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13 Bullets

Reviews

I had previously read a trilogy by David Wellington, and the short version of that review is the first book was fantastic, the second was lacking, and the third was better but not as good as the first.  However, despite the fact that I wasn’t thrilled with the second and third books, the first one was so good that I have been itching to pick up more of his stuff.  I finally did.

13 Bullets is a story about vampires.  In the world he crafts, vampires exist and everyone knows about them, but vampires are extremely rare so people often forget that they exist or at least deny to themselves that they are really real.  These are not your Anne Rice vampires, these are vicious monsters who thirst for blood.  In fact, the more they eat, the more they crave, so a smart vampire might be able to hide for a while, but eventually his thirst will lead to large enough slaughters that he can no longer go unnoticed.  These vampires don’t have two fangs, they have a set of jaws like a shark with rows of sharp teeth.

But specifically, the story is about Laura Caxton, a State Trooper in Pennsylvania who stumbles on to vampires and gets mixed up in the horror along with a U.S. Marshall who has been hunting vampires for twenty years.

Wellington’s writing in 13 Bullets is as strong as Monster Island.  I devoured the book, and am hoping that the sequel, 99 Coffins, doesn’t fall like Monster Nation did.  Definitely, though, 13 Bullets is a damn fine read, especially if you like horror.

Meet Dave

Reviews

8 out of 13 nots.
for being better than I expected it to be

Eddie Murphy was once a foul mouthed comedian.  He used to make rated R movies.  But a few years back he stumbled into a gold mine of family oriented Disney films.  Meet Dave is another one.

Honestly, I went into this movie expecting it to be a pile of crap, or at least another bland family film that I knew would make money but wouldn’t interest me at all.  Instead, I was pleasantly surprised.  Meet Dave was funny, genuinely funny.  Sort of a mix between Galaxy Quest and Starman, it is about aliens who travel to Earth in a giant space ship that looks like a human.  This is because they are about an inch tall, so the human shaped ship also doubles as an android allowing them to move through the population unnoticed.  They have come because they are planning to suck the oceans dry and take all the salt in order to save their own world.  Of course, on the way to destroying our planet, they learn that maybe we aren’t so bad and might just be worth saving.

Anyway, I enjoyed it… I don’t think I would ever pay $10 to see it in the theater, but I would absolutely throw it in the rental queue on Netflix.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Reviews

9 out of 13 nots.
for being good, but not being the Hellboy that I wanted to see

I am sure that there will be many reviews for Hellboy II that are positively glowing.  They will remark that Guillermo del Toro has crafted a work of art.  Others will mention how funny it is.  And none of them are wrong.  Hellboy II is funny, and it is a work of art.  However, it is also a very weak story masked in humor and style.

I like del Toro’s style.  I thought Pan’s Labyrinth was great.  I even liked Blade II.  And I loved the first Hellboy movie.  If I were to base my review of this film entirely on the visual style, I’d be giving it an 11 or a 12.  Its beautiful, even stunning in places.  And the movie is funny.  There are some parts of the movie that are absolutely hilarious, and if this review were based entirely on the funny bits and it was a comedy, I’d probably be giving it at least a 10.  However, the comedy of the film becomes a distraction if you happen to notice how weak the underlying tale being told is, and style is never something I have preferred over substance.

If you enjoyed Hellboy for the occult bits, you might want to skip Hellboy II because the occult is almost absent here.  If you enjoyed Hellboy for the dark and ominous tone, you might want to skip Hellboy II because this movie is bright and sunny by comparison.

In the end, though, Hellboy II: The Golden Army is still a good movie.  Better than a lot of films that make it to the screen, and continues the trend of good comic book movies making it to the screen this year that looks like is going to continue right through Christmas and beyond.  Its a good movie that just wasn’t as good as I had hoped, and not as good as its predecessor.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Reviews

12 out of 13 nots
for thrilling family fun and 3D awesomeness

Nearly two months ago I was lucky enough to be able to go to an early screening of Journey to the Center of the Earth.  Rather than just simply retelling the Jules Verne novel in the present day, this movie takes the approach of “What if the character in the book had been real, had gone to the center of the Earth, returned, and told his tale to Jules Verne?”  So you wind up with a scientist (Brendan Fraser) whose brother vanished ten years ago while doing research on seismic activity, and now the same seismic pattern is appearing again, so he goes off in search of answers, with nephew in tow.

