BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: August 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Underdog Preferences
The college football season got underway this weekend, and while skimming the scores I read about Utah winning @ Michigan. I always enjoy it when a smaller school beats a perennial power, especially when it's a road win, and I watched the highlights with glee. Better yet, the recap mentioned Utah's BCS bowl game goals, which reminded me of another small school's success on that stage. When Boise State beat Oklahoma in the best game ever, the 2004 Fiesta Bowl. There are a ton of highlight collections of that incredible game on You Tube, but this one was fun since it's the Boise announcer hyperventilating over the best half dozen plays of the game, including the 3 legendary late game scores that made this contest so memorable.
I remember watching that one on tape, hours after it ended, with no idea who had won, and Malaya asking me about 10x why I kept yelling and why I was so excited about a game when I didn't care which team won. Technically, that's true. I didn't care who won, but I desperately wanted Oklahoma to lose, and and late game back and forth drama of that one was unsurpassed.
I posted a few random video highlight observations on the Olympics while they were underway, but didn't have any overall theme or plans to present a complete picture of the festivities. I still don't, but a comment by Attila reminded me that I'd meant to post a last couple of tidbits on the games.
Since he brought it up, yes the gold medal men's basketball game was awesome. It featured the US vs. Spain, and it was a rematch, though not an especially anticipated one, after the US had destroyed Spain in the qualifying round, 119-82. Spain was a different team in the finals though, and they played their hearts out and kept it close the whole way. I was cheering both teams as they traded baskets down the stretch, with one Spaniard nailing several clutch 3s and their guard dropping in several incredible running teardrops in the paint.
Kobe saved the US at the end, assisting on or scoring like 6 straight baskets late in the 4th quarter, and while the game ended with a whimper (a Spanish player lost his cool as their comeback faltered and got a double technical giving the US 4 free throws, a 12 point lead, and the ball with about a minute left), it was a very fun game. Somewhat less fun thanks to the awful US announcers, who seemed entirely indifferent to the great game they were watching, as they audibly sweated and worried constantly about what a huge disappointment it would be if the US didn't win.
Less exciting; womens' basketball, where the US beat Australia in the gold medal game, 92-65. I didn't watch it, and I'm not going to do so now. That game wasn't a fluke; the US women were hugely dominant all through the tournament, winning every game by 40+, save for the semi-finals when Russia played slowdown and only lost by 15 in a low scoring affair. No one's talking about removing women's basketball from the Olympics though, since while the US has won 4 straight gold medals, most by dominating performances, there's a lively battle for silver and bronze, a lot of international players in the US professional WNBA league, etc.
Unlike women's softball, which as I blogged about previously, is an entirely US affair. The rest of the world plays for second place, the US has about 75% of all the female softball players on earth, and it's pointless to even have the tournament, which is why they're removing softball from the Olympics next time. The US won every game in 2004 and outscored their opponents by a combined total of 51-1, and this year it was more of the same. The scores for the US in their first 8 games, right up to the gold medal coronation, which was going to be bittersweet since this was the last Olympics for the sport: 11-0, 3-0, 7-0, 8-1, 7-0, 8-0, 9-0, and 4-1. And then came the anticlimax of the gold medal game, with Japan providing the sacrificial lamb... and winning 3-1. Now that is bitterbitter. For the US women, anyway. Perhaps they were distracted by their own success, perhaps they took things for granted with their 57-2 run differential, and perhaps Japan got lucky and wouldn't win again if they played 20 more times. (The US has already beaten them 7-0 and 4-1 in these games in the qualifying rounds.) The fact remains that they put the gold around their neck, and the US women, already brokenhearted by their sport being DQed from future Olympics, got kicked wen they were down and had to settle for silver medals.
Ironically, this might be the game that saves the sport, since it demonstrates that there's not total dominance. (Just near-total. After all, US team finished the tournament with a 58-5 run differential.) It also demonstrates the lameness of deciding a champion in a sport like baseball with a 1-game series. There's a reason the baseball championships in every major league around the world are best of 5 or 7; one game can too easily be swung by a fluke, or one great pitching performance, etc.)
Apparently Baseball is out of the Olympics after this year too, even though it's quite competitive. It's just as well; all the best players in the world are in the US MLB, which plays all summer and doesn't take any notice of the Olympics. Neither do the Japanese leagues, which leaves the national teams for the Olympics to be made up of a bunch of college kids and minor leaguers. Well, for everyone but Cuba, which is the one country in baseball-mad Latin America that doesn't have all of their best players in the pros. Their best players compete in the Olympics, so they generally win. They actually settled for Silver this year; South Korea beat them in the finals, while the US and Japan played for Bronze.
I can't sit through a regular baseball game, but I'd actually watch if there were a real international world championship. Every Latin American country has a lot of great pros, and though the US and Japan would be the favorites, it would be a very competitive event. But with all the best pros in Japan and the US, playing for salaries instead of national pride... who cares?
One of the wackier Olympic moments came when a Cuban TKD fighter kicked the ref after he was DQed for taking too long with an injury delay. It's a stupid rule; the guy banged his toe into the other fighter kicker's shin, and he was sitting on the floor getting it sprayed and taped by two trainers when the sixty second time limit ran out, and the ref called the fight. He was (understandably) pissed off.
