do his PR; she already has the, "What, me take responsibility?" administration line down pat.
And while I don't exactly agree with it, I also like Malaya's theory about this. She says God is punishing the scouts for their determinedly anti-gay policies and general attitude of homophobia. So if locusts descend upon the Jamboree later this week, don't say you weren't warned.
Because nobody wants to be a pig lover?
I keep seeing a commercial for some Denny's breakfast they're calling the "Meat lover's" breakfast. It's eggs and toast, along with bacon, sausage, and ham. So um... how does three kinds of pork = meat lover? I mean sure, it's meat, (mostly, given US slaughterhouse technology), but it's all the same kind of meat. You don't expect bison burgers at Denny's, but this is lazy, even for them.
Friday, July 29, 2005
The Week in (simulated) Violence.
I'm never sure about the purpose of my Kali posts. Some are to entertain and inform the readers, but some are more like diary entries for myself to look back on one day and see just what I was doing and thinking at a given time. I don't really go all out on making them entertaining and funny though (I'd lie more) and I don't make them personal and detailed enough to really be useful memory aids for me in the future. So are these the best of both worlds, or are they failing doubly?
Encouraging introduction aside, I went to two Kali classes and a workshop this week.
Tuesday Night Class: I have no memory of this one. We did something, possibly with sticks, while spending a lot of time talking and thinking about what we'd do in the double stick and broadsword seminar the next night. Oh, and everyone was showing off their new broadswords to each other; a largely pointless exercise, since most of us had identical training ones bought from the same local stores.
Wednesday Night Seminar: This was a lot of fun. We did broadsword stuff for the first hour and a half, mostly solo. Tuhan (the master) would show us a strike, usually one making a circular motion so we could swing it up behind ourselves and bring it down again, and we'd do our best to emulate him while standing in two rows with enough space to avoid killing anyone with our backswing. Broadsword isn't that different than heavy stick, which we practice all the time; you just have to do larger swinging motions, and you want to strike with the middle of the weapon and then slice along to the tip, making long cuts on the opponent. With a stick we constantly strive to hit with the very tip, for maximum force, so some adjustment is needed. You also don't need to keep your grip as straight with a stick, since there's no blade on it and it doesn't matter what face hits the target. That's obviously a bit different with a broadsword.
After going through a few strikes that way, we did some stuff in pairs, practicing basic counters and parries against an attacker, and then killing him in various ways. My favorite was the behind the back stab, where you tuck the sword behind your back, stab it over to the left of your body as you step past your opponent, and then whip it around while turning and chop off their head from behind. Best of all, you not only can do it with a twirling flourish, you have to, since that's the fastest way to move it both behind and out from behind your back. It's like showing off that serves a purpose.
After the broadsword stuff we moved on to double stick for maybe an hour, and that was both enjoyable and frustrating. I love double stick, and practice it all the time on my own. This is useful since I'm very comfortable with two weapons, and I can keep the constant spinning motion (siniwali) going very smoothly, and I'm good at attacking with them. It's bad since I never practice against another person, and when you've got to keep circling them, time your spinning to get your weapons ready on the correct side of your body, and then swing them to hit the opponent's hands as he swings his own weapons, it's damn hard to coordinate all of that. I've done it a few times, and been better than I was for my 30 seconds in front of everyone on Wednesday night, but for whatever reason I was just terrible at it then. I just couldn't get in a rhythm, and kept banging into the sticks of my sparring partner, rather than blending to his speed and hitting his strikes as they passed me by. It was sad too, since others said I had the best siniwali of anyone there but Tuhan, and then my actual fighting abiility was inversely proportional. Sort of like a really hot model who keeps falling off the catwalk.
Watching Tuhan, and also my Gura, go with double stick was inspiring though. Tuhan was truly awesome with them, hitting like a machine, always on target, always taking out both sticks of the attacker, always driving two or three shots into their head or other vulnerable area before they could recover from being blocked on their attack. I honestly didn't think it was possible to be that good with two weapons at once, and while I was very disappointed in my own showing, I was inspired by seeing just how well it could be done. I've just gotta get Malaya to spar with me a bit more, so I can work on my timing and positioning and get used to fending off attacks while moving into my own counter attacks. She just needs to stand there and swing (slowly, for now, given my skill level) so I can practice. The tricky part is that you've got to keep your sticks moving in the siniwali, but speed it up and slow it down so your sticks are in the right position to counter their attacks, no matter how they move and how they strike. It takes a sort of four dimensional timing, since you've got to control your own position, estimate their speed and direction, and anticipate their next attack before they make it. Strong wrists and arms are essential as well, since you've got to snap your strikes right to their hands with good aim, precision, and speed, and you've got to keep track of your own sticks, knowing if you should hit and pull it back low, high, wrap it around your body, turn more sideways, and so on. Etc.
Thursday Night Kali: There were six of us in class, and the four guys had all been to the workshop the night before and everyone had a sore forearm from all the broadsword swinging, and most of us had sore legs from some of the lunge-like double stick footwork we'd been doing. The other two people in class were newer female students, and while Gura said we'd do something light without weapons, I ended up partnered with the biggest guy there, who is also the best open handed fighter. We did a few drills at first, practicing basic parries and counters, but my partner quickly wanted to do more and began free styling around me while I threw lefts and rights and let him practice parrying those and hitting me.
From there we began doing more freestyle, and were soon into out and out open sparring, mostly in long arm style, which is slower and a bit more graceful than your typical jab-heavy boxing match. We use both hands though, swinging backhand a lot, include all sorts of kicks, go in close for neck breaks and arm twisting submission holds, and so on. He destroyed me, of course, but we had a great (and very sweaty) time and both learned from it.
I even got him to go at more than the 50% speed he usually uses for sparring in class, and it was interesting to see just how quickly I had to move and react to stay alive at that point. He's so good at open hand that he basically does it all in slow motion, just practicing his form and aim and such, while the person he's going against is usually getting in their hits only by sheer speed. I was guilty of that, to some extent, but I tried to use form and technique and style more than just giving myself the "I'll go really fast while you're going half speed." illusion of success.
I got in my fair share of hits, for once, marvelled once again at how good he is at blocking any hit from any angle, and got some great practice at blocking his attacks and counter attacking. The more I spar, with stick or kicking or empty hand, the more I appreciate that a fight between two competent opponents is really all about counter attacks and defense. Anyone who knows what they're doing (which sadly does
not rule out quite a few professional boxers/K1 guys/ultimate fighters) can defend themselves well enough that they're almost impossible to hit cleanly. The way you get hits then, is to nail them when they're open, and that's when they've got something extended to hit you. Of course you've got to avoid their hit while moving to get in your own, which requires super reflexes or a lot of luck and timing, and there's nothing to say you won't just be opening yourself up when you swing at them.
Check out this compilation of
old Mike Tyson knockouts, for instance. He makes a few happen with sheer bludgeonery, but most of them come after an opponent's punch; quite often a hook Tyson ducks, before exploding with his own overhead left hook. His style wouldn't work for Kali; you could just kick or knee him in the face as much as he ducks, but it's amazing how well it works in those videos, and how terrible most of his opponents are at defending themselves. You never swing and then stand there with your hands down; always keep at least one up beside your head, and ideally both. I can't see how these guys got through years of amateur boxing without knowing that much, but then again, at least half the boxing matches we see on TV feature constant terrible form and execution. That's why the occasional brilliant boxer like Tyson, or Ali, or Leonard, is able to dominate at so many levels or for such a long time. Simply knowing how to defend, how to keep your head moving, and how to counterpunch is invaluable.
And now there's no more Kali for me this weekend, while Malaya's going to her women's class tonight and then again on Sunday morning before I'm even awake. Hopefully I can get her to do some practice Saturday and/or Monday, since even if she just stands there and throws slow 1s and 2s with a stick, I can work on my double stick technique.
