A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Gameshelf Casting call: "Action Castle"

2009-11-21T19:43:37Z

Howdy, Gameshelf Players and other friends,

I'm looking for some folks who would be willing to play the extremely silly tabletop game "Action Castle" on-camera for the next episode of the Gameshelf. It's a one-shot party game that spoofs circa-1980 text adventure games, where the GM plays the text parser, and all the players take turns "typing in" commands to make the hero stumble through the map in an attempt to rescue the princess.

It's quite unlikely you've even heard of this game before, and so much the better. It's a one-shot deal, and the rules can be digested in a minute. The footage of the gameplay is going to fit into a segment of larger episode about how interactive fiction is perceived within gaming culture.

No shooting date or location is set yet, but I'd like to have this happen on this side of the Yuletide gravity well. The time commitment is relatively light - I'd estimate four hours on the day of the shoot, with no rehearsal necessary. If this sounds fun to you, please let me know. Thanks!

Thoughts on "Put This On", and web video length

2009-11-13T00:39:59Z

Excerpt from a recent letter from me to the Gameshelf crew:

If I may offer an aside, take a look at this:
http://putthison.com/post/231001982/episode-1-denim

It's an example of something I've been looking for for a while - a television-quality, web-based series on some nonfiction topic that isn't straight-up comedy (or games), but uses comedy to ease the topic along. In this case, it's a show about men's clothing. Seeing it makes me very happy.

The fundraising and sponsorship stuff evidenced is quite interesting, but it's the format that has me really on the edge of my seat. I watched the whole thing, and felt full - smarter _and_ entertained - and only ten minutes had gone by. And indeed, I'm not sure I would have sat and ate through the whole thing if the timer at the start had read, say, 30:00 rather than 10:00.

This show, and my experience of approaching it as audience, is the first hard evidence I've encountered for an argument I haven't properly had with myself: whether Gameshelf episodes should be shorter - a _lot_ shorter. I never really revisited the question of show length, even though I started considering the Gameshelf more of an internet-based TV show than a literal watch-it-on-a-television TV show. Seeing an excellent show like "Put This On", which aims way higher than typical YouTube fare, and yet still keeps to a YouTube-friendly length, is a strong argument in the make-it-shorter column.

I'm going to experiment with this for the next episode.

A Serious Man

2009-11-12T23:49:28Z

Saw and enjoyed A Serious Man today. It's a puzzling film that I recommend. Spoilery, thoughts below cut.

Larry spends the movie as Schrodinger's Cat, the same creature we watch him teach his students about. He climbs into his box via his medical examination at the top of the picture, which includes X-rays that require further analysis. God himself then steps in and proceeds to let Larry earn his life by punishing him with a relentless series of ordeals. But unlike Job's tests of faith, Larry's tests are of action.

Larry, it turns out, is a nebbish. When one misfortune after another befalls him, he reacts not as a leaf on the wind (as advised by the film's opening epigram), but as a gum wrapper on a busy street. Rather than standing up to counter the rain of blows, all he can do is wail "But I haven't done anything!" to whomever throws the next punch, whether it's his wife or the Columbia Record House. In so doing, he completely fails to see that that's the problem.

After a dream where the ghost of the man who cuckolded him tries to beat some sense into him, he has further dreams that suggest some ways he can actually shove the universe back, for once in his life, even it all he chooses to do is go next door to bang his hottie neighbor. But he lets every dream turn into a nightmare, and proceeds to pay them no heed.

In the end, Larry finally does make an action, and it's the wrong one. By changing the student's grade to lighten his burdens, rather than confront anything directly, he has chosen to smash open the vial of poison. God collapses his waveform, and lets him die, that very moment, with the ensuing phone call.

What happens next is shocking and mysterious: In the final shot of the film, God physically manifests to the Larry's son as none other than the whirlwind from the Book of Job. As they gaze at one another, the movie cuts to black: the end. The ambiguity, while troubling, is still the opposite of what finally befell his father. I still haven't quite worked out the son's role in all this, especially since he seems to be the film's secondary protagonist. Will let it roll around over the next few days.

I have less idea about what to make of the film's prologue, other than it being another iteration - well, the first one that we see - of the Shroedinger's Cat motif. I'm curious to know if it's based on an actual Jewish folktale, or if only the one element of the (maybe, maybe-not) dybbuk is.

RETWEET

2009-11-09T18:39:48Z

Please enjoy this limerick by 530nm330hz.

