ironSoap

I was reading the lamentably sparse postings on Websnark the other day when I saw this entry about how Palladium games is in big trouble. As in, if they don’t get some cash to pay their debts in a hurry they may be out of business.

I should clarify a bit here. Palladium games makes an eponymous fantasy role-playing game and back in the 80s/90s had licenses to Robotech and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which were both really big at the time. (As an aside, you might be tempted to think that a TMNT role-playing game would be really lame but in fact it was quite a lot of fun for one-off adventures and character creation was a hoot as you weren’t limited to turtles, you could be a mutant of pretty much any animal.) Palladium also had a superhero game, a horror-themed game and a pretty popular game which touched on some Alias-type themes long before Sydney Bristow was ever a gleam in J.J. Abrams’ eye called Ninjas and Superspies.

As the license agreement time began to expire, Palladium introduced the Rifts game which promised “Megaverse” settings where magic and technology were combined in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future where there were portals (the titular Rifts as it were) that granted players access to other dimensions. Ideally this meant that players could put their characters into pretty much any setting as you could simply write it off as a Riftworld. This more or less drew all the original Palladium games under one umbrella since they could claim that the TMNT setting was a particular Riftworld and so on. Plus Palladium games used a company-standard system so in theory all games were compatible with each other.

Now, Palladium games weren’t my first foray into role-playing. In fact my friends and I used to play a diceless variant of Dungeons and Dragons during recess (yes, we were total geeks waaaay back) and the first actual game system I owned was Mayfair Games’ DC Heroes. After that I think I picked up some Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition books before finding Robotech. Robotech was our preferred game for quite some time because for one thing we were total Robotech nerds and for another it felt like a more advanced game than DC Heroes in terms of mechanics. It sounds stupid to say it out loud now, but at the time the fact that it used more than just a couple of ten-sided dice (which were essentially used as percentage dice) made it seem like a more “mature” game.

Robotech begat some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, we dabbled with Ninjas and Superspies a bit and got accustomed to the Palladium system enough that by the time Rifts was announced we were pretty hyped to check it out when it was released.

The problem with Rifts, in the end, is that it does neither of the two things that I feel a good role-playing game should strive for: It isn’t a really solid universal system nor is the setting detailed and unique enough to really act as the primary draw. If you recall this is my same general beef with Dungeons and Dragons although I at least concede that D&D is good in that it is the sort of baseline standard for role-playing gaming in general so it’s perfect for putting together a one-off adventure or as a starting point for a group of players who may be relative strangers since if you collect 100 role-playing gamers I’d put money down that 99 of those are familiar with D&D and at least 95 of them have played it at least once. Which is generally enough to get a game going.

Rifts’ problem is that it doesn’t even have that standard of familiarity going for it so in order to play and enjoy Rifts you have to put up with or modify the game mechanics or you may just really like the general direction the game designers decide to take the setting. I suppose there are people who like the Palladuim system and I admit that in my younger days I thought it was pretty cool but in retrospect I note that my Palladium campaigns tended to have a lot of pretty generic combat partially because I was unimaginative but also because generic combat is pretty much the only really fleshed-out part of the system.

These days I prefer a system more like Hero where the game mechanics are enjoyable even if the party never even finds any combat to get into. If nothing else I prefer a game like Shadowrun where the combat is among the weaker points of the system and the skill checks or character creation is better. Combat in role-playing games is easy since as the GM you can pretty much guide it whichever way you want anyhow (“Oh, these guys just got an order to disengage—miraculously saving your lives”).

But Rifts had some interesting ideas. Clever character classes like Juicers and Glitter Boys were inspired and the attempt to include a mechanism for combining Big Robots with spellcasting fantasy characters and modern combat type archetypes was admirably ambitious if nothing else. I think that generally speaking I would prefer to try to implement something like this in a GURPS-style system instead but you can’t casually disregard the inspiration they provided.

I guess part of what casued the company to have trouble was a poor licensing decision to grant the Rifts license to a developer making a game for the (snicker) N-Gage. Now I’ve heard the game is good, which may well be true. But no one cares because the N-Gage was a horrible platform from the very beginning. It wasn’t some big secret either. I think it must have been Nokia and Palladium that were the only people who though the N-Gage wasn’t DOA before it even shipped. And once the reports came back after the E3 where it debuted in all its battery-covering-cartridge glory, it was all but settled that the thing was going to tank.

My point is that I don’t think that poorly managed companies should be rewarded for their mistakes just because they have done some interesting things in the past and I don’t think I’ll be helping with the drive to help keep them afloat. However, I don’t like to see game companies die. I still sorta hope they pull through just because of that, but I have little hope.

Pity.

Quick Note

So the Sharks made it 3-1 despite making it way more tense in the third period than was strictly necessary. One thing people keep forgetting in their exaltation of Patrick Marleau’s hat trick (not that it isn’t worthy of praise) is Patrick Rissmiller’s initial goal. If there was ever a dude who earned a goal, it was that guy. He pushed for that to happen about three times on that shift, working hard, forechecking, staying with the puck and not giving up. It wasn’t as pretty as the Bernier to Marleau dish, but it was more impressive from a strictly work ethic perspective.

Also, after looking like they might pull the upset for a moment it seems likely that Edmonton won’t be able to hang on against Detroit anymore. Since Colorado all but has its series in the bag that means that Detroit will likely play the Avs in Round 2 leaving the Sharks (assuming they can finish the Predators off, which they certainly should—I’m predicting they do it in six back at the Tank) to play the winner of the Anaheim/Calgary series. At this point it’s probably closer than most people thought between those two teams but I’m pulling for Anaheim because playing them in Round 2 would make for an easier series and the Sharks would get home ice advantage.

Let’s talk about the Sharks for a second. Wait, what?

Oh. Yes, again. We’re talking about the most legitimate Cup-contending team San Jose has seen yet. What else are we going to talk about?

So I was fairly harsh a few weeks back on several Sharks players. I got into a discussion with Lister and HB about some of these players the other day after the Anaheim game HB and I attended. It was your typical guy/sports conversation in which guy A posits controversial theory 1 and guys B and C argue vehmently over theory 1, possibly suggesting counter-theory 2 and generally questioning guy A’s sanity at every turn.

In this case my beefs were with Scott Thornton, Nils Ekman and a general mistrust of the Sharks’ defense. I understand Lister’s indignation: He’s been a Scott Thornton fan since he turned some guy’s face into hamburger a few years ago. They made a fairly strong case for Ekman’s role on the top line as being all about skating away from the puck and opening up ice for Cheechoo and Joe Thornton. And they suggested that I was being too hard on the young D.

My approach to sports fandom is with great cynicism. I’ve been that Great Believer sports fan in my younger days only to watch teams stumble and fail, often spectacularly. My response has been to continue hoping for the best while building a careful protective layer of criticism so when my team finally does succumb to idiocy all I need to is point and say, “See? Called it.”

But I must admit that Scott Thornton has had a quietly impressive series thus far and Ekman—aside from business as usual taking the worst possible penalties—has looked pretty good as well. In fact, since the first game the Sharks as a whole have looked good. Tuesday night they essentially ran amok on Nashville, only rescued from a blowout by some early acrobatics by Chris Mason. You could point to the short handed goal as a sign of weakness on the Sharks part, and indeed it was a boneheaded play but a couple of things rang true about it to me. One is that the Preds executed that 3-on-1 rush flawlessly. They took the D-man out of the play and used the late attacker to simply burn Toskala with a shot he had no chance to get. Second was that it looked more like a case of exhuberance to get on the board in front of the home crowd than a seriously broken play. Had the pinch not been quite as deep or the bounce not come right at that moment and things might have gone down differently. I’m not saying they deserved commendations for the play in the least, but aside from that play and two, perhaps three slip-ups behind their own net on defense and I thought the Sharks looked pretty unstoppable the whole game.

A couple of additional notes:

• The Sharks cycle the puck like absolute madmen. But I feel like they haven’t quite figured out that the Preds have watched enough tape to realize that just possessing the puck won’t win games so they cover the passes and the Sharks control forever but only get a few halfhearted shots on net with no dynamite scoring chances for all the effort.
• Note where two of the Sharks four goals came from: Rushing players taking the shot. Outshooting the Predators 40-17 is good, but when 25 of those shots come after three or four minutes of cycling and funky passes and the end result is pretty much right into Mason’s breadbasket, I mean, they could have peppered him with 55+ shots if they’d stopped horsing around down there and just fired pucks in.
• Especially in need of more shooting: Power Play. I get so frustrated on 5-on-3 situations especially when they sit there and play catch. Hello!? You have two extra guys. Shoot.
• The Avalanche have a 3-0 lead over Dallas. Edmonton has a 2-1 lead on Detroit, with Yzerman improbable for game four. Assuming Calgary goes on to beat Anaheim and the Sharks can finish off Nashville, San Jose will have home ice for round two versus Colorado. Benediction!
• Of course, that would mean it was up to Edmonton to beat Calgary because while it would be a fun Western Conference finals rematch, I do not want to have to play the Flames at all this postseason. kthx.