And yes, this is far more than almost any of you wanted to know, judging by how often (virtually never) anyone offers any feedback on martial arts stuff. I guess this answers my "why do I write these" question from the intro though, eh?
Swimsuit Madness
I tripped over a link to
a page full of images from the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue (
more here, or just go to the
SI site if you for some reason actually need to see women in non-revealing swimsuits), and had to comment. I'll save my rant about these stupid, cheesy,
poorly-photoshopped images for another day, since I just wanted to comment on swimsuit prices.
Malaya tells me that wearable women's bikinis and swimsuits are in the $20-$30 range at discount stores, and maybe up to $50 at department stores. Those are ridiculous prices if you're going by the amount of material and difficulty of construction, compared to other clothing, but since that's never an issue with "fashion," I won't beat that drum. I do find it funny when they have prices all open to comparison in the same photo, though.
Like the one you see here, for instance. (Yes, you can click it to see the whole image.) Terrible photo, not a great model, and not a great suit. But hey, at least it's (slightly) cheaper than a high-end all-weather, waterproof sleeping bag, or a pair of heavy-duty snowboarding boots. Both of which are things that require 50x the manufacturing time, expense, and expertise, and can be used repeatedly, while most of these overpriced designer swimsuits are covered in sparkles or dangly things that will fall off immediately, or even sooner if you actually wear the into the water.
This one doesn't even hold a candle to the most expensive suits they showcase, of course. I clicked
this one for the butt shot and coughed at the $350 price for a suit that's only partially seen as it vanishes into this woman's ass. Used to be women paid good money for clothing that didn't bind up like that, and this one's designed to! (Not that I'm complaining about the view, mind you.) I'm sure there are more expensive suits to be found, if you dare take the challenge of looking through every shot to find one. I'd recommend that instead you 1) get a girlfriend, 2) go look
at actual porn, or 3) go look at
actual sexy bikinis, but hey, it's a free Internet. (Some of it, anyway.)
I did like some of the shots in the new SI swimsuit issue; this one, for instance.
Click it to see the full shot. It's one of the body painting images, and while the model and the photo are mediocre, I love the realism of the copy. I don't know how they do it, but I think we can safely rule out someone spending fifty hours painting in every single little dot of the mesh-looking material. They must have some sort of pre-printed thing that goes on like a big sticker, but isn't plastic? Or maybe they just print it right on the girls, like they're newspapers or Silly Putty? There must be a lot of touch up required to fill in the paint in every nook and cranny, and no, that wouldn't be too bad a job.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Things of the Day, Thursday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don't want them to become politicians in the process."
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Soul-Devouring Worry:The long fricking road ahead.
Answer of the Day:Because you can be motivated and horrified by the same display.
Curse of the Day:May you vividly discover just how woefully inadequate your abilities are, when contrasted against those of a true expert.
Books Lying Open:The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
Harry Fricking Potter, by the richest woman on earth
Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuinMovies to probably-not-see list:Fantastic Four, (Now playing, but probably not to us)
The Aristocrats, August-ish, 2005. (
Waiting for the DVD?)
The Brothers Grimm, August 26th (Doubtful.)
Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Wererabbit, October 5 (Oh yeah.)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
New Kali Shiny Part 2
And then there were two!
As
I related last week, we bought our first martial arts sword in anticipation of using it in class and at the double stick/broadsword workshop tonight. As you can see, one sword for the family wasn't enough, and we decided to go with his and hers weapons. The second one is nearly the same size, but it's made from two pieces of metal, riveted together, and it's thinner and has a lighter blade and handle.
It would probably be best if this second one went to Malaya, since it's a bit lighter, and I took the first one, since I'm a bit stronger and more used to heavy stick. However she prefers the feel and heft of the first one, and she's already done some decorating on it with red and blue paint, so apparently she's keeping that one. I like the lighter and faster feel of the second one better, so it's all good.
Jinxie just likes the smell of them, as does Dusty. Especially of the very tip of the hilt, where cheap ribbons were tied on initially. What they're smelling with such fervor is unknown, but they certainly do go at it. Jinx liked the smell of the very tip of the new blade as well, and spent a good two minutes rubbing her cheeks against it and actually sort of biting at it, last night. I have no idea what it tasted like, but thanks to some recent scientific breakthroughs I think we can safely rule out them dipping the sword into sugar before sending it over from Taiwan.
And as a completely unrelated bonus, here's a photo of one of the family of spiders that busily form huge webs across our back patio. I have no idea what type it is, but apparently a whole litter of them hatched out there some weeks ago, since there are 5 or 6 of them spinning between the houseplants and the heavy bag and the patio table, and they are all identical in appearance and size. This one is the only exception, since it's a bit larger, and I assume therefore the best web-weaver.
Finickiness Explained.
Here's
an interesting bit of science news. New research shows that cats can not taste sweet things.
Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and their collaborators said Sunday they found a dysfunctional feline gene that probably prevents cats from tasting sweets, a sensation nearly every other mammal on the planet experiences to varying degrees.
Researchers took saliva and blood samples from six cats, including a tiger and a cheetah and found each had a useless gene that other mammals use to create a "sweet receptor" on their tongues. The gene in question does not produce one of the two vital proteins needed to form the receptors.
...
Brand said the "pseudogene" in cats is probably a big reason why they are carnivores that get by on a high-protein, "Atkin's-like" diet. "Its sense of taste has driven it to become a meat eater," Brand said. "Losing their sweet receptor has probably changed their dietary habits."
There is just speculation about why this is and how it's changed the behavior and diet of cats over the ages. And I'm sure thousands of cat owners have their own, "My cat loves chocolate." anecdotes to offer up in dispute of this science. I wonder about Dusty; he likes to lick and eat every sort of sweet fruit, including cantaloupe, watermelon, peaches, nectarines, apples, pears, and so on. However he also likes broccoli and various other vegetables that are definitely not sweet. Jinx has no interest in eating any of those things, and always looks quite annoyed when we give Dusty something from that list, she sees him eating, runs over with a jolly little "Brrrollllffff?" and then retreats in confusion once she gets a sniff of it.
So is his taste receptor different than those of cats with more conventional eating desires, like Jinx? Or is it just a learned idiosyncrasy? And what explains Jinx's love of popcorn and French fries and other starchy stuff?
For cats in general, is their lack of a sweet taste what makes them like dairy so much? Dogs aren't big fans of milk and cheese and sour cream and such, as far as I know.
Lastly, this might be a blessing for those of us who own domestic felines. Though cats tend to scratch furniture and curtains and such, they rarely chew things up the way dogs notoriously do. Jinx has gnawed through a few wires in her time (eating Malaya's old headphones off right at the plug, for instance), but you don't have to worry about your cats chewing up your shoes, or clothing. (Though Dusty is partial to anything stretchy and resembling a rubber band, which endangers the straps on some of Malaya's underthings.) It probably helps that a cat is smaller too; comparing the destructive potential of a 10 or 15 pound cat vs. a big 100 pound dog is no contest, and while the cat will never destroy an entire room out of spite, it may well do far more damage, pound for pound.
Rodents and rabbits and such take that cake anyway; given the way they love to eat wires and other valuable things. A dog can ruin a nice pair of shoes in nothing flat, and cats might mar your furniture, but neither is likely to render your new plasma big screen inoperable by eating the cord right up into the back of the cabinet. Remind me why we allow animals in our homes again?
Doom (ed), the Movie
The teaser trailer for
Doom, a movie based on the oh so imaginatively-titled video game
is now online. While admittedly I don't believe I've ever played the game (I played either Doom or Quake some, years ago, but can never remember which.), I have to say that this is maybe the worst action movie trailer I've ever seen. This one makes
AVP look like Shakespeare.
