It is tempting to state, matter-of-factly, that I went to the mall this weekend. But I fear that my submission of such a statement might mislead you into envisioning me within the confines of a vast, space-saving building packed full of commerce and its associated enterprises. Let me clear up your preconceived notions by telling you that when I say mall, you can go ahead and fill in the finger-curling air quotes around that word and take it to mean “A sad, pathetic excuse for a shopping center which features perhaps three stores of any interest, our one movie theater, the World’s Smallest Food Court and 9,647 cell phone peddlers in kiosk locations whose sole purpose is apparently to verbally accost anyone entering the state lines, browbeating them into a variety of two- or three-year contracts, even if they already own several cellular phones.”

I’m not saying I hate our “mall,” I’m just saying if given the choice between having an amateur appendectomy and shopping there, I’d probably have to ask how long I could get out of work before making an informed decision.

At one point Nik turned to me and said, “They’re having a sale on jeans at Old Navy. Two pairs for forty bucks.”

“Isn’t it ‘two pair‘ for forty bucks?”

“That’s what I said,” she replied, curling her lip a bit the way she does when she thinks I’m being dumb. I see that look a lot. “Forty bucks.”

“No,” I said, “You said ‘two pairs‘. But ‘pair’ is already plural. You don’t need to add the ‘s’.”

In addition to the lip-curly thing, she also has this very blank expression with lowered eyelids and a slight tightening of the corners of her mouth. I means, “You are the biggest dork ever.” I get that look with alarming regularity.

“Nevermind,” I added hastily.

Here’s the thing about Old Navy: You can’t beat their prices. I mean, I guess you could go to a secondhand store and wear someone else’s pants, but typically I reserve that sort of thing for metaphorical realms. The problem, of course, is that you get what you pay for which, in this case, is $20 worth of sweatshop-produced poop carefully shaped by tiny, exhausted hands to look more or less like britches. The magic of this illusion is that right up until the moment you place these paragons of duplicity into the washing machine, or any body of water for that matter, they seem like the Best Deal Ever.

Of course, after that initial washing they dissolve not entirely unlike the Wicked Witch of the West did in The Wizard of Oz. If you listen carefully you can even hear them emit tiny, pained little shrieks of misery. “What a world! What a world!” Et cetera.

Yet I keep going back, hoping in vain that this time, what I purchase won’t dissolve upon contact with Earth’s atmosphere (I’m actually looking in to a theory I have which suggests that Old Navy stores emit a specialized kind of holographic ray, or possibly they pump hallucinogens into their air circulator which would suggest that Old Navy pants do not exist at all but are instead entirely fabricated as cruel jokes designed to drain your wallet. I’ll let you know what my investigation uncovers).

As I wandered the store, glaring bitterly at the signs posted everywhere declaring the profoundly reduced prices and already fighting my internal war between Mr. Cheapskate and Mr. I’m-Nobody’s-Fool. These two guys live inside me and they quarrel constantly. Like when I see a sale at the grocery store which says, “Buy 1, Get 1 Free.” Mr. Cheapskate instantly goes, “Yeah, we gotta get that.” Mr. INF waits until I’ve reached for the second item before piping up, “Uh, do we really need this? I mean, you’re not just going to buy this because it’s on sale, are you? Because that’s how the Man wants you to shop.”

Mr. Cheapskate is fairly proud, and hates when Mr. INF is right. But sometimes there will be a retort: “Yes, but we were going to buy this anyway, and now we get a second one, free!” Mr. INF calmly replies, “Were we planning on buying two?”

“No…” Mr. Cheapskate says, suspiciously.

“Well then why are we buying more than we need? Buy one, get one free is just another way of saying ‘50% Off,’ so we might as well just get the one at half price we were going to get and not buy something we’re just going to throw away because it sounded like it might be ‘free.'” Mr. INF is very sarcastic.

Usually, Mr. Cheapskate has to concede that paying half price is better than paying full price, even if you end up with less, but he typically isn’t too happy about it. In this case however, there were strict rules for the buying of pants, which detailed plainly that while two pair(s) of pants were $40, one pair of pants was $27.00. The indication of the signage seemed to make it abundantly clear that only a single-celled organism would ever consider not buying pants in even numbers.

And despite Mr. I’m-Nobody’s-Fool screaming in my head, I actually considered purchasing some Old Navy jeans. What eventually stopped me was that their jeans aren’t just of dubious quality, but they look bad, too. I mean, what’s up with this whole “dirty jeans” look they have going on? You know, where the blue has some dingy brown-grey color mixed in so they look like jeans that someone wore camping for a week? What is that? Listen, if I wanted to wear dirty jeans, I can just wear the jeans I already have. I’m a clumsy guy: I spill a lot. Also, I’m not that tidy of a person in general so (and this may be far more information than you ever wanted) there is roughly a one-in-three chance that any time you meet me, I’m wearing pants that could have—or maybe should have—been washed already, but haven’t been. What I certainly don’t need is to pay money for pants that I didn’t even get dirty myself.

So I grumbled and complained and griped until Nikki finally stalked out of the store, exasperated. “You hate everything!” she cried. “You just can’t stand shopping! Fine, then. Next time, just tell me your size and I’ll pick your stupid pants out!”

I considered this for a long moment. “Yeah, but I’m picky, too. You’d have to get pants that I’d like.”

If irritation were tangible, like sweat, it would have been gushing from her pores. “You… hate… everything,” she said, and her fingers clenched and twitched in a way that made me think she was imagining my throat between them. I backed away a few steps.

“Well, yeah. But if people just made normal pants that didn’t suck, it wouldn’t be such a problem,” I grumbled.

After a moment of uncomfortable glaring, her shoulders drooped, and she sighed, defeated. “Yeah. That’s the problem,” was all she said. I’m pretty sure it was smarter of me not to ask.

