Unbecoming Levity

On the Movie "Quarantine"

Abacquer — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:29:32 -0500

Dear asshole that made "Quarantine"--thank you for making yet another shitty movie with the shaky hand-held camera recovered footage approach that made "Cloverfield" suck too. I'd like that 90 minutes of my life back please.

Oh. And you suck. In case I didn't say that earlier.

DRM, Electronic Arts, and Censorship

Abacquer — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:52:45 -0400

So, the creators of Spore, Electronic Arts, created an online discussion forum where people could talk about Spore. Unfortunately they made the mistake of offering a feedback forum where people could post feedback about the game, and the reviews are positively ghastly. So many people are irate about how shallow the game is and the various bugs in it that last week EA released a patch for the game, only a week after the game went to market. Anybody in software development knows what happens when you rush a patch out the door. And it happened big time... the patch made the game experience WORSE for a lot of users, fixing some bugs but creating a whole host of new ones. Interest in the game is visibly on the wane, online Spore traffic has been pretty much falling since day one and people are already clamoring for "expansion packs". It's generally not a good sign if you are looking for game expansions after owning the game for one week. By comparison I've owned Oblivion IV for over a year now and I only purchased one of the available expansions. I haven't needed to buy any more because there is plenty of content there to keep I (and my family) entertained. But I digress..

The interesting thing is (as you might expect) a number of EA's customers are not at all pleased that they are limited to 3 installs of their game before it won't install anymore, and some are unhappy with SecuRom being installed on their machines without their consent. So along with feedback about various other flaws in the game, EA gets plenty of feedback about DRM and the headaches it is causing their customers.

Which they delete.

Yeah, you heard that right. If you post feedback about the DRM in Spore, they simply delete your feedback. They don't want customers discussing DRM or complaining about DRM. And the reason is quite simply this:

DRM does not stop pirates. It never did. The day Spore was released, there was already a DRM-free hacked version available for download from the various piracy sites. ANYBODY who did not have an ethical problem with stealing the game, could simply download a fully functional pirate version. Personally, I think game makers should be paid for their efforts, so this is not an option for me.

Electronic Arts isn't staffed by morons--they have tech savvy engineers working there who know full well that DRM will not stop pirates. So why do they keep claiming they put it in there to prevent pirates from stealing their game? Why is it really there?

My theory (and a lot of other people think so too) is they want to control (or basically kill) the resale market. If you want to play Spore and figure you'll buy a used copy in a year or so, think again. By putting the install limit on the game, EA prevents you from selling your property to a third party when you tire of it. Why would anyone buy Spore if it had only 1 install left, or less? So if someone wants Spore six months from now, they're going to have to buy it from EA--or they will get stiffed on reinstalls if one is ever needed.

That's fairly evil and a number of people (including myself) have posted threads to that effect on EA's feedback forum only to have them quietly disappear.

Which is also evil.

Spore by Electronic Arts -- Video Game Review

Abacquer — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 05:49:48 -0400

Okay, so gamers everywhere are upset about the Digital Rights Management that comes packaged with Spore. If you don't have an internet connection (because say, you are using a laptop while camping, or your internet modem is on the fritz) you can't play... even though there is nothing on the internet you actually NEED to play Spore. That's annoying, but if you are a home user who never upgrades their machine and has a solid internet connection, you may not care so much. So let's actually talk abut the GAME--how does it play? Is it fun?

The idea behind Spore is exciting and compelling... start with a microbe and evolve it into an intelligent spacefaring species. The game is basically broken into five minigames--and that right there is a sign of trouble--the Jack of all trades is a master of none. All five minigames have weaknesses and are pretty shallow simply because to invest too much development effort in one of the minigames means not investing it in others. Plus there are annoying inconsistencies in the camera controls for each minigame. What used to pan or zoom the camera in one minigame will do something else in the next, so at each transition you need to relearn how to do the same old things--that's right out of the Vista playbook... very irritating.

In conclusion, for $50 you get 5 games that are probably each worth about the $10 you are paying for them. You would probably be better served by spending your $50 on ONE really good game. I sure wish I hadn't bought this... because having played it one time through, I've gone from incredibly excited and interested by the game concept, to disappointed and bored. I have zero interest in ever playing this game again. Oblivion, Warcraft, and Civilization are all far better than Spore. Don't waste your money.

What follows are detailed reviews of the five games in Spore.

Minigame #1 - The Microbe Stage
Ignoring for a moment that evolution is *not* a directed process, and therefore the concept behind the game is annoying if you are a scientist, the idea is promising. But swimming around in fluid and nibbling bits of food gets tired very quick. The graphics are very pretty, but users will likely get bored with the microbial stage very quickly. As your germ wanders around it will collect "DNA points" that can be spent when it mates to pay for additional (or better) body parts.

Minigame #2 - The Creature Stage
All microbes must evolve into land creatures. Why? It's a testament to the shallowness of this game. Germs become land animals. You can give your creatures wings, but they can't live in trees or cliff walls... all they can do is wander around on the ground. You can't choose to stay in the ocean and become an intelligent underwater race. You can't burrow into the ground and become an intelligent underground race. You cannot evolve or design plant life, or become an intelligent plant species. The implication in the game is that though evolution you can evolve whatever you want. You can't. All you can control is the basic shape of your creature, its behavior toward other creatures, and what body parts it has. And it is in the creature-creating portion of the game where most of the development time seems to have been spent.

But even this too is annoyingly limited. The game wants all creatures to be vertebrates with bilateral symmetry--want to make a giant starfish? Too bad for you. Want a creature with two arms on one side and none on the other? Too bad for you.

One of the depressing things about this is that body parts don't actually DO anything. All they do is change your creature's stats. Adding a pointed spike gives the creature a "strike" ability, but adding two spikes doesn't make any difference, nor does changing the position of the spike or even its size. There's no reason not to throw your creature together haphazardly, because the actual arrangement of body parts has no effect on the game. Once the user realizes this, the illusion is shattered and the process of developing creatures becomes boring.

Many of the body parts are completely cosmetic and do nothing at all. Give your creature eyes on the back of its head and it gets no advantage whatsoever. There are dozens of different "arms" and "legs" available, and they are all hard to distinguish from each other, and universally all do the same thing. Add a particular leg to your creature and now it has a leg. Choose a different leg and the creature's stats are unchanged. So why bother having different legs then? And why do all the arms and legs essentially look the same? There are no hairy legs, legs with more joints, pseudopods, wrinkly legs, insectoid legs, etc.

Creatures have 4 basic social behaviors--singing, posing, dancing, and charming, and 4 antisocial behaviors--biting, striking, charging, and spitting. You can pretty much think of your creature as a tally sheet with a score for each of these behaviors. A creature with "sing 4" is really good at singing. The animations for the behaviors are very pretty, but to initiate them is a little clunky and extremely repetitive. Making friends or killing enemies gets tired fast. And unsurprisingly, the game rapidly progresses through the creature stage and tries to push you into the tribal stage.

Minigame #3 - The Tribal Stage
Gather food, try to make friends (or destroy) neighboring tribes. That about sums this stage up. It will remind you of the original warcraft games where your drones gather resources to make buildings, but it isn't as involved. It will remind you of civilization where you can sort-of acquire new technologies and interact with outher cultures, but it isn't as involved. Fact is there are already good games that do both of these things better, and since this game tries to cram in both of them, it does neither well. This stage is shallow but blissfully short. One thing that might annoy you is that all the time you spent developing your creature's physical traits pretty much become irrelevant at this stage of the game (and in every stage after).

Minigame #4 - The Civilization Stage
Now instead of fighting (or befriending) tribes of different creatures, you are fighting or befriending nations of creatures like yourself. The animations are stunning, but again the tactics are pretty shallow. There is no deep strategy to be found here, no clever interplay of various social forces. And this stage of the game too will end fairly quickly.

Minigame #5 - The Space Stage
So you finally made it. The grand conclusion of the game... and it isn't fun at all. At this point you should be controlling worlds and commanding fleets of ships, and instead you are basically an errand boy. You get one ship to fly around in and fly around you will. All that creature development is just a distant memory now... your beautiful creation is just a face on a communicator screen. You will receive missions that basically boil down into two types: (1) go to this planet and scan/pick up/bring back a certian item or items within a time limit, (2) go to a planet and kill all the creatures/beings that are glowing yellow in a certain time limit.

Just getting around is annoying. A mission says "go to planet Dingly Ball and bring back a Pferdburper plant", so the first thing you do is go to your star map (in steps, each step requiring a lengthy animation that you CANNOT skip) and you might expect to see a clear indication of the star you are supposed to go to. Sometimes you will but usually you won't and you spend your time hovering your mouse over each star to try and find the one with the right name. Yeesh... the star should have a blinking colored flag sticking out of it to tell you it is your objective... or the names of stars should appear next to them. There's no end of things that ought to be in here to make it less annoying.

As you try to negotiate trade routes or carry out missions you will CONSTANTLY be running back home to defend your homeworld (or your colonies) from pirates or enemies. Every such encounter is exactly the same and rapidly becomes infuriatingly stupid. I have a spacefaring race but I can only make one ship at a time? Why can't I build a defense force and leave guards on each planet so I am not constantly running back and forth to fight the same boring fights over and over again?

And the ship-to-ship combat is the absolute worst. Clunky as heck, and for all the pretty ships and lovely explosions, very little actual information is communicated to you... there is no useful tactical display--like say, coloring enemies differenly from friendlies, or automatically coloring ships in range differently from those out of range.

The space stage is, frankly, dismal... and should have been left out of the game altogether.

Music Review - Madonna - Hard Candy

Abacquer — Sun, 18 May 2008 13:59:15 -0400

I picked this CD up last night with much anticipation and listened to it today on a long drive.

It started strong, quickly soared to awesome, and then made a meteoric descent to absolutely awful and only recovered marginally after that point. *sigh* Too bad. I admit, that by track 3 I was beginning to wonder if we had another Ray of Light on our hands. Things stumbled a little in the fourth track but came back strong for tracks five and six.

Then came track 7--the inexplicably named song Incredible. The only incredible thing about this song is that it came from Madonna. I'm sorry to say it is the worst song she's ever created. Dischordant, screwy pacing, strange change-ups, and just an all around mess. This one song utterly destroyed the mood and made it hard for the album to come back, which wasn't helped by the fact that the next 3 songs were mediocre at best. I have no interest in hearing any of them again. Madge, you can do better.

The mixing on tracks 9 and 10 was also pretty poor. Madonna's voice was often drowned out or subdued against the music. I understand it's supposed to be dance music but her voice is way too strong to be so downplayed.

Track 10 was the best of the mediocre songs, but Spanish Lesson is no La Isla Bonita... far more cheesy and contrived. I may listen to Spanish Lesson again... I have a feeling it might grow on me.

Thankfully, the tail end of the album was saved by track 11 The Devil Wouldn't Recognize You, definitely an awesome number that I'll be putting on my new MP3 player whenever I can afford to buy one.

Track 12 Voices had a good sound but pretty silly lyrics. I got the impression Madonna was trying to do a sort of "haunting" piece, like perhaps Frozen--but the lyrics were too weak for me to enjoy it.

Obviously I hold Madonna to a pretty high standard, let's face it--7 good songs on a 12-song album makes it a good album. And this really is a good album--in fact if it had been an 11-song album minus Incredible, I probably would have enjoyed the later tracks more.

So here's what I recommend to people who buy this album and who loved Ray of Light and Confessions on a Dance Floor. Listen to the tracks in this order:

2. 4 Minutes
3. Give It 2 Me
6. She's Not Me
5. Miles Away
1. Candy Shop
4. Heartbeat
11. Devil Wouldn't Recognize You

After that, stop and leave the other tracks until your next listen. And I recommend just skipping Incredible forever.

Hard Candy is an awesome album. It is almost another Ray of Light, and once again Madonna rocked my world. Get the album and dance your ass off.

EDIT: After several more listens I have to say this album seems increasingly more kickass. There's no hope for track 7, and track 10 doesn't stand up to a second listen, but track 8 Beat Goes On was much better than I originally thought. On a second listen I enjoyed it much more and I think the first time through I was just so disappointed by Incredible that when the next song came on I was already soured on the experience. So add track 8 to my list of good tracks above. I'm going to be listening to this album constantly for awhile... and "4 Minutes" is frigging huge.

