Chuck

First!

Warning: This post is about World of Warcraft.

Like the other 200 million people who play the game, I’ve got ideas on how to make it better. Since reading the official forums just makes me sad, and since there are at least a couple of people who read this blog who are interested in videogames, I’m posting my Genius Plan here.

My biggest problems with the game are:

Permanence: Nothing you do has any permanent effect. Enemies respawn, zones stay the same as they were before. The best you can hope for is to give a one-hour boost to people on your side, or inconvenience the players on the other side. The solution is to make your actions as a player have some lasting effect that isn’t instantly negated but also doesn’t ruin the game for other players.
Fiction: The game’s good on gameplay, lousy on story. Even if you take the time to read the quest descriptions, there’s not much point because they all pretty much devolve into “Kill ten murlocs and come back here.” Instances and dungeons make a better attempt to tell a story, but you never get the chance to really be involved in it because the people you’re playing with have already done this dungeon (or battleground) dozens of times before and want to get right to it. The solution is to involve players in the story instead of just the mechanics, but without just adding a dozen long text descriptions of the Amulet of Riz’Fal’Ptah that don’t really matter to anyone except the guy who wrote it and imagined it was going to be so wicked awesome.
Differentiation: No matter what the whiners say, the classes and races are all pretty well balanced. This means that you end up doing basically the same thing with every character, just in slightly different ways. There is some strategy involved when you’re in a big party in a dungeon, but for the most part you’re just killing monsters and grinding. The solution is to have things that only certain classes can do, while keeping the game balanced.

Plus, it just seems like the game should be more like Warcraft and less like Diablo. Just because that’s its name and all.

So here’s my Grand Vision, presented for free on the internets: emphasize resources and control points. They do this in the Alterac Valley battleground, but that’s a cordoned-off area that doesn’t have any relevance to the rest of the game. I’d like to see that concept carried throughout the whole game world.
Continue reading “First!”

Helpless, Damp, and Warm

These days when I’m watching my stories, they all start out with the reminder that I could be watching them in glorious High Definition. Why wouldn’t I? I blew a ton of money that could’ve otherwise gone to a charity on a television that was state of the art for at least two weeks after I bought it. And DirecTV makes entering the HDTV generation easy!

Well, easy if you buy a $600 HD DVR with TiVo. And a two-year service agreement. And the additional antenna to pick on-air HD signals, which because of an FCC ruling, satellite providers like DirecTV can’t duplicate. And you may or may not be able to get the $200 rebate on the DVR if you’re an existing customer; I’ve asked four different people (including a confused woman on DirecTV’s call-in customer support, who didn’t know what I was talking about and had to read the website along with me).

And you may or may not be able to find a unit other than through the company directly, as I discovered when I went to two separate Best Buy stores (I wanted to use a gift card, to help soften the blow) and finally was able to chase down somebody to answer my questions. They didn’t know the answers, and it was irrelevant since they were out of stock on the DVRs and weren’t expecting any more.

Because of the break-up between DirecTV and TiVo, they’re now pushing their own separate brand of DVR. But only for the regular models; they’re still selling the HD version using the TiVo service, until they can come out with their own HD equivalent. But they have just launched a new satellite to support MPEG-4 broadcasts of HDTV — which the current HD DVRs can’t work with. So if you buy one now, you’re spending 400 to 600 bucks on something that isn’t guaranteed to be compatible with the service that may or may not launch sometime this year. Possibly.

I looked into EyeTV and other ways to use a computer as a DVR, but haven’t found one that works with satellite providers. Plus the only computer I could spare is the mini, which isn’t fast enough to record HDTV.

The whole business is just giving me flashbacks to when my brother would chase me down the hall, tackle me to the ground, and tickle me until I peed myself. It’s at the point where even I have to take a step back and just say that the whole business is ridiculous. A stupid amount of effort and money for something as dumb and frivolous as television.

In other entertainment frustration news: I lost interest in “24” sometime around the middle of the third season, and I didn’t watch any of last season. But I’d read that the premiere of season 5 was spectacular, not to be missed and all that, so I set it up to record. When I got back from LA and settled down to have my socks metaphorically blown off by the gripping adventure, I found a “partial recording” of the last 30 minutes of the two-hour premiere.