Kicking the ref is outrageous and the guy was banned for life from international competition, but seriously, what kind of injury rule is that? Either have some provision for injury time outs, or don't have injury stoppage at all and let the combatants know they'll be DQed if they get hurt. What kind of medical attention can you possibly get in 60 seconds anyway? It took the medics 45 seconds to get into the ring in the first place.
The funny part is that yes, he kicked him. After all the grief Olympic TKD takes for being such a weird, foot-tag sort of non-combat, (no kicking anywhere but the padded scoring zones, no punching, no pushing, no grappling, etc) the final insult would have been for a TKD fighter to lash out in anger... with a punch. Or some other non-scoring attack.
I was reminded of a clip I saw online from one of those insane Japanese reality/prank comedy shows. In the segment of which I speak, some Japanese TV crew was filming the world champion race walker. That absurd, frequently-lampooned sport where they walk really fast with much hip-swiveling, but aren't allowed to run. As the joke usually goes, "What next, the 50m crawl? The hand stand 100 meters?"
Anyway, on the Japanese comedy show they had a real race walker in Japan for some event, and they took him around the city all day and filmed him at various locations, and eventually took him to a track to demonstrate his sport. The joke was that all day they'd been showing him fake reports about some crazed maniacs who were dressing up like samurai and attacking people, especially foreigners. So he's scooting along the track, and just as he finishes one lap there's a bunch of screaming and the samurais burst out of the locker room, appear to slash the TV crew to death with their swords, and then spy the race walker. They rush at him, screaming bloody murder, swords overhead, and... of course he picks up his heels and runs for his fucking life.
It was kind of stupid in the actual clip, since duh, of course he's going to run. No one says race walking is faster than running; it's just an alternate, somewhat comical, bipedal form of locomotion. But in concept it's damn near brilliant, and thankfully for the self respect of every TKD practitioner on earth, the mad Cuban fighter didn't throw a right hook, or a spinning elbow, or a knee to the midsection when he had his one moment of actual violence.
Finally, I enjoyed looking over the final medal standings for these Olympic games. The US won the most total, China won the most golds, Russia was a strong third, and then Britain, Germany, Australia, and France were tightly-bunched at 4-7th. (Incidentally, it's not an official tally, but just out of curiosity I'd be interested to know how the total medals awarded stacked up. I mean total; there were 12 guys on each basketball team, for instance. Or take women's handball; Norway won the gold medal, and they only won 3 golds in the Olympics, but there are like, 15 people on a handball team. That's more golds to Norway from that one event than China got by dominating the individual events in weightlifting or diving. Of course China won the women's team gymnastics, which is another 8 or so for them there, so maybe it would just balance out.)
Skip down past the big countries with lots of medals though, and look at the odd ones. Armenia won 6 medals, all bronzes, all to men. Three in weightlifting, 2 in wrestling, and one in boxing. I'm guessing there's a fairly macho, gladiatorial tradition in that nation. Better yet, all six guys have at least 4 syllables in their last names, all have at least one "Y" in their last name, and they had two different bronze medal winners named "T. MARTIROSYAN." It's not the same guy in two different events, either. They're both weightlifters, but they're in very different weight classes. Brothers?
India's another odd one, and quite a contrast. India is the second most populous nation on earth, but while China won 100 medals and 51 golds, India won 3. A gold in shooting and bronzes in boxing and wrestling. That works out to one medal per 300,000,000 Indians, I think? Obviously there are very different national priorities between China and India, and equally-obvious is the athletic dividends that can be reaped by a massive, well-financed, nation-wide training program. (Insert snide remarks about three year olds being taken from their parents and stuck into 12 hour a day training facilities, and scientific breakthroughs in undetectible performance-enhancing chemistry, if you must.)
Cameroon won 1 medal, a gold in women's triple jump. I like the winner's bio. "Coach: Herself." So is she like the hero of the country? Or are the Olympics entirely off their radar? And don't you picture her out practicing with a herd of gazelles, leaping into a pit she dug herself, while wearing tires for shoes? (Yes, I'm sure Cameroon has some lovely modern cities, etc. It's a joke.)
Carrying on that cultural imperialist theme of humor, Togo won a single medal, a bronze in Canoe/Kayak. And yes, I'm sure he practices in a boat he carved from a coconut tree, with some chickens and pigs riding shotgun for ballast.
Finally, it sounds like a joke but it's a reality; they're having problems in Korea since they have so few surnames. They long banned marriage between pepole with the same surname, and people are encouraged to invent new names when they marry, but family names and connections are culturally of great significance, so it's not been widely adopted. Check out their medal winners, and you'll see ample evidence. I count 11 Lee's, 8 Park's, 11 Kim's, and lots of other names that 4 or 5 people have, and that's out of their 71 winners. There are 4 Kim's and 6 Lee's just on their baseball team! Plus almost all the names are vey short, 3-5 letters. Odd the side effects long term non-immigration can have in some countries.
That's what the fascinating, ten-page article is called on the Village Voice website. I disagree; the moral I took away from the article is that the "church" has thousands of fanatically dedicated members who are willing to devote their lives to promoting their cult and attacking anyone who opposes it, and that they'll win almost every time, simply by tireless effort. They even beat the IRS, eventually.
