Author: Jason

Remembering GeoCities

Random Thoughts

If you haven’t heard, GeoCities is being shut down by Yahoo.  Back in 1998, after a short period of putting updates in a finger file on my mIRC client, I decided to build my own web page.  GeoCities was the leader in free web space, so I signed up with them.  I honestly cannot remember the account name I used or the URL I had.  But I remember the page, and somewhere on a CD I burned a few years back I still have some of the graphics I used, though I’m not 100% sure I could find that CD.

The thing I remember most about GeoCities was in trying to comply with their advertising requirements without making my page design look like garbage.  They had various schemes of watermarking and drop downs and popups and floating toolbars and other things, and each of those could be avoided by putting certain branding on your pages.  If you threw a GeoCities graphic on the page some stuff would go away, if you included links more stuff went away, and if you voluntarily put a static version of their ad panel on a page on your site then most of the rest of it would go away… at least until they changed the rules and the hidden branding you put on your site failed to comply and the annoying elements returned.  But then again, GeoCities wasn’t meant for real professional design, at least not for free.

Ultimately, the branding and the ads and the bandwidth limits drove me off to find my own space on the net, a trail of providers and domains that would eventually lead me here.  As much as I disliked working with GeoCities, if there had not been a GeoCities its possible I might have never started a web page, and I’ve enjoyed the last nearly eleven years of posting junk to the Internet.

So, farewell GeoCities, I may have hated you, but I wouldn’t be who I am today without you.  Thanks.

Movie Round-Up: April 24th, 2009

Reviews

Fighting:

This is the only movie opening this week that I have seen, and I wish I hadn’t.  I’d seen the trailer and I was actually interested in seeing this one, but it just didn’t live up.  Every actor in this film, without exception, has given better performances.  With the exception of one scene this movie lacked emotion, and never made me care about any of the characters.  Largely this is because they did so little to make me want to care.  Why is this kid from Alabama in New York? Don’t worry, they don’t tell you.  Why is there animosity between the street hustlers?  Don’t worry, they don’t tell you.  Most of the movie just feels random and messy and filled with bad dialogue.  The fight scenes are fairly well done those, so kudos to the fight choreographer, but just not worth the money to see in the theater.

Obsessed:

In my opinion, Beyonce is a horrible actress.  She makes every movie she is in worse by simply being in it.  The wife and I have been having fun trying to guess what the twist in this film is going to be.  I will, however, wait until I can watch it for free or something.  I will not encourage Beyonce to continue acting.

The Soloist:

I think Robert Downey Jr. is a great actor.  I’ve never been very interested in Jamie Foxx.  So I’m torn.  Being a drama though, and one that might likely make me shed man-tears (the rarest and sweetest kind), I just don’t have much desire to see this on the big screen.  But it will definitely make it into the rental queue on Netflix.

Good News, Bad News

Writing

The good news is that I am writing.  The bad news is that most of it isn’t for Script Frenzy.

See, I had this idea.  I was going to take a graphic novel and write a screenplay out of it.  Its actually coming along quite well, but a lot more slowly than I had hoped.  Ultimately, since the graphic novel is from the early 80’s there is actually very little dialogue that I can steal directly from the text.  Did people actually talk like that?  Did people actually think street thugs and criminals talked like that?  Wow…  Anyway, there are also plot elements I can’t use, either because they don’t make sense, or because they can’t be made to make sense in 120 pages or less, or… well…

Oh hell, its not like I need to be secretive… the graphic novel I am working on taking to screenplay is The Punisher: Circle of Blood.  In my opinion, taking the Punisher to screen should be done in three parts: An origin story, then Circle of Blood, and then Suicide Run.  The reasons for this are simple.  The origin story, or at least one set near the beginning of his career sets up the character and puts him on the road of killing bad guys.  Circle of Blood involves Frank dealing with the consequences of his actions.  Suicide Run puts Frank in a place where he has to seriously consider whether he’s actually helping anymore.