Apple Pie

• The New York Times reports that record labels are greedy (BugMeNot required). Shocking of a development as that is, what it means for Apple is that they’re starting to whinge about the flat $0.99 rate iTunes has rocked since the beginning. Instead they favor a more complicated staggered pricing scheme where popular stuff (like the latest Hillary Duff poo-bomb) would be more like $1.50 and older stuff might even drop below the $0.99 point.
  I’m kind of torn because while I really don’t see anything going below $0.99, if it did that would be killer, but I kinda don’t see that happening. And I’m really not that concerned if “popular” stuff gets expensive, because I don’t buy much/any of that as it is. (Well, I guess you could count stuff like Coldplay as popular, so maybe it would affect me…)
  But it’s easier to envision them just raising the prices all around so an album ends up costing $12-$14. If that happens my incentive for buying online decreases since I can grab used CDs for way less than that (about $8.00 on average) and even though they’re used, it’s worth it for about five bucks in savings. And that’s not too cool since I actually really like buying online; it’s easy, it’s cheap and it’s much more likely to have something I want than a used record store which may or may not have much of anything. Plus I can listen to clips of the songs, which helps immensely.
• This is kind of tangental, but I just have to point out that there is still a glaring flaw in iTunes which needs desperately to be fixed which is that if I purchase a single from an album (or more specifically several singles), then if I decide the whole album is then worth my money I shouldn’t have to purchase those same tracks again. I understand that this means all songs would have to have a “single price” and an “album price” but here’s what I’m thinking: What if the single price were flexible and based on an algorithm that measured popularity (number of purchases/downloads) to raise the price to a specific cap? The lowest possible price would be the album price ($x divided by y where x is the cost of the full album and y is the number of tracks for simplicity’s sake, or something more complex that also factors in popularity) and once the song was no longer being purchased like crazy due to popularity it would dip back down toward the album price.
  Eventually most catalog titles would be pretty cheap for one-offs, or you could simply buy albums piecemeal, without taking a hit for trying stuff out. People would be encouraged to find stuff that wasn’t mainstream (because it would be cheaper) and those who really just wanted to be part of the crowd would either have to fork over the single price (supply and demand, baby) or take the plunge on the whole album. I’m just saying.
• Afterglow comes up with an intriguing new idea for the Desktop/Finder and I think he’s on the right track. One problem I see is that he seems to be kind of relying on the Dock being at the bottom and I prefer to keep mine on the left. I find that it gets in the way less over there (at the bottom on my 14″ iBook it makes me scroll more, especially when I’m editing already-too-big image files in Fireworks or Illustrator and on the right it gets in the way of my scrollbar(s)). I’m also not sure about the Clipboard thing, that sounds more like a Widget to me. Having used the clipboard manager in XP (which makes me insane, by the way, since in theory it’s a good idea but it always pops up when I don’t want it to… almost like there needs to be a new copy or cut command like CTRL-SHFT-X/C that copies or cuts and saves) I can say that it’s sorta useful, but not so much so that it needs to be a highlighted feature unless there was an easy way to access the clipboard history through shortcuts. I really don’t usually care to see what’s on the clipboard, I just want to be able to get it.
• Drunkenbatman rants about GTalk in a way that makes a lot of sense. I mentioned before that the only surprising thing about GTalk was that it was completely lacking anything remarkable. But the article suggests that the other IM providers are taking GTalk very seriously and so much so that they may soon start taking drastic measures to prevent Google from running them out of town, even if the chances of that happening are significantly higher in their heads than in reality.
  I actually think the article downplays the extent to which the other IM guys bailing out support for older clients could be exactly what Google is hoping for: If everyone has to upgrade anyway and no one’s multi-protocol apps work anymore, why don’t we all just switch to GTalk and forget these other jokers? I myself honestly could care less which IM protocol ends up winning, and I’d certainly be happiest if it were something open (like Jabber), but I really just want something to step up and clear out some of this cruft. I’d be much happier using AIM/iChat all day, but I have too many people who use Yahoo! or MSN exclusively to just abandon them so I deal with the questionable interface and weird status states of Adium (for whatever reason the “Automatically Reconnect at Logon” option doesn’t seem to apply to dropped connections, just re-launching the app) for the sake of communication.
  On the other hand, if AIM, MSN and Yahoo! got together and created a protocol to compete with Jabber/GTalk and closed it off saying, “From now on you can use whichever app you want and you can talk to anyone from all three networks and we’ll just compete based on client featureset” they could effectively kill GTalk before it even takes off, make multi-protocol apps obsolete and render Jabber another one of those funky hacker-alts like Ogg Vorbis that exists for the freedom freaks but is so far below everyone else’s radar that it might as well not exist.
• I’m not really suggesting anything by this, but I found a P2P app for OS X that connects to multiple networks called Poisoned. And if you were to download something like this, I know you’d only use it legally and for the greater good of man. Right?

This. That. There is no ‘Other Thing’ Today, Though

• I found a blog by an Israeli woman who has some informed and interesting opinions about the ongoing struggles of the Jewish nation. You should read it. You might learn something.
• For the language dorks out there (and I know I’m not alone), there’s a nice series of articles covering some of the stranger nuances of the English language called the Language Corner. The newest entry covers the use of “that” versus “which.” I guess I write like a Brit since I tend to use “which” about every other word. Which reminds me…
• Has anyone read the book Wicked, or seen the musical? The premise sounds interesting, but I want to know if it’s worth it to check either out.

I’m lazy today, so I have nothing to offer except some more sassy commentary on crap I found surfing around the web today. I know you deserve better, but I’ll just have to make it up to you later.

• I don’t normally go for the whole “cute” thing, but this polar bear, while certainly qualifying as cute, is also just a good photograph and the appearance of sheer joy on the little guy’s face actually managed to permeate my carefully crafted shell of bitter grouchiness and made me smile. I figure that’s worth something.
• Then just as I’m feeling all warm and fuzzy, I read this (BugMeNot required) and realize that while furry animals may be sweet and endearing, people are still basically scum.
• Except Zach Vande Zande. That guy rules. In case you’re wondering, the translation is: “I am a Sea Cucumber. I am incapable of wearing pants.” I knew two years of suffering through Madame Gherke’s awful, awful hairstyle and incurable peppiness would come through for me eventually.
• This is good. This makes me happy.
• Sarcasm aside, I actually do approve of this DDR mod. Anything that shoots jets of flame at DDR players gets the a-okay from me.
• Websnark has changed since I first started reading it a year ago. I don’t really follow it daily as a result (the addition of White Wednesday altered the dynamic and I dunno… it wasn’t like I was looking for another personal blog or even a group weblog; I wanted to read about comics) but I did notice today’s post which ties into yesterday’s announcement that America is becoming a collective tub of lard and shows, with startling poignancy, one man’s struggle to buck the trend.
• You know what I love about Robert Cringely? He can take a reasoned argument and then take the most insane leap of speculative logic to come up with some seriously wack theory. And he makes it seem perfectly rational. I love that.
• Following up the GTalk brouhaha: Mac users call the whaaaambulance.

Yesterday’s manic buzzing and twittering all across the ‘net about Google’s new beta, Google Talk (or GTalk as it was quickly dubbed) didn’t really thrill me—although I did set up Adium to connect to it, despite having no one else I know to talk to. I mean, a new IM system/protocol/service? I’m inclined to just hit the snooze button and you can wake me up when something, you know… happens.

However, all the hubbub about GTalk did get people into a mood to discuss online communications in general. This led to people mentioning things like Gizmo, Vonage and Skype. Voice Over IP and voice chatting (audio IM? whatever) aren’t new by any stretch, but Google’s 750-pound gorilla getting in on the act has people speculating that they may be either angling to buy Skype or angling to trash their business, leaving VoIP providers and the few smaller projects like Gizmo floundering.

I personally don’t think Skype has much to worry about. Google’s incessant beta tests (seriously, Gmail is still in beta) and their lack of a “shake-up” feature (such as Gmail’s then-unheard-of massive disk space allotment) in GTalk doesn’t seem to have anything compelling to offer over Skype except the Google name. But this isn’t about Google vs. Skype or really about Google at all.

What got me thinking was Skype itself. I’d heard of Skype and Vonage and all that before, but I’d never really paid it much attention. For one thing, I don’t make a lot of really expensive calls. Some, sure, but not enough that I’m constantly working that angle to try and lower my phone bill. But like anyone else, if there was an acceptable way to reduce any bill I get, I’d be interested. What turned me off about Vonage was that it didn’t really fix my primary problem with phone conversations; that being the phone itself. Vonage converts your home phones into VoIP, which is nifty in a “gee, they can do that” kind of way but not really thrilling when your one and only phone is a crummy SBC model with a seven centimeter cord that just happens to be the only phone you’ve owned in the last six years that functions.

I’ve ranted about my trials and tribulations with telephones before, but the only pertinent rehash that needs to be done here is to remind you that since I became solely responsible for providing me and my household with telephone service I have burned through an estimated $400 or more on telephones, accessories, services and doctor’s bills in a vain effort to have something that works as a means to remotely communicate with friends and family members in a voice-to-voice format. Add in the expense for goods and services which (more or less) allowed me to achieve that goal and it’s been a lot of money with not a lot of return.

Given my detest for the phone system in general and contrasting that with my (likely obvious) fondness for other means of communication, I began to look at Skype in a different way yesterday. In essence it comes down to this: I use the telephone (I’m referring to the wired box in our bedroom that plugs into the wall and we pay for every month) to call maybe ten people. Of those people, perhaps four of them live far enough away that “long distance” calling becomes a factor to the extent where cell phones might be too expensive of an option should the conversations ever get too long. Everyone else I call I’m inclined to do so on my cell phone.

Pardon a quick digression but I feel I should explain my cell phone situation. I get my cell through work, who provides a (crummy, half broken, secondhand, 1998-model) phone and for $10 a month gives me personal use ability. However, the “personal use” is full of stipulations which restrict or outright prohibit expensive features like SMS (text messages), long distance, downloadable ringtones or anything that would add up to more than $10 per month in incurred charges. I’m not really complaining as it is a free phone after all. But what it comes down to is that I have the phone for emergencies at work and I’m really supposed to treat it as if I used it for emergencies at home, too. In protest for this I have never enabled voicemail on it and while I carry it around most places, I don’t really make a concerted effort to have it on me at all times.