Das Rad

Abacquer — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:46:54 -0400

Here's a funny animation I caught on Pharyngula, the excellent science blog by P.Z. Myers. The audio is German, but there are subtitles. I got a kick out of it, perhaps you will too?

Das Rad

Madonna - 4 Minutes

Abacquer — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:26:26 -0400

Kicks ass.

Weird video though.

Another Indie Music Dump

Abacquer — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:57:21 -0400

So it's been awhile since I've posted a summary of the indie music I am listening to. As you know I follow 3Hive, GigaTracks, and also Obscure Sound to find out about new small independent bands and get some of their music. I check these sources every few months and backtrack through the posts to see if there is anything good. Usually, I like very little of what I hear, and that which I do like is merely "passable".

Well this time I waited over six months, and let me tell you my favorite source (3Hive) has been positively dry... dry dry dry. But even when it's dry you can usually find a few things, and some of these are quite fun. There's been a dearth of kickass dance music lately though, and I would say only one song in this list (Duality by The Martial Arts) qualifies as a song you could dance to.

Anyway, I've got most of this stuff on a mix disc and I'm listening to it in the car these days to get a feel for which bands I might want to purchase a CD from. There's definitely a couple I would like to hear more from. Anyway, throw on your headphones and have a listen... I don't think anything here will knock your socks off (there's no Afroganics or Aviatics in this bunch) but you may find something you like here.

Christine Fellows

3Hive describes Fellows as "Experimental Pop"--but I'd simply describe this as thoughtful acoustic music. The only song available via 3Hive is "Advice" which is a beautiful piece advising young people not to be in a great hurry to find love, or at least to "give themselves away". I find it quite pleasant.
- Advice
Club 8

I have a soft spot for Swedish bands, but I would love this duo even if they weren't Swedes. Lovely soft-pop with lots of acoustics and simple vocals that you can sing along with. It isn't dance music… in fact, it's Christian music. Strange that an atheist would enjoy Christian music? It's just words folks, and I can sing them and enjoy them without believing them. Maybe you can too.
- Jesus, Walk With Me
- Heaven -- I particularly like this one… very happy.
- Spring Came, Rain Fell
- What Shall We Do Next? -- Less acoustic, more poppy.
Colour Revolt

This band from the deep American south makes a good attempt at wailing guitar rock with "Naked and Red". It's also a bit of a refresher after the happy spirituality of Club 8. The song opens with a line about God swinging from the "licker tree" and it only gets weirder from there but ties up its interesting message with the idea that "Eden is a hell of a place." I'm glad somebody noticed!
- Naked and Red
Elk City

I seem to be on a spiritual kick lately, because Elk City also serves up a religious offering with "Los Cruzados" (The Crusaders) -- I'm a sucker for a good hallelujah chorus, and Los Cruzados delivers. 3Hive has another song by them available which I didn't enjoy but you may. Check them out.
- Los Cruzados -- Hallelujah… hallelujah… my wife heard me singing some of these Christian/spritual songs and asked "Are you having second thoughts?" Hee hee hee.
Empty Rooms

Sombre and haunting, I'm not sure how to characterize this rock band. In some ways they remind me of Duran Duran, and in some ways they remind me of The Fixx, but their sound is definitely their own. I'm linking two songs here, there's a third on 3Hive that I didn't particularly enjoy.
- Off with His Head
- Try Again
Hasch'm'Méneum

Is it electronica or jazz? It makes me tap my toes and rock my head whatever it is. Unfortunately some of the available tracks seem to cut a little short… probably because the band wants you to buy their CD… well I'm considering doing just that. If you like chirpy electronica with a comical side to it, this may be the blurps and bleeps for you. There are no vocals, or at least no lyrics... it's all instrumental.
- Christerium -- This song is a little funny. Something about it makes me smile. Sadly it is cut short.
- Heliotrope -- This piece is more meandering and contemplative… it would make great background music to read to or engage in some other mental activity.
- Red Sniper -- Stronger rhythm track and a hint of some sort of illicit activity going on in the mood of the music. This would make a good movie soundtrack for a montage where a character is putting his evil plan into action.
- Slide -- Probably my favorite song by Hasch'm'Méneum, this one is goofy and fun. It's another one that makes me tap my toes. Alas it is also cut short. :-(
The Heavy Circles

I have to see if I can find some more music by the Heavy Circles. This pop piece definitely sticks in my head and includes some great whirling sound.
- Henri
The Hermit

Some songs are background music, some songs are dance music, some songs you sing along with, and some you just want to close your eyes and slowly rock from side to side. "Wonderment" is onesuch with its sweeping poppy electronic sound and gently echoing vocals.
- Wonderment (Affekt remix)
- Flutterbye (Sputnichek remix) -- Faster paced than wonderment.
The High Water Marks

Squelchy retro guitar beach music... at least that's what it feels like to me. 3Hive has three of their songs up. The only one I've included here is "The Leaves" although I felt that "Queen of Verlaine" was passable.
- The Leaves
The Martial Arts

Okay, this is another group I need to find more music by. This is great summer music--even beach music perhaps. Music you can sing along with and even dance to, which makes it a little unusual because this latest 3Hive dump doesn't include much in the way of dance music.
- Duality -- Probably my favorite song of all the songs listed here today.
Oslo

This is darker stuff. Sometimes when you are disgusted with the state of the world, it's cathartic to listen to something dark--or at least therapeutic. Rise and Fall of Love and Hate is about divisiveness and how we are taught to be divisive. Sure touches a nerve with me, because I am fed up with all the demonizing I see going on these days.
- The Rise and Fall of Love and Hate
Sittser

If 3Hive has been dry, GigaTracks has been postively barren, but this one piece makes up for all that. It sounds like of a great 80's guitar ballad.
- Losing My Fear of Heights
Sneaky

So if you took Indian music and set it to a funk track and built in a solid driving whorling drone and a lot of repetition you would probably get a hypnotic piece just like this one. Excellent driving music this. I dig it. Purely instrumental.
- Beduija
Spitzer

Okay, I was iffy on including this piece by the French group "Spitzer". This is definitely electronic, like Trash80-style electronic. No vocals and very very synthy, but it has a good beat and it gets the head bobbing and the fingers tapping. Give it a listen... come on... you know you can't pass up a song called DISCO BISCUITS.
- Disco Biscuits
Wojtek Godzisz

I'm not sure what to make of this artist. 3Hive refers to this as "theatrical pop" which as good a way as any to describe it. They listed three songs but this was the only one I enjoyed.
- Light Over Dark Earth

Hope you enjoyed at least some of these... I'll keep trolling the intertubes for good indie music... check back in 3 months!! :-P

Here We Go Again...

Abacquer — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:51:46 -0400

Definition of "undercutting":

Me:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120163294055
Starting time: Sep-27-07 19:45:00 PDT (scheduled, so as to begin after other auctions ended)
Starting bid: US $49.99
Duration: 7-day listing

The other guy:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170153862318
Starting time: Sep-27-07 20:27:48 PDT
Starting bid: US $0.89
Duration: 7-day listing

From Bulk Comes Bilk and EBay Wants Your Money

Abacquer — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 19:21:12 -0400

I've been so busy with work and trying to sell cards that I haven't had time to do much photography. I did get some great pix in Hyannis a couple weeks ago and some more good stuff at a reception for a christening I went to last weekend, but I haven't had time to photoshop the photos, clean them up, organize them, and so forth. It's just been either work or eBay the last couple weeks. Here's one picture I took (at the office, of couse). Somebody in my building went out and got one of those "Dream Cruisers". Isn't it gorgeous? Wow.

On the eBay front I continue to sell and sell. Part of my unlimited set is gone now, and I've gotten the right price for it, and I continue to identify rarities or obscurities in my collection and put them up for sale. I am happy to report that I am at 90% of stage one and expect to make it there by the end of the week. Cool beans!

But I have learned one important lesson about selling. Selling in bulk may allow you to ship more product, but it definitely costs you money. I sold a set of 8 revised dual lands back on the tenth of September for $122.50. In preparation for the end of that auction I got another 7 dual lands together and was prepared to sell them as a batch. But I decided not to. As an experiment I decided to sell the 7 duals as individual auctions (here they are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). They went for a total of $139.60.

Sold as a batch, they went for $15.31 apiece. Sold individually? $19.94. That's 30% difference!!! Viewed from that perspective it makes sense to sell individually unless you have a very small market (say you are selling on a table on your front lawn... maybe a couple dozen people swing by and look at the items, chances of selling them all individually are remote.) But on eBay the market is huge, millions of potential buyers, so go for it right?

Well there *are* the eBay fees to consider. eBay will charge you for absolutely anything you can think of and plenty of things that wouldn't even occur to you. Back in the early days of eBay there was a listing fee and a sale fee. The listing fee used to be 30 cents. That was it. Then if the item sold there was a sale fee which was this sliding scale thing that was very complicated but generally worked out to about 4% to 5% of your sale. Nowadays everything costs money. No longer is the listing fee flat, but it is based on the minimum bid of your auction. If your minimum bid is a dollar, the listing fee is 20 cents. If your minimum bid is $49.99 your listing fee is $1.20, and if your minimum bid is $59.99 the fee is $2.40. As you can see the fee is determined inside some sort of bracketed structure. Want to add a reserve price? You'll be charged 1% of your reserve price. Want to add a buy-it-now price? There's a fee for that. Want to schedule your auction to start later in the day or later in the week? There's a fee for that. And so on and so on and so on. Sale fees aside, eBay takes a hefty chunk out of you up front just for listing the item. To the point where it makes no sense at all to sell anything for under say, 5 dollars. Ebay will simply eat so much of it that it becomes pointless to sell it.

And of course once your item sells, eBay charges you for a percentage of the sale price, this you would pay no matter how many items you are selling, but the listing fees are paid for each item. My listing fees for the first dual land auction was 30 cents (I had no minimum bid, no buy it now). The 7 individual auctions cost 40 cents apiece to list (probably because I set a minimum bid of $9.99, otherwise it would have been 30 cents). But that is $2.80 to list 7 individual items instead of 30 cents to list one.

Then come the PayPal fees, which generally work out to about 3.5% of the sale price but which have overhead costs causing them to be at least 30 cents as a minimum. I read an amusing story about a guy who overcharged his customer about 90 cents for shipping, and offered the customer a refund via PayPal. So the customer got sixty cents. Ouch. For items worth about $20 each, the overhead is not really all that relevant, but it would be for inexpensive items. The PayPal fees would be easier to stomach if PayPal wasn't owned by eBay. Yes, that's right, you pay eBay to list your item, you pay eBay to sell your item, and you pay eBay to collect the payment for the sale of your item. Yeesh. And, to make it even more annoying, PayPal fees are instantaneously applied to any cash transferred, but eBay fees are simply billed to you at the end of the month. That way, PayPal can charge you a percentage off of the $100 you were paid, instead of the $100 you were paid minus the eBay listing and sale fees. I hasten to point out again that PayPal *is* eBay. Double dipping anyone?

After correcting for eBay listing fees, eBay sale fees, and eBay PayPal fees, the group lot went for $14.20 per card, and the individual lot for $17.80. That's still a 25% improvement in price, even after being ~~robbed~~ charged for eBay's fine services. Altogether the 8 auctions sold for $262.10, which isn't bad, even if eBay took $23.92 in total fees. My state government charges 5% in sales tax. eBay? 9.13%. Yikes!!!

So from now on I'm going to sell individually and try not to think about the fact that I might as well just set every tenth item on fire since I'm not going to end up with any money for it.

eBayers Drive Me Crazy!!

Abacquer — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:32:46 -0400

Looking down the notes/status on my selling/sold auctions, they read like something out of "How to be Obnoxious -- A Practitioner's Guide". Let's run through them, shall we?

