Random Thoughts – Page 13 – that Jason Pace

The general category for posts on this blog.

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 3: The Haunting of Julia (1977)

2012-10-03 Jason Random Thoughts, Reviews

It isn’t often that you find a movie willing to open with a mother killing her own daughter in a misguided effort to save the child, but The Haunting of Julia is that rare exception. As the little girl chokes on a piece of apple, I ask myself, “Um, ever heard of the Heimlich Maneuver?” Oh, maybe not. (If you didn’t follow that link, it seems the stomach thrusting reach-around we all know and love was only first written about in 1974, so by 1976 or 1977 when they were filming, Heimlich may not yet have become a household name.) So, perhaps the amateur emergencyÂ tracheotomy was the prudent course of action.

With her daughter dead and her wanting a divorce from her husband, she moves into a nice neighborhood populated mostly be people from the League of Nations. Nope, not kidding, that’s one of the key selling points for the sales agent. Immediately, atmosphere begins to build.

And atmosphere is pretty much all this movie has. I wish I could gush about it, but it was just… well… dull.

Mostly though, I want to focus on one thing. There is a guy, who dies, in the house, where Julia lives. His body is in the basement. And after he dies, the movie keeps going. It’s at least several days, maybe longer. No one finds the body. No one seems to even be looking for him. So apparently, not only is the house haunted, but it has a very cool basement that keeps bodies from rotting and smelling. I don’t understand why the sales agent didn’t mention it.

Oh, and before I forget… terrible sound track. I’m pretty sure it’s just a guy murdering aÂ synthesizer. You know, like a lot of late 70s and early 80s films.

In the end, totally not scary.

Be sure to keep an eye onÂ Final GirlÂ and the rest ofÂ SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Life Between Frames, Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Money and a Half, Final Girl, Mermaid Heather, Thrill Me!

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 2: Let the Right One In (2008)

2012-10-02 Jason Random Thoughts, Reviews

Let the Right One In is the heartwarming tale about a vampire that teaches a young boy how to deal with bullies.

Okay, not really. But it totally is.

In my experience, there are two major types of horror movies. On one side you have the films that are aiming directly at you. They jump and they scare. They throw things as the camera or they toss the camera into things. People are stabbed and gashed and eaten. Blood spurts in slow motion. Then on the other side there are films that tell you a story, slowing revealing details and most of the time they are trying to lure you in to believing that everything is fine or that maybe the little bits of evil you are seeing are justifiable. And then they pull the rug out and show you the monster standing next to you.

This is the point where I say that you should probably stop reading if you are averse to spoilers, because I am about to spoil the shit out of this movie.

“Forewarned is forearmed.” -Peter Vincent

Oskar is just your average kid being beat up by bullies. Chances are you either were that kid, knew that kid, or you used to beat up that kid. He’s a little sad, and a little pathetic. Eli is a strange little girl who likes to hang out at the playground in the middle of the night and has the windows in her apartment boarded up. They meet, they talk, Oskar shows her his Rubik’s Cube (and that’s not aÂ euphemism), and she tells him he needs to hit back when the bullies pick on him.

Oh, and Eli lives with a dude who isn’t her father, who we see killing a random guy on the street and stringing him up to drain him of blood. She might be a little odd, but he’s totally a secret serial killer or something. Only, it’s her who is upset that he didn’t get the blood.

Anyway, she remains being creepy, but she’s nice to Oskar, and we like Oskar, we root for Oskar, we want him to kick some bully ass! And then she kills a guy. But Oskar is totally becoming a stronger better person, so we’ll overlook that little transgression.

Bit by bit we, the audience, gets pulled along… her protector guy gets caught, pours acid on himself and then leaps out a hospital window after she drinks his blood. But, you know, Oskar! He hits the bully with a stick and he’s started working out to get muscles and confidence. Go Oskar! Eli accidentally turns a woman into a vampire, but she explodes in flames when a nurse opens the window to let the sun in… but before that the woman is attacked by a whole mess of cats in a scene right out of Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers (written directly for the ~~scream~~ screen!). Anyway, Oskar finally finds out that she’s a vampire, they dance to music and then he takes a peek at her naked body while she’s getting changed.