All my other communication comes from IM, IRC, email, this site and in-person. Looking at these facts I realize that I “talk” to most people with my computer as it is. Those I don’t I probably talk to with mobile means anyway. So if I need a cell phone and would prefer to communicate via computer in all other cases, why do I still have a landline?

There are two stumbling blocks here: One is emergency services (911) and the other is bandwidth. Skype doesn’t allow emergency service calls (and you’d have to log in through your computer anyway which would probably defeat the purpose of the quick 911 phone call) so it would be fairly imperative to have the cell phone on, charged and nearby at all times. Also, since Skype uses the broadband connection and at least in our household we have a lot of connected stuff including two computers, the XBox and two TiVos, if we thrust the phone service in there, collisions and slowdowns might be a problem for our puny DSL line.

The 911-via-cell isn’t much of an issue at least looking from this side. If a cell phone is your primary calling tool, I’m guessing I’d just learn to have it with me. The bandwidth thing could actually be a blessing in disguise since as I understand it the cable company has come calling around lately looking for people to sign up with their internet service. I would love nothing more than to not just shut SBC phone service down but cancel my DSL account along the way. If nothing else it might be worth it to, considering the expanding uses we’re finding for our internet connection, invest in a more significant pipe anyway.

So what am I missing? Is there any compelling reason not to ditch traditional phone service, use Skype for at-home calling (even using their SkypeOut is cheaper for calling to regular phone lines than picking up my phone) and get a decent cell phone service plan for everything else?

I Have Thoughts. I Will Share. You Won’t Care.

• Scott Ott writes what he would say to Cindy Sheehan if he were the President. While eloquently written and initially persuasive, it neatly manages to avoid the crux of Ms. Sheehan’s query which is, “What the heck are we doing anyway?” The nobility of a death with purpose wasn’t ever, so far as I can tell, being called into question it was more a question of “Why was any of this necessary?” The hooey about “…the number of nations where such protest is possible has multiplied…” sounds all valiant until you remember that Iraq didn’t really ask to be “helped” and we (as Americans which includes the American soldiers) weren’t given the clearest picture about what the motivations were. The whole region hates what we’re doing and we may well have made the terrorist’s case for them, encouraging the exact kind of behavior were were ostensibly trying to interrupt and being the best recruiting propaganda tool they could have asked for. Ott writes, “Let’s, you and I, resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,” but when Bush himself and his cabinet have had a hard time expressing what our plan is, what our rationale was (or should have been, considering their revisionist view of recent history) and what all of this means going forward that sounds incredibly hollow as an answer to the question posed. I mean, you can’t answer someone who asks, “Why did my son die in vain?” with “Buck up or else he will have died in vain.”
• At the same time, we can’t really believe what the administration is saying (even if we could decipher their doublespeak babble) nor can we be sure the information we’re getting is presented in a reasonable manner making the media hard to believe as well.
• In the wake of GTalk’s introduction, the New York Times runs an article talking about the “Do No Evil” company’s new mustache-twirling ways.
• Okay, so it’s not just me.
• Hey, America! You’re fat!
• Whoa, you mean those helpful emails I get several times a day that offer me low low prices on prescription drugs might be shady? I… I… can’t believe it! They seemed so… honest!
• Newsflash: Lots of movies suck. The oft-cited summer movie slump is, assuming it’s even real, commonly attributed to high ticket prices and/or crummy movies by movie goer pundits and piracy/DVD encroachment by studio honchos. The NY Times article suggests it’s probably more the former and definitely not so much the latter. They also suggest that high gas prices may have something to do with it. I know that as of this moment I’m officially sick of people blaming stuff on the high cost of gas… almost as sick as I am of gas being like $3.20/gallon. But back to the movies thing, I think the real problem is in the theater experience. When we saw Four Brothers last weekend, some jerk’s cell phone rang and he had the utter audacity to not just let it ring, but proceed to answer it and have a conversation. I almost flipped my lid trying to keep from getting up and punching the guy’s lights out. I mean hello? How sub-human do you have to be to answer your cellphone during a freaking movie?
  What I think we need are theaters who give us actual value for our dollars. Yes, movie tickets cost a lot. But I think if the cost seemed justified it wouldn’t be so bad. If my $9.00 got me a clean, comfortable seat in a theater with attendant ushers who got paid enough to care that the theater patrons had an enjoyable movie-watching experience and were present to notice if the sound/picture quality was suffering I would fork it over without reservation. I could even understand having the matinee shows forego the ushers; you get what you pay for. As it is I can’t fathom paying full price for an identically rotten experience. Food prices are ridiculous but smuggling in a handful of candy isn’t much trouble and if they offered human-sized portions I wouldn’t have as much trouble buying the inflated snacks. I mean, $3.00 is a lot of for popcorn, but it’s astronomical when you consider that the “small” you’re paying three bucks for could feed an entire third grade classroom at snacktime. When you throw away 70% of a bag you dropped that much money on, you can’t help but feel gypped. And getting free refills on a 64 ounce soda is so funny it almost makes the $4.50 worth the chuckle you get out of it, but not quite. Anyone who can down 128 ounces of soda in two hours without having their bladder rupture deserves to be on the 11 o’clock news. And if you think dudes answering their cell phones during the flick is annoying, try watching Bewitched with the paramedics cleaning up a splattered bladder from the front six rows.
• Haunting and occasionally beautiful artwork depicting the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests.
• One of the funnier, more disgusting posts my brother has made. I approve wholeheartedly.
• Rare it is that I take so long to compose a posting that I have time to retract something I haven’t even posted yet, but I mention above that GMail is still in beta, but I guess you can sign up without an invite… sorta. You have to text message from a mobile phone (something that Dare Obasanjo thinks is a horrible privacy invasion (note that Dare’s site is utter pants in Safari)), but I guess that’s sorta non-exclusive-beta-ish? Or something. Which reminds me, I still have 50 invites milling around if anyone in this planetary system doesn’t yet have a GMail account but wants one.

I mentioned briefly my efforts to set up GPG encryption with OS X’s Mail.app yesterday. There are extents I will go to in order to, say, procure a particular variety of sandwich or locate a specific item nestled within the labyrinthine confines of our computer room closet whose resulting outcome is of less importance than the color of underwear I choose to don in the morning. Yet when it comes to something that has actual significance—for example securing communications of a sensitive nature over untrusted networks in an insecure medium—my typical intensity level involves a lot of shrugging.

But being aware of this fact, I decided today that no amount of mental deficiency would stop me from achieving my goal. Thanks to the industrious folks at MacGPG the initial set-up of the software was pretty painless. The main GPG disk image was a straightforward install, and with the help of one Bruce McKenzie and a site called Zeitform.info I was able to get the initial key generated.

A couple of other utilities from my dawgs at MacGPG (whom, I presume, flow fresh from the nizzle for rizzle) helped get a few other things set up and then I was directed to the PGP plugin for Mail.app, Sen:te. This is where the asphalt and the steel-belted radials unite because my comprehension (and accompanying deficiencies) was not put to the test during the previous steps. It wasn’t until I was required to display some sort of critical analysis of the pertinent data and come up with a course of action that I kind of lost my way.

I don’t mean to disparage Sen:te, because it is a fine product that cleverly replaces $100 worth of software without cost, but the first few times I tried to send a signed message it crashed Mail.app. Crashing apps is an event/experience that I have as much familiarity with as the next guy—I doubt very much that more than a handful of us escaped from the treacherous clutches of Windows 95/98—but my iBook is typically not the cause of these types of circumstances.

