Author: Chuck

Expedition Everest

Attraction SignAs it turns out, the rumors of the total lack of internet access were greatly exaggerated. When I was ironing a shirt this morning, I found an ethernet cable hiding in the back of the closet, and I grabbed it like a kid opening a Christmas present.

It doesn’t make that much of a difference, since I’m still not in the hotel room enough to keep up with my usual level of internet slack time. But it does at least let me talk about Expedition Everest to an audience other than those who are jaded about Disney rides.

But first, the trip in general. So far it’s going so well that it’s unsettling. The travel itself was painless — they’d originally stuck me in the dead center of a 7-seat plane for a 4-hour flight, but just as I was about to sit down, someone asked me to trade seats so I got an aisle. And the flight got in ahead of schedule.

The weather here has been perfect. Again, to the point of feeling unnatural — it’s just not right to be in Florida and not be soaking wet from a combination of sweat and sudden thunderstorms. But it’s been clear, sunny, and cool all week. The food’s been good, the people have been friendly, the parks have been fun, and the hotel is about perfect.

So it’s just been a slacker’s vacation on Corporate Entertainment’s dime, right? Actually, no. Because we’ve got a smaller group here and because we’re far enough along in the project to know exactly what we’re looking for, we’ve gotten a lot accomplished, and the meetings have been going well. (Because I can’t say more than that on the internets, and because I don’t want to jinx it, that’s all I’m saying about that).

And because it’s been productive, there’s been more time to just relax. We went to Animal Kingdom yesterday and rode Expedition Everest two times (keeping in theme with the trip, the line was less than 15 minutes long), and went back today to ride it again (the line was a little less than an hour this time, which was actually good because it gave us a chance to see all the details in line).

It’s an astoundingly good ride, totally solid and a hell of a lot of fun. The Asia section of the park has remarkably detailed theming, and the ride fits in with that. The queue has tons of details throughout and combines a tourist center, a shrine to the Yeti as protector of the mountain, and a Yeti museum. That theming extends to the ride itself, as the lift hill goes through a temple that’s as detailed as anything you saw in the queue. And the rest of the ride crams everything good about Disney coasters into just over a minute — effects, animation, some innovation, an some genuine surprises (even though I knew the basic layout going in).

Apparently the word going around was that it was a “gentle” coaster, but it’s not. It leaves you with the same overall feel as Big Thunder Mountain, but it’s a good bit more intense, especially the section in the dark. And the Yeti (hope I’m not ruining the ride for anyone, but yeah, you do see the Yeti) is just awesome. As much as I enjoyed the ride, it was even cooler seeing groups of kids getting off clapping and cheering and running right back to the entrance to ride it again. It looks like they’ve got a hit.

Me, I got off, bought a T-shirt for it (I’d said I wasn’t going to buy any more Disney T-shirts, but this one was too cool to pass up), and casually walked back to ride it again. If the park hadn’t been closing, I would’ve tried to ride it one more time. There’s still two days left to get my chance…

Semi-caffeinated

Sleeping TigerIt’s been a really nice day in San Francisco, and I’ve spent the bulk of it inside trying to get my stuff in order and dreading having to spend all next week at Disney World. Is this what being an adult is like? If it is, I want no part of it.

The worst part is being without internet access for a whole week. Considering how much of my internet time is spent in pointless time-wasting, it’s remarkable how much I’ve gotten to depend on it. I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly how I’m better off after reading RSS feeds and browsing websites and making rambling weblog posts and replying to e-mails. And still it does seem emptier when I can’t do all that.

Speaking of giving up dependencies, it’s pretty clear what is the addiction that’s causing me the most trouble. Smoking. But I’m not breaking that habit anytime soon, so I’m shooting for a slightly easier one: the caffeine. I’ve been taking baby steps to get myself off of it, starting by switching to decaffeinated Coke. It’s a minor shift, but I’m hoping that once I ween myself off the caffeine (hopefully without headaches), then I can start sleeping and getting up on normal human hours, thereby getting more stuff accomplished earlier, thereby no longer feeling so damn anxious all the time, thereby making it easier to kick the nicotine. Realistic or not, at least it feels like a plan.

Whether it survives after a week at a theme park, there’s no telling. But if I can’t actually spend time in the theme parks, and am left in a hotel room with nothing to do except watch the promotional video that runs on the in-room TV 24 hours a day (by the end of a trip, I can usually recite it from memory), then sleep may be a welcome option.

Frenzy

If you want to see an example of something that took me way longer than it should have, then check this out:

I wrote a little utility to export my RSS Feeds list from my news reader (NetNewsWire) to html. It’s as close as I can come to a links section for the time being, and it still took for freaking ever.