Doom stars a professional wrestler, it looks like a low budget rip off of Aliens, it's visually dead, and they pack half a dozen cheesy action movie cliches into less than two minutes of footage.
The whole plot of scientists creating genetic mutants who run wild has been beaten to death, but I assume that's the plot of the game they're basing it on, so I'll let it pass. Entirely aside from the plot though. Ugh.
There's the "Are you alright, friend?" shot, where the friend of course leaps out and attacks in horrible mutated form. There's the "Oh, that sound was just a rat, I'll relax and then get grabbed from behind/below/above." scene. There's the "We're losing containment! Everyone out!" shot of a crowd panicking as monsters descend upon them. There are at least four or five "What was that?" shots, as something runs past between the camera and the heroes, who are helpfully standing in the only light source around, and looking in every direction but the one towards the camera and the thing. There was even a shot of the hero swinging on a chain and kicking the huge and horrible monster in the head, which is certainly the first thing you'd do when fighting a monster twice your size that's equipped with teeth sufficient to bite you off to the lower thigh. And these are just in the trailer! Imagine how much formulaic shit they'll unleash with an entire movie to fill?
Playing a video game where you wander around in the dark and blast whatever monster leaps out at you is fun. Watching a movie of it is death, as AVP found out, and Doom looks likely to learn.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
The ****ing Aristocrats
The Aristocrats is a new comedy documentary that I've been looking forward to for some time and looking for an excuse to blog about. Today
there's an article about it on Yahoo that serves as a decent, G-rated introduction to the film, so check it out if you haven't heard a thing about this movie. In a nutshell, The Aristocrats is a documentary produced by Paul Provenza and Penn (& Teller) Jillette, in which they interviewed more than one hundred stand up comics and asked them all to give their take on "the aristocrats," an old comedy standby that can be the dirtiest joke in existence, when told properly. As the Yahoo article says:
The joke begins when a performer walks into a talent office seeking work. An agent asks him about his act, so the performer explains it in the most vulgar terms including descriptions of body functions and sex acts. The punchline comes when the agent asks what the act is called. The performer answers: "The Aristocrats."
As punchlines go, it's not that funny. But the way some comics describe the act makes audiences howl. Others, however, won't repeat the joke, and still more startle audiences with a retelling that seems to be pulled from real life. What emerges is a sort of portrait of comedians at work and at play.
"It's like giving 100 canvasses to 100 painters and saying paint this nude person," said Bob Saget, the former star of wholesome TV comedy Full House. "Some people won't paint it because it's a nude person. Some people will paint it incredibly sexually; some people will paint it covered up. Some will paint it deviantly," he said.
Bob Sagat is in the documentary, of course, and if you think his comedic sensibilities extend no further than those insipid baby talk jokes he made while hosting America's Funniest Home Videos, you'll be shocked. I've always heard that he's actually a very good and very blue commedian, and he's said to be one of the stars of the film, for his version of the joke.
Others have singled out Gilbert Gottfried, who boldly told it at a Friar's Club roast for Hugh Hefner and threw in 9/11 references just weeks after that event, back in 2001, when lots of people were still saying no one (in America, at least) would ever be able to make jokes about that tragedy.
Check out the
ThinkFilm Page and
official movie page if you want to learn more; both are cursed with horribly inconvenient flash navigation, but they have tons of hilarous quotes about the film from various articles. The best content there is
this long article about the filmmakers and the process of creating the film. Unfortunately it's an Adobe file, so it will likely take you a minute to load and make you think your computer is locked up.
If you want media, there is
a trailer, but it doesn't convey much more than the basic premise. To really get a taste of what this joke can be like,
watch the South Park telling, from the film, starring Cartman. It's about as
NSFW as anything can ever be for the audio alone, so be warned, or wear headphones. You can even see what the critics think; there are
17 reviews now on RT, 13 of which are positive.
I'm curious enough to see this one in the theater, but we might just wait since the DVD is going to be even better. There's said to be hours more comedy that didn't make the film due to time constraints, and many other famous commedians (Seinfeld is named) who didn't get their version in the film but who now want to contribute.
A Tale of Two Salesmen
I have no idea where today went. I didn't sleep very late, and lazed around for a couple of hours in the morning before napping while Malaya was at the gym. When she got back we ran errands for a few hours, and then I went to the gym after that. I cooked after my workout, making a huge vat 'o refried beans and some roasted chicken for super burritos tomorrow and the next day, then read a bit before making dinner; stirfried portobellos with green pepper and onion on a bun. And after some light Kali and talk and such it was damn near midnight. Malaya went to bed, I tucked her in and did some surfing and now it's fricking 2am, and it's like I just got up an hour ago, for all I've actually accomplished.
And writing a painfully overlong and pointless introduction to my one blog post of the day isn't helping things.
Moving right along, I wanted to comment on two salesclerks we encountered today.
I often bitch about the ineptitude of store employees, and with good cause; most of them are pretty damn inept, either out of ignorance, indifference, or outright hostility towards their shit jobs. Today we've got one story of a case that definitely falls under the "ignorance" heading, and then for a radical change we've got a story of a store clerk who was actually good at his job.
Salesman #1, the dumb one. Malaya needed some touch up paint for her Toyota, to cover up a little ding she got in a parking lot. Easy enough, right? We looked up the color of her '05 Toyota, we went to a nearby Toyota dealer, and while she looked at steering wheel covers and such to avoid talking to the salescleark, I told him her car model, year, and the color. He asks my name and writes it down on a little pink receipt, which I thought strange, but whatever.
We continue browsing, expecting him to look up the color, since there was no way to do it ourselves. See they had a huge display of touch up paint in little pen-shaped dispensers, but they were all plain white and had letter/number codes, rather than color names, and there wasn't any paint color catalogue available. He's busy tapping away on the computer though, so we figured it was computerized rather than in a three-ring binder or whatever. More time passes, and finally he calls me over and asks for my name again. I'm not in the system, you see.
I tell him that it's not my car, and that we don't need to access Malaya's account, we just need to know which of those paints is Impulse Red, or whatever the ridiculous paint name was (I remembered it then.) That didn't compute with Mr. Salesman though, and since Malaya had come over by then she gave him her name, then waited for a good two minutes while he mashed keys before announcing that he couldn't find her listing either. So she gave him her mom's name, since maybe they set it up on her account, and surprise surprise, he couldn't find that either. This is after he's asked her to spell her last name like three times, getting it wrong each time, and spending a lot of effort frowning at the monitor.
Now keep in mind that there was no reason whatsoever to put anything into the computer. We told him what color paint we wanted; we didn't say, "We can't remember, can you look up the car purchase records to check for us?" Finally he gives up on finding her car "in the system" a phrase he uttered several times, as though it possessed talismanic power, and begins flipping through a big three-ring binder, looking over pages of paint colors and their corresponing codes. This goes on for a while, until he asks, "You said it was what, Starburst Yellow?" or something like that. "No, it's Impulse Red." I said, trading the dozenth look Malaya and I had thus far shared during this quarter hour ordeal.
Finally, mercifully, the parts manager, or someone, walks in from the direction of the service area, takes the binder, looks in it for five seconds, closes it, walks over and picks out one of the paints, and hands it to us. He then leaves, all the while being careful not to show any expression on his face.
Capping off the experience, the paint is like $10 for about a tablespoon in a squeeze tube, and since Malaya didn't have enough cash to buy it in the little parts store, he couldn't sell it to us there since he wasn't authorized to take payment from a debit card. So he gives us the tiny tube of paint, and the receipt, and asks us to go down the hallway to the cashier. We did, and we even went in and paid there, though of course we were down the hall, out of the store, and out of sight of the dim salesman, and could have simply walked off without paying.
