the-inbetween.com

Onion Archives

The Onion, America's finest news source, redesigned recently. That's nice. The big news, as far as I'm concerned, is that the archives are now fully viewable and searchable (I think they were "premium" before). Now you can see all the greatest fake online news of the past nine years.

For example, this was the edition when I became (legally) an adult. "Cordless phones" and the Lewinsky debacle. How nostalgic. From the same month: Clinton Threatens To Drop Da Bomb On Iraq. The early plans for Iraqi invasion -- little did they know, ahhh, the innocent days (not really).

My Perfect Albums

Plastic (eh) recently asked about "perfect albums" -- An album in which every track is great, each one worthy of being a hit. An album with not a single song I would skip past and nothing mediocre or even average -- and the result of the tally was: the most perfect album is Radiohead's "OK Computer." There is no argument from me about the merits of OK Computer, but I agree with some of the comments there: "Fitter Happier" is very skippable. This makes it less "perfect" by that strict definition even if, in the context of the album, it works.

By these interpretations, any little intermissions or connecting moments or little musical detours on an album rule out perfection, even if they do serve in making an album more complete. When not part of the whole, like in a random playlist, they feel out of place. They are often skipped. Looking at some of my favourite albums, it seems that a lot of them have these sort of fragments. So, many of those are immediately ruled out.

"Hit" is a little dubious too. If Each one worthy of being a hit means "radio hit", then half of my picks shouldn't be included. They would not ever get any regular radio play, and would never be mainstream enough to be popular hits. But, if "hit" means in the context of its peers and its genre and its niche, then they are more than worthy. Thus, here are my perfect albums:

Haujobb's Solutions for a Small Planet, 1996. It is probably the most overlooked album of the 90s, likely due to its "industrial" classification (and the pidgeonholing that brings with it.) It transcends that label to something distinctly its own. Textured, complex, varied, and consistent.

Blur's The Great Escape, 1995. Some would argue for Parklife instead, but not I. This is the pinnacle of britpop and, indeed, the end of it. After The Great Escape, there was no where to go but down. Every song is a winner and unlike OK Computer's "Fitter Happier", which just drones on, "Ernold Same" is quite listenable and does actually become a song.

Portishead's Portishead, 1997. The hard part of listing this was deciding between Portishead's Dummy and Portishead. In fact, both are equally worthy of being listed here. But if I could pick one, I'd go with this. While it has fewer individual stand-out tracks than Dummy (though that can be debated), it is, in my opinion, far more consistently solid throughout.

Blondie's Parallel Lines, 1978. Yeah, Blondie. I was negative two years old when this came out so, obviously, I didn't discover it until after birth -- but it still remains a great, great album. It has the massive "Heart of Glass" and the popular "One Way or Another", but every other track is equally good, if not better.

Front Line Assembly's Tactical Neural Implant, 1992. This album basically redefined the industrial sound for the 90s, inspite of the "pop industrial" that was gaining popularity at the time. It's only eight tracks, but there's no fluff, no excess, no imperfection.

Tarmvred's Subfusc, 2001. The dark horse entry; it was hard justifying its inclusion. The album is basically six tracks, most of them spanning well more than ten minutes in length, and an eight minute long remix track. The whole thing could just very well be one, extended track. It is an awesome industrial soundscape, going from dark ambient moments to pounding aggro to very short catchy respites with female vocals and C64 SID synths. It's amazing, start to finish, but not even close to something that could be called hit worthy.

My Television

My Television: now with less green!. After a bout of good luck, it was inevitable that negative fortunes would strike back at me. Lightbulbs started bursting, muscles started straining, people leaving, and, lastly, my television blew. Sort of.

It was some annoying Zellers commercial that did it in. There was a lot of green in it. Strong, oversaturated green. My screen started to overload a bit, static built up, it flickered, and then snap. The picture went black and slowly faded back in, but without quite so much green. Everything had a bit of a purplish tinge to it.

After a day, nothing changed. Everything was going violet. The green wasn't completely gone -- it was still visible when it was very strong or in the menus, although the colour was off -- but it was far, far weaker than it used to be. Undersaturated. Underexposed. It was most obvious during baseball and football highlights, the grass that they play on (not a very bright green, but green nonetheless) was brown. Every field and every golf course that I could see on tv looked like it was dead.

Thankfully, I watched House of the Flying Daggers a week before. That's one movie that would not have been the same without all the green.

This is probably not the best photo comparison, as taking a photo of the television is going to distort the colours anyway, but here is how it compares:

How baseball looks like.

How it should look like (TV Capture Card).

If it's some signal being lost or something weird, I should get it fixed next week. If it's the tube, I need a new TV. Fuck. The worst possible timing.

And since I was taking photos of my TV anyway, here's what channel surfing at 5pm on a Saturday looked like:

MORE...