More Hockey

Not had enough? Okay, check out this site with some of the year’s best goals. Note Jason Spezza’s slick move (and the utterly useless defense trailing the play) in the “October” clip.

So I was listening to the local sports talk station on the way to work the other day and they had this… “band” in there. It was pretty much two dudes with guitars and I think one of them was the co-host of the show. Anyway, they decided to do this cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Suzie Q” only they changed the lyrics to “Jon Cheechoo.” I was seriously embarrassed for them.

Misc Weirdness

I stumbled across an interesting comparison image showing the various iterations of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider. If nothing else it gives one a pretty good appreciation for the graphics advancements in modern games. I was also interested to note that Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation (IV) had the most unrealistic looking Lara of them all, in terms of her physical dimensions. Note how stupidly thin her waist is compared to her, uh, upper torso. I’m thinking spinal fracture city.

Here’s an article on the BBC (featuring dubious science) about cow farts. No, seriously.

Oh, and here’s a pretty nifty collection of links worthy of a bookmark featuring freeware to solve common computing problems. If you’re into the whole frugality thing.

Lastly, it seems that Nintendo has given the official name of their next-gen system: Wii. It’s pronounced “we.” I’m so not making any of this up.

A couple of months ago I wrote about totally insane technical support customers. The condition continues. Witness this email service request I received from a customer:

Hello Support,
We are trying to configure our application servers to use our local authentication method. Using this method our users would log in with their network credentials which would map to application users that are configured to be guest accounts. Below I’ve attached instructions for the technical engineer to use with our requirements. That programmer/engineer will work with our analyst in order to set up our application to use the described authentication procedure. They will (shadow the database ID values in order to) configure this to allow employees to access the application. Then your analyst will do the testing of this system.
I need to receive the contact information for this programmer/analyst so that we can have our analyst contact them to develop an action plan. Please respond as soon as possible as I will be out of the office tomorrow (I’ll be returning Tuesday, September 6).
Thanks,

In case it wasn’t stupefying enough, let me clarify the point that this was sent to me. My role (in fact my job title) is Technical Support Analyst and as far as any customer is concerned, I’m the only person they should expect to deal with when they contact our support center. Sure, some issues get escalated to senior engineers, but there is no such thing as a “programmer/engineer” or a “programmer/analyst” who would ever contact a customer to implement a customized login routine.

We do have a consultation team which charges like any other on-site consultant to do this sort of work, but it most definitely isn’t covered under anyone’s support contract. Also note that of the five or so different support contracts we offer, they have one of the two cheapest which means that their expectations ought to be miles below what they seem to be expressing here.

Most baffling is the last line. September 6th? As in four and half months from now? I had a very hard time not replying with, “Hey, we’ll work on this when you get back from your trip to the moon.” And she prefaces the statement with “I’ll be out of the office tomorrow.”

I mean, that’s like saying, “I’m taking a fifteen-minute break. I’ll be back next Thursday.”

We often have problems on the support floor because our product is massive and it interacts with so many other products. For example, the team I work on is charged with supporting the web client portion of the software, but in order for it to work it requires a Webserver capable of processing Java Server Pages (JSP). This server must then be accessed by a web browser. So at minimum the product I support requires the use of a third-party webserver, a third-party servlet engine (JSP processor), the OS the webserver is installed on, and a third-party web browser. Oh, and the server needs to run Java (also third-party). On top of this we support a variety of each: Apache, IIS, WebSphere for webservers; Tomcat, ServletExec, JBoss for servlet engines; Red Hat, Solaris, Windows 2000/2003 for server OS; Mozilla and IE for browsers and the list actually goes on.

Technically we’re not required to troubleshoot other companies’ products, but we often do it when it’s clear that the problem isn’t really a bug with the other software but a configuration issue between their stuff and ours. This translates into a necessity for support personnel to understand a lot of various software packages. But sometimes customers don’t quite see the distinction.

Me: Tech support, how can I help you?
Customer: Hi, I’m having trouble with one of our applications. It looks funny.
Me: Okay, what are you seeing?
Customer: Some of the tabs are overlapping. You can’t even click the ones that are behind there.
Me: Hm, I see. Do you have any customized stylesheets applied to your IE settings?
Customer: Oh, I don’t use IE.
Me: Ah. I understand. Well, you can still use custom styles in Mozilla. Do you have any of those applied?
Customer: I’m not using Mozilla, either.
Me: …Okay. What are you using currently?
Customer: (proudly) Opera!
Me: Uh, yeah. Sir, we don’t support Opera.
Customer: Why not?
Me: Honestly, sir, I’m not sure. Probably because it has such a small market share that it’s not economically feasible for engineering to—
Customer: I don’t care about your economics! I’ve been using Opera for years, and I’m not about to stop now! We’ve standardized on Opera!
Me: I sympathize, sir, but—
Customer: I’ve never had a problem with your product and Opera. Don’t tell me it’s not supported!
Me: But I thought you just called because you were having a problem with Opera. And it isn’t supported.
Customer: Can’t you just download Opera and test it out to see if you get the same glitch?
Me: Well, I suppose I could, but—
Customer: Great! Let me know what you find out.
Me: The problem is that even if I confirm the problem, there’s nothing I can do about it. Engineering won’t fix anything to correct a problem with an unsupported third-party application. That’s what unsupported means.
Customer: Just look at it. You’ll see what I’m talking about.
Me: Couldn’t you have just shot me in the chest instead, sir?

Of course, sometimes it’s not just the customers that lose their bearings. We have a system that interfaces our telephones with our computers so we can track and correctly assign incoming calls. It works by doing a call transfer to the extention set via software preference whenever we pull a live call from a community queue. I worked from home last week so while I was there I had to change the extention preference to my home number so calls I pulled would come to me.

A couple of days later I was back in the office and a call came in. I pulled it from the queue and sat patiently with my little headset ready, waiting for the phone to ring. Nothing.

Several minutes later I got an IM from Nik:

nchamilton: There’s someone on the phone for you.
ironsoap: Uh, take a message?
nchamilton: It’s one of your customers.
ironsoap: ??
nchamilton: His ticket number is AC1566012.
ironsoap: lol

When I finally got it all straightened out, I waited for the call to show up in the queue. Finally it did and the queue info listed the call had originated from a contract number associated with the Central Intelligence Agency.

When I pulled the call and talked to the guy, he acted like nothing at all had happened.

It was like he already knew.