A key problem with using or attempting to use new software, especially if its function is also new (as opposed to using a new email client or something where the interface and features may be foreign, but at least the fundamental purpose of the software is old hat), is that when things go wrong there is often a terrifying period where one senses a floating unease: Something is wrong and without any buoys to guide or markers to point the way to shore, the only hope is to pick a random direction and start swimming, trying as hard as possible not to think that you just may be paddling with all your might out into the depths of the ocean, away from land. In this case I deleted the original key and generated a new one with a different passphrase. I’m still not sure which of those elements contributed to the subsequent success, but that success was had at all seemed plenty sufficient for me.

Since I was sending these tests to myself using my myriad of email addresses, I then generated a new key for the recipient address and sent a final mail from that account, now not only signed but fully encrypted.

So I am now capable of sending and receiving GPG/PGP-encrypted email. My public key is even on my Contact page if you’re into that sort of thing. If not, I suspect you’re unmercifully bored at this point already. Makes you wonder why you’re still reading, doesn’t it?

An Abrupt Change of Subject

• They try to spin it like this is normal, a very common occurrence with first-round draft pick Quarterbacks, but I ain’t buying it. I still say they should have picked Aaron Rogers.
• The video game sites have been a-titter about what madness Nintendo has in store for their upcoming next-gen console. They are fond of making veiled references to a new paradigm in interaction with the system and then giving coy smiles and playing coquettishly with their skirts—er, I mean, suit jackets. The last time Nintendo said some stuff like that they dropped the DS on us which, by all accounts wasn’t exactly the herald of the coming apocalypse as we might have believed if we got all our information from gamer message boards (shudder the thought) and it certainly doesn’t make the DS a first-person shooter dynamo, even with the incredibly dorky-looking thumb nubbin, but it does have some interesting and clever uses. One suspects that this time around the Revolution controller is probably going to have some kind of similar effect where at first everyone says they don’t get it, then everyone says it is clear that Nintendo’s collective brains have leaked from their nasal passages and finally everyone agrees that it is interesting but not really that big of a deal. At any rate the speculation has been intense, in the way that nuclear fusion is “intense” but so far everyone seems to be trying to out-stupid each other. (Which, coincidentally, is pretty much what I think human beings do as a general rule all the time anyway.) But today I saw something that actually had—if not creedence—at least a modicum of plausibility about it: Centrifugal resistance.

  Yes, yes, the photo is a total sham, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is probably the most on-target suggestion I’ve seen yet (you really have to be a news-following gamer to comprehend the vast quantities of theories that have been postulated in the last few months about this; the extent to which people have no lives is staggering). Combining some type of tilt detection in a standard controller could help bridge the gap that I mentioned in my previous rant between the third dimension in gaming graphics and the input mechanisms we use to interact with that dimension. The article mentions that there is actually a precedent for this type of thing in the WarioWare game, which furthers the plausibility. Adding some resistance to that tilting control device could make for some interesting gameplay possibilities, so long as the entire library of games doesn’t disintegrate into a bunch of those marble-maze games where you had to roll the marble along a wooden platform and avoid the holes with two axis controllers.

I’m operating in full Short Attention Span Theater mode today. Sorry.

• Nik and I went and saw Four Brothers over the weekend. It was decent but probably a better rental. Definitely a matinee (as we did) at the most.
• I did note, observing the Coming Soon posters in the lobby and during the trailers, that I have a higher-than-usual number of films awaiting release that I’m anticipating: Serenity, The Chronicles of Narnia, Corpse Bride, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Wallace and Grommit, X-Men 3 (even though they’re not going with my idea—of course), Underworld: Evolution and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
• Some I’m skeptical about: Flightplan (Does this look like The Forgotten on a plane to anyone else?), King Kong (Really? King Kong? Uh… why?), and Aeon Flux (I had some friends in high school who liked the Liquid TV/MTV cartoon, but I couldn’t get into it. Stylistic, but—and coming from me this is saying something—too cultish in the writing department. Plus, Charlize Theron? Blugh.).
• Speaking of Harry Potter, like every good fan I pre-ordered my copy of The Half-Blood Prince weeks ago, but since then I’ve started and stopped reading it about twenty times. The reason is that I can’t remember what happened in book five to save my life. I keep hoping if I press through it will start to make some sense, but so far that is not happening. I read Order of the Phoenix like in the two days after it came out and that was so long ago… I know the events at the end of the book were important to the overall story being told, but I can only remember a few events/scenes. So this weekend I, with great reluctance, picked up my copy of Phoenix. Again. Curse my poor reading retention!
• I keep seeing this story about the iPod silhouette model who “can’t afford an iPod.” Um, okay. What bugs me about this is that every news service that picked up the story reports it exactly this way: “Iconic iPod model can’t afford to buy the product she’s shilling.” Which makes it sound like Apple didn’t pay her enough to even buy an iPod. But in fact they paid her $1,500 for three hours of modeling work (which is, as at least one of the stories pointed out, standard wage for such work). That this particular individual had other things to do with that money than buy an iPod is, in my opinion, only a passing curiosity not really a shocking development.
• Slashdot mentions today that RSS may have won over Atom in the Syndication protocol race. For once a Slashdot poster comes up with a reasoned comment stating that it is functionally irrelevant anyway since nearly all aggregators and parsers work equally well on the various RSS versions and Atom, plus many content management systems and blog software auto-generates both feed types. Besides, just because Microsoft is throwing their weight behind their embraced-and-extended RSS variant (known for now as “Web Feeds”) in the (cough) forthcoming Longhorn doesn’t mean RSS can do a victory lap just yet. In any case all I know is that when I have the option of Atom or RSS to put into NewsFire (my aggregator of choice) I always pick Atom because the feeds are usually cleaner, more complete and less prone to errors. This could be nothing more than coincidence or luck but there you go.
• I downloaded the new Corrosion of Conformity album from iTunes yesterday. COC, at least since Pepper Keenan came on board, has been solid from “Deliverance” to the stunningly brilliant “Wiseblood” and then the criminally underrated “America’s Volume Dealer.” I hoped that Keenan’s appearance at the Metallica bass player tryouts during Some Kind of Monster didn’t mean COC was over with. I guess not. The new album (“In the Arms of God”) is something of a departure from the bluesy, swaggering southern metal they nearly perfected on the previous two albums and channels Black Sabbath almost eerily at times. But that’s not really a bad thing and while some of the sheer beauty of their riff construction has been traded for a more punishing grind, I’m initially impressed with the new stuff. I saw the album at Rasputin’s on Friday coming home from working over at Eggsites on my day off from the City but it was used for $14.99 (what the heck?!) and they had no new copy so I gambled that iTunes would come through. They did and I felt better about legitimately supporting a band that I gather could use the support.
• I also picked up a few Guided by Voices tracks based off a dimly remembered tip from last year and was more or less pleasantly surprised with the quality. It’s dingy alt-punk/rock and I really know nothing about the band so maybe everyone else discovered them back in like 1987 and I’m so late to the party I’m sitting here thinking this is cool new stuff and it’s all retro chic or something. Whatever. Good tunes.
• I’ve had “Learn to encrypt email” sitting on my mental to-do list for like three years now and I started thinking today, “You know, everything else is really easy with OS X, why not public-key encryption in Mail.app?” Well, it’s not really that simple but it isn’t as bad as it had been when I tried back in my Linux-on-the-Desktop days so hopefully by the end of the day I should have me a nice new public GPG key and be ready to share trade secrets via email with the best of ’em. Not that anyone else I know uses encrypted email, but it’s nice to know that I could if the need arose.
• After my video game rant last week I decided to put (some of) my money where my mouth was and go try some games. My beloved locally-owned video store closed down a couple of weeks ago due to some leasing snafu and the insufferably high property values around here which really chaps my hide. My utter refusal to darken the doorway of a Blockbuster is well chronicled but without Home Video (a very original name, I know) to serve my impulse renting needs (Netflix is still my primary source of DVD rentals) I’m stuck with Hollywood Video. Hollywood at least tries to display something that resembles customer service but they’re a crummy mega-franchise so they have the same 16 movies at every store, no stock movies worth mentioning (“Oh look, twenty-four copies of Batman and Robin”) and their video games are about as far behind as I am. Anyway the only game I ended up being able to actually rent and then subsequently play was Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The problem with that game is that it’s all about the exploration in Metroid and I don’t have that kind of time with a rental so I’ve been doing the GameFAQs Walkthrough routine which really cheapens the experience. I will say that I thought the Phazon suit from Prime was the coolest thing I’d seen in a long time, but the new Dark Suit in Echoes leaves the Phazon suit in the dust.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Usually I tell people that I’m not a big sweet tooth. I profess that desserts are for the most part not really my thing. Oh sure, I enjoy a bit of candy now and then and who doesn’t like a nice piece of pumpkin pie after Thanksgiving dinner? But I always operated on the assumption that given the choice between having a good dessert and having a good portion of seconds (assuming I liked the meal), I’d always take the seconds.

