Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

Boxoffice Insanity

Random Thoughts

For the sake of argument, lets assume that I go see a movie every single Friday night. I take my wife and we buy popcorn and sodas. Now, to give the theaters a break, we’ll even be a tad frugal and say that down at the AMC, the wife and I stick to the “Clip’s Picks” special: a 16 oz. soda, 32 oz. popcorn and a regular candy for $7.50. The local AMC just pushed their ticket price for a regular adult evening show to $10. One night at the theater, not including gas, will run me $35.00. Expand that out to a year and you get $1,820. Next year, prices are likely to be higher, not lower.

Last year, I bought an HD projector for the house for under $900, I think it was $832 or close to that. Grouped with the $150 sound system we picked up a few years ago on a Black Friday super deal, our $95 5 disc DVD changer (that upscales content), and the 102″ screen we built for under $25 (wood, white sheets and a staple gun), it makes for a fairly nice experience of watching films. Of course, I didn’t buy this just to watch DVDs on, we also watch TV and play Xbox 360 on it (really freaking sweet by the way). Trying to figure out how much to charge to what activity gets a tad complex. For now, I’m actually going to lump it all together and say $1,200 to make a home theater. Of course, some people don’t like projectors, and that is their choice, but it’ll run them a whole lot more and net them a smaller screen.

Buying in bulk down at the BJ’s, the cost of popcorn runs maybe $0.50 and candy around the same, sodas too. For both of us, at home, the movie snacks cost under $3.00 for both of us. $156 for the year.

As for movies, lets take a Netflix membership. The lowest plan they have that would allow us to see a movie a week is the “1 DVD at a time – Unlimited” plan for $8.99 a month. $8.99 * 12 = $107.88 / 52 = $2.08 a week. So, for us to rent a movie from Netflix and watch it together costs us $1.04 each.

Total cost for 1 year of watching movies at home in a theater I built myself: $1,200 + $156 + $107.88 = $1,463.88.

Now, for the second year, I won’t need to rebuild the theater, but I might upgrade to an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player, so I can subtract the $1,200 for initial investment and add back in a $200 cushion for improvements, if I desire them, making the second year cost me only $463.88.

But wait… what if I bought DVDs instead of rented them? One advantage to buying a DVD is that thanks to places like Amazon and eBay, no movie is every really unavailable, while if a movie you want to see doesn’t open well at the boxoffice it may be gone before it gets a second weekend. If I were really going to abandon the multiplex for the home uniplex, you can bet I’d pre-order movies. Again, thanks to Amazon, a pre-ordered movie will run $16.99, less sometimes. If I wait for the release day, I can usually find a store selling a new movie for $14.99. Even if I was generous and set the price at $19.99, the movie tickets were the same price. Except we get to own the movie and watch it as many times as we want, and if the movie sucks it didn’t cost us any more than going to the theater, but we can give it away or sell it to someone who would enjoy it.

From a purely monetary aspect, the home theater is the wiser investment, so lets put money aside. What makes the traditional movie house better than watching the movie at home?

For one, sometimes I do just like being in a large audience. However, these days that is being severely overshadowed by my desire to avoid people who text message, leave their ringers on, and talk. In addition to this, I’ve noticed that to combat noisy audiences some theaters turn up the volume of the movies, couple that with the not-quite-soundproofed walls and all the sudden my quiet drama is being invaded by the action film next door.

Seeing movies sooner. A movie tends to be in the theaters anywhere from 3 to 18 months before it comes out on DVD, though very few go longer than a year anymore, and for others it is entirely dependent on holiday shopping seasons. But, on the other hand, in general, a movie that fails to do well at the boxoffice tends to get to DVD sooner. So the seeing movies sooner reason really only applies to movies that are going to do well, or movies that are going to get held for some reason (Christmas movies that open at Christmas tend to go to DVD the following Christmas regardless of their boxoffice take). Really though, the only reason I desire to see a movie sooner in the theater is so that I don’t have to spend the next six months trying to avoid spoilers on the internet and elsewhere until I see it.

So where does all this leave us?

