Author: Jason

The Rocker

Reviews

11 out of 13 nots
for making me want to start a rock band

The Rocker is the story of Robert ‘Fish’ Fishman.  He was the drummer in a rock band named Vesuvius, until he was kicked out.  Twenty years later, his nephew’s band needs a drummer to play their prom gig.  From there we follow Fish as he is once again in a band on the rise.

When I first heard about this movie, I was worried it was going to be ninety minutes of “the old guy” being crazy and gross before ending with some sort of heart warming ending.  Thankfully, while there are some crazy gross old guy moments they are few, and the movie is genuinely funny.

I really enjoyed it alot, and I suppose it helps that I am already a fan of Teddy Geiger, so I liked the music quite a bit.

Definitely worth seeing.

Going back to Azeroth…

Gaming

… nah, I don’t think so.

There are many reasons I stopped playing WoW.  The first and foremost was that there were so many blasted servers that after the initial scatter, and then several re-homes, of all my previous-MMO friends, I ended up being invested too much in a server where few of them played, and I didn’t want to start over again, again.  Then the friends I did have on the server I was on stopped playing, or did move servers and started over.  I tried making new friends and joining new guilds, but frankly everywhere I ended up was full of one of two kinds of people, 1) hardcore, you must play now, fanatics who wanted everyone to be on all the time and either farming or raiding, or 2) people who were so casual that the guild was little more than a chat channel while everyone played alone together, soloing their way to glory.  Then when Battleground turned into nothing by a grinding gear-fest, I lost my last reason to play.  I wanted to PvP, but I didn’t want to spend the time, effort, or money required to gear up enough to be able to last more than a few seconds.  And the game supports no method by which you can PvP against only similarly geared people.

Despite my distaste for how things ended, World of Warcraft has remained installed on my PC even though my account is cancelled.  But not anymore.  I’m just removed it and I’m never going back.

For one, I’m going to be picking up Warhammer Online, and I’ve put myself in with a fairly organized group of people who don’t seem to be hardcore slave-driving raid-mongers nor solo-only chatoholics.  For another reason, you need only see the direction WoW has decided to continue heading… and by that I mean into silliness.  With the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard is putting motorcycles into the game.  WoW has always been a pun filled humorous type game.  Even back in its origins at an RTS game, humor was embedding in the voices of the units (if you kept clicking the same unit over and over again they eventually got upset with you and demanded you stop touching them), but WoW has always been a step further.  Mostly, the things in game could be easily ignored, or avoided.  Or, most importantly, they were things you sought out, saw, and then went back to not seeing them.  Funny names and odd sites are great fun when they pop up from time to time.  But this is different… how often do you see people on mounts?  Your answer is probably like mine, “All the time.”  So now, we are going to have motorcycles riding around all over the place.  Not being a flying mount, they will probably be unrestricted, meaning you can ride them around the old world.

If they really wanted to put motorcycles in the game, have them be funny, but not have them be ubiquitous, they could have put in a gnome somewhere, with a motorcycle, who will help you build one.  It would be a series of quests that would give out a couple rewards, but ultimately give out a motorcycle mount, limited uses (10 or 20), non-repeatable.  Of course, people would cry about not being able to keep the mount, but a few people crying is better than unleashing the World of Motorcyclecraft, in my opinion.

With that, I’m done.  And I’m never going back.

Listening versus Waiting To Talk

Random Thoughts

Have you ever been talking with someone, regaling a story, and when you finish they immediately respond with a story of their own?  One that somehow makes your story insignificant?  Have you ever told someone something to which they respond that they disagree, but the reasons they give are completely out of line with everything you just said?

I have.  When it happens, I try to notice, because most people who do this become obvious in their patterns.  They are not really listening to you, they are waiting for their turn to talk.

The Internet is full of people with this problem, especially when it comes to game design.  Take this thread for example.  Where I linked to should be a post of someone saying that the upcoming Star Trek Online game should avoid being a DIKU clone like so many other games.  He goes into a pretty elaborate tale of how things might work.  The second reply following him is a post saying his idea would fail as a DIKU.