There once was a man who would balk
Whenever we asked him to talk.
We thought it was queer,
'Til he said, "My idea
Is to hide that I come from New York."

Comments should go here.

The Big Broadcast of 1938

2009-11-01T16:54:32Z

The first act was ingenious, wonderful, and perfectly paced. derspatchel has such an affinity for both creating and delivering radio comedy that one is tempted to conclude he was born 70 years too late. The music from Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band was hot, and fit in perfectly as a buffer between the vocal performances. I would have happily sat through another two hours of any material, had it maintained the pace of the first.

Unfortunately, acts II and III - the headline acts, really, involving the War of the Worlds adaptation - needed some seriously fierce editing. I know it's easy for me to say, down here in the audience, but I think it would have been possible to compress them into a single act, or at least into two significantly shorter ones.

Now, there were many strong moments (the scene at the site of the first cylinder landing was particularly memorable, with excellent sound engineering from both Foleys and performers), and the use of the Martian Chorus and the Crazy Sound Dood to represent the Invaders was just wonderful. But: there were many scenes that should have been cut, compressed, or combined, not just to bring the three-hour running time down (not counting intermissions), but to better emphasize the cool stuff.

I would have dropped stuff like the mayor's monologue and at least one of the professor's monologues, and ground more out of the three(!) lengthy doomed-news-reporter sequences. I envision the latter two reporter scenes overlapping or interleaving quite nicely, though I realize that's my film-editing experience talking, and that it would be harder to do on-stage.

I would even consider completely removing all the scenes involving the North End mobsters' club. The moll's introduction would then occur when the professor meets her, letting her mob connections (as well as the mobsters themselves) become revealed as a plot twist later on. I would have found the mobsters' motivations stronger if those characters all showed up as a late-game surprise, fighting side-by-side with the army but also trying to get at each others' backs from the get-go.

But, all this is just me sitting in my comfy chair making sniffing noises about how the great and talented me would have done things, when the fact of the matter is that the PMRP has outdone itself once again with a hell of a show, no matter how much tighter it could stand to be. I'm proud to be able to say I worked with them when they were getting started years ago, and prouder still that they just keep getting better.

Embittered Movie Reviews: "Metro Polis"

2009-10-29T15:37:22Z

I literally sat up in bed pre-dawn last Saturday morning with the idea to make this, and I found the time put it together last night. Enjoy.

Klingon propaganda video

2009-10-26T16:17:47Z

This is nice:

Interesting pattern develops here, if this is a viral for the next J.J. Abrams Trek film (which it almost surely is, since it looks too polished, and its credit roll is too absent, to be a fan video). It follows the same precedent for superhero-story reboots set by the Nolans' Batman films: in the first installment, pit the hero against a canonical but somewhat lame villain. This keeps the focus on how you've revitalized the hero - or, in Trek's case, the heroic ensemble. If that goes over well, then you can sustain fan-glee by rolling out the arch-nemesis for part two.

rikchik points out to me that the latter-day Dr. Who TV series follows this pattern as well. The first Eccleson episode had him shining as he dealt with the obscure-but-canonical Autons, and they waited a few episodes before the ol' Daleks showed up to steal his spotlight away.

Edit Oh, the glyphs at the end are totally a URL passed through a simple latin1-to-klingon-character cipher. I am too lazy to figure it out though.

Edit 2 OK, fine: it goes here. (Ripped from an IO9 comment. whee...)

Wedding

2009-10-25T23:44:52Z

Before I start talking about some other damn thing: warmest congratulations to my dear friends Jess (dictator555) and Nate-of-no-real-social-media-presence on getting married yesterday evening. I was pleased and honored to be in attendance for the relaxed and friendly ceremony out in Western Mass, which turned into kind of a con (of the fannish variety)... eventually nobody was left except a gaggle of gamer geeks staying up late, and many of us slept over. (The venue had a B&B conveniently attached.)

I just realized that this now means more than half of the seven players from the Diplomacy episode have gotten married since we filmed the game in early June. Wow. And they call that game divisive?

Evidence of bad karma bringage-upon

2009-10-25T17:56:00Z

Sequence of events on Friday:

• Helped take care of some paperworky PITA at the bank, feeling good about myself.
• Succeeded in swapping stinky new headphones for better ones at the Apple Store.

• While crossing the street, gave an exaggerated, sneering "I'm walking here!" shrug to cars blowing through a red light at Porter Square. I did not see until after they passed that they were part of a funeral procession.

