Not Really an Update

It's true, hardly qualifies.

Just thought I'd tell you - here's a sneaky little preview of a short story I'm going to be redrafting soon.

Expect some comics over there as well, soonish.

And maybe some articles over here in the next two weeks. Figure it's about time I start, you know, actually doing stuff.

Until then, gorge yourself with some tasty Gun Show by KC Green.

yours,
Noah J.

Huzzah Wha?

I have a blog?

Well now.

Spent the last few time intervals struggling with school, disappointment, and bemused obsession.

Expect more posts soon.

yours,
Noah J.

Like, Totally Freaking Out

Hate to post and run, but this article is about a robot that is controlled by cultured neurons.

If you're not like, freaking out, might I suggest you reread that sentence, and then the article and then start FREAKING OUT.

This is the single coolest thing to happen during my lifetime thus far.

yours,
Noah J.

...I Watched as the World Shrunk Before My Eyes

Zwoop! There it goes!

What? Right. Google.

The time stamp will tell that I am up late tonight, and finding myself unable to concentrate on anything I was supposedly up to do (writing, natch), I've spent the past few hours doing my usual time waste- when I've bloghopped myself to death I start jumping over my Science/News links, and once that's run out I just cruise around on Wikipedia and IMDb.

Somewhere in the middle of it all I noticed a little blip on PopSci about Google's newest map feature and decided to check it out for myself. In the process I discovered a few things that you will no doubt be wildly interested in.

The feature discussed in the article was Walking Directions for Google Maps, a useful little addition that I've been wanting for a while. It avoids no right turn signs and one-way streets, and makes me just that much more dependent on its route calculations than I already was.

Turns out I've been right about my way to campus being shorter all along. Take that.

Of course, once trapped in the endless labyrinth that is Google extra apps, I started using Street View, and lo and behold, some minor mapping has been done in France (which follows the Tour de France, note if you will the modified icon for the route), some cities in Japan and a whole lot of Australia- you can check out a little bit of Paris, or quite a bit of Tokyo, or some mysterious post-apocalyptic wastelands. The resolution of the Tour de France street views are a significantly higher resolution than the rest of the world, which is refreshing, even if it makes every other street view that much more disappointing.

The oddest thing that I found though, is that Google Maps has no mapping of Israel. None whatsoever. They have satellite imagery, but just try getting it to give you directions from Cairo to Leipzig. Apparently, Google Earth was being used by Palestinian militants to plan attacks.

Seems so pedestrian, but I guess you can weaponize anything if you try hard enough.

I can easily plot the course, however, from Paris to Berlin.

yours,
Noah J.

Some Games that Matter

I suppose they'd matter a lot more if you actually cared about video games, but since these are all free on-line you can afford to.

You Have to Burn the Rope

What it Is: You Have to Burn the Rope wears the guise of a classic 8-bit platformer, with its axe-tossing bebowlered pink blob of a protagonist and the terrific chiptunes that play in the background, but it’s a lot more than that, or really, it’s a lot less. YHtBtR plays perfectly like the genre it apes but it clocks in at something under two minutes of gameplay- like the title says, all you really have to do is burn the rope.

Why it Matters: YHtBtR’s minimal approach to its genre is shrugged off (“we didn’t feel like making a longer game” the end credits cheerily report) but it’s a brilliant post-modern* satire of modern gaming, a pointed jab at the moody seriousness and over-complication that’s become the cliché of games today, much as coins and kidnapped women were the standby of days since past. They even give delightful instructions as you pass through the opening tunnel, as though the title weren’t enough already. Even if you could care less about satire, the games ending credits (stills of your epic adventure and a quirky song) are worth the trip, brief though it may be.

Ben There, Dan That

What it Is: Ben There, Dan That is a amusing and generally well-written send-up of the point and click adventure game, and it follows the exploits of its creators, Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, two lay-abouts who just want to watch television. For those of you unfamiliar with adventure games, allow me to enlighten: these games generally drop you in some sort of situation (helpful, I know), and then leave you to puzzle it out. Objects will be examined, picked up, combined, and used, often in a frustratingly unintuitive way. BTDT manages to sidestep the frustration however, and is weird without being annoying, and most of the puzzles are on the easy to medium side, usually with a minimum of illogical puzzlecraft. The graphics are simple and fun, and though the right-click-to-cycle-actions thing is annoying, the dialogue is clever and entertaining (barring the relatively dull alien conspiracy plotline).

Why it Matters: Truth be told, BTDT doesn’t really matter. It’s an ode to a genre that’s long been dead, and despite a few half-hearted efforts to revive it (i.e. Zach and Wiki for the Wii) it doesn’t really seem like the point and click gaming that gave us Sam and Max and the Monkey Island series is ever going to make a mainstream comeback. But that’s also sort of the point. BTDT is the perfect sort of parody, much like Edgar Wright’s Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (I’ll jump mediums when I damn well please)- though relentless in its spoofing, it’s also a completely valid work of the genre it targets. With plenty of direct and indirect references to its progenitors, BTDT matters every joke and jab is made with love, and it makes a valiant though largely unheard call back to the days when writing wasn’t an afterthought, and games about goofy pirates and animal detectives weren’t just allowed- they were lauded.

Façade

What it Is: Everything seems like its fine when your slightly awkward friend Trip calls you over for drinks with him and his wife, Grace, but by the time you’ve gotten out of the elevator and knocked on the door, it already seems clear that their perfect marriage has more than its share of problems. Façade is the most unique and bizarre game I’ve ever played- it’s a first-person drinks-and-marriage-counseling simulator, where your only weapon is your voice. That’s it. That’s what you do. Stop looking at me like that.