I started trying to piece together what had happened, and as far as I can make out, the TiVo decided to record “Iron Chef” and “Harvey Birdman” over the first hour and a half of the premiere. Except that I can’t find those recordings; they only show up in the recording history. It’s almost like the TiVo knew it’d done something bad and was desperately trying to cover its tracks. I still can’t tell what happened, since it’s supposed to be set up to avoid stuff like that. I can only guess that it’s upset about the whole DirecTV deal and is lashing out at me. All I’m saying is I don’t need my DVR giving me no lip.

Writing Too Much About iWeb

There’s a new post on SFist wherein I talk about how iWeb isn’t as cool as HyperCard.

And talk, and talk, and talk — I blame ecto. I liked it enough to pay for it, and now it means I don’t have to use web browser editors for my crucial blogging endeavors. Which means I’ve got even less restrictions on my natural inclination towards long-windedness. It turns out that living in fear of accidentally hitting the back button and losing everything was the only thing helping me towards succinctness.

My other discovery yesterday was RSS readers. I knew of them, of course; I’m not that far out of the loop. But I thought Safari was plenty sufficient — it tells you what sites have been updated, and then you can click on the links to see the full thing as it was intended to be presented.

After trying out the dedicated readers, though, I’m hooked. It actually makes what is essentially a time-wasting activity more efficient. You only see what’s updated, and it checks every site you’re interested in. I decided on NetNewsWire, but PulpFiction was almost as good. The only reason I didn’t choose that one is because it looks too much like Mail, which feels like work. NetNewsWire straddles the line between web browsing and efficiency, plus it just looks better.

This isn’t all just unfocused rambling, for once: the topics actually have something to do with each other. When I was setting up the different news readers, I could check out all the content from websites without ever visiting the page itself; some of the sites I’d never even heard of before. It only took a few minutes to come up with a NetNewsWire theme that I liked better than any of the defaults, and better than most of the source pages (including my own).

Which raises the question: does all the attention to CSS and webpage design even matter all that much anymore? Artistically-challenged people like myself should be excited at a world where substance is more important than style, and poor graphic design skillz aren’t a barrier to entry. But it’s kind of disappointing, too — there’s always the potential for a full website to have more functionality than a simple newsfeed, but I like the idea of a site’s just being attractive enough that you’re encouraged to see it, just for looks.

iWeb is on the other end of the spectrum from RSS feeds. It’s all about presentation, and the back-end support is pretty weak. It’s not even featured enough for a blog as simple as this one. But it makes it relatively easy to make a page that’s pretty damn slick; I imagine that people more artistically inclined could do really nice stuff with it. I just wonder if it’s doomed to irrelevance. Do people even care how a website looks anymore? Livejournal is one of the most popular blogging engines out there, and I’ve never seen a livejournal entry that didn’t look like ass.

I never thought I’d be arguing for style over substance, but there it is: I want the intarweb to look better. And before anyone points out that charity begins at home: I’m working on it.

Yeti!

Chuck SMASH!! A Disney podcast called Inside the Magic has posted two ride-through videos of the Expedition Everest ride at Animal Kingdom in Florida. It is what we Imagineers like to call so totally wicked awesome.

The video is from a roller coaster, so it’s dark and bumpy and blurry and such, but then that’s why The Zapruder Effect is in play. You can see the cool Yeti shadow effect, and the twisted tracks sequence, as well as pretty much the entire ride in the video. But what’s going on in all the pitch black sequences? And what’s it feel like on the ride itself?

I’ll find out the next time my job takes me to Orlando. I’m feeling lucky!

If you use iTunes, you can get at the video podcasts part one and part two.

(And the goofy picture of me is just to test out ecto, a blog-writing app that I’m thinking of using.)

Face for Radio, Voice for Print

My copy of iLife ’06 was waiting for me when I got back from the southland, so I spent last night and most of today playing with it. Early impressions: GarageBand seems like it’d be cool if it’d work, but I get no sound and no preferences pane, so until that bug is fixed, I can’t use it. Everything else in the existing apps is pretty much a point upgrade; all the remarkable new features require a .Mac account.