• Missed, by minutes, a UPS delivery I'd been waiting weeks for.
• Made things worse by calling and asking for a redelivery; with silent tittering they invited me to come pick it up at the depot under the bridge, not mentioning that the Friday-night line would be hours long.
• Burned up several minutes of one-hour Zipcar reservation trying to figure out how to make the car start via random button-mashing, because it's some newfangled keyless thingo. Had to give up and call Zipcar and ask them how to do it.
• Arrived, saw line, returned empty-handed.
• Was told by UPS that now that I'd exercised my pick-up option, they didn't wanna deliver it after all, so I'll have to rent another Zipcar for gord knows how long on Monday.

Moral: do not shake your fist in the wake of the dead, or they will inconvenience your consumerist lifestyle for days. Clearly.

Diplomacy - deleted scenes

2009-10-15T03:42:50Z

Some bonus silliness for you.

Time Machine via WiFi (Airport Extreme)

2009-10-13T14:20:10Z

This is how I finally got Time Machine to work over WiFi:

I plugged my big-ass[1] third-party hard drive into the USB port of the Airport Extreme base station that I had purchased the day before.

I let my desktop Mac, connected to the house LAN via Ethernet, discover the base station automatically (it shows up under the "Shared" section in any Finder window's left sidebar). Via the Finder, I connected to the airport and mounted the drive.

I told the desktop Mac's Time Machine System Preferences to use this mounted drive as its disk, and let 'er rip. Hours later, I had a working, browsable Time Machine history on that machine. Hooray!

I set up my laptop beside the base station, connected to it directly with an Ethernet cable, and turned off the laptop's Airport access in order to ensure that it would use only Ethernet for the time being.

I repeated steps two and three with the laptop, mounting the backup drive via the network and letting the laptop spend a few hours making its initial backup. And then it worked too. Hooray!

I turned the laptop's Airport back on and unplugged it from Ethernet, so it's back to how it usually is. Time Machine continues to work as nicely as you please, both in making its hourly incremental backups, and in browsing them through the Time Machine application.

Previously, I had the hard drive plugged directly into my desktop Mac's USB, and tried to have the laptop back up to it via network-mounting it from there, but it didn't work properly - Time Machine would make all of its scheduled backups, but the Time Machine application would not recognize them, acting as if no backups had ever been made.

Admittedly, I changed several variables at once going from there to my current, working setup. Most obviously, there is the presence of the new Airport base station, and the fact that the backup drive is now plugged into it rather the desktop Mac. But also, I didn't know that my laptop's ethernet port worked - I thought it was broken! So I didn't try to make my initial backup that way; instead, I connected the hard drive to the laptop via USB, performed the backup, and then reconnected the hard drive to the desktop Mac, doing subsequent backups via the network. I suspect this may have confused matters. (I discovered the working state of the laptop's ethernet last night, as a desperate move. Wow.)

Therefore, I can't prove that my previous setup wouldn't have worked if I had tried to connect my laptop to the network differently. However, I don't regret purchasing the Airport, because the house now has a very nice new router. It gives us not just 802.11n WiFi (several times faster than anything we've had before) but also gigabit ethernet (ibid) and a separate wireless internet node for guests, with a trivial password and no LAN access. Plus, classicaljunkie's old router is junky and prone to freeze up if you looked at it funny, so just as well that it get replaced.

[1] Yes, I'm aware that calling one and a half measly terabytes "big-ass" will seem laughable in a dozen years' time. I well recall how I purchased a two-gigabyte hard drive in 1997 and how infinitely huge it seemed then, and on and on back through time. This setup is for today, and lo, the ass, it is big.

Alea iacta est

2009-10-13T04:56:43Z

Earlier today, ran into a reference to Julius Caesar's The die is cast, and its meaning in context. Here we are crossing the river, and while I have stacked up the odds in my favor to the best of my ability, from here on out its all down to ol' dame fortuna. Roll 'em.

As someone who loves the mechanisms and the history of cards and dice, this should really be one of my favorite quotations, right? But the fact is, for the time being anyway, I get vaguely irritated when I hear it. For most of my life, I thought the metaphor had a completely different referent: one of my well-meaning teachers, at some point early on, introduced me to this phrase, and taught that Caesar was comparing his crossing to metal-casting. ("Die" as in "tool and die", see.) And that made enough sense at the time - Caesar, in this version, was saying that the blow had been struck, the metal had been cut, shaped, and cooled, and there was no unbending it now. I had no reason to question this interpretation.

