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Last.fm

Stuff on the Net

I’ve been a user of Last.fm for quite a while now.  Originally I would just hit it up occasionally to find a band or song and listen to it and maybe find some new music I’d never heard before.  Then, when the wife and I started having guests over to the house, either for parties or dinners, I put a PC up in the kitchen and dining room area where we could pick an artist and have random selections play in the back ground while we cooked, ate and hung out.

Then something happened.  With the idea that a television show could showcase and promote music through the site (something I still think every TV show should consider), I found myself spending entire work days on Last.fm, winding my way through genres of music.

So, I finally took the plunge and actually signed up for a free account there so I can actually store favorites and all that stuff.  This means, of course, I now have a profile there.  If you happen to also use the site, feel free to add me as a friend, and if you want to, let me know your profile so I can see what you are listening to.

Bottle Shock

Reviews

10 out of 13 nots.
for a little comedy, a little drama, and a little wine

Based around the infamous blind wine tasting in 1976 that has come to be known as the Judgement of Paris, this movie follows a British man, Steven Spurrier (played by Alan Rickman), living in Paris as he heads to California to find wines for his tasting.  His intent is to draw notice to himself, his wine shop and his Academie du Vin by having a showdown between French and California wines to celebrate the American Bi-Centennial and France’s involvement in the origin of the American Nation.  He expects the French to win.

But the movie isn’t just about the one man and his wine tasting… it is also about the people of the California vineyards.  Specifically the family of the one vineyards in particular and some of the people around them.

There is nothing really surprising here.  If you know anything about the 1976 wine tasting, you know what happens, but all of the actors here (the aforementioned Alan Rickman, Chris Pine, Bill Pullman, Rachael Taylor and Freddy Rodriguez) put in great performances and make the film an enjoyable journey to the inevitable end.

It is not for everyone, to be sure, but I liked it.  It may be hard to find at the theater though, as it is only opening in limited release.

Ptolemy’s Gate

Reviews

Every once in a while, something you intend to do gets away from you.  Back in 2006, I picked up and read The Amulet of Samarkand and I really enjoyed it.  Like a grim and gritty version of other books about magic with a kid for a main character, it just felt more… real… than things like the Harry Potter books.  Later that year I did read the second book in the series, The Golem’s Eye, and I enjoyed it as well.  I even picked up the third book, but somehow, for some reason, I never got around to reading it.

Well, I finally did.  Ptolemy’s Gate is the final third of the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud.  In this tale we find ourselves back with Nathaniel, a few years older and stronger, but perhaps not wiser.  He’s kept poor Bartimaeus enslaved and trapped on Earth so that his essence has become quite weak.  Meanwhile, Kitty has gone into hiding and taken up learning magic because she desperately wants to talk to Bartimaeus and the only way she can think to do so is to learn to summon him herself.  War rages in the Americas and the commoners of England are beginning to get out of control.  The magicians are losing their grip…

And I won’t go any further, because it would spoil everything.  This book makes for a perfect end to the trilogy, wrapping everything up quite satisfactorily… for me as the reader, some of the characters don’t make out so well in the end.  The three books together make up 1500 pages of excellent storytelling.  I look forward to new works from Mr. Stroud in the future.

Swing Vote

Reviews

10 out of 13 nots.
for good clean (dirty) political humor

Swing Vote is the extreme representation of the idea that every vote counts.  Two candidates are running for President, one has 266 electoral votes and the other has 267.  The only state not reporting is New Mexico, which is a swing state (meaning the winner of the popular vote gets all the electoral votes), and in fact it has all come down to one tiny town with only a few hundred registered voters.  Even more improbable, it has come down to one single vote, which due to machine error did not get counted and by law is allowed to be recast in ten days time.

Of course, the identity of the voter, Bud Johnson, which is supposed to remain secret, gets out and the media, as well as both Presidential campaigns, descend on the town of Texico, NM, and the absurdity begins.

