Errata

Correcting misinformation from previous posts and episodic adventure games.

Look: you made some mistakes, I made some mistakes. When you’re arrogant enough to assume that what you write is worth putting up on the internet, one of the biggest disadvantages is that occasionally you’re going to write stuff that just plain isn’t true.

It bugs me to be spreading misinformation, even on a low-traffic blog like this one. I rewrite and/or correct it in the post if I catch it soon enough, but that has a feel of revisionist history that’s a little unsettling to me. So here are my corrections to recent posts. Apologies for any inconvenience:

  • Writing about “The Mighty Boosh,” I said that they do all the animation themselves. That’s because I believed it when BBC’s YouTube site said “animation by Noel Fielding.” The making-of documentaries on the Boosh box set (which comes highly recommended, if you can watch Region 2 DVDs) give proper credit to the pair of animators who do the titles and cartoons for the series. The animations are based on Fielding’s drawings, which is still impressive but not as unbelievable as having to write and star in a series and do a few minutes of animation for each episode.
  • Sienna is southwest of Florence, not southeast.
  • Writing about Metacritic scores and designer Soren Johnson’s defense of them, I spent several paragraphs trying and failing to explain my problem with his post in detail, when the real problem is that I disagree with his entire assumption: that developers need an objective metric for quality. I should’ve just said that this isn’t true and been done with it. “Quality” is inherently subjective; you can get objective metrics for sales figures, return rates, even reviewer scores, but those aren’t quality. Assuming that quality is tied to popularity is poisonous to any creative medium.
  • When I claimed that Ann Coulter is a 1000-year-old attention-seeking hag who bathes in the blood of children and is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the American media, that was incorrect. Ms. Coulter is 47.
  • In all my posts about my trip to Italy, I forgot to include my treatise on bus and train tickets. In brief: it’s confusing, but not nearly as bad as the tour books make it sound. You have to get tickets validated before you board the bus or train, but there are no BART-like mag stripes or fare deductions like I’d been expecting. All the yellow validation boxes do is print the current time & station on the ticket, to show where you got on, nothing magical or electronic. I wish somebody had explained this to me before I left, so I’m including it here as a public service.
  • The Apollo 12 mission was not besieged by moon bears immediately on landing, resulting in a life-threatening mauling of Commander Pete Conrad that was subsequently covered up by NASA. It was just lens flare in one of the photos.
  • Also about The Mighty Boosh: I said earlier that it was impossible to explain the appeal, but several British & American comedians explain the appeal very well in the making-of documentary “A Journey Through Time and Space.” The biggest appeal is that the series isn’t cynical or mean-spirited at all, but it’s not vapid or toothless or dated, either. It’s confident enough to be completely silly without being self-conscious. They heap abuse on themselves, but it’s not so much that it’s tiresome self-deprecation. And whenever they parody someone or something outside the immediate cast, it’s clear that they really like it. They’re not making fun of everything, they’re having fun with everything, and there aren’t enough people doing that.

Edited to add some errata from videogames:

  • Inflammable means the same thing as flammable
  • Apparently, it’s not particularly cold in the Ukraine. Who knew?