Monday, July 30, 2007
Old writing, quality, and publishability.
This was in the news a couple of weeks ago, and I meant to blog about it then, but didn't get around to it. Better late than never though, so here's the deal. An aspiring author who hasn't had any luck getting his stuff published went and submitted some classic Jane Austen novel to publishers and agents,
all of whom rejected it, most with brusque form letters. The inference the clever, unpublished guy wants drawn is that those dumb publishers don't know brilliant literature when it smacks them in the face, and that they're too busy cranking out shlocky celebrity "biographies" and barrel-scraping, formulaic genre
novels about video games to recognize quality writing when they pull it from an unsolicited manila envelope.
Which may or may not be true, but it's kind of not the point. The point, as heretically related
by scifi author John Scalzi, (a successful novelist and blogger who's blog and business model I will write about at length in the immediate future) is that 19th century literature isn't marketable today unless it's by a famous 19th century author.
If I were an editor today, and Jane Austen had not previously existed, and someone submitted Pride and Prejudice as a mainstream novel, I'd probably reject it. Because it's the 21st goddamn century, that's why, and the style is all wrong to sell a whole bunch of them (even if it were pitched as a mainstream historical novel). In point of fact, I'd probably reject anything written in a 19th century manner, with the possible exception of Mark Twain's work; for my money he's probably the only 19th century author whose writing style doesn't make me feel like I'm slogging through a morass of commas and odd language structure. After Twain, it's a hard slog through to the 1920s, and then everything suddenly becomes far more tolerable.
A further point Scalzi makes, by quoting another blog on the subject, is that if you're working the slush pile at a publisher/agent, and you get a submission that you recognize as plagiarized from some classic piece of fiction, what are you more likely to do? Email the author a condemning rejection and run the risk that some lunatic who thinks he's the reincarnation of Nathaniel Hawthorne will become fixated on you? Or just rejection stamp it and hope the kook leaves now and never comes again? You're an overworked cog in a big business, desperately trying to assuage your conscience by balancing some degree of literay quality with the crap that's more marketable. You are not a college professor. You are not the plagiarism police. It's not your problem, and you do not have the time/energy to get involved.
On this topic, I'd had a big, 600-page hardcover collection of Edgar Allen Poe's writing sitting on my bookshelf for years. I bought it for $6 from the discount section at a Borders in 2003, and I kept meaning to start reading it, but never quite got around to it. Not until earlier this summer, when I vowed to consume it all, in reasonable daily chunks. It was easy to read in 20-40 page blocks since the collection is made almost entirely of short stories, essays, and poems. I got through about half the book before I bogged down and got too busy with other things to keep at it, but the half I read included all of Poe's famous stories, so I think I had a fair sample of his
oeuvre. Better than fair, since I read all his best stuff and didn't get to lots of his (probably justly) lesser known or unknown work.
How was it? I hate to say it, but on the whole, it sucks.
Poe lived from 1809-1849, and his writing is an artifact of the time. It's a morass of wandering sentence structure, armored by a semi-impenetrable thicket of verbosity, unconventional punctuation, unnecessarily-obscure multisyllabic spelling-bee killer words, and most of the prose is infected with a general wandering pointlessness. It's a slog to read the stories, even the famous ones, and though I went into the book with high hopes and eagerness, I was soon reduced to creeping through one or two rambling short stories a day, while constantly struggling to pull my attention back when it drifted away on each semi-endless page. It was with not a little relief that I put the collection down four or six weeks ago when more pressing matters demanded my reading time, and I have no idea when/intention to pick it up again.
It hurts me to not enjoy or even appreciate Poe, since I love Lovecraft, and his writing style is easily the equal of Poe's in terms of being difficult to crack. Despite that handicap, I've read everything Lovecraft wrote several times by now, and I am definitely not a detractor of excessive verbosity and archaic linguistic conventions. It's just that Poe brings very little else to the ballgame.
Lovecraft wrote in the early 1900s, and in an intentionally archaic style, but he had such visionary, genius subject matter that his mythos is still resonating today. Poe had a few cleverly-gruesome ideas, but they're never very well executed in the stories, there's no unifying concept or theme to his work, and it's all very small in scale. Individual weird things happen, but it's just some guy (or orangutan) doing unto some other guy, (or mother and daughter) and since every story is quite short there's never any emotional heft to anything that happens. Every story is brief, all the characters are completely static and largely devoid of unique traits, there are no human interactions (just scenarios/plot events), women and children are nonexistent, all the narrators/main characters have the same voice/personality, and even Poe's reputation for a healthy weirdness of imagination is misplaced. Most readers have heard of the stories starring investigator Arthur Gordon Pymm, short stories
The Cast of Amontillado,
The Pit and the Pendulum, and poem
The Raven, but really, that's about it for the good stuff, or the lurid stuff. The rest is often bizarre, but in an absurd, forgettable way. Poe wrote a lot of farcical, humorous shorts about things like con men pretending to have ridden hot air balloons to the moon. Poe was also deeply involved in the literary magazines of the day, so the collection has numerous shorts that are satire about magazine publishers and dueling literary journals. The stories are not bad, and sometimes even interesting, but the subject matter really couldn't be more disconnected from any modern reader's interests.
As best I can tell, Poe is famous largely for his short life and tragic death, for being one of the first to write stories that were kind of horror-esque, and for sort of pioneering the mystery/detective genre. He never wrote any novels or even novella-length tales, and it's weird that he gets credit for horror stories, since his aren't especially horrific, and countless, centuries-old folk/fairy tales have many more elements of horror and weird fiction than anything this side of Clive Barker.
I'm glad that Poe is still remembered and read, and I'm sure a lot of his work was ground-breaking and visionary and brilliant in 1830, but it's all pretty dated and often quite hard to get through these days, and would have no chance of being accepted for publication today. Which is, I suppose, the whole point/greater truth elucidated by the
perennial efforts of someone to expose publishers as modernistic-hacks.
Labels: edgar allen poe, publishing, writing
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Sieezupp your phalhpos. Urgent!
That was the subject of a spam I just received. Like everyone else with an email address on a webpage, I get a ridiculous amount of spam every day. The vast majority of it gets nailed right into the junk folder, but maybe 10% survives to be individually deleted, and sometimes it's funny. It amuses me what they do to try and sneak past junk filters; usually by changing the spelling of words that will be banned. And since there's a ridiculous amount of spam of the, "Too small, your penis!" nature, you see a lot of creative spellings of words that could conceivably be synonyms for the male reproductive thingie. I don't believe I've ever seen it spelled, "phalhpos" before, though. It sounds a bit like one of the Greek demi-gods/monsters in
Bookworm Adventures.
The rest of the mail is pretty straight-forward, and more inventive with the punctuation than with the spelling. Plus it even wraps up with one of those haiku-esque random strings of words that are thought to throw off junk filters. Since this one got through mine, perhaps they work?
Sieezupp your phalhpos. Urgent!
Ladies always giggled at me and even guys did in the public toilets!
Well, now I laugh at them, because I took Mega Dik
For 4-6 months and now my dick is much bigger than "average" size.
Web-Site of our shop
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
not. While his own parents had doted on him and his brother, he, found him in faraway Minnesota. Jim Marquez was then a 33-yearold Marquez reported for work on January 1, 1983. Soros turned over half Their departure sliced the value of the fund almost in half-to $193.3 Investor. Next to his smiling face on the magazines cover was the/font>
That's all a quote, including the half-broken font tag at the end. The URL points to the neutrally-named http://nevadacor.com/, which redirects you to http://a1herbals.net/, which is worth a look if you're bored. It's NSFW with two sets of before/after photos of the naked male thingie right on top of the page, but what amused me was the faux-scientific babble throughout, and the somewhat disturbing medically-themed diagrams of the male phalhpos. They've got skinless penis, and then cross section of penis, either of which would be enough to trigger a witch-burning riot in many parts of Africa.
I do like this aspect of their pitch:
Unlike pumps, weights and surgery, MegaDik delivers results that are safe and permanent! When you reach the growth size that you want to achieve, you no longer need to take MegaDik. GRADUAL penis enlargement is the key to effective, permanent results. Other forms of penis enlargement can't deliver permanent results, SAFELY, because they go against the physical laws of the body. The body grows and develops GRADUALLY, not over night! This is why MegaDik is the greatest breakthrough product in the history of male enhancement! Penis enlargement, as we know it, will never be the same.
In other words, you'll take their pills for months and months before you give up on them actually doing anything. I'd go on, but
I've so frequently expressed my amazement that people make millions selling a bottles of M&Ms for $50 that I'm kind of burned out on the subject. Get over your tiny penis, no one really cares, and learning to last longer than 30 seconds and/or how to perform really good cunnilingus will get you 1000% further than an extra inch would anyway, my man.
While we're on the topic though, what would be interesting was if there actually were a non-surgical, physically-difficult way to enlarge the penis. Say there were something like sit ups or push ups that made the dick bigger, but that were exercise-like in their execution. Would men be sufficiently motivated to actually to it? I suspect not.
Everyone knows how to have a good body; eat less fatty crap, exercise, lift weights, etc. It's not exactly a secret. Stop drinking soda and eating at McD's, jog up a steep hill every morning, do some situps, and in not too long you'll melt away enough body fat that your new muscle will be fetchingly-outlined by your skin. (Assuming you don't weigh like 400 pounds to start with, have horrible health problems, etc.) Everyone knows this, and yet hardly anyone does it, and since the results are desirable but obtaining them is tiring, there are countless fad exercise machines that promise to do the work for you. Of course they don't work, since the only way to get exercise-like results is to... exercise, but they sell millions of units to people who use sometimes even remove the Crunch-Master 2000™ from the UPS package before realizing that the machine 1) does nothing, or 2) requires effort to use, at which point it gets stuffed into a closet or under a bed and is never seen again.
Would an uncomfortable, sweat-inducing, painful exercise that made the phalhpos larger be any different? Almost every guy says he wants a bigger dick, and plenty of men are willing to take some magic pill, or jerk off with some kind of appliance, or even get surgery to try to make it happen. All things that are expensive, like a home workout machine, but that don't require any personal determination or effort, unlike a home workout machine. If it required 1000 push ups a day, even if they were
cock pushups, I rather suspect we'd still see just as much phalhpos sieezupp emails as we do now, only the words, "Without tiring exercises!" would be added to the copy.