Yeah, they lost this one case, but the $2.5m judgment was pennies to them, as effective as their shakedown operations are at bringing in new financing. It swelled to $8.7m with interest, since they spent $50m fighting the case for 10 years, but hell, Tom Cruise probably pays them that much every year to tell him he's special and that his magical powers are ever-increasing. Besides, the guy they paid it to had his life ruined and he hardly got a penny from it after all the legal fees and other miscellaneous shakedowns. Plus, Scientology only paid it at the last minute since another trial was about to get underway at which some more of their crazy internal documents were going to be put into the public record, and keeping that out of sight was (obviously) worth more than $9m to them.
Rather than getting too incensed by the crazy evil of their cult, I read the article the way I do all my reading about religion; by trying to see how it works for the people who are able to believe in it. What needs of human psychology does it meet? How does it help people cope with every day life, and how do this particular religion's manifestly false beliefs hold up in competition with objective reality? Not very well, I wouldn't think, but I found this bit fascinating. It's quoting the man who won the judgment against Scientology:
“OT III totally shatters the core sense of identity. The central concept of mind control is attacking the core personality, the threat that you are not who you think you are. At OT III, you find out that you’re really thousands of individual beings struggling for control of your body. Aliens left over from space wars that are giving you cancer or making you crazy or making you impotent. The reason for every bad thing in your life is these alien beings,” Wollersheim says. “I went psychotic on OT III. I lost a sense of who I was.”
Years can be spent removing these aliens—called “body thetans” or “BT’s”—by talking to and about these supposed hitchhiking entities while holding onto a device called an “e-meter.” “You’re talking to thousands of beings. They have histories. And anger. They’re complex personalities. I started drinking heavily to drown out the voices. I was non-functional, irrational, filthy. I wandered the streets of L.A. for three days. Finally I came enough to my senses to get in touch with Scientologists I knew.” He was cleaned up and calmed down, but Wollersheim was told that the solution to his troubles was just more auditing.
The power of belief and the way cults can get humans to believe almost anything, through successive brainwashing sessions, is well-demonstrated by this bit. The basic premise is farcical. I won't even dignify it by calling it unbelievable. Every human being is made up of thousands of invisible, unmeasurable alien souls, fighting within you and causing you to misbehave, is so stupid it's not even laughable. Talking snakes, and forbidden fruit trees of knowledge, and virgin births are laughable ideas, but they've got a certain mythic, archetypal power. The mythology of Scientology never even begins to rise to that level. Galactic Lord Xenu and all the rest sounds like something dreamed up by a bad science fiction writer... oh wait.
And yet, tens of thousands of people have been convinced to give up their free will and devote their lives to this uninspired madness. There's really no way humans will ever be free of religion, you know? Most people don't want to be, and for all that we can praise about the human brain and our capacity for logic and reason, we're too good at compartmentalizing. Devoutly religious people don't (often) drink poison and think it'll cure their cancer, or throw their money out the window believing it'll turn into solid gold birds. They're able to function in society since they apply normal rules of logic and reason and analysis to most areas of modern life. They're just able to switch that off when it comes to some set of foundational myths and beliefs, and through a weird inversion of logic and reason that I don't quite understand, they actually feel better, the weirder the magical beliefs they're able to take seriously.
Thus you get an intelligent, productive adult American who nearly kills himself because he loses his sense of self when presented with the foundational truth of the universe; that we're all puppets at the control of thousands of struggling, 70,000,000 year old alien souls. I just marvel at the groundwork required to support such an elaborate fantasy.
I go through phases where I feel I should stop drinking soda, and occasionally I do, for a few weeks. It never lasts though, since eventually I have a night where I really need the caffeine to stay up to work on some urgent project, or I just really want that cola taste to pair with fried food or pizza or nachos, and I gots to have a Pepsi, or sometimes a Dr. Pepper. (By the way, I'm typing this at 8am, 3 hours past when I wanted to be asleep, after working 8 straight hours. I'm starving since the peaches I meant to snack on at midnight are still sitting, unsliced, on the kitchen counter, and I'm now gobbling corn chips and washing them down with about a 1 to 3 mixture of mango juice and Tanqueray, which is hitting my empty stomach like a cannonball from the 10m platform. So um... beware typos. And brain-os. And pretty soon drunk-os.)
I'm not a big soda drinker; a day with 2 of them is very rare, but I just figure the empty 150 calories a can is pointless, when I work out so hard to keep a flat stomach. More or less successfully. But I'd like to be a not-soda drinker, so my idea lately is to try and switch to diet soda, as preparation to not drinking the stuff anymore. At least not at home. I can splurge once in a while in a restaurant, I suppose. Unfortunately, I've always hated diet soda. Fortunately, that's part of my plan. I'll drink it for a while and pretty soon I won't want soda anymore at all, since diet soda sucks.
My grandparents used to just Hoover (shop wet-vac?) up the stuff when I was a kid. I'd drink a Pepsi or three every day while visiting them in the summer, and they'd each go through 4-6 cans of Diet Coke. Mostly caffeine free Diet Coke. I was, of course, having the straight Pepsi, and they used to wonder why I was always so hyper. I'd try a sip of one of their Diet Cokes once in a while though, and it would almost make me puke. Literally; I don't mean I didn't like it, I mean that the stuff actually nauseated me. I read Stephen King's Tommyknockers when it was released in 1990 or so, and when the main character has to force himself to vomit after taking a bunch of sleeping pills, he pours a bunch of salt into a glass of water and drinks that. I used to wonder why he didn't just have a Diet Coke.