The wife and I like the AMC theater chain. The main reason for this is that they run a special, see a movie on Friday, Saturday or Sunday before noon and its cheap. It was $5, now up to $6 with recent price increases. At $6 and generally being less hungry or apt to snack before noon, a $12 showing of a movie is worth it. Even if we snacked the usual nighttime snacks it would be just $27.00 if we both went for the full Clip’s Picks deal, and that is much closer to the approximate $23 we’d spend buying the DVD and making our own snacks. Close enough that it doesn’t bother me… much.

Overall though, except for the occasional “must see” movie, I just don’t envision myself going to the movies much anymore. Hollywood and movie theaters have priced themselves right out of my casual budget and wedged themselves nicely into the “once in a while” budget. If they raise the prices any more, they’ll shift into the “almost never” budget, and beyond that is the realm of “when I win the lottery” and “not on your life”. If they want my money on opening weekend, something has to change…

Hello 2008!

Random Thoughts

Last night we said goodbye to 2007, and good riddance. Not that 2007 did anything wrong, but come on, who wants some old year hanging around when we’ve got a nice shiny new year sitting right here!

Looking back 365 days at the welcoming of 2007, lets examine how my predictions and premonitions worked out…

First, I’m still using electronic billing for everything but my garbage collection, so I can look forward to another smooth date transition as again I won’t be writing enough checks to accidentally keep writing the wrong year on.

Next, I said I’d eat better… and I have… a little… I get salads when we eat out sometimes, and I’m eating more fruits and veggies. Overall, I’ve shed ten pounds that I’ve managed to keep off in the last year. Yeah, I’m still pushing the needle on the scale over to the “hefty” side, but it doesn’t go as far as it used to. Another few years of this and I’ll be positively svelte!

Onward… MMOs and computers… I did actually cave and got new PCs for the wife and I. I did buy the WoW expansion, and messed around with it. I played the Vanguard beta, and it sucked. I bought a Wii. I bought a 360. And I am, in fact, pretty much done with the PC as a gaming platform, sort of. I canceled all my MMO subscriptions and nothing on the horizon is blowing my skirt up. I apply to every beta that I can and I participate in those trying to help them make a better game, but in the end they all end up not interesting me enough for me to make the buy. The MMO I’m most playing right now is actually Urban Dead which is about as far from WoW as you can get without actually dialing up a BBS to play TradeWars 2002 (which is officially 6 years ago now… where is my intergalactic trade federation? huh? when I see a Presidential candidate address that issue, I’ll know who to vote for). For my fantasy gaming fix, my bi-weekly group has continued to meet and our campaigns progress quite nicely. They may not be massively multiplayer, but they sure are more fun than the current slate of MMOs.

Lots of superhero books did come out, almost all of them for established comic book characters, and I didn’t finish any of my own projects.

I said that the business front was “looking pretty good”, my exact words. The key word here turned out to be “looking”. I’ve come to realize that a person whom I have always believed was only smoke and mirrors is in fact only smoke and mirrors, in a manner of speaking, his machinations and manipulations in the end are much ado about nothing. I keep pressing the Escape key, but I’m still here.

So… what does 2008 look like from here, the first day of the year?

S.O.S.

Same Old Shit, ladies and gentlemen. I suspect in 2008 I will write even less checks (garbage company might start taking credit soon), I will manage to drop another ten pounds (at least), I will continue to play betas but not buy MMOs (I’m pretty sure all the games I might buy will get delayed to 2009 anyway), I will play console games (the ones I already play and new ones coming out all the time, why, the Christmas season alone has produced a good eight or nine games I don’t own that I want to play), there will be more superhero books and business will continue to “look good” while actually being anything but (although, this year as new budgets are approved and hiring goes into higher gears I’m actually working with a recruiter, the only one recently to actually get me interviews).

New resolutions? I resolve to actually rake the yard (provided Georgia lifts its burn ban so I can dispose of the leaves myself, bagging sucks). I resolve to finish building the bar (we have the cabinets, now we just need to put them in and make the counter tops). And I resolve to stop buying crap I don’t need (seriously, I spend too much money on stuff when I should focus on convincing other people to buy it and then lend it to me). I’d make more resolutions, but then I will feel worse when I fail to do them all.