I’m lazy today but I want to update. This sounds like a job for…

Bullet Points

• I attended a corporate meeting in San Francisco today. It was an hour bus trip (one-way) with some company provided snacks of dubious quality as an incentive. Unlike the Microsoft company rallies you see in famous internet clips, this was less of a pep rally as a sort of drab, state-of-the-company report. Turns out, the state of our company is “pretty okay, probably.” Inspiring!
• I’ll count it as acceptable that the Sharks managed to draw a tie from the opening road games in their series. That basically puts them in a best-of-five with home ice advanatge. What I don’t find acceptable is the officiating so far in the series. It’s not that they call too many penalties (although I’d prefer a lot fewer, thanks) it’s more that they are so mind-numbingly inconsistent with them. Both ways. Each team has alternated in the young series from penalty box parade to getting away with murder. The series is tied but I’d basically give both games to the refs had the Predators managed to make the game yesterday even remotely interesting. As it is I’d say the Sharks were robbed of any legitimate chance to win on Friday and the Preds had the wind sucked out of their sails by a bunch of really random calls on Sunday. Going forward with the series I really hope these refs can get out of the way and let the teams decide who wins.
• I caught Silent Hill on Saturday with HB since both of us are pretty big fans of the game(s). The movie wasn’t preview screened for critics (bad sign) and got a lot of bad reviews from those who made the effort to give it a rating. I don’t necessarily disagree with some of the criticisms (bad dialogue, some questionable acting, too much/not enough exposition) but I think considering the source material games are basically incomprehensible as well and horror movies aren’t exactly the place to go to see fine Academy Award-worthy performances that it did what it was trying to do pretty admirably. At the very least I was entertained for a couple of hours. I can’t exactly recommend it, but I wasn’t sorry to have seen it. What I was sorry about was spending $4.00 for a small diet soda that tasted like regular soda that had been sitting in melted ice for about eight hours.
• I went over to HB’s place on Friday to catch the game and while I was there I tried to do a bit more work on the network I messed up. I was able to determine that their net connection was fine by plugging the ethernet cable right into my laptop so with no other troubleshooting steps revealing any useful information I diagnosed the AirPort Express as having some sort of issue; possibly a faulty ethernet connector. After we caught the movie we headed over to the nearest Apple store for our appointment at the Genius Bar to have it looked at. The Genius plugged it in and it worked fine for him which left us back at square one. I had to take Nik out to Whimsy‘s place for some tea party/Mary Kay pusher meeting so I couldn’t follow through with the new info, but HB called and said that he got home and just unplugged everything and plugged it all back in and stuff started working again so the final diagnosis is: Who knows? Man I love computers.
• We caught the end of The Next Food Network Star last night and Guy won, which is what I was hoping. The funny thing is, I don’t know that I’d actually watch his show or not because I get kind of tired of generic in-studio cooking shows, but at least that unpleasantly-shaped, uncomfortably effeminate goofball Reggie didn’t win. Seriously, dude, dry up the waterworks. Even the chicks weren’t as weepy as you.
• I picked up Indigo Prophecy for the XBox over the weekend as well. It’s a very curious game that I knew only from a comment made by a friend and the description on the back of the box so I had very few preconceptions going in. It works like an adventure game, mostly, where you wander around and try to figure out what to do. Usually it isn’t too hard to determine and the story is cinematic and intriguing enough to keep you pushing along, trying not to get stuck up in the game so the story can fight its way out. The strange thing is that all the “gameplay” elements are very abstracted from the action on the screen, such that action sequences are handled via a series of rythym game-style follow-the-leader joystick movements. In this way it’s kind of like Dragon’s Lair, which is sort of unfortunate because it kinda pulls you out of the action and forces you to think about something other than what your avatar is actually doing. It works in certain cases like when playing a guitar (the rythym element makes logical sense there) but when fleeing from a horde of mutated insects or kickboxing a punching bag it feels divorced from what the character is actually doing. Also failing in certain tasks merely ends the game forcing a restart which, for a game that is trying really hard to be an interactive movie, feels forced and simply reminds the player that—despite the sheen of freedom—they really are still on a rail. What’s almost the most frustrating is that I’m really interested in the story but I feel like I’m being needlessly thrust into interaction where it doesn’t add to the enjoyment. I’d almost rather be watching Indigo Prophecy: The Movie than guiding these characters through their morning shower routines and whatever.
• Nik and I stopped by the mall for a bit yesterday so I could look for a plain black zip-up sweatshirt now that the weather is finally threatening to get nicer. My agitation at being shut down in this endeavour has led me to a brilliant business idea: Normal Clothes. I’d sell plain T-shirts without any Socially Inexcusable If Spoken Aloud and Largely Offensive Statements Played For Laughs Because They Appear On a T-Shirt; clothing that doesn’t force one to become a walking billboard; jeans that don’t cost enough to dent the National Deficit and seasonal clothing available year-round because weather doesn’t really care about our human calendars. Okay so maybe as a business it isn’t brilliant, but if such an establishment existed, I’d be their #1 customer.
• I did find a pair of sunglasses that were relatively cheap. Of course, they were broken and I had to take them back.
• Whomever said that shopping was therapeutic does not own a dictionary and clearly mistook “therapeutic” to mean “capable of inducing suicide.”

I got a chance to work from home today in an effort to figure out how to get our car back. It was cool because while I’ve sorta-kinda worked while not actually being in the office before, this was the first time it actually counted as a day of work. That my boss was cool enough to let me do this already (I mean, I’ve only been working this job for about four months) either means he’s got a lot of faith in me or he has no idea how clueless I am.

At least in this case I’ve done the self-motivation thing before so I’m not concerned about my own performance in that regard, it’s more of an issue where I really would like for this to be something I can continue to do on a semi-regular basis. In order for that to happen I need to show that not only will working from home not be problematic but also that my overall skill in my job is continuing to improve despite being away from the office on occasion.

Of course in terms of the car situation, there was some miscommunication with the insurance company and I’m still not completely clear how we’re supposed to get it back in our possession (I thought I would need to go with Nik to the tow yard it’s being stored in so one of us could drive it home). So in the end my working from home was not strictly vital but it turned out to be a good thing that I was here to help Nik sort out the confusion with AAA.

Anyway, the only other thing I thought might be of interest is that I’m working on a new design for the site. You can see a preview here if you like and I’m happy to get any feedback you might have.

Network? Yeah, Right

For someone who is ostensibly a computer geek and who makes a living solving computer-related issues, there are few things more frustrating than running into a stumper which negatively impacts someone I care about. Last night Nik and I went to HB and Gin‘s place for some barbecued steak to celebrate the first reasonable weather day in what feels like forever. The food was good, the company was excellent (as always) but after dinner Gin suggested that I give her new Sony Viao laptop a look to see if I could get her on their wireless network.

Troubleshooting network issues, especially wireless network issues, is not exactly my forte. It’s also not exactly my idea of a fun evening, but HB and Gin are exceptions to the rule because a) they seem to have mostly converted to Mac folk which I certainly respect and admire and b) they’re good people who had just fed me a marvelous dinner. What was I going to say, “Yeah, thanks for the steak but I’m not interested”? Hardly.

It became pretty clear off the bat that the Belkin PCMCIA wireless adapter Gin had and its associated software was designed by feral orangutans so it wasn’t going to be easy. But I forged ahead, fiddling with the connection settings, SSID keys and whatnot until I got to the point where it should have been online and working but I could get no traffic coming in from the Internets. Puzzled, I tried to transfer some of the settings I found on their AirPort Express configuration over to the laptop for a while and while I was doing that HB decided to show Nik a website he had found.

As he fired up Safari, it said there was no connection to the Internet there, either. So switching gears to troubleshoot the Mac, I started investigating. It was possibly the weirdest network issue I’ve ever seen: Everything was fine. The internal network worked just dandy, with the APE receiving the signal from iTunes to play over the stereo and the AirPort status was listed as on, active and connected to the Internet. Yet there was no signal coming from the outside world. Gin even kindly called Comcast to see if there was some freaky, coincidental outage at that moment but, alas, no.

What really baked my noodle was that I hadn’t touched a single thing on the Mac. Other than opening the configuration panels for the APE to look at the settings, none of them had been messed with. It made no sense. After an hour or more of frustrating trial-and-error, I was pretty grouchy, Gin seemed to be concerned for my sanity, HB was asleep on the couch and Nik was gently urging me to give up so she could head home. Somehow leaving their network in worse shape than I had found it when they had merely requested some help seemed very rude.

Eventually, on the verge of doing what inevitably leads to nightmarish support calls and wiping everything clean and starting from scratch, Nik and Gin finally talked me in off the proverbial ledge and promised that it wasn’t a big deal. After all, they reasoned, I was coming back on Friday to watch the playoff game so I could maybe sleep on it, get some inspiration or look up some online help guides and get it all back to normal in a jiffy. Unconvinced but now thinking clearly enough to not desire any kind of major catastrophe wrought by frustration, I conceded.

The funny thing about being a geek with a certain sense of pride in the moniker, I didn’t sleep well last night as my dreams were plagued by uncooperative network adapters who, for whatever reason, were semi-sentient and acted vaguely like domestic chickens.

CALIFORNIA—Law enforcement officals noted today that a stolen 1997 Saturn SC2 was found only a few miles from the scene of the crime, parked near an elementary school. It is reportedly in rather good condition, parked with the doors locked. It has been towed to an undisclosed location for review by the owners’ insurance adjuster.

Short Attention Span Theat—Hey, Who Has Some Gum?