Anyway, impendingly-drunken digression aside, since I've sort of resolved to switch to diet soda, I figured I should compare and contrast. I know I like Pepsi more than Coke since I have Coke on airplanes and in restaurants from time to time, and it's just not as good. It's got a kind of malted, gooey flatness to it, while Pepsi is much crisper and fresher on the tongue. I may lapse into wine-inspired terms here in a minute. Be warned.
After checking the selection at CostCo this week, (Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke, but no Coke Zero) I stopped at a Mini Mart on the way home from the gym Thursday night, and picked these two up. Taste test!
I've heard word of mouth extolling the quaffability of Coke Zero, and their commercials are relentless in driving home the "tastes just like Coke" meme. (Actually, most of the Coke Zero commercials are those idiotic "we're suing ourselves for copyright/taste infringement" ones that I think are easily the dumbest beverage commercials since Budweiser had those non-threatening black guys bellowing "Wazzzzup". After a full football season of those ads, I swore never to drink Budweiser again, a vow not particularly hard to keep, giving the utter mediocrity of their brew. I'd probably have sworn off Coke Zero by now too, based on those stupid lawsuit, faux-reality commercials, if I'd watched TV anywhere other than on the overhead sets at the gym in the last year.)
So, supposedly Coke Zero tastes like Coke (although the fact that their commercials state it is pretty strong evidence that it does not). Ironically, I don't particularly like Coke, but I figured I might like it more than Diet Pepsi, so I had to compare. Hence the (plastic) bottles of Diet Pepsi and Coke Zero. I thought there was a Pepsi One product, at some point, though I don't know what the difference between that and Diet Pepsi might be. (I do know the difference between a big shot of 100 proof gin, or not, in my morning/late night mango juice is, though. Cause I am flying!) They didn't have it at the gas station, faux-7/11 I got my samples at, though, and they didn't have it at CostCo either, so let us never speak of it again. CostCo didn't have Coke Zero either, but that was almost to be expected, since their selection has rocketed downhill over the past year or two. At least 5 or 6 things I used to get there every time are no longer carried, and I do almost as much bulk shopping at Smart & Final as CostCo now. Not that Smart & Final is any good, and it's not as cheap, but since CostCo no longer sells chicken chili, vegetarian refried beans, jalapenos, red pepper flakes, battered chicken strips, canned peas, tater tots, poppers, onion rings, any frozen pizza that's not pepperoni or supreme, sliced black olives, Dr. Pepper, Shi'itake burgers, portobello mushrooms, or any fresh produce that's not 1) rotten in 2 days, or 2) totally green and never to become edibly-ripe, those of us who shop in bulk and live nowhere near a Wal-Mart (and wouldn't shop there if we did) have somewhat limited options.
So, the soda. Or something.
I had the Diet Pepsi Thursday night, pairing it with a variety of fried food appetisers (most of the Smart & Final options listed above) and a garden burger (which CostCo usually has, though brand keeps changing the the price keeps going up). It wasn't bad. Tasted like weak, slightly flat Pepsi, but it was drinkable and didn't have that horrifying chemical additive taste that diet soda usually has. I can't imagine drinking one by itself, just for the taste of it, but it didn't make me want to Tommyknockers all over the floor, and when I had a few inches left in the bottle after my food was done, I sipped it happily enough.
I had the Coke Zero the next day, with a similar menu (for the sake of comparison). It's much different. Tastes absolutely nothing like Coke, which didn't surprise me, after all the effort those commercials spend swearing that it was interchangeable with the American classic. I don't think it's on my old commercials logic page, but it's pretty much common sense; anything an ad spends that much time telling you is true, is sure to be false.
What does it taste like? I can't really describe it, despite my recent years of wine adjective training. It's shockingly artificial. Like something that fell from space, or was engineered to never spoil and to keep astronauts healthy on long voyages. It's not really food-like, and it doesn't taste organic. It's got a weird, slippery mouth feel too, kind of like mouthwash, as it slips down your throat without leaving any impression on your tongue. It's like some kind of high tech, biologically engineered hydralic solution, like something Data would drink to keep his interior joints squeak-free.
I don't mean this as an insult or a criticism, either. It's nothing like Coke, or any soda with actual sugar in it, but it's distinctive and unique, and it tastes like it's designed to taste like it does -- whereas most diet sodas just taste like lame, melted-ice versions of their full sugar selves. They didn't try to make Coke Zero just another cola-esque liquid; they made it something all its own. I didn't particularly like it, but I can imagine a person deciding they liked it, or growing/choosing to like it, with an intensity that most diet sodas will never know. It's potent and pungent and memorable, and 2 days and I can still remember exactly what it felt like in my mouth, and I'm sure I could pick it out of a blind taste test. Whereas I already have no idea what the Diet Pepsi tasted like, other than being a vaguely cola-ish stuff with a hint of that aspartame-tang sugar free products (and gum) all have these days. (Coke Zero is pure artificial sweetener taste. It leaves your mouth feeling like you just crammed a whole box of Orbitz.)