I was most looking forward to iWeb, after gushing about it on SFist and on here, and I’m still evaluating it. My first impression is that it’s neat but limited. I’m using it to finally put together my pictures from Japan, even though I’ve mostly forgotten that trip, and anyone who would’ve been interested in seeing those pictures has already seen them in different formats and heard me repeat the same stories over the past 2 years. It’s more to see how flexible iWeb is, and to finally be able to check that off instead of having it feel like a big project that I’ve left unfinished.

Apple is really pushing podcasting and videocasting with its new stuff. So just for yuks, I tried playing around with iMovie and my iSight camera. Wow, that was a mistake. Technically, it worked fine, but there’s nothing that blows the self-image quite like seeing yourself how others see you.

Few people like hearing their own voice, because it never quite comes out as good as it sounds in your head. And I’m vain enough to have spent some time playing around with the iSight to try and get a good picture of myself, so I’ve got a pretty realistic idea of what I look like. But I always kind of imagined that in practice, the voice and the face kind of cancelled each other out and reached a reasonable compromise. What I saw in the video was more like a surprisingly fey version of Frankenstein’s monster.

I guess if it proves anything, it’s that Apple’s web-publishing and podcasting revolution isn’t going to change the world anymore than its desktop publishing revolution did. Some people just don’t have any business being in the broadcasting realm. Whether or not I have any business in the writing realm remains to be seen, but I’m sticking with it for now — better to have a lower-bandwidth assault on my self esteem.

I Said Lady, Step Inside My Hyundai

I’m going to take you up to Glendale.

Land at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank and groove to the hot hits of the 80s played constantly on the PA system. What’s that playing at the rental car booth? “Who Can It Be Now?” by Men at Work? Oh yeah, gonna get my groove on while I slide up to spend some time with My Lady. She knows how I like it; she always makes me wait, take it nice and slow before she asks me for my driver’s license and credit card. Lady knows how to treat a man, insisting on a second phone number even though I don’t got one; I’ve learned to just make one up, give her what she wants. She gives me a mini-van and won’t hear no back-talk from me. That’s all she’s got. And she knows I gotta drive.

Pick up the key and there it is at the far end of the lot — my Dodge Caravan. Oh yeah, that’s my ride. Got a lady on the side in the security booth. She asks me every time what I do for Disney, and gives me that same look every time when I tell her “programmer” instead of “casting agent.”

Tearin’ up the 5 past the In-n-Out, watchin’ the ladies watchin’ me in my sweet ride. Pulling all up into that ABC parking lot. Putting in my time with The Mouse, then heading back to The BUR for a night on the town. Fine dining selections await, such as the Baja Fresh. But there are cultural options as well, such as Borders and the AMC 12.

So yeah, that wasn’t really going anywhere so I’ll stop now. I got off work a little early tonight and didn’t feel like spending 2 hours stuck in LA traffic to get to Anaheim, so I just came back to the hotel. Maybe I’d be better with spontaneous entertainment if I were in downtown LA (I’m skeptical), but with Burbank there’s just no chance. At least the hotel room has an internet connection and I can smoke indoors.

I thought I would be kind of daring and look at what the titles of the adult movies were, but they’re all pretty generic and dull. Bi Bi American Pie was the closest to what you’d expect from an adult film title, although Real Japanese proudly boasts “No Pixilation,” and they relish diversity, what with Running Wild as the “Gay Alternative.” Considering the hotel, I was hoping that One Night in Paris would be available, but no such luck.

But they don’t have the Cartoon Network or Food Network for some reason, so I’ve been forced to spend hours channel-surfing and browsing the web. And being exposed to broadcast television for the first time in months has really made me realize how little I’ve been missing. In between watching the same episode of “The Daily Show” twice and an Anderson Cooper show about James Frey and his whole book scandal, I watched a whole lot of sitcoms. I keep hearing about “My Name is Earl” and “The Office,” but I just don’t get the appeal.