• So I caught the Sharks game on Saturday with HB, which was a lot of fun. Afterward we convinced Nik and Gin to drive out and meet us at Lister and Whimsy’s pad with a cameo by RR for a fairly raucous but tasty trip to a local steakhouse.
• So, Saturday was the second game I managed to attend this year. Jonathan Cheechoo scored a hat trick at the game I went to see for my birthday back in January. Cheechoo scored a hat trick on Saturday, too. I’m only saying.
• Sadly after Saturday’s winning performance and eighth victory in a row, they basically rolled over on Monday for the Kings whom they most certainly could have beaten. Yeah, the game didn’t matter for much and no one wants to go out with an injury in a “pointless” game (anyone else get kind of jittery when Cheechoo went down from that collision?) but getting shut out? Not a good note to start the postseason on, I’m afraid.
• So Thornton and Cheechoo managed, despite getting blanked by the Kings, to take home some league hardware for points and goals scored, respectively. Congrats to them both as I think they very much deserved to win. I doubt Thornton will be able to shine bright enough for the east coasters to have a legitimate shot at the Hart trophy for league MVP, but we can all rest assured that he is the most valuable player, trophy or no.
• You know, ever since I saw Waking Life I’ve thought that animation-over-film is a very nifty effect. Check out the trailer for the upcoming film A Scanner Darkly and tell me that doesn’t look super rad.
• I rented Tomb Raider: Legend over the weekend. Of course by weekend I mean “Monday I took off because I couldn’t stomach the thought of working another five days in a row,” but whatever. I beat the game in a day which suggests that the game is way too short (which it is) but does not suggest much about the quality of that brief experience. Overall I’d say Lara has her mojo back, although the combat needed more slow-mo effects than the one or two moves that provided it because those involved getting all up in some thug’s face (putting one scantily-clad adventurer in rather perilous circumstances). The story was a bit hard to follow since I haven’t completed a Tomb Raider game… uh… ever, I think. And I haven’t even picked one up since the Sega Dreamcast days so, you know, it’s been a couple of weeks. The fun factor of the puzzles and the visuals are quite nice but I really feel sorry for anyone who actually dropped the coin on the game. Ten hours. At most.
• Beating TRL so quickly got me thinking about the sweet spot for game purchases. Basically it’s like this: Either you buy a game hoping you’ll play it for months and months and never really bother trading it in (lots of sports games fall into this category, as do really good multiplayer games like Counter-Strike and Halo 2) or you hope that you buy a popular game and manage to push through it in a reasonably short amount of time—but not so short that you would have been better served just renting it. For example, a $50 game will, within about a month of release, get you maybe $35 in trade-in value. Which means you take a $15 hit from buying the game. If you can make up that amount of gameplay in a shorter amount of time than it would take you to rack up $15 in rental fees, you come out on top. Since most rentals are about $1 per day, you’re looking at games that can be finished (without getting too stuck in one spot) in roughly 30 hours.
• Finding 30 hours in a few weeks to devote to a video game… you’re on your own there.
• The one bad thing about the car being found (okay, not bad per se, but sort of sad) is that the rental car we got from the insurance company, despite being a crummy Ford, is much nicer than the Saturn. It even has a CD player that understands MP3 discs. Mmmm…. 700MB commute goodness…
• Public Service Annoucement: Roast Beef + Beano’s Horseradish Sauce = teh yum.
• Also tasty: Woebler’s Spicy Mustard. Semi-related lameness: Woebler’s does not have a web presence to speak of.
• Finally, Ryan points out that last week was the first time, at least since switching to the 888.net server, that I’ve updated five days in a row. Nice eye, Ryan. In other news, my buddy Ryan has no life. Film at 11.

I don’t know if you recall, but I posted a long ol’ rant about why I wasn’t going to watch Alias anymore a while back. Since then, I haven’t, just like I said.

But you know what? When it starts up again next week in the final run toward the series finale, I actually am going to watch.

So what changed?

Honestly, nothing at all. As far as I know they still tried to let things go on too long, they still folded to stupid actor demands and they still have displayed no indication that they have a clue how to wrap this all up. Yet, I feel as though I must watch. Not because I care about Alias any more, but rather because seeing what they do with the endgame on that show will give me a good indication about where I need to set my expecations for Lost.

I look at it this way: The Alias crew (including Lost creator J.J. Abrams) has written itself into a monster hole. Getting out with any semblance of grace is going to require some very, very good writing. I see this going one of three ways:

1. The end is a massive letdown. In keeping with the direction the show has been going since season three, there is nothing redeeming about the series finale. In this scenario, I lower my expectations for Lost to the floor. As in, “I’ll enjoy it while it’s good but the moment it starts getting lame, I’m outro.” I have no interest in investing myself in shows that are just going to end up sucking eventually.
2. The end is a Matrix-like disappointment but not a complete failure. The Matrix could have ended any number of ways. The way I would have preferred it is not the direction they went, but I could at least see what they were trying to do and respect their choice. If Alias pulls something like this off I’ll remain cautiously optimistic about Lost and hope I never end up writing a bitter diatribe about it down the road.
3. The end is a bonafide blockbuster, shattering my expectations with its awesomeness. If Abrams et al manage to pull this steaming pile of poo out of the fire and craft something worthy of the early seasons from it, I will gladly retract every negative thing I ever said about them and put my trust fully back into their capable hands. I will fear no Lost development and all will be well.

I don’t know how likely that last one is, but I think a clever writer could do something to shake things up. But here’s the catch: Even my all-time favorite TV hero (Joss Whedon) didn’t exactly knock it out of the park with his Buffy and Angel series finales. I’d classify both of them as secret option #4 in which neither show actually ended because you never know when you might want to head back to the well and have some sort of reunion TV movie or whatever. Not exactly the kind of thing that would inspire confidence for Lost, I think something like that would fall into category 1 or at best 2, depending on how clever the execution was.

But either way, here’s my prediction: If Lost doesn’t end after season four, it’s going to totally suck. Someone on a message board suggested that the only acceptably cool conclusion to Lost would be for it not to end and the mysteries to never be revealed. As endlessly frustrating as that would be, I gotta say he had a point. I still say that the show can be done and completed in a satisfactory way if this season’s finale marks the mid-point of the entire run, but unfortunately no one bothers to ask me how stuff should work; so with history as my guide I only hope that this Alias experiment works enough to allow me to keep enjoying Lost as long as possible.

No pressure or anything, Mr. Abrams.

So in case you didn’t quite catch the drift from the “More Stuff I Could Do Without” post a couple of days ago, my car got stolen. I had parked it in the train station lot, roughly as far from the one exit as you can get, underneath one of the “security” cameras’ lens. The car was locked and there was nothing except an ice scraper and my iPod’s $8.00 tape adapter visible inside the car. Come to think of it, ever since last year’s window-smashing burglary I haven’t kept much of anything in there so that was pretty much the extent of it.

There was no glass in the vacant space the Saturn had once occupied so they must have jimmied the lock. The responding officer said that they were having an 85% recovery rate in the city (but no guarantees on condition of recovered vehicles) and most cars were located within 24-72 hours. As of tonight at about 5:30 pm it will have been 72 hours.

I’ll be honest with you: Getting ripped off really sucks. But you know, it could be a lot worse. The insurance company contacted us and said that our insurance wouldn’t go up at all since it is a no-fault incident. They’re going to wait 15 days to see if the car can be recovered and if so, they’ll evaluate it for damage and do the payout on that or if it isn’t located they’ll pay “fair market price” (whatever that means) to replace it. Plus we owned the car outright. I’m not sure what would have happened if we were still making payments on it, but I can’t think it would have been all that great.

Besides, I was about ready to trade that car in anyway; the only thing holding me back was that we did own the Saturn and I wasn’t crazy about taking on another car payment just yet. As of right now we’re a bit unclear on how Nikki’s physical state will be once her eligibility for temporary disability runs out so there’s some question marks about what she’ll do for income. That impacted the choice to not trade in the car sooner but in this case it may also impact how we proceed from here. If Nik doesn’t get well enough to go to school (something she’s talked about) or get a regular-type job, she may have to find some kind of work-at-home plan which would actually mean we might not need a second car for a little while since I have clear access to work via the train/bus and it’s (hopefully) not a vile imposition on Nik to drop me off and pick me up from the station two blocks away.

Of course I’m a bit miffed at the train company at the moment. I really don’t understand why, considering how much they charge for fares, they can’t have some better security. In a twist of Murphy’s Law, I got one of those annoying fliers stuck under my windshield wiper at the end of last week saying they had been seeing a rash of break-ins and vandalisms in the park and ride lot lately and were planning a community access meeting for the 17th of this month. Yesterday they posted them on people’s windows again, this time mentioning car theft. I’m pretty sure I know what spurred that particular action. As expected, when I got the flier last week I threw it away, having no intention of wasting a weeknight at some boring safety meeting. Mea culpa (that’s latin for “my bad”).

So it goes.

Rain on the Parade

I’ve already apologized for not believing the Sharks would make the playoffs. But now that they are in there, I have expectations. Remember that we’re talking about the defending Pacific Division Champs who were within arms reach of going to the Stanley Cup Finals the last time we saw them actually, you know, play.

I’m not asking for a Cup victory this year. The team is still very young. However, we know that they can be a phenomenal team—when they want to be. So all I’m asking for is forward progress. They don’t have to win the Cup this year, but I want them to make it at least to the third round if not the Finals. Next year I’ll expect a Cup.

So here’s what concerns me: I want this team to be legitimate contenders for the Stanley Cup, even if they may be a bit too green to actually take it home just yet, and there are a couple of parts of their game (as a team) that is going to have to get better in a hurry if they’re going to beat the Dallases and Detroits of the postseason.

First though, a couple of things that suggest the Sharks need to be thinking “Win this year” and not be as forgiving of themselves as I am prepared to be. One is that they are a remarkably healthy team. Where other teams are struggling with aging veterans fighting off nagging injuries (Hi, Hasek!), the Sharks have missed very few games due to injury and the ones they have missed have been from lower-priority role-players like Parker and Thornton (Scott). The other is that they have a psychological advantage right now, coming off a dramatic uphill climb into the playoffs, breaking franchise records right and left and generally having the right people hot at the right time.