And indeed, I don't think that I did reëxamine it until, honestly, only a year or two ago, when it occurred to me that he was talking about rolling dice - as if he had just committed all his units in a tense war game! Luckily, the web had been invented and distributed in the intervening years, so it took only a moment for me to confirm that I was correct. It floored me. Not only was that a cooler version - because, you know, games and all - but it makes a so much more compelling story. Caesar at the height of his ambition, making the move that would forever seal his place in the tale of human history, and his pull-quote utterance is his admission of uncertainty despite it all. That's awesome.

So yeah, running into the quote now makes me itchy, annoyed that I was mis-taught something that strikes me as so relevant, and yet probably wouldn't have had a huge impact on my life had I learned it correctly. Whew.

Cut tags and time machines

2009-10-12T14:20:46Z

Thanks for all the feedback re: cut tags on (non-LJ) blogs! I've instituted them on Gameshelf and am cautiously optimistic that the site's bounce rate has decreased as a result. It's still pretty crappy even so, but there's other fixes I've got in mind for that.

Bounce rate, in Google Analytics-ese, represents the percentage of people who stay on a site for five seconds or less - in other words, they load the site, say "meh", and move along. Some bounce is inevitable: there are regular readers who don't use RSS and visit the site between updates, and there are folks who breeze in from search engines and decide that we're not what they were looking for. Based on research, I'd like to get our bounce rate down to 50 percent. It's been hovering around 80-85 percent, which suggests that we're losing a lot of potential audience that should be more interested in us, but the site looks so boring that they have no reason to stay...

In other news, for the last week I've been trying to set up Time Machine in our home so that both my laptop - which speaks to the internet only via WiFi - and my Ethernet-using desktop Mac can both benefit. (The Intellish laptop is my main work machine, and the desktop, a rusty ol G5, performs various labors appropriate to a sessile machine: print server, Torrent torrenter, etc.)

First, I purchased a 1.5TB external hard drive last weekend, connected it to the G5 via USB, and net-mounted it on the laptop. The G5 took to it immediately, and after some groveling, I got a setup where the laptop was also backing up to it - but the Time Machine browser failed to ever show any history for the laptop. It acted as if no backups had ever been made, even though they were all there and accounted for on the backup disk, with new patches getting added every hour.

I couldn't find a solution to this on the web, though I quickly got the impression that was I was trying to do was quite unorthodox, and might work better if I acquired an Apple Airport Extreme router, and plugged the drive into that. So yesterday I visited my friendly local Apple store and had a conversation about this with one of the experts there. Was told that what I had in mind wasn't an officially supported solution, but the fellow had set up something similar in his house, and if I didn't mind getting my hands dirty it should work fine. OK, sold.

So am how having both machines perform their initial backups over the network, to the hard drive that is now plugged in downstairs, under the television, piled in with all the game consoles and DVRs and the new Airport router. They've been going at it for close to 12 hours now, and have miles to go, but that's expected; there's a lot of data. (Yes, I excluded the enormous Final Cut Scratch directories and such from the backup process. There's still a lot of data.) We'll see how well this works.

Side question: if any locals have a FireWire cable they'd be willing to lend me, it may help reduce the laptop's backup time from a few days to a few hours. (Its Ethernet port is busted, alas.)

Dear smartypantsweb

2009-10-10T15:19:22Z

What's the purpose of having jumps ("Click for more...") on long blog articles?

I'm not talking about sites that break stories across 10 short pages so that they can expose you to 10 times as many ads. I mean the click-once-to-read-the-entire-post style that I very often see on popular blogs. Random example: Andrew Sullivan puts a "Continue Reading [topic]..." link at the bottom of posts which reach past a certain vertical length, maybe one out of every four of the posts on the front page.

I can guess some reasons, but what reasons does the conventional wisdom hold? (Yes, I'm wondering if we should institute something like this for the Gameshelf.)

Please don't tell me to rewrite Volity for another platform.

2009-10-09T17:03:59Z

Or rather, go ahead, but I'll just tell you the same thing I tell everyone else, when they say "Hey, you should make Volity for $SOME_NEW_THING" (most recently, this has been Google Wave). "No," says I, "you should make it. It's an open protocol. Knock yourself out."