Oh, and if somehow Fred Thompson actually becomes President, I’ll eat my hat… and then I’ll begin weekly posts about how he should just round up Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell, Jack Ryan, Ray Levoi, John McClane, and the Law & Order guys and go straighten out all this Middle East stuff. But that is the extent of my campaign promises…

So, welcome 2008! Please don’t hit me in the junk!

Goodbye 2007

Random Thoughts

This is where we look back at the year and see how we did…

… or not.

In the grand scheme of things, unless I have set in motion unseen events that will lead to the destruction of mankind or its salvation, not much of anything important happened to me personally in 2007. Although, I dare say, this year, this blog has taken on a more cohesive shape, and I hope to continue that and expand that to the root website in the coming year.

All in all, in my corner of the world, things have been smooth sailing.

Goodbye 2007…

Tis the Season

Random Thoughts

Or perhaps it isn’t.

I can’t help but think that something is missing this year. Of course, as with every year since her passing, I miss my mother. She really enjoyed Christmas time. And I have lamented before about the lack of Christmas TV programming, specifically It’s A Wonderful Life being shown nine million times on seventy channels.

But this year, there is something else missing… It seems that even though people dislike thinking of Christmas as a commercial holiday full of spending money, they’ve also managed to suck everything but the commerce out of it. I was at a mall last week and they weren’t playing holiday music, not even the old classical stuff, and they didn’t have much in the way of decorations at all. A few stores had up some bows or snowflakes, but the mall itself was clear of holiday cheer. The grocery stores all look the same as they do any other day of the year, as do the Target’s and Wal-Marts. Best Buy has adopted a gift logo for general use, so even though it might appear they’ve got “present” decorations up, it is really just their every day stuff. At restaurants, nothing indicates that any celebration might be going on, except maybe the occasional wreath.

Luckily, many of my neighbors, myself included, put out lights and other decorations… but many is less than half, and once I leave the neighborhood it becomes a rare occurrence to see anything in the spirit of the season that isn’t directly selling something.

Lots of people I know say they are having trouble getting into the spirit, and to me at least its easy to see why.

I suppose it might be considered insensitive to want to see more celebration of my chosen holiday… but isn’t it also insensitive to want to see less celebration of someone else’s chosen holiday? I really don’t care… I want to see more of everyone celebrating however they choose to celebrate it.

Anyway… I’m off to observe my holiday traditions… a bunch of nothing today, followed by a late night snacky supper (sandwiches with all the fixin’s), a fitful sleep, breakfast and presents over at Dad’s house in the morning, and a misfits family Christmas dinner at night.

So here’s to you, in all that you do, whatever you are up to. Merry Christmas!

Enjoy!

Movie Reviewing Goodness

Random Thoughts

You might notice that there are more movie reviews lately (and more coming) and less game design talk. There are a few reasons for that, and I thought I’d take a moment to address them…

One. Its that time of year. Christmas, for me, is always a big movie watching season. Blame Hollywood. They stack the deck, both for revenue and for Oscars, putting lots of good stuff on the screen all at once. I hate them for it. But, I still go, because as much as I hate the price of going (more on that another day), the big screen experience is still something I really enjoy. A good crowd (as opposed to a message texting, cell phone yapping, movie explaining, annoying crowd) does enhance a film. To me anyway. So yeah, I’ll be going to the movies once or twice a week for the next few weeks.

Two. Its that time of year. This sounds like a repeat, but I need to stress that Hollywood wants your money. All the good DVDs all come out at Christmas too, just in time for gift giving. So many will be bought, or gotten as gifts, and with TV shows cycling down for the winter break (even moreso with the writer’s strike this year) I’ve got time.

Three. I’m not gaming a whole lot. I’m playing Rock Band, Dead Rising, the occasional game from XBox Live (I’m addicted to Puzzle Quest)… I play Urban Dead on the web, Conquer Club, I occasionally drop in to Guild Wars (got it for $9.99 on Black Friday), and spend a little time in a few betas that I am in, some I can’t talk about and some I can. I’ve just dropped out of all the MMO gaming I used to do. It got too expensive. Although, I am considering the Sony Station Pass thingy since I’d get access to a whole bunch of games, some of which might actually be worth playing.

