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Undead or Alive

Reviews

4 out of 13 nots.
for bad zombies, worse jokes and even worse music

So, a little over a week ago, I decided to sign back up with NetFlix, which I had canceled a while back just because the wife and I were watching so much TV and buying so many movies that we never had time to watch our rentals.  Now with TV in flux and not buying movies, we’ve got time… plus, since we use a PC to watch TV anyway, it gives us a great way to take advantage of the movie streaming available from NetFlix.  Furthermore, as I work from home most days, it also gives me an opportunity to stream movies I might otherwise never see to my other laptop while I slave away on program code.

And this is how I came to watch Undead or Alive, a zombie western comedy.  It was… bad.  The zombies were corny and goofy, the jokes were lame (in fact the movie never crossed the line from “mildly amusing” into “funny”), all in all not really a good film, or even a good bad film.  Don’t see it.

More after the break… Read more

The Edge of Disbelief

Reviews

The wife and I have been watching the show Alias lately, on DVD of course since its been off the air a couple of years. I must say that I am really enjoying it. Overall, J.J. Abrams proved that you can do incredibly complicated multi-season stories where each episode is also satisfying within the whole, something he would later lose during season three of Lost.

While the show includes many quasi-realistic gadgets and situations, its normally just right at that line of believability without going over into complete bull shit… at least until the last couple episodes of season three. This may not be exact, but the scene is that they’ve just put together this machine and slapped a container of goo in it, and it begins drawing out these wavy lines, which are determined to be a brain-wave pattern, and the dialog goes:

SLOANE: Each individual has a signature brain-wave pattern as unique as a fingerprint. So to exploit this, the DoD’s developed an experimental satellite network capable of remote encephalography.
SYDNEY: Reading brain-waves from orbit.

See… I’d buy that perhaps brain-waves are as unique as a fingerprint, but reading brain-waves from orbit? I had been comfortably standing at the edge of the ocean, happily watching the waves hit the beach, and this exchange was like stepping into the water to find out that despite the sunny day and warm winds the ocean water is so very very cold. I was snapped right out of the show to turn to the wife and say, “Did they just say reading brain-waves from orbit?” Luckily, they didn’t dwell on it, they didn’t show the team calling the brain-scanner office to track down the pattern in question, they just said “Found her” and moved on. In fact, its unclear if they even used the brain-waves at all as they may have just had a hit on one of the identities they knew the girl had been using. Of course, season three ended shortly there after with the girl in question being on the loose again, so its possible that the orbiting thought police might be utilized in season four to find her again. I hope they don’t…

Anyway, I’ve heard that season five wasn’t so hot, but I plan on watching the whole thing. I’ll post a review of the entire run once I’m finished.

The Best of Both Worlds

Gaming

In most fantasy based MMOs these days (and even in most non-fantasy based ones), there are only three functions a player performs at the root: take/absorb damage, deal damage, heal damage.  Most games also usually have one class that is designed to exclusively do one of those tasks.  A warrior tanks, a cleric heals, a wizard or rogue does damage.  Then we introduce the hybrids and controversy ensues.

In real life, at a real job, it is perfectly respectable to have people who specialize in small skill sets working alongside people who have two or three lesser specialties, not to the depth or quality of the single set specialist.  I’ve encountered this in my own life, worked with a guy who was aces at building databases and understanding database structure however his every attempt to ever do user interface work not only looked horrible but failed to function.  I’ve also worked with people who can build the most beautiful web pages but couldn’t properly lay out a database design to save their lives.  Personally, I live somewhere in the middle, I generally do all of programming work from UI to database with a decent degree of competency.  I’m not the best at any of it, but I do all of it well enough.  Usually in a work environment, its best to have a team built mostly of specialists with one or more generalists to support everyone else and to translate and transition work between the specialists.  See, when the UI guru and the DB savant get into a knock down drag out over design, I’m the guy who knows enough about both to be able to talk to both of them and make them see that they are actually agreeing with each other, but using different terms, or to make simple suggestions for both sides to bring them to a point where the work can get done.

