Unimatrix Two

Making adaptations

It has always been a good thing for my spare time that World of Warcraft won’t install on my laptop. (Actually, I did make it install one time, but only got one video frame every 4 seconds or so, so off it went again.) Unfortunately, Monday night a friend’s casual reference reminded me that the laptop’s specs were well up to another piece of software, and last night, I put Starcraft on it. Maybe now I can finish the darn Terran campaign and play the other two-thirds of the game.

Blizzard does not own me. But I think it’s trying to acquire controlling interest.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Alan Moore and the Wachowskis have manufactured this little tiff they are having just to make sure V for Vendetta retains a brighter blip on the geek radar. As someone recently pointed out, any author who has sold thousands of copies of professional fanfic (I refer to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when bitching about other creative folks modifying their characters and storylines.

You know, a book is not a movie is not a comic is not a TV show. They all have different rules and must make adaptations if they are to flourish in a changed environment. “Spamalot” is hardly a scene-for-scene copy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for example. If SciFi ever makes that rumored miniseries of “Ringworld”, they’ll have to change quite a bit to keep a good novel from being very dull television. (Knowing SciFi, they probably won’t – they’ll follow the advice of some uber-fan who wants a line-by-line copy.) I wish fans were better at judging material on its own merits, instead of what they wanted the material to be. (I also wish more fans understood the difference between “This is poor quality” and “I personally don’t like this much.”)

Speaking of which, some website recently applauded the Enterprise-D as one of the most iconic spaceships in visual science fiction, making the note that “not a lot of thought was put into the original television Enterprise.” I hope the ghost of Matt Jeffries hunts this person down and explains a thing or three to him.

M for Monday

raininva and I went to see V for Vendetta yesterday. Considering the amount of whining that I’d seen at various ‘Net sites, I was surprised to enjoy it a great deal. It never went all stupid on me, and it practically begged for thought and argument about its ‘message’, rather than blind acceptance.

I’m really looking forward to Technicon. It looks like I’ll be a very busy camper that weekend, but that’s okay – I won’t get bored 🙂

I’m working my way through my yearly LOTR re-read. I’ve got a lot of new books on the shelves waiting for me, but I needed the familiar lands of Middle-Earth for a while. I haven’t made it a page farther into “Wicked”, which tells you how gripping I’ve found it.

And I’m really done with 40-50 degree temperatures. It needs to get warm, and stay warm.

Return of the Doctor to these shores

The SciFi Channel doesn’t have a history of showing quality first-run material, though there are exceptions: “Farscape” and the Stargates come to mind. In a nice change of affairs, they have recently been broadcasting the new “Battlestar Galactica”, which despite initial doubts, soon won over large chunks of the geek populace. Heck, even though the new BSG is not really my thing, I’d watch it in a second over “Low-Budget CGI Monster Movie CLXI”.

Tomorrow night at 9 Eastern, they are showing the first two episodes of the new Doctor Who series. If you’re a Who fan, it’s probably already on the DVR, but if you aren’t, I strongly suggest you give it a try. You may have heard of “that weird British show with the scarf guy in the phone booth”, but this show bears the same resemblance to that as “Star Trek: The Next Generation” bears to the original “Star Trek” series. (Intentional comparison, as I have quite a soft spot for the ‘classic’ versions.) Now the stories come in one or two episodes each, not six half-hours of padding. The characters are much more fleshed out and three-dimensional, and even develop over the season. There’s even a late-season character who’s less discriminate than Riker about his bed buddies! And there’s a two-parter near the end of the season which may be the best 90 minutes of the Doctor we’ve seen since the show’s 1962 beginning.

Whovians: please watch or record it tomorrow. Many of us have seen bootlegs on the ‘Net, but the cable companies will read our DVRs and report back to SciFi – and the BBC is gearing up for season two.

Who is this guy?

Guilty Pleasures

I was tagged by twistdfateangel, so here it is. My “tags” aren’t mandatory. Heck, some of the five of you may have done this already and I forgot.