To recap, did he do anything right other than not actually insulting us or breaking something? He wasn't some brand new kid either; he was maybe 40, white, male, and not drooling or anything.
Salesman #2. After that depressing experience, we headed over to Target to pick up a few random household items. We would have picked up
Constantine too, but since we missed the debut day (when it was on sale for $15) and it's now $21, we decided to wait a month until it's on sale used at Blockbuster for $10. We got some other stuff though, and as we were walking up to the cashiers Malaya asked if they'd try to stuff the new and very large dirty clothes basket into a bag. Knowing cashiers, we expected a slow, hilarious, and ultimately disastrous effort to insert the large plastic rectangle into a slightly less large plastic bag.
I didn't even reply to her, since well duh, it was a retail store in the US. Of course we'd get some idiot cashier who would waste three minutes trying to put the hamper into a bag. And if not he/she would at least put the few smaller items into a bag, and then awkwardly hand that to us, rather than just sticking it back into the hamper where we were logically carrying the items to begin with.
We picked a line with no one in it, and got an older white guy for our cashier. He was maybe 65, obviously working there since he'd been fired or laid off of some other job and needed the money, and obviously wasn't too happy about it. He wasn't nasty or anything though, and shocking, he made several correct decisions.
He didn't start off that well, since we had like five small things in the hamper, and he reached into it, stretching his arm over the top, and picked them out one at a time. Simply tipping the hamper over sideways would have been a better idea. He got the stuff out pretty quickly though, and quickly noticed that the bathroom caulk strips (they look like rolls of tape) had the SKU (barcode) printed on the back of the packaging, partially beneath the roll of stuff, which made them impossible to scan.
A panic situation for most clerks, and we expected him to call for the manager, or call for a price check that would never have been carried out. Instead he showed us the problem with the bar code, said he'd have to open one up, pulled a pair of scissors out of the drawer beneath his cash register, cut off the side, and pulled out the label enough to scan it. Better yet, he knew how to hit the code to charge us for two more of them, and did that, rather than fumbling around and trying to cut open the other two packages as well. He even stuck all the stuff back into the hamper and just handed it to me, without wasting anyone's time with all "Would you like that in a bag?" bullshit. Bravo, I say. Bravo.
Malaya and I were duly impressed, and laughed as we went out, chattering about the fact that we'd have been there for a good ten minutes if we'd had some eighteen year old on the register. I've got to give the old guy credit; he's clearly smart enough to work in a real job, and probably did for many years, and has brought his common sense along to Target. It's got to be a lonely damn job for him; being surrounded by typical retail store idiots, most of them forty years younger than him, but at least he hasn't been completely beaten down yet. And his competency certainly made our day.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Pleased with myself, 1, 2, 3.
I am feeling uncharacteristically pleased with myself tonight. I'm not usually displeased, but I tend to keep a healthy "things could always be better" attitude going. That's still true, but just for now let me be happy.
1) I've gone to the gym the last three days, after slacking off and going just once or twice a week for a few weeks. It's been hot, we've sweated a lot and worked hard in Kali Tues/Thursday night, I was out of town in San Diego and doing a lot of yardwork there, etc. All excuses, and I decided last week that I'd work out every day over the weekend. And I have, and it's been fine. It's actually cooler in the air conditioned gym than it in the condo during the late afternoon, so even though I'm sweating, I'm sweating in cool air. Which makes a difference, somehow.
There was some worry Friday, when as I neared the end of my series of weight machines, I felt something tweak on the
back of my right arm. I couldn't really tell where, and it didn't hurt to the touch, but it hurt when I belt my arm to touch the back of my head, and it felt weak when I tried to finish my weights session. So I did more situps and leg machines instead, and walked home hoping I hadn't torn something.
Apparently I hadn't, since it felt okay that night, and while I skipped the arm weight stuff Saturday, it felt fine Sunday when I did my usual full workout and all of the weight machines.
2) Entering chapter five in my ongoing fantasy novel, I was a little unsure about it. I knew what main events had to happen in this chapter, and I knew how it was going to end, but I wasn't quite sure how to catch the reader up on events since the end of chapter four (five starts off 3 months later). That problem resolved itself pretty easily, and as I worked on the opening and filled out the outline for the chapter and the rest of the novel, I kept getting good ideas for the small details. Why no one else can go down into the ancient tunnels below the city, why they have the leave the city in a hurry, how they get out of the city without being pursued, what happened to the strange creatures they were traveling with at the end of chapter four, and so on. It sounds immodest, but I guess I'm feeling reassured by the fecundity of my imagination, at least when it comes to my own novel.
I really enjoy it when a novel has more to it than just the essential elements to move the plot along. Many people have remarked that what made Tolkien's Lord of the Rings novels so great was the backstory. Even though you didn't have to wade through the appendixes of begats lists and elf language primers and ancient legends and such, you could tell they were there, and that he knew far more about the characters and their world than he put into the actual novel(s). I'm not going to that extreme with my fantasy world, at least not yet/not this one in my first novel/series, but I like to put in interesting tidbits all through and through. They're mostly throwaway lines that don't advance the plot, but they're fun to write and fun to read. Even for me, since I usually forget writing them and rediscover them when I reread a chapter months later.
I don't want to spoil any now, but just for instance one character reveals their magical armor in chapter two, and then tells a quick story about how they found it on a man who had been long buried in a deadly trap... and how the man wasn't quite dead yet. The armor's origin could have been left completely out of things and it wouldn't have made any real difference, but the background tidbit was interesting and I thought it added some depth, both to the world that the story takes place in, and to the character who tells it (in terms of why he relates that info and how he goes about doing so).
3) The one thing I'm not especially chipper about lately is Kali. It's not going poorly or anything, but suddenly I've reached an intermediate stage where everyone else who is a regular student is much more experienced than me, and they're better at all of the intangibles. Intangibles I wasn't even really aware of just a few months back, but that now seem all important.
It's all about movement. At first you strive just to keep up and learn to land your hits with open hand and stick, and then you refine them in control and accuracy, and then you work on your form and style, and that's the really tricky part I'm at now. The other stuff can be done merely with practice and timing, but the form and style require you to really change the way you move (at least the way I move). It's about flowing and staying loose and being "water." You don't punch by jerking your arm, you do it by sending a wave through your body from the other shoulder and up from your hips, and then flinging out your arm with the roll of movement. It's sort of like the dance move where you stand still with your arms out, start by doing a little dip with your left hand, and then roll up that arm, through your shoulders, and down the other arm. It can be done through multiple people; Dr. Evil does it while holding hands with Mini Me in
Austin Powers 2, and the wave travels through him and into his homunculus.
The form they had in the movie was terrible, and we're not standing around practicing break dancing moves in Kali class, but that's basically the theory of the motion. It's all generated from the hips and goes down the leg with a kick, or up and out the arm with a punch or a stick or sword swing. We obviously don't do that every single time, and it's usually far too small of a circle or wave to see it flow through you, but once you grasp the concept of the movement a lot of things begin to make sense. I can now see why the Gura and Tuhan look so fluid and flowing when they move, and how you can punch them on one side of the body and get hit by the hand or foot on the other side an instant later; they just transfer the wave of motion through their body and lash out when it reaches the other side.
This is probably all very vague and hard to follow from my words, but in practice it means that Malaya and I are spending a lot of time walking around the house with our arms waving like the branches of a sea anemone, or standing still and swaying so our arms swing freely as our torsos and hips move. The hard part for me is separating the movements; my hips and torso always want to turn at the same time, and to start a motion down low, turn my hips, and then let it go into my shoulders and then down my arms is very awkward.
