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The Wish List

Reviews

I really enjoyed the Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer, so when I browsing through Barnes & Nobles’ “Books under $3” deal a few months back, I picked up The Wish List for $1.

The basic plot is this: a girl, who was in the midst of being bad after having done a number of bad things in her life, dies after doing something good, which winds up with her having a fifty-fifty read on the good-evil-ometer. So since neither Heaven nor Hell can take her just yet, she is allowed to go back to Earth and help out someone who needs help. If she succeeds, she goes to heaven; if she fails, she goes to hell. And while Heaven agrees to let her make her own way, Hell cheats and sends someone to stop her… the spirit of the man who did her in. When she gets to Earth, two years have past and she ends up having to help a man complete some items of his wish list before he shuffles off to the afterlife himself.

Okay, so its not so basic. But it was a good read. I thoroughly enjoyed the tale as she, Meg, deals with the man she has to help. I guess with this book Mr. Colfer hops over on to my “good author” list, which means if I see his name, I’ll probably enjoy it.

They ARE out to get you!

Gaming

One big topic of discussion when it comes to any MMO game is its “death penalty”. Mostly this is because people want to know, up front, what’s going to happen when they are too stupid to live, but the other side of this is that most MMOs are specifically designed to kill you.

Its the one thing I find lacking in online games as oppose to the pen and paper games I enjoy with my friends. Yeah, Brian is actually out to kill us too, but he’s generally nicer about it so that at least in part its our own damn fault. But in online games, there are so many encounters that get designed to be killers, to the point where playing a game is more of an exercise in triage than an adventure. You can hear it in the uber guilds as they lay out their tactics in which they are actually calculating losses. “When the first tank goes down…” Not IF the tank goes down, WHEN.

To a degree, this is acceptable, when you are leading an army against a god, you should have some fatalities, but this attitude leaks over into groups as well, and sometimes you can even see that it leaks into the developers as they design expansions. Of course, the developers may just be reacting to player tactics.

But, is introducing permanent death and encouraging player fear of death the answer?

Well, yes. But not alone. The best thing about real life is that not everything kills you, even muggers. Sometimes you just get hurt, incapacitated and left alone. This should happen more in games. Why is everything not only out to get me, but wants to kill me and lick my bones clean? Why can’t some of them be happy with knocking me unconsious, stealing my money and leaving me pantsless in the woods?

I think designers really need to get more creative with defeat. Death shouldn’t be the only answer.

Stuff on the Net

Stuff on the Net

I keep watching this and it just gets better every time I see it. Good fan films are awesome.

Lum the Mad clued me in on the next big thing in Chinese online games. The funny thing is, while this is the first game that comes right out and says that the goal is to be just like everybody else, that idea is not new… every MMORPG seems to follow that mantra.

You know, when you go to the movies, the policy is that they don’t sell tickets to R rated movies to kids under 17, however it is not the law. But some government stooges would like to make selling “mature” themed video games to minors illegal. Support better parenting and stop the government from doing it for them.

So those are the things that stuck with me this week…

Gangsta Scouts

Random Thoughts

I’m riding MARTA minding my own business when three young African-American males board the train. These men were garbed in traditional “street” attire: pants hanging low, shoes with the laces out, Starter jackets, baseball caps on at angles other than forward or backward. One sat and two stood. And then, they spoke:

Gangsta_1: Yo dawg! Check it. I gotta get home an’ get me some of them cookies, yo!
Gangsta_2: What kind you got?
G1: I got me some thin mints just chilling in the freezer waitin’ for me, yo.
G2: Yeah.. thin mints are da bomb yo. But I didn’t get none this time round.
G1: What you get, dawg?
G2: Listen to this, yo. I got me a couple of boxes of Do-Si-Dos.
Gangsta_3: Man, them peanut butter cookies are good. Damn good.
G2: I know, yo. I gots to find me a way to order more.
G3: I think my sister has some friends who be sellin’ cookies still.
G1: Get some thin mints, yo. And Tagalongs. That shit is crazy good!
G2: Damn, I forgot about them. Shit, I think I could eat nuthin’ but Girl Scout Cookies.
G3: True dat.
G1: No doubt.

The doors opened at the next station and the three young men left, and as they did, one of them said, “Man, I’m hungry now, yo. I don’t think I can wait until my lunch break to eat my cupcakes.”

As the train pulled away from the station, most of the passengers, me included, burst into laughter.

1st to Die

Reviews

At the urging of my wife, I read 1st to Die by James Patterson. I’d heard alot about Mr. Patterson over the years, and I’d really enjoyed ‘Kiss the Girls’ and ‘Along Came a Spider’ as movies, so I figured what the heck…

Its not a bad book. Quite good in fact, however, for me I was left feeling a little… underwhelmed. There didn’t seem to be a twist in the book that really caught me by surprise. If, by chance, something did come up a little unexpected, that item would telegraph the next few items.

I also found the four women main characters to be a bit… touchy feely. Maybe lots of women are like that, but not very many I have known.

Anyway, I do recommend it. Its a very interesting plot, and if you aren’t as much of a detective as I, it might catch you unawares.

Programming Consistency

Random Thoughts

Sometimes I just feel like if I could get my hands on certain programmers I would slap them silly. Or perhaps kick the living crap out of them.

I’m working with this legacy application. In one table there is a column that is a string. Its an ID number stored with leading zeroes, like: 005, 016, 548. In another table, the same ID is stored as an integer, no leading zeroes. And they are key values in both tables. I am not allowed to correct the tables due to the effect it would have on existing applications.