In game design, this is where the hybrid should be.  He should be a mix of tanking, healing and damage dealing, any two or all three, to various levels but never as good as the single focus classes.  Hybrids should also be rare, and largely confined to group settings, because the whole point of the hybrid is that he supports other classes in doing their work by picking up slack or boosting just a little.  The problem, of course, is that hybrids are often more dynamic, by design, than the single focus classes, and so they attract more players.  While many people are content to be a specialist in real life, in gaming they want to be able to do everything, on one character.  So you end up with a bunch of people playing Paladins because they want to tank and heal, but then they complain when they do neither of them as well as warriors or priests.

So, what’s the solution?  Is there one?  Does it need one?

I’ve got no answer to those questions… but maybe other people do, and I would love to hear them.

Fool For A Day

Random Thoughts

In my opinion, there is comedy and there are April Fools’ jokes.  Comedy comes in all forms, any day of the year.  April Fools’ jokes come one day a year and the only good ones are immediate and physical, or slow gotchas.  The immediate ones are like putting tape on the water fountain with a pinhole in it, or whoopee cushions.  Timeless classics that make you want to punch someone in the face because the joke is retarded AND you fell for it like a giant dumb-ass.  The slow gotchas are the best though… present something that is just bordering on too far, plausible but not totally probable, and once you’ve hooked them with enough detail and spin, shove it over the edge and make people feel silly for believing you.

The problem with that second form is that you are literally getting people’s hopes up and then crushing them with comedy.  Strangely, people don’t like that.  So, most people who pull April Fools’ pranks usually just start over the edge and try to be funny from the get go.  While I don’t doubt that many people put a lot of effort into their creations for this particular day and I admit that many of them are in fact funny, the art of the April Fools’ con is lost to most.

Thanks to living in Atlanta for a number of years, I had the good fortune to experience some truly inspired April Fools’ pranks at the hands of the old 99x morning show.  A few examples:

  • Releasing information about a new theme park under construction in the Atlanta area called Magic Island, which was to be entirely underground.
  • A control room mishap that resulted in accidentally giving out Leonardo DiCaprio’s home phone number.
  • Firing one of the Morning X DJs because she wasn’t pretty enough to be on the new Web Cam that the station was setting up.

Each of these were well done because they did their homework… they got buy in from management, from sponsors, from actors, and they sold it to the audience, remaining in character even in the face of being called liars.  The joke wasn’t dumped on you in the space of a few seconds, it was slowly built over the course of two or three hours, the kind of investment into a prank you just don’t see that often.  Sadly, 99x is dead and the Morning X is long gone.  But I’ll always have my memories…

Anyway, I’m not going to link to any particular site for jokes today, but over at April Fools’ Day On The Web they keep a running list of all the jokes that people report.  Wikipedia will run a list also. Very few of them will really fool you, but some of them are funny.

An Upgrade Is Coming

Site News

At some point during this week, once I’m sure none of my needed plugins will be broken, I will be upgrading to WordPress 2.5.  This is an apology in advance for when I screw it up…

It does certainly appear to have a number of new features and fixes (read about them here), and I’m excited for it.  However, in the past, while bug fix releases have always gone smoothly, full releases have always taken down some esoteric plugin I had built my site around causing me to have to redesign the whole damn thing.  I’m hoping that’s not going to happen this time.

Even if it does though, I’ll work through it.  WordPress has been the best blogging software I’ve come across, so unless someone just blows them out of the water with cool useful features, it is here to stay.

Casserole

Random Thoughts

According to the definition:

cas·se·role: kas–uh-rohl
noun, verb, -roled, -rol·ing.
–noun
1. a baking dish of glass, pottery, etc., usually with a cover.
2. any food, usually a mixture, cooked in such a dish.
3. a small dish with a handle, used in chemical laboratories.
–verb (used with object)
4. to bake or cook (food) in a casserole.

the sentence “I casserole a casserole in this casserole.” would be valid. But trying saying it ten times fast…

21

Reviews

11 out of 13 nots.
for Card Counting fun and the best recent use of old Cowboy Curtis 

A couple years ago while watching yet another poker tournament on Bravo or some other channel, they ran a TV special about other card games, and their coverage included Vegas security and mentioned a book called Bringing Down the House.  Surprisingly, I’d actually heard of the book before and even snippets and summaries of the story it contained, but that special was enough for my wife to decide she wanted to read it.  She got the book (for Christmas or her birthday, I forget which) and she read it… then I read it.  I loved it, and at the time I recall thinking to myself, “Somebody should make a movie out of this!”