Item 1 is a very rare set which did not sell because some rather clueless sellers all decided to run auctions for the same item at the same time as mine, and undercut me. As a result they all hurt each other and nobody made what the set was worth. One guy had an extremely low minimum bid and got no bids. After his auction ended, there was only one auction left to bid on, it shot way up over the first guy's minimum despite having poorer quality cards. Thinking about that makes my brain shrivel. Now I have to wait around for all of these shmoes to finish relisting and selling their sets so I can get a fair price for mine. And they appear to be waiting for me. Greaaaaaaat.

Item 2 is my most valuable set, wouldn't sell for 80% of the retail price. I received the most ridiculous offers, promises from people who then disappeared, and got strung along by people who eventually just backed out as if surprised when I repeated stuff to them which was clearly stated in the auction description. Meanwhile the auction has had hundreds of views and dozens of people watching it. I've now relisted (cha-ching! extra ebay fees!) lowered the price to 70% and it still isn't selling. Jesus. I'm going to have to split it up and sell it in pieces (cha-ching! more fees!)... and I'll end up making way more than the current asking price. Had one buyer offer the full price if I would ship to Spain (auction says shipping to USA only.) He assured me up and down that it was perfectly safe and he does it all the time. Then I told him that he would have to assume the shipping risk (i.e. item goes missing, he has to wait for the UPS refund, up to 6 months). And suddenly it's no longer something he feels comfortable doing. (Guess he doesn't have as much faith in the Spanish courier services after all.) Currently I have one offer from a guy who "is trying to get the money together". We'll see... past history is not a good indicator.

Item 3, a set so rare that only a handful exist in the world. I set a reserve and have people who expect me to sell it to them for one tenth of the reserve. One bidder offered to buy it for the reserve price, but insists I cancel the auction and relist it with a buy it now option first!! (For those wondering, it cost about $9 to list it the first time, and would cost another $9 to list it again.) Guy refuses to just bid the goddamned reserve amount. I refused to end the auction for him.

Item 4, fixed price/best offer auction. I accepted an offer of $150, only to discover that the buyer was from Japan (you don't get buyer's location until you accept their offer.) Auction description says shipping to USA only. Genius. I recalculating the shipping charges, and they tripled. Sent buyer an invoice and pointed out that he should have contacted me first before he bid because that's exactly what the auction description says. I hope he doesn't back out, but I suspect he will (and I lose $5 in listing fees... cha-ching!)

Item 5, sold Aug-31. No contact from buyer. Invoice sent 9/1. Reminder sent 9/4. Still no contact. Standard eBay grace period is 3 days from end of auction. Going to have to send buyer a warning tomorrow and if he doesn't pay within a day after that it will be negative feedback and relist the item (cha-ching! more listing fees...)

Item 6, shipping to USA only. Bidder from Germany pleaded with me to ship to him, and eventually I agreed and let him bid. Then after winning the item he argued with me about the shipping costs and insisted I ship USPS instead of UPS.

Item 7, buyer asked repeatedly about card condition despite pictures of the cards being in auction description, and then took his sweet time getting his payment together after he won (took 5 days to make an instant electronic payment.) At least he apologized for taking so long. He'd be the first.

What next???

I See How It Is...

Abacquer — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:35:11 -0400

As you know I am selling some of my MTG collection (the oldest and the bestest stuff) to finance photographic gear. I spent awhile researching prices so my stuff could be competitively priced--which was a little challenging because for some of the hotter stuff (the Unlimited and Arabian Nights sets) there hasn't been an auction on ebay for months on these items. I finally figured out why. Potential sellers are waiting for a price to beat. After months with very little in the way of complete sets of Unlimited/Arabians, within a day of me listing my sets for auction, a bunch of other sellers crawled out of the woodwork and listed their sets for auction, all undercutting me by small amounts (typically about $50), or by setting high reserves and no minimum bid. Since all these auctions are now running simultaneously, there is suddenly a lot of options for the prospective buyer, and since mine is ending before the others, the lower-priced auctions are going to see all the action.

So at this point I don't expect the Arabians or Unlimited sets to sell, and now I'm going to have to sit around like the other campers and wait for some other seller to come along so I can undercut him or her.

Pain in the ass. The amusing thing is, sets this rare sell so infrequently that if a seller waited until my auction was over, he'd end up doing better than he would if they all try to sell at the same time and undercut each other. Oh well... I guess the buyers win!

Name That Movie #67

Abacquer — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:00:00 -0400

Watch out! It's time for 10 images worth of Name That Movie goodness! First image is up now, next one at 9 AM. Last one (the gimme) at 3:30 in the afternoon. Get cracking folks...

Below is an image from a movie. If you can guess the movie via that one image, do so, if not, links to further images will be posted throughout the day. The second image should be more obvious, and the third image even moreso, and so on. Please try not to read the comments before you guess!

NTM is JavaScript driven and will automagically make the images available at the listed times. Once you've got the page open, you can refresh the image links just by clicking the refresh button below, this will check the clock and enable further images as appropriate. Times displayed should be in your local timezone. (Yes, obviously you can cheat either by viewing the source, or simply changing the time on your clock.)

The image links will replace the primary displayed image when you mouse over them. This way you can view the images right in the article without having to open up new windows. You may have to wait a second or two for the new image to download before it will replace the primary image. The original primary image will return when you mouse off of the image link.

I will, as time permits, also post the image links in comments for those of you whom cannot run javascript.

That said, here's the first image...

GOOD LUCK!!!

EDIT: By the way, you can recap all the previous Name-That-Movie posts on Unbecoming Levity, by use of this neat little page.

End of an Era

Abacquer — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:39:47 -0400

Well, after years of collecting, I've finally begun selling off pieces of my Magic: the Gathering trading card collection. The collection is enormous, and I'm hopeful that I can wring enough cash out of it to get the camera gear I feel is necessary to start attempting to supplement my income. Wish me luck!

Village Atheist = Village Idiot?

Abacquer — Sat, 26 May 2007 07:48:22 -0400

The jobs don't pay a lot, and you take most of your pay in self-esteem, but somebody is always trying out for village idiot or village atheist. Often they're one and the same...

-- Wesley Pruden, Revival time with the village atheist, (Washington Times)

In a classic pot-and-kettle scenario, Wesley Pruden has done disservice to the readers of the Washington Times with an irrational screed mocking atheists for writing "irrational screeds mocking those who have the faith the authors clearly envy." The saving grace for these unfortunate atheists is that the average Times reader is probably too smart to be taken in by such drivel.

Pruden has nothing constructive to offer in his screed. He merely calls atheists names and cites examples of atheists saying bad things about people who deserve to have bad things said about them. This is what his article boils down to:

Did you know that there are atheists living among you?
Atheists are idiots.
Atheists hate people of faith because they don't have faith but desperately want it.
Atheists say the darndest things.
Atheists are getting more attention than I am and it pisses me off.

Mr. Pruden apparently doesn't concern himself with the facts regarding persons atheists have spoken ill of, or even facts about the atheists themselves. I mean really, who among us who has actually read The God Delusion would use the word "irrational" to describe it? I've been struggling with the book myself and have found it incredibly dense, repetitive, and belaboring of points, but irrational? Rationality is the coin of the atheist realm. The author has got it backwards... it is faith that is irrational.

The article is clearly calculated to incense the readership, as opposed to communicate any meaningful argument as to why atheists are idiots, or naughty, or whatever else he's trying to say. He notes Christopher Hitchens' reference to Mother Theresa as "the ghoul of Calcutta", without bothering to say why. He notes Pulitzer prize winner Paul Greenberg's mention of Reverend Falwell's one "decent" moment on record, without bothering to say why. Apparently the "why" doesn't concern the unencumbered-by-a-Pulitzer-Prize-Pruden.

A rational person will find little of interest in this yawn-inspiring rant against atheism, except perhaps an appreciation of the irony by which the author reveals himself to be the shrill irrational caricature that he tries to paint atheists as. Beyond that, there's nothing to see here.

Scumbag at Work

Abacquer — Wed, 16 May 2007 21:04:29 -0400

An Australian video game designer has caused a major uproar Down Under with his creation of a game based on the Virginia Tech massacre.

Called V-Tech Rampage, the game has several levels of "stealth and murder," reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

But what really is causing the kerfuffle--as if the game itself wasn't in bad enough taste--is that its designer, Ryan Lambourn, says he will take the game down from his Web site only if the public comes up with a $2,000 payoff.

For another grand, he'll apologize...

-- Game designer causes uproar with Virginia Tech game (Tech News Blog)

Halo 3

Abacquer — Wed, 16 May 2007 09:36:47 -0400

Yippee!

Various

Abacquer — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:34:24 -0400

Okay, here's a bunch of little things I want to talk about. None of them really deserves its own article but I want to share it anyway. I suppose I should caution you that I am on percoset right now, so I am a little loopy... I apologize if this is a scatterbrained.

Eating

I still can't chew, and won't be able to for another week at least. So I am exploring different things that I can eat without chewing. Stuff that has worked out well has been jello, applesauce, soup broth, rice in thick gravy, spagettios, small bits of bread soaked in broth, yogurt, pureed fruit mixed with yogurt and juice, and so forth. Pureed baked beans is really grainy, and I don't like it. Gonna try baked beans again sometime soon where I just try to swallow the beans whole, unchewed. I've found I can eat Italian Ices, but all the acid in fruit juice is making this bothersome.

All this nigh-liquid food combined with drugs that mess up my sleep schedule, and amoxicillin (to avoid infection) is making my stomach pretty upset. But I'll get through. (It's not like I have a choice!)

NPR Podcasts

When I go to bed I like to listen to music or speech on my MP3 player. I find that listening to the same stuff every night helps me sleep. But eventually I get tired of the same stuff. The NPR website has always been a great place to go to stream shows you've missed, but at some point they began offering these shows as podcasts. (The difference, from my perspective, is that you can download old shows as MP3 files, drop them on your MP3 player or your computer, and listen to them anytime.) You guys were probably aware of that, but to me it's big news... streaming is great, but it is much nicer to grab the last few episodes of my favorite NPR program and listen to it whenever (in my case, when I go to bed.) NPR has a huge podcast directory with shows from all their member stations. Here's a link to the directory... you can subscribe to these shows as feeds in Google Reader or just hit the URL directly and save the MP3 files.

The podcasts (shows) that I am most interested in are:

Stem Cells

So I was listening to one of those podcasts of NPR Science Friday where the topic matter was stem cell research. A guy called in who equated a 14-day-old blastocyst with a person. He was in the crowd that considers a fertilized human egg to be a human being, what he framed as "life begins at conception". Obviously holding that view, there was no way he could get behind stem cell research since it involved killing embryos.

Then one of the guest experts offered the caller a challenge which I committed to memory because I never wanted to forget it:

Imagine you are a fireman dealing fighting a fire in a fertility clinic. You enter a room and find in it a six year old girl, and a tray with 20 frozen embryos. You can either save the girl or the tray of embryos. Which one do you choose?

In my opinion, the caller chickened out. He said something like "that would be a call I would have to make as a fireman... it would depend on who was closest to the door and who was most likely to survive." I felt his answer betrayed that he couldn't really equate 20 embryos with 20 people... if he could, the decision should have been both straightforward, and patently ridiculous... as if anyone could ignore a 6 year old girl screaming for rescue from a fire and instead choose a rack of test tubes.

Although it isn't clear exactly when an embryo becomes a person, it seems downright obvious that a 14-day-old blastocyst is far less a person than a six year old girl. I'm going to remember this challenge. It really made me think.

Birdies

I've been feeding the birds in my yard again lately. I stopped many years ago, but started up again after my Dad passed away. It's funny, I sort of got him interested in birds and birdfeeding years ago, and now he has sort of gotten me back into it. Things haven't changed much. Regular wild bird food doesn't have enough millet in it, and has some other seeds that most of the birds don't eat. So I went back to one of my old recipes and it worked like a charm, but it involves buying parakeet food and mixing that into the seed, which is expensive. I have to find a place where I can get millet cheap. Anybody know a place?

Dawkins Discussions... on Amazon?

I've been following some discussions on Dawkins which are popping up on Amazon. Apparently any product for sale on Amazon gets its own discussion forum. So at the bottom of the amazon page for The God Delusion are the hot forum topics related to that book. It's amazing what lengths some people will go to in order to discredit Dawkins. Check it out, if you dare. This is where I found out about the "Dawkins Pause" video... this particular discussion links to the video (it's something of a relief to see that the theists seem to be in the minority on this forum.)