The most prevalent commentary of the film is that politicians will say anything to win, that they try to court the most voters, even if they don’t believe in the ideas it takes to get their votes.  Narrowed down to a single vote, the normal blurry understanding of what a candidate is saying becomes very clear.  And the candidates, and their staff, change directions at the drop of a hat in order to try to get this one single deciding vote.  Imagine, for instance, a man who had always been for lightening immigration laws and allowing more people to come to the US suddenly stating that if elected he will work to close our borders and tighten laws, all because one man made an offhand comment about how he lost his job to cut backs and Mexicans taking the jobs for lower pay.  These flip-flops of policy are also the source of the biggest laughs in the film, as they unveil new commercials to try to show this one voter that they are the right man for the job.

But, to counterpoint the humor of the worst in politics, the movie also includes a heavy dose of people wanting to be better people.  From the candidates, to the reporters, to the voter himself, at times every person is faced with realizing they may have gotten caught up in something and they have to decide if they want to just keep going with the flow or if they want to stand against the current.

As for the casting of the movie… Kevin Costner always plays a down on his luck everyman pretty well and so does just fine as Bud Johnson, and Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper make damn fine Presidential candidates, while Nathan Lane and Stanley Tucci pull off excellent campaign managers.  Madeline Carroll is also excellent as Bud’s daughter, the true heart and soul of the film.  Heck, even Judge Reinhold does well as one of the Bud’s best friends.

Overall, Swing Vote is a good film.  It isn’t perfect, but it does manage to get its message (that every vote counts) across enjoyably, and without too much flag waving and “America is the greatest nation on Earth” rhetoric.

Somewhere Between Impossible and Impossibly Easy

Gaming

This month over at Man Bytes Blog’s Round Table, the topic is game difficulty.

When I try to think of examples of games that I played that are either “too hard” or “too easy”, I usually wind up going way back to the King’s Quest and Hero’s Quest series of games by Sierra.  Of all the games I have ever played, I think that King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human is probably the most difficult game I ever played.  Not because it was really all that hard to figure out or challenging, but because the game used a typed interface and required keywords, which were not provided to you.  If you wanted to pick up a duck and put it in a pot it might take a good thirty minutes or more to discover that you needed to “get pot”, then “hold pot” and finally walk to the duck and “put duck in pot”.  It was, in a way, very similar to the maddening “open eyes” command you needed to execute at the beginning of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text game, only it happened a lot more frequently.  On the other end of the spectrum, Hero’s Quest employed an almost entirely mouse driven system.  In fact, to win the game all you really needed to do was walk into a room and drag the mouse across the screen over every object and see if the cursor changed.  If it did, you clicked on it.

It is those two ends of the spectrum that determines how much effort I am willing to put into any game.  If a game’s control system is so obtuse that even when I am sure I know the answer I can’t seem to actually solve the puzzle, or if I walk into a room and it is covered in highlighted objects and glowing question marks and exclamation points, I lose all interest in playing.

This even applies to MMOs… when I first tried out EVE Online, it was clearly an example of the first.  There were no tutorials on the UI, nor was there much in the way of any sort of quests or missions.  I ended up doing the things in game that were the easiest to figure out (mining) and was bored out of my skull.  I quit.  Later, I would return after they added in a number of tutorials and more missions, and it has gotten much better.  On the other end you have World of Warcraft where if it isn’t marked by a giant floating exclamation point there is almost no reason to investigate at all, and once you have investigated the exclamation point you are rewarded with a bullet list of things to do before you return to the giant question mark.

To me, from the point of view of having to figure things out without struggling and not being given “the” path, I understand why I played EverQuest for so long.  In that game you entered the world with a note saying to visit your guild master.  You did, and in most cases were rewarded with your first quest, where they asked you to do something, but you weren’t given a bullet list.  Learning that talking to people got you quests, you would then talk to other folks, some of which had quests, and some of which just added flavor to the game.  As you traveled, you talked to more folks… visiting an inn?  Talk to all seven NPCs while you are there.  Of course, some people played the game in such a manner that they felt required to talk to every single NPC in a town, running themselves ragged and making detailed maps and notes to be sure they had talked to absolutely everyone.  I never did that, I just talked to the NPCs as I found them.

