the-inbetween.com

Razuddite

The one frequently used consumer product that annoys me the most is razors. I don't like shaving and I often accumulate a lot of stubble between shaves, but I hate the bullshit marketing even more. While watching the Leafs lose again on Hockey Night in Canada tonight, I saw the most rediculous commercial ever for Gillette's new "Fusion" razor. The advert was building hype for the "coming song" Fusion by making it look like the second coming of a well-shaved Christ. It's the ultimate advancement in human technology ever and forever!

The amount of hyperbole is crazy. I mean, seriously. A Huge day in the shaving world. HUGE!? Give me a break. There's a good reason why the "bait and hook" is often known as the Razor and blades business model. What is sad is that there's enough people being ensnared by its nets.

So I say "NO" to it. I might be a luddite when it comes to shaving -- I use a freaking two blade Sensor XL and that's more than enough -- but at least when I cut myself I don't do it with five blades at once.

Need for Speed: Toronto

Toronto feels a little more tense than normal. Elevators are dropping. The Leafs are dropping. The Raptors are... well, have dropped a long time ago. Crime in the city is spiralling out of control -- or at least the media would like you to think that. Buses are driving into buildings. Motorists are fighting cyclists. And teenage street racers, spoiled douchebags going 140km/h in their parents' Mercedes, are crashing and killing people.

Here's the thing. In that crash, investigators found a copy of Need for Speed: Most Wanted for the XBox 360 on the front seat of a suspect's car. Naturally, as Clickable Culture noted, the finger of blame was pointed at the game. The link was later downplayed by the investigators, as it should be since a videogame was not behind the wheel, but that didn't stop them from considering using the title as evidence in the upcoming court cases. Nor did it stop the media from making the connection.

A lot of the criticism is that a street racing game like Need for Speed: Most Wanted inspires street racing. You can call NFS's makers, EA, a lot of things, but you can never accuse them of being on the forefront of culture, being inspirations for it. EA regurgitates fads and trends and culture (both from within the game industry and outside of it) more often than a decadent Roman in a vomitorium.

Street race (rice) culture has been around for years. It was around before EA's bandwagon games and before Juiced and SRS and Midnight Run. It was around even before the TV show Fastlane and the movie The Fast and the Furious. So when you consider that timeline, which is more likely: a video game that came out months ago inspires, out of the blue, some moron to race his parents' Mercedes down a city street; or, some moron kid that thinks street racing and rice culture is cool and was likely to speed anyway would be interested in a game that reflects his preconceived interests? Correlation is not causation.

I would bet that amongst football players, you'll find a higher percentage of EA Madden players than you would amongst non-football players. That, however, does not mean that Madden caused them to play football. It reinforces their interests and it can further them (what I know about football plays I learned from NFL Blitz), but a single videogame isn't going to turn anyone.

Prosecute the driver, not the passenger.

Thankfully, Toronto police can make the distinction between a game and reality.

"A game is a game," Toronto Police's Det. Paul Lobsinger told CTV Toronto. "And when you get behind the wheel of a car it's not a game anymore. And when something tragic happens in a huge crash with a lot of smoke, there is no reset button. You can't start over with a new car and a new life."

Conservative Minority

There's not much to say. Same shit, different smell. There was change in the air, and it came. Not as resolutely as some might have predicted, since the Conservatives have captured a very tenuous minority, but still a shift in the Canadian political landscape. Martin's stepping down from Liberal leadership certainly adds to that, and it contributes to what will be a very interesting year in politics. One with plenty of positioning and politicking and strategy, from all the major parties. There's a lot at play with how the votes turned out and how the parties will deal with that (the possibility of a coalition hasn't even been ruled out yet), but I'll leave analysis to the experts.

Minorities have a half-life of about 18 months, give or take a few, so for all we know we might be going back to the polls in 2007. In the meantime, who knows? At least Bulte wasn't elected, so I did my part.

That said, I'm going to leave a joke I posted elsewhere that I made up and is kind of lame: Harper is going to feel really, really uncomfortable since he's going to have to deal with a visible minority. harhar. GET IT? HE DOESN'T LIKE IMMIGRANTS AND HE ONLY GOT 124 SEATS! CLEVER.

Election Day in Canada

Today is the federal election. The second in two years, following the last government's short and ineffectual minority. The bad news is that, save for the possibility of some drastic last minute vote swings (not unfounded, it happened last time,) our politics are guaranteed to swing hard to the right. Not good. On the plus side, unless there's some drastic last minute momentum, we are going into yet another minority. That should make it a lot more difficult for them to try to pass any unfavourable social pullbacks or anything drastic. And if they do try to push that agenda, something they have downplayed on the campaign trail, hopefully the public will remember it and will force them out early. Again.

Either way, it doesn't look too good for the near future. Having the Conservatives seize the most seats would mean that politics would be dictated from a western, prairie point of view. That's something that Ontario would not like. It would be akin to New England being under the shadow of Southern/Texan politicians... and we know how that is working out.

