November « 2007 « Spectre Collie

Thursday November 29 2007 The Internet

They grow so that we don't have to

I found out too late that this year’s Whiskerino had already started, and I was ineligible on account of being goateed at the time.

Cause I totally would’ve been up for a four-month beard-growing contest. There’s no part of that that doesn’t sound like a straight-up fun time explosion. Two or three weeks of being all itchy, followed by at least two months of not being able to wear shirts with collars or jackets with zippers. Getting hairs in your mouth. Finding stray threads, or bits of lint, or crumbs. Possibly grossest of all: beard dandruff.

And in my case: spending a few weeks looking like a werewolf in mid-transition, and then having half your face come out solid Gandalf-white before you’ve even hit 40. I usually can’t last more than three weeks before it drives me nuts and I have to get to trimming. And I think the longest I’ve gone is three months before I have to shave it all off. I spend the whole time being reminded that man evolved to use tools for a reason.

Of course, I suspect that the thing is really just an excuse for talented photographers to take wacky pictures of themselves. There’s some hilarious stuff out there; my favorites are from wiseacre photo (plus the official entries) and dubstyle (more here).

And really, isn’t it every guy’s right to make an ass of himself on the internet? Maybe next year I’ll have the stones to step up.

Comment on this Post

Monday November 26 2007 Battlestar Galactica

All of this I've seen before, and I will watch it all again.

I got back from Thanksgiving to find the “Battlestar Galactica: Razor” movie waiting for me. On a scale of 1 to 10 I’d rate it radical. (For comparison, the episode where they get off of New Caprica rates a holy crap that was wicked awesome, and the one where Starbuck gets kidnapped on a farm rates a 3).

Really, it only earns a “radical” for showing the old-school Cylon Centurions, and for dropping a few bombs as to the overall storyline, with Starbuck’s “destiny” and the Cylons’ plot. But the rest of the movie suffered, because it did the stuff the series doesn’t usually do — show big set pieces and the details of “side” stories. There’s a sequence where a bunch of Cylons attack the Pegasus at a shipyard, and it is pretty impressive, but it mostly serves of a reminder of how well the series conveys an epic space battle without actually showing the space battle.

And it’s the same for the story. We already knew that Admiral Cain was a bitch, from when she was on the series. The movie just revealed that wait, no really, she was a total bitch. There’s a half-assed attempt by Adama at the end of Razor to say that “I’m not sure I would’ve done differently in her situation,” but that just seemed like a feeble attempt to add depth and moral ambiguity to a character that had neither. And in the end, it made the whole Pegasus story seem smaller and less interesting. The more they show of the spacefights, the more you realize how small and forgettable they are; the more they show of the characters, the more you realize how two-dimensional and unlikeable most of them are, and how all the plot threads are a little convoluted and flimsy.

I mentioned that when I first saw seasons 1 and 2, I saw most of the episodes out of order, and missed a couple. As a result, I had the sense that everything was much larger and deeper than it really is. The show excels at suggesting more depth and scope than is really there; when you watch everything in order, it starts to stretch the plausibility.

For instance, I know that there are only 12 Cylon models, so it makes sense to keep seeing the same ones over and over again. But how come there are over 40,000 humans, but there are still only 4 or 5 people in the military? We keep seeing and hearing other ones, but it still comes back to Apollo and Starbuck being called in as not just the best pilots in the fleet, but the only ones capable of acting as bouncers for a summit meeting, hostage negotiators, mining facility inspectors, secret raids on Cylon Base Stars, etc.

There was a scene in Razor where they assembled the entire good guy cast into one place to stare at a spaceship on green screen, and it was kind of comical. You could almost hear the actors’ cars in the parking lot, their engines still running. This set up a cool plot element for the final season, and it tied into the “web episodes” pretty well, but it still suffered from the syndrome of having about 4 people in the entire galaxy to which everything of any significance happens.

But it ultimately doesn’t matter, of course. I’m still going through the episodes on DVD in order, and I’m still enjoying the hell out of them. I’d feel a little better if we didn’t have to wait until March for the final season to start, but at the rate I’m going, it’ll probably take me that long to get caught up.

2 Comments

Saturday November 24 2007 Personal

Thanksgiving, cont'd

I spent most of actual Thanksgiving digesting and being thankful for the traditional stuff — the health of my family and friends, having pretty much exactly the job I’ve wanted for over a decade and as far as I’m aware I’m keeping it despite the wishes of several people on the internets, and the fact that the world hasn’t completely blown up yet.