Its so irritating to have to constantly convert back and forth due to some long ago idiot’s lack of planning. But what really irks me is that these tables were created about six years ago. The guy who did it hasn’t worked here for five years. In all that time, all the expansions and upgrades and applications, no one has been allowed to fix it. This mismatch of data, over five years, has probably resulted in hundreds, thousands of lines of additional code, to the point where fixing it will now cost the company a small fortune to fix. So they don’t fix it.

So, here I am, writing a couple extra lines of code per function, every page of code, probably three or four hours per week of my time, because one guy six years ago made a stupid error.

Ugh.

Love Monkey

Reviews

While the show Love Monkey was on, I praised it. I dug the show and its stars, I even dug the music they put on it. It was a fun quirky show that I just could not get enough of. I found out that it was based on a book by the same name, so after the show got canned, I saw the book in the bookstore and decided to pick it up.

A while back I reviewed “On The Road” by Jack Kerouac. Basically, I thought it sucked. Sadly, I feel pretty much the same about Love Monkey. The TV show was great, but this book is… its rambling diatribe on things that just aren’t particularly funny to anyone but the author.

In the show, Tom Farrell worked in the music industry, had a tight group of friends, and was smitten by a woman he worked with. In the book, Tom works for a tabloid, has a loose group of acquaintences, and is completely obsessed with a woman who works for the same tabloid but rarely actually sees.

Much like my trip through “On The Road” gave me a few personal insights and new outlooks, “Love Monkey” gave me a dozen of laughs. At 368 pages, a dozen of laughs is pitiful. This book just… it… I… ah… jeez, I’m drawing a blank and I just keep coming back to “sucks”.

Wrath of the Dragon God

Reviews

Long ago when I saw the first preview for the Dungeons & Dragons movie, I got excited. First off, I love D&D, and second, it had Jeremy Irons, Bruce Payne, and Thora Birch. It looked like they were making a real class film. Somehow I managed not to know that Justin Whalin and Marlon Wayans were actually the main heroes of the film until I sat down in the theater. Wow, this movie sucked! It was so horribly campy. At least the special effects weren’t bad, and the scenes with the skies filled with hundreds of dragons were kinda neat.

Last year, when I heard they were making a sequel, I groaned. I actually looked into the film and found that while Bruce Payne had returned as Damodar, they’d managed to fill the rest of the cast with people I’d never heard of. I decided to pass. However, later a friend told me that it wasn’t that bad, it was even good. So, I dropped it into the Netflix queue and waited for it to be released.

This weekend, I finally got the movie and watched it. About the best review I can give is: At least Justin Whalin and Marlon Wayans weren’t in it.

First off, the special effects were not good. Ever watch TV shows like Charmed? The computer generated stuff looks fine, but when they put it together with the live action it doesn’t mesh well. They don’t touch in the right places, actions and reactions aren’t timed correctly. It just makes you increasingly aware that the person and the monster were never actually in the same room.

Second, and this is both a praise and a slam, this movie was exactly like a gaming session of D&D. The good part is that the story elements were pretty cool, it was like I was flipping through one of the old AD&D campaign modules reading about the kingdom and the towns, all the people and the history. The bad part… the dialogue. It was like someone had literally set a tape recorder down on the table while a group of guys played this module. When one of the characters died, I could almost here his player saying, “What? You’re going to bury me? Come on! There has to be a temple around here when I can be resurrected! Come on! You know what? Screw you guys!” and then he takes his Cheetoes and Mountain Dew and goes home.

This is one of those movies that seems to have so much potential going for it, but loses because the budget is a little too small and the script writer can’t lay off the wooden trite dialogue.

I think for the first time ever on one of my web reviews I’m actually going to say… Stay away from this movie. Its just not worth it.

State of Fear

Reviews

This book, State of Fear by Michael Crichton, scares the crap out of me, and its not even a horror novel. The topic of the book? Global Warming. Now, it is a fiction novel, detailing a fictitous lawsuit against the EPA and a tangled web of espionage and adventure as the lawyer of a billionaire environmentalist gets pulled into a crazy plot to engineer difinative proof that global warming is a dire threat to all of humanity.

But why does it scare me? There is a point in most people’s lives when they finally come to an understanding of just how little we, the human race, really know about how our world works. And I am not talking about just a personal realization, because I had that many years ago when I discovered that I did not know everything. I am talking about how much science is going on and how little actual certainty there is about what they are studying, especially when it comes to complex systems like global climate.

The book reads like any other thriller type novel, but right at the beginning there is an author’s note that states “references to real people, institutions, and organizations that are documented in footnotes are accurate.” And the paperback copy of the book contains a 32 page bibliography. So while reading the book, I didn’t take everything Michael Crichton chose to spoon feed me. I looked up the books and articles and read some of them myself, and I read others not used in the book, and in doing this research I ultimately came to the same conclusions about the material as he did when it came to writing his book: the media and politicians exaggerate the hell out of conjecture and dish it up as solid fact. When you read a bunch of the data, you come to realize that it is very possible that we might one day have another ice age, or that we might have a global drought with searing heat, but that we cannot conclusively say which or what is going to happen because these is alot of data out there and it points in every conceivable direction and we do not know all the variables yet. Global warming could be very real, but right now we have evidence that supports it and refutes it, in fact if you restrict your view to the data that global warming supporters throw out you would be lead to believe that the planet is actually cooling. And what really gets to the core of why this book scares me is that the world is making policies based on conclusions that are not fully realized, that cannot be fully realized.

I highly recommend this book, and I also recommend reading up on what is really going on in the world. Do not settle for what the TV tells you.