That said, I doubt I'll ever drink it again. It's just too chemically. I poured out the last 1/3 of it when my food was done, since drinking it was making me kind of uneasy. It didn't taste that bad, but it felt like it was going to give me cancer of the brain, or nasal passages, or something in that area.
So while I can't really recommend the Diet Pepsi, and I'm not sure if I'll buy some of it, or try to just survive on water alone, and the occasional beer (wine too, but not with greasy fried foods), I will not do Coke Zero. Don't trust it. Too weird.
I don't think this even registers on the surprise-o-meter, but it turns out that thing the rednecks had, that looked exactly like a rubber gorilla suit in a freezer... was actually a rubber gorilla suit in a freezer. Who could have guessed? Now the 2 hoaxers are laying low, ditching media appearances, claiming illness, etc.
In funnier news, someone's selling a Bigfoot trap on Ebay. Better yet, they claim it works on Santa Clauses and Sasquatches too. Not to mention 6 year old children.
One of the fun things I'm doing on the D3 site these days is running contests. We've recently received a bunch of loot from Blizzard, and it's been amusing to think up ways to pass it out, while including a few hoops for readers to leap through. I've long enjoyed very short story contests, so we're currently running an 11-word Diablo-themed story contest, along with a fan art contest, the entries for which are, unfortunately, pretty lame thus far. Also, just this morning I put up 4 Caption This! contests, which have more than 50 replies each so far, quite a few of which are amusing. (The #2 comment on this one is my favorite so far, but I don't think I could pick it to win just because it's so non-Diablo in theme.)
One of my favorite blog reading activities is to hit the caption this posts on D-listed, ideally about once a week, when I'm buzzed late one night. They get much funnier then, and since I've long planned to have regular Caption This posts on the D3 site, the contest was a nice way to get those started.
I've still got a bunch of the Tyrael mini-pet cards, and 5 Blizzcon tickets, so more contests are in the works. Next up? Probably an LOLDiablo caption contest. I'm just debating if I should limit it to some pre-selected images, or tell people they've got carte blanch to use any officially-released screen/art/wall/etc. Or perhaps I'll include D2 screens in it as well, so people can create their own. Thanks to the handy DIY software at I Can Has Cheeseburger, people won't even need Photoshop to enter.
There are few small bonuses in life more pleasurable than peering dubiously into the fridge, your belly rumbling, and finding two last pieces of leftover pizza you'd forgotten you had. Lunch mission = accomplished!
I imagine anyone who reads this site and cares about computer games has long since seen this news, but Flagship Studios is all but dead, and the people who built it have largely scattered to the winds. The first big group to (officially) start something new are the Flagship North guys, who were developing HGL's bastard stepchild, Mythos. (Which I always type "Muythos," for some semi-typo reason. That's Spanish for Verythos, if you're even less bilingual than me. Which wouldn't be a terrible name for a video game, actually.)
Mythos is gone from them since the intellectual property is owned by one of Flagship's creditors, and the entire (small) Flagship North team has moved on to found Runic Games. It's headed up by Travis Baldree, the former lead designer on Mythos, and Max Schaefer, one of the creators of the Diablo series, former head of Blizzard North, and founder if Flagship Studios. Max's brother Erich is also semi-officially part of their team, and they sound pretty likely to hire a few other Flagship refugees.
If you want more info about it, here are two recommended reads. This interview on IncGamers was mostly written by me. Rush asked me to provide some questions, and while I was in the middle of working up questions for the Ben Boos' Swords interview I took 10 minutes to brainstorm/type out some questions for the Runic Games guys. Rush added two more and sent them off, and while I didn't think much about them at the time, when I read the replies a couple of days later I found myself wincing. My co-workers told me they didn't think the questions were harsh, but they felt pretty merciless to me, on the reread. Perhaps only because the first four were directly probing inquiries about why the last three years of Travis' work had just been flushed down the toilet, thanks to the company-running incompetence of his semi-bosses. Here are the first two questions, which at least cut through the BS.
What happened with Mythos? The IP was sold and you guys have moved on? At present the Mythos IP is held in such a way that we have no access to it. It seems the best move for our team to dive straight into developing a new product, and put to use all that we've learned from the development of Mythos. This has an added advantage for us in that the Mythos IP really grew a little oddly over the course of development, given its inception as a network test. Starting anew gives us an opportunity to do the story and setting elements right, and with input from the whole team right at the outset.
Do you know if a new team is going to continue development of Mythos, and release it? At present I just don't know if that's going to happen. I will say that picking up work after the fact and taking it to completion is an extremely difficult task - there is a lot of shared knowledge in a game development team that exists there organically, and it's hard to go through rediscovery on a project of this complexity with a new crew. I don't have any real inside information, however.
There was another interview posted a couple of days later, and it reads like the transcript of a phone call, which allows more back and forth conversation. It's got more talk about what went wrong with Flagship, and is equally non-PR bullshiting.
And you say Flagship Studios did close? TB: Max, are they still kind of open? MS: It’s barely open. It’s just open enough to take care of the final affairs, but for all intents and purposes it’s closed down.
