Author: Jason

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?

Advertising in Web 2.0

Random Thoughts

Web 2.0 is all about user generated content and collaboration.  From YouTube to Facebook, from blogs to Twitter, the big thing is social sites that let people do their own thing, with each other.  And yet, all of them fail in exactly the same place: making money.

You would think that a site which has millions of people looking at it, all day long, would manage a way to get advertising dollars.  And yet, according to this Time article, they suck at it.  Let the armchair quarterbacking begin!

I think the failure is that while the content of these social sites is embracing the Web 2.0 phenomenon, their advertising models are still stuck firmly in Web 1.0. Want to know why advertisers aren’t paying to be on Facebook?  According to the Time article, and I agree, its because there is no target.  Its just a big bunch of “users” and not smaller slices of that group which fit their demographic.  Why buy an ad on Facebook just to have 99% of the people who see it have no interest at all?  The content of these Web 2.0 sites is all about sharing and community and being part of something, but the ads are still being shoved at you with little or no input or control on your part beyond installing an ad blocker on your browser.

That’s why advertising needs to embrace Web 2.0.  And no, I don’t mean user created ads.  I mean allow the users to specify their demographic.  What if, on Facebook, there was a page you could go to that listed Advertising Categories, and you could drill down into them, and select just the ones you would see ads from?  Of course, selecting zero categories would be the same as selecting all of them.  But what if the only thing I cared about were video games? and PC games at that?  I could go in, drill down in the “Games” category, drill into “Video Games” (as opposed to “Board Games”), and then deselect “Mac”, “PS3”, “Xbox360”, etc, leaving only “PC” selected.  Save my options and from that point on I would only see ads in the “Games->Video Games->PC” category while on Facebook.  (And I’d see new categories if they were subcategories of things I already had selected, and maybe get an email once a week/month letting me know about new categories.)  I know I’d be happy.  Even more so if I could drill in to “PC” and select some other things, like deselecting “Gold Farming.”

While from the user aspect you’d be able to control what ads you see, from the site’s side they’d be able to more accurately sell demographics.  Right now, buying an ad on Facebook means you have access to 175,000,000 or so people, and I’m sure you get some control, but its likely to be as simple as their own advertising page illustrates: location and age groups.  That’s all well and good, but even TV gives you better definition than that.  The people who watch Heroes aren’t just an age group, they are fans of a genre.  Imagine if you could say to a potential advertiser, “We have 13 million users who see ads for PC Games, and given the rates of page views and category loads we can guarantee that they see, on average, 1 PC Game ad per five minutes, and if you buy at this level, we’ll guarantee that they’ll all see your ad, at least once, within a 24 hour period…”  So, not only are your users seeing ads they might actually care about, but your advertisers are getting hard numbers about how often their ads will be seen by people who actually care about their products.

I just played around in Facebook for a bit.  I went to my home page, I went to some applications, the usual stuff, only for once I actually paid attention to the ads… and I was reminded why I started ignoring them in the first place.  I got ads for Netflix (I’m already a subscriber, so not interested in ads for them), for a church, for workout secrets, a room for rent, goth clothing, free credit reports, tax services and an ad offering me a free MacBook if I just buy at least two offers from their page of offers.  In over half an hour I didn’t see one single ad that I cared about, so I’ll go back to ignoring them.  The other thing that was clear from looking at the ads: no big companies.  The biggest thing there was Netflix, but they advertise everywhere (I must close a popup from them at least four or five time a day).  And the only option I had was to vote an ad up or down.  I voted Netflix down with the reason that I am a subscriber and don’t need to see their ad, and yet it was still the most frequent ad I saw even hours later, proving that I have no real control at all over the ads.

Internet advertising has always been a bit of a cesspool of scams and bait-n-switch offers, but it doesn’t have to be that way if effort is put into the tools for allowing users to identify and categorize themselves.