My attitude towards Volity today is something like borderline hostility. I consider it an aspect of what William Gibson has called "the great clomping foot of nerdism", the kind that is always more interested in taking things apart and exhaustively cataloguing the components than it is in creating wonderful new stuff. Obsessed with categorization and taxonomies, of finding the common root to all things, and then trying to capture that in code, or at least in sprawling wikis. And then, when it's "done", wondering why nobody except for one's fellow robed adepts show any interest at all in it.

It's the video-game equivalent of spending more time writing and trimming an enormous, detailed "world bible" than in creating any stories set in that world. Or of tabletop-game "systems" like Icehouse or Piecepack, which despite their aspirations never sold to anyone other than hardcore game geeks (hi).

If you want to make a video game, go make it. The tools, community and resources to help you do so are all there for you. And yet, if you're a certain kind of geek, the temptation will exist to instead treat your game idea as the top level of a stack: the real prize, you're sure, lay in generalizing all the lower levels, paring and refactoring them into some sort of Ur-Game technology that will solve gaming, somehow, and lead inevitably to lifelong fortune and glory.

My advice is: don't go there, because I know you have great ideas and you're a ninja and everything, but that is folly. Please just make your game instead. I guarantee that you'll be happier with it, and you'll make more fans that way, too. If you're new to making games, the fans might not come, but you'll be so thrilled at what you made - even though it sucks - that you'll do it again, and again, and it will keep getting better. And eventually you'll really be onto something.

I started writing this post with the intent that it'd accompany a release of Webgamut source code to Volity's Sourceforge account. I had a burst of energy to do so earlier today, but it didn't take long to peter out. I am loath to put context-free, commented-but-otherwise-undocumented code out there, because that sounds worse that nothing. I'd instead want to spend a day or so writing some nice farewell documentation for it, first. And I just can't muster the energy right now to re-learn how to get this 18-month-old glop of Perl, Mason and Javascript to run on my laptop.

What do you think? Would it be useful to you or anyone you know were I to just paste a couple of my hard disk's directories into Sourceforge and just put a "Here, you figure it out" README next to them? I don't know, I'm asking. Would the fact that the target for this maneuver would intentionally be obsessed game geeks make it OK?

This post also briefly had a concluding thought along the lines of "I wish someone told me all this six years ago, alas," but that's just dumb, and I apologize for the five minutes of wrong-idea-giving it gave.

I don't regret my work on Volity, nor the work that others have put in, and certainly not any interest that others still have in the project. I think that's great, and I wouldn't even be asking about Sourceforge if y'all didn't exist. I just wanted to put my own current attitude about Volity into words. I'm proud of what we did manage to build, and I am wiser - the real kind, not the cynical kind - for the experience.

What my parents are dealing with

2009-10-07T18:36:58Z

My parents have been in a most unfortunate legal battle over the last year or two with a gentleman to whom they sold their Fairfield, Maine apartment building earlier this decade. He did this as part of a property-buying spree, using money which he didn't actually have, and a few years later the inevitable occurred, just like you've been hearing all over.

They don't want the building back - they would much rather retire from the property-management business - but they also don't want to have the house, which they still live in, default over to whichever entity would end up with it upon foreclosure. So they're fighting for it anyway.

Talking with me on the phone today, my mom said she'd heard that if you do an internet search for the guy's name, you see the message "landlord from hell", or something, and maybe I could look, and print it out and mail it to them? (My parents don't cotton to computers.) I quickly confirmed that, yes, the number-one Google hit on the guy is this horrified essay, which we can call the There's poop in the tub! document - sadly, the story is about my parents' building. Mom's mentioned the flea incident before. (Thankfully, they didn't get outside of that one filthy apartment, but jeez.)

Also in the top ten hits for the guy's name are this story about a different building, and this jawdropping forum thread where, halfway through, sockpuppets defending the guy and his partner start piling on. First, they pretend to be an earlier poster who has changed her mind, declaring the subjects to be paragons of humanity. When that proved ineffective (since the original poster was still following the thread and able to say wtf at this), they settled on anonymous sniping, blaming the victims for being so stupid and careless. There is an entertaining interlude before it wraps up where someone suggests calling a local TV news desk about it, and then a puppet says, "O hai! I'm from the TV! Plz stop calling me kthx"

So, yeah, dealing with these two folks is my parents' full-time occupation right now.

An experiment in coordinated assault

2009-10-02T15:55:23Z

If you're bored at work today, please consider suggesting the Diplomacy show (http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2009/09/episode-7---diplomacy.html) as a link du jour to Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net/suggest.html).

