Note: Huge spoilers abound in this post. The show is definitely worth watching, so if you haven’t seen all of them yet, I recommend you read this only after doing so.
Over the past three nights, I’ve watched the re-envisioned miniseries The Prisoner on AMC.
The last two episodes obviously do a lot to uncover the biggest mysteries of The Prisoner: what/where is The Village, who are Two and M2, why can’t 11-12 go to the Other Place, and most obviously, why is 6 there and why can/can’t he return.
I’m out in Los Angeles for E3 2009 (my fourth E3). The friend I’m staying with has two avocado trees, a lemon tree, an orange tree, and olive trees. The squirrels apparently love the avocados, and I managed to coax one over after about an hour of trying. She ate out of my hand for several minutes. We shot almost twenty clips, and this one happened to be the best. Watch in HD on YouTube for full-effect.
New York Comic Con attendees were treated this past weekend to the first twenty minutes of the upcoming Watchmen movie. Original Watchmen artist David Gibbons appeared on-stage to thank the over 2,000 people in attendance and introduced the footage we were about to see. Within minutes, the crowd was witnessing the opening scenes of this year’s most anticipated film as it will appear in theatres on March 6, plus a never-before-seen clip from later on in the movie.
(I did not play a sufficient amount of the following titles to properly rank them: Sins of a Solar Empire, Fable 2, Midnight Club Los Angeles, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, Saints Row 2, Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, Crysis Warhead, Ninja Gaiden 2, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, and Prince of Persia. Had I spent more time with them, perhaps the above list may have appeared differently)
Movies
The Dark Knight
Australia
Blindness
Iron Man
Cloverfield
Burn After Reading
American Gangster
Tropic Thunder
Quantum of Solace
Death Race
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
In Bruges
Choke
Step Brothers
(I still haven’t gotten the chance to see a lot of well-received films from this year, like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Wall-E, and Frost/Nixon, so again, this list may have appeared differently)
Albums
Third (Portishead)
Vampire Weekend (Vampire Weekend)
Raise the Dead (Phantom Planet)
At Mount Zoomer (Wolf Parade)
Water Curses (Animal Collective)
A Mad and Faithful Telling (Devotchka)
Dear Science (TV on the Radio)
Vivian Girls (Vivian Girls)
The Seldom Seen Kid (Elbow)
The Music of Grand Theft Auto IV (Various)
The Odd Couple (Gnarls Barkley)
Ghosts I-IV (Nine Inch Nails)
Nouns (No Age)
Rock N Rave (Benny Benassi)
(There was some absolutely fantastic new music released this year, but I spent the majority of my time listening to older albums I missed from bands I discovered or rediscovered, including Sigur Rós, The Decemberists, Wolf Parade, Pixies, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
Tracks
Water Curses (Animal Collective- Water Curses)
Magic Doors (Portishead- Third)
Kissing the Beehive (Wolf Parade- At Mount Zoomer)
Grounds for Divorce (Elbow- The Seldom Seen Kid)
M79 (Vampire Weekend- Vampire Weekend)
Transliterator (Devotchka- A Mad and Faithful Telling)
Dropped (Phantom Planet- Raise the Dead)
No Sex for Ben (The Rapture- Grand Theft Auto IV OST)
New World (Devotchka- A Mad and Faithful Telling)
Going On (Gnarls Barkley- The Odd Couple)
Threads (Portishead- Third)
Some Riot (Elbow- The Seldom Seen Kid)
Halfway Home (TV on the Radio- Dear Science)
Wild Eyes (Vivian Girls- Vivian Girls)
Mansard Roof (Vampire Weekend- Vampire Weekend)
Do the Panic (Phantom Planet- Raise the Dead)
On a Day Like This (Elbow- The Seldom Seen Kid)
Run (Gnarls Barkley- The Odd Couple)
Undone (Devotchka- A Mad and Faithful Telling)
Raise the Dead (Phantom Planet- Raise the Dead)
Crying (TV on the Radio- Dear Science)
The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Weezer- The Red Album)
One of the things that struck me the most about the release of Wordpress 2.7 late Wednesday night, had nothing to do with Wordpress 2.7 at all. It was that nifty video walkthrough presented in the post. The player was attractive and functional and the video quality was impressive.
I dug a little bit and found out that that’s a newish feature available to Wordpress.com users. It requires a paid space upgrade of either 5 GB ($20/year), 15 GB ($50/year), or 25 GB ($90/year) to your Wordpress.com blog. Users have access to unlimited bandwidth, which seemed a bit suspect to me, but I got in touch with a Wordpress rep and was assured that “unlimited bandwidth” really means exactly that.
So I bit the bullet, created a new Wordpress.com blog under my existing site account, and dropped $20 on 5 GB of space, just so I could check out what the video service was like. I filled out my credit card information through a subsequent Paypal screen and my account was credited with the space instantly.
After messing around with the video functionality for most of the day, I feel like I can present a reasonable critique.
The most recent post, “Friends Like These”, on Duncan Fyfe’s Hit Self-Destruct concerns itself with the believability and limitations of NPCs. He uses a game that’s fresh in all our minds, Fallout 3, as a means of example, first considering the general NPCs scattered throughout the D.C. Wasteland, and then specifically the various companion NPCs, both human and non, that can accompany the player.
The crux of Fyfe’s argument is such:
Any NPC is believable to a point, and as soon as their scripted routines are disrupted all the flaws become quickly apparent. Bethesda largely prevents that from ever occurring, except, inexplicably, in this case. It’s a technical issue. The companions can’t be programmed to exhibit a convincing array of responses to all the emergent possibilities conceivably generated in an open-world playground. Games aren’t able to simulate human behaviour at the level which Fallout 3 requires to be consistently credible.
This is a point that I’ve personally been struggling with for some time. The question that remains is one I posed to Fyfe: Is this truly a technical restriction or a limitation inherently present in the medium itself?
1. Depending on the severity of the date and your own threshold for physical pain, consider setting yourself on fire. This can be done casually, as if by accident (knocking a candle precariously situated on the dinner table onto your lap) or more conspicuously (say, quickly excusing yourself from the table, running across the street to the Mobil station, and dousing yourself in gasoline). Who knows, there might be a hot nurse on-duty at your hospital’s burn ward! Win-win!
Alternatively, you can attempt to set your date on fire, however this may result in jailtime if there are too many witnesses present. If she manages to escape before being engulfed in flames by fleeing the restaurant/movie theatre/nursing home, I guess that works too.