The day after Thanksgiving is reserved for being thankful for gross consumer excess and frivolous entertainment. Considering I’m always bitching about stuff on here, including the stuff I like a lot since I can’t seem to stop criticizing, it should be a nice change of pace.

The iPhone
I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that I paid a bit more than was necessary for this thing. But once you get past that — especially now, since it’s been reduced to “really expensive” instead of “holy crap you’ve got to be kidding me” — it’s pretty neat.

Especially for plane flights. I’m not having to fly as much as I was last year (another thing for which I’m extremely thankful), but plane flights back to Georgia are still 4 hours long, and there’s only so much time even I can spend sitting staring at nothing. On the way out here, I watched three episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” on the thing, and the picture is startlingly clear, and the sound is even better than watching from home. (Trucks are constantly passing in front of my apartment, and the Edward James Olmos, he tends to mutter). The picture’s at least as good as the Sony PSP’s, if not better, and it just makes more sense to lug the phone around than a videogame player that has only two good games for it. Plus, even if the phone didn’t have a longer battery life than my laptop, it’s a lot easier to deal with than a computer and DVDs. The seats on economy flights are so cramped these days, I can’t even unfold the laptop all the way.

And three hours of video fit on the thing, even the 4GB version, in addition to over 700 songs. For the seven-hours-including-layover flight back to SF, I’m loading the phone up with Minority Report, which I’ve ever seen, plus more episodes of “Battlestar” and “Flight of the Conchords.”

The iPhone SDK
This is still tentative, but the optimistic part of me is already thankful for it. Since all the stuff the device does works this well, I’m looking forward to seeing the stuff the device can do. And Apple finally did what they should’ve done months ago, and announce that they are indeed planning on releasing an SDK for the phone.

It can all still go horribly awry, of course, when we learn that you’re kept from accessing any of the data or private storage of the phone, or you have to pay some obscene developer’s fee to develop for it, or you can only release stuff through the iTunes store or some nonsense. But there’s still a chance they’ll do things right. And it’s still a lot better than having them lie to us with nonsense about bringing down the cell network, or telling us how sweet it is to make web apps for a device with a slow internet connection.

30 Rock
Alec Baldwin’s performance a few weeks ago is probably the best 2 minutes of television this year. And even the MSNBC caption scrawls from the Edie Falco episode (“Mysterious Visitor from Future Wins Lottery Yet Again”) are funnier than 90% of the other stuff on television. Points go to their Lifetime movie parody, as well, if only for the title: “A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me a Better Face So I Could Change the World: The Celeste Cunningham Story”. Loss of “30 Rock” is about the only genuine reason people should be upset about the writers’ strike, and reason enough for the networks to capitulate.

Lobster Johnson
This is a new series based on a character that’s been in backup stories in the Hellboy and BPRD comics. And it takes all the potential that’s been bouncing around all the other comics and finally realizes it: a pulp adventure about supernatural evil that’s got some of the humor of The Amazing Screw-On Head, the epic feeling of Hellboy, and the Shadow-inspired team stuff of BPRD.

Plus, Jason Armstrong’s art is outstanding. He doesn’t slavishly mimic Mike Mignola’s style, but it still feels very much like a Hellboy comic that’s been put into a blender with the whole of comic book art history. Even better, he uses a style exactly when it’s needed — you’ll see characters with Mignola-style hands and Jack Kirby-inspired faces, plus I’m sure several other artists I can recognize but can’t pinpoint exactly what’s the influence. The end result is that you get the mood of a Hellboy comic, but you can actually follow what’s going on.

Teen Titans Volume 2
The DC Showcase series is a great idea that turns out to be disappointing in practice — for those of us who are more readers than collectors, it’s the chance to see all this comic book history that we missed, with all of the stories compiled in one affordable place. But as it turns out, the stories were never all that deep in the first place. And you’re not actually missing out on all that much by reading a synopsis online.

Except for Teen Titans, and that’s almost entirely due to Bob Haney. The man just knew how to make a shamelessly pandering, goofy comic book story and make it more awesome than it had any right to be. Volume 2 is lighter on his stuff than Volume 1 was, and as the comic moved into the late 60s and early 70s, it lost some of that goofy innocence of the early 60s. Still, I doubt you’re going to find anything that’s as just plain fun to read as these Teen Titans collections.