This movie is pure action adventure family fun.  And I highly recommend it to people with kids… and even people without kids.  Even as an adult I certainly was never bored.

One of the best things about this film, however, is that it is in 3D.  And it is not the old red/green blurry 3D.  This is the new digital 3D like you may have seen in last year’s Beowulf or the 3D version of The Nightmare Before Christmas or to some of the IMAX nature films.  Filmed with a pair of digital cameras that approximate the distance between your eyes, without the special glasses you’ll see two images nearly overlapping, but with the glasses on you’ll see the action almost literally jump off the screen.  And to top it off, the movie only blatantly abuses the 3D angle a few times at the beginning with shoving a couple of things toward the audience for thrills and laughs.  After that, you just feel like you are watching an enhanced film where many scenes just feel more real than you are used to.

Definitely, if you are going to see the movie, try your hardest to see it in a theater that is showing the 3D version.  It is worth it.  I just hope more movies get made in 3D, because it was a blast.

Tremor

Reviews

Every once in a while I pick up random books that hook me with their jacket blurb from the bargain big at the book store.  Barnes & Noble’s discount section is especially good at it.  So that is how I came upon Tremor by Craig Dirgo.

What attracted me to the book was simply the mention of Nikola Tesla.  I’m a nut for science based science fiction.  (Its one of the many reasons I prefer Angels & Demons to The Da Vinci Code.)  So when I saw that the crux of the book was that someone had a machine built on Tesla designs that could cause earthquakes… I was in.

Sadly, this is the second book in a series, but fortunately does not rely heavily on the reader having actually read the first book.  The first book is about Einstein.  I’m going to have to track down a copy.

Anyway, it was a good book.  If you like Dan Brown or Clive Cussler or those types of books, you’ll probably like Craig Dirgo’s stuff too.  Its typical “male adventure” … smart and/or skilled guys tracking down bad guys and fooling around with inordinately hot women mostly in exotic locals.  I mean, the main character, John Taft, who is a spy, goes to sneak a peak at some of Tesla’s old papers at the Tesla museum in Belgrade, only to find that the curator just happens to be a really hot chick who he charms and sleeps with in a matter of hours so he can steal her keys and break in.  Its par for the course in books like these.

Overall, fun, but not something I’d find myself reading more than once.

RSS and Advertising

Random Thoughts

Yesterday I decided to go through and make sure my RSS feeds in my reader were up to date.  I ended up dropping a couple where they haven’t posted anything in a while (a year), and decided that while I was doing it I’d try to see if feeds were available for some websites that I visit frequently.

Out of all the web comics that I added to the feed reader, only one (xkcd) actually had the comic in the feed.  The rest, at best, gave you a feed item letting you know that a new comic had been posted and you needed to visit the site to see it.

Now, I am not stupid.  I know exactly why they do this… advertising.  See, most of these sites, in order to offset the cost of hosting the comic (bandwidth and all that), have advertisements.  And as is the trend of ads on the web these days, most sites don’t manage their own advertising directly, they sign up with a banner providing site and then throw snippets of code on their site that will request an ad from the ad provider.  They do have some control over the ads, usually the ability to block ads they don’t wish to support, and overall I suppose they do a good job of keeping the ads “on message” with the rest of the site.

My problem is… well, why can’t the code snippets live in the RSS parser as well and tack on an ad at the bottom of a feed item.  Same banner image (though not the Flash “punch a monkey”/”you’ve just won two free ipod nano” ads), a line of text and a link/url to follow.  The capability exists.  WordPress has a plugin that does exactly that by putting a footer on RSS items.  Of course, not all web comics are using WordPress, but if it exists for one system it has to be possible for other systems.