If you need more Dawkins, here's a feed for RichardDawkins.net which you can drop in your news aggregator.

I'm about halfway through The God Delusion myself. Having trouble reading it right now... mostly because of the percosets.

Topix.Net

Don't know if I've recommended this before, but topix.net is a nice source for regional newsfeeds for small towns. They incorporate feeds for local newspapers and blogs, and all you do is enter the zip code of the town you are interested in, and topix.net will generate a feed for that town that you can plonk into a feed reader like bloglines, Google reader, and so forth. (It's my understanding that IE7 has a feed aggregator built right in.)

My Shared Shite

I've been regularly flagging articles in the feeds I read as shared so that other people can enjoy them. You can access the GoogleReader page devoted to my shared articles here.

3Hive Decency

Some fairly decent stuff has cropped up on 3Hive since my last article about indie music. I recommend The Autumn Defense and Lymbyc Systym.

Name That Movie #66

Abacquer — Fri, 11 May 2007 03:32:33 -0400

Watch out! It's time for 10 images worth of Name That Movie goodness! First image is up now, next one at 9 AM. Last one (the gimme) at 3:30 in the afternoon. Get cracking folks...

I will, as time permits, also post the image links in comments for those of you whom cannot run javascript.

That said, here's the first image...

GOOD LUCK!!!

EDIT: By the way, you can recap all the previous Name-That-Movie posts on Unbecoming Levity, by use of this neat little page.

Sheeps and Stones and Lilting Tones

Abacquer — Mon, 07 May 2007 10:58:14 -0400

This week's gonna be rough because I'm having my teeth taken out and replaced with dentures. Therefore I'll be spending most of the week out of my head on pain meds. It was important to me therefore to do some things I haven't done in a long time this weekend, and just to enjoy myself.

Saturday

So on Saturday morning, me and the family went to Wachusett Meadow in Princeton, MA for birdwatching and other attractions. The sanctuary administrators were shearing a ewe when we got there, so we watched some of that. Lynnea really enjoyed the sheep, especially the little lambs.

The birding was good, we racked up 35 species by 11 AM. The highlights were extensive views of a Rose-breasted Grosbeak (hadn't seen one in 10 years), an Eastern Phoebe on the nest (never seen one on the nest before), and my little friend, the Yellow Warbler, who found me while I was resting on a bench and sang to me from a nearby shrub. The Bobolinks aren't back yet. I'll have to go back sometime soon to see them.

The complete list was:

House Sparrow
Blue Jay
European Starling
Northern Cardinal
White-breasted Nuthatch (heard only)
Dark-eyed Junco
Downy Woodpecker
American Crow
American Robin
Common Grackle
Red-winged Blackbird
Black-capped Chickadee
Rose-breasted Grosbeak (A rare treat for me! Was feeding at the sanctuary feeders.)
Barn Swallow
American Goldfinch
Mourning Dove
Brown-headed Cowbird (at least three pairs of M & F)
Red-tailed Hawk
Tree Swallow
Eastern Phoebe (saw one nesting!)
White-throated Sparrow
House Wren
Song Sparrow
Eastern Bluebird (what a nice surprise, got to see a couple)
Common Merganser (pair, M & F)
Hooded Merganser
Canada Goose (pair, presumably M & F)
Yellow Warbler
Northern Flicker
Bufflehead (pair, M & F, took awhile for me to identify, male not in full breeding plumage)
Chipping Sparrow
Tufted Titmouse
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Northern Mockingbird
Flycatcher, Empidomax Species (Beats me, I can never tell these guys apart. Its eye-ring was very pronounced so I'd venture it was either Acadian, Alder, or Least, or maybe even a Yellow-bellied migrating through. Probably not a Willow.)

After heading back home and eating leftovers for lunch, the family rested. I was sore and tired from the hiking. So I spent the afternoon reading The God Delusion by Dr. Richard Dawkins. It's very dry, and so far there are no surprises (most of the content therein I've heard from watching Dawkins speak, so it's largely an expansion on arguments I've already heard), but I am getting some reasonable enjoyment from it.

My neighbor Mark came over to ask if I would be able to help him move a giant boulder he had unearthed while working in his yard. He wanted me to come over on Sunday when he would have another person to help, but I told him I was visiting my Mom on Sunday. He didn't know my Dad had passed away and expressed his condolences.

Around dusk I decided to head out to L.A.N. Games in Leominster to play some Magic: the Gathering with friends I hadn't seen in a long time. I can't remember the last time I made it out there. Certainly before my pneumonia set in (February 5) and probably not in January because I was on the project from hell at work. I'd say I probably got out there sometime in December so it has been quite a while.

My old friend Rich was there, as well as my friend Dave (who is also the proprietor). Later on my friends Dillon, Mike, and some others showed up and we all played cards. I had a really good time. Before I knew it, it was coming up on 10 PM, and I needed to get home and get some sleep because I was heading out to see my Mom in the morning. Once I got home I read a little more Dawkins and then went to bed.

Sunday

I discovered Patty was sick when I got up Sunday morning. It might just be allergies, but she was very uncomfortable, so I planned on going to my Mom's alone. After I took my shower I decided to shave off my beard. It was getting quite thick, and I didn't want it to get in the way of the oral surgeon this week. While I was shaving my wife brought my cell phone to me in the bathroom. My Mom was calling to tell me she had a lot of work to do today, and why don't I just stay home?

So after chatting with my Mom, I decided to stay home. I finished shaving and went next door to tell Mark and Heather that if they needed help moving the boulder, I was going to be available after all.

Around 11 or so, Heather's Dad John came by with his pickup truck and various chains, and winch-like contraptions with which we got the stone out of its hole in short order. It was a huge boulder, roughly triangular, perhaps about 3 feet wide by 2.5 feet long by about 2 feet thick in the thickest spot. John felt it was around a thousand pounds or so. Heather wanted to stand it up in front of her house and build a small rock garden around it, so we spent the next 2 hours or so getting it from the backyard, around the house, up onto the driveway, across the front lawn, precariously around the front walkway railing which was very old and rickety and up to the spot where the garden was going to be. It was hard work and it took all four of us to move. We kept laying down planks of wood and plywood for it to slide across so as to minimize the damage to the front lawn.

We were all exhausted when it was finally close to where it needed to be, and we were too tired to jockey it the last couple feet and stand it up. Project for another day, I think. Moving a thousand pound boulder really makes you think about how people long gone moved far bigger stones to make the pyramids, stonehenge, or other ancient structures.

I thought I was tired the day before, but after helping to lug around that fat-ass rock, when I got back home and sat in my comfy chair I immediately passed out. Later I got up (ow) and trief to play a little Oblivion on my xbox 360 but fell asleep again. Eventually I recovered and became incredibly hungry. I just couldn't get enough to eat! I had some toast, and then some baked beans, and then some beefaroni, and finally ate a few rice cakes with peanut butter. I washed this down with alternating glasses of apple juice and ginger ale and followed it up with a pair of fig newtons for dessert.

Later in the evening I read more Dawkins and tried not to think about my upcoming oral surgery. And that was my weekend. It was a pretty good one as weekends go, and nice weather to boot. Hope everyone else enjoyed theirs!

The Amazing Color Changing Card Trick

Abacquer — Sat, 05 May 2007 00:18:27 -0400

I found this awesome video via the equally awesome Bad Astronomy blog. I'm not big on card tricks, but this one is really amazing, and you might learn something from it as well.

Sony Needs a Dope Slap

Abacquer — Tue, 01 May 2007 09:08:45 -0400

I really need to add a "WTF" category to this blog. I had heard about this peripherally and figured it was just an urban legend, but it's not. In the last few days Sony released its new adult-oriented video game God of War II for the PlayStation console. Recently they had a big "European launch party" in Greece for members of the press who write about video game news. They tried to theme the party to match the nature of the game, so the party featured an actor dressed up as the hero from the game (okay, you might expect this), games involving throwing knives and pulling live snakes from pits (?), topless women who hand fed grapes to the guests (WTF?), and as a centerpiece, the decapitated carcass of a freshly slaughtered goat (WTF!!?).

Now it's not the first time Sony has done something amazingly stupid to promote their wares, but, as you can imagine not everyone was cool with a slaughtered animal being used as a "prop" at a party. Guests were invited to reach into the goat's lacerated body, pull out entrails, and eat them. The entrails had in fact been replaced with some sort of Greek dish that resembled intestines. Yum.

If a goat had been killed and served as a dish which guests could eat, that probably would have been fine... I mean anyone who eats meat is eating a killed animal. But to morbidly lay out a dead animal at your dinner party with its head hanging off as a lurid decoration? That's just disgusting, cruel, morbid, and a waste of an animal. According to Sony the goat carcass was purchased from a loal butcher and then returned to the butcher after the party.

Apparently it has finally occurred to Sony that this whole party really wasn't such a great idea. Mostly because of the backlash from animal rights groups, Sony has issued an apology.

From Sony Apologizes For Decapitated Goat In 'God Of War' Launch (InformationWeek via Yahoo! News):
..."On this occasion we recognize that we fell short of our normal high standards of conduct and apologize for any offense caused," Sony said in a statement. "We are conducting an internal inquiry into the circumstances of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put in place measures to ensure that this does not happen again."...

The article goes on and quotes animal rights activists decrying the use of the goat's carcass, and a professor of marketing who calls the party centerpiece "stupid".

Which is all expected of course, but what I find intriguing is that nobody quoted seems to have any complaints about topless women feeding grapes to the partygoers. Okay, of course they are performers, and they were paid to perform this service, but it hardly seems appropriate for a video game launch party. The use of "pretty girls" at product launches or other types of retail expositions is not a new thing, and includes some sort of compensation, typically money, but not always. But this goes beyond anything I've heard of before. I would expect something like this at say a strip joint* or something like that, but a video game launch party for the press? WTF were they thinking?

Here's an article from 1Up.com recapping the event and including a picture which is probably NSFW.

That's effed up, yo.

*: Which is not to say I've ever been to a strip joint. For the curious, no I haven't. I have no interest in watching ecdysiasts perform live. That would be way too embarrassing for me.

Cherry Picking from 3Hive -- More Indie Music

Abacquer — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 09:20:21 -0400

It's been awhile since I blogged about my latest finds at 3Hive (a great source for downloading tracks from terrific indie bands.) The pickings have been pretty slim over the last 4 months, and though I have grabbed some things I liked, I haven't found anything that blew my mind. This is what I've heard recently that I enjoyed (in chronological order)...