Time out a second here… You see, I saw the remake, Let Me In, first. And it pretty much cloned the original almost shot for shot. Except for this scene, which is not in the remake at all. I’m not a perv, because my wife was totally in the room, but I had to watch that scene twice because I wasn’t sure what I saw. Earlier, in both versions, there is this scene where the vampire girl and the normal boy are hanging out in his bed and he asks her to go steady and she says, “I’m not a little girl”, which I totally took to mean “I’m a vampire” or “I’m a monster” but in this, the original… did I just get Crying Gamed? Is Eli actually a little boy who had his junk cut off? What the hell is going on here? And now I’m recalling the scene where Eli is puking after eating the candy, and she asks if he likes her and he says yeah and she asks “Would you like me if I was a boy?” and he says “Sure.” I totally just got Crying Gamed!

I just Googled it, the movie and the book. Mind. Blown. That’ll teach me to watch remakes!

Anyway… so Eli kills another guy, and this time Oskar watches. Eli leaves, like, for good. Then the bullies trick Oskar into coming back to the fitness program and they are in the process of possibly drowning him when Eli shows up and kills everyone. Cut to train, Oskar looks out the window, we hear a tapping and Oskar smiles. He taps out a reply on the large trunk that accompanies him.

So, back to where I started… two types of horror films, one where the monster leaps right out and one where the monster sneaks up on you. Let the Right One In is definitely the latter, and while I’d classify the movie as a horror film I wouldn’t call it a scary film. It’s practically a romance. Although, knowing what I know now, maybe it’s a bromance.

Peace out… I’m off to write some scorpion/frog slash-fic.

Be sure to keep an eye onÂ Final GirlÂ and the rest ofÂ SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Final Girl, Life Between Frames, Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Money and a Half, Thrill Me!

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 1: Sunshine (2007)

2012-10-01 Jason Random Thoughts, Reviews

I first saw Sunshine in 2008 after the DVD released in the United States. I really wanted to see it in the theater, but never quite found the opportunity to do it. I mean, it was a no brainer, right? I think the conversation should have gone something like this:

Marketing: From the director of 28 Days Later…
Me: Oh?
Marketing: …starring the guy from 28 Days Later…
Me: Sold.
Marketing: …comes Sunshine, a movie about
Me: Yeah, you can stop now. I’m in.
Marketing: You don’t want to know what it’s about?
Me: No, just tell me when I can see it.

However, somewhere between knowing that I was going to see this film and when it stopped showing in local theaters, I didn’t manage to find any other people who also wanted to go see it, and since going to the movies alone isn’t something I normally do (though I am not opposed to it) and so, I didn’t. Not until about a year later.

But that’s neither here nor there, nor on the surface of the sun. The basic plot is this: for some reason, which I don’t recall even after rewatching it, the Sun is going out and the world is going to freeze, but there is a plan – to fire a giant bomb into the Sun and reignite it. I looked up some stuff on wikipedia and saw there was apparently some back story about a Q-ball or something causing the Sun to expend energy faster than it should. Anyway, there was a previous mission which after passing into the dead zone – where they can communicate back to Earth because of the radiation interference of the Sun – it didn’t appear to complete its mission. So now we are on mission two, the final mission, because it took everything the Earth had to make these two bombs. And they fly toward the Sun, and they approach Mercury, and discover the first ship, hanging in orbit around the Sun.

Of course, they decide to investigate…

I think what I love most about this movie is that there is a lot of science in it, but a bunch of it is junk science – science that makes sense in its pieces and parts but not in the manner in which the movie lumps them together. And it’s got that whole race to save humanity element. But another strong element is that I think, at least emotionally and in some ways stylistically, it parallels another movie that I love: The Black Hole.

You got ships sitting on the brink of oblivion and men who have lost their sanity and an ending that leaves open a lot to interpretation because it goes for art rather than solid facts.

When I saw it then and now as I watched it again, I know this is supposed to be a horror film, but it doesn’t scare me at all until the boogeyman shows up. Until that point, the movie is just science, logic and hard but inevitable choices clouded with a little bit of human curiosity and compassion. Seriously, until the sun scarred former captain arrives and starts stomping around the ship killing people in the last act of the film all of the horror is based on preying on the primal fears of uncertainty and helplessness in the face of nature and science we don’t fully understand – which doesn’t scare me.