Still, all is not roses. The Sharks won last night but I was very, very concerned by some of the stuff I saw there. Observe:

• Evgeni Nabokov: Dude. Dude. The guy is listed as having 17 saves, but basically all those saves were little weakling “shots” or low percentage dinks on unlikely scoring chances. Basically, those were 17 easy saves. On the other hand, every time the Canucks got even a half-decent shot on net, it went in. Nabby has to make some key saves. He didn’t. He was spared because the Sharks played pretty good defense most of the night (at least in terms of limiting scoring chances) but when I start wishing Toskala was in the net because Nabokov is looking uncomfortable in comparison, something’s wrong with your number one guy.
• Which brings up an interesting point: Toskala has been hot lately, there is no doubt. But is this Vesa’s push to be a marquee name, or is it a temporary insanity that will come crashing back down at the exact wrong time? I want to believe that he’s just come into his own enough that whether Nabby is on his game or not the Sharks could go all the way, but I find it difficult. If Toskala has a postseason meltdown, I’m not confident that Evgeni Nabokov is going to come to the rescue.
• The Sharks played ugly. Coyotes ugly. I’m sorry but that Ekman goal was a kick. Whether he made the kicking motion before it went in or after it hit his skate, the replay was clear that he intended to kick that puck in, and to me that should not be a goal. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Because hockey refs believe in karma, and if you think this won’t come back to bite the Sharks in the tailfin later, you’re wrong. Plus you have to imagine how differently this game might have gone if that goal doesn’t count. If that’s the case, then Carle’s third-period goal only draws the tie with 8:36 left and Vancouver doesn’t have to pull Auld out at all. Remember that Vancouver only needed a tie to maintain their playoff hopes. Without the empty net, Cheechoo doesn’t score and the game goes to overtime. I’m just saying.
• Never mind the kick-in goal, the Sharks got away with murder out there. I saw Joe Thornton on I believe the empty net goal hook his man and drag himself up into better body position before even trying to move his feet. It was like he was water-skiing. No call, and San Jose gets a goal. Patrick Marleau got called for a penalty in this game and that’s only happened about 12 times all year. It was embarrassing to watch and if I’m a Canucks fan I’m livid right now at the officiating in a critical game. Admittedly, Vancouver didn’t exactly lose because of the refs (they lost because they couldn’t solve Joe Thornton) but it certainly would have been a different game with some tighter work from the refs.
• I appreciate the fact that the power play has put up a lot of points for San Jose lately. It has certainly made their seven-game win streak possible. But the Sharks typically have four or more extra power play chances than their opponent because they (usually) play a much more disciplined game. Why are games being this close? I think it’s because the Sharks power play hasn’t been all that phenomenal, it’s just a matter of probability. Get enough man advantage time and eventually something will allow you to score. Compare that to the fact that while not often penalized, it seems like every time they are down a man, the Sharks get scored on unless their netminder comes up big. What happened to the dangerous short-handed team from last season?
• Was it just me or did Joe seem like he really wanted to score an actual goal last night? Is he getting sick of playing the set-up man? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him shoot that much. Okay, I guess that’s not a concern but it did kind of make me think that the Sharks didn’t really take last night very seriously until it was getting late in the game. Kind of a “yeah, let Joe shoot. What difference does it make?”
• The difference, of course, being whether or not the Sharks have to play Calgary (or, more specifically, Mikka Kiprusoff) whom they are 1-3 against this season, or Nashville (minus Tomas Vokoun) which they are a slightly better 2-2 against. That might not seem like much difference either way, but when you consider that San Jose has lost to Calgary twice since Joe Thornton’s arrival on the scene and they actually beat Nashville back in November (one of two wins that whole month) plus again last month and I’d say San Jose vs. Nashville would be a very good thing for the Sharks. Plus that would put them into a position where if they did have to meet Detroit in the playoffs, it wouldn’t be until the conference championships after that veteran team had gone through two rounds already. Given the Sharks’ relative youthfulness, that’s about as much as you can ask for. Well, except for having the Red Wings knocked out by an earlier opponent.

Are Pee Gee

I was thinking about Final Fantasy games earlier today. I’m… really not sure why. But then I noticed that Nintendo has released Final Fantasy IV Advance and I thought to myself, “You know, I never played through that one.” Of course it was originally released in the US for the Super Nintendo as Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy VI was released here as FFIII until everyone came to their senses and skipped to naming them the same as they were in Japan upon Final Fantasy VII’s release. Since then it seems there has been a push to go back and re-name everything according to the Japanese numberings. All of which has done little except confuse the heck out of everyone.

But anyway, I was researching a bit and it looks like they have Final Fantasy I & II on one GBA cart; Final Fantasy III coming out for the DS soon; the previously mentioned IV for GBA and I noticed a page for Final Fantasy VI Advance but the only information I could find about it from some Googling was that it is projected for a Q2 2006 release… in Japan. So maybe it will be out around Christmas in the US?

Either way I think that I might see if I can find a used copy of FFIV Advance and/or I & II so that by the time the DS Lite comes out in the States next month I can have III on the backburner in case they delay the release of VI, which is what I really want to play on the GBA.

Here’s something else that struck me as odd: I don’t think I’ve ever finished a Final Fantasy game except for the very first one. I didn’t play the US FFII because my brother and I didn’t get a SNES until III was almost out (by that time FFII was so yesterday). I played the heck out of III, but I was competing with Scott, Dr. Mac and one of Scott’s friends for battery-save space and I think eventually my game got erased by “accident” when I was near the end. I didn’t have the patience to push back through.

Dr. Mac and I split the cost of VII and took turns playing it when we were roommates out in Texas, but during the game’s extended final sequence, I used my one save mechanism way too early in the proceedings and by the time I got to the final boss my supplies were tapped, my party was weakened and I worked into a three hour stalemate with the end guy. Facing the prospect of having to go back through roughly five hours of game to try again, I tossed in the towel instead. VIII, IX and X I tried and thought were so weak as to not warrant the effort. I didn’t even bother with X-2 or XI. I’ve also put in a stupid number of hours playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but never bothered to get around to advancing the story toward the end: I just like levelling up my guys and looking for secret weapons to add new attacks.

Maybe they keep making the “Final” Fantasies because I never see the end! I guess it can’t be final if it’s never finished…

I predicted the Sharks wouldn’t make the playoffs this year. I’ve rarely been this happy to be wrong. As pennance for my doubt, I shall force myself to refrain from making further predictions about how those playoffs will turn out.

No, really. I’m not saying a thing.

I mean it.

Okay, okay, I’m not making predictions but I will make an observation: No matter what happens you have to recognize that this team is pretty dang good. You know, when they want to be. But once you recognize that and then you realize that the average age for the team is 26 years (and that would be less if they traded 35-year-old relative geezer Scott Thornton like I keep saying) it’s tough to see them not being legitimate Cup contenders for some time to come.

I’m not saying they’re necessarily Cup-bound now, I’m just saying they have the raw material there to make it happen.

That’s all I’m sayin’.

• Soulless automatons that take other people’s stuff.
• Having to call my wife and say, “Can you pick me up? The car’s been stolen.”
• Waiting for thirty minutes in the cold drizzle for the crack “Community Enforcement” squad to arrive and take my statement regarding stolen car.
• Realizing crack “Community Enforcement” squad consists of one fat pseudo-cop in a pickup, weilding a clipboard.
• Insurance company phone trees.
• Repeating identical information five or six times to various people who would save everyone a lot of time if they communicated amongst themselves.
• Waiting for callbacks.
• Companies that are too cheap to install legitimate security devices, choosing instead to invest in such winning—and effective!—concepts as the “dummy camera.”
• Having to wake up a peacefully slumbering spouse to take me to train station due to aforementioned automaton’s actions.
• Train delays.
• Forgetting my iPod and having to listen to crass, exaggerated conversations from fellow train passengers about obviously fictional sexual conquests.
• A lack of ability to destroy people with my mind.
• Perpetual rain in “sunny” California.
• Rain.
• California.
• Bus drivers that leave early and abandon daily passengers.
• Bus drivers that operate their large, unweildy vehicles as though they were involved in some manner of Nascar event in an effort to compensate for previously mentioned delays.
• Fearing for my life prior to 7:30 am.
• Being late to work due to forces beyond my control.
• Lateness that causes irreparable schedule shifts resulting in missed meals.
• Realizing it’s going to be a bad day prior to 8:00 am.
• Thinking it can’t get any worse prior to 9:30 am.
• Being proven wrong.

Can I be heretical for a moment? Cool, thanks.

I hate Wayne Gretzky.

Seriously, that guy bugs the heck out of me.