I’m starting to rethink this conclusion.

For the last three days I’ve been on a reduced carbohydrate diet. The purpose of this exercise is not to debate the relative merits of Atkins (which I’m not doing) or to get into the low-fat versus low-carb flamewar. As it happens I simply wanted to trim some body fat without compromising my protein intake so I could continue to build muscle but lose fat. I’m not even sure this is the best way to do it, but I heard that it was more efficient than a low-fat diet and I’m into efficiency so here we are.

Anyway, for the most part it’s been okay. Breakfast is lots of eggs and a small piece of fruit, I have a small bowl of oatmeal midmorning (like I said, reduced carbs instead of strict Atkins) so I have some energy for my workout, then a protein shake after the gym and some kind of light carb lunch (typically a wrap of some sort). Dinner has been fish or chicken with a few vegetables and then I’ve been having a late evening snack of either more eggs or tuna.

Aside from the first day where I didn’t add up the calories and I about starved myself, it’s been okay. In only three days I’m down 2 pounds with no noticeable loss of strength. I’m optimistic but still need to give it a few more days. By next week I should be able to tell if this is working or if I need to rethink.

Where I’m slowly going insane is that if you note from the menu above, assuming you like those types of foods, it’s a pretty decent selection of foods. So far everything that I’ve made or tried has been quite tasty and aside from some inevitable monotony, I don’t find myself missing the heavy carb diet. Except one thing.

Sugar. When I was planning out this week’s food items, I looked at the desserts and thought, “Man, these are all carbs. Okay, no sweat. I’ll cut these out and kill off half the carbs I’d normally consume right there.” What I mean by that is I had gotten to the point before this little adventure where I’d have one small cookie after each meal. Nothing huge or gluttonous, just something sweet to finish off the palate with a bit of a treat. Two cookies per day is roughly 120-200 calories which I made up for by eating generally low-calorie food and burning about twice that many calories during my workout. Maybe it is obvious now that wasn’t such a great idea.

The problem with trying to reduce carbs is that anything—anything—sweet is probably loaded with sugar, corn syrup and/or caffeine, all of which are either super-carbs or bad for people on high-protein diets. I tried to just do without, I really did. The first day I thought it was just the new diet that I needed to get used to. The second day I thought it must just have gotten to be a habit and I’d have to break it. Yesterday I decided I couldn’t take it and I went and got a low carb candy bar.

Because I haven’t been much of a dessert connoisseur in the past, I don’t spend a lot of time comparing the relative merits of chocolate treats. I’ll try anything once and if I like it, great, if not I’ll pass. The faux-peanut butter cup I consumed last night may actually have tasted like sawdust. I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that the sawdust had something that was vaguely like sugar mixed in with it and that was fine with me. I was quiet for a few moments after I ate it and I could hear, just faintly, the section of my tongue that processes sweet food screaming, “Thank you! Oh, bless you!”

Perhaps I need to redefine my stance on sweets in light of these insights. Obviously they are not the take-em-or-leave-em products I originally thought. So perhaps I’m just incredibly picky about dessert and I’ve applied that generalization to all desserts. For example, I’m not a huge cake fan. There are a select few cakes I really like, and none I could be said to love. Carrot cake, when done right, is pretty good. There’s this Molten Chocolate Lava cake at Chili’s that is right tasty. But your standard run of the mill birthday cake is just… meh. Yet when it comes to donuts, I’m there. I’m even the rare equal-opportunity donut consumer in that I don’t participate in the “classic” vs. “Krispy Kreme” debate. A nice hot KK or a stale Old Fashioned Glazed, I don’t care. Both are good for different reasons. I really like a few pies: The aforementioned pumpkin is a favorite, and my mom makes (cliched as it may sound) a really smokin’ apple pie. French silk pie, when you can actually get it done correctly (which is frustratingly rare) is almost an experience more than just a dessert. But your typical fruit pies (especially cherry) are among those foods that I’ll typically only eat when I feel like I need to in order to be polite.

So okay, I can’t say I’m “Not a Dessert Guy.” But I am a selective dessert guy.

Oh, and I never eat dessert first. That defeats the whole purpose.

Ryan‘s motto is that the Internet won’t surf itself. Strictly adhering to his creed he has once again unearthed link-y delight with this overview of the English subtitles on a Chinese pirated Star Wars Episode III DVD. Hilarious, although be warned: A couple of the translations feature foul language which is curious since the words there don’t even appear in the original dialogue. How they ended up in the double translation is beyond my capacity for understanding.

Which really isn’t saying much when you get right down to it.

There’s also another one with different (but fewer) scenes. Same cautionary notes apply here.

I forgot to mention earlier, but if you need to smile today (or any other day, really) you should check out Animals Have Problems, Too. It’s a silly webcomic that just… works. Start with #1: Shark with Poor Body Image and read ’em all. They’re one panel each, so it goes (too) quick.

Also, look out for my suggestion, coming… sometime. Zach is like, swamped with them but he assures me it will appear eventually. No, I won’t tell you what it was. That would so totally ruin the surprise. It would come up finally and you’d be all “I’ll never get my cumuppance!”

No one wants that.

No one.

I have tasty morsels of linking joy to deliver. Hot and fresh, just for you.

• In spite of a curious lack of pricing information, how freakin’ cool would this be?
• A curiously useful vacation planner for the wired vagabond in all of us.
• Sports fans are weird. In other news, I’m glad that Livan Hernandez is no longer a San Francisco Giant.
• There has been a lot of buzz today about Microsoft’s desire to rename RSS. The creator of RSS thinks otherwise, in a shocking development. I personally think that acronyms in general are horribly overused, especially in software and engineering (and government) but I tend to agree with Dave Winer that changing the name of something is a good way to just further the confusion. I don’t think the problem with adoption of RSS is directly tied to it having a dumb acronym as a name, but more that it is a little difficult to describe the benefits of syndicated content. It’s like trying to describe what the World Wide Web was ten years ago; once you got it it was really cool, but until then it was just too difficult of a concept for some people to grasp until it was obvious it was here to stay and people had to force themselves to understand.
• The XBox360 will cost $399. I don’t consider the stripped down version to be a real 360 model since it doesn’t have a hard drive and it has a lame wired controller. It is $100 cheaper, but I’d be happier if they just had the hard drive-capable model alone and set the standard price at $350. My rationale is that the hard drive will be basically ignored since developers can’t rely on it being available on all units which means that while the hard drive was one of the best features of the original XBox (aside from Live), it has been reduced to a really large built-in memory card. Dumb.
• Boston.com has a fascinating and surprisingly thorough article on the causes of homosexuality. The genetic predisposition argument (which is logically the most likely and unsurprisingly falls somewhere in the middle of the extreme spectrum ends of totally genetic or totally choice) is compellingly made despite what overall seems like a pretty fair and open-minded approach to the topic.
• The endlessly fascinating PVRBlog offers thoughts on TiVo Wishlisting. I’ve often found myself wanting finer-grained control of my Wishlist creation using some sort of (even primitive) boolean and other mathematical operators to weed out the stuff I want. TiVo has a better interface than any other PVR out there, but it sometimes seems to me like they’ve let it go kind of stale lately as they’ve instead scrambled to find some clever new way to make some actual money. I’m not really blaming them, but it would be nice if they tried a little harder to do the best they could with what they already have. I mean, eventually they’re not even going to have the bragging rights to the best interface (someone out there making competing products has got to realize eventually that their clunky UIs are keeping them from being really widely adopted). What will be left then? Half-supported PC interaction? Downloadable movies?
  Speaking of downloadable movies, a lot of people have been grumbling that the oft-rumored movies-on-demand feature that TiVo is slated to offer will be either crummy quality or require long download times. Let me tell you something: People are already waiting for long times to download movies. Right now. Don’t believe me? Go check any BitTorrent site or Grokster. There are hundreds of full length movies in high quality files available for download and people nab them all the time. Let me do it legally right to my TV and I’ll wait patiently, just please don’t give me picture quality that is total pants. The couple of hours I may save is totally not worth it.
• So I guess some guy who makes bad video game movies wants to do a Metal Gear Solid movie. I could care less about the director, but it reminds me that I tried yet again to play Metal Gear Solid 3 last night and I couldn’t do it. Hideo Kojima has wasted too much of my life already with his incessantly prattling/preaching characters hijacking my otherwise interesting games. So I give up. You win, Hideo. Make all the jibber jabber you want; I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to play games that don’t feign intellectualism with sheer quantities of dialogue and, should a movie ever be made, count me out. I’m not that much of a masochist.