This time I'm voting for NDP. I don't like the NDP much, especially their very strong union politics (even if the head of the Canadian Auto Workers is backing the Liberals), but for my riding it is the best choice. It is the first time I've been in a riding in which the choice of MP has felt so important to me since, for the first time, issues that I care about are on the forefront in a big way. It has engaged me more than any previous federal election ever did (in my eligible life span). Especially since, for the first time in that period, there seems to be a genuine shift in politics on the horizon, whether for good or for bad.

Thus, I am voting for the issues that matter to me and that means ensuring that Bulte does not get re-elected. It might not stop the problem of copyright reform for good, I'm sure others will take her position and CIRA will try to grease their balls too, but at least it will slow it down. For now. I was going to vote Green Party, as I did last election, but stopping her, for now, is the bigger priority.

Oddly enough, this means that in my seven years of voter eligibility this will be, provincially and federally, the fourth different party that I have voted for. Maybe third. I can't remember if I ever did vote for the Liberals. They have been forgettable.

Super Limited Ultra Mega Director's Cut Edition Plus

I was on the phone with my sister when I walked into an HMV, curious about what new releases were displayed under New Releases. "Ooooooooh," I breathed into the receiver, "there's a Criterion version of Ran now. But it's fifty bucks. I really shouldn't buy it."

After the conversation finished, I bought it.

The fortunate part of the story is that on several prior occassions I had opted to not purchase this great film because I didn't know which version to buy. Before the Criterion release, there were two different DVDs of the same film. Which was the "better choice" was never clear, even if they both contained the same movie. So when presented with the option, I went with safer purchases of other DVDs or CDs.

Criterion quality trumps that.

Nonetheless, I started to think about that force that kept me from buying Ran and is currently keeping me from acquiring Kill Bill. That force is the expectation that there will eventually be a more concise, complete, "final" edition one day. This is an assumption created by the studios with their incessant milking of movies with Special Editions, Collector's Editions, Director Cut versions and the Limited Editions with the fancy boxes and useless junk.

The studios are to blame for this. In their drive to sell more copies of the same thing, they are inadvertently losing sales because nobody wants to buy the same movie twice and because nobody wants to buy an inferior product unless the savings are substantial. With these movie editions, they rarely are.

When you know that a better product is on the horizon, you wait for it. Even before the first volume of Kill Bill was released, around the time we learned that the single movie was being split into two, I knew that eventually there would be a double pack. Or a Special Edition with both movies together as one. Something more concise than a seperate release for each individual movie. I bitched about it back then too (even if I did go and see it), but it wasn't baseless. Film Rotation, in April of 2004, wrote about the "Kill Bill scam". There they quote:

Boston Globe pop critic Renée Graham has castigated film studios for their increasing tendency to release multiple DVD versions of hit films. Graham points out that Miramax is currently planning to release six different DVD releases of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, noting that Miramax COO Rick Sands recently told the New York Times: "Vol. 1 goes out, Vol. 2 goes out, then Vol. 1 Special Edition, Vol. 2 Special Edition, the two-pack, then the Tarantino collection as a boxed set for Christmas. ... It's called multiple bites at the apple." Graham predicts that the public will soon wise up to the fact that it's being exploited, observing: "Studio suits would do well to remember the hard lessons learned by the record industry. As CD prices inexplicably increased year after year, some fans turned to peer-to-peer downloading services ... for their music fix. The music industry has been crying foul ever since and suing the very people it wants to purchase its product."

Two years have passed and what do we have to show for it? Nothing. None of those other editions exist. There is no concise set. There is no double-pack. There are just two movies (now starting to hit the bargain bins) with few features and the still lingering shadow of a pending release. I still don't own a copy of Kill Bill because of it.

So thank you movie studios for saving my money by making me reconsider my movie purchases everytime I go for that not-so-special, not-so-limited, not-so-complete edition DVD. You may now blame the internet for your lost sales.

Do Not Vote for Sam Bulte

Do not vote for Sam Bulte in the Parkdale-Highpark riding. Here's a reason why. Yet another. And another.

Yesterday afternoon, one of her cronies canvassers came to my door. This is the first time someone from the Liberals came to my door; the NDP has stopped by twice already in the last week (I ignored them the second time they knocked on my door). Perhaps there's less need to rush if you're incumbent.

Anyway, the guy knocks on my door, I open it, I see the Liberal pamphlets and paraphernalia, and before he says a single thing, I preempt with "No thanks, I'm not going to be voting for her."

"Will you at least take some reading material to look at?" He extends the propaganda to me.

"No, I've done enough reading about her copyright supports."

"Oh," he pulled the pamphlet back towards himself, "you like to download music?"

"No." I was taken aback by his bluntness. "No, no. That's oversimplifying the issues." He didn't care anymore. He was already picking up his gear and eyeing the next door.