Labels: penis size, spam
Friday, July 27, 2007
Furry Grim Reaper
I've seen a lot of recent mentions of the
angel of death feline from a Rhode Island nursing home, and couldn't resist posting about it myself. A quote should sum things up nicely.
Like any feline, Oscar gives a hefty portion of his day to sleep. He likes to doze on stacks of patient reports. Or on the desk at the nurses' station. Or in the linen closet.
When awake, however, the mixed-breed cat shows a solemn dedication to duty, making regular "inspection" rounds of the unit, sauntering in and out of patient rooms -- as if checking on the condition of the occupants.
When death is near, Oscar nearly always appears at the last hour or so. Yet he shows no special interest in patients who are simply in poor shape, or even patients who may be dying but who still have a few days. Authorities in animal behaviour have no explanation for Oscar's ability to sense imminent death. They theorise that he might detect some subtle change in metabolism -- felines are as acutely sensitive to smells as dogs -- but are stumped as to why he would show interest.
In any event, when Oscar settles on a patient's bed, caregivers take it as a sign that family members should be summoned immediately.
"We've come to recognise him hopping on the bed as one indicator the end is very near," said Mary Miranda, charge nurse on the surprisingly cheery floor that is home to 41 patients in the final stages of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, a stroke, and other mentally debilitating diseases. "Oscar's been consistently right."
The cat's been written up in an article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, and while none of the media coverage touches on it, I hope there are some actual stats and figures in the journal article. Total patients who died, Oscar's attendance %, false positives, etc.
Another issue is the established medical fact
that cats have an
affinity for the human soul. They're notorious for asphyxiating babies, (and who can blame them?) but I've long believed that's largely related to opportunity. Healthy adults can fight off the worming tentacles of a cat's nocturnal predations, but babies are weak and easy prey. The sensation is kind of enjoyable for adults, really. I've awakened many a time to find Jinx and/or Dusty crouching upon me, their sickle pupils gleaming in the ethereal light shed by the soul dust they are eagerly lapping up. It tickles and makes me dream in watercolors.
Oscar here is no maternity ward cat; he's stuck with old people, but that's not entirely unlucky, since the dying old people provide a lovely crop of defenseless, senile delicacies. Granted, their withered souls are leathery and taste faintly of camphor and other astringents, but perhaps Oscar has learned to like it? Besides, no human can ever hope to fully understand the vagaries of the feline palate.
Labels: cats, death, medical
Parental Visits and Alcohol
My dad was in town for the past few days, and it was nice to see him and just hang out some. Recap time!
Dad worked at a convention in The City (AKA SF) on Monday and Tuesday, (the primary reason for his visit to the Bay Area) but we got together for dinner late Tuesday night. It was a bit too late, unfortunately, since I didn't want to miss Kali class entirely, and Tuesday night is the only night of the week for that. So I drove to Oakland for class like usual, and had some fun/hard work there, including a rare opportunity to go double broadsword against another student using a staff. I got most of the hits in, but only because he was "throwing" for me and doing long, high swings to give me openings to get in and practice my cutting technique.
Staff, when used properly, i.e.
not held in the middle like Daffy Duck doing Robin Hood, is generally the king of weapons since it's so fast and has so much range, and if it's got a point (would would make it a spear), and the person wielding it has a clue, the fight's all but over. Going against an un-pointed staff you've got a bit of hope, since you can maybe take a hit to the back or arm and get inside where your weapon, especially if it's bladed, will triumph. With two broadswords, real ones; not the unbladed ones we use to practice, you could just try to cut the damn stick in half, if your opponent were foolish enough to swing it in big sweeping motions to give you the opportunity.
Class activities were fun, but I had to leave a bit early to have time to drive back home and meet Dad for dinner. Unfortunately, it was well past 9 by the time I showered and got to his hotel, so we had to settle for Chili's. I used to
eat there, with Dad, fairly often back when I lived in San Diego, and I ate there occasionally with Malaya until we realized that 1) it wasn't really any good, and 2) even if it was good, Claim Jumper was essentially the same thing and, 3)
much better. (This is why you shouldn't drink and blog. It's late and I'm going through crappy microwave popcorn and a good portion of the half bottle of syrah Dad willed me when he headed back to SD yesterday. As a result I lost count while counting to three in that last sentence. Well, I started to count to 2, and then option 3 added itself on, and was initially numbered "4" because um... wine. More on excessive fermented grape issues in a bit.
I hadn't eaten a meal at Chili's in months, perhaps years, but it was okay. I got some kind of spicy Cajun chicken sandwich which was, like all non-Mexican restaurant food, nowhere near spicy. It wasn't bad though, and had to be better than the grilled salmon on faux rice'a'roni Dad got. (My half-drunken inclination is to say that going to Chili's for salmon is like going to a whorehouse for cunnilingus. Does that make any sense? I'm not sure, but I don't believe so. This is why you shouldn't drink and joke. Or blog.)
The next day I got up early (well, earlier than usual, despite not going to bed much earlier than usual) and we were off to Sonoma for some wine tasting. Mmm... wine. I am so fucked up right now. Anyway, um... wine. We toured a few vineyards and tasted their fermented product. I'd say which ones, but I never remember. It's funny too, since my dad's always saying, "And that time we went to ________ vineyard, and tasted all the zinfindels. You remember, they had the raven on the label and their tasting room had the big taxidermied hawk in one corner." I usually nod and smile, but I have no idea which one it was. Any of them was. Were.
So we went to 3 or possibly 4 places, and had a fair number of samples at each. Dad's been working at wine competitions in San Diego for decades, and he has undergone the certification process to become a wine judge, and he tastes and writes for a wine tasting magazine, so yeah, he pretty well knows from grape orchards. He was informing the wine servers at the places we went to, and explaining what malolactic fermentation is, and how bricks measurements work, and why barrel samples are different than the finished product, and why yeast sometimes stops fermenting if the residual sugar content is too excessive, etc. And yes, these are all real things that I sort of know about, thanks to talking to dad about it enough times. I find the science of wine making interesting, and I've developed somewhat of a palate, but I'm not really working at it, due to a lack of money or strong enough interest. But I get an immersive course every time I visit Dad or he visits me and we drive around to wine tasting places.
Best of all, Dad's good at schmoozing and he obviously knows his stuff, so they believe he's in the wine industry (which he is) and we get comp'ed at every tasting room. Most of the places in Sonoma and Napa now charge for tastings, usually around $5 for any 4 wines out of the 6 or 8 they're serving that day. Some places have higher prices for the reserve wines, usually $10 for 4 or 5 of those, but with dad there we get all we want for free. Last time he visited I got wrecked at Ravenswood on zins, since they had oh... 15 different types of zin, and they poured every single one for us. Dad's long since learned to spit, the way wine judges do when they have to try 50 wines in 3 hours. I'm no prom queen so I don't spit, but I seldom drink more then a couple/three sips of each 1oz sample poured for us. Since I seldom drink at all though, that's plenty to get me tipsy, and that's where the trouble began.
At the second place we
drank tasted, which I'm sure my dad could name, (needless to say, I can not) we got another 6 or 8 samples, including some reserve (Cabernet Sauvignon, IIRC) that was not being poured for other people, and that cost something like $130 a bottle. Pouring them for us was a woman of about 25-30, who was of average attractiveness. Not ugly, not a model, and just kind of average all around. She was capable of making and maintaining eye contact though, and had a sense of humor, and while she poured for us and talked to us and we both listened to dad explain things, she leaned on the bar from the server side, I leaned from the customer side, and by about the sixth sample, I was envisioning making out with her. Right over the bar, right in front of her boss and about 20 customers and my dad, etc.
Now keep in mind that she was not very hot (unlike my perfect self, of course), was not flirting or chatting with me in any suggestive way, and was not drinking. She was working, doing her job, speaking with some slightly more entertaining than usual customers, etc. I knew, even in my slightly-pixeled brain, that there was absolutely no reason to think she was even vaguely entertaining the concept of kissing me, that she might well be married, that I wasn't looking to date her even if she'd been single, etc, etc. And yet with my wine goggles on, and our faces maybe two feet apart, and the revelatory nature of her being at work and me being a customer, I was pretty much sure that she'd happily welcome some lip lockage with me.
This, I realize, is why people go to singles bars. Not only do you meet people who are available (assuming you are yourself), but you're all half-tipsy, and in that state pretty much anyone of your desired gender looks good. Or if not good, good enough.
The really sad part is that I was so not drunk. I'd had about half of about a dozen wine samples by that point, over the course of an hour. So maybe 6oz of wine, which is maybe one drink, and at my body weight I should require about 2.5 drinks on an empty stomach, to be legally drunk in California. Legally drunk here, as all Lindsey Lohan fans know by now, is 0.08 blood alcohol content. I might have been at .03 or .04, absolute max. And even that much was plenty to strap on the wine goggles and completely destroy my usual inhibitions.
Now granted, I did not act on my wandering imagination. I knew I was being stupid, I knew it would be wrong, I didn't try to kiss her, etc. I was certainly in control of my libido, and if some porno movie scenario had suddenly unfolded I would have had no trouble resisting the opportunity. But the fact that I was even thinking in that way, without any provocation, was kind of troubling. In a trouble-free, idlely-amusing fashion.
There was more wine tasting later on Wednesday, and after a nice lunch we drove north through the valley and over to Santa Rosa, with a quick stop at the store where I got my computer earlier this year. I got another gig stick of RAM there, since a certain unnamed alpha test game has been loading new levels very, very slowly. I guess saying if the RAM helped would be NDA-violating, so I'll just say that I don't feel a need to get my $67 back. I do wish we'd gotten their earlier, since the traffic from Santa Rosa back to the Bay Area was horrible, and I was hardly able to get, on time, to the final exam of a summer school night class I've been taking. Yes, final exams while half in the bag and with no study time all day. The true road to academic success!
I think I did pretty okay anyway, and I finished in time to get dinner with Dad (mediocre pasta for me) and followed that up with some late evening reading and a bit of alpha-testing, before an early(ish) bedtime since Dad wanted to get brunch and tour around a bit more on Thursday before his flight home in the afternoon.
So that was that. A quick visit, but a fun one, and isn't that better than two weeks of family togetherness that reduces to seeing bad movies by the fifth day, after exhausting all other possible activities? Yes, yes it is. Was.