Like everything else I do, my music attentiveness goes in sine waves. The reasons for this are inexplicable and I’ve given up trying to understand what makes me “into” or “not so into” a certain thing at any given point. But lately I’ve been listening to a lot more music and enjoying quite a bit of it. A byproduct of my inability to stick with anything for more than a few months at a time is that I tend to catch on to trends and “buzzes” later than I suspect I might if I had some sort of focus. Therefore a lot of these albums are going to seem old to people, but I’m just now catching up so bear with me.

• The Killers “Hot Fuss” – This album took a while to grow on me. I liked the funky-retro rock of “Somebody Told Me” from the radio play and the follow up single “Mr. Brightside” confirmed that they had the capability of a decent sound. But when I got the whole album nothing really stood out to me on the first few listens aside from the Duran Duran-inspired opening track, “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine.” Three out of twelve isn’t typically good enough for me to declare an album worthy of note so I moved on. But I noticed that as the 12 songs on “Fuss” began to seep their way into my random iPod playlists, I started cranking up more and more of them as they hit the rotation. First listen of the anthemic, gospel-tinged “All the Things That I’ve Done” may have you scratching your head but it doesn’t take long before you’re crowing “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier!” right along with them in the mind-sticky breakdown. Aside from a few missteps (“Andy, You’re a Star”) the album is similar to a lot of alternative pop/rock coming out (see The Darkness) that looks back to the 80s for inspiration but unlike some comparable acts The Killers manage to avoid sounding like a cover band gone awry. A few of the hooks are buried too deeply under odd production choices (why the catchy synthesizers of “Jenny” don’t make a noticeable impression until a few bars during the solo is beyond me) and some of the album feels rushed (could they maybe have written another verse for “Mr. Brightside?”) but patience pays off nicely with this one.
• The Decemberists “Picaresque” – I have a difficult time classifying The Decemberists. They write acoustic songs that evoke pre-industrialized European bardsongs (“Eli the Barrow Boy”, “From My Own True Love”, “Mariner’s Revenge Song”) but occasionally they slip in a modern reference or a catchy pop tune (“The Infanta”, “16 Military Wives”). Their lyrics are often woeful—depressing even—but their literary style (and delivery) paint fascination into the melancholy and the previously mentioned catchy tunes help brace the downhearted subject matter just when it is necessary. The album is just shy of masterful, actually, providing a perfect foil for a moody fall day but their strongest musical accomplishments are the more uptempo numbers (even if you never listen to another Decemberists track, hit iTunes and get “16 Military Wives” right now) and while well executed, there are about one or two too many mellow acoustic strummers to be perfect.
• Arcade Fire “Funeral” – I can tell you right now that not everyone is going to like Arcade Fire. Their curious brand of pop is all oddball melody, light driving indie rock and introspective balladry with the most intense vocal delivery I’ve heard on an album. These aren’t necessarily loud songs, but Win Butler sings them as if his points were absolutely vital to be heard and understood, perhaps not just by the listener but by himself as well. The songs on “Funeral” are crafted as near to perfection as I can imagine and aside from a bland closing track “In the Backseat,” there isn’t a weak spot here. The “Neighborhood” tetralogy (broken up by the pretty but indecipherable French/English hybrid “Une Annee Sans Lumiere”… not entirely unexpected from a Quebecois band) is not a musical series but more a thematic one and each entry is amazing in its own right, culminating with #4, “Kettles,” a descriptive slower track which suggests the album may have hit its peak until the next song (“Crown of Love”) comes on and completely blows you away. While the album is singularly fantastic, casual listeners will find it easy to dismiss them as underground U2 progenies or mainstream Belle and Sebastian crossovers. Others may simply find their patience unwilling to tune to Butler’s strained delivery or the catchy but subtle hooks and arrangements. In truth, it’s their loss.
• The Postal Service “Give Up” – Ben Gibbard is part of Death Cab For Cutie, one of those indie mainstream acts whose shirts get featured in Hot Topic, songs get on lots of soundtracks and magazine reviewers love to crow about (or bag on, depending on the phase of the moon) but who don’t get on the radio or MTV much. Gibbard’s interesting but ultimately disappointing side project is The Postal Service. The music was constructed from bits of electronic mishmash and the songs were collaborated on by Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello via tracks mailed back and forth between Seattle and LA. Perhaps they were trying to do something a bit catchier than the notoriously grim DCFC and achieve real pop success, perhaps they were just interested in messing around. Whatever the case it ends up sounding more like the latter than the former. Aside from the standout single “Such Great Heights” (see also Iron & Wine’s brilliant and unintentionally ironic cover for an equally good but drastically different rendition) most of the songs here are un-catchy and while technically intriguing, the sum of the parts is somehow less than the promise of an “indie supergroup.” “We Will Become Silhouettes” gives probably the next best listen, but it’s a distant second to “Heights” and other tracks have flashes of brilliance but the collaborative process makes for a better story than a song and the end result is overproduced mush whose too-light electronic beats betray pop aspirations and whose meandering vocals (and bizarrely misplaced backing vocals) aren’t nearly as interesting as Gibbard wishes they were.
• As I Lay Dying “Frail Words Collapse” – I don’t mean to mislead you; while I listen to a lot of indie rock (see above), I have other musical interests as well. As I Lay Dying is death metal, plain and simple. They feature lead screamer Tim Lambesis going from a gutteral snarl to a wailing shriek over intensive double kick drums, grinding guitars and tempos that threaten whiplash. But As I Lay Dying is different than your typical death metal band growling about war or context-less violence; Lambesis is a spiritual guy and he sings about his struggles with love, God and hope. You can’t really call As I Lay Dying a Christian band (although magazine articles have characterized them as such); their lyrics are not overt enough to specifically not be about human relationships but the sentiments are, according to Lambesis, often originally directed toward God and the juxtaposition is obviously one that suits As I Lay Dying just fine. Chances are you’d have to read along in the liner notes a few times to catch what he’s growling anyway, but doing so provides surprisingly thoughtful sentiments and the delivery is masterful for this type of music. But the music is where it really happens. These are hook-y, dense riffs played at blistering speeds with only a few oases between (“Behind Me Lies Another Fallen Soldier”) when the band shows a hint of restraint and manages to weave in some softer textures, a feat that in turn makes the inevitable return to form that much heavier. As I Lay Dying inject melody into their metal, something that is irrelevant to their spiritual beliefs and allows “Frail Words Collapse” to avoid being an unexpected crossover aberration and transcend into punishingly beautiful metal. If you’re into that sort of thing.
• Imperial Teen “On” – Classifying music is always a dicey proposition, especially when it comes to music that isn’t Top 40 material. It’s easy to call heavy rotation tunes and artists who frequent weekend morning countdown radio shows and MTV (when they bother to play videos) “pop” because, well, they are popular. But indie fans like to use the term pop as a descriptor to indicate that some album or band employs the use of melodies and arrangements that would be popularly accessible, should they be given sufficient airplay or marketing muscle. So for lack of a better term you can safely assume that Imperial Teen’s “On” is a pop album, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that they’re in the same vein as Jessica Simpson. “On” is not complex, it’s full of simple but catchy tunes with dumb but not insipid lyrics that serve mostly to drive the clever and classic vocal lines sung by committee in old school boy/girl style. At times one almost imagines that Imperial Teen is what the Mamas and the Papas may have been, if they’d grown up on steady diet of The Pixies and ABBA. It works, and while “On” isn’t going to be one of those life-altering albums that allows for a deeper insight into the human condition, it is good for cranking loud with the windows down on a summer day, and sometimes that’s as deep as I care to go.