Wandering Boy, Flying Daggers

I had originally intended to write four mini-reviews, covering four different types of media -- interactive game, music album, film, and book (for once, non-fiction!) -- but after writing the first two the following two never came. The two that I had written then sat in limbo for a week. Might as well post them.

Lucky Wander Boy seems like it would be an obvious book for me. The plot focuses on a nostalgic gamer (though he's purely nostalgic, not interested in the new and the future, as I am) not knowing exactly what to do in life, going from a fake designer job (in Poland, no less) to a fake writer job at a fake wannabe Hollywood production house. I'd use the word "phony", but that reminds me too much of a book I do not care for at all.

During his "wandering", he starts writing the Compendium of Obsolete Entertainments, a sort of cultural critical analysis of classic era games. Through this, he starts to obsess about a (fictional) game from his youth, Lucky Wander Boy. A game that seems to have disappeared from the face of the world (no ROMs exist, no one has seen an arcade machine.) It's that search for the heart of that game that basically constitutes the plot. This is where I think it kind of falls apart. Maybe it's just me, but I find the Compendium entries on Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Double Dragon to be better than the actual storyline. Reading that nostalgic mental masturbation fascinates me a lot more than reading about the main character physically masturbating while playing Adventure.

That's not to say that it's bad, it's just that in the end, it feels a little... weak. Now, if the Compendium were a real book, I'd buy that! 3/5.

House of Flying Daggers. Despite wanting to see this film for a while, my impressions of Hero kept me away until last week. It is better than Hero, but that's not necessarily a compliment. I really did not like Hero. It was shot beautifully, but the pacing and execution of the plot paled in comparison to the cinematography. The plot "twists" seemed forced and unnecessary and the very strong nationalist fervour was offputting (to put it mildly.) The movie was basically like "this is what happened. No liar, this is what happend. No, this is what actually happend. This is what should happen. GO NATIONALISM."

The first half of Flying Daggers starts off promising enough, without any of the faults that killed Hero, but by the end it too succumbed to some of the same problems. Back and forth flip-flopping and a really forced (and sudden) love triangle that seemed to exist for no purpose but to add drama to the end. Which is something that the movie had enough of on its own. There is a lot to be said about a focused plot. This was not. Disappointing. 2/5.

greasemonkey escapist

I'm not sure what the origin of this... comic thing is, but it amused me greatly. Do not tell Jack Thompson of its existence, though.

On a similar level of stupid, I made my first second ytmnd, ff3battle.

Moving on to more technical matters, I really, really like the concept of the Greasemonkey extension, even though I do not have it currently installed (I have not bothered to reinstall after the, now resolved, security concern.) It gives the user power to access content how they like and it, effectively, can even fix web designer arrogance and misconception. It's not without faults, obviously, as Greasemonkey can be horribly abused -- generating extra, maybe even excessive, server load, or just generally mucking things up.

Wanting to refresh my client side scripting skillzz, I decided to make my first Greasemonkey script (or plain old bookmarklet). Though minor, some abuse is being commited in the form of page preloading. The target of this javascript abuse is The Escapist. This is how it appears now:

It's unnecessarily cramped, small text with a tiny, useless navigation (you can barely make it out). They're trying to do the "magazine on the web" thing, but they're going about it the wrong way. My script, while early, reformats the whole of the content into a two page spread (it preloads the content), enlarges the text, and big navigation buttons that dynamically load the next and previous pages without reloading the page. It needs formatting work and code clean up, but it's getting there. Slowly.

badlands

Cheltenham Badlands Photo Set, from Sunday afternoon

Corrupt Imagery

I love how truncated or corrupt JPGs render (depending on the renderer). This was supposed to be a black and white image.

"Glitch art" can be really interesting as long as its generation doesn't interfere with your work (like, say, through a software crash) or, in the case of interactive glitch art, you don't have to use it. As much as I like Untitled Game for its concept, I wouldn't want to play it for more than a brief moment. It's fun enough to mess around with for a few minutes, though.

Related: NES Glitch Compilation (v1.3) (2001-2004). The classic Potatoland Shredder. Glitch Art & Design Aesthetics Book, new book from the glitch art site (link above) people.

Why I have not been on XBox Live lately

I've played some PC Battlefield 2 here and there, but apart from that my online gaming has been relegated to, maybe, loading some Colin McRae Rally 2005 scorboards through Live. There is a good reason for this. Apart from Forza, all of the Top Ten XBox Live games are of the "played one, played them all" variety.

1. Halo 2
2. Delta Force: Black Hawk Down
3. Tom Clancy`s Ghost Recon 2
4. Rainbow Six: Black Arrow
5. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat Demo
6. Forza Motorsport
7. Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike
8. Counter-Strike
9. Tom Clancy`s Splinter Cell CT
10. Conker: Live and Reloaded

So, basically, if you like shooting people (or squirrels) a hell of a lot, XBox Live is for you! Sadly, it doesn't look like there are any new online experiences coming to XBox Live anytime soon.