The motivator is that it translates into superior Kali almost instantly. Just last week we were doing a series of moves (blocking a punch with the right arm, then swinging that arm into a sort of clothesline, then flowing into several punches to the side) that we've done before, and that I've always been far slower and less precise with than the Gura. While doing them, I tried to stay loose and let my shoulders roll and my hips move, and I suddenly realized that I didn't need to do the sidearm block, stop, then curl it into a throat strike, stop, then swing my arm over and hit them in the ribs. I was doing each move with decent form, flowing from my hips and torso to give it power, etc. But I was stopping between each portion of it, since I couldn't think about doing one thing with my hips while my shoulders and arm did something else at the same time. I tried it though, and suddenly I was able to start with my hips, throw my arm sideways to block, and while my arm was still going I swung my hips to the left, let the wave go out my arm, and used that to change my arm from a downward swing into a sideways one, to the throat.
I don't know how perceptible it was to my partner (he was an occasional student and not one who is very flowing so I doubt he noticed), but it felt so much better to me, and I realized that I was doing it far faster than I had before, and with far better form and power. It's basically what we do with stick; you don't swing it left, use muscle to stop it, and then more muscle to bring it back to the right. You turn your straight swing into a circle at the end of it, and use the momentum to keep moving quickly as you come back to the right. It's faster and harder, while requiring far less effort. Easy and simple with a stick, but far harder with the body. And of course as I learn more about moving I realize that my initial stick swings were almost all arm and muscle, and that if I flowed them more they'd go faster and I'd have more control and power.
One of the humbling things about Kali is that you're constantly realizing just how awful you were a few months ago, and how limited your understanding of the martial art was at that time. Everything I thought I was good at in January and February I now know I was barely adequate at; in form if not results. And I know that will be true in a few more months. At least I hope it is; if not I'll realize that my progress has stagnated, and that would be truly depressing.
3.1) A tale of two students.
Student #1 has been doing Kali for about 3 years, and is good at most everything we do in Kali, but he's got very little of the flow or wave movement the real experts exhibit. He just does everything with muscle and speed and reflexes, much like me, though he's better (at
everything but kicking) due to much more experience at it. Student #2 has been taking Kali for a couple of years and was pretty similar to me in results a few months ago. #2 has really been working on movement and flow though, and he's recently had some breakthroughs in his form. He can't quite work them into his Kali all the time yet, but suddenly his stick work is vastly improved, and it's scary as well as inspiring, seeing how quickly he got so much better. #2 isn't yet better than #1, but you can see huge potential for continued improvement, while #1 has basically been stagnating for 6 or 12 months, as he learns new tricks and refinements, but hasn't changed his basic movement enough to really make a big difference.
I hope it doesn't take me a year to get to where I can move like #2 is now, but I'd certainly take that over being #1 in two years. And even though I'm not either of them now, I'm happy to just see clearly enough to realize where they are relative to me. (And yes, I'll probably look back on this in 4 or 6 months and think what a completely clueless noob I was now. That's par for the course thus far, at least.)
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Weekend Box Office and DVD Stuff
The
weekend box office estimates are out, and while no one thought The Island would do huge business, no one thought it would flop this badly. I'm feeling too lazy to throw in a table this afternoon, so we'll just live with a quick list:
1 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory $28,300,000
2 Wedding Crashers $26,200,000
3 Fantastic Four $12,275,000
4 The Island $12,100,000
5 Bad News Bears $11,500,000
The second weekend of Charlie, Wedding Crashers, and Hustle and Flow (opening in 6th place) all did nearly double The Island's per screen average too, so it's not like The Island wasn't in enough theaters to compete. Perhaps the strategy of giving away the entire plot of the movie
in the trailers (not to mention every magazine article and interview) wasn't so smart after all, eh? Not to mention casting two leads with zero box office draw, and believing that anyone would buy a ticket to see a Michael Bay picture, (rather than a picture that looked fun and happened to have been hacked forth by Michael Bay).
Malaya and me saw no films this weekend, though we might plow through a DVD tonight. We've got several newish ones we've still never gotten around to watching, including
Kiki's Delivery Service, which was one of my birthday presents over a month ago. (Though we've yet to watch it, the fact that "kiki" is childish slang for "vagina" in Tagalog, which Malaya speaks, ensures that we never forget it.) We did watch a new DVD a few days ago, thanks to the 3 for $25 sale at Blockbuster. There we got National Treasure, The Incredibles, and Blade Trinity. We'd seen the first two in theaters and just wanted the DVDs for our collection (I took them both to San Diego and watched them both while there, enjoying them.) and were curious about Blade Trinity, since we'd sort of enjoyed the first two films, and had almost gone to see Blade 3 in theaters. How was it?
*coughing sound*
It wasn't the worst action movie I've ever seen, but that was only because it had high production values. It was certainly far and away the worst of the 3 Blade films, and was a terrible movie. It was borderline watchable just because there were a lot of fight scenes and exploding vampires and such, but the story was idiotic, the plot had zero momentum, and the actors looked about as happy as the international guests in Guantanamo Bay. Word from the filming was that Wesley Snipes went insane and stayed "in character" for the entire shoot, and since his Blade character is basically a brooding asshole, that couldn't have been real pleasant. I'll do a full review and categorize why it was such a train wreck at some point... but not today. Stay away from Blade Trinity though; it's 2 hours of stupid stuff with far too little decent action to make up for it.
Presidential Responsibility
I thought this article about
Clinton expressing regret and personal failure over not stopping the Rwandan genocide contrasted nicely with the current Bush administration's failure to take responsibility for pretty much anything.
"I express regret for my personal failure," Clinton said before touring the museum, which features graphic images of people being decapitated and bodies twitching on the road.
"I think it faithfully, honestly, painfully presents the truth of the Rwandan genocide," he told reporters after seeing the museum which his Clinton Foundation partially funded. "It is an important contribution to the history of the world, that the world cannot afford to forget."
...
Clinton administration officials avoided the word [genocide] in public for fear it would spark an outcry for action they were loathe to take, six months after U.S. troops were killed by Somali warlords in Mogadishu.
And then when I read
this editorial about Bush's failings and the opportunities they have created for the Democrats, I had to contrast them. The whole piece is a home run, but I liked two quotes especially, to compare to what Clinton said above:
President Clinton's success became all the more apparent when juxtaposed with President George W. Bush's gross failure on the same subjects. We have a record deficit, out of control government spending and a larger and more intrusive government than ever before. What happened to fiscal and personal responsibility?
All we hear now is excuses. There was a recession, September 11th, business cycles, yada, yada, yada. It's your presidency now and you own it. You didn't have to spend $198 billion in Iraq and still counting, you don't have to keep buying nuclear missiles for our Trident submarines, you don't have to spend $10 billion on a defense missile shield which isn't going to work, you don't have to give away $12 billion to the energy companies for "energy exploration" (read "oil drilling"), you don't have to give Halliburton a $72 million bonus (yes, I said bonus), you don't have to have billions of dollars in farm subsidies, etc., etc. Corporate welfare is still welfare. What happened to personal responsibility?
...
This president does not understand the consequences of his decisions. He never has. When he did poorly in school, his father got him into a better school. When a war started, his father got him out of the war. When he didn't take his physical in the National Guard, powerful people made sure he didn't have to. When he did poorly in his businesses, his father's friends started new businesses for him with new investments.
The rest of us learn the hard way that if you run a business into the ground, Texas and Saudi millionaires don't materialize out of nowhere to give you millions more for a new business. When you don't take your required physical in the Armed Forces, you get court-martialed. When you don't do well in school, you don't get a great job, like the owner of the Texas Rangers or President of the United States. And when you start war, your daddy won't be able to bail you out of it if you didn't properly prepare.