GameCyte: We'd figured as much, but all we'd had was a press release saying "We're still open! We still have our IP!" It's hard to tell what's actually going on. TB: It's a little bit of a new experience for all of us. (chuckles) We don't exactly know the 'proper' way to close down a company. First and foremost, we're just trying to take care of the debts and the employees in an orderly fashion, so Bill [Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios] and one or two other people have stuck around and are doing their best to get that done before we move on in different directions.
Sad for it all to end so badly, but as they say, everything ends badly, or it would keep going. At least I didn't waste a year and a half of my life working on something related to that company, only to receive zero return for my efforts. Oh wait...
This is so obviously a joke it's not worth the effort to mock, much less put forth any serious debunking efforts for. But it gave me a few laughs, so you might enjoy it too. A couple of hillbillies from Hog Waller, Georgia apparently ran out of hogs and/or sisters to screw, dun run through alla ther'un moonshine, and dun went and founded them a Bigfoot! For evidence they've got several contradictory discovery stories, a few blurry photos of a gorilla suit, and even an an irrelevant email from one-uv-them you-nee-vur-setty pointy heads. It must be true! Religions have been founded on less defensible evidence!
Anyway, with those bursts of phonetically-flawed mockery out of my system, here are a couple of amusing quotes from the "news" coverage.
Whitton and Rick Dyer, a former corrections officer, announced the discovery in early July on YouTube videos and their Web site. Although they did not consider themselves devoted Bigfoot trackers before then, they have since started offering weekend search expeditions in Georgia for $499. The specimen they bagged, the men say, was one of several apelike creatures they spotted cavorting in the woods.
As they faced a skeptical audience of several hundred journalists and Bigfoot fans that included one curiosity seeker in a Chewbacca suit, the pair were joined Friday by Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot.
...Biscardi fielded most of the questions. Among them: Why should anyone accept the men's tale when they weren't willing to display their frozen artifact or pinpoint where they allegedly found it? How come bushwhackers aren't constantly tripping over primate remains if there are as many as 7,000 Bigfoots roaming the United States, as Biscardi claimed?
"I understand where you are coming from, but how many real Bigfoot researchers are out there trekking 140,000 miles a year?" Biscardi said.
Um... what? Is that an argument for or against? Also, do the math on that? 140,000 / 365 = 383 miles a day. You wonder how he's got time to stop for publicity stunt press conferences with that sort of daily marathon schedule.
The whole thing is patently stupid, though. For one thing, it's funny how the media is all skeptical and suspicious and asking hard questions. Meanwhile, they greeted Dubya and company's stories about all of Saddam's nukes, and the precise locations of his WMDs, with nothing but the gravest silence and respect. If the media treated all utterances from politicians with the same skepticism that they do press releases from Bigfoot "researchers," this country would be an such better shape.
As for the Bigfoot stuff... please. Imagine you actually had found the freshly-killed carcass of an unknown higher primate. How would you go about presenting it? Even assuming you dared to touch it, and didn't just call 911 on the spot, and that you dragged it home and stuck it in a freezer... what would your next step be? Offering $500 backwoods tours to credulous fools? Holding press conferences armed only with painfully lame photos? Of course not. Those are the sorts of things that only people who have no real story or body or evidence would do.
The real story about this non-event would be what and why and how is in the human brain and pop culture consciousness that this sort of thing can get media coverage. What if they'd said they'd found a unicorn? Or the Loch Ness Monster? Or a noodly appendage from the FSM? Those would be just as believable of claims, and I think they would be almost unreported upon. Would even the local paper show up to cover that? Even on a slow weekend when we're all heartily sick of negative ads against Barack Obama, positive speeches by Barack Obama, and occasional mentions of that old guy he's running against.
Just a couple of videos I watched tonight that were worth sharing. You can't embed them; you've got to go to the NBC site and attest that you've got some local cable service before they'll let you watch. If you're outside the US and want to cheat, just say zip code 94518, Concord California, Comcast, and your local market is SF, and you should be allowed in.
Anyone following the Olympics has heard endlessly about Michael Phelps quest to win 8 golds in this games, which would break Mark Spitz's record of 7 from about 36 years ago. (They're calling Phelps' golds the "Great Haul of China." Yes, you may groan.) Phelps has already shattered the lifetime gold medal total, with one event to go this year and firm plans to keep training and compete in 2012. Sure, the most career medals is sport-dependent; you've got to be a sprinter, a swimmer, or a gymnast to have a shot at it since you can pick up 4 or 5 per games in those sports. (The all time record of 18 total is by a female gymnast.) So sure, some sports have a chance to win multiple medals, but it's not like it's easy to be the best sprinter, swimmer, or gymnast in the world. Much less to do it twice, four years apart. Or thrice, eight years apart. You don't see too many Olympic champions in such sports past the age of about 25. Or 20, when it comes to female gymnastics these days. Or 14, when it comes to the Chinese female gymnasts.
On the other hand, there are some sports that are finesse and precision based, and don't require the speed and strength only available from 20 year old lungs and legs. Check out this Hungarian fencer. He won medals in 1932, 1936, 1948, 1952, 1956, and 1960. Seven golds total, and if there had been Olympics in 1940 or 1944, his total would surely have been higher. I don't think we'll see Michael Phelps churning out 200m butterfly world records in his 50s. (Then again, a female US swimmer qualified first for the women's 50m freestyle, and she's 41.)