Labels: drinking, vacation, wine
Monday, July 23, 2007
Harry Potter Madness vs. HGL Alpha
So Harry Potter #7 dropped over the weekend and there was much pandemonium. I have not purchased it or read it (had no interest in reading from digicam photos leaked online), though I will at some point. Too busy with other things, though I probably would have gotten the book by now if the Hellgate alpha test hadn't expanded to include lots of new people, including myself, late last week.
I spent several hours playing last night, getting much further into the game than I ever had before, and while the NDA precludes me from giving any details or saying much more than that I am in the alpha, I will add that this preview has me more eager than ever for the full game, and that it's so much more fun playing when I can take my time, experiment with different spells and equipment, read the NPC dialogues, and just generally enjoy the ambiance. Playing HGL previously at game shows or during quick visits to Flagship Studios, I was always rushing through to see as much as I could, and doing everything with half my mind on how I'd write up what I was seeing. Since I can't write about the alpha, I'm just having fun playing and enjoying the experience, while still keeping an eye out for bugs and thinking about how best to present the info, in a month or two when the NDA ends and I'm able to get back to updating my HGL site.
But to get back to Harry Potter, there's a ton of coverage online about the book and the book's record-breaking
first day sales. I saw a link to one article in the NYTimes book section, and as I clicked to the next article, it was more Harry Potter. And
the one after that was too. And the one
after that. All about the launch, the media coverage, the publishing sensation, the fans' eagerness, the way the movies have evolved along with the books, and so on. It's kind of insane; when else do you see a photo of someone holding up a book, on the front page of the newspaper? They even have
a review that went up before midnight embargo was lifted.
The whole thing makes me happy; that people will still line up for a book, rather than just some new electronic trinket from Apple or Sony, and that people care so passionately about fictional characters. I enjoy the books but they're not my favorite fiction, and I didn't start reading the Harry Potter series until after book three was released, so the whole thing has been compressed into a minor portion of my adult life. I can imagine what it's like for younger readers though, who started the series when they were 5 or 8 or 10, and have followed along through the books and the movies, and grown up along with the characters. I remember how many times I reread favorite books when I was in my tweens/teens, and can only imagine if I'd had new ones in a series I really enjoyed, released every other year for my whole childhood. I would probably have grown jaded and said they were just for kids (as I did when I stopped reading lots of books I liked at 10 and 12 once I discovered horror fiction when I was about 14) at some point around 9th grade, but in the unlikely instance that I didn't... it would have been pretty cool.
Labels: harry potter, Hellgate: London
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Google Maps Mashups
I posted about one of these last week, with the video of the race car (allegedly) driver in Paris and the google map of the city
pacing his progress. Now here's
a whole blog devoted to various Google maps mashups. I've only viewed a few of them, but they've got ones that show the worldwide locations of ebay real estate auctions, local temperatures anywhere on earth at any magnification level, world coffee finders, ones that show the location of every McDonalds on earth, and many, many more. There are even small towns around the world with twisting, confusing layouts that are using the Google maps satellite photos to map themselves for locals and visitors, with hospitals and police stations and other key elements marked in a Google maps mashup.
One I had some fun with was the
Dig a Very Deep Hole application. It's pretty simple; you just pick a spot on earth, click go, and it shows you where a hole would emerge if it went straight down to the center of the earth and kept going back to the surface. Like a toothpick through an olive. Got your shovel in the Bay Area? Pack a swimsuit. You come out in the Indian ocean, somewhat east of Madagascar. Aside from satisfying some idle curiosity, the function vividly demonstrates how screwy a view of the globe is provided by the universally-used
Mercatur projection maps. With the south so squished, and the Pacific Ocean basically disregarded, you've got no ability to judge how far apart things actually are. The Mercatur is entirely an artifact of the earth's unevenly-distributed continents, and it would be interesting to see what kind of flat map would be used if the earth's inhabited land masses were spread all around the globe. Unfortunately, with the pace of continental drift we'll have to wait sixty or eighty million years to find out. More likely we'll be mapping the land on some other planet long before then, and using some pocket-sized holographic projector to view it anyway, so it's kind of a moot point.
Labels: the internet
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Movie Review: Ratatouille
Caught Pixar's latest on Friday afternoon, when Malaya and I belatedly realized that
Sunshine, (catch
the Extended Trailer; see my raving
about it here) which we both much more wanted to see, was not opening wide until the next weekend.
Sunshine was showing in the Bay Area on Friday the 20th, but only at a big theater in downtown SF, and we didn't care enough to BART way the hell over there. So
Ratat it was.
The first risk of seeing a Pixar film is that the experience may be ruined/compromised by noisy children. Fortunately, that risk can be minimized by not seeing the film on opening weekend, or at any weekend matinee thereafter. We were in the early afternoon, but on a Friday, so we were okay there. The second risk is less avoidable, and it hit us right between the eyes. Horrible trailers for horrible "family" movies. We endured
Daddy Day Care,
Underdog,
Bratz, and a couple of equally-mind numbing others, none of which generated any audible response from us or anyone else in the theater. They're not merely stupid and bad; they literally suck the air out of the building. No wonder Pixar puts a short before their films (a cute but forgettable alien-abduction comedy before
Ratatouille). They need some kind of buffer to let the audience's minds reboot after going into white noise neutral to survive the onslaught of other brightly-colored "family" films.
The trailers were useful in one way; as a reminder of why I do what I can to never watch any regular network programming during the afternoons or weeknights, or any non-feature films on Nickelodeon, Disney, USA, ABC-Family, or other similarly-themed cable channels. The pandering and dumbing down of everything to the level of a not very bright eight-year old is physically painful. Painful to adults, and even to the children. As I mentioned in my recent
Transformers review, I remember thinking how stupid the writing on that TV show was when I was in the target age audience.
In retrospect, I can hardly imagine how crazy I would have gone for the Anime available today, if they'd had it when I was nine. I loved cartoons as a kid, despite the fact that every series on US TV was just so stupid. Childish characters, formulaic plots, crappy animation, etc. I remember sitting through
Inspector Gadget and
Transformers and
He-Man and
GI Joe and all the rest and loving the visuals, but always being so bored with the stupid events. But that's all we had, in the early 1980s. Most of it was being drawn in Asia, and lots of it was translated and dubbed (dumbed?) into English from original programming in Japan or Korea or Hong Kong, but it might as well have been churned out by the hacks running Fox Kids these days.
If I'd have had access to real Anime though, the good, intelligent, adult-themed (but still silly and juvenile, granted) series that are now on Adult Swim and filling up the Anime section at your local video store, I would have been in heaven. The visuals I loved with interesting characters and plots more involved than your average episode of
The Smurfs? Man, if I were 10 today I would just about live on YouTube grabbing every episode of everything coming out of Japan, and anime DVDs would permanently dominate my Xmas/Bday lists. And imagine how different I would be today? Why without those years of soccer practice and skateboarding, I might still have two functional knees, for one thing.
That digression aside, the trailers for everything before
Ratat were ghastly, and the worst was for the new Mr. Bean film. I know nothing about the guy/character other than that he did an earlier US movie that I have remained blissfully ignorant of, and that people say the Mr. Bean in the movies now is a stupid, dumbed-down, Americanized version of a classic comedy character he created in Britain. I have no opinion on that, but I don't disbelieve it. I do have an opinion on
this new trailer though, and it is that I have almost certainly never seen a stupider trailer in my life. I'm sure I have seen something dumber and forgotten it, but it couldn't have been much worse. I am willing to entertain the notion that if you like the Mr. Bean character you might be older than the age of 8 and find some portions of this amusing; but you would need some pretty strong evidence to convince me of that. Malaya and me sat there in dumb, sociological, horror. What was it? Who was this meant to entertain? Are children really entertained by this sort of face-making, pratfalling, silly-dancing imbecility? It's almost a kind of art, like a parody of parodies, with a nonsensical man-child idiot capering about, performing antics no actual human would ever engage in, to the soothing-toned narration of Mr. Voice.
There was one decent trailer, the
one with SpiderPig, but even that trailer isn't aging well. I enjoyed it when I first saw it online, but now that I've seen it several times it's grating on me. It's too frantic and chopped full of .5 second clips of every single chaotic scene in the movie. It's as if the marketing people had a list of trailer requirement, and they insisted that the Simpsons trailers give no more than a faint hint of the film's plot, and that they constantly remind the audience that it's a Simpsons
movie. "This is the big screen, ladies and gentlemen, and we've got a budget now. We can produce shots in which more than one character moves at the same time!" As a result, every shot in the trailer depicts hundreds of townspeople running from an explosion, or hundreds of missiles blasting into space, and the only slower portions are those with Homer and SpiderPig. Those are the only bits with anything character-based, the only moments in the whole trailer that show the sort of human interaction that's made the show popular for umpteen years, and the only thing anyone remembers from the trailer, since everything else is just a wash of frantic
Strum und Drang which possess no cohesive properties for our memories to latch onto.
If the Simpsons trailer were for a new cartoon property, or even one not known very well, it would be an abysmal failure. At best it would inspire some faint "WTF?" curiosity. Since everyone knows the Simpsons, and everyone pretty well already knows if they're going to see the film version or not, based on how they feel about the TV show, the trailer exists mostly to let us know it's not just a 3x longer version of a TV show episode. And at that they theoretically succeed. I think the trailer would be much improved if it stressed more of the elements that makes the show work, rather than all the special effects the movie gave them the budget/processing cycles to indulge in. The greater resources will not make the film, but they might well break it. Fans of the Simpsons, even/especially ones like Malaya and me who haven't watched the show in years, are interested in the movie because it's a wacky comedy staring characters we love. No one is buying a ticket to
The Simpsons Movie because they've always wanted to see Springfield destroyed with slightly 3d-tinged computer graphics, while hundreds of the townsfolk run in individually-animated terror. Yet that's what the trailer pushes, almost non-stop.
As
Ratatouille itself... it's very good. Very smart, very well-written and well-produced, and filled with interesting, living characters who evince real human emotions (even when they come from rodents and food critics) with clever and witty dialogue. It is not, however, a great deal of fun or action-packed or anything else you might anticipate or desire from a Pixar film. It's directed by Brad Bird, who last directed
The Incredibles, which I thought was the best Pixar film to date, and almost certainly the best superhero movie as well.