The reason I did it is because the RSS feed reader on the Sony PSP is kind of cool, but entering links into it is a total pain in the ass. I assumed this would be simpler.

I don’t keep all of those up-to-date, but most of them I’d consider worth passing along. Make your own recommendations in the comments, if you’re so inclined. It’s not like I spend too much time browsing the web anyway.

Update: Just so I don’t end up leading any other PSP owners astray: apparently, Sony’s concept of an “RSS Channel” and mine are very different. The PSP’s feed reader only works on audio podcasts, as far as I can tell. Even if you get that far, though, it doesn’t recognize one of the two most common RSS formats, so half of my list isn’t accepted at all. As the WWW Consortium would say: “weak sauce.”

Still, knock yourself out with access to my bookmarks, and still feel free to recommend your own.

The Week in Videogames

Chuck is losingVideogames are cool, because they’re fun to play, and they’re fun to write about on the internet! Everybody knows that the best kind of videogames is the kind where you learn things, and that’s awesome because that’s the best kind of internet weblog post, too!

For instance, I learned from Cory that Suikoden V is coming out this week, like tomorrow. According to the previews and the only review out there (which is mostly negative), they’re trying to make it old-school. It’s aimed directly at the people who loved Suikoden II so much that they’re willing to keep buying up any sequel, even though the last two and the spin-offs haven’t been all that spectacular, just on the off chance that it might be as good as a game that came out years ago and even at the time was an off-brand version of Final Fantasy. In other words: me.

No sign of kobold puppies or duck generals in the screenshots I’ve seen so far; closest is a conversation some goofy-looking badger guy. The best thing about the series is its goofy characters, like the kobold pair, the Sanjuro knock-off and Tai Yo, the Iron Chef who fights with a ladle. I’ll be checking out the game, no doubt, but it’s not anything I’m going to stand in line at the store to buy. I may even wait a couple of weeks!

Speaking of waiting a couple of weeks, I finally broke down and ordered an Xbox 360. I couldn’t help it; Oblivion is coming out. I could’ve saved a lot of hassle by just getting the PC version, but with my brain disease and all, it made a lot more sense to spend a lot of money on a videogame machine I’m not going to get for at least two weeks at the earliest and is going to be delivered when I’m out of town, for a game that I’m not going to have any time to play anytime soon.

But I’m a slave to the hype machines, and the game’s getting loads of hype. The best, for the definition of “best” that means “most depressing and awful,” is GameSpot’s live marathon promotion, where paying subscribers can log in to sit and watch somebody else play the game for twelve hours straight. For everybody who’s wanted to get a peek inside the exciting world of a videogame journalist, now’s your chance! They’re going to have a live chat service up during the video where you can talk to other fans watching a GameSpot editor play a videogame, as well as suicide hotline representatives.

I also learned about the new CivCity series that supposedly is going to combine Civilization-type strategy with SimCity or Caesar type city-building. When I was talking about how I don’t like RTS games, but always wish that I did, this is exactly the game I had in mind. Something that’s not as open-ended as SimCity, but still gives you time to check everything out and just build something. There’s no telling how it’ll turn out, of course, but they get my vote just based on the concept.

And there’s an expansion pack for Civilization IV on the way, and another Railroad tycoon type game by the end of the year.

But wait! There’s also a platformer called “Daxter” for the PSP that’s getting all kinds of good reviews, and a new version of Katamari Damacy, perfect for anybody who’s going to be going on two four-hour transcontinental plane flights next week. I’d be stupid not to buy them!

With all this stuff coming out, the only thing that could be better would be if I actually had time to play videogames anymore.

V4 Vendetta

Also available in a V6Today we went to Haight Street for lunch, and no matter how many times I go up there I’m still struck with how ridiculous the whole place is. It’s as if all the hypocrisy of San Francisco is laid bare — the “summer of love,” rampant commercialism, poverty, empty promises of “counter-culture,” the head shops with signs warning you that you’ll be ejected for saying “bong” or “weed.” I was making a joke that we should go into the Anarchist Collective Bookstore and ask for a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; Mac went one better and suggested we ask for The Rules.

All the “free love” and “anarchy” and “counter-culture” stuff doesn’t even seem offensively hypocritical anymore; it’s just laughably quaint. So maybe it’s true that “there are no coincidences,” like V says in the movie, because on the same day we went to see V For Vendetta.