This isn’t a new development. He bugged me to death in the Sharks early years when they had to play him as a King all the time. If there was ever a player who lived off his superstar status, it was Wayne Gretzky. He would whine, he would moan, he would grumble and he would argue every little call, every minor mishap, every time anyone even looked at him funny. Finish a check against the “Great One”? Please, you’d grind the game to a halt for twenty minutes while ol’ whineypants took the refs to task for not ejecting the offending defenseman. That was, of course, if the refs didn’t give you a four minute hooking major for, like, brandishing the stick.

It would be nice if now that he’s all Mr. Face of Hockey that he seemed like a mellower kind of guy, humbled by his place in the pantheon of ice hockey.

Nope.

Now that he’s behind the bench he—I didn’t think this was actually possible—complains even more than he used to. Listen, the Sharks didn’t play magnificent hockey last night but they at least showed their usual discipline and managed to come out on top. The Coyotes played like their namesakes and cheated at just about every possible opportunity. The refs even let some calls go on them after a while because I’m sure they were tired of blowing their whistles (the game seemed to take forever). But you know who never got tired? Yep, The Great Crybaby never showed any signs of exhaustion as he screamed and griped and fired spittle on the backs of his players’ heads.

So since no one else seems to want to say it, allow me: “Hey Wayne! Shut up.”

Moore Weirdness

I’ve been on a graphic novel kick lately; probably because the lull of a moving train is too much for the car-sleeper/book-sleeper in me to resist. Confronted by the combination of a novel and engine noise during commute times I tend to nod off, drool on the pages and miss my stop. So I read less intellectually demanding stuff like comics to keep myself entertained while also awake.

Also, I really like comic books (Gasp! Something geeky that Paul likes! Say it ain’t so!) but that they have ramped up to $2.50 per monthly book is way more than I’m happy spending. Besides, comic books are like soap operas: They don’t end. Graphic novels, however, are usually complete narratives and are, comparatively, much cheaper. So I buy those.

The last two I’ve read were Alan Moore’s Watchmen and V For Vendetta. Of course I picked up V For Vendetta because the movie just came out and I wanted to read the source material first before seeing the film, especially since Moore has been so critical of the result.

After having read the two works he’s most famous for and reading a bunch of his interviews, I can say that I feel Moore may be a gifted writer but the man is just a flat-out weirdo. I mean, V For Vendetta is a pretty politically challenging story and I’m fairly impressed that the thing made it to the screen at all. If he expected them to accurately portray V as the full on nutcase anarchist that he is the books, he apparently has never bothered to cast even the most casually critical eye toward Hollywood. I mean, that’s just not how they work.

I get the indignation, but I think that generally speaking the whole “artistic integrity” thing is being blown out of proportion here. It’s perhaps one thing to say “This isn’t what I meant, if you want the real story, buy my book and throw me a couple bucks in the process.” If nothing else you can look at the movie as a perhaps effective if maybe misguided marketing vessel for the graphic novel (which I note comes in a hardcover version now). It’s another to say, “This isn’t what I meant, so I want my name taken off the book, I want to be distanced from the whole thing and I want you to act like I had nothing to do with any of it because my feelings are hurt.”

Whether Moore was tricked into signing away the rights to the story or not, he still signed them away. I can feel sorry for him but it becomes less so when he comes across as such a baby about it. Buck up, kid, us wistful aspiring writers should have such problems. I mean, I might cry for ten whole seconds if someone wanted to convert my writings into a movie so bad that they didn’t care whether I wanted it to be done or not. Sniff.

Of course, it isn’t just the grumpy compromised-vision interviewee that makes me realize the guy is bizarre, his stories are strong enough testament to that on their own. Not that they aren’t good; thought-provoking stories in a comic book format is something of a nerd holy grail and Moore definitely delivers there. But Moore is unique in that he seems to try to defy convention so much that he seems to try to have us sympathize with really vile individuals. Even V is clearly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people with his actions. His rationales are presented in abstract terms but Moore conveniently sidesteps any moral landmines by whitewashing over the fact that V’s bomb-happy master plot must logically involve substantial collateral damage.

Watchmen is a little different in that it is forced to deal openly with the problem of heroes (literal and literary in this case) who are merely human or even those who are anything but and therefore cannot sympathize with the human condition. This works on a level slightly above V For Vendetta but the examination needs some place to build to and when the curtain is lifted from the story bubbling beneath the intellectual and character examination it seems so farfetched and out from left field that it kind of feels like a grotesque kick in the head.

Which isn’t to say that either is ineffective: I enjoyed both very much. It’s a testament to the overall quality of the subplots that the major events are flawed but don’t make the ideas presented seem like foul-tasting medicine. Unlike watching Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan where the ideas and information presented are admirable but the exectution is so unpleasant as to prohibit any literal enjoyment or entertainment, Moore delicately walks the line and manages to stay just this side.

Still, I think my next graphic novel is going to be something even easier. Like a Plastic Man anthology or something.

A few days ago I mentioned—almost in passing—Apple’s Boot Camp. As expected whenever Apple does, well, anything the Internets have been abuzz with punditry. First off I’d like to direct your attention to the haters, starting with CNet Australia’s Asher Moses’ piece, “Bunk Camp: Apple Gets It Wrong.” It bears mentioning that Moses’ article spawed from another CNet tidbit from the “Well Hello Duh” files titled “Dare I Say This Aloud? Boot Camp is a Gimmick.”

I realize that, coming from me, it may be difficult to reconcile that I might take exception to Moses’ arguments. But note that I don’t buy into just everything Apple does; in fact up until the Boot Camp announcement I was pretty underwhelmed by the whole Intel switch. I’m the first to admit that Apple has its faults; it is only that they are capable of really impressive technology and occasionally accomplish leaps forward in consumer products that makes me a “Mac Guy.” This is not an apology, just a clarification.

But let me cut to the point here. After rambling on for a while about how Boot Camp requires a reboot to use the other operating system (duh), he says:

Rather than enticing existing Windows XP users to switch, Boot Camp will be primarily attractive to current OS X users that are lusting after certain Windows XP applications, such as games. This makes sense—they’re already accustomed to performing most tasks on OS X, and only need to switch over to Windows when they feel the urge to game.

Once again, I reiterate. “Well, duh!” What all these XP adherents completely fail (possibly due to blissful ignorance, possibly because of untreated fevers) to grasp is that while Windows and Linux folk continue to preach about the invisibility of operating systems and the apathy of the average consumer to what actually runs the programs they need, OS X users are smug in their knowledge that an OS doesn’t have to be much of anything but when it is a smooth, well designed program in itself it makes using all those other programs so much more pleasant.

Does Moses honestly think the 3% of computer users who choose Macs put up with idiot web designers, incompatibility, sluggish game support, expensive hardware from a single manufacturer and the constant badgering by the other 97% just so we can be “different?” Of course not. We know something about what it is like to use a system that works. I was talking to HB the other day about his switching experience and he noted, “What’s strange is that I’m so used to Windows and how everything is convoluted and takes 400 tries to get it right that when I try to do something new on the Mac, I spend a lot of time trying all the hard ways first only to eventually figure out that it’s the easiest thing in the world.” And he’s right: On OS X, simple things are simple. It’s usually only the fact that we’ve been trained for years by Microsoft that simple things are a pain in the neck that makes using a Mac challenging. It’s not the system design, it’s years of poor conditioning.

So no, it doesn’t matter that Boot Camp is a gimmick or that it could be better if it was some sort of virtual machine. Moses’ “thesis” seems to be that Boot Camp should have been a virtual machine. Listen to the madness:

To most users, the operating system is simply a means to an end—a basis for running their favourite applications. So the real potential lies in allowing Windows XP to be run inside Mac OS X, enabling users to execute Windows and Mac applications side-by-side without rebooting. This day could be closer than you think, too, thanks to a technology called virtualisation.

Oh really? Closer than I think? Like how about, I dunno, years ago?

The whole point is that VMs are slow. You can’t run games in virtual machines because they need full, uninterrupted access to the system resources. VMs are cool, don’t get me wrong, but being able to dual-boot is a huge bonus that has been a pipe dream for people who actually, you know, have a clue as to what they’re talking about for a long time. I mean, if you want to nitpick Boot Camp, maybe pick on something that is actually a problem.

Bullet the Blue Links

• Why don’t spiders spin when dangling from a single strand of web? Scientists don’t know, either. They’re trying to figure it out, though.
• Know what would be awesome? Buying a $500 graphics card that will be obsolete in 10 months. Man I love that.
• I admit that while the 10% or whatever that they take is kind of atrocious, I really dig those little Coinstar machines. Now they do iTunes music cards, which is kind of pointless but cool anyway. Honestly if it weren’t for the fact that we have to use quarters to do our laundry I bet I could finance a vacation with the amount of spare change we collect in a month.
• Since “controversial” usually means “tasteless,” this article on GamePro about the most controversial print ads for video games shouldn’t be much of a mystery: It’s tasteless. Kids, don’t click that link! The funny thing is I remember seeing all but the Gameshark example (and honestly, aside from her outfit being fairly skimpy I don’t see the big deal there) and in every case thinking, “Ooh, someone’s going to get a nasty letter for that.” I totally called it.
• You know, the more I hear about what Nintendo is doing with the DS, the more impressed I am. Downloadable content? For free? Sure! Now they have a locator for the Download Stations. Sweet.
• Nik pointed me to an interesting article yesterday about the offensiveness of the word “midget” referring to people with dwarfism. This is somewhat intriguing to me because after watching the first episode of F/X’s “Black. White.” a few weeks ago Nik and I were talking about what gives words their power: Is it the words and the concepts behind them from the perspective of the speaker or is it the weight and impact granted them by the listener? Discuss.

