Films of the Moment: Festive Light Friday Night

I won't, at least not yet. See if you can connect the dots: (La, la la la!)

• Full Metal Jacket
• Ed Wood
• Rent

On Receiving Gifts

I only have about half a verse so far: (feel free to sing along)

So my father has become well known at this point for having a difficulty in receiving large gifts. It's something that has bugged my mom for a while now. My brother this year had a long list of things that he wanted, but had a hard time narrowing it down and ultimately decided that he didn't really need any of it, and nuked his entire list and announced that he didn't need anything and he didn't need to be given anything, but he was working on getting a new car with my dad and that is all he really needed. My mom was angry because how could she buy him gifts he didn't tell her what he wanted? I joked that he was becoming more like dad. But it was me, ironically I guess, that really ended up like my dad this year.

My mom gave me, as her big surprise gift to me this year, a new car stereo. I was certainly surprised. I reacted poorly. I reacted like my dad might have, I guess. Sure, I might want a new stereo for my car (it has only a broken cassette deck), but I certainly wouldn't use one and I have more pressing car-related needs than that. I don't use my car hardly at all. A car is a vehicle, a means, not an end, and most of my driving lately has been to and from the bus stop. Sure, I have a crappy radio, but I also have crappy speakers ...

Entertainment Thread: Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon

It's a small entertainment world, particularly the actually funny, weird stuff. Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon seem to be pretty cool, weird and funny guys. Co-founders of Channel101 and involved in an interesting list of projects including Robot Bastard, Heat Vision and Jack (apparently a feature-film is in the works), and The Sarah Silverman Show. I finally cleared Doug TenNapel's (creator of much of Earthworm Jim and The Neverhood) graphic novels out of my Amazon wishlist and onto my shelf and Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon are credited for bringing him into comics. It was weird when I finally noticed their credits in The Sarah Silverman Show, which I think is the best actual sit-com in years. I turned to my brother when I noticed it and said, "Yeah, you remember, those were the guys that did Laser Fart."

As if I weren't already depressed enough...

I was doing so well staying away from posting about religion, but I've decided that one needs look no further than the Westboro Baptist Church's latest public excrement to prove that the xian God cannot exist. In a season supposedly espousing the xian virtues of Charity and Compassion these so-called "Christians" at the WBC have taken a song, We Are The World, entirely about Charity and Compassion, and twisted it into the bigoted and hateful God Hates the World. I cannot in good conscience directly link to such intolerant bullshit. Search for it yourself if you are prepared for possible irreversible psyche damage. Ugh.... I think I'm going to be sick.

On Puzzle Quest and Mass Effect

I have a Level 50 Wizard in Puzzle Quest (for the 360), making it only my second CRPG character (ever) to reach a level cap, joining my Level 50 Ice/Ice Controller in City of Heroes. I'm not much of a fan of RPGs, and I've espoused this many times before, but Puzzle Quest and Mass Effect have both ensnared me. There are three major things that bug me about most CRPGs: 1) Fantasy, 2) Analysis Paralysis, 3) Grind. So far, Mass Effect is the only CRPG that has ever managed to avoid all three pitfalls in my mind, automatically awarding it the grand title of my favorite CRPG ever. In detail:

Fantasy

Most Fantasy just plain bores me, especially Tolkien and his millions of followers. I just don't have much interest in it. Mass Effect is Sci-Fi, and even bad Sci-Fi entertains me. Mass Effect's plot pattern is a common strand in Sci-Fi (in games alone it's very similar to FreeSpace's plot, just with more alien species and less dogfighting). I played City of Heroes as much as I did simply for the comic book world and some of the socialization aspects.

Analysis Paralysis

I'm not a number muncher, nor an Industrial Engineer. I don't really care to sit down and plot out my strategy in Excel before committing to a course of action. I don't want to spend a lot of time fretting a decision and I certainly don't want any decision I do make to handicap me from playing the game. Puzzle Quest as a "casual" CRPG didn't have this problem because there were fewer choices. Mass Effect doesn't have this problem because it lets me throw a lot of that stuff out the window ...

GrandCentral: Unified Communications for the Masses

I was introduced to Unified Communications at Microsoft, and it can be a really cool thing to have. The goal behind Unified Communications is to finally pull together all of our various communications devices and software together into harmony. Microsoft and it's partners like Cisco have been busy selling such services to big businesses. Microsoft themselves rolled out some of the features while I was there. It was really nice... if I got a phone call at work, my computer would pop up the Caller ID and an IM chat window (Microsoft Office Communicator), so I didn't even need to glance at the phone to see who was calling. I could pick up the call on the computer if I had a microphone attached, or I could pick up the actual phone handset and answer it there. The IM window let me know how long I was on the phone, could let me record conversations if I needed to, and would allow me to copy and paste text fragments or send files if the other person had their computer on. If I received a voicemail while I was away from my desk I didn't need to bother with a voicemail service, instead voicemails were delivered right into my email inbox as a simple email with the caller ID information and the voicemail as an attachment. Contacts in Outlook or Office Communicator had Call items in the menus and the dialing would be pick up-able from the phone handset (or the computer if I was so inclined). Pretty cool, huh?