(Yes, cross-posting from twitter / facebook. I don't do this every day! I thank you for your patience, as well as any flogging of my links you can spare.)

Wobbling back to (the rest of my) life

2009-09-25T15:35:30Z

The thing about the Diplomacy show was that it had the weight of a thesis, for me. Even though so many other people were instrumental to its production, the invisible (I hope!) work of editing took up the vast majority of the raw labor involved, and that was all performed by Y.T. . So now that it's done, I wanna take a vacation. But instead, I have my day job waiting for me! For now I must settle for the celebratory dinner at a favorite restaurant that classicaljunkie treated me to a couple of nights ago.

It's hard, though. I want to spend some time removed, and recharging. I spent a little too much time yesterday obsessively reloading my stats pages on blip.tv, YouTube and BGG, and bouncing with delight each time I got five more views. Fun, but pointless. It's been a while.

Gameshelf #7 - Diplomacy

2009-09-23T20:58:13Z

Good afternoon. Please enjoy Episode #7 of The Gameshelf: "Diplomacy".

LGF really freaking angry at the crazies

2009-09-17T04:59:02Z

My pal Robert points out to me (by way of Andrew Sullivan) that over at Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson has - as I write this - literally filled the blog's front page almost entirely with story after story of himself being utterly dumbfounded at the skyrocketing levels of batshittery coming from the part of the American Right that's managed to get control of the mic, and is calling them out on their various bald-faced lies and deceptions.

If I were visiting the site for the first time right now, i'd have no reason to guess that this was anything other than a centrist-to-leftish blog of the stripe I normally haunt. I certainly would not suspect that it was one of the preëminent online wingnut bastions through the breadth of the Bush administration.

The blogs I do normally read have been saying "OMG the right is off its nut" for a while now, and my first instinct is to roll my eyes at this, because even smart people have short memories. But this... is something else.

Gameshelf #7 progress

2009-09-14T01:43:31Z

Finished the first draft this evening, after putting another full weekend of work into it. Showed to it a focus group (classicaljunkie), and now have a bullet list of 17 fixes to make before release. This is good, but, goddamn I'm tired of this thing. This, too, is good. The burning sensation means it's working, etc.

The thing that's made this such an albatross is the lack of control. The gameplay was totally unscripted, and since I had no first-hand experience with Diplomacy going in, I had no plans for the show's structure once the cameras started rolling. This is not good. In my case this was 18 hours of raw, completely undirected footage of not good. It's at least tripled the amount of work I've had to put into this, compared to an "ordinary" episode. I will not knowingly make this mistake ever again.

I'm bummed because I really thought I'd be done this weekend. I'm not going to say when it will be done. I will surprise you. I just want this off my plate so I can move on, because I am excited to start applying everything I've learned to a fresh canvas.

Marcotte on the Obama school speech

2009-09-08T14:49:30Z

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon hits the panic over the Obama-corrupting-the-youth thing square on the head:

We laugh at the wingnuts pulling their kids out of school, and we point out that Obama’s speech is perhaps the most bland, inoffensive, apolitical thing he’s ever written. But that’s exactly what the wingnuts are afraid of. They can just imagine their kids sitting in a classroom, watching this man speak---a Democrat, a liberal, a “socialist” (so they’ve been taught), a black “racist” (so they’ve been taught)---and two things might occur to them. 1) Their classmates do not share their fear and hatred and 2) Obama is saying the same sort of things that anyone would say. In fact, the sheer normalcy of the situation is hard to deny, and kids who are eager to fit in with their peers are extremely unlikely to start insisting that up is down and this normal situation is scary and fucked up. And that might be the first step towards becoming a more open-minded, decent human being. No wonder their parents are scared.

As one who doesn't consider his life as an independently conscious entity to have begun until the day he left home for college, this resonated deeply with me.

More thoughts on Basterds

2009-09-06T16:07:44Z

Was awake in the wee hours, thinking about Inglorious Basterds. The word I finally choose for the film's climax is disturbing. It's a huge energy release after hours of buildup, and while that much is expected, it blasts in directions that feel completely wrong. And it's brilliant. The amazing visuals (not just the special effects, but their context and arrangement) make it all very watchable, letting it batter your brain directly with its very intentional wrongnesses.

