If game materials are dangerous, what does that make me?
NYC Ferry guard tries to confiscate role-playing book as “inappropriate”.
I’m not even going to be sarcastic about this. This just makes me angry, and sad. Are we really going to have to give up all our freedoms one at a time in the interest of “public safety”?
Edit: According to Greg Costikyan’s weblog, the New York Waterway folks are very red-faced about this and are attempting to get more details in order to take corrective action. Urge to kill falling… falling…
Oh lookie, a long line of cars
I have discovered something about this part of Virginia.
If you have to drive anywhere that involves passing through a tunnel, don’t be shocked if you’re late to your destination.
Foamy Flash A-Kon
A little bit of Flash video, where Foamy the Squirrel of Ill Will Press opens the recent A-Kon 15 anime con.
(Parts of this may offend some folks. I think that’s what the animator was going for.)
Cruel, cruel cable masters
The Sci-Fi Channel Loves Me! They are showing an original Bruce Campbell movie next year. Who cares if it sucks like most SFC movies; Campbell is a man who can make nearly anything watchable. If he’d been in Battlefield: Earth, I might not have wanted to projectile vomit while in the theater.
The Sci-Fi Channel Hates Me! (same article) They plan to do a miniseries next year of Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Excuse me while I curl up in a ball and whimper.
“La Repth – Staccato – Data Drain!”
I finished .hack//INFECTION tonight.
Got some side quests to do, but the main storyline is complete. Next week maybe I can start on .hack//MUTATION. The final boss battle wasn’t as rough as I feared, but I’ve seen raininva do it, and I was well prepared. Good game! I’m enjoying it.
I have several unfinished PS2 games, it always makes me feel good to clear one from the queue.
Movies! Music! Games! Parties!
For the first time since moving here, my weekend return to Salem was marred by traffic delays in both directions, both at the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. Neither time did I see an evidence of an accident – it was instead as if a claustrophobe had realized too late, “oh, I’m going through a tunnel!” and slowed to 15 mph, causing everyone for 6 miles back to have to slam on their brakes.
However, the Game Day / raininva‘s Party / Con Meeting / .Hack Session was lots of fun. Rain proved once again why she’s nearly indispensable to Rising Star, I demoed MegaMan, and Nick P. showed me a .Hack//Enemy deck which is no fun to play against :p I also got to say hi to a bunch of Blacksburgites who I don’t see as often as I did before the move – I might not be in B-burg again before Rising Star.
Despite reviewers’ best efforts, I have figured out the plot twist in The Village from reading reviews, just as I did in The Sixth Sense. The difference is that the deduction made me more interested in watching Willis and Osment, but I know I’m going to give this new movie a pass. Instead, rattrap nearly talked me into seeing Thunderbirds after all – at the very least, I can sit back and enjoy the CGI rescue vehicles.
Moving to Virginia Beach has certainly improved my concert situation. I saw a Chicago / Earth, Wind, & Fire doubleheader last month, and this month Blondie is playing a show less than 2 blocks from where I work. Yes, I am still all about the 80’s – if I can catch Duran Duran on their 2004 tour, I can check off two more bands that I always wanted to see.
Time to go fix another laptop…
Return of the Editor
Hard to say whether this is a forgery or not, but this web page claimes to have a revised clip of the last scene in Return of the Jedi. Yes, Sebastian Shaw’s face has been replaced with Hayden Christiansen’s.
*sigh*
Speaking of tech
Hail Eris! I have a 2-button mouse again at work. Once you get used to right-clicking, it’s not easy to give it up.
“You mean this isn’t real?”
I suppose it’s because I know a little about technology, but I tend to get quickly annoyed by “sucked into the computer / Internet” stories. To start with, there’s no “there” to be sucked into, mainly – it’s all numbers, words, and pictures constantly copied from A to B and back; and there’s no technology on the horizon that can copy & paste your consciousness like an MS Word file. Moving the story ahead several technology levels helps a bit, as does tossing in blatant magic (if a character is sucked into a painting, no author ever tries to convince us that it’s a glitch in the painting). Still, to simulate *everything* about a world, one needs information storage, processing, and display greater than the sum of the information to be simulated. If you plan to build an virtual planet with a convincing ecosystem and 6 billion people, that can be a heck of a challenge.
Ironically, one of the movies that did the best jobs of this was actually Tron. The hero was sucked into the computer by a device specifically designed to suck physical objects into computers – there was no “I put my cell phone on my low-bandwidth acoustic modem and I suddenly ended up here!” crud. And the simulation he arrived in was clearly crude and basic – there was no pretense of complete realism. Maybe the plot and characters didn’t hold up, but at least there was some underlying logic.
On the other hand, a compelling plot and interesting characters can easily make up for technological BS. The world of the Matrix movies is extremely technologically suspect, but at least during the first movie, we didn’t mind. Just be aware that if you have an “in the computer” story you have to tell, make sure something’s distracting us from the technology, please?
It seems I’m a cat lover.
I did the “Opera” quiz… it was a moment of weakness.
No, I don’t mean the web browser.
