the-inbetween.com

Movies and TV

The Oscar nominations are out and I have realized that: I don't care; there are no more LotR love-fests; and, with the exception of Eternal Sunshine, I have not seen a single film on the list. In turn, this makes me care even less.

It's not that I haven't watched a lot of movies in 2004 -- I did -- it's just that all the movies that I watched last year have been considerably older than that. Hell, most of them weren't even from this century! With movies, I feel years behind.

With television, I'm not even on the map.

I don't even know why I pay for cable (digital cable no less) as I rarely watch it. Apart from the Daily Show, I haven't regularly watched a *new* show since Futurama premiered. And thanks to Fox's retarded scheduling, I never had much of a chance to watch that regularly anyway. I just can't get into a new "watch tv at this time on this channel every week" kind of habit. It was easy when I was still in school, but not so much now.

Most of my tv consumption comes on DVD format as a result.

However, I did manage to catch the new Battlestar Galactica series. I had left the tv on Space for something, went off to do something else, and returned to see it playing. I couldn't tune it out. What I caught, I liked. Sort of.

The first episode had a habit of getting overly preachy. Though expected, as there is a Mormon connection to the series, it still remains highly irritating. The worst part is that the evangelizing doesn't add anything to the plot, it just seems to be there for the sake of being there. Useless and redundant. The second episode, which I caught this weekend, had a lot less of that and was a lot better for it. The show's got potential, and if I can catch a couple more episodes (and if they are of equal quality) I might be hooked on a new show for the first time in a long time.

It might seem predictable that I would fall for a show about a giant fleet in space escaping evil robot armies. I know this. Nonetheless, I have not seen the new mini-series and the original show was way before my time, so with no prior expectations I was surprised by it. This is coming from someone that really disliked the pilot episode of Firefly.

Or maybe my new found sci-fi interest is due to my new found sci-fi infatuation. Screw the Seven of Nine-ish "Number Six" (say that three times fast!) -- the Canadian born Number Six -- I'd rather "boomer".

(Boomer? I hardly know 'er!)

This new Boomer is also a lot more pleasing to the eye than the old one. Now there is a change of casting.

Segue: speaking of TV on DVD...

Today, on the internets, I caught the US remake of The Office. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. It's exactly as you would imagine it to be (ie. not so hot). It has Steve Carell (former Daily Show-er, who I generally like) playing Ricky Gervais' David Brent role, and a bunch of other not-so-funny people playing the other characters.

The episode is almost scene for scene identical to the original, except that some of the Britishisms have been replaced by Americanisms and the subtlety in the acting has been removed. Typical, really. An American remake of a British dead-pan comedy translates about as well as an American remake of a culturally-dependant Japanese film; it lacks the subtlety, lacks the context, and misses the point entirely. Why do they even bother?

If you want to experience the American Office for yourself, you can either download it or you can follow these easy steps:

1. place the original The Office DVD into you DVD player and start the first episode
2. find a comfortable seating position
3. adjust the volume up three points
4. adjust the accents to -10
5. set the funny level to zero
6. decrease line delivery by 200%
7. forget about this American abomination, and just enjoy the original

Steam Plunk Down

There's a big blizzard outside, so today (er, today being Saturday) was bound to be a stay indoors type of day. Once I realized this in the early afternoon, I figured "eh, might as well get Steam and buy Half-Life 2". I was going to eventually get it anyway, and it's not like I need to go out into the cold to get it at retail, so why not?

The first 10 minutes was easy. Just downloaded the client, installed it, complained about the UI, and then went on to buy Half-Life 2 Silver. The process was quick and painless; before I knew it, I was choosing what games to download. I selected all, and then realized that it meant twenty fucking gigs. Yeesh. I choose only Half-Life 2 and Counter Strike: Source... it's only like 6-8GB.

Hour One: watching it download and download, while listening to some music and surfing a bit.

Hour Two: I realize that I really don't want to go outside into the blizzard despite the need to go pick up some groceries, so I order a pizza. Not long after, the game launch screen tells me that the game is ready! Woo.

I click to play, the resolution changes, and... nothing. Manually terminate the application, try again... nothing. Ok there. Hit support, see a few pointers, try a few of them out and... voila, the Valve logo pops up. Then a loading screen. Then nothing again. This time, even ctrl+alt+delete doesn't save me.

Apparently, when Valve says the "game is ready", they mean that it is not. I try a few things more, fail again, and loudly curse. At the exact same moment there was a knock at the door. That freaked me out a bit.

As I eat my pizza, I figured that I should wait for the download to hit 100% (it was at 65%) and try again later, despite the fact that Steam is telling me that I can already play the game. Lucky for me, I was getting some good network performance.

Hour Three: at 100%, I launch and it works! It works, and it blazes. Nice and fast, good performance, better design. I play it, I like it, I continue playing.

Hour Four: man, this game is good and the visuals are stunning and... crash. Try again. Crash. Time to redownload that 450 MB file.*sigh*.

Hour Five: "this should work now, why don't I try to play this game at 1024 resolution?" Hey, this runs well. Alright, I finally made it past the area that kept crashing on me. Hmm, the sound is clicking a bit at this resolution, I think I'll set it back to 800... crash.

Hour Whatever: give up on the game in frustration, will return to it when I feel up to it again.

What I have played of the game is really good, but this whole experience isn't selling me on the concept of digital distribution. Maybe for smaller files, but not for something this massive.