The Outstanding Videogame Glut of 2007
I can’t remember the last time so many great games were released in the same year. At least not since the Dreamcast’s golden year. Game of the Year for me is still Team Fortress 2 and The Orange Box in general, but Bioshock and Super Mario Galaxy were both outstanding enough that if they’d been the only good thing out this year, it would’ve been a banner year.

And I haven’t even gotten around to playing much of Final Fantasy Tactics or Jeanne d’Arc for the PSP, or The Phantom Hourglass for the DS, or the Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword expansion on the PC. Then there’s the list of games that I keep hearing are great, but for the first time I can remember, I’m not buying any more games until I actually have time to play them. I’m even still spending time with the latest Sims 2 expansion, and that game’s at the point in its life cycle where it’s supposed to suck.

The best aspect to it all is that the success of The Orange Box and Bioshock have invalidated all my long-winded worrying about the death of storytelling in games. Stories aren’t getting squeezed out of games, they’re just getting started.

3 Comments

Thursday November 22 2007 Movies

In the event no actual movies are available, the Internet may be used as a substitute.

They’ve been warning us for years that the onslaught of digital distribution, torrents, iTunes, rental-by-mail services, and the new entertainment-in-pill-form (not available in some markets) was going to change everything. What they failed to warn us about were all the tragic implications of the entertainment glut.

Case in point: there are currently movies by Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers showing in theaters available for anyone to watch, but I have yet to see either. Instead, I watched The Omen: 666 the other night, just for the sake of getting my Netflix queue moving again. Other stuff I’ve watched since those movies have been released: the unforgivably abysmal Highlander: The Source on Sci-Fi; four episodes of the TV show “Ghost Hunters;” an episode of “Ace of Cakes” (that I’d already seen!); 300 again, only to see if the Blu-Ray made things better (it doesn’t); Superman II, to see if it’s as good as I remember it (it definitely isn’t); and Ratatouille to see the new short (awesome) and to see how long I could last until the objectivist undertones made me turn it off (about 20 minutes).

So I can’t really make the argument that I’m avoiding the theaters because there’s good stuff to watch at home. To be fair, though, it’s usually more exciting to read about movies on the internet than it is to actually watch them. The potential energy of the DOOM trailer could have powered a city, provided that city used engines running on perceived awesomeness. The reality couldn’t have sparked a penlight. So here’s more stuff on the internet about movies!

There’s a new trailer for Cloverfield (previously just called “1-18-08″ or “Untitled J.J. Abrams Project”) that’s not only renewed my interest, but has got me even more excited. The teaser was so indescribably cool that I’d put myself on a media blackout for the movie, afraid that finding out too much about it would pour cold water over everything. But it looks like the “filmed on home camcorder” gimmick is used throughout the entire thing, which is a brilliant idea: it’s a first-person monster movie! I’m predicting it’s the one really great scene from War of the Worlds (the flaming train), repeated over and over again. Or, it’s The Blair Witch Project with a big budget and CGI. But I still have a month and a half to be optimistic.
Kevin Smith’s blog has a post about his crush on Seth Rogen and the casting for his movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno that would be so over-the-top gushing and self-effacing you’d think it was impossibly phony, if not for three things: 1) Kevin Smith’s turned self-effacing into an industry; 2) It’s nice to believe that at some level, it’s still possible for Hollywood to break down to just people working on stuff they’re fans of; and 3) Seriously, who doesn’t love Seth Rogen? He’s got pretty much the same aura as Kevin Smith himself, which is that whether his work is brilliant or not, you just can’t help rooting for the guy.
For the record, The Omen: 666 wasn’t all that bad, considering. But that may be just because I think the original is one of the stupidest movies ever made. It’s basically two hours of dozens of people telling Gregory Peck his son is the Antichrist, and his being too dense to catch on (“Hmm, no, I’m still just not seeing it.”). At least the remake was slightly more plausible, in that Julia Stiles really did seem like she didn’t like the kid. And Liev Schreiber came across as more of just an uptight overprivileged white guy than a total idiot. So in short, the remake was inessential, but if you’re going to insist on making a remake of The Omen, they did about as good a job as you can possibly do.
Rome isn’t a movie, but I feel obligated to mention it again since I was ragging on it earlier. Once you get a few hours into it, it’s really engrossing and very good. The production values were high enough to cancel it after two years, and they remain high throughout. But what really sells it is exactly the kind of thing you only get from episodic storytelling: a story that feels epic and ridiculously detailed, simply due to repetition and the ability to see a bunch of “smaller” scenes. You don’t see huge battles on this show, but you see how the battles affect the dozens of people the story follows. It also bugged me in the first few episodes how much of the stories seemed to be based on random chance or coincidence, but they had Caesar explicitly mention that in one episode, which makes it okay. In fact, that’s one of the themes of the series, how fate pulls Pullo and Vorenus into making a huge impact on Roman history. Plus: frequent nudity.
The short film “Your Friend the Rat” that comes on the Ratatouille DVD is excellent. It feels like the Pixar guys got the chance to throw every possible style of animation and art style at the thing, and it’s just bursting with the feeling of a ton of absurdly creative people finally getting an outlet for their talent. It feels a lot like the classic Disney shorts of the 70s, and even a little like “Schoolhouse Rock,” in that it’s not afraid to bounce all over the place in different styles. I think that alone was worth the cost of the DVD.