Phelps has come out on top in two amazing races thus far.
The mens 100m freestyle relay was widely-called the best relay race in the history of the Olympics. Phelps led off and the US team was in the lead after the second swimmer, but the third guy was slower and the 4th French swimmer was a rocket for the first 50m, and had damn near a body length lead. The annoying, screaming, jingoistic US announcer said, "The US should hold on for silver." with about 30m to go, since the French anchor swimmer was so far ahead. And then it started to look like he was dragging an anchor, his big lead shrank remarkably, and the US swimmer, Jason Lesak, just Jaws'ed him over the last half length of the pool and out a victory for the team by .08 seconds. Thus keeping alive Phelps' chances of setting the all time Olympic record of golds in a single games. You can not watch the last 30 seconds of the race without saying, "No way. No way!" as the huge lead fades and the crowd roars.
Phelps' seventh gold came in an even closer race in the 100m butterfly, and one with perhaps an even more amazing finish. I just watched this one about five times, and I'm still not sure how he caught up. The Serbian swimmer was a good half body length ahead with about 25m to go, and he was swimming well. He didn't choke it away like the Frenchman in the freestyle relay. He was well ahead with just a meter to go! But he took his last stroke and glided for the wall, while Phelps took another full butterfly stroke and in the process of whipping his arms around he covered the last arm's length faster than the Serbian swimmer covered the last hand's length, and Phelps won by .01 seconds. It looked like he lost. There was no way he won. Until they showed the super slow motion overhead camera, and you could see that yeah, he actually did it. How he didn't break his hands hitting the concrete wall of the pool at that speed, I don't know, but he just wanted it more than the Serbian guy, who had the lead and should have, by all rights, won it.
In non-video news, I was surprised to see that the Olympics is dropping women's softball after these games. Actually, I think I was surprised to see that women's softball was an Olympic sport at all, but it won't be after this month's festivities conclude. Some research informed me that softball was introduced in 1996, so this is only the 4th Games for it, and it looks like the American domination of it has spelled its doom. The US women lost a few games in the preliminary rounds in 1996, but still won the Gold. They went undefeated in 2000, and have really found their stride since then. In 2004 they won every game and outscored their opponents by a total of 51-1. So far this time they're 5-0, and have won by scores of 11-0, 3-0, 7-0, 8-1, and 7-0. That's 36-1, if you're wondering, with 3 games yet to play.
I want to feel sorry for them losing their sport, but ehh... If this sort of article is the best partisans can do to persuade me, I'm not shedding any tears. The big news in it is that the international softball federation is working to encourage people to play the game worldwide. They sent $2m total to 91 countries the last few years, to spread the game! Yes, that's two million dollars. To 91 countries. Over several years. Meanwhile there are probably 50 US universities that spend that much per year on their women's softball program.
If a sport isn't truly international, and one country always dominates it, I'm okay with it not being in the Olympics. There are plenty of odd sports in the Winter Olympics that are utterly unknown in most of the world (as is snow, which is why the Summer Olympics are such a bigger deal than the Winter), but so long as Norway, Sweden, Finland, and a few other Viking-esque countries are fighting furiously for the 10kg curling gold medal, that's cool. In retrospect, the US women would have been wiser to claim monthly issues and sit a few starters the last couple of times 'round. Would it have killed them to drop a couple of 3-2's to Japan and China in the preliminary rounds? I think not, and if they had they might still be underhand fast pitching and sliding into second in shorts in 2012 in Moscow, or wherever the hell the Olympics are next time.
Just to show I'm not only watching/following sports that the US wins (it's actually hard to find other ones with exciting finishes, since only the ones the US wins get written up on US sports sites, and I don't care enough to search widely, or sit through hours of odd sporting events through the online feeds), check out the men's archery gold medal match. It features a Ukranian against a Korean, and try not to read the caption on the page if you click to it, since it's got an amazing surprise finish, with a choke by one guy and a clutch shot by the other. And since it's not a sport that was shown on US TV, there's no narration or interruption at all, which is nice after enduring that screaming idiot during the swimming. I'd much rather watch the direct camera feed from the arena, with the huge block of Korean fans chanting boisterous and well-rehearsed patriotic anthems between rounds.
Finally, speaking of things I'd much rather watch... hoofah. I defy any heterosexual male to make it through this 1:13 of beach volleyball cheerleaders without your mouth sagging agape. Eight hot girls in matching bikinis and swiveling hips = sensory overload. They put the overly-costumed, grossly-cosmetic'ed, usually butter-faced cheerleaders you see at most pro sporting events to shame.
So, long time no blog. No real excuse; I've been busy running the Diablo 3 site, making a lot of forum posts, writing the wiki, setting up the columnists and editing their submissions, and working on a detective novel I'm writing with my dad. I have been doing a fair amount of blog-style writing, but it's been via email for an audience of one, since the I.G. has been out of town on her summer project for 2 months, and with not much else do to at night, and in need of distraction from the papers she had to write to earn credit for her ordeal, she's been quite finger (and voice) chatty.