Four. Since I’m not gaming a whole lot, my thoughts haven’t been focused around game design. Yes, I’m still working on my own wonderful game, and its actually beginning to see a foundation, but its a long way from daylight yet and I don’t want to talk about it anymore until I have at least something I can say is complete and functions.

Five… hmm… can’t think of one. Cool.

So, four reasons. Anyway, until things change, you’ll probably be seeing alot of movie and/or book reviews. I do want to get back to more varied content, and I will. Just bear with me.

A Book a Week

Random Thoughts

Some people are a little crazy… other people are freakin’ nuts! This time Kevin may be falling into the latter.

The idea is to read 52 books in 52 weeks, a book a week for a year. And you know, its not really that the idea is all that outlandish. I mean, when I was riding downtown every work day and spending two or three hours on the bus between home and work and back again, I was probably on that pace. Of course, I work from home now pretty much nine days out of ten, and reading time has been given over to sleep and game time. But maybe I need something like this to give me a gentle kick in the butt.

I won’t start now though. I’ll wait until January and start the year fresh. Likely I’m also going to choose to do 26 books in 52 weeks, a book every two weeks, because I know that unless I throw in some hundred pagers like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, I’m not likely to do it. And I know myself too well. If I fall behind a few weeks, I’ll give up.

So, January 1st, I’ll start my new reading regiment. We’ll see how it works out.

Ratings Systems

Random Thoughts

I decided that I wanted to start rating things. When I review movies or games or TV shows or the lives of people I meet or customer service or my own stupidity, I want to have one of those goofy scales so that something can be a “9 on the ProbablyNot scale”. But I can’t just arbitrarily slap one on.

Or more to the point, I needed to make sure my scale was absolutely arbitrary.

First off comes the symbol. There are the overused stars and thumbs or even lawn chairs. I wanted mine to be confusing, so I looked long and hard for a symbol to properly represent the site but also to completely misrepresent the scale itself. Eventually, I settled on the wide spread “not” symbol, as seen on road signs and warning labels everywhere.

A Lone Not

With the symbol decided, I next needed a range. Typically these ranges go to 3, 4, 5 or 10. Each of these makes logical sense, so as with my symbol, I needed to make sure my range made no sense at all. Being that my name is Jason and thanks to a particular slasher movie franchise it will forever be associated with the number 13, and I happen to like the number 13, I am going to go with 13. Oddly enough, this actually will help reduce some confusion, especially when it comes to reviewing video games. Most game reviewers use a scale from 1 to 10, and since 70% is passing is most educational establishments, people (insane people) have come to expect that a 7 out of 10 means that it is just barely passing, and anything from a 6.9999999999 down to 1 is failure. Stupid, yes, but also completely understandable to magazines looking to sell issues and to get exclusive previews of new games. So many game sites and magazines actually rate games from 7 to 10, with lower scores being reserved for items that are complete and utter crap. Back to my scale, confusion will be lessened because a “middle of the road” score on a 13 point scale is 7. So game makers can feel good in getting a 70% on my scale, as long as they realize that I give out grades up to 130% for awesomeness.

But a straight linear scale would be too easy, so two elements are added.

First, on my 13 point scale, 7 will indeed be an “average score”. What a 7 means is that whatever I am reviewing was not a complete waste of time. If I am reviewing a movie and give it a 7, that means that after two hours I felt like I’d just spent two hours, but not wasted two hours. Enjoyable, but nothing to get excited about. Being on the low end of the scale is not always a bad thing. While 7 will be middle of the road, the “worst” score to get will be a 3. A 3 means that this thing is godawful bad, and had no redeeming qualities. To score a 2 or a 1 on the scale, your product must be so horrifically bad that it actually turns a corner and becomes something I will actually share my pain with others about. The kind of shitty movie or game that I insist other people must experience to truely understand the depths of the miserable quality contained therein.

Secondly, even with a confusing symbol and an unusual scale, the review score still isn’t odd enough for me. So I’m going to also steal an idea from the ESRB (the people who rate video games for content) and the MPAA (the Motion Picture Arbitrary Assessment, or something like that) and include verbiage for why the score is what it is, but make sure those words are vague enough or strangely worded so that no matter the rating you might still want to see the thing I’m reviewing just so you can get it.