I also think the movie tried to do something it didn’t succeed at. It’s a brilliant idea, to tell a scary story that normally relies on shadows and darkness but do it in full light. And if this movie had done that, it would have been awesome, but when the captain shows up the first thing he does is kill the computer and turn off the lights. We are plunged back into darkness, the very familiar darkness. It also doesn’t help that Danny Boyle went with an artistic style when showing us the captain and his skewed perspective of his environment. He’s a shaky blur rather than a solid figure, and it robs him of some of the terror he might have caused. If they’d kept the lights on, gave us a clear view of the captain and had him speaking logically and passionately about how the mission had to be stopped while relentlessly hunting the crew – perhaps using things he’d learned in the last seven years trapped on his identical ship.

And yet, despite that, I do still love the movie. It helps, I guess, that the final act is so short. Once it’s over, we spend a beautiful moment with Cillian Murphy, experiencing the strangeness of the uncertain warpings of time and reality that occur in the heart of the Sun, standing before a wall of fire for an eternity even though from the outside he probably vanished in a flash of fire nearly instantaneously.

The sacrifice is made. The Sun reignited. The Earth is saved. Humanity lives on. And Sunshine ends.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Final Girl, Life Between Frames, Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Money and a Half, Into the Mirror

SHOCKtober 2012: Prelude

2012-09-30 Jason Random Thoughts, Reviews

So, there is this blog I read, Final Girl, that is all about horror films, and for the month of October she is doing a thing she calls SHOCKtober, which is basically a movie a day. The idea is to spur discussion and thought about horror films and I intend to participate. For the next 31 days, assuming I can get access to every movie through my collection, Netflix, Amazon, Redbox, and… more nefarious means, I will be posting something each day relating to the movie in question. Many of them will probably be reviews, but perhaps not all of them. We’ll have to see what each movie inspires.

In any event, I hope it is an enjoyable ride.

In the meantime, go check out Stacie Ponder’s Final Girl blog. Read back through the archives, there are quite a few gems in there well worth reading.

UPDATE: Adding links to this post.

Ruining It for the Rest of Us

2012-09-18 Jason Random Thoughts

Last night I attended a screening for the upcoming movie Dredd (very good, enjoyed it a lot, plenty of action, too violent for the youngsters, looking forward to some sequels) and ran into the latest round of backlash and silliness.

No Recording Devices — All Your Cameras Are Belong To Us!

I’ve been to many screenings, so I’m used to them saying that you have to turn off your phones or even saying you can’t bring them in. Sorry folks, they keep making better phones and with 720p HD video recording on your phone, it is getting easier for people to bootleg movies. And that’s really what they are looking for, recording devices.

First off, to all you people there who download shitty bootlegs recorded with camera phones: Stop. For one, there are better bootlegs out there. For another, THERE ARE BETTER BOOTLEGS OUT THERE. I’d say that again in bold and italics, but I figure CAPS should be enough.

Secondly, to the theaters: see the above paragraph. Very few people are downloading bootlegs made on iPhones. Mostly because almost no one is making bootlegs on iPhones. Most bootlegs are made in empty theaters by unscrupulous theater employees, or made as a digital copy right off the discs/camera/stream, however you are getting your digital copy of the movie. If the screening is months before release, then I further understand a desire for “security” to keep screen grabs from leaking onto the Internet, but when you are within a week of release and professional paid reviewers are already dropping bombs and spoiling your film, a kid who snaps a crappy photo of your movie is the last thing you should be worried about.

What really irked me though, was the insistence by security that not only were phones, cameras and such not allowed inside, but no iPods or Kindles or Nooks or any electronic device. That’s right, even devices that do not have cameras because they are not made with cameras, were not being allowed inside. Certainly this was because of lazy – it’s easier to ban everything than to actually know things and selectively exclude devices that are capable of recording. On top of that, though, is the fact that in all the screenings I’ve been to the only thing that ever needs to happen is for security to say, “Put all phones on silent or vibrate. If you use an electronic device during the movie, or a device you have makes noise, you will be removed from the theater.” and then stand in the back of the theater, watching and listening. When that happens, no one pulls out their phones to make calls or text or play games. Because, by and large, people don’t suck when given simple logical instructions.