Well, they did.  It’s called 21 and it comes out tomorrow.  I managed to see a screening of it a few weeks ago, and I have to say that they captured the book pretty well.  Not exactly, of course, but the spirit of a team of people using a card counting scheme to win money in Vegas.

The movie had good performances all around, though I especially enjoyed Laurence Fishburne as the casino security man trying to catch the people “stealing” the casino’s money.

Completely 100% worth the price of admission.

When Big is Too Big

Random Thoughts

Yesterday, I rambled about my dislike of applications on social networking web sites. Today, I’m going to ramble about the other aspect I dislike about Internet community and social networking sites. They are just. so. big.

Back in the dayâ„¢, I played online games with, what I though was, a large group of people. There we literally dozens of us. Maybe hundreds. There were tons and tons of Quake players online, but, the community at large was segmented. Some people played Death Match, others played Capture The Flag, and then there were mods like Team Fortress. No part of it was really enormous, because even within segments, like Death Match for instance, there were further segments, built around servers and server groups, web sites, tournaments, geographical areas, etc. I can see this when I talk to people who knew of TF but didn’t play TF and I talk about us having year long tournament seasons with dozens of clans and alternates and all sorts of stuff. They just didn’t realize how big TF was… and I always thought DM was just scattered random chaos until they start waxing about the days of ranked tiers and what not. The same was true of EverQuest. While I was/am familiar with the players and guilds from my own server, outside a few standouts, the workings of other servers were non-existent. One day at work I found out a co-worker also played, but on another server. When I explained to him how “public” raiding worked, he was shocked, because his server had no public system, in fact it was a very tightly controlled tier system long before SOE ever considered making tiers. Today, I still hang out on a community board from my EQ server, and it consists of a few dozen or more regular posters with more infrequent posters and a bunch of lurkers who might post occasionally.

When I look at newer game communities, like the WoW official forums or places like Guild Cafe, I’m turned off. Being a dude with a regular job and other hobbies, I simply can’t keep up with a community of thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands (or potentially millions in WoW’s case), posting with no restrictions. I log on one day, read some threads, post, and then leave. When I come back in a week, the conversation I was interested in is over, three days dead after getting four hundred posts and eventually being locked by a moderator, or simply faded away to page 47 (implying that 46 pages of posts have been made, not just since I’ve been there, but since the last time someone replied to the topic I was interested in). I lose pretty much all interest in the site. I can’t spend all day reading posts, and I certainly can’t spend all weekend catching up, so at best I’m tagging one thread in a hundred to participate in, and at a ratio like that I don’t feel like I’m a part of any community that may exist there.

In the end, its all a question of scope… how wide does a community cast its net? If you go too wide, you will end up alienating people who might be valuable members but do not have enough time to be fully involved and encouraging people who might be less valuable yet have ample time to participate everywhere. Go too narrow and your community will die on the vine, or at best be little more than a place where your tiny group of dedicated members can hang out, which in most cases isn’t going to be enough to run a business off of unless that business is small or the price is high.

Currently, I think most, if not all, of the social networking sites are going too wide without enough tools for the users to both segregate themselves and to find the segregated communities in which they belong or wish to belong. In addition, they all seem to be reinventing the wheel in everything they do. The message board functions of most social networking sites are like stepping into the stone age when compared to the robust readily available software solutions on the market. You’d think Facebook or MySpace might consider investing in one of those.

Perhaps in a future post, I might wax poetic about what I would do if I were to invent a social networking site.

The Handcart We Are Rapidly Pushing to Hell…

Random Thoughts

… is filled with social site web apps.