If you were to say that I’m a fairly rabid consumer of entertainment in the sense that rags like “Entertainment Weekly” and the E! network use the word, you would not be incorrect. Music, movies, TV, books: These are my launchpads for shared experiences, backdrops to lively discussions and time-markers for set pieces of my life. I devour this stuff because it is pop art, accessible at times and utterly repulsive at others, its whole point is to be fascinating and the way in which it defines its terms must be revealed by the interaction between creator and observer.

I don’t know, it’s a curious interaction and I keep investigating it because, partly, I know that it is a common thing to devote time persuing and the mentality behind lifting what amounts to disposable artistic creation onto revered platforms is intrisically (or perhaps morbidly) engaging but also because that process itself occasionally creates things that I feel are not without value in their own right.

Consider that on one hand you have a movie like Fahrenheit 9/11 which sets its agenda as something less than art (at least art for its own sake) and something more than escapism: It is a vessel for a message (nevermind the message itself for now, you can substitute any politically charged movie/documentary here). On the other hand you have a film like Sahara which has very little (if any) aspirations to make a statement about anything but which is determined to be escapism at all costs. Then you can look at something like Waking Life which perhaps struggles as a cohesive narrative film (therefore eschewing escapism) and perhaps touches briefly on a message it wants to send but is so wrapped up in being pure art that it ends up being only truly remarkable when other contexts can be set aside.

Occasionally you may find a film that has something to say, does so with a sense of artistic style and manages to entertain at the same time. These are rare films, rarer television shows, and usually interpretive in terms of how well a given book or piece of music achieves this goal, assuming it was ever a goal at all.

I’m not trying to say anything, really, I’m just pointing out why I like entertainment. Searching for the elusive example of the boldly artistic, thought-provoking example of pop culture that also manages to be something you really want to experience versus doing so because you feel like, culturally, you ought to—it’s pretty fun.

King Kong

I’m pretty sure I’ve already bemoaned the fact that I don’t get out to the theater too often. Despite the fact that most modern movie megaplexes are flawed operations completely worthy of the scorn heaped on them, I still like going to the movies. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that while I don’t mind watching DVDs at home, I don’t exactly have some awe-inspiring home theater set up going. Who knows. But I sorta like seeing big action flicks on the big screen. Stuff like comedies or talking head dramas I can certainly wait to see at home. I mean, what difference does it make? But there is something really cool about watching an explosion on a 40 foot screen instead of my little 36″ TV, you know?

Now I’m not a huge fan of King Kong. I saw the original black and white movie when I was younger and I was decidedly apathetic about it. I mean, that ape looked pretty bad by the time I saw it and I sort of walked away thinking that people in the 30′s who were scared by the movie and thought there must be a real 25 foot gorilla somewhere must have been pretty retarded. But when I saw that Peter Jackson was going to re-make the movie and it was this summer popcorn flick, my first thought was, “Yeah, okay cool. Maybe I’ll go see that.”

Then I saw rough cuts of the effects on a preview or trailer somewhere. The effects looked pretty sorry and I was almost ready to say “forget it” when I saw some newer clips that made it look like it might be at least tolerable. But once again the stigma of the modern theater got the best of all my acquaintances and I never got around to it. So I figured I’d drop it in the Netflix queue and catch it on DVD.

So here’s the thing about the new King Kong: It’s a lot better than I expected. Considering that I was initially unimpressed with the effects and not a huge fan of the story to begin with, I managed to somehow really like this movie.

A couple of beefs: First, they didn’t fix all the effects. Kong looks a lot better in some shots than others. Also certain lighting effects show the warts of the technology more than others (most of the scenes in the jungle at daylight are fantastic, but at night it’s less impressive). There’s nothing particularly wrong with any of the bazillion effects shots in the film, but whenever I found myself noticing the Uncanny Valley it worked to pull me out of the story and start reflecting on technological limitations which is not really what you want from your audience. Secondly, they rarely get the effect of Kong clutching Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) correct, and it usually looks either fake or like she’d naturally be crushed.

Lastly, PJ has a serious problem with his editor: Jamie Selkirk. I don’t know who Selkirk is, but he really needs to learn to tell Jackson “No.” This is a three hour movie that granted needs to be a bit longer than the two hour standard, but certainly doesn’t need to be as long as it is. There are about four too many rescue scenes, the fight between Kong and the T-Rexes goes on for about ten too many minutes and a fairly disgusting and pointless scene in a canyon with a horde of giant insects both defies logic (a guy shoots a bunch of squirming bugs off of a guy from point blank range with a tommy gun and never even grazes the human) and wastes time. There are dozens of other scenes where the camera just stays on too long.

But once you get over all that, it’s actually a pretty great movie. What impresses me the most is that I don’t recall the original doing enough to give Kong his motivation. Why would he be so fixated on Darrow? It also had a creepy element in the Darrow (Fay Wray)/Kong scenes since the ape model was incapable of realistic emotions so he had a kind of creepy smile and an angry scowl, but that’s it. Here, Kong’s emotions come through in a more animalistic yet completely natural way. Rather than trying to project full human emotions on Kong, Jackson manages to make him like a giant pet. Anyone with a dog or a cat at home can understand the personality of animals and the connection that can happen between human and animal. It is this bond that Kong and Darrow show. Kong is dangerous, there is no doubt, but he has a persona and a compassion that we learn as the characters do.

Which would all be useless and even laughable if not for Watts’ stunning acting. Why she didn’t get an Oscar for her work here is beyond me. She manages to juggle her swing from desperate Depression casualty to hopeful dreamer to terrified captive to concerned protector with a remarkable ease and never once makes it seem hokey or implausible. Consider that she does all this while mostly playing off of a green-suited stand-in and you have to marvel at the result.

Coming Attractions

A couple of movies I’m excited about that are new or coming up: Brick, the neo-noir flick set in a high school and Silent Hill which looks like it might be the first really good movie based on a video game. Although why no one has re-done that game for modern consoles totally escapes me.

Gross

Today’s repulsive moment: A book bound with human skin. Yet somehow the phrase “anthropodermic bibliopegy” is about the coolest thing I’ve seen all day. Say it a couple times. It’s awesome!

The words emitting from my keyboard yesterday in regards to Lost were joyous. Enthusiastic. I really like that show and I look forward to it each week. I even get a little bummed out when the repeat-streak comes.

Let me quickly set about deflating any of that happy, positive vibe before it starts to spread. The only thing we like to spread around here is vitriol.

Oh, and jam. But that’s a whole other deal.

Top Chef

Nik and I started watching a couple of dumb shows that came on around the same time. One is Top Chef and the other is The Next Food Network Star. Now, both shows are ostensibly about finding out which of a pool of candidates is best suited to have their culinary skills put on display. The execution of each is night and day.

I’m not even going to bother “reviewing” The Next Food Network Star. It’s a decent show that has a fairly likeable ensemble who seem to be cordial to each other even if they are technically in competition and it works as both a reality contest and a sort of backstage look at the staple Food Network shows. They don’t focus on forced interpersonal drama and the prize being offered is clearly one of obvious tangible value. I’ll keep watching it.

Top Chef, on the other hand, is an unmitigated disaster of a TV show that I’m almost inclined to carry on with it just to have the object lesson of how not to execute a reality show—or for that reason any style of TV show. It is only the fact that I have zero interest in ever actually creating a reality show that prevents me from persuing this particular lesson.

First of all, they focus almost entirely on the drama between the differing personalities of the chefs/contestants. In case you haven’t heard me say it before, I have no problem repeating myself: The absolute worst, most un-entertaining, deplorable part about “reality” TV is the constant bickering, arguing, intelligence-deprived raving we’re subjected to that is I guess supposed to approximate drama. Actually it’s like listening to cats fight: All sound and fury with no real purpose but to annoy the crap out of anyone in earshot. And this is 85% of the show.

A large part of this negativity comes from them having cast The World’s Most Unlikeable Contestants featuring six of the seven character traits most likely to cause spontaneous migranes followed by blackouts and vast chasms of lost time leading to bewildering arrests and insanity pleas. I mean, that Steven guy? That simply must be an act for the camera because I simply cannot believe in a world where someone that repulsive and supererogatorily smug finds a way to function in society. Anyone I ever met that took themselves so seriously as to suggest that they might be unfamiliar with a hot dog due to its base nature would, by definition, require ejection into the void of space. “I’m accustomed to four-star dining,” indeed.