So this Thanksgiving weekend, I’m in Georgia at my parents’ house without much to do. Am I going to see The Darjeeling Limited or No Country for Old Men or even Beowulf, or am I going to read the same RSS feeds and watch hours of the worst programming the Food network and Sci-Fi channel have to offer? (Note: if you’re the betting type, odds are strongly in favor of the second one.)

Comment on this Post

Wednesday November 21 2007 Videogames

You Can't Go to World 1-1 Again

I took advantage of the weekend and nights sneaking out of the office just after dark, to play some of Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii. I’m about 31 stars in, and I’ve come to two conclusions: 1) It deserves all the perfect reviews it’s been getting, and 2) I’m old.

Now, it doesn’t take much to remind me of my increasing decrepitude these days, but with Super Mario Galaxy, it’s a double whammy. First because I keep getting shown that my reflexes are less suited to running upside down and having to jump on top of things than they are to watching “Matlock.” Second because I can still vividly remember playing Super Mario 64 for the first time, and I’m not getting that same feeling from this one.

Not because Galaxy is a worse game by any stretch, but just because it’s not the same. Playing Mario 64 wasn’t just a revelation; it was one revelation after another. Just running around outside the castle and leaping off of trees was about as close to pure concentrated fun that you’re ever going to see in a game. And each new secret area you found or level you opened was a real discovery — wait, there’s an underwater level and a secret haunted castle in this game?!? No way!

Galaxy throws so much stuff at you, it’s every bit as big and varied as Mario 64, if not more so. I’m not even halfway through the game yet, and I’ve already played at least a dozen different types of games (flying around in a bee suit, running on top of a rolling ball, surfing on the back of a manta ray) and seen even more in screenshots. And just the basic stuff it throws at you is impressively brain-bending: you spend the opening levels running all around planetoids in the midst of a field of space junk, jumping between the gravitational pull of different planets without being sucked into a black hole.

Not to mention that most of it is set to space adventure music with cool entry sequences for each level where Mario flies through space encircled by comets. It all reminds me of that early-80s-at-Epcot-Center stage, when space travel had just matured past the awkward late 70s but was still pretty cool.

If I were to write a transcript of my game so far (minus the frequent swearing) and send it to myself ten years in the past, I don’t think I would’ve believed it. And I’m sure I would’ve said that it’s the best videogame ever made.

But the grizzled version of me just keeps noticing how the camera is never quite where I need it to be to keep me from getting sucked into a black hole or hit by a Koopa charging at me. Or that there’s clearly a line of coins leading to some secret level, but I don’t have the time or patience to be running after that kind of stuff. Or that I’m sure there’s already videos of kids on YouTube who’ve gotten perfect timed runs in this level or managed to find all 50 coins, but I don’t have any interest in duplicating that achievement. Or that there’s something vaguely disturbing about dressing up in a bee suit and running all over the thorax of a giant moaning queen bee. Or that that stupid Cosmic Mario clone keeps racing me and he cheats like a bastard.

Or really, that I’m past the age of the perfect audience for this game. Nintendo’s got the right idea with the Wii, of course, and they’ve done another fantastic job with a Mario game that genuinely appeals to all ages; I can’t think of any other videogame that has such universal appeal. So I’m in the audience, I’m just not the perfect audience, the people who open up another level and realize that they’re seeing something unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.

2 Comments

Saturday November 17 2007 Disney, Videogames

Hooray for stuff I worked on!

I’m starting to regret all that stuff I said earlier about videogames being non-union, because a writer’s strike would be pretty sweet right about now. Not because I have anything in particular to protest, but because it’d be nice to get a little break. Yet another problem with doing exactly what I want to be doing while working for a company I like.