Of course, EverQuest is not like that any more.  Now they have co-opted WoW’s features so that new quests do give you a quest log bullet list of highlights.  You don’t even need to bother reading the quest, and if the NPC doesn’t have the appropriate level range in the tag over his head, you can just avoid them altogether.

I can see the argument that some people use against EQ, in that its quests didn’t properly lead you from one area to the next.  Breadcrumbs.  But in newer games, I feel like they’ve got so far as to bypass breadcrumbs and just install a rail system.  They don’t suggest I should try the next town so much as they point all my quests to the next town and if I don’t go there I won’t have anything to do.  The problem is that often I would like to go some place that is personally more interesting, but I get there in WoW and find there is nothing to do because I went the “wrong” way.

Outside of MMOs, whenever I play a single player game, I always feel that I need a good strong narrative to keep me going.  I enjoy Half-Life 2 and Bioshock because as I progress of location to locations, even though I know I am on a rail and there is no other way to go, the story and the action keep me wanting to go that way.  Then I pick a game like Lost: Via Domus and I barely played into the game at all… I just didn’t want to go the direction the story wanted me to go.  I want to explore the beach while the game wants me to run into the jungle, and just as they finally manage to make me interested in the jungle they are now forcing me to go back to the beach.  Someone is shooting at me and I want to fight them, but I’m not allowed to, whereas in HL2, someone is shooting at me, I’m not supposed to fight them and the I don’t want to fight them, I want to run.

Anyway, this post has been enough of a rambling mess, so I am just going to stop now…  I’m not even sure I managed to cover the Round Table subject…

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Summer Knight

Reviews

As is evidences by my reviews of the three previous books, I like the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher.  So it should be no surprise that I enjoyed book number four, Summer Knight.

Although, I must admit, after reading about an angry wizard, werewolves, and vampires, an impending war between faeries just didn’t pull me in as well as the previous books.  Butcher’s concept of faeries living in the Nevernever is alien to me.  Sure, he’s touched on them before in the earlier books, but I’ve never encountered them outside of Butcher even close to the way he uses them.

Still, an enjoyable read.

The Instance and The Bench

Gaming

Reading this post over at Clockwork Gamer got me to thinking about why raiding in most recent MMOs never excited me.  Back in my days of EverQuest, when I would lead raids, I often would take anyone and everyone who showed up.  Some of my “raids” were silly, intended to train people for raiding.  I took five groups into the Mines of Nurga (before they revamped the zone) and made them form up groups, main tanks, pullers, heal team, etc.  Just like a huge raid, but everyone was around level 30.  Many of those same raiders would show up later when I started doing Epic raids, smaller hits for pieces to Epic Quests.  Places like The Hole, City of Mist, etc.  Of course, I also lead some dragon raids, and some Hate and Fear, Chardok, a few bits in Velious, and even some Planes of Power raids.  It was all great fun.

The only raid I never got off the ground was the Plane of Sky.  The reason for this is that the islands in Sky gave out random numbers of keys, and the zone had a very very long respawn time for most spawns.  In order to take a large raid to Sky, you needed to use complicated corpse summoning to get from island to island.  It was easier on a small raid, but small raids, due to the difficulty of the zone, needed to be very regimented, certain amounts of certain classes.  I’m sure its not so hard now.  Sky can probably be single grouped, or even done as a duo.  But “back in the day” it was much more difficult.

In EQ2 and WoW (and other games), raids are often (always) instances, with caps on how many people can go.  One thing I never like to do is bench people.  If a personal is capable of surviving the raid, I’ll take them… I mean, seriously, I did raids in EQ with 90 people.  Of course, in EQ2 and other more graphically intensive games, I couldn’t imagine 90 people being in the same place and having the game be even playable.  Even WoW can struggle.. just try going to the auction house in Ironforge. (I might be showing my age here… is the auction house in Ironforge still crowded?)