Poker Nights

Played poker on Saturday, for the first time since high school. It was also the first time for money and the first time playing something other than ole' fashioned draw Poker. The game last night was, naturally, Texas Hold'em. That seems to be what all the cool kids are playing now. It's also what all the fucking wanker spammers are linking to in their comment spam attempts, but I digress.

I lost eighty bucks.

Despite that, I did alright -- alright for a first-time noob. The hands that knocked me out were four queens in the second game, and three sixes in the first (obviously drawn on the very last card. Fucking odds.) I played the hands as well as I could have been expected to play -- though I wasn't aggressive enough with some of my bets (I'm learning) -- it was luck that killed my chances. Losing the eighty bucks is annoying, but not as annoying as just losing. Anyway, this is beyond the point.

What I'm getting at is that while leaving, I said something along the lines of well, that's about the price of a video game. Right after I said that, I realized that I use that justification a lot. It's not the overall price of the entertainment that counts, it's the cost of entertainment per unit of time that matters, and video games are pretty good in that regard (despite their higher price).

This justification has been used for years by gamers explaining their frivolous purchases. It became more commonly used in the face of rising movie ticket prices. 90 minutes for $14? Forget it!

I've been around this cost-per-hour comparison for so long, I subconsciously calculate it whenever I spend money on any form of entertainment. Of course, there are many, many other factors in play with these rationalizations, but whenever something can be measured in minutes or hours... I can't help but compare it to that which consumes many of my free hours: videogames.

Gaming on Flickr

Flickr might or might not be an MMORPG, but it is a window into the gaming worlds of others.

Pictures of people playing games, pictures of people showing off their collections and hacks and other game related paraphernalia follow (I don't know why, but I find this interesting): VideoGames, Gaming, Nintendo, SEGA, Xbox, Playstation, DS, GameBoy, Halo2, and it seems like a lot of people have named their pets Zelda.

Hey, look! A GameBoy Camera Gallery on Flickr.

Welcome To The World of PC Gaming

I brought the new PC rig home, went to the computer store orgy on College and picked up a new monitor, came home and hooked it all together and... the keyboard didn't work. God damnit. Stupid wireless piece of shit.

Everything else, though, was working flawlessly, so I am 101 keys away from getting back into the "has a decent computer and can play games released this year" club. It's been a long time since I was a member.

This is why I never was a PC gamer. Apart from the occasional sessions of Civilization III and SimCity 3000, and the even rarer (way long ago) plays of Counter Strike, my PC gaming for the last five years was virtually restricted to browser based games, some emulated MAME titles, and the occasional freebie (ABA Games and such). Anything with the slightest amount of polygons was out of my range--my computer just couldn't handle it (thank god for old school software renderers, they were the only reason I managed to play Counter Strike, low-resolution and all).

Now I have a machine that can handle all that. I installed a demo of Doom 3 to test its capabilities, and it looked and ran great. I have no idea how it plays, as all I can do is just stand still and look around, but Doom's gameplay wasn't the motivating factor for downloading the demo anyway. No loss there.

Thus, I now have the capabilities to catch-up on the years of PC-centric gaming that I have sorely missed. I need game recommendations. For titles released in the last five years, preferably. Anyone?

I do intend to pick up Half-Life 2. That's a given. I want to give Far Cry a shot, and maybe even Doom 3. Should I get Battlefield? Or should I wait for the sequel? Call of Duty?

The original Homeworld has always been a game that I've wanted to play, so I'll try to track that down. Maybe some Rome: Total War too. Beyond that, I'm having a hard time thinking of anything that isn't a shooter (there's enough already) or an RTS (not interested). Suggestions?

Fiver

Even though it's still unfinished and needs a lot of tweaks, I decided to change the style sheet anyway. I meant to have a complete site overhaul (not just style change, but dump MT and restructure everything) for the 31st, but that didn't happen thanks to busyness. Then I just meant to change the style for the 31st, but I couldn't even get that done in time. Putting this live will hopefully give me that extra bit of motivation to get it finished.

I do like the style, though. Even if it is a bit "standard" in layout.

The reason I was pushing for a 31st relaunch is that, well, that was the day this damned weblog turned five years old. December 31st, 1999 was the original incept date*. Man... that's a long time ago now. A whole other millennium even!

I'm amazed by my persistence at it, though. It's been stronger here than elsewhere--I couldn't get past my second year of post secondary schooling and this morning I start my fourth job in a year (this one will last, I swear). I can't get myself to start writing the next great novel -- or just a lousy one -- and yet I have published tens of thousands of words right here. Hell, probably as much as two-hundred thousand. Geez.

Anyway, happy new year and welcome to Year Six. I'm freaking ancient in weblog terms.

Oh yes, and regarding TEH NEW JOB: I'll probably have more reason to think about games because of it, so hopefully I'll have more post fodder from that. It should be fun!

* The history is as follows. December 31st, 1999: first Blogger post to a free hosting service. More entries followed in January. Early February 2000: I moved it from my free host to my free university webspace. I redesigned it and gave it more focus. For some stupid reason, though, because I changed servers I just created a new Blogger weblog instead of just changing the config files. The older stuff, since it wasn't in the archives, went into limbo. So, in a way, February 2000 can be considered an incept date as everything has been a continuous sequence since then. May 2000: registered the domain, got paid hosting, and moved it there with a new design and, obviously, new name. That is the birth of "the-inbetween.com".

(Yes, I like big titles.)