Anyway… that’s my thoughts, but what do I know… I’m just the consumer…

If you run a company, and decide to steal this idea, let me know, I might be interested in helping you implement it.

Movie Round-Up: April 3rd, 2009

Reviews

Fast & Furious:

I have to admit, I liked the first movie in this series.  Really liked it.  It didn’t make me want to trick out a car and start racing, but I felt it was a well crafted film and worth watching.  The second one… not so much.  As for Tokyo Drift, well, I’ve never really enjoyed when a series gets to the point where no one from the original is involved.  Its like those direct to DVD movies that were filmed to stand alone, but once it became clear that it wasn’t going to the theater the studio decides it will sell better if its “Urban Commando 5: Rough Water” rather than just “Rough Water”.

So the tag line for this film, “New Model, Original Parts”, was just pure genius.  Its clearly aimed at people like me.  People who wanted to see “The Fast and The Furious 2” instead of “2 Fast 2 Furious”.

And having said all that, the movie delivers.  The only thing the movie fails at is making the timeline clear.  Even now, I’m still unsure of exactly how much time has passed since the first film.  Other than that, though, Fast & Furious rocks.  Its got the fast cars, the hot chicks, the adrenaline pumping races and chases.  If you liked any of the previous entries in this series, you’ll like the fourth installment as well.

Adventureland:

Growing up, I knew a few people who’d get those summer jobs working at the local theme park.  Being in Atlanta, we have Six Flags and White Water.  They loved those jobs… and they hated them too.  I never worked one myself, but sometimes wish I had.

Anyway… this movie, in my opinion, suffers from the same problem many many movies do: bad advertising.  The commercials for Adventureland emphasize that its “from the Director of Superbad” and it has upbeat music and lots of funny lines, but the reality of the movie is different.  Its not anywhere near as crazy or foul as Superbad, and while it is funny at times, its also a story about a guy whose post college plans fall apart and him trying to figure out how to get what he wants, all while falling in love.  This movie is less Superbad and more Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

That said, I really enjoyed it.  As always, managed expectations are important, so if you go with the right attitude I think you’ll like this one, if its something you like.  But go in expecting a profanity filled “dick & fart” joke-fest and I think you’ll be disappointed.

Six Away

Random Thoughts

One of my goals when it came to working out and getting in shape was to see my weight fall south of two hundred pounds.  At my heaviest, I was probably close to 250.  I can only guess because once I crossed 240, weighing myself became too depressing.  Last week I finally decided to weigh myself for the first time since I started my new routines (Mid-December).  Previously I had weighed myself a couple of weeks after kicking caffeine and sodas, and I had been at 221.  Now I am down to 206.

In addition to dropping the weight, I also generally feel a whole lot better.  I have more energy and my back pain, which has been fairly constant for years, is much less, almost non-existent.

Currently, my workout goes like this:

  • First, I do some stretching.  This is a mixture of some straight muscle stretching and some yoga poses.  This, more than anything else, has led to me feeling a lot better.  Good stretching really opens you up.
  • Second, I do my push-ups.  I’m still doing them slow, and I have no expectation of speeding them up.  Fast isn’t the point.  Each one takes a little more than a second to complete, and I’m at the point now where I do five sets of twenty to make my 100.  A short (30 second to 1 minute) break between sets.
  • Thirds, I do my sit-ups.  Same at the push-ups.  Slow.  Sets of twenty.  Break between sets.  Five sets.
  • After that I do some more stretching and some breathing as a cool down.

I do want to put some leg work/cardio in my workout, but for the moment I’m happy because this is a workout that I can do anytime, anywhere.

Of course, I can’t attribute everything to the workout.  I’ve also been watching my diet.  One thing I’ve learned reading books and listening to trainers and specialists is that the most important element is portion control.  So I’ve been learning to eat leftovers and make sure I’m not stuffing myself at mealtimes.

All in all, I am very pleased so far and really looking forward to the day I get myself under two hundred for good.