Ummm… duh?  And the guy even quoted the entire original post, including the parts where the original poster said explicitly that it wasn’t a DIKU idea.

This is the sort of thing that makes conversation hard on the Internet.  Some people know what they want to say, they are just waiting for an opportunity to say it.  They don’t join a conversation so much as they look for an opening (no matter how ill fitting) and step in to criticize and spew their opinion.  I mean, if a few people are talking about how to make great soups, what is the point of walking in and stating that, while their soups might be okay for people who like soup, a steak would be a better meal.  It was a thread by people who like soup about soup… what the hell does steak have to do with it?

Sometimes people need to realize that if you can’t contribute to the topic at hand, then perhaps the best course of action is just to listen instead of trying to turn the conversation to something you’d rather talk about.  It really makes message boards less enjoyable, especially when the same person keeps trying to hammer his point of view into thread where they don’t belong.  If no one is talking about what you want to talk about… start a new thread, or at least propose that the thread steer another direction, don’t go hijacking.

Hellboy: Emerald Hell

Reviews

It is not often that you can read the same character portrayed in more than one way.  If you read all the Dirk Pitt books by Clive Cussler, they all pretty much read the same.  Not to say they aren’t good reads, but a Dirk Pitt book is a Dirk Pitt book.  In the realms of Science Fiction and Fantasy, however, sometimes you can find a character who is written by several authors, and those authors can be very distinct in their styles.  Conan, for example, has been written by dozens of authors, and if you read enough of them, while Conan himself remains relatively the same throughout, his surroundings and the tales in which he is enmeshed change.

Hellboy falls in here also.  Many of the Hellboy books I’ve read and reviewed here are akin to superhero novels.  Hellboy and his band of misfits saving the world from one monstrosity or another.  Emerald Hell on the other hand is a much more sedate book by comparison.  More brooding.  More searching.

Within the pages we find Hellboy on his own, and after hearing some tales about the six silent daughters of Bliss Nail and the little Georgia swamp town of Enigma, he decides to check them out and see if something sinister is afoot.  Of course there is, but its not the potential world ending calamities of the other books.  Instead its about a pregnant girl who needs protecting from a misguided undead minister who murdered the girl’s mother.  More so than the other books, this one is all about mood and sorrow.

I don’t think I’d put this book at the top of my Hellboy pile, but I enjoyed it just the same.

Name This Blog

Site News

For a long time now I have been content with calling this place “weblog.probablynot.com” and leaving it at that.  But while I begin considering expanding my empire, I figured it was time to give this blog a name of its own.

In all likelihood, I will ignore every single suggestion made here… but I may not.

So, keeping in mind that I ultimately plan to spin the movie reviews (and perhaps the book reviews) off into their own corner of my domain, what name would you suggest for this blog?

If you want more info about me to go on, just ask questions and I’ll answer them as best as I can…

Henry Poole is Here

Random Thoughts

9 out of 13 nots.
for being about faith without being preachy

Technically, this movie opened yesterday, and I should have put up the review then.  But I already had two reviews set to go up, and three posts in one day seemed a tad crowded to me.  Besides, I don’t think many people are going to rush off and see Henry Poole is Here on a Friday night.  It is more of a lazy Sunday morning movie.

Henry Poole is dying.  Although, we never learn from what, he does say he won’t be around long.  But he’s gone back to his childhood home… or at least he tried.  Instead, he bought the house down the street.  He has a Hispanic neighbor who used to date the man who previously owned the house (who died of a heart attack in the kitchen).  He also has a neighbor whose husband ran out on her and their child, a daughter who hasn’t spoken in a year.  And he’s got a water stain in the shape of Jesus in his stucco.

Its that last thing that causes the most problems.

Henry Poole is Here is a movie about faith, about belief in something greater, but at no point does it come out and shove any particular religion down your throat.  It also never says anything remotely close to people who don’t believe going to Hell or anything.  It is more a message of, “Having hope is better than having no hope.”