To top that off, the movie was in 3D. You cannot, to my knowledge, record a 3D movie projected onto a screen with a handheld camera and preserve the 3D. At best, you slap one of the polarized lenses on the camera and record only the left or right eye image, capturing it in 2D – but it will be much worse quality than just capturing the film in straight 2D.

And further insult to injury, the security staff was willing to “bag and tag” phones, but they offered no insurance. One guy actually said, to the crowd, “If you lose your ticket or we lose your phone, you will not get a replacement. It’s just gone.” You know, there is a reason that I keep a photo of myself on my phone at all times, that way I can walk someone through unlocking the phone and opening the photo to prove it’s either mine or someone who knows me. But if that wasn’t enough, the parking garage at this particular theater is a typical parking garage, and thus on your parking ticket states “The management of this garage is not responsible for damage or theft of any vehicle or its contents.” So when the security guys were offering to let people out of line to go put their phones and Kindles and iPads in their cars, they were basically saying “You can’t take those in the theater, with you, where they are safe, you need to put them in your car, where the garage has specifically stated that they aren’t responsible for them.”

I guess people could just not bring their phones and things with them, but who goes around without a phone these days?

Anyway, I’m sure we got this terrible treatment by security because some schmuck somewhere tried to record a movie with his iPhone and then uploaded it to YouTube. If you are that guy, just know, you are ruining the movie going experience for everyone. Cut it out.

City of Fallen Heroes

2012-09-10 Jason Gaming, Random Thoughts, Writing

In yesterday’s post I said that City of Heroes was “inspiring”. But what did I mean by that?

Obviously, as linked in that post, it drove me to create a character who wasn’t a hero, just a reporter who wrote about heroes: Calvin Meeks and the Front Page. But it also heralded my first serious foray into fan fiction.

Sure, I’d written things about my characters in EverQuest, but those were just short stories, a few pages. City of Heroes inspired me to actually write an entire outline of a book, a series of intertwining stories that culminated in a cohesive plot. Sadly, when I allowed myself to get dragged off into other games, I also allowed myself to abandon that work, entitled City of Fallen Heroes.

I dug through my office the other day and found most of the outline and a bunch of jotted mini plots for the chapters. I’m going to take a stab at finishing that, if I don’t get too depressed about the closing of the game.

In the meantime, you can read the first three chapters, which I did complete and placed online way back when.

To me, it was an interesting concept. Write a story set in the Rikti invasion, the event that happens just before the launch of the game, and write about all the heroes who don’t survive. I know from the start that none of my characters will make it. Some will die “on-screen” while others may survive to take the plunge with Hero 1 into the Rikti homeworld. Or maybe they won’t, because I have to say that I developed an unreasonable attachment to the main character of Chapter 2 and actually made changes to my outline at the time to account for it. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it and I hope I can churn out more worth reading.

A City of Heroes

2012-09-09 Jason Gaming, Random Thoughts

This is what regret feels like.

EverQuest wasn’t my first MMO, but it will probably always be my favorite because it gave me, at the time, exactly what I wanted and what I needed. Coming off of three years of hardcore Team Fortress playing, I found a new community. The game itself was only moderately fun, but what saved it were the people. I’ve been looking for that game ever since and haven’t found it again.

But in late 2003/early 2004, I was accepted into the beta for City of Heroes. While I never found the same type of community that I had in EQ, what I found was a game that inspired me. On many levels, the greatness of the game is that, despite what some theory-crafters out there will try to sell you, every character, no matter the build, is playable if you just learn how to play it. But what really sold me on the game, what caused that inspiration, was that the game allowed me to play in the way I wanted to play, even when that was different than everyone else.

To the right you’ll see a shot of one of my characters, Calvin Meeks, writer for The Front Page. He was an investigative journalist who knew no fear, and when he got in trouble wouldn’t hesitate to call in the big guns. For his entire career he never did a mission solo that required super powers, because he didn’t have any. He followed the leads and when violence was called for he phoned up one of the heroes he’d gotten to know while working the beat and together they would take down foes. It was strange and exciting to be able to play the game this way, to join a group and follow them into enemy territory like an embedded combat journalist.