To make a very poor analogy,
Ratatouille is
The Incredibles minus 90% of the brilliantly-inventive action sequences. Same good characters and clever dialogue and believable motivations; and lots of scenes of them interacting exactly as real human actors could have, without the benefits of CGI. It's proof of Bird's frequent statement that animation is a technique, not a genre. There's basically nothing in
Ratatouille that makes it children's entertainment, except for a lack of profanity or sexual content. It's all about mature themes such as pursuing your dreams, accepting diversity, learning to grow in life, balancing family with desires for independence, not being afraid to try something new and different, etc. And it handles all of them very surely and very competently. It is not, however, a thrilling movie experience.
To be honest, even though it will put me into direct conflict with my excoriation of the trailers presented before the film, I wanted
Ratatouille dumbed down a bit. More action, more comedy, more wacky hijinks. I appreciated all the good acting and voice work and animation and direction and such... I just wanted more fun in my movie experience. I don't think those elements are mutually-exclusive;
The Incredibles demonstrates that. I just wanted more oomph in the voomph.
Some scores.
Ratatouille
Script/Story: 8
Acting/Casting: 8
Action: 3
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 6
Overall: 7
I'd go into my reasoning on some of the individual scores, but I think they're pretty self evident from the intro, eh? Nothing was done poorly in the film, I just wanted a rebalancing of the elements. The personalities and human conflicts and dynamics in
The Incredibles worked even though there were lots of wildly enjoyable action sequences, and that could have worked here as well. Not to the same extent, since this isn't some kind of SuperRat movie (*shudder of memory at the
Garfield the Movie-esque, uncanny valley-dwelling,
Underdog trailer*), but I'm an action movie fan at heart, and if I can have a great film with action sequences, I'll take that over the great film without them. In fact, quite often I take good action sequences and ignore
the utter crap that is the rest of the film/overall product. So yeah, I'm biased, but at least I’m honest about my biases.
Ratatouille is being rapturously received on the whole, and has the highest score to date this year on
RottenTomatoes and
MetaCritic, metrics that are achieved by aggregating dozens of individual reviews. As I remarked to friend while discussing it on Saturday, this is the kind of movie that you appreciate more, the more movies you see. Me seeing a movie a month, enjoyed this but wanted a bit more fun to go with the intelligence and character-driven performances. A movie critic sitting through eight or ten instances a month of the kind of empty-headed drivel we saw trailered before
Ratatouille... couldn't help but think this film a revelation. As evidenced by the near-unanimity of their scores.
Labels: movie review, movie trailers, pixar
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
I had no intention of seeing two movies in the same day, but since Malaya was buying for my belated b-day event, and since we were both kind of depressed/dismayed by how stupid Transformers was, we thought what the hell. So off to Harry Potter we went, after gorging on Chinese food. This review assumes you've read up through HP5, so if you haven't you might want to skip this, since it'll be casually spoilery.
I'll preface this review by saying that I've read book 5 twice, though not since shortly before book 6 was released two (?) years ago. As such I had no trouble following the plot and found myself mentally filling in the blanks the abbreviated script leaves. My review is written very much as someone who knew the story and felt relatively fondly towards it. I have no idea what a person who hadn't seen the other films and/or at least read book 5 would have thought about this film, but I doubt it would have made very much sense. Read
Ebert's review for the sort of questions a person who hasn't read the book would ask. I don’t know if he's read it or not, but he wrote his review as though he hasn't, which is probably why he's the best known living movie critic and I'm writing this on a blog for people who are more interested in me going on another tirade about other
Hellgate: London fansites.
Anyway, to the scores, with my biases clearly stated:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 8
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7
Harry Potter 5 was kind of the opposite of Transformers for me. Very little variation in the scores, with everything good, but not great. I liked the movie. I didn't love it, much of it felt rushed, things that were cut out and simplified were missed, but I liked the plot growing darker and more serious, the special effects were very nice, the wizard battle at the end was good, the acting was almost uniformly excellent, etc. Again, this is all as someone who knew the plot from the books and who had seen the HP2 and HP3 movies just last week on cable. (But not HP4, which would have helped since I didn't really remember how that one ended to lead into this one.) I do not think someone who didn't know the series very well would enjoy this very much, with their confusion outweighing their fun.
Script/Story: 7Way, way, condensed. Lots of stuff was left in almost as a kind of Easter Egg for the reader come to the film. There was a very brief shot of the previous house gnomes petrified under glass jars in the front walkway of Sirius' house, which I only noticed since I remembered and liked that touch in the book. So much else was skimmed over, from the invisible carriage pulling winged horses, to the ongoing slander of Harry by the paper, to Loopy girl's dad's tabloid doing the real truth, to Loopy's mixture of imagined (or are they?) bogies and snarks, to Harry's nascent romance with Cho, to the communications with Sirius through the fire, to the ways Ron's older brothers resist Umbridge's stifling rules, to Harry's psychic link to Voldemort and his efforts to control his memories with Snape's cruel tutelage, etc.
The movie could profitably have been an hour longer and still hardly gotten beneath the surface of the plot elements in the 5th book, and this one would definitely benefit from a LotR-like 45 minutes of added footage on a super DVD, but for what it was, it wasn't bad.
Acting/Casting: 8The kids are still doing pretty well, though they're clearly not as good at acting as the adults, who are pretty much a who's who of great British actors. How Judy Dench hasn't shown up in some role yet is beyond me, but every other living British thespian has glued on some warts and a fright wig and done a turn in the Harry Potter series. The only two that seemed a bit off to me were Harry's adopted brother, and Dumbledore. The brother is aging and looking less corpulent and idiotic, and I'm not sure the kid playing him can act at all. Maybe he can, but my thought after his amateurish early turn was that they cast him when he was like 8, and now he's 17 and maybe isn't even acting anymore, but they don't want to cast some new kid for reasons of continuity, plus they figure Dudikins is only on screen for about 2 minutes a movie at this point, so it hardly matters. Unfortunately it's always the first 2 minutes, and starting off with the worst acting isn't the best technique to suck in the viewer.
As for Dumbledore, I know the original actor croaked 3 movies ago and this is the replacement, and I don't think he sucks, or that the original guy was better, but the character has gotten less imposing and magisterial with each movie. He's now more like the crazy uncle, (Sirius actually is the crazy uncle, and he's got far more presence) and his fashions have gone very "aging hippy," which doesn't help. Dumbledore was basically wearing shiny women's gowns for this whole movie, and they're way too form-fitting to his rotund, old man shape. They desperately need shoulder pads and a girdle. He can be decorated and bearded and wizard-metrosexual, but his figure is awful. Remember how Gandalf was always robed and shrouded, but still very masculine in LotR? Dumbledore needs some of that to give him some authority.
Action: 6There's not much action, hence the score. I was fine without any quidditch, and the very ending wand battle was pretty cool, but the whole concluding action sequence was greatly abbreviated from the book, to its detriment. We hardly got to see any of the Order vs. the Death Eaters, and the scenes with the kids vs. the Death Eaters weren't real convincing. I was also disappointed in how little we saw of the anarchy at school stuff, and Ron's brothers' wacky gizmos and gimmicks.
Eye Candy: 6It's more of the Hogwarts we've seen for 5 movies now, and while the big wand battle had the best graphics we've yet seen in the series, and the various practicing Pretorius charm effects were very cool and smoky, this was one of the more visually blah movies in the series. No dragons or sea monsters, only 2 dementors, and Hagrid's half brother giant was super CG-looking. Like something out of Roger Rabbit.
Fun Factor: 6It's very plot-heavy and full of exposition. I enjoyed it, but it's far from light hearted.
Replayability: 7I'd see it again. The whole series of films has grown on me quite a bit, since I was bored through the first two tedious films, before I'd read any of the books.
Overall: 7Not great, but competent. As I keep saying.
On another topic, I was wondering about this after the movie yesterday. This is kind of a spoiler for book 6 if you've not read that one yet, but my question is how they're going to handle Malfoy in movie 6. The younger Malfoy, I mean. As you know if you've read book 6, he is expected to do something instrumental and enormously important in the climax of the book, and in reading it there was a lot of suspense as to whether or not he would. I wasn't sure which way it would go, and it was a scene of great tension.
It worked because Malfoy has always been a pretty major figure in the books, and while he's faded from his position as Harry's rival, as he was in books 1 and 2, he's still a major pain in the ass in the books. And not just as a lying little shit; he's scheming and pretty strong in magic and dangerous with his evil dad's backing. In the movies though, Malfoy has been reduced to a little bitch who is usually a punch line and who always loses out to any sign of determination by Harry or his friends. Malfoy is good for a few nasty remarks early on, but he always gets pwned in the clutch, and usually runs off crying.
In movie 3 Malfoy teases Harry about fainting at the Dementors, then acts a fool and gets his arm broken by Buckbeak and exits the scene sobbing. Later on he gets hit with snowballs and humiliated by invisible Harry in town, and runs off crying and knocking over his friends. Finally, he gloats over Hagrid's misery, then immediately snivels and begs when Hermoine points her wand at him. To cap it off she punches him with her little bird arm and he goes down, then runs away crying.
In movie 4 he did some other bitchery; I can't remember at this point.
In movie 5 he's hardly there at all. He does his patented taunting early on as they arrive at school, then is only seen again getting his Informer Brigade badge, then joins in the failing to find the magical practice room. He's not punched out by a girl and he doesn't cry when hit with a snowball or threatened, but he does nothing to distinguish himself.
My point here is that with Malfoy's screentime cut so much in movies 3-5, and his character turned into more of a one dimensional bully who runs the instant he's pushed back, I can't see how it will be believable when he's supposed to be a dark, nearly murderous young wizard in movie 6. Who will believe that he can pull the trigger when he needs to, when we've seen him played as such a bitch for 3 straight films?
I guess time will tell...
Labels: harry potter, movie review
Monday, July 16, 2007
Movie Review: Transformers
With Malaya returned from her extended foreign business trip/family vacation, we had some time for a belated b-day (mine) celebration day, and we chose to spend it largely in the cinema. We caught Transformers in the afternoon, then had a big Chinese food dinner, and to get the taste (of the awful Transformers, not the excellent meal) out of our mouths, we went back and saw Harry Potter 5 in the evening. I've not reviewed any movies in months, but I might as well get back on the horse and do these two. I'm curious to see how Transformers will fare in my categorized rating system anyway, since it was incredibly uneven.
Well, that assumes I even remember my movie rating categories. It's been a while. Thank god for cut and paste, eh?