Anyway, the result is, after adding a bunch of comics to my feed reader, I then removed all of them except xkcd.  For all the ones I removed, I’ll go back to visiting them when I remember to, which is usually once a month.  Just think, if they put the comic and an ad in their feed, they’d make me a daily reader of both their comics and their ads…

The Rock-afire Explosion

Random Thoughts

If you are anything like me and grew up in the 80’s, you probably went to Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz Pizza for someone’s birthday or some other special occasion, or maybe you just went for the fun on it.  Both places had, in their dining hall, animatronic bands that would play songs while you ate.  I haven’t been to one lately, so I can’t say if they still have them, or if the shows are any good, but I do recall the last time I went (on a first date when I was 17 back in 1992… I wonder if she remembers that date, heh) the dining hall remained well lit while the band performed, which was kind of a let down.

Anyway, it seems that the band from Showbiz, The Rock-afire Explosion, is experiencing a resurgence.  A guy, a car salesman, bought himself one of the animatronic bands and with the help of the original designers is making music videos for more current songs.  They made a documentary about it.  You can see videos of several performances by searching for “Rock-afire Explosion” on YouTube.

I just wasted an hour watching this stuff, and I am bound to do it again.  I want to go to a Showbiz now, although I figure it won’t be as cool as these videos, and I would love to see those old pizza party places make a comeback, old-school, with the darkened dining hall, music and light show.  If I have kids one day, I want to take them there, or some place like it.

Thanks to Cyanbane for the heads up…

The Problem With User Rankings

Gaming

Not too long ago, on the Conquer Club website, they implemented a new system for player ratings.  Previously it had been based on an eBay style positive/neutral/negative scale with a comment.  You simply voted weather your experience playing them was positive, negative, or neither and then said something like “played all his turns in a timely manner” or “excellent team mate, worked well together” or “stupid dumbass only attacked his own team”.  Anyway, they switch over to a 4 stat 5 star rating system.  If you don’t care to follow the link, the short version is that after you play someone you can leave them a rating which is a rating from 0 (no rating given) to 5 (excellent) stars in 4 categories: Fair Play, Attendance, Attitude, Teamwork.  And the rating isn’t revealed until the game goes into the archive (no more ratings can be made on that game).

Going back to the eBay style ratings system, I hated it on eBay, largely because it was heavily retaliatory.  I once bought my wife a cello on eBay.  I didn’t buy the best model out there, I just wanted to get her a practice cello so she could start playing again (seriously, I’m not going to spend five grand on anything for anyone if there is a chance its just going to sit in the corner collecting dust).  The one I bought arrived and the bridge was not set up, which I expected.  What I did not expect was to wind up driving around to about two dozen music stores in an attempt to get someone to set up the bridge and have none of them willing to work on it because it was an “off brand” they didn’t sell or support.  I ended up setting it up myself, and did a very poor job of it, and after I gave it to my wife we finally found a music shop where someone relented and set up the bridge and tuned it.  So, I went to eBay and left a review of my purchase experience.  I was limited by the number of characters, but I said, “sale and shipment fine, but cello was ‘off brand’ and most music stores would not set up bridge or tune it.” and I gave him a neutral review.  To which, he replied by giving me a negative review that said “clueless user, DO NOT SELL TO HIM AND DO NOT BUY FROM HIM, liar and cheat!”  Now, because this was the only review I had, I ended up over the next 6 months unable to buy anything.  All my bids were refused.  The entire time, I was talking to the cello guy trying to get him to change his review.  I had been totally honest and had not given him a negative review, I just felt that anyone who purchased his items might want to know about difficulty getting service on those items.  Finally he relented and changed the review to neutral saying, “inexperienced eBay user, expects to get more than he pays for”.  After having a few more bids of my dropped, I just stopped using eBay.