So I've been invited into the GrandCentral Beta. GrandCentral, which is owned by Google and in the process of moving/migrating to more Google-ishness, is something like Unified Communications, and once Google is done with it I ...

Book of the Moment: The Big Switch (Early Review)

First of all, let me preface this review with the warning that I may work too close to the subjects of this book to be very objective in my review of it. I wanted to like this book, but I don't. My reading of it was full of moments where I was filled with "Yes, but really..." or "Not really, it's more like..." moments. Worse, there were a few "I don't think that necessarily follows" issues I had with the logic of the book. There are at least a couple of chapters that if I had the inclination I could write some decent rebuttals to.

The early section of the book is about building a giant analogy between the era we live in now and the last turn of the century when mass electrification basically changed everything. It might be a good analogy and these early parts of the book are interesting for their simple documentary-like focus on "the world that was" in the analogy. Unfortunately the analogy mostly gives out and takes a back seat in the latter section, which ends up being the majority of the book, which is mainly a pedestrian enumeration of the potential downfalls and dangerous repercussions of "the world that is" that might be amplified in moving into "the world that will be". It was fairly jarring how the book moved from the tone of an interesting history documentary/exploration to a collection of bad 60 Minutes segments that lack in any real substance and barely notice the surface texture of the things being discussed. What's worse is that the book never really follows through with the initial premise offered in the early chapters. That failure to maintain the narrative over the course of the book, to keep the analogy ...

Zero Punctuation on Peggle

I just noticed the Zero Punctuation Peggle Review and in addition to containing Yahtzee's normally acute observations and descriptions of the game it also includes some observations of Pop Cap itself. I definitely agree with his characterization of the company as something now of a "big bully" in the space. I apparently didn't mention it on my blog at the time, but during PAX '07 in August my opinion of Pop Cap shifted quite downward, into basically what Yahtzee points out, in my interactions with a few Pop Cap employees that were attending PAX to represent that company.

PS, If Zero Punctuation is new to you, you should watch some of his other reviews, particularly the one on Psychonauts.

Heroes Speculation: Why did Chandra Suresh first visit Gabriel/Sylar?

There will be some Season 2 spoilers in here, so avert your eyes if you gave up early in the season. Personally I think that Powerless was the great mid-season finale I was looking for and I didn't mind the slow exposition/build-up to it. (I forgot to watch it on Monday due to some brain misfiring and part 2 of Tin Man, so I watched a DivX copy on my Xbox 360. So thanks to the Dashboard Fall Update I was able to watch Heroes in HD on my nice 32" screen, which I can't normally do (due to lack of tuner/HD service).)

So to fill some of the void until Heroes Volume 3 (Villains) I've been watching Volume 1 in HD-DVD with my brother. What's interesting about that is that I roped my brother into watching Heroes about four or five episodes in and he never really saw the early episodes in Volume 1. One of the questions that came up was "Why did Chandra Suresh start with Gabriel (soon to be Sylar)?"

In thinking about it from after Volume 2 I think a pretty simple picture is developed. Chandra ("Papa") Suresh was seeking his "Patient Zero", the first known appearance of the hero genetic markers. In Volume 2 we have a much better idea of who the real Patient Zero currently alive is: Adam Monroe. It makes a lot of sense that Adam Monroe himself, and also The Company that Adam Monroe helped found, would be interested in obfuscating any and all information about Adam Monroe. Interestingly enough, Chandra's research (via the Human Genome Project, which is presumably controlled by The Company) wasn't entirely off the mark: Adam Monroe was indeed in New York, just locked up in The Company ...

Activizzardo

The Vivendi buy out of half of Activision and "merger" into the newly named Activision Blizzard is somewhere between stupid, bizzare, and shameful. The big game companies just keep getting bigger...

...and there went my daily allotment of faith in humanity...

Woke up early, invigorated. Headed out the door and discovered some jackass had egged my car overnight. On the fortunate side was that I had woke up early and headed out the door... otherwise I might not have noticed until Tuesday or Wednesday. Also fortunate it was raining today, keeping it from getting too hard, other than the fact that I felt like an idiot using a car wash on a rainy day.

I park on the street (because we have 4 cars between a 2-car garage and a small driveway), and the obvious explanation is just the fact that jackasses hate that I park on the street because it does a little bit to slow down the 45+ MPH traffic flow on a supposedly 15 MPH speed limit neighborhood street, but people use it as a damn shortcut between Hurstbourne Road and Shelbyville Road... I've even seen semi-trucks do that and it's fucking ridiculous. Oh my gosh, people are parking in the street in a suburban neighborhood! People wonder why I have such a low opinion of just about everything related to the modern car... I guess someone took their holiday traffic angst out on my car.