Tom Rothrock
Track: Darker Blues

Like the title says, this isn't just the blues, but has a darker bent to it. A piece like this would make fine theme music for the life of a criminal. Thanks Tom for this bit of darkness.
Kama Aina
Track: Hotaru

It's not clear where this piece of meditative slowcore by the Japanese artist Takuji Aoyagi is going, but as it draws me in with it's rhythms I slowly lose interest in the destination and simply enjoy the journey. It makes me think of water gardens and zen gardens as it works through its progressions.
L.A.O.S.
Track: Drowning Deep Inside Your Soul

And from Japanese acoustical meditative music, we move to Finnish electronica meditative music. L.A.O.S. (Large Amounts of Soul) may inspire you to move as much as Kama Aina inspires you to sit still, and yet I can't help feeling that there is something common between the two pieces. A word to those who are not broadbandy -- this is a "Large Amount Of Music"... it's approximately a 15Mb download. So if you aren't huge on funky electronica, you may want to give it a pass.
Missing Numbers
Track: The Real Realizer

Darker than Darker Blues, this piece will make you feel the power of the drone. It took all of a few seconds of the throaty saxophone at the beginning of this song to make me sit up and pay attention. The music runs thick with coarse gritty cynicism and the disturbing taste of exhaust fumes. When I close my eyes with this song playing, I can't help seeing a man in a dark trench coat, wearing a fedora, and walking through a dark alley in a city at night. Steam billows from the grates behind him as he stops to consider the bum sitting on the sidewalk and holding out a cup for change, and then just walks away.
Money Mark
Track: Pick Up the Pieces

Okay, I'll be honest and admit up front that this song is fairly mediocre in my opinion. I liked it enough to not throw it away while I was looking for something better to download. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the execution. It's decent filler in your background music... not necessarily something you would actually want to pay attention to. But, maybe you'll like it more than I do. It would make decent music for a video game like The Sims.
Reutschle
Tracks: (1) Can You Remember?, (2) Don't Turn Around

This pop band comes from Dayton, Ohio, and although I would hardly call these tracks "deep" I would definitely call them "fun". This summery stuff strikes me as both corny and goofy, but if I just let it play I find myself smiling and wanting to clap along. I am not a music afficionado by any standard, so I couldn't even begin to tell you what influences this group, but their music simultaneously reminds me of the Beach Boys and the Partridge Family. Have a listen and make your own determination. There are actually more tracks available for download than these, but I didn't check them out.
Bee and Flower
Tracks: (1) Don't Say Don't Worry, (2) Riding on Empty

Of the four tracks available for download, I only liked these two. The vocalist has a great voice and the music is moody and beautiful, but ultimately depressing. If you are in an angsty mood, this might be something you would enjoy. This is not happy music, but instead a wretched downward spiral... particularly Riding on Empty.
Buildings Breeding
Track: Emma Wood

I place this piece in the same bin as Pick Up the Pieces by Money Mark, which is to say "well... I didn't delete it." This is background music for sure. There were two other tracks by the same band available, but I actively disliked them.
The Expos
Track: Little Red Hook

Now this is a fun piece of music if you like ska. I hear a lot of stuff on 3Hive which is described as ska, but when I hear it I find myself saying "this is ska?" Not so this piece. This gets my head bobbing... the singer notes "I've got a little red hook" and he has caught me with it.
The Red Button
Track: She's Going Down

3Hive describes this piece as a "sleepy little pop song". I agree wholeheartedly--what a fun, pleasant little tune. This is music to listen to while you and someone you love cuddle in a hammock and laugh a sunny summer afternoon away.
Sister Vanilla
Tracks: (1) Jamcolas, (2) Can't Stop the Rock

Not my typical fare. It's still pop, but it's pop flirting with grunge and a little punk. Sister Vanilla wouldn't sound too out of place in a mix that included Billy Idol, Nirvana, and Garbage. I like both of these tracks. Jamcolas is more on the punky side, and Can't Stop the Rock is more on the grungy side.
The Bird and the Bee
Track: I Hate Camera

Here's an interesting song. I definitely want to hear more from The Bird and the Bee. I love eccentric lyrics and eccentric music. One thing is certain in this song, she hates that camera and doesn't want her picture taken. This piece has a retro element to it and also sounds like it incorporates music from old video games in spots.
Luz Mob
Tracks: (1) The Selector, (2) Ella Se Fue

What strange mix of styles! When Selector starts, I'm thinking, okay some kind of mellow electronica funk. But then the second layer of music kicks in and I'm listening to the sort of reggae I would expect from The Police. And as I wonder if I'm going to be Walking on the Moon the horns begin. Horns? Is that... jazz? I don't really care for jazz, and I suspect a hardcore jazz fan might not call this jazz, but it sounds like jazz to me... uh, set to a reggae beat with electronic undertones. So then I switch over to Ella Se Fue and I'm bathed in a distinctly latin tune being belted out in goofy synthetic cherps. And there go those horns again.

What the hell do you call this?

Luz Mob, apparently!
Vapnet
Tracks: (1) Färjemansleden, (2) Thoméegränd

I'm only 25% Swedish, but I have a soft spot for Swedish bands, and Vapnet actually sings in Swedish (an incredibly beautiful language which I have never been able to master.) This is the second time today I am going to mention the Partridge Family, except in this case it would really be the "Rapphöna Barn". It isn't awesome music, but it is very gentle, and if I allow it, Färjemansleden and Thoméegränd buoy my soul, swaddle me in melody, and carry me away.

Tack så mycket, Vapnet.

Sadly missing from today's lineup of songs is any really good driving music, except perhaps for Darker Blues or Real Realizer. Hope you enjoy at least some of this music, and BTW if you know any good sources for downloading free indie music (legally), please share them.

With Virginia Tech Fresh in Our Memory

Abacquer — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:52:11 -0400

...So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did...

-- Allen Lee, Carly-Grove High School Student

Allen Lee wrote some seriously disturbed crap during a "Free Writing" assignment in his high school English class this week. Apparently the instructions on the assignment made clear that the students were not to censor themselves and should instead write whatever came to mind. The point was to keep writing and not to stop until the time ran out. Allen's essay begins "Blood sex and Booze. Drugs Drugs Drugs are fun. Stab, Stab, Stab, S…t…a…b…, poke." The end of the essay concludes with a message to his teacher: "No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting." The "cg" refers to "Carly-Grove", the name of Allen's school.

It is evident from his essay that he has an extremely low opinion of his teacher, and English in general. So I suppose it's possible he selected subject matter most calculated to upset the teacher. If so, the calculations were spot-on. Allen's teacher apparently called the police, and now he is charged with disorderly conduct according to the Chicago Tribune. You can read Allen's entire essay here.

I read the last sentence of Allen's essay as a threat, and therefore I am not at all surprised that some sort of discipline is in order, and I fail to see why Allen would be surprised. But apparently a lot of people are surprised because they seem to be leaping to his defense and claiming that the teacher/school are overreacting.

In the meantime Allen is planning to join the Marines.

The questions here are, are these the ravings of a deranged mind, or a normal high school student attempting to undertake a free writing assignment and making a poor choice of subject matter? Was arresting him an appropriate reaction or an overreaction?

What do you think?

What's Goin' On, What's Goin On

Abacquer — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 09:26:11 -0400

Life has been a little hectic for me, and while I've had time to take part in interesting discussions on articles I posted over a year ago (weird) I haven't had much time to post any new articles. So here's what's goin' on, reduced to a bullet list, just so I can get the shite out there:

Went to see the oral surgeon on Tuesday, no real surprises there, it was just a consult, they wanted me to know what to expect and to talk to me. Had to read some scary consent forms where they tell you everything that could possibly go wrong during your procedure... we might break your jaw, we might puncture your sinuses, we might damage teeth you were planning on keeping, you might have a heart attack from the anaesthesia, you might die, the world might end. Great stuff to read if you are a person with an anxiety disorder triggered by medical situations. Thanks guys.
I go in for my impressions at the dentist this afternoon. Probably have to have the surgery in about 3 weeks.
Celebrated Easter with Patty's family on Saturday, and with my family on Sunday. Plus we had a little egg hunt for Lynnea at our house Sunday morning. Total of 3 egg hunts, and I hid somewhere between 85 and 145 eggs over the weekend (I had help on the last hunt.)
Atheist's don't believe in jinxes, but lately it's hard to shake the idea of misfortune following me around. During Saturday's get together, I noticed that the dog of one of my sisters-in-law, who had been brought to the gathering, was acting funny--labored breathing, strange movements. I told my sister-in-law about it, and she took the dog to a vet during the celebration and was informed that the animal needed to be put to sleep. Happy Easter kids, the dog is dying. They had the dog put down that same day and a lot of the kids were crying about it.
Continuing the jinx thread, I was on the phone with a friend yesterday afternoon and we were discussing all the things that had been going on in my life when suddenly I heard a loud bang on my cellphone. My friend had been rear ended by another driver and terminated the conversation with "my back is hurting, I can't talk now". Later in the evening I heard back that after a trip to the hospital my friend was okay, but he didn't yet know how bad the damage to his car is. We joked that I should try to capitalize on this Hurleyesque bad luck of mine, have people pay me to stay away from them, or pay me to hang around with folks they don't like until the meteorite hits them.
I've been seeing my Mom each weekend and helping her to get things taken care of now that Dad is gone. Mom runs a small business out of her house and depends entirely on an ancient Windows-98 box to do her work, and the box is acting pretty spotty lately. A few weeks before Dad passed away he had purchased a new computer, and so now I am trying to repurpose that box so that when my Mom is ready, she can switch to the new box and run her business on that. Unfortunately the new box comes with Vista which my Dad hated, and after spending a couple of hours trying to use the box I can see why. Microsoft completely changed the standard windows interface, all the control keys are different, and no functions are where they used to be. They also decided (apparently) that menus are overrated, so the standard office suite doesn't have menus anymore... yeah you heard that right. Everything is now reorganized on a new fat toolbar with tabs on it so that you can switch between toolbars. Microsoft calls it "the ribbon", I call it "thumbing your nose at everybody who already learned how to use your shitty applications". Vista does not come with a "classic mode" option like XP did... they really expect you to relearn where everything is. I refuse to subject my 68-year-old mother to this nonsense. So I backed up Dad's files, packed up his computer and all his peripherals and disks, brought it to a computer shop and told them to wipe it, and then install XP home edition and Office 2000, and get all the drivers to make sure the peripherals work. In the end, my Mom will be happier for it. And having a chance to check out Vista I am now quite certain that I won't be upgrading to it.
Had a little birthday party for Pat at home last week, a little cake and song, and a couple gifts (taking our economic situation into consideration of course). Pat got the movie "Eragon" which was -eh-. It's basically Star Wars... AGAIN, and progresses far too quickly. I kept saying "these guys forgot the montages" while watching it. But the dragon was pretty, and it was still fun to watch.
Oh, and I am saddened to report that Kurt Vonnegut passed away. Thanks for the stories Kurt, we'll miss you.

Guess that's about it. Gotta get to work! See ya later.

Swimming in Raw Sueage

Abacquer — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 09:05:46 -0400

Viacom Sues Google

You probably know that the media giant Viacom recently sued the internet giant Google over Viacom content which appears on YouTube. People who watch big companies like these have been saying that as soon as YouTube got purchased, the lawsuits would come. Mostly because YouTube didn't have a lot of money, so suing them for damages wouldn't net much.

Now that YouTube is owned by Google, there's money to be had, and so now a company isn't limited to seeking injunctions so their content can't be shown on YouTube, now they can seek damages--quite a bit of damages actually. Viacom claims Google owes it 1 billion dollars, which is pretty hefty.

Google for its part has been trying to negotiate with Viacom, to work out some sort of deal where Viacom content can be shown on YouTube. The lawsuit may just be another way that Viacom is choosing to negotiate, so it may never actually go to court.

Viacom seems less interested in allowing YouTube to show Viacom content, and more interested in having all of its content taken off YouTube. The sticking point, from what I've heard, has been the filtering of any future Viacom content from YouTube. In order to prevent any more Colbert or South Park or whatever from appearing on YouTube, people would need to actively view every posted video and delete content owned by Viacom (which is a pretty wide variety of stuff).

Google has basically said "when you want something taken down, just send us a list and we'll take it down." But that isn't good enough for Viacom, and they want Google to actively filter the material. To which Google has indicated for that kind of service they would need some sort of compensation. Of course Viacom is not going to pay Google to take down content which belongs to Viacom in the first place!

The complexity of such filtering, while perhaps not immediately appreciated by Viacom, is certainly appreciated now. MoveOn.org and a number of other groups have sued Viacom for asking Google to remove videos which were not Viacom content, but parodies of Viacom content and therefore protected under fair use. You see, it's not as simple as searching for "Colbert" and printing a list. Duh.

All that aside, I think Viacom has a good case against Google. The content really does belong to Viacom, and it is copyrighted. The "we can't control what our users do" argument didn't work for Napster and I wouldn't expect it to work here, even though the content here is partial clips instead of entire songs. The hope therefore is that Viacom will instead work out a deal with Google so that the case doesn't go to court.

In many ways it is good for a company to have clips of it's content appear on YouTube. For example, I was never a big Family Guy watcher. But after laughing my ass off to some clips on YouTube, I went out and bought the first season of Family Guy on DVD, and now I own seasons 1-4 on DVD. The YouTube clips made the owners of Family Guy some money in my case. It's really a form of free advertising, and some companies have embraced that.

Ultimately if the case goes to court, I expect Viacom will win, and YouTube will have to change dramatically. I hope that doesn't happen.