Not to say that the movie is quaint or laughable or as empty and meaningless as Haight Street — it’s really excellent. Very well done in presentation, emotion, and intellect. (And it kind of pains me to say that, considering how much I dislike The Matrix and was ready to hate this movie). It does a remarkable job of updating the comic book, working as a big-budget action/thriller movie, and making a statement. In fact, it’s causing me to re-think some of the political opinions I’ve formed over the last decade, formed out of either apathy or the sense that it’s “not my problem.” Balk at changing political opinions based on a big Hollywood comic-book movie all you want; I think that as long as the message gets out, that can’t be a bad thing.
Continue reading “V4 Vendetta”

Awesome Inflation

One example of the titular happiness.And no I’m not talking about Pamela Anderson’s chest. ha-HA! Implants.

I’m talking about how it’s getting harder and harder for something to qualify as “awesome” these days. People have uttered the phrase “there’s nothing any cooler than robot ninja ghost pirate monkeys” so many times that it’s ceased to be true. Somebody could release The Ghost Ship of Dread Captain Jojo-san 3000 today, and I’d go see it, no doubt. But I can guarantee that it wouldn’t be satisfying.

Because if it were possible to make a good movie out of that concept, there’s no way somebody wouldn’t have already done it. We are rapidly depleting our reserves of coolness.

So I’m saying that’s probably why I was disappointed by The Happiness of the Katakuris. Back when I was reading about Takashi Miike and The Great Yokai War, I kept seeing mention of the movie on websites. It was always described as a big departure for Miike; depending on the obsequious-to-hipster ratio of the site, it was either further proof that Miike could do anything, or evidence that he’d sold out.

Either way, I’m damned if I know what to make of it. Did I go into it having too high expectations? If you just read a description of it, it’s a:

  • Japanese
  • black comedy
  • musical
  • with animation,
  • a schmaltzy message about the meaning of life,
  • scenes filmed as if they were from a Japanese TV commercial,
  • and a dance number performed by zombies.

So on paper, it sounds like The Perfect Movie. The reality, though, is just kind of… there. There’s plenty of imaginative stuff in there, sure, but it either draws too much attention to itself, is paced so poorly that it doesn’t have any impact, or is executed so amateurishly that you’re left thinking how cool it could have been as opposed to how cool it turned out.

The movie starts out with a young woman in a restaurant who finds a small white creature in her soup. She pulls it out and screams, the creature sees her uvula, thinks it’s a heart and he falls in love. So he bites off her uvula and is then carried away by a raven. After that is a sequence about five minutes long where the creature fights the raven, gets dropped, dies and is re-hatched from an egg, plus some other stuff I’m forgetting, all in seemingly random order. The creature, the bird, and most of the backgrounds are done with claymation — more proto-“Sledgehammer” quality animation, not Wallace and Gromit caliber. None of the characters from this sequence are seen in the movie again.

I was about to say that “none of this has anything to do with the rest of the movie,” but in a way, that sequence has a lot in common with the rest of the movie — it’s wacky but not in a particularly entertaining way, it’s amateurish, and once it’s over, you’re left wondering what was the point. And the movie has lots of amateurish claymation, but it seems that it was used for budget reasons more than stylistic ones — every time an action sequence starts, it switches to claymation.

So there are deaths followed by musical numbers, and there are transvestites on television, and big musical love songs, and stories about Princess Diana, and a guy drinking water from an inexplicably polluted stream and then getting diarrhea, and a love song done in the style of a karaoke video (complete with cheesy 80’s lighting, and subtitles), and a song with zombies dancing on a landfill, and a volcano erupts, and then a finale song in the style of The Sound of Music.

And still, my reaction is just, “well that happened.” And I honestly can’t tell if it’s because I’m too jaded, or if it’s because the movie isn’t very well-done and it doesn’t have as much imagination as it thinks. The zombie musical sounds cool until you remember it’s already been done. Most of the rest feels like an early Peter Jackson movie.

And of course like with everything “post-modern,” it’s impossible to tell if the acting and effects are intentionally amateurish, or if they just didn’t do a particularly good job. What makes Japanese commercials so cool is that you never get the impression the people making the commercials are on the outside looking in — they’re in it 100%. That’s not to say they’re ignorant of how batshit crazy it all is, just that they’ve committed themselves to being completely and totally batshit crazy to the best of their abilities. (Take the Final Fantasy Potion ad, for example). Adding ironic detachment to that would ruin everything.

But in the end, I didn’t even dislike the movie. The actual ending is kind of sweet and lives up to the promise of the whole concept. And nothing in it, even the nonsensical opening, is blatantly bad. It’s all just not nearly as cool as it could’ve been, and therefore ends up saying nothing. I’m still no big fan of Miike’s, obviously, but at least Audition and The Great Yokai War were memorable.

St Patrick’s Day

DSC01611.JPGToday’s the day we celebrate St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, much as Samuel L. Jackson is going to drive those damn snakes off a motherfuckin’ plane.