As an example, recently I saw the movie The Mist, which I might have given, had this system existed at the time:

11 out of 13 nots
for Creepiness, Social Commentary, Religious Fanaticism and Clever use of Dog Food.

All reviews will be presented with the rating first followed by a more in depth write up. In depth write ups will likely contain spoilers.

Keeping up with a rating system can be a chore, so we’ll see how long I stick with it. I might get bored and give it up, or not… who knows…

Oh, the THINKS you can think!

Random Thoughts

I have always been a dreamer, and when it came to Dr. Seuss, while part of me even now holds a special place for his final work “Oh, the places you’ll go!”, my all time favorite is “Oh, the THINKS you can think!” I suppose my imagination and all the thinks I can think is why I enjoy fantasy and science fiction so much, all of the magic and technology sets my brain sparking. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I were a touch older, just a decade or two, and have had to have lived without the things I have lived with. By today’s standards, even what I grew up with seems like the dark ages. Life without cell phones and the Internet probably seems unbelievable to people younger than me, as much as life without multiplexes and cable television would be strange to me. Every day, in every way, it is like we are living in the future.

I’ve seen laptop computers and palmtop computers, I’ve seen portable devices and ebook readers, but Amazon’s new Kindle, to me, is another one of those leaps, like I’m staring at something that has fallen out of a rip in the space time continuum. The future right now.

We have six five shelf bookcases in our house, and four smaller ones. By width of the shelves we probably have one hundred feet of books, but likely more than that as some of those shelves are two paperbacks deep and double stacked, books laying across the top where we could find room to jam them in. Working in computers, I’m not really surprised to know that all of those could be digitized and stored on a thumb drive, but somehow the idea that all of those books could be purchased, stored and read wirelessly on a device the size of one of those books just makes my head momentarily spin.

I’m sure people will say that nothing will replace the feel, the smell, the experience of books, and to a degree I agree. I’ve got two shelves of children’s books for the children, nieces and nephews that I don’t yet have. I don’t think an electronic device can replace the book you share with a child, at least until they come up with the Kindle 2 with two color screens to better emulate an open book. But outside of that, I think of carrying books with me on the bus as I travel to work, or back to my days of lugging heavy texts around the high school halls and across the college campus and I know that an electronic book from the future would have been a welcome replacement for the weight and the hassle.

Of course, no advancement of technology can come without its own share of pitfalls. The voracity with which my wife and I devour books these days, we’d be bankrupt in no time thanks to the ease at which we could purchase books. Owning such a thing would definitely be a test of will. I suppose we’d be okay as long as we retain the option to not store credit card information on the account. One click purchasing is an innovation I think we’d all be better off not having.

That said… I still want one.

Friday isn`t for the faint of heart

Random Thoughts

The day after Thanksgiving has become known as Black Friday. I’ve said it before, I go shopping on this day. The second reason I go is for some great deals. I’m not the camp outside all night type, so I never get the $100 TVs and things of that nature, but I’m more than happy to take advantage of DVDs under $5 and other such deals to help take the bite out of holiday spending.

The main reason I go out though is that I am, especially during the holiday season, an avid people watcher. I don’t do it as often as I used to, but every now and then I’ll head to the mall and wander around, or find a nice place to sit, and just watch people. The holiday season is great for this, largely because they are so focused on shopping that people rarely catch you watching but also because of that focus they are so interesting to watch. How people deal with crowds and lines and limited quantities, misprinted ads, misunderstood special prices and getting around from here to there and back again. It is a smorgasboard of idiosyncratic behavior of people at their best and their worst, and the two sides of every person struggling from moment to moment over which will win at any given obstacle.

The day after Thanksgiving, to me, is officially the “Christmas Season” and I love me some Christmas. If you do decide to brave the shops this Friday, do everyone a favor… every half hour or so, stop, take in a deep breath, exhale slowly and relax. One missed deal isn’t going to ruin Christmas. If it is, well, you’ve probably got far more problems than the wit and wisdom of a blog will ever be able to solve. Seek professional help.