Carol Burnett Sues "Family Guy" Creators

In one of the recent seasons of family guy there is an 18-second clip featuring Carol Burnett's famous cleaning-lady character mopping up the floor of a pornography shop. Ms. Burnett has responded to this parody of her character by suing the creators of Family Guy for copyright infringement, and is seeking 2 million dollars in damages.

When I was a kid, I loved the Carol Burnett show. I watched it all the time (even in reruns) with my family and laughed myself silly. What I find odd is that many times the show included parodies of movies, TV shows, or novels. So clearly, Ms. Burnett understands the use of parody, particularly in comedy. One would think that to see her trademark character remembered after all these years would be flattering.

Guess not.

There's no way she is going to win. It's obviously parody and is protected. I can't see how she would not know this and so I'm assuming she just needs the money and is hoping for some sort of settlement. It's depressing really, because I've always liked Carol Burnett.

A Few Random Items

Abacquer — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:35:41 -0400

Continuing in the vein of yesterday's post, I have a few more random thoughts to share...

Survivorman
Perhaps you've never seen this show, it's on The Science Channel (not to be confused with Discovery Channel or The Learning Channel). I really enjoy it. The premise is simple. In each episode they take Les Stroud and dump him in the middle of nowhere with meagre supplies and about 50 pounds of camera equipment. His only mission is to survive for seven days before the crew returns to pick him up. He's not allowed to break down the camera equipment and use it for survival, and he does all the filming himself. I can only imagine what an incredible amount of effort is involved in shooting himself walking past the camera or trudging off into the distance, only to have to return and get the camera. This show strikes me as one James would enjoy. I've seen this poor guy dumped in the arctic tundra, the swamps of Georgia, some desert out west somewhere, even one episode where he had to survive in a life raft at sea for seven days. You can order season 1 of the show on DVD if you are interested. I discovered this show during my many days of bedrest over the last month or so.

North and West of the City...
I'm sick of this phrase. I hear it all the time during weather reports, as in "2 to 5 inches of snow are expected in the Boston area, while areas North and West of the city could receive as much as a foot." It's snowing today. Unlike those in and south of the city, there's no rain following the storm here... it's just piling up. Day before St. Patrick's day and the snow is just dumping down. *sigh*

Cosmos and Carl
I miss Carl Sagan, and I loved Cosmos when I was a kid. One of my best memories of childhood is sitting in the living room with my Dad watching Carl explain history, other dimensions, outer space, the doppler effect, and various other intriguing things. Pat and I both talked recently of trying to find the Cosmos series on DVD to watch with Lynnea (though it might be too slow paced for her.) Amazon has it, if you are interested. One of my favorite segments of that series was when Carl explained what it would be like for two dimensional creatures to encounter a three dimensional one, as a way of explaining what a fourth dimension might be like, as a mechanism for explaining the concept of a curved universe as it relates to the big bang. The two dimensional creatures were called "flatlanders" because they lived (appropriately enough) in Flatland. I finally found that segment on YouTube, but it is included in a larger 10 minute video. You can watch it here, the part about Flatland starts about 3 minutes in, after a discussion of Hubble's discovery that the universe was expanding. In the next segment, Carl ties in the curved universe and questions about the existence of God. It's slow paced but wonderfully done. I really should pick that series up and watch it again as an adult--I've no doubt I'd learn more this time.

Destroying a Career
As you probably know, Valerie Plame testified today before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and finally had a chance to speak out on her cover being blown by an administration with hopelessly misplaced priorities. One of the saddest things about this, as far as I can see, is that her CIA career as a covert agent is basically over at this point. That's got to be infuriating for her. I can't imagine what that must be like. From her testimony today:

..."My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department. [...] I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained." [...] Under questioning, Plame recounted feeling "like I had been hit in the gut" on the July 2003 morning when she saw a newspaper story by syndicated columnist Robert Novak identifying her...

Pace and the Unbagged Cat
Smooth one General, really smooth. For those of you who haven't heard, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, stepped in it on Tuesday by saying he supported the Pentagon's ban on gays serving openly in the military because homosexual acts are "immoral". Way to go, dickhead. There are thousands upon thousands of gay people serving in our great nation's military right now, many of them putting themselves in harm's way. Thanks for telling them that they're a bunch of immoral perverts. General Pace, for his part, has refused to apologize for the remarks, and has only gone as far as to say that he regrets making them. I'll bet he does, but only because it is inconvenient for him now that the cat is out of the bag. As far as offending the gay troops who've been valiantly serving over the last four years of this misguided war? It's clear what Pace thinks of them. I never understood the ban on gays in the military, and I understood don't-ask-don't-tell even less, except that it allows good soldiers to serve a country that needs them, regardless of their sexual orientation. And the same people that screeched in 1993 that we couldn't let gays in are screeching today that we can't let gays serve openly, for the same stupid reasons--because it would cause a breakdown in unit cohesion on the battlefield. What a bunch of bullshit. I'm sorry but a guy brave enough to crawl across a battlefield under fire while trying to avoid landmines isn't going to be worrying if the guy behind him is checking out his ass. Give me a goddamned break, PLEASE. Here's a thought, I won't ask then next time something as stupid as that enters your mind, and you don't tell, okay? (As a sad but not unexpected sidenote, conservatives are leaping to the General's defense.)

Too Much To Talk About

Abacquer — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:36:39 -0400

I'm sorry I haven't been able to blog in awhile... there's just been so much going on my life. I've got a lot of things I'd like to talk about, but any one of them would be a full blog article I don't have time to write. So here's the "Cliff Notes"...

My Health
I visited the doctor about 2 weeks ago. My TB test came back negative, as expected. I woke up with the area around the injection on my arm completely flat and showing no reaction other than a slight redness. I could tell it was a negative result, but still I had to get to the doctor and have a nurse stare at my arm for two seconds and say "yep, negative." Did I mention it was snowing? A lot? The doc informed me that the plan at that point was to let the antibiotics run out, and then monitor myself very carefully, watching for fevers. I was to take it easy and not exert myself once off the antibiotics. I took my last pill the day my Dad had his aneurism. So I was getting almost no sleep, no regular intake of food, a high amount of exertion and stress, exactly at the time we were hoping my body would be able to cope with the remaining infection. By March 7th I was having fevers and my doctor extended the antibiotic. By March 8th the fevers had reached 102, and I was having painful chills in the night. On March 9th the fevers subsided and I haven't had any since. I had another visit with the doc today and she began to speak very frankly about having a surgeon go in and "break up" the scar tissue, or using a needle to drain out the infected area so it could heal. I spoke very frankly about how disturbing those prospects were to me, and if sixty days of antibiotics would solve the problem, I'd rather go that route. For now, we are on a middle ground. The doc has given me a script for 10 more days of the antibiotic, but I am to repeat the "wait and see" experiment when the current batch runs out (Sunday). If the fevers return I can start the next script. Next week I will have another CAT Scan, and then based on the results we will make a decision. The doctor said I could come in and speak with the pulmonologist at that time if I liked. At this point I'm beginning to feel resigned that a surgical solution is going to be necessary.

Mr. Deity
If you haven't seen the "Mr. Deity" videos yet, check them out, they are hilarious. A warning to my theist readers, these movies are created by humanists, and are therefore pretty irreverent. Don't check them out if that is going to bug you.

RSS & YouTube
Why doesn't YouTube support RSS in any obvious fashion that I can detect? Why do I have to go to my subscription page on YouTube to see what is new. If they are tracking what is new, then they have the information necessary to provide an RSS feed. Bloglines tries to "fake it" for you, building an RSS feed out of a YouTube search, but that doesn't work well. Partly because old videos keep popping up on it, and because jerks post movies on YouTube with the usernames of popular YouTubers in their keywords simply to bring in viewers. The only YouTubers I subscribe to are ImpyTheRap (i.e. Nobody's Watching) and SuttSteve. Yet my Bloglines is constantly telling me they have new videos when they don't, simply because the RSS feed is built from a keyword search, and some people are not capable of getting viewers on their own talent. Does anyone have a good way to get a YouTube subscription as an RSS feed? It's really bugging me. I had to discontinue my YouTube "feeds" in Bloglines because it was a waste of time.

Texas and the HPV Vaccine
The Republican Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has mandated that all girls entering the sixth grade in Texas schools must receive the HPV vaccine Gardasil, produced by Merck. HPV, or Human papillomavirus, is a virus that can be carried by both men and women, but some strains of which are shown to cause cervical cancer in some women. It is primarily transmitted sexually, but can be contracted in other ways (skin on skin contact, or being born from an infected mother). Under Perry's plan, parents could choose to refuse the vaccine for their child, but it is not clear if the child would then be allowed to enter the public school system (any more than they would be allowed to refuse, say, Mumps and Rubella vaccines and still put their kids in school.) The Texas legislature voted 118-23 to basically overturn this order. The primary complaints were that (a) there are questionable connections between Perry and Merck, (b) parents should have the right to choose whether their daughters will be vaccinated, (c) the drug is new and needs to be further tested, and (d) Perry circumvented the legislative process. On (a) and (d) I can't really comment, on (c)... well the FDA has approved it, so it has to have undergone some testing at this point, and on (b) I'm just mystified. The mandate clearly has an opt-out clause... so what's the diff? The thing I can't shake is that the early complaints about the possibility of making this drug mandatory that came out of Fundie USA was that it would encourage young women to have sex. Which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. But I can't help feeling that because those who said it are realizing how stupid that sounds, we are now getting other excuses like a through d above. I find myself wondering if HPV was transmitted in a nonsexual manner, would there be any outcry at all?

These are the Same People Who Said...
Tell me you haven't heard this one before: confronted with the latest news from climate scientists about global warming, a politically motivated skeptic will claim "These are the same people who said the world was headed for another ice age back in the 1970's... why should we believe them now?" Like so much politically motivated rhetoric, there's little merit in it. Between the 40's and the 70's a cooling trend was noted in the data available at that time. Scientific journals noted that although such a trend could be the precursor of the cyclic ice ages that our planet goes through, there was not enough data or understanding of the climate to accurately predict when the next ice age would come. The popular press on the other hand (i.e. those journals which are not peer reviewed) took the story and made a sensation out of it. The scientific community never said another ice age was imminent, period. Needless to say I hate hearing this stupid argument, especially when it is delivered by people who unfortunately are accorded undue credibility... like Michael Crichton for instance. But if you want details refuting this particular bit of rhetoric, check "The Global Cooling Myth" on Real Climate.

Guess that's all I have for now. Hope everyone else is well and happy...

Still Here...

Abacquer — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:58:20 -0500

This sucks. Man will I ever get better? I'm doing a little work from bed these days, but only a few hours a day. Nights are still the worst... coughing fits and so forth. At least twice now the coughing fits have been so severe they've led to puking fits... or whatever you call it... you cough hard a few times and then you ralph up a little lunch. And then you do it again. Cough-cough-cough-wretch. Cough-cough-cough-wretch. Loads of fun. Doc has recommended Mucinex DM for that, and it seems to be helping.

I stopped taking the Vicodin and the flavors of things seem to be coming back. Now I take Tylenol when I start feeling discomfort.

Here's a snapshot of my little world.

Daytime television is awful. There's very little worth watching and on some channels they have perhaps 10 commercials (or less) which they will rotate through multiple times every hour. The Science Channel is one of the worst offenders. The first time I saw their ad for their upcoming show about an expedition to Borneo, I thought it looked interesting. Upon seeing this same damn commercial repeated 2000 times, I realized I have no interest in watching the Expedition to Borneo. Know why? Because all the way through it I will have to watch some other endlessly repeated commercial that will make me nuts. Eff that.

Oh and GEICO? All your commercials make me want to do is stomp that stupid lizard to death.

So I've mostly been rotating through the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Science Channel, and occasionally G4TV. Heavy use of the MUTE button on my TV remote to shut out the annoying commercials. I saw an interesting show about the Cassini orbiter, and another about gamma ray bursts. Most of it hasn't stayed with me.

G4TV... what the heck happened? Didn't this use to be the video game channel? What's all this other crap? The Jamie Kennedy Experiment? WTF has that got to do with hot games?