The ESRB and Ontario

The other big problem with the ESRB is that it lacks regionality. Here is an American organization creating ratings for titles based on American value systems despite the fact that these same games are being sold in Canada. An American organization that caves to American government pressure. Our ratings come from such an organization? As a Canadian, I have a problem with this.

You could argue that since this is a voluntary system, it shouldn't matter either way. However, that is not that case. Not here. But before I get to that, let me first draw some parallels between film ratings to set the context for game ratings.

In the US, film ratings are the responsibility of the MPAA and are regulated and self-enforced by the MPAA. There is no legal meaning to the ratings. People can sell, rent, or show rated (from G to NC-17) and unrated movies how they please (copyright laws not withstanding.) In Ontario, that's not the case. Film ratings are determined by the Ontario Film Review Board and are (save for some exceptions) mandatory. Their enforcement is also mandatory by law.

Cultural differences between Canada and the US could mean that such a state of affairs might be viewed as profoundly negative in the States (free speech and all that.) I can understand those, and I definitely do see that putting such powers in the hands of government can lead to problems. Indeed, one does not need to look any further than Australia for proof -- they have effectively banned Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas -- but as long as there are checks and limits to that kind of power, it's not necessarily negative. In Ontario, these limits exist.

Recent changes to the Ontario Theatres Act reduced the scope of Ontario's censorship powers because, according to the Superior Court, they were too broad and unconstitutional. Some movies can still be banned, but only if they're exceedingly pornographic or explicit to the point of breaking the law. The law states:

(4) The Board may refuse to approve a film for exhibition or distribution if,

• (a) the Board considers that the film has, as its main object, the depiction of explicit sexual activity; and
• (b) the film includes a depiction of,
  • (i) explicit sexual activity coupled with violence,
  • (ii) explicit sexual activity that is degrading or dehumanizing, or
  • (iii) a person who is under the age of eighteen, or is intended to represent someone under that age, where that person appears,
  • • (A) nude or partially nude in a sexually suggestive context, or
    • (B) in a scene of explicit sexual activity. O. Reg. 204/04, s. 1.

(5) The Board shall approve a film for exhibition or distribution if the criteria on which the Board may refuse to approve a film for exhibition or distribution as set out in subsection (4) are not met. O. Reg. 204/04, s. 1.

While it could be argued that there's some grey area there, a movie would practically have to be illegal for it to be banned by the government (child porn, for example) All other films are still rated and enforcement, but they have almost no power to stop a film from being released. This I can deal with. This I can tolerate.

Video game ratings were adopted into the Theatres Act earlier this year. There are a few things of note about this.

1. By acknowledging video games and treating them as movies, the government has, in a way, legitimized the form.
2. To further enhance the idiocy of the Hot Coffee fiasco and the subsequent ESRB rating change (from M to AO), in Ontario there is no legal difference between a game rated M and a game rated AO. In other words, games rated M or AO are both treated as being a Restricted movie. So, the rating change shouldn't mean a lick of shit over here -- yet some places still pull the game for the inconsequential change.
3. This is the one that prompted this post. The OFRB, which independently rates all films, does not rate video games and leaves it in the hands of a third-party. I have a problem with this.

As you may have noticed, throughout this entry I've been talking about Ontario ratings. You see, most provinces (All? I'm not familiar with provincial law across Canada) have their own film ratings board. Ratings like this can be inefficient -- does the latest crappy Michael Bay film really need to be rated ten times by ten different boards? -- and there is a slight movement to nationalize film ratings, however, there is one very strong positive: these ratings better reflect the values of the province. This is important because in a country as big as this, you better believe that there are moral and judgemental differences between the east and the centre and the west.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Quebec. I think it's safe to say that Quebec is more liberal (and mature) about such matters than the rest of Canada and, especially, the US. It's more "European." Films in Quebec are rated differently than anywhere else in North America, and while only some movies see any negligible ratings differences, they do exist and they are better rated for their culture. Their ratings board reflects this:

The Régie du cinéma is constantly striving to keep track of the ever evolving social consensus, a primary consideration in film classification.

Therefore it takes into account social concerns; it follows the evolution of public opinion on alll matters that can enlighten its decision-making process. It aiso calls on experts for issues that require specialised advice.

That is how it should be done, but it's not. American ratings are being blindly regulated by an Ontarian body without any local input; the Ontario government is failing to listen to its own province's "social consensus." If we are going to have ratings, then I'd rather have our own.

Of all the issues that "Hot Coffee" has brought to the for front, this, of all things, annoys me the most. Perhaps I've been reading/watching too much about Canadian Northern sovereignty issues. Perhaps those issues are seeping in to my more local interests. Perhaps I'm becoming a bit of a nationalist (not sovereignist, that's altogether different.) I don't know. All I know is that it bugs me the wrong way.

Hopefully it'll be a long time before I have to mention the ESRB again. I grow tired of them and the subject matter.