None of that excuses me from at least managing semi-frequent updates here, though. Oh well, if you want a refund, I'll send it right over.
It's lame to, since I've had a lot of interesting stuff to blog about. And I've got a bunch of reviews to post; I have read a few of the literary classics I threatened to read when the summer began, and they're quite ripe for discussion. I wrote notes for them and squeezed them into my ratings matrix, so at some point I'll flesh them out and post them. Today though, I'm just going to throw up a few tidbits about this and that.
The Olympics have begun, and while I've not had TV since last fall (I have TV, but don't want cable and don't care enough to buy an antenna, so it's just a DVD-watching device), I've seen some of the coverage online. NBC actually has a really good online option. A great option really, one that's considerably better than watching them on TV. You can see almost every event live, without any announcers or commercials. And you can see almost every past event in its entirety, also without announcers or commercials.
To watch, go to the NBC Olympics video page, and just click on anything. You get a pop up window with a good sized video screen, and navigation that lets you select every event in the Olympics. Each event then has dozens of videos to view, far more than you'd ever see on TV. You'll want to fast forward liberally though, since it's just a straight satellite feed and between events you get 10 minutes of random shots of the crowd, of referees talking with their heads close together, of workers rearranging the equipment, etc. It's just like being in Beijing yourself! Minus the smog and occasional deranged, homicidal, suicidal, knife-wielding locals.
I watched a variety of events; basketball, swimming, the opening ceremonies replay (shut up Bob Costas), and the ones I actually wanted to see; fencing and Taekwondo. The fencing is ridiculous; there's no vestige of actual sword play in the sport. Saber is the worst of the 3 forms, since everything above the waist is a scoring zone, and since they're pretending the electrified car antennas they're using for "weapons" are cutting blades, any sort of contact scores. The sport breaks down to a lot of twitching and pacing, until both guys (or girls) lunge and whoever hits the other a millisecond before they are stabbed themselves, wins.
Some of the female foil fencing was better, since the foil only counts if you get a stab, so there's some defense and blocking in close. A few times both women would end up face to face, trying to poke each other with weird "elbow bent by their ear" moves, like a pool player trying to hit straight down on a cue ball against the rail. Which is, of course, ridiculous in any form of actual combat, but at least it was entertaining on TV. Computer.
Unlike the TKD, which, under the Olympic scoring rules, was outright farcical. No pushing, no punching, no grappling, etc. Just kicking. Hitting the huge chest pad is worth 1 point, and hitting the helmet is worth 2 points. The arms do nothing in the sport, and the less skilled combatants often ended up basically sumo suit wrestling (minus the laughs and dog piling when someone fell), while trying to do these absurd little half hopping kicks to the side, in hopes that they might graze the life vest-style chest padding.
Nutshell version: Olympic TKD is to actual martial arts as Olympic fencing is to an actual sword fight as Tyra Banks wandering around LA in old clothes with a camera crew is to actually being homeless.
I wonder why, though? They have real boxing in the Olympics, after all. True, they wear very padded gloves and headgear, and the fights are only a few rounds so the endurance and strategy of real boxing isn't a big factor, but there's actual hitting and occasional knockouts. They don't stand 10 feet apart and wear space suits and sensor-equipped gloves, and engage in some fist-based version of TKD/fencing, where the goal is just to touch your opponent in a scoring zone an instant before they touch you. You try that hopping, touching-for-a-score bullshit in boxing, you get laid out, since it's actual combat, and power and accuracy and impact matters. Which makes me wonder how Olympic TKD and Judo and fencing have become such effete, reality-divorced displays, when they all started out as actual forms of combat? Dunno, but it's sad, and a somewhat painful viewing experience.
I've got a lot less to say about this, but I highly recommend reading it. It's a nicely-detailed, inside-researched article about how Hillary Clinton achieved such an epic fail in the Democratic primaries. She came in almost as the presumptive nominee, with all the name recognition, all the money, all the media coverage, the ex-president husband, etc. And through poor planning, lack of strategy, constant adviser in-fighting, and just general incompetence, she let Obama snatch the pony out from beneath her.
I read political blogs every day, but I hadn't followed the gruesome details of the campaigns all that closely, so it was great to read such a well-researched article that could effectively summarize six months of conflict in 5 short pages.
Finally, I saw these pics today, while doing the first gossip blog surfing I'd done in at least a week. (I was too tired after a long bike ride to do anything but slouch at the computer and move my mouse hand.) They're shots of the Jonas Brothers (who are apparently famous, in a boy band sort of way. I've no idea where they came from, but I'd assume some Disney show.) at an Mtv show, and the teenaged girls sitting near them going completely out of their minds. Turning red, sobbing, shaking hysterically, etc.
This is not a new phenomena, of course. It's been epidemic since at least Beetlemania and Elvismania, but it's not one I understand. Leaving aside the cheap joke material of comparing the flavor-of-the-week teenie-bopper Jonas Brothers to the Fab Four, what is it in adolescent girls that causes this sort of behavior?
It seems to be age or maturity-related; younger girls get squealy and hyper, and adult women might salivate, but they don't turn red and faint. It's some combination of post-puberty hormones, repressed sexual energy, Prince Charming fantasies, and some other things I don't know about and probably never will, having grown up with entirely different plumbing and psychology.