Transformers
Script/Story: 0
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 8
Eye Candy: 9
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 4
Overall: 3
This score is very up and down, and obviously comes nowhere near averaging out. It's actually better than I thought it would be in one way, since while driving home with Malaya and taking turns laughing at the most unbelievably stupid thing we could each think of in Transformers, I commented on some portions of the score being sub zero. I believe, "negative five" was mentioned, and when Malaya pointed out that such a score would in fact be illegal, I answered with one word. "
Rush."
I didn't dip anything for Transformers that low, but as I once threatened in my review of
Charlie's Angels, if my categories had an, "accurately reflects physical reality" score, it would now be broken. I have never, and I mean this seriously, as a veteran of many, many very stupid action movies, seen a movie that made less sense and had more unbelievable (in a bad way) things happen in it than did in Transformers. I won't say that every single scene in the film was logically impossible or at least stupidly improbable, but far more were than were not, and most of them were in multiple ways. There were at least 15 or 20 times during the film that Malaya or me leaned over to the other and made some sarcastic remark about how dumb or ridiculous or absurd was something we'd just seen on the screen.
The only saving grace, if there is one, is that the horrible, horrible script and events within it were intentional. It wasn't just an endless series of accidents and stupidities and errors; the script was intentionally written to exclude more than the most casual regard for "that could/would ever happen in a million years" and that turned the countless mistakes and errors and stupidities into stylistic devices, rather than mistakes. In theory, anyway.
I will explain, and I might as well go in order to do it.
Script/Story: 0Okay, so this is the one that really dragged everything down, and the one that most closely meshes with my main complaints about the film. And even though I'm giving this a zero, take this with some salt grains, since I am grading it as a semi-demanding adult viewer, even though I realize the movie was basically written on about a 3rd grade level. It's a film-length episode of the old, crappy, Transformers TV show. Of course all of the actions are stupid and the conveniences legion and the bad guys dumb and scheming and the good guys noble and stupid and the humans scrambling and annoying, etc. If you look at it from the correct perspective, this score could probably be an 8. And it would be, if I too were 8 (years old) or I were grading this $200m movie on how well it recreated the insipid, seemingly Google-bot translated from Japanese, every episode was the same, all dialogue and events are irrelevant except as a lead in to the final fight scene, children's cartoon.
That being said, as an adult who was at best a very mild fan of the Transformers as a kid, this movie had the dumbest "plot" and most ridiculous characters and events I've ever seen in a major Hollywood production. Listing or ranking all the stupidities would take longer and force far more contemplation on this mental bubble gum than I'm willing to sacrifice, but I will list a few things I learned.
Annoying teenaged boys with stupid fathers will willing car shop at the spur of the moment and pay $4000 for beat up yellow Camaro's without pink slips from shifty used car salesmen when said car might have an actual resale value of as much as $500. (The oldest Camaro the Kelly Blue Book site lets you select is 1987, and in far better condition than the movie one it's estimated at $1700.)
Once you establish contact with the Pentagon; whether by phone, ancient computer morse code, or short wave radio, you can order an air strike from US fighter jets which will arrive anywhere on earth within three minutes.
Whether an action sequence begins at dusk or noon, and whether it lasts 5 minutes or an hour, it will always be dark by the time the special effects begin. The first 5 set pieces in this movie did this, with absolutely no regard for the actual speed of the earth's rotation.
An Autobot can send a message to other Transformers flying in deep space by shining a light from its chest on the clouds over town. The message will be received and the other Autobots will fly to earth and crash land within a day, in violation of every Einsteinian law of space and time.
The US Military cracks (not very) encrypted computer virus codes by inviting in dozens of random computer experts and putting them all in one giant room with lots of desks covered in huge flat screen monitors and then leaving them completely unsupervised.
When the Autobots arrive they will land all over the earth, yet be able to shape shift into cars and drive to meet up in an alley in downtown LA in less than an hour. Once they arrive they will know all about earth customs, speak slang English, know how to break dance, and have formed detailed, morally-nuanced opinions of humans despite having never heard of us until approximately thirty seconds earlier.
Robots that can take on the shape and function of any machine on earth will all choose to become crappy plastic 2008 model Chevrolets, despite the fact that their enemies are tanks, fighter jets, giant guns, and other actually useful things.
The same seven US Marines will wind up in five or six separate fire fights with the Decepticons on three different continents, and despite routinely taking cover behind plywood and glass walls as enough fire comes in to hurl tanks hundreds of meters, will take no more causalities than one guy getting shot in the leg.
Honestly, I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Literally every major scene in the film has at least a handful of complete physical impossibilities obvious enough to strain the brain of any thinking adult human. As I said, it's a kid's cartoon blown up to 4x the length, 100000x the budget, and in live action. The plot is on the level of any episode of any Japanimation series from 1982, nothing makes any sense, there are no realistic physics, none of the humans ever behave at all like a real person would, none of the robots or humans have believable motivations, there's no reason for 90% of what happens, etc, etc. I spent the first hour of the movie sighing and rubbing my face in pain, in much the same way I do while trying to skim through one of the horribly-written, formulaic, PoS fantasy novels that result from most computer game adaptations.
One interesting approach to the film was in Harry Knowles' review. Yeah, the AICN guy. I hadn't looked at that site in at least a year, but I saw a link to his review and thought, "Oh yeah, I should see what an uber geek who might actually have liked Transformers when he was 8 thought about the film." As it turns out Harry didn't really like it, though he said he'd see it several more times to be sure. Huh? His insight though, was that it was supposed to be a movie about a boy who falls in love with his new piece of junk car, uses it to get the hot girl, and then discovers that the car is actually a living alien robotic creature, and that it's there to protect him and help save the earth from evil robots. Harry pointed out that all the stuff about the Pentagon, the soldiers in Qatar, the world wide presence of the Decepticons, etc, was all distraction from the core plot of the movie, and should have been less obvious and only come in once the core premise was established.
It's an interesting theory, and probably a better idea, but there's one key problem with it. Every single scene with the boy and his car and the girl was absolute cinematic shit. Horribly written, acted, and directed. It was those scenes that had me sighing and rubbing my face for the first hour of the film. More of them would have improved the movie on a theoretically level, but only in the way that adding more shit and stink to an outhouse improves its essential function.
You get Michael Bay to make your movie, you'd do well to write out all the human interaction, since he's just going to turn it all into schmaltzy bullshit anyway. The guy made Pearl Harbor, FSS. A movie so bad that one of the funnier songs in Team America could casually refer to something sucking almost as hard as that film, and have everyone in the audience get the joke, whether they've actually seen Pearl Harbor or not. I never saw it, but I have seen The Rock, and I think they could have saved a few million on Transformers by just reusing all the military jet/airport/troop footage from that film in this one. It would have been cheaper than shooting all new scenes that were almost shot for shot remakes of the ones from The Rock.
Acting/Casting: 4
Is there any point in going on, at this point? I might as well. I'll be brief, though. This score is internally conflicted, since I didn't care about any character or robot in the movie, but I'm not sure how much of that was the acting, and how much was the dreadful script. So I'm giving the actors the benefit of the doubt. The stammering, nerdy guy hero wasn't endearing or interesting, but the girl was pretty hot, at least the portion of her above her hips and below her clavicle, and while every other character in the movie was some flavor of ridiculous stereotype, they were relatively effective stereotypes.
Action: 8
Obviously this was the selling point, and while I thought they needed far more of it, and while most of it was pretty stupid in deed, it looked pretty, and some of the fights were cool. If illogical.
Eye Candy: 9
I'm overscoring this one, but the robots were very, very cool in robot form and during their transformations, and that's really what the movie was about.
Fun Factor: 5
I didn't exactly enjoy any of the action scenes, but they were kind of fun to watch, in so far as I could turn off my brain.
Replayability: 4
I would require a considerable bribe to sit through this whole film again, but I'd watch the best 30 minutes of fight scenes and such for free.
Overall: 3
I freely admit that I'm scoring this one as though it was intended to be a real movie that would be enjoyable by an adult who didn't spend the last year playing with their Transformer toys in anticipation. It was not. It was a kid's movie, and I'm sure a kid would enjoy a lot of it. I wouldn't have at that age, since I remember thinking how stupid the Transformers and G.I. Joe cartoons were (they had essentially the same plots every episode). Every time the bad guys would scheme and attack and nearly kill the good guys and destroy some huge chunk of the earth, and the good guys would fight back and just barely win, and then as the bad guys limped away the noble good guy leader would say, "Let them go. We've got work to do rebuilding."
And then next episode the bad guys would attack again.
Even at age 8 or 9 that drove me crazy, and I used to shout at the good guys, through the TV, "Why don't you kill them when you have the chance? They're going to come back and kill thousands more innocent people next week!"
Thankfully, that plot element was not (directly) recycled in Transformers the movie, but everything else was equally dumb, and the overarching sensation I had while walking away from the theater was disappointment and regret that they'd aimed low, and achieved lower. It reminded me, in a way, of Ice Age, another relatively popular film that I did not think acceptable for an adult audience. Nothing in Ice Age was that horrible, but it was just so relentlessly mediocre and bland and unimaginative. Transformers was the same, in plot and logic and physics. Looked pretty, but existed on about a 4th grade level, and I was unsuccessful at unplugging my brain completely enough to tolerate it. That being said, Ice Age was relatively popular and I've heard numerous adults say they actually enjoyed it. Transformers is getting more positive than negative reviews, and those are presumably by adults. So maybe it's just me.
I'll add the Harry Potter 5 review later on Monday.Labels: movie review
Friday, July 13, 2007
The coolest thing ever
Okay, maybe it's not quite that good, but it's pretty damn nifty. This video of a formula one driver blazing ass through downtown Paris one morning at dawn has been popular on the Internet forever. As the official blurb goes:
"On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.
No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit."
It's an inspirational eight minutes of squealing tires, roaring engines, and optional red lights, and the several near misses with taxis and pedestrians just add to the fun. The addition that makes it so cool
can be found here, and it's thanks to a plotted course on Google Maps. Read the directions on the top left of the page; basically you pause the movie long enough to let some buffer build up, then start the map at the 4 second mark, so they're synchronized. As the video of the bumper cam plays and the Ferrari hurtles along the Champs Elysees, the Google Map plays along, giving you a God's eye view of the car's progress along the absurdly sinuous and non-right angleed streets of Paris. I sat through it with a big smile on my face and an urge to urge the driver to go faster, but then I generally approve of reckless driving, so long as it's intentional, rather than beer-induced.