In its defence the best show I've seen this week was on G4TV and it wasn't about videogames. It was an English subtitled Japanese show called "Ninja Warrior" (in Japan the show is called "Sasuke"). Hundreds of contestants from around the world compete to be a "ninja warrior". How? By attempting to cross an extremely challenging obstacle course in four stages. The obstacles are nightmarish and I really felt for the contestants. The courses were so difficult, it was typical to have no winner at all.

G4TV ran about 8 episodes of Ninja Warrior back to back on Sunday. Apparently some time passed (like several months) between each new round of attempts on the course. During those intervals the courses would also change somewhat, obstacles would be added and removed, as if it wasn't challenging enough for some of these guys who were building their own copies of the courses and training at home. Oh did I mention that most of the stages had time limits?

On the last episode, the guy I had been rooting for (it really pulled me in) finally won, being only the second person to ever complete the course. It was pretty intense.

In some ways it reminded me of American Idol, because some of the people who showed up to compete were actors, or comedians, or beauty queens, or whatever--clearly untrained and only looking to get their few minutes on camera. One guy who showed up every time was a sculptor who built miniature models of the ninja warrior course. The models were exquisite and delicate. And their creator was also obviously delicate... he was clearly a very frail little man who had no chance of completing the course, and yet he would attempt to run it anyway, failing spectacularly at the very first obstacle every time and falling in the drink.

I enjoyed the show a lot. If you get a chance to catch it sometime, check it out.

Well I'm getting tired. Hope everyone out there is happy and healthier than I.

Have Game Designers Forgotten How?

Abacquer — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 09:59:20 -0500

Although it is very nice to have the XBOX 360, the current crop of games out for the system has me wondering if it is even worth it to purchase one. It's great to have hi-def output of course, and there's no doubt in my mind that it is a better system. But the dearth of good games for the platform is appalling. If I wanted a great piece of hardware with shockingly few good games, I'd have bought a Macintosh. The only conclusion I can come up with is that game designers are rushing to produce games for the 360 and therefore cutting corners. The sad outcome of all this is that I have a sleek new xbox 360, and I am just not using it that often at all.

I recently picked up 2 new games because a gamer friend at work who is typically on top of the game scene said they were "awesome". They are not "awesome", and I have previously noted how the word "awesome" has become meaningless in the world of video games. In that same article I also noted that typical video game ratings are gratuitously inflated on GameSpot. Remember, the GameSpot versus reality scale?

The two new games I tried were Dead Rising and Lost Planet. Lost Planet was better than Dead Rising, but not by much, and both games fall into the "too boring to finish" category. It is both sad and confusing to me that when I go online I find people on discussion fora raving about these games--people must actually be enjoying these boring experiences--and I wonder if game designers are trying to redefine the game experience to the point where folks have lowered expectations.

GameSpot	Me	Review
8.1	4.0	Lost Planet: Extreme Condition: Think 1980's. The reason I suggest that, is that the 1980's saw the introduction of the "big boss battle" to arcade games. This was done for one reason, and one reason only, to keep the kids pumping quarters into the machine for longer periods of time. If the game had no "bosses" you could become very good at it and go for long periods of time without having to dump in another quarter. Enter the boss, a huge opponent that fought like nothing else in the game, was much much harder to kill, and usually required a certain trick or technique to eliminate which would only be learned by dying over and over as the player attempted to figure out how to beat it, all the while dropping quarter after quarter into the game. The essential problem is that the "big boss battle" has become ingrained in the minds of game designers (and some players as well) as something you're "supposed to have". And even though nobody is putting quarters in a slot to play, some designers are still coming up with bosses as if that is what players want. To be fair, some players do enjoy that, but I am not one of them. It's not because I can't beat the bosses--I can and do all the time--it's simply that I have no interest in doing so. I want the game and the story to keep moving, and getting stuck on a giant creature that I have to fight for an hour as I figure out all the places to move and the magic spots where the creature has to be hit a zillion times for it to die is not my idea of fun. To me, that's a chore, a pain in the ass I have to get through to get on to the next level where I can explore and have fun again. Lost Planet might as well be called Boss Planet. The entire game is essentially one lame boss battle after another, which is too bad. The idea is interesting (humans fighting off alien insects on a frozen world where heat is a commodity), and the game has moments where it entertains (exploring caverns and fighting off hordes of insects), but in the end it focusses almost entirely on fighting the big boss, which bores the shit out of me. On one level I started playing, and it took all of a minute to get to the boss. I thought to myself, "already?" The boss was a giant worm that lived under the ice and it took copious amounts of ammunition to destroy it. Once it was slain I began to proceed across the ice field where I had fought it and another giant worm popped up. Just like the last one, except that I had very little ammo left and no weapons where handy. I died time and time again trying to defeat the second worm until I finally went online for a hint. Here was the hint: you only have to fight the first worm, the others you just run past. THIS was the trick the player was supposed to figure out? You are SUPPOSED to fight these creatures until you get so bored and frustrated you just say "fuck it" and run away from them? What sort of head-up-the-ass idea is that? In total there are something like 5 giant worms, but unlike the first one, the others you can just "run away from". When you get to the other side of the field you explore for about 30 seconds and then find a new boss to fight. A completely different (boring) battle where you fight this same enemy over and over until you figure it out, and then, the level is over. Are you kidding me? So you can sum up this level like so: 1 minute exploring, fighting hordes, a half hour fighting a giant worm and figuring out you have to run away from its brethren to move on, 30 more seconds exploring and fighting hordes, another 15 minutes figuring out how to defeat a chick in some battle armor. Essentially the whole level is just two big boss battles. This redefines boredom. It would be as entertaining if you had to walk, real-time, for 45 minutes across a barren ice plain to get to the end of the level. Your character depends on "Vital Suits" for much of the game. This is basically like power-armor or a battle mech from mech assault. A big walking robot you climb inside of and drive around. As you wander you can find ammo and upgrades for your suit, as well as thermal energy. But unfortunately, the game is pathetically episodic. After defeating the big boss, instead of being allowed to wander about and gather up scattered weapons, upgrades, and ammo, the level is just over. When the next level starts you may or may not have a vital suit, equipped with whatever the game chooses to give you. I played this game through about 60% of the way and became too bored to finish it. It didn't matter how hard the boss battles were. I didn't want to fight them, it was just too boring. I have to point out that Halo was one of the greatest games of all time and basically had no boss battles whatsoever. There were portions of the game where the hordes themselves were so efficient or prolific that you needed to learn new tactics to defeat them, but not because the creatures acquired special powers. As a result, what you had to learn was basically good battle tactics based on the lay of the land and what was available to you, not "where's the magic spot I have to shoot a million times to defeat this new giant creature I will never see again?"--i.e. what you learned had some applicable value later in the game. Further, it was largely open ended. A mission would not end until you chose to end it, and you could wander about forever and gather up goods. CAPCOM has been making boss battle games for years, and these guys seriously need to find a new idea.
8.4	3.0	Dead Rising: Also from CAPCOM, Dead Rising suffers from some of the same mistakes as Lost Planet, and some whole new ones. Here's a new idea, you are trapped in a shopping mall infested with the living dead. Wow, what a revolutionary idea... a veritable Dawn of the Dead setting with a Dawn of the Dead storyline where the zombies are just like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. The game actually includes a disclaimer that any similarity between it and Dawn of the Dead is purely coincidental... my ass. That said, once you get in the mall you will find killing the zombies interesting for about 5 minutes. After the 5 minutes, you might as well take the game out and put it away. It will never get any better. Every now and then you will come across a new way to kill the zombies, but since they are largely just lurching bags of skin and bones, it's not exactly challenging. The variety of ways in which to mutilate the animate corpses loses its novelty quickly. Further, the supply of zombies is limitless and they appear out of thin air. Clear out a section of hall, wander away, and then come back, and the zombies you defeated are gone and the hall is full of zombies again. In this way, the game suffers from the same problem that Destroy All Humans did... insanely repetitive gameplay. Note to game designers everywhere, I can't believe I have to tell you this but, mindless repetition is not entertaining, it's effing boring. Once the novelty wears off, the game simply devolves into a series of episodes, and in most cases these are "go find the live humans, and escort them to safety". The live humans are pathetically hopeless, and will basically stand around and let themselves be eaten, and often won't follow you when they should. And this is entertaining, how? Add to this an enforced time limit on missions and on the game (yes I'm not kidding) and it makes for yet another "chore posing as entertainment". I mean jesus, how do you make fighting for your life against an army of the undead boring? Hire CAPCOM, apparently. As if this weren't bad enough, you carry what amounts to a cellphone and you constantly receive phone calls on it from the mall's janitor, who tells you what missions are available. If you don't answer he will call incessantly. If you do answer you get a few seconds of reprieve before he starts calling again. Nothing like fighting a horde of zombies while your phone is ringing. CAPCOM being CAPCOM, this game also has its share of boss battles, but the bosses... are humans? They aren't zombies, they're just bad guys, and they are ridiculous. I fought one guy who was not wearing any sort of body armor and was not one of the undead. The fight took like 20 minutes and I put dozens of bullets into his abdomen with a pistol. And then he escaped by running away and climbing a rope. WTF? Beyond the issues of boring or poorly thought out gameplay, this game has severe technical flaws which detract from the enjoyment even more. Saving is thankfully, not checkpoint-based, but is area-based, which is even worse. You have to be in a specific location to save--a bathroom. And the bathrooms are not easy to find in the mall (just like in real life). As a result you have to wander, sometimes for several minutes or more, fighting zombies all the way, when you need to save and quit. That's just fucking stupid. Instead of making the save points be clearly marked locations right in the main hallways, they are tucked away and hard to find. Stupid beyond stupid. And here is the stupidest thing of all. You can't play this game without a high definition television. Note that it doesn't say this ANYWHERE on the game packaging or materials. In order to know what you are doing you have to be able to read text which appears in such a small font it is essentially a blurry smudge on anything but a high definition TV. You therefore cannot follow instructions, complete missions, or receive other important game information. It is insanely stupid beyond belief in that there is a ton of room onscreen, and this problem could be easily solved simply by making the text bigger. The first time I played the game I was using my upstairs TV which is not high-def and it was hopeless--I could not read the mission instructions. Later, after getting my HDTV repaired, I tried the game again and was able to read the instructions finally, but this did not make the game any more fun to play. So there you have it, the germ of a good idea ruined by game designers who frankly, should get out of the entertainment industry.

GameSpot

Review

8.1

4.0

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition:

Think 1980's. The reason I suggest that, is that the 1980's saw the introduction of the "big boss battle" to arcade games. This was done for one reason, and one reason only, to keep the kids pumping quarters into the machine for longer periods of time. If the game had no "bosses" you could become very good at it and go for long periods of time without having to dump in another quarter.

Enter the boss, a huge opponent that fought like nothing else in the game, was much much harder to kill, and usually required a certain trick or technique to eliminate which would only be learned by dying over and over as the player attempted to figure out how to beat it, all the while dropping quarter after quarter into the game.

The essential problem is that the "big boss battle" has become ingrained in the minds of game designers (and some players as well) as something you're "supposed to have". And even though nobody is putting quarters in a slot to play, some designers are still coming up with bosses as if that is what players want. To be fair, some players do enjoy that, but I am not one of them. It's not because I can't beat the bosses--I can and do all the time--it's simply that I have no interest in doing so. I want the game and the story to keep moving, and getting stuck on a giant creature that I have to fight for an hour as I figure out all the places to move and the magic spots where the creature has to be hit a zillion times for it to die is not my idea of fun. To me, that's a chore, a pain in the ass I have to get through to get on to the next level where I can explore and have fun again.

Lost Planet might as well be called Boss Planet. The entire game is essentially one lame boss battle after another, which is too bad. The idea is interesting (humans fighting off alien insects on a frozen world where heat is a commodity), and the game has moments where it entertains (exploring caverns and fighting off hordes of insects), but in the end it focusses almost entirely on fighting the big boss, which bores the shit out of me.