I enjoyed it.  Not the greatest film ever made, but far from the worst.  I can think of plenty of worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Reviews

9 out of 13 nots.
for great animation but a not so great story

If I were a fanboy of all things Star Wars, I might be inclined to proclaim that this movie, The Clone Wars, is the best thing since sliced bread.  Since I am not, however, I maintain that when you consider it, sliced bread is in fact still pretty awesome.  If you know you, you might have heard me say some form of that before, and basically it means that I feel the movie was a great attempt, but that it missed greatness.

The Clone Wars is set during… the Clone Wars.  It happens between episodes II and III of the Star Wars Saga.  Someone has kidnapped Jabba the Hut’s son, and since the Republic needs use of the outer rim space travel lanes to move troops, the Jedis agree to help find and rescue him.  Of course, nothing is ever simple, and lots of things go awry.

The biggest problems I have with the film stem from the same place that the problems I had with the new trilogy came from: George Lucas is just making shit up.  And I don’t mean that in a “he’s a creative genius” way… I mean that in a “he doesn’t even read his own work for consistency” way.  So, despite it never being mentioned, not once in the three original films, or in the third new film (the most logical place for it to have appeared), Anakin gets his own paduan.  Which despite its complete out-of-left-field nature, makes perfect sense given Lucas’ (and others) incessant need to manufacture adolescent characters for kids movies, because they clearly would never be interested in any movie that didn’t have a kid in it.  (Note: The original trilogy of Star Wars films, which was wildly successful, contained no children, not even pre-teens.)  The character of Ahsoka feels completely shoe-horned in.  Dialog between her and other characters smacks of the “Oh yeah!  Well, I may be young, but I’m no kid!” attitude Hollywood loves.  Its just… annoying.  And every time I hear the word “youngling” I want to punch George Lucas in the face.

Outside of issues with the characters and story, the film itself is beautiful.  It sits in a place that I can only describe as a blend of computer graphics and painting.  The textures and shading used adds a unique element to the film that lifts it from being an ordinary CGI affair.

I will say, though, if you go to see an animated movie this weekend, see this instead of Fly Me to the Moon.

Fly Me to the Moon

Reviews

4 out of 13 nots.
for wasting 3D on a film not worth seeing

I went an saw Beowulf in 3D and I liked it.  I saw Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D and I loved it.  In Fly Me to the Moon they went for the gusto and used the absolute most 3D they could possibly cram into every single scene and I hated it.  There were so many things going on on so many levels that it physically hurt my eyes to watch some scenes.

If that weren’t enough, the movie itself was boring, the plot had giant holes you could launch the Space Shuttle through, and it wasn’t even very funny.  Unlike other kid’s movies, like those from Pixar, there is nothing in Fly Me to the Moon to appeal to the adults who go see the film with their kids.  In fact, most adults will probably be bothered, like I was, by the inane story and aforementioned plot holes.

The entire film seemed like a bunch of ideas thrown together to use 3D and mesmerize toddlers with pretty colors.  But don’t think just because the movie is aimed at kids that your kids will love it.  If you go see it in a 3D enabled theater, your kids will need to wear the glasses for the whole 84 minutes, and if the population of my theater is any indication, half of kids will “ooh” and “aah” and laugh at the funny flies, while the other half cry at all the things coming at them from the screen.

All in all, I really, honestly, can’t recommend this film to anyone.

Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned from Video Games

Gaming

This month’s Round Table is about learning from video games.  The truth is that I actually learned quite a bit from video games.  From things as simple as Math Blaster forcing me to be able to do math fast enough to win, to budget management in games like Sim City, to teamwork and risk versus reward evaluation in EverQuest.  Games can teach quite a bit, in many cases they teach the same way life teaches: through experience.  You do, you learn.