Labels: driving, google maps
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Terror on the home front.
If you thought those guys who fouled up the recent British terrorist attacks were inept,
check out this story.
Three Burleson men who belong to a "radical Christian activist group" were in the Johnson County Jail on Friday night after a church deacon caught two of them attempting to ignite an explosive device on Independence Day at a church under construction in north Burleson, authorities said Friday.
Dayton Lee Calaway, 19, and Michael Philip Plaisted Jr., 18, were arrested Wednesday night near the Victory Family Church after they got bogged down in mud as a fleet-footed deacon chased them from the church in the 400 block of Northwest John Jones Drive, police said.
Two other people drove away, the deacon told officers.
An explosive device in a glass container was found propped against the church door. The suspects apparently tried to detonate the device twice before being interrupted by the deacon, police and Burleson Fire Marshal Stacy Singleton said.
...
On Thursday, Jered Michael Ragon, 18, voluntarily went to the police station for questioning after Calaway and Plaisted implicated him, police Detective T. Catron said. Police called a MedStar ambulance because Ragon's feet were burned, and a emergency medical crew treated him at the station.
Ragon had gotten gasoline on his feet as he tried to destroy evidence from the church fire in the field, and his feet were burned, Catron said.
So not only could four guys not manage to set fire to an unoccupied building, and not only did they run from a single unarmed man, and not only did two of them run into deep mud and fail to escape their persistent pursuer, but one of the two who got away actually
set his own feet on fire trying to destroy left over bomb-making evidence! Not exactly Iraqi
resistance fighter terrorist quality pyrotechnicians, were they?
At this point I was wondering why. Why were self-described radical Christians trying to burn down a church? Was it Mormon or something? Happily, the article explains things. As well as something this inane can be explained, anyway.
Cmdr. Chris Havens, the Police Department spokesman, said the suspects boasted about belonging to a leaderless group of 10 or 15 who share a belief that society has become too focused on self-improvement and self-gratification and has lost focus on the glorification of God.
"They admit to being Christian and being brought up Christian, but they believe there should be one denomination and one church, not multiple denominations," Havens said.
"They did not say they had a name for their group, other than they were a radical Christian activist group. That was the way they explained their group," he said.
Perhaps they were just taking actions
the Pope's recent comments seem to require? If you're wondering if you have to grow up in the asshole of nowhere to be so bored that this sort of thing seems like a good idea at age 18...
well yeah. Pretty much.
I should note that from age 12-13 I
was incarcerated lived about where the upper right corner of the green arrow is on that map. An experience that was not quite awful enough to make my ensuing San Diego-based years of high school tolerable, but that did imprint me enough with Southwest redneck PTSD that I've never been able to watch more than 30 seconds of
King of the Hill without starting to shudder at its documentary version of my junior high school years.
Labels: stupidity, terrorism
More HGL Drama
I
posted last year about the minor Hellgate: London drama that stemmed from Flagship Studio's accidental leak of the name of the third character class. It's a long post and it wanders around (fasten your seatbelts), but the gist of it was that Flagship leaked the name accidentally, every fansite posted about it, and then several days later Flagship's PR woke up to the fact and sort of indirectly hinted that they'd like the info removed because they had a full reveal scheduled for an upcoming issue of a major gaming print magazine. Flagship's PR never actually told or asked anyone to remove the hunter name leak, but the mere suggestion was enough for most of the other HGL fansite admins to scramble to do their bidding. And I mean scramble; not only did the other guys delete their news posts, but they voluntarily scoured their forums for mentions of "demon hunter" and deleted threads and banned people for asking what was going on... even though all of the approximately 500 people on earth who were following the game at that point already knew about it.
I thought it was amusing at the time, more for the fevered reactions of the other HGL webmasters than anything do to with the actual (meaningless) info leak. The drama came not from Flagship, who were hardly involved, but from the kids running other HGL sites who were embarrassingly starstruck by their vague proximity to Flagship's community manager, and who took it upon themselves not only to police their own forums, but to troll mine posting outraged notes about how I wasn't doing what they thought I should do and how I was hurting the company and I had journalistic pretensions and such. (The fact that maybe I had a bit more perspective on things, having been the admin of a very busy fansite for 6 years, and that I personally knew all 9 founders of Flagship Studios, was disregarded by overexcited teens with the vast knowledge they'd accumulated through their weeks of fansite admin experience.) I kind of understood; as I admit in the aforementioned post, back in the late 1990s when I was admining a Diablo II fansite and interacting with Blizzard North employees I was pretty impressed by it all. I was talking to the actual designers, not just the PR wing, and I like to think I might have shown a bit of journalistic "my readers have the right to know the truth" backbone, but I can't honestly swear to that, 8 years later.
At any rate, that little episode passed without evident impact. The funniest part was that I was invited to visit Flagship Studios just a few weeks later; the first fansite admin to do so. I will admit to savoring some schadenfreude (at the time) when I thought about how the other fansite fanboys must have taken that news. They were already showing every sign of terror/jealously at the existence of my HGL site, so you know they'd gotten their little peckers up fantasizing that Flux would get blackballed for teh infor leakorz! And then 3 weeks later I'm getting hands on with HGL and an office tour.
Anyway, nothing more of dramatic interest has transpired since then. We had to ban Krazy Kaution, one of the volunteer admins from that other site when he wouldn't stop trolling our forums, and then sent obscene and sexually-explicit messages to Elly when she told him to STFU and follow the forum rules, but that's kind of par for the course in this amateur-infested field. I'm sure I could find things to be dramatic about, as most of the other HGL sites do all they can to not link to the exclusive content I produce, but I've long since grown to expect that. The funny part, to me at least, is how transparent they are, when they think they've being sneaky. It's all new and exciting to them, while it's just Diablo II all over again to me, and when I remember how the other fansites reacted then I can see the exact same stuff happening now. Even the personalities are the same. There are the serious, hardcore info types (usually European), the chatty social network types who don't really care about HGL and are just involved since it's a way to meet people online (almost exclusively younger Americans), the overly-competitive, tooth-gnashing fanboys, etc.
Another weird aspect is the loyalty issue. Early adopting fans tend to become very clannish, and whatever site they first get attached to, they adopt and become possessive of. This is especially true of younger fans, so there are these angry posses of 13 y/os whose actual knowledge of human behavior and motivations is inversely proportional to the amount they believe they possess, who decide they are part of some fansite, and that other fansites must therefore be the enemy. On top of that, the admins of the main other English language site, HGG (Hellgate Guru), are pretty clearly obsessed with my site and how I run it, since they do all they can to avoid posting any links to the content I put up, regularly troll forum threads on my site to advertise themselves, and constantly talk about my site in their forum posts. (In contrast, I have never seen their site mentioned by anyone for any reason in forum threads on my site, except when the thread itself points to magazine scans some HGG reader posted in their forums -- and none of their flock of admins have ever been mentioned by name.) The main admin on HGG has something like 80 posts in my site's forums; I have 5 there; 2 of which were made long before I started my own HGL site, and 2 others were made in the thread I quote below.
Honestly, this is pretty smart of them; by constantly posting in my forum they advertise themselves (by their signature or site logo icon, if not direct links), while I can't be bothered to read their forums and thus don't promote my site at their expense. The funny part is that HGG has busier forums than my site, but that's really all they have on the site. Their image gallery has a handful of unorganized and uncaptioned screenshots, (I have over 2000 with military organization) their wiki is skeletal with like 65 pages, 2/3 of which they cut(ted) and paste(d) straight from the official site (which hasn't been updated since last summer), they don't maintain archives of interviews or features, they don't have a files gallery, they don't monitor Flagship employee forum posts and put them into their news, they don't add any info or context to the news they post, etc. And yes, it annoys me that their forums are still busier (primarily since they were online like 2 years before my site was started) when the rest of their site is such crap.
What makes it really silly is that we're fighting over crumbs. A really busy day on the HGG forums means maybe 45 registered users. They're usually around 35 when I check once or twice a week. My site is usually around 25 during the day, though we've been over 70 when we had some exclusive content we required people to register to read. In contrast, the
forums for the D2 site I earned my dubious fame on has 207 registered users and 1104 guests viewing it right now, in the middle of the night on a Thursday. And that's for a game that was released in June 2001. The
forums for the World of Warcraft site that my co-admins run has 143 users and 1700 guests right now, and when I check it in the day it's usually up around 400 registered users. So yeah, compared to that HGL traffic is entirely incidental, and as
I discussed in a previous blog entry, it's quite likely my HGL site will get more traffic the first week of the public beta test than it has totaled during its first 16 months.
Endless preamble aside, here's the recent amusement. Some months ago a few videos of Hellgate:London were leaked from some public event in Korea. They showed all the skill trees in the game, which had not been publicly released in any form, and lots of the basic skill information. The leak was plugged up, but the admins of several HGL fansites got a look at the shots. Flagship asked everyone not to post them or mention them, and no one did, until after the recent community day event, when we were all invited to their offices in downtown San Francisco and got to watch a demo and play the game and eat a catered lunch.
Since we saw the whole game then, including all the skill trees, and since lots of fansite admins filmed the screen during the presentation early in the day, the info was due to burst loose. Flagship understood that, and asked us not to put up any shots of the screens, but said the info was okay to release. (At dinner after the day's festivities I sat between company founder the CVO Dave Brevik and Flagship's PR director Tricia Gray, and we talked for about an hour about media issues, information releases and priorities, fansites vs. major gaming sites, etc. So trust me, I have a pretty good idea what Flagship's priorities are and where their focus is and how they feel about fansites posting news and game information.) My main community day coverage was in the form of a massively-detailed 24k word report that I got fact checked/approved by Flagship and posted a week after the event. I was then in San Diego on vacation for a week, but when I got back I updated all the report info into the wiki, and added lots more info on specific skill details on the appropriate pages. The other HGL fansites all linked to my updates (without me asking), though unsurprisingly, HGG did not. Nor did they update their own info, other than typing in some obviously-transcribed skill info in very bare bones form. (
See for yourself; it's just names and basic info, without any context or description, since that would require actual writing... but more on that later.)
Something like six weeks after community day, they finally did some work, putting together a javascript sort of skill menu that showed some of the skill trees and their layouts, but with the bizarre addition of
MS Paint-quality icons. That was actually sort of Flagship's request, since they didn't want us posting photos of the game screens, but were fine with representations of them... which looked far, far worse. Why Flagship preferred that is a question I can not answer, and a topic for another entirely too long blog entry.