The first episode of Sam & Max season two, “Ice Station Santa” has been released to generally favorable reviews, and it sounds like the audience is liking it pretty much.

Also, a while ago I mentioned that you could get “Abe Lincoln Must Die!” from the first season for free over GameTap; now you can get it for free from Telltale’s site or via Steam, if that’s how you roll. It’s a pretty good indicator of what the games are like, and a good free test to see whether you like old-school point-and-click adventures still.

In unrelated news, the Kim Possible playtest at Epcot that I worked on last year just won a THEA award for Outstanding Achievement, which I hear is the Theme Park industry equivalent of an Oscar. So congratulations to Jonathan and the rest of the team at Imagineering R&D! The playtest was one of the coolest things I’ve seen at a Disney park in over a decade, so I think the award was well-deserved. I’m really looking forward to seeing (and playing) what they do with the technology in the future; there’s so much potential there and I’d like to go through it just as a park guest.

Now, I’m going to spend the next day or so doing stuff completely not Sam & Max-related for a change.

Comment on this Post

Saturday November 3 2007 Apple

You had me at bienvenido

As expected, I used the money Apple overcharged me for my phone to get OS X Leopard, and I’ve been really impressed with it so far. I don’t agree with most of the criticisms that have been made against it — I actually like the new Dock — and I think in just about every category, it’s an unqualified improvement. In some cases, an outstanding improvement.

But I’m kind of easy to please, since I was sold from the moment I saw the installation movie. (You can see it at the bottom “It’s hot” link in the Ars Technica review by John Siracusa. I don’t want to link to it directly). Is it shallow to base my overall impression of an operating system on a 1-minute intro movie? Of course. But then, that’s a big part of the appeal of Apple. You take for granted that they’re going to get things right under the covers; what sets them apart is the amount of effort they put into making the experience enjoyable. Right down to the gratuitous flair; the thing that finally convinced me to switch back to Macs after using Windows for so long was seeing a movie of the Dock magnification in action.

So onto the functionality: QuickLook is perfectly implemented and has instantly become essential. Spotlight is so much improved that you can finally see its potential in changing the way we use computers — random access instead of browsing. CoverFlow in the finder, and the “stacks” on the Dock, are a little useless, but don’t get in the way, either. Spaces is generally well-implemented and nice enough but not essential. Accessing networked folders, especially Windows ones, finally makes sense. Overall, things look more consistent. There’s a feeling of things being not overwhelmingly “Oh my God I never knew such bliss from browsing files” better, but just better.

Except for Time Machine, which is a perfect example of how Apple gets it right. First, they recognize the problem: nobody backs up their files as often as they should. (I do it once a year at most, and I should technically know better). Then they take each one of the reasons why, and they come up with a solution.

You have to buy or download separate software to do it, so they include it in the OS. Backing up to CD or DVD media is extensive and time consuming, so they make it work with external drives, and any external drive. The existing stuff is usually complicated to set up, so they make it bone simple — you plug in a drive, and it starts. There are usually tons of confusing options and settings in backup software, so they give you one big on/off switch. It’s always tedious to do the actual backup, so they do it all in the background (after the lengthy initial copy). Actually recovering files from a backup is tedious and error-prone, so they integrated it into the Finder and made it painless. When you realize you’ve lost a file, you’re in a state of panic and frustration, so they put all their UI and presentation energy not into the backup stage, but the restore stage — it’s straightforward and actually kind of fun to use.

And on top of all that, it does intelligent incremental backups that don’t take up a ton of space, and it still presents it as if it were a normal disk hierarchy, letting you browse through it outside the fancy Time Machine interface. It’s just an outstanding job all around.

There have also been a ton of improvements to the development side of things. XCode just feels a lot more substantive and less like an open-source development app. And looking through the Interface Builder has all kinds of new items you can drop into your apps, with extremely sophisticated stuff you get “for free.” Matt Gemmell’s blog has a post about all the stuff that’s included with Leopard that developers formerly had to do “by hand,” and it’s pretty astounding. It also makes me wish I weren’t in the middle of deadlines, so that I had some time to play around with it. I wrote a simple image editor a while back, and it looks like Apple has included all the functionality of my editor in a simple widget that you can drop into any app.

Speaking of unnecessary flair and not having enough time, another of my favorite features of the new OS X is a screensaver. You can now choose any of your iPhoto collections, albums, folders, or events, and have it generate photomosaics using all of the pictures in your iTunes library. It’s really cool, and I must have spent an hour today just staring at it.

5 Comments