I was in my robe and in the middle of doing something, so I didn't press the issue. His body language showed that he didn't want anything to do with the subject anyway. The door shut. She wasn't going to get my vote before this, so this mere distraction changed nothing, but it showed to me what her campaign's stance on copyright reforms was. Oversimplified.

mp3 tag tools

I have had a long standing feud with id3 tags. They made an inconsistent mess of my music files and I called them stupid dummies. I ranted about them two years ago.

Having some spare time this weekend, I decided to clean up various file dumps on my computer. Regroup years of photos, move images and videos, delete useless installation files (I don't need installers for ten different versions of Firefox!) and downloaded demos and, most daunting, clean up the mess that is my music library. Everything up to the music library was easy. Delete, move, unzip, new folder, done. There was a lot of garbage there (holy hell, how do I accrue all of this shit? I think I moved around 20gigs and deleted 20 more), but it's all clean now. Except for the music library.

I can't say how much Tag and Rename has changed since I dismissed it two years ago, so it might be a far better product than I remember it to be. I was going to try it, but I figured it was worth a shot to try the freeware Mp3 Tag Tools. I'm glad that I did. I love it. It batch renames files based on their id3 tags and batch retags files based on their file names. It is simple to use and it does what it's advertised to do with ease.

The last update for Mp3 Tag Tools came two years ago. It doesn't matter. It's stable and feature complete. It does everything I need it to. So the lingering question is that if the final release came two months before my rant, why did it take so long for me to discover it? If I knew of it then I wouldn't have been in this id3+filename mess to begin with.

With this tool at my disposal, I hope that I will never fall into that mess again.

Yet Another Web App

Newsvine has gone into public beta and I've been playing with it a little bit today (Here's a look at it).

Like many such apps, it's an amalgam of other tools. del.icio.us meets digg meets google news meets weblog software. It's got tagging, a user reward and moderation scheme, community interaction, rss feeds, and its own set of buzz words (you don't post, you seed). It's a solid, well designed app that's going to grow fast. There are some issues with the interface and data organization, but those should be worked out during the beta.

The problem is that as more of such applications pop up, saturating the market, the less useful each individual one becomes. The more social services there are, the smaller the social network for each one gets; the more services that I use, the less control I have of my data.

I already use del.icio.us to bookmark and tag links. Some of those can be classified as "news." Using newsvine would either segment those links between the two services or it would cause an overlap (cross posting). Either way, it means that more of my generated content is being seeded across the web across various services. I lose control of it. I lose the data. In the end, they lose their usefulness.

As I try it out, you can find me at n0wak.newsvine.com. I posted hockey stories there because I don't post any of that elsewhere. More game commentary would border on redundant.

Regardless, if you want to try it out and want an invite, tell me.

Like Learning to Walk

The other day, I dusted off Amplitude for the first time in a long time. I pulled it out to settle an argument of sorts and to continue with the Harmonix loving while giving my pinkie finger a rest. It was hurting. In the tradition of "Nintendo Thumb" and "iPod finger", I dub this condition "Guitar Hero pinkie".

After a couple of warm-up tracks in Amplitude, I was back to (or near) the level of skill I had when I stopped playing the game. I was able to beat Brutal and Insane tracks -- save for the few that gave me trouble before -- and even managed to get some new high scores in. It was amazing that after over a year, I could continue exactly where I left off (getting my ass handed to be by Komputer Kontroller.

A couple of weeks prior to this, I was playing Halo 2. After the slow and arduous task of downloading all three map packs (since I couldn't play without them), I was competing online for the first time since last winter. Getting back into the groove of Halo 2 was less successful.

After a pair of maps, my aim was coming back to me and my timing with the shotgun and energy sword had returned, but something else was missing. I just wasn't battling as well as I did before. Some of it was due to being on new and alien maps, and perhaps some of it was due to an increased level of average skill amongst players, but the rest of it was something else. Something was slightly off.

Amplitude is a game that is all about rhythm, timing, and hand-eye coordination. It's habitual and almost instinctive. Games like Halo 2 require that too, but they also require far greater spatial reasoning. To succeed, you have to know map layouts, know all the good vantage points and tactical routes, you need to have reliable depth perception in its 3D world, and it greatly helps to be able to mentally map blips on your radar to where the players are relative to you.

These things might seem obvious, but to someone coming from a classic 2D game background or to a non-gamer these spatial requirements take some getting used to. Even more so when it's in a world that requires fast-paced actions and twitchy controls. I've seen first hand, amongst classic game collectors and my mother, how much an extra dimension complicates things.

For me, it didn't take much longer to get back into the groove with Halo 2. I've played a lot of games in my life, so adjusting to differing game spaces is old hat to me. However, it got me thinking about the initial accessibility of games like this. To a non-gamer, the shift from something more simplified like Amplitude to something more spatially complex like Halo is likely to be mountainous. If Amplitude is akin to driving, Halo 2 is akin to driving in reverse in traffic towards a destination that you have never been to. Overly complex control schemes don't help much either.

I don't know what the solution (or conclusion) to this is, or even whether one is necessary, but I'm sure time will help matters greatly. As the generations of people accustomed to such things age, navigating virtual worlds will become as normal as driving.