Of course, I played City of Heroes normally as well. I had a few supers who ran around pounding bad guys into the dirt, but I was most excited to play Calvin. And I’d like to think that there are people out there who really enjoyed being the muscle for me.

Eventually, I got caught up in WoW and I wandered off through a series of games, each less satisfying than the one before, mostly because so many of them lacked the basic community that EverQuest and other early games had in spades. And now it just might be too late. NCsoft, faced with losses in other areas, have chosen to close Paragon Studios and to shut down City of Heroes. Efforts are being made to try to save the game, but I don’t hold out much hope.

I logged in last night to check out the protest, and found my old friends list filled with lit up names. I chatted with a few of them and we all had the same regret. “Why did I ever leave?”

If, by some miracle, the game is saved and stays online, I’ll be back. In fact, for the three months that remain, I’ll be there. I need to get in as much of this wonderful game as I can before it disappears forever.

The Desk That Helps

2012-08-07 Jason Random Thoughts

So, you have a company and you have customers and they might have problems with your products. You need to provide a method for them to redress those problems. First thing first, decide if you are building a Help Desk or a Call Center. Hopefully you are building a Help Desk, because if you aren’t, I will cut you.

Now that you are building a Help Desk, the next thing to do is determine the avenues you wish to open for support. Phone support is a tried and true method, but you can also do support by email, text, live chat, message forums… So many options. Which ones work best will depend on the type of products and services you provide, but the key is to just avoid confusion. It should be clear to your customers how to contact you and the level of feedback they should expect.

Feedback is very important. If I call and leave a message and then no one calls me back, I feel ignored. Next time I go to buy a product, I might not buy yours if there are other options. The same goes for emails and forums and texts… anything asynchronous needs to have a response time, a point by which you will either have an answer or you will contact the user and tell them you are working on it. I worked for a company once that funneled all support calls to a voice mail box, then when a caller left a message a pager would go off in the office, the person in charge of the pager would listen to the message, create the ticket, and assign it to a tech. We would only call the customer if the message was unclear. The tech would have 60 minutes to respond to the customer, either with an answer or to get more information. The important part is that we explained exactly how this worked to our customers, and while some people I know predicted we’d be flooded with messages that said “I have a problem, call me” the opposite happened. Our customers began leaving extremely detailed messages. Later we added an email address they could send problem descriptions and screenshots to. Again, some people predicted we’d get lots of “I have a problem, call me” emails, but instead we started getting well written narratives with pictures. It was great. But the point is that we established an expectation – report a problem, get contacted within the hour – and since we never ever failed at that, our customers worked to maximize that system, providing the best detail to speed response and increase accuracy of solutions.

Now, the next step is one that nearly all help desks/call centers I’ve interacted with fail at on some level. Assume you are in the business of providing phone service. Now assume half of your network has shit itself and half of your customers are experiencing problems. You need a way to communicate to your staff that the problem is known, how to identify if a caller/user is affected and what to say to them to explain the problem. If I call your help desk to report a phone service problem and your people there happily take my information, assign me a ticket number and tell me a technician will call me shortly without even a mention of a wide-spread outage, you have failed. And the failure will just get bigger because in an hour when I’m still having problems and no technician has called me back (because he’s too busy trying to fix the problem), I’m going to be furiously angry and possibly seeking out a replacement for your service. What would have fixed that? “Oh, this issue is linked with the current company wide outage we are experiencing. Our technicians are working to resolve it as we speak. I will put your name on our call back list to notify you of any significant updates or when a resolution is found.”

The final part of a good help desk (besides good help) is the followup. After the problem has been resolved, probably the next day, someone from your company is going to call the customer and ask them if everything is okay and if the problem was resolved to their satisfaction. Don’t outsource this. And I don’t mean to another country, don’t outsource this to people who don’t know anything about the problem. I work with one company and their followup call is a person who not only doesn’t know anything about the problem, the only thing they know is my name, my phone number and the problem ticket number. They can’t even tell me what the problem was, which is a problem when I have a half-dozen open tickets. 83759374 doesn’t tell me anything worth knowing. And when I ask, “Is this concerning the [insert problem description here]?” they can only reply, “I don’t know.” And I can’t fault them, because they don’t know, they haven’t been given the tools. However, I do fault the company, and it means they exist with one strike against them all the time.