I seriously don’t like the idea of raid caps.  Having 25 people show up to fill 24 slots… I’d rather not.  Over in this thread at the Nerfbat forums, I put forth the following:

I’m all for removing hard caps on content. I realize that a developer may want to design his content to be optimally experienced by 5 people, or 25 people, but it really sucks as a player to keep running into the wall because I have 6, or 29, friends and we have to repeat content not just for the loot, but simply so people can experience it. Game devs should consider ways to remove hard caps and instead reward soft caps. Design the content for 5 people, but allow any number to go in, however have the reward scale upward as you approach the “optimal”. That way, people who want to min/max content for the best possible reward can do so, but also people who just want to play can experience it as well without having to jump through extra hoops just to play with their friends.

I’d love to see a game at least give that a shot.  And I wouldn’t even mind going back to the flagging model of EQ, where you could bring any number of people to the raid, but only X number would get the flag.  You’d still have to repeat the content, but at least you could repeat it with the entire raid group instead of playing musical chairs mix and matching your raiders in order to be able to do the raid with only X number of players.

Maybe.  Someday.  Perhaps.

The Dark Knight

Reviews

13 out of 13 nots
for being everything I wanted and more

When Chris Nolan relaunched Batman with Batman Begins, I immediately knew that the right team had been put in place.  While that film has some issues, the overall impact of it was fantastic.  With Nolan behind the camera and Christian Bale in front of it, they were creating something truly magic.

On the strength of that film I was excited when I heard about The Dark Knight.  Well, until they announced that Heath Ledger was going to be the Joker.  While I liked Ledger well enough, I hadn’t seen him do anything previously that lead me to believe that he could pull off the Joker.  This worry was allayed when early word started to leak out about his performance.  Then he died.

Having seen the film now, one element of the true tragedy of his death is that there will be many people who write off praise for his performance as sympathy for his having passed on.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  All of my early fears were put to rest and now I honestly feel that no one was more meant for this role than Heath, and now I am worried about what they will do with the franchise going forward.  Heath has left some enormously large shoes to fill in regards to this role.

Outside of Heath’s performance, every other actor also pulls off some fantastic work here.  I found every character to be fully believable in the world that Nolan has crafted.  And the story is no weak link either.  I literally spent a full third of the movie with my hand to my mouth in a futile attempt to prevent my breath from being taken away.  The most important aspect that this film holds is that it is not “Batman Begins 2”.  You do not need to have seen the first to understand the second.  Rather than being a sequel, The Dark Knight stands as a whole and complete story set within the same world as Batman Begins.

After leaving the theater and walking out to car, I said to the group I was with, “If there had previously existed only nine kinds of awesome in the world, this movie would be the tenth.”  Two days later, I still feel that and I am certain I will feel that way for some time to come.

If you have not already, see this film.

For Those About To Rock…

Gaming

Yesterday, Harmonix officially released the Features List and Set List for the upcoming Rock Band 2.

Hell fucking yeah!

Over the last few years, I have noticed that I am less and less excited for new games coming out.  But back in November of last year, Rock Band really knocked my socks off.  I had played some Guitar Hero before, but the style of the game (being stuck with their personas and all that) just left me less than thrilled.  Sure, it was fun to play sometimes, but only really fun when you had someone else in the room to play with.  When I got Rock Band, however, that changed.  With the fully customizable avatars and being able to play four people at a time AND do more than just play guitar, I finally got excited about a game.

We’ve had a few parties at the house, and I have gone to a few other parties, and Rock Band plays so well as a party game.  With four people able to play at once and easily being able to rotate people in and out, and especially with the big 102″ screen and the large room to play in, everyone really gets into it.  Its not the stand still staccato snoozefest that Guitar Hero always ended up being, with one or two people staring intently at the screen clacking away on the strum bar and tapping out colored notes.  This was a band, and bands rock!

Now I need to officially begin saving up my money so that Rock Band 2 can find its way into our home…

Harmonix… From Those About To Rock, We Salute You.