One that was surprisingly interesting, although I’m not convinced I’d call it “good,” was “Crumbs.” It’s the one with Fred Savage and Jane Curtin. It went overboard with the laugh track and the maudlin moments, but from the pilot it was kind of like Schrödinger’s Sitcom: it had the potential to be either really awful or pretty good (not brilliant, but okay). One thing I liked about it is that they didn’t do exactly what I’m about to do: they didn’t make a big deal about Fred Savage’s character being gay. It wasn’t a total non-issue, but it wasn’t A Very Special Topic, either. I had heard or read about the show before (probably from Entertainment Weekly), but all I took away from it was that it was about a dysfunctional family. So I was surprised when they’re in the middle of the show and all of a sudden (I’d missed the beginning), a friend starts asking him about his boyfriend.

I did a Google search on the show, and I was surprised again. Considering what a ridiculous sham the whole Brokeback Mountain phenomenon has gotten to be, I expected there to be all kinds of attention on it. There are dozens of sites that use the same stock interview, and none of them mention it until a few paragraphs down, when Savage says they talk about his character’s orientation but “that’s not what the show’s about.” Well, none of them except for, of course, The Advocate, which uses the same interview but changes the headline and spins the whole article to make the show sound “Will & Grace” meets “Six Feet Under.” Everybody else just seemed to treat it like it was no big deal. Are people finally starting to realize that it’s not really all that interesting? Whether the show turns out to be any good, I dunno. But I thought it had some potential.

Who’s Peeking Out From Under a Stairway?

And Wendy has stormy eyes. When we went to Disneyland last year, Rain played a CD where every track was a person’s name, from A to Z. The entry for W was “Windy” by The Association. And so began my two-month-long nightmare.

I’ve always been susceptible to getting songs stuck in my head, but this one is the worst since “Tom’s Diner.” I hear it before I go to sleep, I hear it just as I wake up, I hear it when I’m tripping down the streets of the city, smiling at everybody I see. When I had my La Tortura episode in the Sony store, I could hear it in the background. “Make Your Own Kind of Music” from “Lost” wasn’t able to drive it out. “We Used to Be Friends” from “Veronica Mars” didn’t work either.

I finally just gave up and bought the album, hoping I could listen to it enough to get sick of it. It almost worked, but that album also has “Cherish”, which is of course the song that was the worst at getting stuck in my head when I was little, before I’d ever even heard of Suzanne Vega. So now they’re both running together constantly, like some infernal medley. (“Infernal Medley” would be a decent band name, now that I think of it.)

Speaking of Disneyland, they’re keeping up with this whole closing-at-8 bullshit. What’s the point of spending three days in LA if you can’t at least go to D-town? I’m starting to think buying an annual pass wasn’t such a great idea.

So Much For My Pulitzer

Yesterday’s post on SFist was about the MacWorld Expo. I only got to see it one day, because I’m in LA for business the rest of the week, but I think one day was plenty.

I actually got up early enough yesterday to make the morning keynote address, but I’d assumed that my exhibits-only pass wouldn’t give me access. I didn’t bother verifying that the thing was open to all attendees until yesterday morning around 8, and by that time, it was already too late. When I got to the Moscone Center, there were hundreds if not thousands of people lined up outside the building trying to get in for the keynote. (According to reports on the web, I didn’t miss much. It’s all on video from Apple’s site anyway, but I would’ve liked to see the crowd reaction to having Their Lord And Master in the same room as them).

So instead I had breakfast at Mel’s and then dicked around at the Metreon until the exhibit hall opened. I was very tempted to get Guitar Hero for the PS2, but some unseen calming force convinced me that it would be an even bigger waste of money than what I’m used to. Instead I just hung out at the Sony Style store and watched the video to La Tortura by Shakira and Alejandro Sanz that they had running on a constant loop. I watched it about five times and let me just say: daaaaaammmn. They’re both astoundingly hot. (And I like the song, too).