Of course, not everything you do in games is a quality learning experience, and some games are best approached as a game only and not a lesson to be learned.  For example, no matter how many Grand Theft Auto games come out, hopefully no one “learns” that killing hookers is a decent source of cash.

The title of this entry is moderately tongue in cheek… because, obviously, I didn’t learn everything I needed to know from video games.  I learned plenty of things from TV, movies, comic books and an old homeless Navy man named Morty.

I’m kidding about the homeless guy… or am I?

But what exactly could I pretend I learned from video games?

Dungeon Keeper taught me that I can get more work from people if I beat them, but that beating them costs moral and breaks their spirits, so while they may work faster, they won’t respect me or be loyal.  Sim City showed me how to balance a budget, and understand that no matter how great things were, Godzilla might still come and destroy everything.  EverQuest taught me to be nice to people in random encounters because you never know when someone you chose to shit on is going to be the recruiting officer of that guild you want to join, or when its going to be that guy who you helped get his corpse back when no one else would.  Burnout Paradise showed me that you can work hard, pay attention, and be great, but the cross traffic at the intersections are still going to get you now and then.  Playing almost any console game online has made me understand the importance of preparation, because there is nothing more frustrating than playing with someone who jumped online and into your room as his first action, without even knowing how the controls work.  King’s Quest III taught me the importance of semantics by only allowing certain words, conjugations and word combinations to mean anything, everything else was frustration.  Warlords, and many other turn based and real time strategy games, showed me the importance of production schedules and how to think ahead before committing to decisions.  And Dead Rising taught me that when the zombie hordes come, everything is a weapon.

Of course, little of that is strictly true.  I don’t have any fantastic story about how a game helped me overcome dyslexia or cure cancer, but I do feel that games have, throughout my life, helped encourage and reinforce certain aspects of my education.  And I think that almost any game has that potential, given the right context and perhaps a guiding voice (of a teacher or parent).  Sometimes, though, games simply provided a break from learning, a rest for my brain, so that I could attack learning again later with renewed vigor.

[include file=http://blog.pjsattic.com/roundtable.php?rtMON=0808&bgcolor=FFFFFF iframe=true width=512 height=80]

Tropic Thunder

Reviews

10 out of 13 nots.
for kicking Hollywood in the gonads

I am sure by now, unless you live under a rock, you have heard about the controversy surrounding Tropic Thunder.  Ben Stiller’s character of Tugg Speedman portrayed a mentally disabled boy in a movie called Simple Jack.  Yes, the character of Jack is rife with stereotypes of the cognitively challenged… but that’s sort of the point.  Tugg took the part of Jack in a blatant attempt to show that he was more than an action star and to try to nab Oscar gold.  Tropic Thunder is not about Jack, its about Tugg, who himself is a stereotypical action star, doing what we, the audience, already consider to be fairly tasteless (blatant Oscar bid films) and taking it to the extreme.  Much the same way that Robert Downey Jr.’s Kirk Lazarus is taking actors who physically transform themselves for their craft to the extreme (he gets his skin dyed so that he, a white actor, can portray a black man).  Every character in the film is a caricature of people who exist in the real Hollywood, and it is really funny.

However, to every person out there… this movie is rated R for a reason.  Take it seriously.  And its not just for the swearing (of which there is a lot), or the blood and gore (or which there is plenty), or nudity (which there isn’t any, unless you count Jack Black in his underwear), it is also because, unless you are a person who can discern the difference between a joke and not a joke (like, for instance, kids), this movie might be extremely offensive… to everyone.  But hey, if you can take a joke, and if you can separate having a laugh from having a world outlook, this movie is a hoot.

Of course, we could always ban jokes about the mentally disabled… and other disabled people… and blacks, and jews, and fat people, and skinny people, and business people, and homeless people, and normal people.  We could ban all those jokes… but then all we would have left are knock-knock jokes, and not very many of those at that.  Remember, for every movie you think isn’t funny, there is a movie you think is hilarious that someone else thinks isn’t funny.  Even Finding Nemo makes fun of people who have memory problems…