Been a while since I posted some random links. Think I might do just that.

• Some dude did some Photoshop work and came up with a sweet gallery of FPS-style pictures.
• Blockbuster is moaning about their profit loss, citing Hollywood’s inability to produce a flick worthy of their sky-high standards and online competitors. They don’t mention, I notice, their utter lack of regard for customer service.
• In good… er, news… Google News now has RSS and Atom feeds. Spiffy.

I feel myself drifting away from video games.

Call it a between-console-generation lull, call it the belated maturation of a stubborn man-child, it may or may not be a permanent drift, but it is nonetheless real and it is significant. Video games have been a staple interest in my life since… well, practically for as long as I can remember. From my earliest memories of Chuck E. Cheese’s dimly lit arcades to the hours spent in front of my brother’s NES to my well-chronicled passion for XBox, Counter-Strike and Game Boy Advance, being a gamer is part of who I am.

Or rather, it was, until about eight months ago. The last game I played from start until completion was Resident Evil 4 earlier this year. I’ve managed to play maybe a total of eight hours worth of video games since then and not for lack of spare time but for lack of real interest. None of the new portable consoles (PSP, Nintendo DS, Gizmondo) really interest me and while there are some far-off titles that have me vaguely intrigued (Zelda: Twilight Princess) nothing that is currently out or slated to be released soon holds much more than passing interest, if any.

What’s going on here?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I think I’ve narrowed down the problems that plague my enjoyment of my once favored pastime to five things the video game industry is doing wrong and one thing that I’ve done that has no bearing on anything else other than to redirect my attentions elsewhere. I guess I’ll start with that to get it out of the way.

0. Non-Video Gaming

My recent fascination with war gaming has probably more than a little to do with my reduced time with a controller lately. When you have 3,000 points of Warhammer 40K and 1,500 points of Warmaster plus three teams of Blood Bowl and a sack o’ Napoleonic minis to assemble, prime and paint that tends to suck up the free hours. This is not a complaint, merely an observation.

I might also observe before moving on to more interesting points that war gaming has provided me with a lot of the things that I feel are missing from video games, such as tolerable (enjoyable even) human interaction, strategic gameplay and creative involvement. Plus, hour for hour, I’d wager the two are comprable in terms of cost which probably explains why one had to wane for the other to flourish.

But my vide gaming hours being spent elsewhere doesn’t explain why that even when I do want for some downtime in painting, sanding, gluing and sculpting I don’t automatically reach for a controller any more. The reasons for that are in fact more due to what I see as failings on the part of the video game industry as a whole.

1. Stupid Human Interaction

I may be accused of assaulting a fallen equine here, but while the proliferation of online gaming is in my mind a Good Thing, it has so often taken the form of player versus player that the aspect has become synonymous with the whole. Don’t get me wrong, competitive online play certainly has its place and some games are ideally suited to it. The problem is that it has so overshadowed the cooperative possibilities inherent in online games that there have only been a handful of games which even bother to explore the possibility. Those that do (Full Spectrum Warrior, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory) do so in a way that betrays the lack of experience developers have in getting players to work together to achieve a common goal which typified competitive online gaming of ten years ago.

Games which sorely need cooperative play (hello, Halo 2) ignore it and games which could be developed with cooperation as a primary means are, as near as I can tell, never given a chance to see the light of day. I assume that game manufacturers are operating under the assumption that modern gamers don’t want cooperative modes in their games, and perhaps gamers themselves perpetuate this. The problem here is that gamers who feel they wouldn’t be interested in cooperative games don’t realize that a lot of the problems they complain about in player versus player (annoying opponents, unfair matchmaking engines, repetitive gameplay) would nearly disappear with strictly cooperative games.

In fact, many competitive games which have enjoyed a great deal of success incorporate passing nods to cooperation that suggest working together is not something players have no interest in: Witness Counter-Strike which more or less perfected team-based (nee cooperative) competition. Also note the extremely popular versus mode in the latest two Splinter Cell games in which two teammates work against an opposing pair. These hybrid type games (and their accompanying popularity) suggest that they are drawing from both the inherent fun of working with a friend (who may not even be in the same hemisphere) and the standard means of challenge of working against a thinking human foe, when in fact there is nothing being drawn from on the team-up side of the coin, and what should be half of a well-matched pairing is relegated to a novel concept due to nothing more than lack of previous example.

2. Misplaced Focus

I am impressed with modern graphics engines.

OK?

Now enough. Nintendo head honchos came under a lot of fire when the next generation consoles were being discussed because they started a mantra that went something like: “We’re not trying to produce the machine that generates the most whizz-bang graphics. We’re trying to produce a machine that generates the most fun.”

I have to applaud that sentiment, and loudly. I’m a graphics junkie as much as the next guy, but gorgeous visuals is really a small piece of the overall fun of a game. Observe The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Most of the graphics in that game could be produced, at least passably, by previous generation machines. The game was pleasant to look at, sure, but it was fun because it was deep and engrossing and simply a hoot and half to play through. Combat mechanics were precise, the puzzles were challenging but not frustrating, the story was interesting and the secondary elements (music, mini-games, controls, level design) were superb.

Now look at a game like Final Fantasy X, a gorgeous game by all rights… but a gorgeous mess. The digitized acting was cornball, the battle system was tedious and dull, the gameplay was stale and static, the level design was focused more on looking nice than being navigable. I wonder if the people who claimed to like the game were actually enjoying the game or enjoying their sightseeing trip sometimes.

I play some Nethack on occasion. We’re talking about a game that uses ASCII characters to represent a fantasy dungeon crawl. When the letter Z can inspire fear, there may be some decent gameplay happening. What Nethack gets absolutely, positively right is that it is deep… crazy deep. It’s frustrating, aggravating and endlessly enjoyable because you can do so much. Learning the game is part of playing. Chatting about the game is part of playing. Complaining about the game is a huge part of playing and it doesn’t get old. Sure it uses randomized dungeon maps to help keep things fresh, but a simplistic game with a randomizer wouldn’t be any fun, so they gave you so much to do you could play the game—just the first level mind you—for a year and probably never do everything possible. It’s a game whose source code is less than four megabytes; we have DVD-ROM games capable of holding over ten times that amount and we fill it up with licensed pop tunes and mammoth textures and don’t bother to worry about whether the game is any fun.

At this point in time I should have to be impressed when a game like Fable lets me change my appearance with age and experience. That sort of innovation should have happened long before reflective surfaces in quarter panels and ragdoll physics. I want a role-playing experience that is actually role-playing, that gives me a chance to develop how I want and achieve goals in clever ways without being tied to a rail for the sake of a few cutscenes.