Look! One of my friends has installed SuperFunAwesomeWall! To read the cool stuff they have written I need to install it! But wait! Another friend has installed AwesomeFunSuperWall, which is not the same application… and, uh, a third friend installed FunSuperAwesomeWall… and another FunAwesomeSuperWall… okay, what the hell… And I’ve been bitten by a vampire, and a werewolf, and a zombie, and a dog, and I’m in bat country.  I’ve been asked to join an entourage, a pimp squad, and a sports team, no less than three movie applications, and some trivia.  I’ve been Poked, SuperPoked, MegaPoked, SexyPoked, and CanadianPoked, could someone please stop with all the damn poking?  I’ve had myself compared to other people in every possible way, and I now know which superhero (Marvel and DC), L Word character, Simpson, Lost castaway, Friend, drunk, color, type of Irish Republican, chocolate, Spice Girl, assassin, and dead Russian author I am.  Among a great many other things, and while all those things might be true, one thing I can say with absolute certainty that I am is someone who has almost entirely stopped logging in to Facebook.

About the only time I go there anymore is when I get an email that someone new has requested to link up, or on the odd occasion that I remember I have an account and decide I want to check and see if any more people I forgot I used to know have appeared.  The sad thing about most of those apps, besides the fact that they are horribly repetitive, is that most of them are crap.  Seriously, and annoying to boot.

Perhaps its just me… maybe I just don’t get it… but there really doesn’t seem to be much “social” is all these social networking sites.  In fact, the social aspects of direct messaging and message boards seem to be the hardest parts of the sites to find or use as they are drowned out by ads and apps.  One day, I was logged into Facebook using my Heroespowers to try to gain another level when I asked myself, “Why?  Why the fuck am I doing this?”  So I tried to dig through the app to find the community, the social part that should exist beyond spamming all my friends with useless power messages and invitations to install the app and join the spam, and I couldn’t find any.  I searched all my Walls (I had 3 installed in addition to the default one) and the only messages I found were the equivalent of chain letters.  I removed a good 90% of the apps I had installed (I’m a sucker for trivia) and sent out a couple of messages to some friends.  After a few days I realized that using Facebook for anything social beyond finding people to begin with was pointless.  Once we found each other and exchanged contact info, dropping “back” to email or AIM was so much easier than using Facebook.  And more reliable too.

“Why have Facebook email me every time I get a new message when I can just have people email me directly?” I found myself wondering.  I suppose if I were famous, I could use sites like Facebook to have a “public” face that people could talk to while hiding my “true” email address.  But I’m not, and everyone I currently talk to I feel safe giving my real email address to.

Of course, I realize that my gripes with these sites are largely about the efforts they have chosen to make in regards to traffic and ad revenue.  These aren’t pay sites, after all.  But then again, I’d say that overall their efforts are failing.  When was the last time you clicked an ad on Facebook or MySpace or some other social network site?  Just this instant I logged in to Facebook and the ads presented to me as I navigated ignoring all the random spam messages were for AllPosters.com, some weight loss thing, a local college bar, a website to find out who’s searching for me on the Internet, and upromise.  The one thing all five of those have in common is that they are things I wouldn’t click on.  Only one had any interest to me (AllPosers.com) but I already know about the site, have it book marked, and use it every now and then.  However, had it been some game advertisements, TV shows, movies, or something of that nature, I might have clicked on it.  The one thing all of these social networking sites suck at is directing the proper ads to the proper people.  They need a control panel where I can choose to get video game ads but not weight loss ads, to get TV shows but not college loans.

And just so it doesn’t seem like I’m picking on Facebook, I have a MySpace account as well that I use a little more often (its not too horrible at browsing and finding new musical insterests).  Recently that launched their application platform, and its largely full of the same crap as Facebook, with, in my opinion, the only exception being the MetaChat application launched by the people of MetaPlace.  It is fairly nifty, except… its also fairly useless.  Sure, I can now put a chat room on my profile page, but how often do I hang out on my own profile page?  How often do people visit my profile page?  Do I even really want to chat with the random people who cross my profile?  Everyone I want to chat with, I tend to give them my email address, or my AIM account and we chat elsewhere.

Tomorrow… more on social networking and Internet communities…