Anyway, the show was okay but kind of a disappointment. Not just because the new Apple stuff wasn’t all that spectacular, but because like I said in the article, I was hoping to see more of the Apple Thuggee Cult. The people were kind of clap-happy, but not to a particularly embarrassing degree; I’m guessing (and hoping) that most of that went on during Jobs’ presentation. The new iMac and not-Powerbook-anymore are impressive, sure, but there’s not the same kind of holy-shit-I-have-to-buy-that-right-now compulsion to them like there is with the new iPods.

But I admit I did buy the new iLife as soon as I got home. It was pretty standard stuff, there Apple goes again charging almost 100 bucks for a point upgrade, until they got to the iWeb demo. It does exactly the kind of stuff I’ve wished a million times over the year that somebody had already written. I’m sure that there are going to be all kinds of limitations with it that are only going to become apparent after I’ve played with it a while, but it made a great first impression.

Of course, GarageBand made a great first impression as well, and I used it for about a week and then never touched it again. But that was before I could make a podcast! Actually, I’ve got to say that the podcasting stuff in GB was the next most impressive part of the demo. I’m about as un-interested in podcasting as anybody (at least anybody self-absorbed enough to have an internet blog), but the support they have in there is pretty neat. For instance: if you set up a vocal track and a background music track, it automatically fades out the background music as soon as the voice starts, all NPR style.

A Street of Wonder

Maybe this is common for people who live closer to Golden Gate Park, but it’s still a novelty to me: just now a family of racoons (I assumed they were a family; I didn’t do any blood tests, but then again, isn’t family about more than just blood?) came trotting down the street in front of my apartment. Like the last stragglers of a parade. Albeit a very quiet parade, that concentrated on trash cans and reeled back in horror if they noticed any onlookers. So maybe a parade in support of abuse victims.

Seeing as how it’s 2am and I’m paying the same every month for this website whether I have something interesting to say or not, I thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to make a list. A list of Things I Have Seen On Or Around My Front Steps:

Racoons (x3)
Sandwich with two bites taken out, in ziploc bag (x2)
Single-serving pudding container, half full
Man in underwear, wielding baseball bat
Dog poo
Dog (?) urine
Klingon (drunk)
Obese lesbian with scalp tattoo smoking and talking on cell phone (regular appearances)
Desk lamp (broken)
Shoes (various)
Teddy bear
Dot matrix printer
Man playing digeridoo
Woman playing digeridoo
Man with ten-foot long piece of molding, hitting every post, tree, and sign with it as he walks by, saying, “What up, G?” when he saw me
Two children, one of whom asked me “How’s it goin’, bitch?” and the other one running back to apologize profusely to me
Old woman walking her very old chow dog (both wear matching yellow raincoats when it rains)
Restaurant delivery menus (various)
Half-eaten rack of ribs (presumably pork)

The most mysterious thing is that none of the stuff stays there for more than an hour. (Except for the obese lesbian*, and possibly the pudding container. Coincidence?!?) I’m actually less curious about who’s leaving the stuff there than who’s taking it away. Note to self: inquire city services about C.H.U.D.s.

*Before anyone takes offense that I’m being too hard on someone for being either overweight or homosexual or a woman or whatever, I should probably point out that she leaves her cigarette butts all over the steps and when I try to walk around her to get up to my apartment, she acts all offended like I’m putting her out.

Dude, where’s my puppet?

I finally broke through the blockage in my Netflix queue and watched the two movies that I’ve had for over a month now: Dude, Where’s My Car? and Team America: World Police. Considering the Netflix fees and how long I had them out, I figure they cost me about $12 each.

Which makes me a lot less charitable of them than I probably would be normally. Both were in the “no really, they’re better than they look” category, based on what I’d heard from reviewers and friends. So I had low expectations but was willing to be pleasantly surprised. I wasn’t.

Dude, Where’s My Car? I moved up in the queue because it has Jennifer Garner in it, but she’s no reason to see it, even if you’re not already bored with “Alias.” I’m fine with stoner movies; in fact, I liked Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and I actually bought Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. But I thought the whole point of stoner movies was to make something that you react to basically like you would to a stoner person — they’re harmless and mildly entertaining normally, and really hilarious if you’re high. Considering that this one wasn’t harmless and mildly entertaining when I saw it, I’m not all that inclined to try it again the second way. I’d been expecting it to be gleefully absurd and dumb, but it was just dumb and kind of sad.