Drection one: The shots of terrified and defenseless men and women getting machine-gunned / burned alive en masse by the protagonists are sustained well past the point of comfort, by a director who knew exactly what he was doing. The event might have happened in someone else's movie, but the viewer wouldn't be allowed to linger so over the accruing carnage. An air of "But they're Nazis! Isn't this what you've been wanting to see, for the last two hours?" hangs over it.

Direction two: The movie's matter-of-fact depiction the entire Nazi high command and at least a couple other historical figures meeting violent ends together, casually ripping bullets into the viewer's knowledge that these people most certainly did not die in a theater fire in 1944. This made the film, at a stroke, more fantastic than, like, the backstory of Hellboy, or a hundred other secret-history stories that still keep the historical shape of the war's end intact.

Until someone went and broke it before my eyes, it never occurred to me there was an unwritten rule that you don't let your protagonists fucking kill Hitler in the middle of your (non-SF) war movie. I was struck speechless.

Direction one and a half: dougo and I were sitting behind a giggly dude who was waving his arms around and hooting during this whole bit. With everything else going all teasingly, brutally semi-meta on-screen, he almost felt like part of the movie.

Films I saw this past week

2009-09-05T04:19:40Z

I saw a girl movie, and then I saw a boy movie. I liked them both.

Julie and Julia A net win because the biopic parts are delicious. Meryl Streep is phenomenal in the (co-)title role, as is Paul Tucci as Mr. Child. It focuses on the time that Julia Child spent in postwar Paris, from arrival as the bored wife of a government agent through her transformation into an expert and then a published author on French cuisine. Her passion for the subject matter drives her through years of obstacle-laden effort, supported always by her friends and loved ones. I cannot not love stories like this.

The other half of the movie, set in 2002 New York, is a stock romantic comedy with boring and silly characters that I found tolerable, right up until the end titles. These informed me that what I just watched was based on an autobiographic account, after which I retroactively downgraded it to uncomfortably wanky. Oh well.

Inglorious Basterds I saw this only this past afternoon, and I'm still reeling from it. The film is much more tense than it is violent (and it's quite violent). I made a mistake in drinking a large cup of coffee prior beforehand, and so got to feel my heart trying to pound its way out of my chest as I watched one long, super-tense scene after another. At least a couple of times I had to close my eyes and control my breathing for moment lest I rupture something.

The film travels down paths so surprising and even bizarre that I don't wish to say much outside of a spoiler-cut, and I don't think I have that much to say about it yet. As always, Todd Alcott's thread on the picture is a fine place to read some (spoiler-filled!) intelligent discussion.

It gets a recommend from me, with a strong advisory to avoid spoilers if you do plan on seeing it.

Starting Mad Men

2009-09-03T14:57:52Z

classicaljunkie and I started watching the first season of Mad Men last night. Bloggers I respect who write often on race and gender politics are rapt at this show, and have taken to writing long posts about it after each new episode. What I'm expecting to be the big dun-dunnnn end-of-season reveal ( pbapreavat Qba'f vqragvgl fjnc va Xbern ) has already been spoiled for me, so now's the time to dig in before all the rest falls away.

Unsurprisingly, we're enjoying it a great deal. We are both surprised at how sympathetic the principal protagonist, Don Draper, is. Early reactions to the show led me to believe that he's a jackass, and that the show chronicles how the changing times slowly undoes him. Thankfully, that seems to be quite an oversimplification. While he is certainly a creature of his era - and would therefore be a howling sexist by modern standards - his adventures in the first episode clearly reveal him to be complex, and flexible.

While he does snap appallingly at a female client who disagrees with his campaign ideas (clients aren't supposed to be ladies, wtf), he soon starts fumbling around for a way to make it up to her. He has to make this up as he goes, and falls down a lot, because the idea of a woman having any power at all - even the simple power of a client over a contracted ad agency - is totally off-script for him. But Draper's willing to adapt quickly, if it's clear that he has to. So, I look forward to traveling through the early 1960s with him.

Really my only complaints so far are the obvious "We're in the past!" gags, like when Draper observes that a thick report he tossed in the trash can permanently destroyed its information, because "it's not there there's some sort of magic machine that makes copies of things". (To which I say: Yes, well, carbon paper? Wev.)

I may end up buying the first season DVD for my dad, for selfish reasons. I bet he'd dig it, but I would really love to hear his reaction to it, because he worked in sales in a big corporation at exactly this time period, and a lot of what this show portrays meshes with his own stories about it.