As this relates to Conquer Club… well, I played a game with some people and I rated most of them 3 out 5 in most categories, except attendance in which case missing zero turns got people a 5, the occasional missed turn got a 4 or 3, and every player who dead beat (missed three turns in a row and was kicked from the game) got a 1.  Once the games got locked down and ratings were revealed, I got a flood of private messages from people complaining about getting a 3.  But looking at the rating scale:

0 means No Rating.  Or in other words, I don’t feel like I can judge you on this.

1 means Bad.  A rating of 1 means you sucked at whatever it was.

2 means Below Average.  This means you performed worse than I would expect.

3 means Average.  Meaning you performed as expected.

4 means Above Average.  You exceeded my expectations.

5 means Excellent.  You are awesome.

In most cases, people are Average.  To get Above Average in Attitude, for example, you just need to be gracious when you lose… or win.  To get Excellent, you need to also chat and be a good natured guy.  If you are silent the entire game, I cannot give you anything other than Average because there is nothing to base it on.  The ratings are from Bad to Excellent, not from I Want To Kill Them to Didn’t Piss Me Off.  There is a phrase where they call something “going above and beyond” and this is what they mean, you have to go Above and Beyond the Average to get better than an Average rating.

The problem is, people don’t see it that way.  3 out of 5 is a 50%, its halfway, and 50% is failing.  Most user based rating systems end up being all but useless for the same reason.  People being rated expect to be given the highest score possible unless there is a problem, and even then most of them want to still get the highest score possible after explaining or fixing the problem through other channels.  People rating others get pulled into the retaliation loop where they are giving higher ratings than they should because they don’t want to be rated poorly themselves.  And then most importantly, the site/game/whatever that is using the rating system, if they allow comments, usually have the length limited to the point where meaningful comments are not allowed.

I don’t know if there is any solution… you want to have the ratings to assist you in avoiding problem users, but the ratings can be, and are being, gamed so you don’t even know if a problem user is really a problem user.

Hancock

Reviews

10 out of 13 nots.
for heroes with problems and problems with heroes

If you loved Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk and want to see another super-powered thrill ride, Hancock is not the movie for you.  While previews and commercials may have made this movie seem like a funny action film about an alcoholic superhero, the truth is that this is a more somber tale about a lost superhero being helped find himself and recover from the mistakes he has made.

Closer in tone to Unbreakable than the more recent superhero fare, Peter Berg has crafted an interesting tale of a superhero who feels the need to save people but isn’t sure why and doesn’t take care in how he does it.  The movie has a few twists and turns, some of which can be seen coming if you pay attention, that veer the story away from being just another action flick.  I really enjoyed it, but I can easily see how others would not.  Dramatic and “slow” in places, it still has good action sequences and moments of comedy.  That said, I was never really at the edge of my seat.

So, enter with an open mind and you may enjoy the film like me, but if you go in looking for Iron Man, I think you are going to be let down.

Blogging Is Not Just For Pontificating Anymore

Stuff on the Net

Admit it… I mean, I know I do… most blogs are there for people to hear themselves talk.  But a co-worker of mine had a medical emergency a couple of weeks ago.  He complained of a headache before bed, and later his wife couldn’t wake him up.  After getting rushed to the hospital, the doctors determined he had a bleed in his brain.  They went in, relieved the pressure, found it was not bleeding anymore (it had clotted and stopped on its own), and now he’s doing much better.

During all this, his family was given a profile at CarePages.  This allowed them to notify friends and family and send out an email with a link to the page.  People can log in and see updates (done by the family) on how he is doing.  They can leave messages.  See photos uploaded by the family or patient.  Give virtual gifts and get contact information.  You can even sign up for notifications so that you get contacted every time the family or patient updates the page.

It has actually been quite nice for us, the people on the outside, to be able to get news when its available and not have to wait until the phone chain trickles down to us.  And it has to be pretty nice for the family, knowing they can go to one place, make an update and have it automatically sent out to everyone.  Nice for the patient too, when he or she can read all the well wishes from all the people in their life.

Anyway, its just something that I thought from a pretty good idea and decided to share it.