In any event, the fact that the HGG guys had actually created some content worth viewing was enough of a surprise that I wound up viewing
the forum thread about it, and to my non-surprise, I wasn't halfway down the thread before one of their admins was bitching about my site and insulting me. The main mouth goes by Krazy Kaution, henceforth abbreviated to KK. All the following is quoted from that forum thread; the purple are comments by other people; the black are my replies. We'll start with KK's comment from early in the thread, apropos of nothing, which earned my first reply.
KK: Unlike Flux, we bring you good content and not old shit lol. So I'm going to be creating a new post all about surges.
I seldom view their forums (because of this sort of thing and since the misinformation would drive me mad) and post there almost never (I had 3 posts in 2 years prior to this thread.) but I couldn't let this one slide. So I made a reply, starting off quoting one of their fanboy posse (who like all of them, gets the game info from my site and then returns to HGG to discuss it).
Re: BLADEMASTER SKILL TREEHe would have to give credit to HGG if it ain't altered enough, which snakefuckerer anonymous dosen't want too (I don't mind him i guess just like that name )
I've posted links and news about every interview HGG has posted. They never link to incgamers. Besides not pointing to the 25k word write up I did about com day that every other hgl fansite linked to, I've posted an original interview with a FSS employee the last 3 Fridays, none of which have been mentioned in the HGG news. Who doesn't credit, again?
As for this skill menu, I agreed with what KK said. I didn't see any point in making a skill calculator when we don't know more than slvl 1 about the skills, and we know nothing about how they'll scale with the clvl up, which will likely be more important than the slvl changes, which will not increase damage in most cases. Come beta NDA ending, real skill calculators will appear and those will be worth the time to program and play with.
KK's photos of the game screens (I have shots of every skill menu in the game too, but I haven't posted them or created representations of them since I signed an NDA at com day.) had a few more/different stats than I posted when I did the char updates weeks ago, but 1) all the values will change before launch, and 2) I concentrated more on info than numbers since I thought it more valuable to post info on how skills will be used, what they work like, etc, rather than numbers that are meaningless out of context.
Also, I don't read these forums much since it would drive me crazy to not (advertise) by posting links to current info and screenshots, but I can't let this one pass. HGG's wiki has 67 content pages and 990 edits since launch. The hellgatewiki.com has 387 content pages and 4440 edits since launch. There's just no comparison in size, quality, depth, currentness, etc. Furthermore, none of the hellgatewiki pages are cut and paste from hgl.com, as what, maybe 40 of the hgg db pages (all the items, all the monsters, all the levels, etc) are? And that's not even mentioning that HGG has no image gallery, or movie hosting, or archive listing of hgl interviews and features and magazine scans, etc.
You guys can prefer different sites for the forums or chat or admins or whatever you like, but at least be honest about the quality and amount of relative info.
Sp3tSnAz, one of their many mods, replied.
A number of your credits though don't only say the original site's name and not the actual address of the site, and if I ever news that, I say it was found on your website. However whenever we find something on another site we always provide a link to it, but rather than saying you saw it on guru thanks to another site, you just link the site. A lot of the stuff you news you put into your image gallery, which means that we leave that to your site's credit as you do not point to original links of those so we can't news them as well....
The first oh... 70 or so pages on the hellgate wiki were transferred over from original html versions of the pages when we set up the wiki last year, and that killed all of the links and formatting. Formatting wasn't hard to redo, but no, I didn't bother to google around and find all of the original sources of the bill roper and max schaefer and other quotes. I think the vast majority of those have been replaced by more current info by now anyway. I do always credit a source on original writing, (since that's someone's content and opinion and may be wrong) but when it's a quote by bill roper or whoever, I'm less concerned. There's a pretty high churn rate on wiki quotes getting replaced during game development, and honestly, do you think any fan gives a damn if the original interview was conducted by gamespot, or gamespy, or inhellgate, etc? Of course not.
Given how much you guys complained about me clinging to some misguided journalistic principles back when I was reporting on publicly available HGL info that you decided your readers didn't deserve to know, I find it pretty ironic how you perpetually return to beating this one dead horse.
As for screenshots, I credit where I find new screenshots in the news post, but not so much on the shot captions. I've written something like 2000 of them by this point, so even if I'd started doing it, I'd probably have gotten lazy by now anyway. You'll look long and hard to find a fansite with an image gallery that's got source credits for all of the shots. None of the german hgl sites, the korean ones, SuE's czech site, etc have source credit for all of their shots. I notice the few shots you've added have zero info about where they came from, aside from the ones of Brennan's templar, which lack any source links.
Besides spez's (civilized, intelligent) reply, KK had leapt on my first short reply as well, and as befits his status, his reply was entertainingly insane, and rather a barrel of sitting duck fish, to boot. I certainly had no trouble (and some pleasure) Fisking it to bits.
KK: Sorry Flux, you can attack us saying we don't "credit" but you fail to see what Credit actually implies.
Actually, I was just making a point about how you'd rather not share info with your readers than have to credit another site for creating/breaking it.KK: You talk about your wiki as if it had good information on it. Well here, ill give you a little insight as to how "good" it is.
Looking at the skills list for the Blademaster you have these skills listed in your wiki:
Fire Aura
Aura of Holy Wind
Grand Aura
Slam
Path of Righteousness
Now, let's see here... nope not on the list of skills I've seen the blademaster use. I could be wrong, but the images of the skills trees that I'm looking at has none of these on them... maybe Flagship Studios fucked up and forgot to put them in Alpha!
I haven't posted any info from the alpha, other than linking to those welcome message pages that are publicly accessible. Are you implying that your info comes from the NDA'ed alpha?
Furthermore, your argument is that you have 1 page, in your entire wiki, that you updated yesterday, that's more current than a comparable page in my wiki, which I updated with community day info a month ago? Wow, congrats. You might want to look into your items and monsters and general info and flagship sections, when you take a break from congratulating yourself over this great blademaster success.
As for the older skills on my blademaster page, you'll note that 1) I list lots of changes that have been made during development, since readers like to know where the game was as well as where it is now, and 2) that I put in more info than just the skill hover, and that those older skills say things like, "This sounds more like a Guardian aura than a Blademaster one, so we won't be surprised if it doesn't make the final cut." on them, as a disclaimer.KK: You can't possibly think that your Wiki is the best source of information when it clearly contains crap that is either months old, or never were. I think you have some work to do, you know, all that verifying of information on your wiki that you are oh so proud to have "made".
I know you're proud that it only took you 6 weeks to get around to transcribing (now outdated) skill hover info from community day, but you do realize that like 75% of the hgg wiki is still direct cut and paste from hgl.com, circa August 2006, right? A saying about glass houses and stone throwing register in your memory anywhere?KK: Did it ever occur to you that there was a reason you initially weren't invited to Community Day? Perhaps, just maybe, you aren't a very good site admin and you have done things in the past to piss off Flagship Studios. If you are wondering what I'm talking about, maybe you should check your e-mail history, there should be something in there regarding leaked Hunter.
Which explains why I was invited to FSS 3 weeks later, the first fansite admin to visit? Also, I'm also kind of amazed how happy you are to admit, publicly, that you'll gladly withhold information from your readers for an imagined friendship with flagship CMs. That's not something I'd be real proud of, personally, but I guess you've got your own priorities.KK: I loved the part where you were a month late on posting news that the alpha actually started, that was cute.
Like everyone else, I posted about the imminent alpha when bill roper talked about it at the Asian launch event in late May. And I posted about the official Alpha page June 1st, when I was first tipped off to its existence. I note the first hgg post about the alpha page was made on... June 1st.
I think you made 5 assertions in this post, and 4 of them are demonstrably incorrect. You're really not very bright, are you, KK? No wonder Scapes and your other coworkers are so often embarrassed by your antics.
I've not returned to the thread since last week, so I don't know if apoplexy ensued, or they just deleted it and banned me, or what. I have not seen any of their admins in my forum during the past week, so perhaps it at least served some purpose...
As I said in the beginning, the dynamics of this whole thing are basically identical to how they were in the early D2 days. There were other sites that were about as busy as Diabloii.net, but they had almost no content, and their chat rooms were largely comprised of fanboys, and their admins were largely there for the social interaction and since they enjoyed feeling like someone. They withered up and died come beta time, since they had no ability to turn game goodies into website content, and there were no tools at the time to automate the process.
The HGG forums are not entirely comprised of fanboys, but almost all of the fanboys are on the HGG forums, if you see the distinction. The first part of that puzzles me, since it means that most of their threads have a weird dichotomy. There are intelligent, insightful arguments and discussions about some new news item, and then every other or third post is someone with a lot of l33t in their forum name, babbling about "roxor grphaics" and "lol hedshots!" I guess the adults there just learn to tune out the babble, since I don't believe their forums have tools to allow muting of individuals.
One unusual aspect of the site is that of their 7 or 8 admins, KK is one of the only ones who actually does any work. It's not very good work, and he's never written an original word of content that I've seen, but he did transcribe the skill info from screenshots to that javascript skill menu with the MS Paint icons, and trust me, finding someone to volunteer to work on your fansite who will even do that much is a minor miracle. We went through hundreds of volunteers during the heyday of Diabloii.net, and 99% of them did maybe half a page of whatever they'd agreed to work on before they vanished. People like the idea of being part of a popular website, but what they really want is to chat/mod the forums and bask in the glory of having "mod" or "admin" for their forum title. They might post some news once in a while if someone sends them a link, but that's about it. Actually writing up something original or editing or organizing screenshots is completely out of the question. If they wanted to do that they'd be running their own fansite.
So KK is kind of an oddity, in that he's a slobbering fanboy, who actually does content. Occasionally. In any normal circumstance I think the guys who actually run/own HGG would have cut him loose months ago. (I've spoken with some of the other HGG admins in private and they've apologized for KK's troll actions in my forum and said they think he reflects really poorly on their website.) But since he's about the only one doing any content there, how can they? They're stuck with a guy who starts website feuds, gets banned from other HGL sites for being a foul-mouthed troll, curses anyone who disagrees with him on their forums, brags incessantly, and has, at best, a tenuous connection to reality.