Remember the 90s? Peace, prosperity, and a press corps obsessed with possible oval office blowjobs. Seems quaint, compared to the burgeoning worldwide terrorism we have now, fueled by constant reports of US soldiers torturing prisoners in Iraq and Cuba, and the smoldering fuse of civil war in Iraq.
And with that happy news item, enjoy your Sunday!
The Tour de Lance
Well the Tour de France has ended, and for the seventh straight time,
Lance Armstrong won it. He's retiring while on top, so make all the "that took a pair of brass balls" jokes you want, and loathe him if you must for starting the goddamned plastic bracelet fad, but winning a 2300 mile three week bike race seven years in a row is still an amazing achievement. Not that he cares about your jokes or loathing, not with his millions, his international fame, and his non-fugly rock star girlfriend.
I do wonder though, who actually watches the Tour on TV?
It looks like fun in person, sitting out and picnicking in the countryside and yelling when a bunch of sweaty guys go coursing past on bikes, but on TV? What's the point? It's on the Outdoor Life Network in the US, displacing their usual "killing God's creatures" programming fare. OLN is only on cable, and if you get it it's usually like channel 91, squeezed in between Telemundo and QVC. When they show the Tour live it's on at like 3am, due to the 6-9 hour time difference between the US and France. They replay it during the day, of course, but it's not exactly an event made for television: Each leg is like four hours long, there are only three or four guys out of hundreds of racers who are actually in competition for the overall title, and since it's a road race you don't get to see them passing each other as they do laps around a defined course. The main fun is waiting for a racer to run into one of the buzzing cameramen motorcycles, or for some costumed lunatic to leap out onto the course and sprint along beside the racers (this happens quite often), or actually knock into one or stab him (this happens less often).
My dad had it on in the morning several times while I was in San Diego earlier this month, and while it's sort of peaceful to watch them pedal along in their brightly-colored outfits, that keeps you going for like five minutes. After that you're ready to see if ESPN 2 has K1 on.
Friday, July 22, 2005
BlizzCon?
So Blizzard got the bright idea to host their own convention this year. They're calling it
BlizzCon, and running it for two days, the weekend before Halloween. Here's the quick event run down:
BlizzCon 2005 will spotlight World of Warcraft, but will also feature hands-on gameplay of StarCraft: Ghost and other Blizzard games. Some of the activities at BlizzCon will include:- Q&A panels with the World of Warcraft and StarCraft: Ghost developers
- Playing World of Warcraft Battlegrounds live with friends
- 1st public hands-on gameplay of StarCraft: Ghost
- BlizzCon Invitational Tournament, featuring top Warcraft III and StarCraft professional gamers from around the world
- A separate LAN area stocked with PCs for your gaming pleasure
- Contests for die-hard gamers to compete in for great loot
- Custom BlizzCon merchandise and other Blizzard merchandise in the BlizzCon store
- A blowout closing night concert featuring a to-be-announced band – more details to come!
To quote a commercial many of you are probably too young to remember, "Where's the beef?" If you're dying to meet some Blizzard employees (hope you like skinny 20-something white and Asian guys in jeans and black t-shirts) and can't get into E3, it's golden. And if you're dying to play WoW in front of other people, rather than just at home alone, it's golden. Otherwise, why?
To recap, you get to (distantly) watch a live version of a gaming magazine interview, watch other people play computer games you can play at home, play a game you already own in a LAN on a rental PC, wait in line to play two minutes of some small demo area in an upcoming X-Box game no one really cares about, and pay convention prices for merchandise sold by the company that's hosting the convention.
For $120?!I hope whoever thought this up gets a bonus and a bigger cubicle, since it's purely an act of genius. Blizzard is hoping to sell 4400 tickets "though Blizzard reserves the right to sell additional tickets in the future." and at $120 each that's $528,000, not counting the $20 a piece (at least) people will be dropping on merchandise.
The saddest part is that I'm considering going, and would actually want to go, if they were doing anything with Diablo, and if everyone I knew from Blizzard North hadn't quit over the past two years. It would be fun to chat with some of those guys,
but they're all
gone now, though I think a few of the guys I used to know who worked on Battle.net are still around, in Irvine. It's even sadder when you consider that the
last time I went to E3, 3 years ago, I left in half an hour, and
E3 is the biggest electronic entertainment show on earth. This BlizzCon is basically Blizzard's E3 display, with a LAN area tacked on and an interview panel or two.
I bring this all up since I got an email from
D2 site co-worker (sort of, it's not like we interact more than every other month at this point) Elly, who asked me if I wanted to go and report on it for her
WoW site and
Loaded Inc. She'll even pay the ticket price, though I'd hope a comp ticket for media could be arranged, given the long relationship her websites have with Blizzard Entertainment.
I don't much want to go since I don't play World of Warcraft and any Diablo II presence there will be minimal (understandable, given that the game is 6 years old). The hope is that they'll announce and show something about Diablo III there, but they've given no hints of that, and as slowly as they make games I wouldn't expect that announcement anytime soon. One might also hope that they'll announce some more cool stuff between now and October, but the problem is that they're only selling tickets online, with no refunds and no options for reselling them, and they're not even selling them at the door (or so they say now, as they try to sell them for full price in advance). So you've got to commit to it well in advance, and then hope for the best.
I may still go, (though I'll take a book and leftover cell phone minutes) but only because Anaheim is about 100 miles from San Diego, and I could visit my parents before or after the show. I also know a couple of people I could stay overnight with in LA, so I wouldn't need to lay out cash for the hotel. I'd still have to get there though, and while it's just 100 miles from San Diego, it's 400 miles from here. So if I go I'll probably fly down to SD, stay a couple of days, borrow a car from mom or dad and drive up to Anaheim, then go back down to SD and fly home a couple of days later. Meaning that the little two day convention for games I don't care about would swallow a week of my life. *sigh*
Friday Things of the Day
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Art is a jealous mistress."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Soul-Devouring Worry:The future shiny not being nearly shiny enough.
Answer of the Day:Because not sharp enough to cut is still sharp enough to hurt.
Curse of the Day:May your favorite sports writer take two weeks off, before returning with a
five-page article about the same boring thing he wrote approximately seventy-three straight columns on last fall. (I skimmed the first page before giving up.)
Books Lying Open:Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
Movies to probably-not-see list:The Island, July 22th (maybe)
The Brothers Grimm, July 29th (probably not)
Fantastic Four, (now playing, but probably not to us)
Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryWar of the Worlds
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it.
To no one's real surprise (except for perhaps the weather bureau) the forecast of sun and hot and more sun and hot has completely broken down. Today it's cloudy, windy, and cold, with the thermometer standing at 63 right now, at 3pm. Today's forecast is undeterred, proclaiming an eventual high of 83, and though they've erred slighly on the side of caution with an 83 and "mostly sunny" prediction for tomorrow, Saturday jumps right back up to 89 and cloudless, which is what
they boldly predict for the rest of the week as well.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
New Kali Shiny!
Thanks to the fun we had playing with a broadsword last week in Kali class, and thanks to the announcement that this month's Kali workshop is going to cover broadsword and double stick... Malaya and me went and got a broadsword today. Behold!
The broadsword is there, with two sticks and a long kitchen knife beside it, for a size comparison. It's made from welded aluminum and is a nice weight and size. It's a practice sword, i.e. it has no blade, though you could still inflict quite a bit of damage with it if you were trying to (or were careless in Kali class) and the point is plenty to skewer someone with. Neither Malaya or I know quite what we're doing with a broadsword yet, but it's a lot of fun to swing it around, and they only way we'll gain the control and precision to use it well is by practicing.