3. The Funnel Factor

I have the sense that while game developers are busy seeing how sweet they can make their graphics look, they are ignoring the role of game designer to the extent that they are becoming like Hollywood in terms of originality.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not one of those people who bashes sequels just for being sequels. At least, unlike in the movies, video game sequels are often superior to their predecessors because usually (hopefully?) a good game gets refined and has a few mechanical defects tweaked and improved in later versions. But a sequel of a First Person Shooter at this point is just another First Person Shooter.

Because so many developers don’t want to have to come up with an original way to play a game, they continually fall back into a tired cliche until the number of genres in video games is funneled into a handful. Shooters (First Person), Strategy (Real Time), Platformer (Devil May Cry-style or Grand Theft Auto-style), Racing (Driving), Role-Playing (Full Motion Video-fest): any license or concept has been shoehorned into one of these styles or, if the developers are feeling really nutso that week, multiple genres.

I understand that there are limitations (odd as that sounds) with 3D. Cameras become a problem in three dimensional environments, field of vision and scope of action have to be considered. Controls are tricky, too, because 3D implies realism and while old sprite-based games might have gotten away with some abstraction of controls 3D gamers assume that controls will function in a way that is consistent with a world that, relatively speaking, operates under the same rules as their own.

But the problem with funneling all games into a handful of genres is that they begin to define the limits of what should be a more or less limitless medium. Instead of finding cool game concepts and building worlds and stories into and around that, people think of genres and find minor tricks and tweaks to set them apart that will fit with the theme of the day. Games have started to become detail-tweaks with every one subgenred down into their minutiae with literal differences such as “stealth action like Splinter Cell… but with camoflauge!” Is this the extent of the originality game developers have left? When individual death animations for each type of foe is a selling point, I’ve already halfway checked out. Wake me when someone does something worth mentioning.

What happened to turn-based games? Why does strategy have to be “real time?” Why are all massive role-playing games online multiplayer? Doesn’t anyone see the appeal of a massive solo campaign? Maybe a small-band cooperative online role-playing game? And I don’t just want to see top-down racers or even a return to 2D games, necessarily. Show me something unique; something that has a cool concept or a great license that doesn’t do something stupid with it. When Shadowrun is a first-person shooter, something is seriously wrong.

4. It’s the Writers, Stupid

Games have gotten more complex. I’ll give them that. Sometimes, complex is better. Sometimes complex can suggest the ability to delve into artistic realms. I don’t know if I believe it has happened yet, but I think that at some point games could be considered art.

I know it isn’t just games (watched any TV lately?) but writing is bad all around—and as bad as it is in movies and on TV, it’s 20 times worse in games. Writing dialogue and stories for games needs to not be something that just the mega-budget games can afford (or something that mega-budget games horribly abuse). Games need to all be given the benefit of a native-language speaking writer who actually knows how to write stuff. Ideally, it would be someone who knows how to write games. At least someone who understands the mindset of the gamer so we don’t end up with crossovers gone awry.

Movies are expensive. They cost about $9.00 per person around here for non-matinee showings and I grumble for days if I pay for a movie with crummy writing. Video games cost an average of $50. The math is yours to do if you wish, but anything past the price of a badly written hardcover book is too much to pay for this kind of thing.

5. Pushin’ Forward Back

My final beef with video games is games that continue to make mistakes that should have been resolved as soon as the technology or the innovation to correct them appeared. I’m talking about things like save-anywhere. Really, in today’s day and age of gargantuan quantities of dirt cheap disk space, games that require you to “find a stopping point” don’t deserve shelf space in the bargain aisle of Jimmy’s Vid Shack. People are busy, adults with responsibilities play games too, let us save where we are and come back later. No, I don’t want to collect save crystals or typewriter ribbons: I want to save where I am exactly and come back to the same point when I have time. No backtracking, no save-of-doom, no hassle.

This same concept can be applied to entire games such as the Tomb Raider series who, in spite of ever shrinking sales from gameplay that was broken by way of overexposure, continued to be rehashes of the previous games for years. Reluctant kudos go to Resident Evil 4’s design team for finally doing something about the oft-maligned “tank walker” control scheme of the previous games, but it certainly shouldn’t have taken five games to get the clue. I have yet to see a Tomb Raider game that does anything TR2 didn’t. Oh, I’m sorry, is it still possible to defeat a skilled Soul Calibur player with some random button mashing? Wow, that’s some great fun there—and a real incentive to practice, too!

Let Me Explain. No, There is Too Much. Let Me Sum Up.

I suppose that at some point I will probably find a new system or game or something that will attract my attention again. Perhaps I will one day be complaining as much about war gaming as I am now about video gaming. But with so many games being showcases for some 3D artist’s portfolio instead of something I really want to spend my time playing, I have a hard time wondering if I’ll have to wait a long time for video games to catch up to my expectations or if at some point I’ll just have to lower them to make do.

In the meantime, I’m keeping busy and while I’m not sure if I’m excited yet for the new systems to launch, I’m still open to trying a great game that flies below the radar and gets a lot of this stuff right. Got any ideas? I’m listening.

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I went to bed last night no better in mood or disposition than I had been upon my arrival at home from work. My headache had subsided only momentarily and even a relaxing swim in the pool and a tasty root beer float from Jack in the Box hadn’t stopped my mind from wandering to the pending workday and the hassles it would contain. Normally I am not the type to concern myself with work when I am not physically there; this week has been different and it’s lasting effect has been to drain my leisure time of delight. I resent work in general as a result.

This morning came and despite better intentions, I slapped at the snooze alarm several more times than is typical. I dragged through my routine, feeling lethargic and unmotivated, still plagued by the nagging headache. My inevitable tardiness, a product of succumbing to my doldrums, did little to lift my spirits. As anticipated, the load of work that stood before me was daunting and I felt the throbbing in my forehead intensify several levels as I reviewed it. I had run over a piece of construction equipment on the ride over, so I retreated from my cube to examine my car for tire/body damage. While the car seemed okay the inspection process made my head worse and I realized almost simultaneously that I had left my keys inside on my desk and I had forgotten to bring anything to eat for breakfast (nor had I eaten at home because of my belated and last-minute dash to compensate for my sluggish morning preparations).

Walking the long way round to the front of the building my shoes got wet in the freshly watered grass and by the time I returned to my workspace I was so close to confronting my boss and requesting the day off I had my Windows PC powered off.

Then, I saw this.

Glee.

Okay, okay, I’ll admit that I’m almost thrilled to see that Apple is finally producing a multi-button mouse. Yet I’m still skeptical about the scroll wheel/trackball thing; I’m reserving full judgment until I try it out (thanks, Apple Stores!). My biggest gripe is that they don’t have a bluetooth model. What’s up with that? Granted the wired one would work fine with my iBook (on which I did not opt to include the bluetooth module) and possibly replace my RF-but-still-takes-a-USB-slot wireless mouse that I think is either broken or perhaps just the biggest battery hog this side of the PSP but either way is a right pain in the sitter. That still doesn’t help the situation with the mini where it has bluetooth capability but for now surrenders a USB port to a wired optical mouse that sits on one of those sliding keyboard trays.

It sounds like a decent setup except that when the tray is pushed all the way in (as I usually keep it when I’m in the room but doing something else like painting miniatures), if I need to just do a quick something with the mouse, its cord is trapped between the tray and the back of the desk, rendering it immobile. You’d think the situation wouldn’t come up that often but it does so enough that I’ve kicked the desk in frustration more than once.

Let me tell you, when you’re wearing flip-flops, kicking a desk is not pleasant.

So hey, Apple, for feet’s sake, get it together.

That is all.

I am looking for a companion to accompany me to a show I dare not miss: The Download Festival which features not only The Killers, but Modest Mouse and The Arcade Fire. If I have to explain why that is significant, consider yourself uninterested and ignore this entire post.

I already have a reluctant offer from Nik to go along for the proverbial ride, but I think both of us would prefer if someone who appreciates these particular bands would volunteer to join me. Tickets went on sale yesterday; I have no idea how quickly they may go but consider it well within your best interest to notify me soon if you are interested.