On one level I started playing, and it took all of a minute to get to the boss. I thought to myself, "already?" The boss was a giant worm that lived under the ice and it took copious amounts of ammunition to destroy it. Once it was slain I began to proceed across the ice field where I had fought it and another giant worm popped up. Just like the last one, except that I had very little ammo left and no weapons where handy. I died time and time again trying to defeat the second worm until I finally went online for a hint. Here was the hint: you only have to fight the first worm, the others you just run past.

THIS was the trick the player was supposed to figure out? You are SUPPOSED to fight these creatures until you get so bored and frustrated you just say "fuck it" and run away from them? What sort of head-up-the-ass idea is that? In total there are something like 5 giant worms, but unlike the first one, the others you can just "run away from". When you get to the other side of the field you explore for about 30 seconds and then find a new boss to fight. A completely different (boring) battle where you fight this same enemy over and over until you figure it out, and then, the level is over. Are you kidding me? So you can sum up this level like so:

1 minute exploring, fighting hordes, a half hour fighting a giant worm and figuring out you have to run away from its brethren to move on, 30 more seconds exploring and fighting hordes, another 15 minutes figuring out how to defeat a chick in some battle armor. Essentially the whole level is just two big boss battles. This redefines boredom. It would be as entertaining if you had to walk, real-time, for 45 minutes across a barren ice plain to get to the end of the level.

Your character depends on "Vital Suits" for much of the game. This is basically like power-armor or a battle mech from mech assault. A big walking robot you climb inside of and drive around. As you wander you can find ammo and upgrades for your suit, as well as thermal energy. But unfortunately, the game is pathetically episodic. After defeating the big boss, instead of being allowed to wander about and gather up scattered weapons, upgrades, and ammo, the level is just over. When the next level starts you may or may not have a vital suit, equipped with whatever the game chooses to give you.

I played this game through about 60% of the way and became too bored to finish it. It didn't matter how hard the boss battles were. I didn't want to fight them, it was just too boring.

I have to point out that Halo was one of the greatest games of all time and basically had no boss battles whatsoever. There were portions of the game where the hordes themselves were so efficient or prolific that you needed to learn new tactics to defeat them, but not because the creatures acquired special powers. As a result, what you had to learn was basically good battle tactics based on the lay of the land and what was available to you, not "where's the magic spot I have to shoot a million times to defeat this new giant creature I will never see again?"--i.e. what you learned had some applicable value later in the game. Further, it was largely open ended. A mission would not end until you chose to end it, and you could wander about forever and gather up goods.

CAPCOM has been making boss battle games for years, and these guys seriously need to find a new idea.

8.4

3.0

Dead Rising:

Also from CAPCOM, Dead Rising suffers from some of the same mistakes as Lost Planet, and some whole new ones. Here's a new idea, you are trapped in a shopping mall infested with the living dead. Wow, what a revolutionary idea... a veritable Dawn of the Dead setting with a Dawn of the Dead storyline where the zombies are just like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. The game actually includes a disclaimer that any similarity between it and Dawn of the Dead is purely coincidental... my ass.

That said, once you get in the mall you will find killing the zombies interesting for about 5 minutes. After the 5 minutes, you might as well take the game out and put it away. It will never get any better. Every now and then you will come across a new way to kill the zombies, but since they are largely just lurching bags of skin and bones, it's not exactly challenging. The variety of ways in which to mutilate the animate corpses loses its novelty quickly. Further, the supply of zombies is limitless and they appear out of thin air. Clear out a section of hall, wander away, and then come back, and the zombies you defeated are gone and the hall is full of zombies again. In this way, the game suffers from the same problem that Destroy All Humans did... insanely repetitive gameplay. Note to game designers everywhere, I can't believe I have to tell you this but, mindless repetition is not entertaining, it's effing boring.

Once the novelty wears off, the game simply devolves into a series of episodes, and in most cases these are "go find the live humans, and escort them to safety". The live humans are pathetically hopeless, and will basically stand around and let themselves be eaten, and often won't follow you when they should. And this is entertaining, how? Add to this an enforced time limit on missions and on the game (yes I'm not kidding) and it makes for yet another "chore posing as entertainment". I mean jesus, how do you make fighting for your life against an army of the undead boring? Hire CAPCOM, apparently.

As if this weren't bad enough, you carry what amounts to a cellphone and you constantly receive phone calls on it from the mall's janitor, who tells you what missions are available. If you don't answer he will call incessantly. If you do answer you get a few seconds of reprieve before he starts calling again. Nothing like fighting a horde of zombies while your phone is ringing.

CAPCOM being CAPCOM, this game also has its share of boss battles, but the bosses... are humans? They aren't zombies, they're just bad guys, and they are ridiculous. I fought one guy who was not wearing any sort of body armor and was not one of the undead. The fight took like 20 minutes and I put dozens of bullets into his abdomen with a pistol. And then he escaped by running away and climbing a rope. WTF?

Beyond the issues of boring or poorly thought out gameplay, this game has severe technical flaws which detract from the enjoyment even more. Saving is thankfully, not checkpoint-based, but is area-based, which is even worse. You have to be in a specific location to save--a bathroom. And the bathrooms are not easy to find in the mall (just like in real life). As a result you have to wander, sometimes for several minutes or more, fighting zombies all the way, when you need to save and quit. That's just fucking stupid. Instead of making the save points be clearly marked locations right in the main hallways, they are tucked away and hard to find. Stupid beyond stupid.

And here is the stupidest thing of all. You can't play this game without a high definition television. Note that it doesn't say this ANYWHERE on the game packaging or materials. In order to know what you are doing you have to be able to read text which appears in such a small font it is essentially a blurry smudge on anything but a high definition TV. You therefore cannot follow instructions, complete missions, or receive other important game information. It is insanely stupid beyond belief in that there is a ton of room onscreen, and this problem could be easily solved simply by making the text bigger. The first time I played the game I was using my upstairs TV which is not high-def and it was hopeless--I could not read the mission instructions. Later, after getting my HDTV repaired, I tried the game again and was able to read the instructions finally, but this did not make the game any more fun to play.

So there you have it, the germ of a good idea ruined by game designers who frankly, should get out of the entertainment industry.

So those are the new games which I'm not playing anymore. Boss Planet and Ass Rising. And I am ever so done with CAPCOM.

The Hounddog Hullabaloo

Abacquer — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 10:14:18 -0500

Wow. You've probably heard about this since it is all over the internet, but people are just going nuts about the movie "Hounddog" which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. I've heard both good and bad reviews about the quality of the picture itself, but there is an explosion of outrage over the fact that the film portrays the child-star, Dakota Fanning, being raped.

On multiple occasions financial backers have pulled out of the production, and the film has no buyer presently. What it does have is hordes of people calling for the head's of the director Deborah Kampmeier, Fanning's agent Cindy Osbrook, and her mother Joy. There's even online petition demanding their arrest and some are going further than that, as this excerpt from a CNN article notes:

...Even before the first screening of "Hounddog" at the Sundance Film Festival this week, a Christian film critic, citing Fanning's age, decried the movie as child abuse, and Roman Catholic activist Bill Donohue called for a federal investigation...

...Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission and publisher of the Web site movieguide.org, claims "Hounddog" breaks federal child-pornography law. He said the law covers material that "appears" to show minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

"Even if they're not actually performing the explicit act, we are dealing with a legal issue here," he said.

Baehr said Fanning is being exploited in the film, and that it should be considered an outrage.

"Children at 12 do not have the ability to make the types of decisions that we're talking about here," he said. "If we're offended by some comedian's racial slur, why aren't we offended by somebody taking advantage of a 12-year-old child?"

Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said he has asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether anti-pornography laws have been broken...

It's not hard to understand why people would be upset by a film showing a 12 year old girl being raped, even if it isn't real. It's an upsetting concept. That it happens in the real world is tragic and brutal and awful. If it did not happen in the real world, a film like this would likely never have been made.

And there is the fear (which Bill Donahue mentioned in an interview) that sick perverts will see the film and be inspired to act out their twisted fantasies.

Count bastion of Bill-O'Reilly-Wannabeism Sean Hannity among the offended, who interviewed a conservative child advocate who had seen the film, and was sadly shocked when she informed him that the various claims about the rape scene were not factual.

As for what I think about Hounddog? Well, I don't like the idea, and I have no desire to see the film. I don't think I could watch that. Especially since Dakota Fanning is such an amazing actress, doubtless she would be able to convince me that it was really happening and I don't think I could bear it.

But then, not having seen the film, I'm not about to make a snap judgement as many others seem prepared to do. If you haven't seen the film, then you really can't comment on whether or not Dakota was in some way injured during the production.

As far as what I have heard from people who have actually seen the film, the scene is disturbing but tastefully done (inasmuch as it is possible to do so). There's no nudity or skin-on-skin contact. Basically the rape is implied by carefully editting together various disparate clips shot at different times. You see Dakota shout "No!", you see a man unzip his fly, you see a hand hit a wooden floor, etc. Each individual component is shot separately, nobody is unzipping their pants in front of Dakota, nobody is touching her inappropriately. The rape takes place in the mind of the viewer.

Add to this the fact that Dakota's mother and a child welfare worker were present on set during the shooting of this scene, and that really ought to allay fears, but apparently it does not.

It is disturbing to me that this level of outcry doesn't surface over movies where children are enduring violence, or abject suffering of any other sort. Only when the subject matter is sex do folks go nuts.

I would hope that the primary reason one would be offended is if one thought Dakota was being exploited, or worse yet emotionally injured by performing in this production. All other concerns really ought to be secondary. But from the criticisms I'm hearing, it sounds more like people using Dakota's fame to add oomph to their particular platforms while using inflammatory terms like 'kiddie porn' to describe the film. I find that disturbing for sure. That is also exploitation.

Although Fanning says she has no career plan in mind other than to keep acting, I have to assume she is trying to break out of kid roles and break into more mature roles. She will be 13 in February, and can't realistically do "Charlotte's Web" and "Cat in the Hat" films forever. This is a trail blazed by many actresses before her who transitioned into adult roles by portraying an abused youngster, Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, Jena Malone in Bastard Out of Carolina, Dominique Swain in Lolita (1997), Linda Blair in Born Innocent, etc.

These break-out roles are very common. The last big one to make the news was probably the announcement that Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame will be appearing nude onstage in a production of Equus, a story about a young man who is carnally obsessed with horses. Granted, Radcliffe is 17, but the motivation is probably the same.

Some might wonder why such a film has to be made at all, even if Fanning is in no way harmed during filming. Personally, since I will never see it because of the subject matter, I can understand that sentiment as well. This is the second movie this director has made about a young girl who is raped, and I suspect it's because she wants to raise awareness of child abuse. From a Reuter's article:

..."Hounddog" is based on director Deborah Kampmeier's personal history, and she called the criticism of Fanning's decision to take the role an insult to the young actress.

"She should be applauded [for] the voice she has given to so many silenced women," Kampmeier said...

Okay, I'll applaud her, but I still don't like it. But then, I guess I'm not supposed to. I'll close with various quotes from the precocious Dakota Fanning herself who is angry about the criticism that has erupted over Hounddog.

From Fanning tells "Hounddog" critics she is mad (Reuters):
..."When it gets to the point of attacking my mother, my agent ... my teacher, who were all on the set that day, that started to make me mad," [...] "I can let other things go, but when people start to talk about my mother, like, that's really bad in my opinion ... that's an attack, and that's not fair. They hadn't seen the movie,"...

..."I loved the Elvis Presley story line. I loved the fact she's born of hard circumstances and is trying to survive those," Fanning said. "I like so many things about it that had nothing to do with being abused, or sexually abused."...

..."I'm going to be a freshman in high school in September, and I think it would be irresponsible of my parents not to let me know of things that happen and to try not to get yourself in uncomfortable situations," [...] "It's educational."...

From Online Petition Demands Arrest of Dakota Fanning's Mother and Agent (Cinematical.com):
..."You have to prepare your children for things that happen in the world. Everything isn't rosy."...

From Dakota Fanning: 'It's called acting' (CNN):
..."It's not a rape movie," [...] "That's not even the point of the film."...

..."It's not really happening," [...] "It's a movie, and it's called acting. I'm not going through anything. Cody and Isabelle aren't going through anything, their characters are." [...] "And for me, when it's done it's done," [...] "I don't even think about it anymore."...

What do you think?