A broadsword has slightly more reach than our sticks, and with the hilt protecting the hand it's deadly against a stick, since you can simply go for the hand of your attacker every time, and outreach them most of the time, hit harder with your narrow metal blade, and you've got a hilt to protect you in case of a tie. The drawback is that it's a bit slower than a lighter wooden stick, and that makes it hard to manipulate with very short strokes or in close quarters. You've got to use the weight and the speed of it (the narrow blade cuts through the air very quickly) to your advantage and keep moving, flowing each swing and cut back up to another one, with circular motions. That's how we do most stuff in Kali anyway, so it all works together nicely. It's also very effective with wrist twisting fencing type motions, since you can stab while rotating your wrist, and due to the curve of the blade the tip will change location by half a foot or more, making it trickier to fend off for your opponent. Broadswords are also very quick to swing and pump over, thanks to the concentration of weight in the handle, and this changes the moves you can make as well.
Of course I'm talking about fighting with the practice sword against wooden sticks here; with a real bladed sword you'd simply chop through the sticks with any hard impact, and pretty well disarm your opponent just like that. In a real fight against a real sword the person with the stick(s) would be on the defensive, and would have to do a lot of jabbing, fencing type movements, while trying to get an opening to get inside the longer/slower sword's range.
I'll likely bore you with many more sword stories in the future, so I'll stop for now. And yes, if we could afford it and knew what to do with them, we'd buy a lot more swords. As the years to come will doubtless prove.
Writing and Blogging.
After being well-delayed by various vacations during the month of June, I worked pretty heavily on the novel over the past few days, and have at last put another chapter to bed. It's finished, at least well enough to print out and let my mom and Malaya have a look at it, and while a chapter doesn't sound like that much, my problem with this novel is how goddamned long the chapters are. Call them "sections" or something like that if you prefer, since they have multiple mini-chapters in them; 26 in the one I just finished, dividing up the 85,000 words into managable chunks. The total for the four chapters to date: around 370,000 words.
To put this into comparison, I'll look at the novel on my desk.
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin, is 246 pages long, with 30 pages per line (relatively large print) and about 11 words per full line. Simple math tells us that's 330 words per page x 246 pages = 81180 words. So this whole novel is shorter than my last chapter, and it's probably quite a bit shorter, since LeGuin's novel has blank pages where chapters begin, lots of lines are shorter when paragraphs end or there is dialogue, and so on. It's likely down around 78k for the actual word count. Longer novels are usually in the 120k or 150k range for 350-400 pages, with really long (fantasy, often) ones getting up over 200-250k for the 750-900 page doorstops.
So in theory I've written nearly a trilogy's worth so far, or at least a novel and a sequel, and I'm barely getting started with my story. Chapter one introduces the two main characters and tells of some of their early adventures, and while the novel version is much changed from the early D2 Halloween
story online, it's still recognizable as the same story, and it alone is 44,500 words. That's more than half the length of this entire novel by LeGuin, and in terms of the novel as a whole, chapter one is just a brief introduction; like that opening action scene in every James Bond movie. Chapters 2 and 3 are more about the two characters and their traveling and getting to know each other, and then 4 is where stuff starts to happen as they interact with others in their magical, medieval world, before other characters come in in chapter 5, and the novel really takes off. In theory it's better to be too long than too short, since I can always edit down, but damn... when the story isn't in full swing yet and you're into book 3, that might be a problem.
Four is actually the most on target chapter yet though, since chapter one, in terms of having minimal dead time and keeping things moving along. It's also somewhat similar in form, since 1 and 4 both tell an exciting tale of one night's wild adventures with fights and escapes and magic and treasure and such. Apparently my writing style tends to run very long on words, and while it's not really a conscious technique, I really detail every bit of action and thoughts by the characters as I'm telling an action scene. See the link to chapter one online for an example. In light of that, I don't see how I can cut down the length that much from her on out through the 10 or 11 total chapters, since so much of the remainder of the book is one wild action scene after another.
I could easily cut out most of the background stuff and world info and downtime, and just do a bunch of, "...two months later, Valena looked up at the city gates they were riding towards and thought of the battle that was sure to come..." but given how long my descriptions of battles and action sequences run, that wouldn't necessarily make it much shorter. Plus I don't want to ruin it by writing it differently than I've envisioned it all along.
So I'll just keep plugging away and trying to get right to the point in each chapter, and if it's really, really long... it's really, really long. I hope the eventual editor/publisher doesn't force me to cut it to the bone, but in any event I'm saving all of my supersized drafts, so they'll always be around for some future unexpurgated edition, even if my grandchildren have to publish it posthumously, for your grandchildren to read on their holobook displays.
Oh yeah, and I part of the reason I was posting this book blub was to explain why there haven't been many blog entries for the last couple of days, and why I haven't read more than about 100 pages in total of the 4 novels I've got lying open at the moment. I've got notes written for half a dozen interetsing blog entries, I've got 4 book/movie reviews to write, and so on, but since I've been working on the novel so much to finish reviewing chapter four, I haven't gotten to any of that. And I can't say when I will, since I'm eager to start on chapter five later today, once we've gone shopping and hit a martial arts store for some new weapons. Practice (no blade) broadswords, hopefully.
London Bombing Motives
We've all read about the terrible death toll from the recent London bombings, and other news apparently proving it was the work of Al Quida sympathizers. I was initially surprised that it was such big news; I had thought the IRA blew up that much and more on a monthly basis for a couple of decades, but I guess they were more into personalized murder and bank robbery, rather than creating a massive death toll. Anyway, the very liberal London mayor
has made some comments about the bombings, and his comments are, for some reason, considered very controversial.
Livingstone, who earned the nickname "Red Ken" for his left-wing views, won widespread praise for a defiant response which helped unite London after the bombings. But he has revived his reputation for courting controversy in recent days.
Asked on Wednesday what he thought had motivated the four suspected suicide bombers, Livingstone cited Western policy in the Middle East and early American backing for Osama bin Laden.
"A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in (U.S. detention camp) Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy," he said.
Police say they believe there is a clear link between bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the four British Muslims who blew up three underground trains and a double-decker bus on July 7.
"You've just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil. We've propped up unsavory governments, we've overthrown ones that we didn't consider sympathetic," Livingstone said.
"I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s ... the Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians to drive them out of Afghanistan.
"They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that, he might turn on his creators," he told BBC radio.
Honestly, what is there to argue about that? I mean it's a hard truth, and it sucks to look in the mirror, but his comments seem perfectly logical and historically-accurate to me. He's being savaged for them anyway, of course, despite the fact that most Britians are savvy enough to agree with him.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has insisted the bombings have no link to its foreign policy, particularly its decision to invade Iraq alongside the United States.
But an opinion poll this week showed two-thirds of Britons see a connection between the Iraq war and the bombings. A top think tank and a leaked intelligence memo have also suggested the war has made Britain more of a target for terrorists.
That did not stop the right-wing Daily Telegraph castigating Livingstone, a maverick member of Blair's Labour party who was celebrating London's selection as host of the 2012 Olympics just hours before the bombers struck.
Wednesday's edition of the paper featured a picture of the mayor between photographs of two radical Muslim clerics under the headline: "The men who blame Britain."
It's funny how much some people hate to face reality and the complexities of it. Some of those on the US right wing are fond of saying liberals "hate America" and that they "blame America" and that terrorists "hate freedom." I always assume that's sort of sarcastic hyperbole. No adult could really see the issue in such blacks and whites, could they? I mean really, they have to know better and know that the London mayor is speaking the truth; they just choose to go on the crazy attack against him since it's easier than being an adult and facing up to the realities of a complex situation.