And I say we all start a fund, where we each contribute $1 a month, and all the money goes to Andy Dick. The stipulation is that he can never work again.

Team America was just bullshit. It seems like they’re just not aware they’ve obsoleted themselves. They’re stuck in the same thing that was subversive back when they did the first “South Park” short, even though the rest of us have all moved on. (And we moved on partly because “South Park” is so ubiquitous).

Violently cutting up puppets and making them have sex and make dick jokes just isn’t at all subversive anymore. And Parker and Stone just aren’t all that subversive anymore — they make the big joke about pretentious Hollywood needing to be put in its place, without seeming to realize that they’re pretentious Hollywood now. Yeah, there are plenty of pompous blowhards who have no business sticking their noses and money into politics, but at least they’re saying something. It’s easy just to say nothing more than “you’re stupid!”

The only reason I didn’t completely dismiss it is the same reason I can’t completely dismiss “South Park.” When they drop the BS about being adolescent and edgy and just let themselves get absurd, they’re actually funny. There were occasional bits in Team America that are funny just for the sake of being funny, because the characters are puppets. Like the panther attack that’s actually just a couple of house cats with sound effects. And the special emergency signal Gary has to make when he’s undercover. And any of the fist-fight scenes where it’s just two puppets flailing at each other.

They should just learn to drop the pretense of how they’re not pretentious, and just make something funny. Every once in a while, “South Park” manages to actually have a message that makes sense, and while those aren’t the episodes that sell T-shirts and catch phrases, those are the ones that actually work.

A Burbank Vignette

GET IT? A couple months ago I had to spend a week in Burbank for work. I was neither sleeping nor eating right, and I was preoccupied with work and stressed out about the whole NaNoWriMo thing (that was back when I still thought I’d be able to finish it). So I found myself outside the hotel at 6:30 AM simultaneously trying to find a place to eat breakfast and come up with a good story idea.

All I could think about was if Galactus, the planet-devouring villain from Marvel Comics, came to Earth and stayed in a hotel and ordered the Continental Breakfast.

Anyone who still thinks they want to read my “novel” should keep in mind that that was one of my better ideas.

Not at CES

That last post turned out to be all about “Arrested Development,” so I guess this is the one that’s posting just for the sake of posting.

I made a post at SFist yesterday about all the rumors around a Google PC. The story itself is kind of lame — even the rumor sites were saying that it was unlikely, and by the time I got home to write the post, the rumor had already been officially denied.

But what was more interesting to me was the whole “meta-story,” how the thing got so wide-spread so quickly, even though there was really nothing to it. As far as tech rumors go, it was actually kind of approaching compelling. It was a wacky idea (not only a line of cheap PCs, but they’d be writing their own operating system!) that had a little bit of validity because it was printed in the LA Times. And it had the whole “black fiber” angle that I still don’t quite understand but puts an X-Files spin on the whole thing. It’s just amazing to me what a phenomenon the company’s become; Google is building a public perception kind of like NASA’s during the space race. Or seeing as how it’s trading at over $400 a share these days, maybe it’s more like the Tyrell Corporation or SKYNet or Arvin Sloane’s OmniFam.

So I keep hearing stuff coming out of CES, but none of it’s really sticking as particularly interesting. I’m curious to see how Windows Vista looks; I keep seeing articles mentioning that MS is demoing it at the show, but nothing with real details. This eBook reader mentioned on Gizmodo looks pretty cool, and I’ve always liked the idea but don’t think I’d want to be an early adopter of the technology unless it gets a lot cheaper; both for the device itself and the content. Especially since the thing doesn’t have a backlight; what’s the point of an electronic book that you can’t read in bed?

Next week I’m going to be at the MacWorld Expo for at least one day. Maybe that’ll get me all geared up to be Geek Republican again, spending way too much money on disposable electronics and consumerism. At the moment, I’m worried that something’s wrong with me — I’ve got gift certificates for the Best Buy but when I went to the store Tuesday there was nothing I wanted!