I just don’t understand how so many companies can get something so simple, so basic as setting up a functional help desk that provides actual help and makes their customers feel helped. No, wait, sadly I do understand. Lots of people just don’t care.

Email: The Lost Art

2012-08-06 Jason Random Thoughts

I suppose I should entitle this something like “Reading & Comprehension: The Lost Art” because that’s really what’s about to happen, but since I’m most irritated with the way people treat their email, I went with this instead. Anyway, onward…

Let’s pretend I send you an email. And let’s pretend that in that email I ask you two questions. When you reply, answering only the first question and I have to send you another email with the second question, you look like an idiot. Emails aren’t twitter. Don’t stop reading at 140 characters. Read the whole damn thing.

Extending this, if you are sent an email asking you to do something – for example, to look into a previously reported problem and find out why it doesn’t appear to be being worked on – and your first thought is that you need more information – continuing the example, the ticket number of the original problem report – before you fire off an email asking for the information – “Do you have the ticket number?” – you should probably scroll down and read ALL of the emails in the chain – including the one right below the one you are replying to, in which the ticket number is given. When you don’t do this, you look like an idiot.

Some people – idiots – will defend this behavior, often citing reasons such as “I was reading this on my phone and the screen was too small.” As a solution, try this: Don’t read emails on your phone if you can’t properly read emails on your phone.

Lastly, sometimes when a company sends out an email – specifically an automated one – to which they do not expect a reply – probably because they are just informing you of a status or error – and within the body of the email, either at the top or the bottom or somewhere in between, it says “this email comes from an unattended mailbox, do not reply” or some variation thereof, when you reply to that email, get no response, and then later call up angry that no one replied to your email that you send to the totally non-functioning mailbox that the sysadmin only checks to see if it’s getting a large number of bounces or other error conditions, you look like an idiot.

Seriously, though, I’m saying this for your benefit – and mine – because you don’t want to be thought of as an idiot – and I’d rather get stuff done than repeat myself or listen to you complain about a problem that isn’t mine.Â For the sake of all that which you hold dear, read your damn emails! In full!

2012 and still they fail

2012-07-26 Jason Random Thoughts

It’s 2012 and companies are still failing at The Internet.

The Olympics have begun, and NBC has made available every event online for streaming so you can watch them on your PC or tablet or phone. BUT only if you are already paying for TV. If you are one of those people who decided to cut the cord and go back to getting your broadcast TV by antenna or through websites on the Internet, then you are shit out of luck.

NBC had a real opportunity here. They could have allowed people to purchase an online package to get access to the feeds without needing to have Comcast or Cox or DirecTV or some other service. The pitch could have been, “Get access to all the Olympic events streaming on your PC, tablet and phone for $99!” with a perk of “Or, if you already pay for TV through one of our partners, get it for FREE!” Instead though, we are left with “If you are already paying for TV, get access to the Olympics events on your PC, tablet and phone for FREE!”

I really want to give NBC my money. I’d be willing to set aside a number of activities for a couple of weeks while the world’s best athletes compete for the gold, but I can’t. I cannot give NBC my money. Instead, I have to give Comcast my money, so that Comcast can give NBC a tiny fraction of that.

Well… fuck that! I’m not about to pay Comcast a bunch of money for access to 300+ channels I will never watch just so I can stream Olympic events to my PC, completely not using a TV, a set-top box (that Comcast requires) or even Comcast’s internet (since I’d be watching more stuff at work than at home).

This is crazy ass backward. I know why they do it though. It’s because the subscription cable/satellite business is too much to give up. It’s the same reason you can’t get HBO Go without already being a PayTV subscriber and already having HBO through that. I’d love to give HBO my money, but they won’t take it unless it comes filtered through Comcast and their ridiculous pricing plans that force me to get 300+ channels so I can watch 5.

Oh well, I guess I won’t be watching the Olympics. Maybe they’ll get this sorted out by 2016.