“I yam a jalapeno onna steeek.”

raininva and I went to the Virginia Beach Funny Bone to see Jeff Dunham tonight. Lots of you might have caught part of his act, because he’s been doing it for a while – I swear I saw him on “Solid Gold” once. I haven’t laughed that hard since the first time I saw Eddie Izzard do his act. The tickets were pricier than usual, so it’s good to leave feeling like we got our money’s worth.

Our oil heater, once again, isn’t working right. In what I think is an intentional snub, it’s getting air in the line and failing every time the weather gets cold out. I woke up this morning to a 50-degree house. On the bright side, I got a couple points to spend in “Driver’s Seat Replacement” today and made the skill check just fine. Rain’s Pontiac should be much more comfortable to drive, now.

A few weeks ago, I bought the first book of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, thinking if the first one was any good, I’d buy the rest. It seems Pullman knew I would do this, because the first book isn’t a bad start at all, but the second two fall apart almost immediately. The books are being marketed to the Harry Potter crowd, but while Rowling does a fair job of writing about adult themes from an adolescent’s viewpoint, Pullman tries to stuff in philosophical observations of the nature of good and evil, the way that people’s souls change over time, and a literal war to destroy Heaven. Throw in a large cast of characters we’re given no reason to care about, and I’m reminded of Steve Martin’s line: “I’ve written a number of children’s books. Not on purpose.”

Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” is a slightly better read, but only if you are willing to assume that everything you saw in the movie (I haven’t read the original books) was a propagandist’s lie. At this point in my reading, the WWW isn’t any more evil than your average misunderstood goth chick, while the Wizard is a fascist dictator bringing all the worst kinds of “progress” to Oz. If the writing wasn’t pretty decent, I think I might have moved on from this one by now… and I can’t imagine this being the Broadway musical that’s it’s been adapted into.

It’ll take a while to load, but you should watch this Flash animation. Any non-geeks on my friends list (are there any?) may understand the rest of us a little better 🙂

Speaking of web video… Rube Goldberg meets Half-Life 2 in the “Doctor Breen Butt-Kicking Machine“.

Oh, and over the course of Thursday and Friday, I put 22 hours in at work. Yeek.

WANDA WANDA

Real post coming later today, or perhaps tomorrow.

For now, 2-D Katamari Damacy.

(In the beginning of the game, you control the King, and the Prince follows him. Don’t let them touch! It’s easiest if you try not to move the mouse outside the play area. And don’t click!)

Adobe Priceyshop

From a humor website: Encyclopaedia Dramatica. I think this may actually be true…

“Photoshop: Adobe’s® professional photo editing software, often used to create background images, icons, image macros, and to airbrush webcam photos. Nobody actually knows how much Photoshop costs, because nobody has ever actually purchased a copy of it before. Every copy of Photoshop out there is actually the same pirated copy downloaded off of a file sharing system. In fact, it is now believed by computer scientists and warez kiddies that Adobe doesn’t actually even create Photoshop anymore.”

Good choice of reward, too

For the diminishing (but still a majority) group of folks who don’t play World of Warcraft, advancement in power within the game is measured in Experience Points (XP, in gamer lingo). XP is usually gained by slaying monsters over and over (often a tedious process), or, more profitably, completing quests (which usually involve slaying monsters, so doubleplusgood).

How does one receive a quest? In any populated area where the monsters are close to one’s level, citizens will have a yellow exclamation point over their heads, announcing that a quest is available. Usually, one returns to that citizen after completing the requirements, and is rewarded with XP, and often coins, weapons or armor, reputation increases, or other valuables. Sometimes, the quests are almost silly: “Take this note to the person standing outside this room”; and sometimes, daunting: “Kill 20 of this monster, 15 of this monster, and 10 of this one, and bring me their gall spleens. Oh, they travel in packs, so bring a friend or two… did I mention that only one out of four of them even possesses a usable gall spleen?” Blizzard has shown great creativity in inventing different types of quests and related rewards, and is to be commended.

But someone recently wondered how this bore any relation to reality. In the scientific tradition, he decided to put it to the test… though he didn’t figure out a way to generate a holographic punctuation mark over his head…

I’d Be Thinner, I’d be Taller…

This is the second Heineken ad in this campaign that’s tickled me.

I would totally go to this club 🙂

Heineken Goths

Protected: Memory holes