But you know, I watch Survivor (against my better judgement, but that has yet to stop me for longer than one season) so I’m pretty familiar with the “repugnant fame-seekers” routine here. I may not like it, I may gripe about it incessantly, but I can cope with it. What I cannot abide by is the utterly asinine and completely farcical nature of this so-called competition.

To recap, the prize at stake here is $100,000, a full line of high-end kitchen applicances, a write-up in a respected culinary magazine and a job catering a high-profile event. For a budding chef, this is pretty huge I’d imagine. You would think, with so much riding on the line, that the producers of the show would make an effort to try and both cast people of roughly equal skill and then follow that up by creating fair and reasonable tasks for them to compete in which would allow the judges to fairly identify which was most deserving.

Apparently that never entered anyone’s mind in setting up these “challenges,” or even the premise of the show itself.

First of all, each show has two competitions, the “Quickfire” challenge which is a fairly short test of some kind where the winner is given immunity (using Survivor parlance) from the second elimination challenge in the second half of the show. The first flaw in the logic starts right there because while having immunity prevents a contestant from being booted, the person who is eliminated is the person who performs the worst in the challenge. So if the person who won the Quickfire challenge performs poorly in the elimination challenge, the eliminated contestant is the second worst person, which is a pretty massive injustice to begin with. But that ignores the fact that you have a negative contest, which in and of itself is a very poor game mechanic. Think about it this way: They give one player the title of “winner” from each elimination challenge. But it means nothing. Literally, nothing happens from winning. It is only the ultimate loser who suffers which means that the contest becomes (once you factor in the immunity granted from the Quickfire challenge) “be at least the third worst.”

Put another way, you are only ever—ever—competing to be better than just two other contestants.

But it gets even better. Assuming that was simply the case, you still might have a decent competition if the playing field remained level. But it doesn’t. For starters the contestants range from a twentysomething ex-model trying to start a new career who has practically negative real world chefing experience to competitors who have owned and operating their own restaurants for years. The above mentioned Steven isn’t even a chef, but rather a Sommelier. It turns out he does have at least a modicum of cooking skill but he could have easily spent the whole show just handing the judges various glasses of wine. Even if you assume that it would be more or less impossible to get a group of chefs who were of roughly equal skill and experience, you would have to at least assume that the challenges themselves were balanced, right?

Bzzzt.

Consider the most recent episode. The contestants were divided into teams of two. Now, right off the bat that’s a suspect condition because remember we’re trying to decide which individual chef is worthy of a massive reward and now we have them working with randomly drawn partners which, if improperly paired, might result in someone’s dismissal due to any number of non-cooking-skill related factors (managerial miscues, personality conflicts, poor performance by the teammate, etc). If that weren’t bad enough, the challenge was to create street food that fused two distinct culinary styles. The common thread was that all had “Latin cuisine” as one of the styles. In the interest of fairness I would assume the other style would be identical across the board. Nope. Instead there were as many different secondary styles as there were teams.

When you note that one of the styles was Japanese while another was Moroccan you realize that there is simply no way that the results of the contest could be fairly and accurately compared, much less quantified into some sort of heirarchal structure. On top of all this there is a different “celebrity” judge each week, usually a respected local chef from a restaurant in San Francisco where the show is filmed. But this too is another problem because these chefs are under (apparently) no direction to keep their opinions limited to the taste of the food; rather they judge contestants (in turn) by their attitudes, their execution of the specifics of the challenge, their personalities, their choice of ingredients or any other thing they might choose to use as criteria. In one case last episode the guest judge remarked a number of times that he absolutely loved a particular kind of pork, which one of the teams had just happened to use. A happy coincidence but one wonders if the team in question might have suffered if a different judge who did not care for the dish had been involved.

I realize that these types of shows are not exactly fair. Survivor isn’t fair. But the one thing about Survivor and its clones is that at least of the ones I’ve seen they manage to stay internally consistent. The biggest clue that Top Chef can’t even manage to work within its own context? Each contestant has, at one point or another, been among the lower tier of the players at elimination time and facing a potential punting from the show. Explain to me how you can award someone a title and a prize if at some point in your own competition designed to find the best, they (in theory at least) had performed poorly enough to warrant ejection from the game?

Derailed, though, is a mess. I had zero expectations going in, even not knowing what genere it fell under. In spite of this handicap I had the movie’s plot, twist and outcome nailed within twenty minutes and was actively annoyed when the plot of the whole movie hinges on the lead character acting like a complete simpleton twice in the span of ten minutes. Do yourself a favor and miss this movie.

Good

Okay, I know the Intel Macs have gotten some negative press for various technical issues but it sounds like Apple is busting their humps to get them cleaned up, so I won’t really get into that right now. Basically I pretty much suspected that the first versions of the processor swapping hardware needed to be categorized under “Early adopters only; buyers beware.” I mean, it’s a first rev of an Apple product. Duh.

But dude. I mean, have you seen this Boot Camp business? Homina.

Bad

I flipped on the TV last night to check out the Sharks game only to catch the fade to commercial at the end of the first period. When the ads were over they switched over to the Giants game.

For clarity’s sake I want to point out that I’m a Giants fan and generally speaking I want Fox Sports Net to broadcast local teams’ games. But let’s think about this for a minute: On one hand we have the Sharks, nine games from the end of the regular season, on a comeback year after the lockout, locked in a tense and exciting playoff race. On the other hand we have the Giants vs. the Padres in a stadium that got rained out yesterday, playing the effectively meaningless third game of the year. Which of these two events should get top billing on FSN?

What really hacks me is that they moved the Sharks game to Fox Sports Net Plus, which our wonderful local Comcast affiliate pulled a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, I was pretty flamed about it. I ended up listening to the Internet broadcast (barely maintaining my sanity despite the onslaught of ear-wrecking audio artifacts, pops, hisses and dropouts—hooray for Windows Media Player) but it wasn’t the same. I would have even begrudgingly admitted defeat if the game was at home, but this was in Colorado. Colorado.

There is no justice.

Awesome

Are you watching Lost? Because if you aren’t, you’re totally missing out. Totally.

Potential minor spoilers follow. Read at your own peril.

I probably don’t need to be enumerating the wonders of this show since it doesn’t seem like it has a really tough time finding viewers, but after last night’s episode I saw more than a little negative feedback around the Internets from people who felt that the “It’s all in Hurley’s head” meme of “Dave” was a set up for an eventual cop-out.

Maybe it’s just me but I took this episode as a direct dismissal of that explanation (or any other “It’s all just a dream” hooey). Put it this way, I can’t see how the writers, producers and directors who have spent the last year and a half building an intricate, layered mystery would choose now to reveal essentially the entire secret. I mean, if this is all it is—Hurley or someone else’s (Walt comes up a lot in these discussions) dream—and they’re telling us now, who’s going to keep watching? Who’s going to care what the hatch is all about or what the map means or who the Others are or where the smoke comes from? The answer would have to be “What difference does it make, it’s all in Hurley’s mind anyway?”

Presenting this as a possibility at this stage in the game suggests to me that the island is anything but a dream. And I don’t even think it’s a red herring, it’s just a way of saying “We wouldn’t do that to you… but wouldn’t it have been wicked if we did?”

I’m not saying this show won’t disappoint in the long run. J.J. Abrams didn’t exactly inspire confidence with Alias in his ability to develop effective exit strategies for his shows. But I read more than a few posts from people on message boards that said based on “Dave” they were done with the show. To those people I say, “C’mon! If this is all it takes for you to lose faith in the writers maybe you didn’t really like the show that much to begin with.” Which would be sort of sad because for my money there hasn’t been anything on TV this engaging and this generally high quality since… well… I dunno. Buffy, maybe. Even then Buffy had its share of filler or outright bad episodes; my complaint with any episode of Lost has only ever been that they didn’t move forward enough and that’s probably just a testament to how deep my appetite for the story this show is telling goes.

I meant to update my “Box in the Living Room” series for the mid-season but I’ll be honest and say that I watch a fraction of the shows I made sure were on my TiVo back in September/October. I’m only still watching Surface, Supernatural and How I Met Your Mother from the fall’s new shows (even then, Surface is over and Supernatural isn’t necessarily what I’d call a can’t-miss in my book) and most of last year’s staples have drifted from my immediate consciousness leaving me with basically Lost, Scrubs and Veronica Mars as weekly appointments.

I was a bit hard on Lost back in October but it has occurred to me that the pacing of the show is actually pretty good this season and as long as I’m having fun, the revelations and new mysteries are coming at a decent pace to keep me intrigued. I’m not sure what else I could be asking for, you know?