I mean that literally, by the way. It's not an insult, it's a description. I wasn't exaggerating for the sake of the argument in my forum reply; almost their entire wiki is 11 months out of date, and most of it is directly copied from the original site. At the time of the forum post, their entire website literaly had 1 page, updated that day, that had slightly more info than my page on the same subject. (A situation that was swiftly rectified, of course.) Even then though, my wiki has comprehensive information, with a history of skill development, information about how the skills work, links to screenshots of them, and so forth. I would never consider simply transcribing a bunch of skill hovers and posting that without context, since it's not very useful information to the vast majority of readers who have never yet had a chance to play the game.
KK had no such reservations, and not only did he transcribe some screenshot info and post it without an original word of analysis or insight or image added, he was immensely proud of his effort, to the point that he started bragging, completely without provocation, about how they didn't have "old shit lol" like Flux did. And this was despite the fact that my wiki had something like 4x more pages than theirs, that almost every other content page on his site was nearly a year out of date. Did he really think no one would call him on it? That none of his readers were aware of the overall quality of his wiki vs. mine?
I find it quite amusing, in a "Christ at the state of kids these days" sort of way, and it's almost refreshing. I work on a gaming site for an audience comprised primarily (as is all pop culture) of vulgarians, and I'm pretty vulgar myself at times. Plus I'm eagerly awaiting the same game as all of my readers. That being admitted, I do try to use my mind in other areas; I read a lot of intelligent political and science blogs, I've been reading a lot of philosophy and intellectual nonfiction for the past year, and while I don't socialize much (or want to), when I do hang out the people I hang with are bright, educated adults. Malaya's got a PhD, our friends are well-educated and authors or scientists or lawyers, etc. I'm far from a sophisticate, but at the same time it's kind of refreshing to descend to a level where an antagonist thinks that calling me "snakefucker" is the height of rhetorical wit.
Speaking of, I'm mildly curious to see how this plays out. KK is clearly a bit off. Not right in the head, as a friend of mine often says, and leaving aside the isuse of just what's wrong with him, the kid is clearly a ticking time bomb. In lo these many years, I've seen dozens of fanboys like him come and go, and it's always just a matter of time. A very, very few of them mature and mellow. Far more frequently they implode and vanish, or explode and get banned. They exist by manufacturing a constant state of conflict with outside targets, but eventually that unstable center can not hold. They turn some minor tiff with a coworker into a war, or get criticized by their readers and throw a shit sandwich into the buffet of their forum banquet with indiscriminate bannings or flaming private messages, or they get angry about something the company or its representatives do and turn on their former idols. It's always ugly and dramatic, for hell hath no fury like a fanboy spurned, and eventually they self destruct and the grown ups, if there are any, have to step in and try to restore order.
I'm making no predictions about KK's fate, since I've had only very limited interactions with him, but trust me on one thing; this little contretemps, if it can even be called that, will be a mere footnote in his biography by the end of the year. Fanboys like him never lack for feuds, and while he's in way over his head this time, I'm just bemused by the whole thing. Sooner or later (sooner) he'll sink his fangs into someone just like him, and then it'll get ugly as poo is flung in both directions. At this point he's got no one else to fight with, since there really aren't any other active, English-language, full-service HGL fansites (others are niche, or news aggregators). When a bunch more sprout up during the beta, as happens with every game, and they're at least partly staffed by fanboy trolls of KK's ilk, and start showing him what stealing content and not crediting really means, the fireworks will begin.
My strategy is to enjoy the show, while keeping busy providing the best content and news and trying to maintain a mature tone in my forums, and enough content to sticky the eyeballs of the surge of new readers the beta and ensuing game release will bring. The younger-skewing, content-lite sites can roshambo each other for the fanboy forum traffic all they want, since I know those kids are ravenous for game info, and will eventually end up reading every word I post, even if they retain their primary loyalty to some other site's forum. Only time will tell how successful this approach will be, but as much as D2's early fansite history is repeating itself, the odds seem good.
That aside, what I find most interesting about the forum drama quoted above is the psychological aspect of it. Why are they so hung up on the issue of giving credit? You know it's not something they ever care or think about in real life, and if any of the objectors are in college yet, sites like
TurnItIn.com are their personal garlic and holy water. So why do they bring it up every chance they get (it's come up in numerous minor arguments on my site's forums as well)?
They say, time and again, that I didn't/don't fully credit the sites I got the quotes from that I sprinkled into my early site content. That's not actually true; I did link to everything at first; what I didn't do was type out the full URL on every citation. So I'd quote Bill Roper or some other Flagship guy, from an interview conducted somewhere, and my credit would say, "Bill Roper Interview" with that text linked to the actual source. I sometimes said, "fansite interview" when it originated from a fansite, but I always put in the actual link, and I usually specified the site, ala "gamespot interview." I debated about that at the time, and really wanted to change it when we converted the site content into a wiki, but I was lazy and didn't bother. As you know if you ever read the actual wikipedia.org, they never put full links into page entries. It's editorially-frowned upon. Instead they strongly encourage summarizing and encapsulating rather than quoting, and their style guide utilizes footnote type citations, with in-text links to the bottom of the page, where the full links can (usually) be found. If I'd done my wiki in tha fashion (as I should have), there would have been about 95% fewer quotes, and
none of the links would have been in the text. Imagine the complaining about that, if the source citations were found only in the footnotes, which everyone knows no one ever scrolls down to?
They do have one point worth complaining about though, and that's what I said in the forum post. I did the original site content in HTML, and when we changed layouts around and introduced a wiki, we did an automated conversion of all the pages from HTML to wiki format. There were something like 80 pages of content and that point, and all of the links and formatting got partially/largely destroyed during the conversion. This rendered lots of those early quotes into something like, "fansite interview" without a link to where it came from. Which is poor journalism, but at that point in mid-2006 I was busy adding dozens of new pages and updating all of the existing pages, and I knew there would be a heavy churn rate of continuing updates. Besides, as I said in the forum post... no one cares. No reader gives any flavor of flaming damn whether the interview was conducted by some anonymous reporter at gamespot, or gamespy, or flagshipfanatic.com, or Flux's private interview session, etc. Readers just want the info. The only ones who care are... the webmasters of the fansites, and even amongst them the only real concern comes from those who are new to this.
It's probably a bad sign of the regard with which I hold human nature, but I've been doing this for years, and at this point I don't even seriously consider the possibility that everything original I post won't be ripped off and stolen as quickly as I put it online. The fact that it's not happening constantly with HGL speaks far more about the low quality of the content on other HGL sites (at least the English language ones) than it does about some inspirational upsweep of integrity on the part of fansite administrators.
In any event, the fact that the HGG guys are always bitching about every possible time I didn't fully credit the source of something means they must always do it when they get the chance. Right? *snort*
The vast majority of their news is just posted as news; without any source where they saw it, unless one of their readers posted a link to it in the forum first. Needless to say, they've never credited my site, or any other English language HGL site, for a news source, and I know for an absolute fact that I've posted dozens of news items before they did, since I often check their site after I find news and post it, since I know they'll do as they did in this thread, and say I stole it from them. With a time machine, evidently. Furthermore, I wasn't exaggerating in my post. Their wiki really is at least 2/3 direct cut and paste from hellgatelondon.com, and I don't mean 2/3 of each page. I mean 2/3 of the pages are 100% identical to the versions on the official site, which were posted last August and have not been updated since. (For example. Locations:
HGG vs.
HGL.com. Mods:
HGG vs.
HGL.com. And so on.)
The bulk of HGG's content, to this day, is literally a wiki-fied version of the official site, right down to the formatting, the exact same thumbnail images (which is good for a laugh, since they don't link to anything on the HGG pages since changing the URLs or copying over the full size screenshots would have been actual work), etc. And no, of course there's never a mention that all the pages are direct cut and paste from someone else's work. Giving credit is only important when other people don't do it as they think it should be done, I guess.
What most interests me about this is the pop psych angle... why do they care? Why bring up the credit/not-credit thing every time? I guess they think it's a winning argument, though that one seems a stretch to me. "We don't have shit for content and we're slow on news, but some tiny amount of the quotes on Flux's vastly-superior site don't say exactly where they were quoted from!" Well, they've got me there. Guilty as charged. Why do they bring it up, though? It seems self-evidently self-defeating, since they can't really believe their readers give a shit. This isn't exactly a journalism ethics course; we're fansites about a computer game, and even if my site, or some other site, stole every word, never gave credit, etc, the vast majority of interested surfers would still bookmark it, since they want the info and don't give a shit where it originated.
I'd say the constant references to me stealing are a sign of desperation, but I don't think that's it either. Not yet, at least. Their forums are busy still, even on the very micro scale of this pre-game HGL interest. Is it sloth? It's certainly easier to accuse someone else of stealing and then dismissing them from your beautiful mind than it is to spend the hours it takes to upgrade your own content, and insulting others always takes a person's attention away from their own problems. I know it gets me through the day when I read politics or blogs by other (successful) authors.
Maybe it's the ability to summarize and encapsulate? I think nothing of that; it's just what I do in blog posts for fun, but a lot of people can't write very well, and don't have much reading comprehension, and it's very difficult for them to turn information they read into information they write. Especially if they have to reformat it, or condense it, or combine it with existing page info. I do that sort of thing automatically, and I don't mean to brag, since I don't think it's really a skill. It's just what I do naturally, since I usually (and not always correctly) think I can express a point or make an argument better than the other guy did in his original version of it. To people who can't write and who have a great deal of trouble turning a new gamespot feature into four paragraphs explaining how
Ranged Combat works in Hellgate: London, it must seem almost like a magic trick. Like cheating, since all they can do is quote, or link, or plagiarize, while the writer can effortlessly consume the information and regurgitate it in a more useful form.
I think it's some of all those points, but mostly it's just a difference in outlook. I don't really pay any mind to being ripped off since I know it'll happen and I am used to it by now, but also because I know I'll create a ton of more content in the future and replace/upgrade all that was just stolen. For people who can't write and don't create content, anything that is created seems supremely important, since it's so rare and special to them. It's like the first time a little kid makes his own sandwich, or takes a successful dump. Things adults don't notice after decades of doing them are new and fascinating to a child.
Anyway, this went absurdly long, but I only blog once a week lately, so you can read a paragraph a day and derive weeks of entertainment! Besides, I needed something to keep me awake for an hour longer, since I keep waking up after 5 hours of sleep, then lying motionless while I worry about nearly certain doom courtesy of my impending future. So maybe this'll help me sleep through the
night morning.
This post is 6200 words, if you were curious.
Labels: Hellgate: London
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