The 1989 Dolph Lundgren film was a travesty.  The 2004 Thomas Jane film actually told the origin well, but it changed the origin a lot and the villain was lame.  The 2008 Ray Stevenson film actually got Frank as close to right as I think they could, but then they ruined the film with a terrible misuse of Jigsaw, horrible accents and dumb ultra-violence.  However, when it came to approaching my take on Circle of Blood, I didn’t want to be stuck with the legacy of these films, and yet I also didn’t want to ignore them.  The first scene in my script doesn’t exist in the book.  My version opens in a courtroom where the DA is laying out his closing arguments against Frank Castle, the Punisher.  Its important because this DA’s monologue touches on the idea that legend and rumor are a factor, and it is the job of police detectives to sift through that to the truth.  This opens the door to allowing the audience to feel like maybe they haven’t seen 100% of the truth so far.  That maybe the other three films were just versions of the truth, stories told and retold, much of the details being filled in by the tellers since real witnesses are few and far between.  It even opens the film up to allow a fourth actor into the role of Frank if that is something that has to happen.

The next major hurdle for me was in trying to decide if I needed Jigsaw.  Circle of Blood makes use of that character, but the makers of the 2008 film saw fit to kill him off.  So now I am managing two versions of the script going forward.  One is Circle of Blood without Jigsaw, which just seems a little off, and the other is Circle of Blood with Jigsaw’s introductory scene including a jab at the previous film as Frank says, “I thought you were dead” and Jigsaw replies (without a lame cartoony New York accent), “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” alluding back to the courthouse scene as well as setting Jigsaw up to be more than the semi-brainless thug of the 2008 movie by actually having him quote Mark Twain.  I really like the second version, but I’m not sure other people will be so ready to buy it.

The last hurdle is in taking some of the extraordinarily fantastic action of the comic and trying to ground it more firmly in reality without losing the spectacle of it.

All of this, as I said, has been tougher than I first imagined, mostly because it had been years since I’d actually read Circle of Blood and I didn’t realize how much of it I wasn’t going to be able to just take from the page.  Due to this, I’ve found myself wandering off and writing other things while I ponder decisions.  I’m afraid I won’t make 100 pages by the end of the month, but this has been a good experience none the less, and I plan to try to finish this screenplay even if I miss the deadline.

Movie Round-Up: April 17th, 2009

Reviews

17 Again:

Look, it is, fundamentally, a body switching movie.  If you have ever seen a movie where a person gets to be younger or older or swap bodies with a friend, an enemy or a parent, then you have seen this film.  But the reason Hollywood keeps on making this film is that it can be told in so many ways with so many angles.  The body switching story is always, fundamentally, about self discovery.  The main character or characters are in this situation because they need to learn something about themselves.

Thomas Lennon makes this film.  Sure, Zac Efron is going to be the huge draw with all the tweens screaming and wetting themselves during his shirtless scene, but it is the character of Ned who steals every scene that he is in and is the main draw for the parents of those tweens.  Zac’s (and Matthew Perry’s) Mike is the popular jock kid, while Thomas’ Ned is the extreme caricature of the rest of us for whom High School were not the best years of their lives.

Anyway, the movie overall was fun, enjoyable, but predictable.  If you like body switching movies, you’ll like this one too.

Crank: High Voltage:

Did you see Crank?  Did you like Crank?  I can answer yes to both of those questions, and so I suspect I’ll like Crank 2 when I eventually see it.  But while I suspect the film will be a fun action filled ride, I’m comfortable waiting to see it when it hits DVD.

State of Play:

I want to see this film.  I got a free pass to see this film.  I also got a free pass to see 17 Again on the same night.  As you can see from my long review above, the wife and I saw 17 Again.  It is because I drag her to all those horror movies, I’m sure.  I definitely might have to see if I can scrounge up the dollars to go see this, if not at full price then at least at the matinee or early bird (shows before noon on a weekend) price.  If not, then I’ll be waiting eagerly for this one to get to DVD.  Hopefully no one spoils it for me before then.

Movie Round-Up: April 10th, 2009

Reviews

Let me begin by saying, I have seen none of these movies.  The one I cared about I didn’t get passes to any screenings of, and the other two, well, I hope you understand why I had no desire to see them.

Observe and Report:

This movie looks… odd.  If you could take Paul Blart: Mall Cop and then completely turn it in reverse you might get Observe and Report.  At least that’s how the previews look.  Its one of those films where I laugh at some of the antics in the trailer, but overall I’m not sure I’m going to enjoy the movie as a whole.  But, it does have potential.  I want to see it, but maybe not for full price.