I’d thought it was earlier in the week, and I’d already missed it. The only reason I knew today was The Day was that Google’s logo changed. Which is yet another way I miss having a real job — typically, I go into the office and either I’ve remembered to wear green and everyone says “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” all day and then we all go out after work and get embarrassingly drunk; or I forget that it’s the day and everyone chastises me for not wearing green and then we all go out after work and get embarrassingly drunk.

Today, there are clovers on the Google logo, the comic book blogs mention Green Lantern, and even if I did have an opportunity to go out drinking and didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t feel much like it. I don’t even know how I’m going to get my ritual corned beef and cabbage, since I sure as hell don’t feel like going to an Irish pub in the city tonight.

I’ll say it once again: people with a tendency to be anti-social and nocturnal shouldn’t take jobs working from home. The past two weeks have seemed like one interminably long day. I’m still less than halfway to completion of what I’m working on. I’m behind on all my personal clerical BS — getting taxes together, paying bills, etc. And worst of all, now my alcoholism is suffering. I’m too apathetic to get drunk. How can I call myself Irish?

A Bunch of Noise

What started out innocently enough as a search for “I Want Candy” by MC Pee Pants (second page) somehow ended up with me on the iTunes Signature Maker.

It’s a java app that digs through your iTunes library and generates a file that contains snippets of your favorite tracks mixed together. It’s not exactly pleasurable listening; the author’s sounds okay (kind of like what I imagine an alien SETI program would hear), but it seems like most of them come out pretty atonal.

I imagine the only way to get something that flows well is if you’re one of those people who claims “I have a very eclectic taste in music” but it turns out you listen to a bunch of bands that sound exactly the same, but you have the soundtracks to Manhattan and O Brother, Where Art Thou? to show how diverse you are. Or something.

On the other hand, this is pretty much what it sounds like in my head all the time, so maybe the computer don’t lie.

And speaking of noise, I just realized that I’ve got to be in Florida all next week for work. I’ve known about the trip for a couple of weeks, but I’ve been thinking it was further away. If it’s anything like the last trip, it’ll be that infuriating feeling of knowing I’m at Disney World but being unable to get out and enjoy it because I’m working. And even when I get free time afterwards, it’s no fun going to the parks by myself. Plus, during the week the parks close a lot earlier, leaving only a couple of hours between the end of a work day and closing time. Since I’m contracting, I can’t get into the parks for free unless I’m working there — which means I have to pay full price just to go a couple of hours.

And I’m not really fooling anybody, I realize. Even on a business trip it’s pretty damn cool. At the risk of sounding like I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid: the Disney hotels really just get everything right, and they’re a blast to stay at even independent of the parks. And as for the parks, I’m still hoping I get a chance to check out the new Expedition Everest ride at Animal Kingdom. It’s not supposed to open until next month, but supposedly it’s in “soft opening preview” mode now.

Update: Calendars are hard. Apparently I’m not leaving next week, but the week after. I just wanted to make sure that the Internet was aware of my travel plans. Go on about your business.

Dumb Old Internet

It looks like moving everything to the new host worked out okay for the most part. It wasn’t painless — as easy as it is to install WordPress on a new site (and it is ridiculously easy), it’s difficult to move the contents to a new site unless it’s exactly the same as your old one, which is seldom going to be the case. Also, there are a lot of characters that didn’t make the transition, so you’ll see spurious stuff in old posts until I get the time to go back and edit every one out.

Probably more effort than the hosting change will be worth, but what’s done is done.

Yesterday I thought my cold was finally on the way out, because I could actually breathe and see without my eyes watering and go for a minute or more without coughing. But I guess that was “Indian health” or something, because today I feel like a cold turd. I ended up sleeping all day; I kept waking up and immediately falling asleep again. So I get the joy of waking up just as it’s getting dark, and having to be up all night and tired tomorrow.

Plus I kept dreaming about minor comic book characters (like Blue Beetle), which adds another level of creepiness to the already-creepy waking-up-at-nighttime. Bleh.

Imminent Downtime

I decided to change my webhost, so access to the site (and my e-mail) may be spotty until the transition is all sorted out. It’s just as well, because my cold is getting worse and I don’t feel like posting anything anyway. Try to stay strong through the transition!

And the reason for changing is partly because I couldn’t access my mail or website at all when I was down in LA. Turns out that was the hotel’s fault, not the host’s, but I’d already gotten the idea stuck in my head. The old one was fine, but the new one is cheaper and has a few more features, and it comes more highly-recommended. Plus I think it’ll be easier to do cool web-app type stuff with the new host, because there aren’t as many restrictions on what my site is allowed to do.

Of course, I don’t have the time or motivation to do cool web-app type stuff these days, but it’s nice to know that I could.