Why it Matters: Façade doesn’t sound that special, well maybe it does, but at first glance it seems more weird and unique than significant. It starts to hit you after you’ve spent a bit of time making small talk with these people, and I say people very pointedly. You know that your making tense conversation with two computer controlled players but it’s eerily difficult to identify them as such. Their manner, their voices, the looks on their faces and responses to what you say (Façade uses a pretty slick text parser to read your typings)- it’s uncannily human. They respond to your actions, and you guide the argument to some sort of conclusion, whether it be Trip guiding you out of the apartment, or Grace confessing to an affair or both of them deciding to work on their relationship. Only after your third or fourth time through do the limits of the conversation become apparent, but those first few run-throughs are a spookily convincing player guided story, something that the gaming industry has been trying to make for decades. This isn’t to say it’s perfect (the text parser sometimes seems to get the exact opposite of what you said; some dialogue lines get retread with annoying frequency; where the story actually ends up can seem frustratingly unrelated to your prodding questions) but it’s the most significant step that’s ever been taken in this direction. Color me excited for The Party, the sequel that’s the same technology upgraded and applied to a whole crowd of chatty uncanny-valleyers.

That was... longer than expected. Go and download them. Now.

yours,
Noah J.

*I know what post-modern means, and am allowed to use it. Quit your scoffing.

A Movie I Would Like to Talk About

I've seen a lot of good films recently: In the last month I've seen The Dark Knight, Taxi Driver, Through a Glass, Darkly, Wall-E, and Yojimbo, but despite all of that the only movie I really want to talk about is Wanted.

Oh how I've been wanting to do that. So anyhow:

"You're not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank!" shouts Tyler Durden from atop a burning, paint-spattered building, or at least he does in my head as I try my good goddamnedest to ignore the oversaturated sarcasm that drips through James McAvoy's insipid voiceover.

Now it might be a stretch to say that Fight Club dealt with corporate drudgery and modern emasculation with a delicate hand, but the claim seems infinitely more reasonable after sitting through a hundred and ten minutes of Wanted, a male power fantasy so broad and stupid in its choices that blowing up credit card buildings becomes sensible in comparison.

The problem isn't that Wanted wants to be Fight Club, the problem is that Wanted never bothers to understand the nuanced of the film. It asks similar questions (what is the role of masculinity in a society that seemingly discourages it? Is violence the answer? What is the second rule of wait a minute now) but rather than discussing the various angles it simply pulls back on the trigger and screams "Yes!"

Of course, any one who saw the movie and drank it up is probably wondering what I'm going on about, since Wanted really only bothers with these sort of issues in its first act and a little in the last. "Noah J.," you might say, "why worry about all of these high-falutin' thematic notions when all we really want is a whiz-bang action extravaganza?" Well I'm glad you asked me that, me, and since I'm asking I might as well tell you- Wanted can't even deliver well on that front.

Take for example the first real action sequence, the shoot-out in a grocery store leading to an absurd car chase. As far as consistency goes, these scenes fail to make any sense; why is Fox (Angelina Jolie) using a gun-on-a-swivel when she can supposedly bend bullets? Okay, I'm nitpicking, but be honest- can you really enjoy the flow of an action scene when every few seconds James McAvoy screams jesus christ and goddammit, neatly translating the crash bang crescendos into annoying little bits of ugly syncopation. Barring even annoyance, it's difficult to avoid that deja-vu feeling that seems to crop up every few minutes in the film, that little voice in the back of your head that says "haven't I seen this before?"

Maybe it would be quieter if the special effects didn't rip every genuinely interesting stunt from the Matrix CliffNotes. It can't even get that right either, opting to explain every moment of its physics raping action bloodfest with heightened adrenaline, instead of, say, super powers, which might be less realistic (ha ha ha) but at least the film wouldn't be breaking its own rules every thirty-five seconds.

Admittedly, Wanted is adapted from a comic book, and the comic book was one of those unfortunate okay-at-best sort of ventures, so themes and consistency and rule breaking could maybe be forgiven, even a little bit, but nope, they have to go ahead and make the Loom of Fate.

Let me repeat that for you. The Loom of Fate.

Writer: Okay, so I've gotten everything worked out, I think. We take the supervillains and make them assassins, we take the super-powers and make them adrenaline stuff-

Producer: Adrenaline?

Writer: It's stupid but it'll hold. It's an action movie, right?

Producer: Okay, okay.

Writer: We just need something to hold it all together, a unifier.

Producer: How about weaving?

Writer: Um... weaving? I- uh. [a pause, the noise of shuffling papers] Hm... well maybe, actually. Like, a secret society behind a legitimate front? That might actually work.

Producer: What if they got their assignments from a giant automated loom that they read the names of targets from?

Writer: Pardon?

See Wanted if you enjoy watching things explode. If you seek not to waste your time and money on a half-assed ripoff of other movies' points and particulars, and are not yet convinced, allow me to reiterate, and please, understand just how dumb this is.

The Loom of Fate. The Loom of Fate.

the loom of fate

yours,
Noah J.

p.s.: sorry for the rambles.

Writer's Block

It is not a good thing! It is, in fact, a very bad thing, and a perfect explanation why there hasn't been a substantial post in relative ages in either of my steam-powered binary word collectors.

It's a terrible rut to get in- I've been doing nothing, less and less as the days go by. I'm starting to become threatened by my word processor; my laptop will sit open on the couch in the living room as I sit nervously in the kitchen, trying desperately to avoid making eye contact. Every time someone asks me what I've been up to this summer, I reply that I've been working on personal projects, writing and such. Every time someone asks I feel worse about the delivery and feel more and more like a fraud.

Whine, complain. Complain, whine whine whine, bitch, moan, complain.

Complain complain.

yours,
Noah J.