I can see the temptation to just say, "We're prefect, they're crazy, we've done nothing wrong." but I could never do it. It seems laughable to me, to try and boil down such complex issues to something so stupidly simple. As if there are these "bad guys" who sit around fuming at our freedom to have a Starbucks on every corner, and want to blow themselves up just out of spite. And honestly, if that was the real situation, and they hated us just for existing, we'd be screwed. It would be like fighting robots or alien invaders in some movie, and they'd never stop coming. They might not triumph ultimately, but they could certianly turn the world into one huge armed camp.
The fact that they are just people with a different perspective on things is good news, in my view. After all, points of view can be changed, and when/if their homelands are given some democratic freedom and shared economic prosperity, most of the support for war and suicide attacks will be gone. I'm not saying that the West should give into every demand and complaint, but it's pretty stupid to keep standing on the fire ant hill while insisting we simply need a stronger insecticide to keep our feet from being bitten.
Things of the Day, Late Tuesday Night Edition.
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
--Mark Twain
Soul-Devouring Worry:Extreme fatigue.
Answer of the Day:Because fluidity isn't just for non-frozen water.
Curse of the Day:May the first late arrivals make everything all wrong, and the last make everything all right.
Books Lying Open:Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
A Maiden's Grave, by Jeffrey Deaver
A Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:The Island, July 22th (maybe)
The Brothers Grimm, July 29th (probably not)
Fantastic Four, (now playing, but probably not to us)
Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryWar of the WorldsBatman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Forecast or Poorcast?
Since I've been complaining about the weather a lot lately (with no real cause,
compared to the rest of the country), I have to mention that it was suddenly and inexplicably about ten degrees cooler on Monday. The high was maybe 82, in the shade at least, and we didn't even need to run the fan much in the evening to cool things down. By 10pm we even closed the back door since it was down around 65 outside, and now at midnight it's almost cold outside, in the high 50s.
The weird thing is that
according to the weather.com page, Monday was just the same as Saturday and Sunday, and Tuesday-Friday is going to be more of the same high 80s/low 90s temps. I don't really care that the forecast missed the sudden and very welcome dip in Monday's temps, but it's very odd that they aren't even admitting that it occured, after the fact. I'm not sure if I should be hopeful for cooler temps the rest of the week, or pay no attention at all to the weather.com info from now on.
It's also odd how fine an edge there is between comfort and unhappiness, when it comes to the temperature. I probably wouldn't even notice a difference between 40 and 50, or 50 and 60, but 80 to 90 is huge, since in one I'm relatively comfortable, and in the other I'm sweating and miserable. YMMV, as always. By the way, it was
130 in Death Valley yesterday. That's 55C, if you're wondering. Or about as hot as a toaster oven.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Free, Quick, and Fun Online Games?
A question and a request, of sorts. If anyone has a favorite online game, or gaming site, for quick, free, and of course fun games, can you share it? I've had a few favorites for some months, but they're all losing their luster for various reasons, and I think we could all do with some suggestions.
By "quick" I mean something that is fun to play a full game of, challenging, but that doesn't take more than say 10-15 minutes. Even shorter is not a bad thing, since I generally want to play for just a few minutes to take a mental break before or during or after some time spent writing, but I don't want to get involved in something that sucks up hours of time. That's why I can't really imagine buying any computer games at this point.
Anyway, my current (fading) favorites are:
Heavy Weapon -- This PopCap game is a lot of fun and is very fast-paced, but as I've improved at it it's beginning to take too long to play. Initially I could have a fun and intense game in 5 or 6 minutes, but since it now takes me at least 11 or 12 per game, and more like 15-16 on a good game, it's becoming a time sink.
Bejeweled 2 -- Another one from PopCap, and I've got the same problem here. I used to die on lvl 5 or 6 and in under 10 minutes. I now almost always make it to lvl 8 or 9 (never 10, yet) and games take anywhere from 15-25 minutes. (Sometimes I can't quite get the combos to beat 6 or 7, but I'm fast enough to keep the timer treading water, and it goes on seemingly forever.)
TeaGames.com -- has numerous fun games, most of them relatively quick. For super quick games try the
BMX Ghost tracks; you'll quite often play those for literally 4 or 5 seconds before you die, but with practice you'll improve until you can start to get near the top 100 times ever, all of which are well under 30 seconds per track. I don't have any of them, though I've been very close on several tracks. In theory BMX Ghost should be perfect games for my quick break playing, since each game is 30 seconds at most, but in practice I wind up playing the same track for far longer as I try to improve or get a perfect run, and in any event, I'm pretty sick of all of those tracks and the maddeningly precise button clicking required to compete on them. There are a lot of other fun games on that site too, but
BMX Backflips is too slow and retro,
BumperKarts takes 30 minutes or more,
Funky Truck takes too long and isn't that much fun, and I'm disappointed in the lack of challenge (and ludicrous high score format) of the new
BMX Backflips 2.
Seven Seas -- is another one by PopCap that was my favorite a couple of years ago. It's still fun once in a while, but it also takes too long, and it would take even longer if they had ever fixed the ridiculous bug that causes it to crash, sooner of later, on every level that has a sea serpent on it. (This makes Hard a random crash game of Russian Roulette, and does the same to Medium after lvl 15.)
Yeti Sports -- These games were fun for a while, but I only really liked game five (Pengu Golf) for anything resembling long term play. Game One (baseball) was fun but too simple (even when you remove all skill, while adding
decapitation, gore, and landmines), game six (Bigwave) was only mildly amusing when trying to catch the biggest air possible, and game eight (Jungle Climb) was never fun, only challenging, and when
I reached the top after several hours of obsessive play I vowed never to play it again. (And have not had any trouble keeping that vow.) The new and last one, Llama Spit, doesn't do much for me either.
BlackJack -- I occasionally play this one for a few mintues, which is about as long as it takes me to lose $1000 while rolling more 13s and 14s than R. Kelly (to steal an old joke). It is helpful to remind myself why I would never gamble with real money I didn't fully expect to lose every cent of, though.
FreeKick -- A fun little soccer game, this was fun until I figured out how the angles and heights worked and learned to score a goal every single time. It's still fun for a few minutes here and there, though the constant scroll of UK soccer gambling odds is annoying enough to make you tape something over part of your screen, or squeeze in the right side of the browser window.
Dynomite -- This was my favorite PopCap game for months, but like most of the others, it eventually
got too easy.
Proximity -- This is a nifty little strategy game that I haven't played very often and aren't sick of; I just wish it had better AI, since it can't compete on the default settings (where a placed piece increases the value of other pieces of yours around it) since the computer never learns to play with any thought to defensive position. I'm also not sure how fair this one is, since the computer possesses a seemingly magical ability to constantly draw a 16 immediately after you play a 15.
I could list more, and I still even play a quick game of D2 (Hell Baal runs with my lvl 93 SP v1.10 Javazon.), but these are ones you guys might enjoy checking out. The key issue to all of it is taste, and of course everyone's is going to vary. Games I love other people won't, and vice versa, which makes it a challenge to find one that's free, fun, and fast, and that can stay that way. Heavy Weapon is probably the best bet there, since on the Survival game (which is all I play on the online version) it just keeps getting harder, and you stop getting powerups the big powerups after 9 minutes, and you will eventually get such impossible spawns that it's just impossible to survive them long enough for a chopper to bring you another nuke.
And yes, if I didn't make it clear above, I'm asking you guys to please post your gaming comments or suggestions or questions in the comments, or via email, if you prefer. Also, I know there are tons of PopCap-like sites with tons of games, but the problem there is I've got to spend many minutes trying each one out, playing it a while to see if it's any good, etc. And I'm looking to not spend very long playing, and certainly not very long looking for something to play. I'd just install Warcraft III if I wanted sure fun and had unlimited time to indulge in it. And will, later this summer, with any luck. Once Malaya finishes her big writing project and wants a reward/break.
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