Dragonball Evolution:

I’ve never been a Dragonball fan, and I doubt I ever will be.  I think this movie has the potential to be fun, and it might even do well at the theaters considering there are lots of Dragonball fans out there, but I’ll be waiting for this to be available to watch streaming through Netflix.  There is no rush for me to see this at all.

Hannah Montana The Movie:

No.

Fight me!

Gaming

Another in a long line of web pages diversion from productivity is My Brute.  You create a little gladiator, and then you send him to fight.  Three times a day, and you can enter tournaments.  And you control absolutely nothing.  You pick the opponent and that’s it, sit back and enjoy the carnage.

So, come, fight me and be my pupil, then take on other brutes in single combat.

Scenes from the Apocalypse

Writing

My process for writing is often that I think of a setting, a situation, and then I think about how it is going to end, then I start writing scenes, chunks of text that might be interesting from wherever I decide to start along the way to the end I have envisioned.  Many of these scenes don’t make the final cut, either because they don’t end up working in the overall story, or because the characters I needed for them to work ended up being somewhere else, or not surviving long enough to be in the scene.  For years I’ve been crafting scenes for an apocalyptic zombie story, some are better than others, some are really bad.  What follows is one scene that was dropped from the story because the two characters involved got split up before this could happen.  A version of this still exists, but it is completely different now, with different characters and a modified setting, although much of the dialogue remained the same.

Anyway… enjoy…

“Do you believe in God?”

Robert rolled his eyes.  For the first six days Martin had barely spoken at all, but now at just over a month since the world went to Hell he was getting more prone to long winded often philosophical diatribes.  Robert did not have an answer to the question, nor did he need one.  He only needed to wait for Martin to take up the conversation all on his own.

With the spoon of franks and beans held just inches from his mouth, Robert sat motionless waiting for Martin to continue.  He looked over the boy wearing jeans and flannel shirt whose hands lightly gripped the rifle.  Martin never turned to look at Robert, he had kept his eyes focused out the window.  They both smelled like rotted flesh.

Tired of waiting, Robert started eating the room temperature food again straight out of the can, occasionally pausing to wipe his mouth with his hand and then wipe his hand on his pants.  Every time he wiped his face he was reminded that he really wanted to shave.  And a shower, but they could not afford to be clean for the time being.

“I’m pretty sure I used to,” Martin said at last.  “No, I’m certain of it.  Went to church every Sunday with Mom growing up.”  His eyes darted this way and that, tracking each and every movement outside.  “I believed in God, and God believed in us.  Maybe that’s what this is, maybe God stopped believing in us.”

Martin shifted slightly in his crouch.  Gently he lowered the rifle to the ground and picked up the crossbow.  He pulled the crossbow up to his chest, made sure the bolt was sitting proper and started sighting something out the window.

Robert craned his neck to peer over Martin’s shoulder.  There was a man in overalls shuffling down the street.  The overalls looked frayed at the edges, and their denim blue was lost in a dark stain that covered nearly the whole of it.  His left foot never left the ground, dragging the gravel when it was its turn to move.  Both men caught their breaths and the sound of the shuffling man’s feet swallowed the world.  One crunching step followed by the scraping drag of the other, then the crunching step again.

The crossbow made a quiet twang and the bolt sailed with a whisper until it drove home with a thunk through the temple and into the brain.  The man in overalls slumped the ground in a heap next to three other corpses in the street, each with a crossbow bolt protruding from the head.

Martin drew back the string and nocked another bolt in the crossbow.  He placed it back on the floor, picked up his rifle again and settled back into his resting crouch position.  His eyes never left the view outside the window.

Robert rolled backwards and leaned against the wall.  “Getting slow out there.  Might be time to burn them and move on?”

“Maybe.”  Martin turned his deep blue eyes on Robert.  They were his mother’s eyes, clear and pure.  “Maybe this is God believing that we can overcome anything.  A test of faith.”

And with that Robert knew they were here another night, Martin was not listening again.  But they were out of beans, which meant they needed to go foraging for canned goods before dark.

Encouraged Grouping

Gaming

There was an article over on Massively, and then Cuppy wrote about it, and it got me to thinking, so I figured I’d chime in…

The first thing to deal with is that games, especially MMOs, are a business just like any other.  And like every business they are very trend driven.  If one company has success with something, expect other companies to follow it, because, in their thinking, that way lies success.  You see it in movies fairly clearly.  One superhero movie does well and suddenly the market is flooded with superhero movies.  If next year a gritty noir cop film were to rake in a $60 million opening weekend, you could expect to see a few more of them the year after.  Books are another place this is obvious.  How many young adult targeted books about child/teen heroes battling evil existed prior to the success of Harry Potter?  How many after?  Bookstores practically have entire aisles of them.

EQ encouraged grouping.  I like to say encouraged rather than forced because despite what some people will tell you every single class in EQ could solo… many of them were just horrible at it.  Grouping, then, felt forced because a bunch of people who couldn’t solo effectively could overcome that and gain much better advancement by grouping together.  Because grouping was so much better than solo for the majority of classes, people say it is “forced”.  Semantics.  In any event, it worked well for EQ.  Grouping, forced or encouraged, fostered communities.  Players built friends lists and joined guilds, they frequented the same zones to be with the same people, they followed those people to new zones.  Because of this, the games that came shortly after all tried to encourage grouping.  EQ was successful, and that way lies success.

WoW came along and said people didn’t need to group.  Every class can solo, and often times they solo more effectively than grouping (because solo you don’t have to worry about stupid people invading your group and messing you up).  And it was more successful.  So, that way now lies success.  Most of the games since, and most of the ones coming down the pipe all allow for rewarding solo play.  In fact, many of these games, through experience split and bonus structures, and loot sharing actually discourages grouping.  Why split exp and loot with random strangers when you can just solo the content and keep it all yourself?  Of course, they still do encourage some grouping, in instances for groups and raids, but the game leading up to the “end game” doesn’t need, and plays more efficiently without, grouping.

This too will change.

The problem I have with this is that MMOs are not quite like other businesses.  If Nike were to decide to change the way they make shoes and I didn’t like the new shoes, I could still find the old kind, through eBay or even through Nike as they are likely to rebrand the old shoes as “classics” and keep selling them until they become unprofitable.  But when it comes to MMOs, if the new trend moves away from your game model, you only have two options: 1) change your game to follow the new trend, or 2) accept that your game might diminish, plan for that, and begin building a new game.

As I touched on in my post about quests, with EQ they chose option 1.  After the launch of WoW (and some even before, the benefit of being a running game while another game runs an open beta and media blitz) they began implementing changes in their game to capitalize on the new buzz of new success.  At this point, EQ plays more like a WoW skin draped over an EQ bone structure with a bit of reconstructive surgery.  The old EQ is lost (unless you want to play the Mac version, which I would, if I didn’t need a Mac to do it), and that is the game I want to play.

I want a game with encouraged grouping throughout, with quests you have to discover, without maps built in to the game, but no one is developing that game anymore, and even the games that were that game aren’t that game anymore.  I am a niche that is not being serviced.  When people ask what MMOs I play, that is the answer I give them.

Choices That Matter

Gaming

Overall, even though I do like First Person Shooters, I’m not a big FPS guy.  Mostly this is because I’m not a savant at deathmatch, and so when I go online and hop in random games I lose significantly more than I win.  It’s okay to lose more than you win, as long as it doesn’t “feel” like you are losing.  If I get a kill for every 2 to 4 deaths, I feel fine.  When I’m only getting a kill for every 10 deaths, I don’t want to play anymore.

One of the things I don’t like so much about FPS games is that weapon choices are specifically just weapon choices.  Changing from one gun to another changes the damage, the field of fire, the rate of fire, reload rates, etc.

I’d love to see a game that took things a step further and tied other game elements into weapon choices.  The first thing I thought of was light.  Imagine a horror game like Dead Space, or Left 4 Dead, where if you are holding a pistol it allows you to hold a lantern in your off hand, giving you light in a 360 degree radius for 30 feet.  If you switch to the shotgun or machine gun, a two handed weapon, you can’t carry the lantern, but you have a flashlight attached to the barrel, allowing you to have light in a typical flashlight cone in a narrow arc, but it goes 100 feet.  In both cases you can always switch off the light, and use Nightvision goggles, giving you a green tinted low light in all directions, but would react to light sources badly (people could actually hide from you in a pool light much the way they would hide in a shadow from a player without nightvision, and a flashlight shined in your face would cause temporary blindness).  Throughout the course of the game, both solo or in multiplayer, choosing a weapon and a kind of light source could be made very important.

Maybe someone has already done this.  Are there any games out there where weapon choice is more than just a choice of weapon?