why i hate everything

I’m not talking about fake robots. I’m not talking about toys. I’m talking about actual ‘high end’ ‘robots’ that were sold to consumers in the 80s. Of course these products weren’t very advanced but they were meant to modernize convenience. What menial task was so horrible that it should be delegated to a robot servant? A waiter, of course! This is what the pinnacle of thinking in the decade of decadence came up with.

In 80s movies, whenever there is a rich guy who lives in excess you will often see a short scene of a stumpy robot rolling two feet and stopping holding a tray of Coca-Cola. In Rocky IV (1985), the boxer has a lot of money and apparently buys a present for Paulie.

Even Wall Street did it. Seriously. Gordon Gekko is at a house party hosted by a rich guy and this little R2-D2 looking thing haphazardly rolls up.

How retarded is the concept that it would actually be easier to deal with this half-working drone simply to very slowly give you refreshments? It’s a good thing these big houses don’t have any stairs or furniture in the way to trip up the robots- there’s a good reason why these movies never actually show them doing anything.

And even if they worked, I’d like to be the rich guy whose biggest problem is figuring out how to get Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator.

Tags: Products // Add Comment »

It’s about time I talk about the new Trent Reznor side project with his wife. Teased on Pitchfork a couple months before its June 1st release, How To Destroy Angels promised to have a more melodic, trip hoppy sound. With the multitude of releases by Nine Inch Nails in the recent years, how does this one stand out?

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The first song, The Space in Between, comes with a macabre video showing Trent and his wife laying dead after some horrific murder, eventually catching on fire. In other words, it is really cool. Mariqueen Maandig’s drugged out vocals work perfectly with the slow rhythmic song. A very promising start.

Parasite has some dirty guitar reminiscent of Broken. Not bad, but it is immediately noticeable that the trip hop vibe is suddenly gone. Fur Lined sounds like a With Teeth B side- a decent song, but more NIN sounding than I expected from this album. BBB, or Big Black Boots, is a lackluster song that sounds very Year Zeroish, aside from having a subject that might have been cool 20 years ago but feels forced now. The Believers likewise has a distinctly NIN sound, this time a pretty good semi-instrumental with its roots in The Fragile.

Listening to the entire album I can only think about two things. I love Nine Inch Nails, but if I listen to a side project I really want it to stand on its own and have a different feel. Also, Mariqueen is truthfully not the best vocalist. She does the down tempo thing well but lacks the depth to stray much further. The resulting product is pretty good – I listen to the album often- but it is nowhere near reaching its full potential.

A perfect example of what could have been is the last song, A Drowning. Finally, another slow, constant beat with Trent masterfully playing the piano. Without a doubt this is the best song on the album and what How To Destroy Angels should have been all along. It’s hard to argue with the price – you can pick up the album for free at howtodestroyangels.com. It’s a good listen- just don’t expect a legendary new sound. I have no doubt that for HTDA to be relevant in the future they will stay in their sweet spot and give us a modern twist on trip hop.

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Freakonomics is a very interesting read on the economics of random topics. Describing it as disparate is not an exaggeration- the book jumps around from sumo wrestlers to drug dealers to cheating school teachers and breaks down trends with compiled statistics. It is not simply data analysis though- it actually makes analyzing that data fun. Before you think this book is all about numbers, its other author has his foundation in journalism and adds color and a stream-of-consciousness style to the writing that makes it sound conversational. And there are a good deal of funny jokes as well.

Economics in general is an interesting subject that caught my attention in college and even had me considering it as a major. But it isn’t necessarily the study of money that fascinated me, but the analysis of trends, what they mean, and how to read and control these factors to achieve a desired result. Freakonomics, likewise, abstains from discussing the conventional and instead focuses on social, financial, and moral incentives and how society has responded to them.

One of the earlier focuses of the book is how the internet has brought power to the people. Experts have long hoarded and used information to get the better end of transactions with the uninformed. Now, with information readily available online, it is easy for the layman to get facts or price comparisons and make a more well-informed choice. It goes into great detail and breaks down numbers to show why, for example, it is in a real estate agent’s best interest to sell their customer’s houses below cost than to spend the extra time and money to get a better deal. Personally, this is something I’ve long suspected since I sold a house years ago and felt like I was rushed through a bad deal as if just getting it over with was the primary goal.

Of course there are times when I found the facts to be lacking. A section of the book explains how a record of racism could be gleaned from looking at the statistics of who was voted off The Weakest Link. The authors claim that the optimal strategy is to vote weak players off in the beginning and strong players off in the end, so any behavior that fell outside this rigid guideline was defined as anomalous. With this study I would be much more lenient and accept that different players may have different strategies or just not be smart enough or have the wherewithal at the time to conform to what someone else deems is in their best interests. Still, even these *loose* sections, while they are not as factually accurate, are still intellectually stimulating. While I usually find myself hating topics with shaky foundations being forced down my throat, I at least found entertainment with these.

Freakonomics is a surprisingly short read. I found myself actually wishing for more random topics by the time I was finished, especially since the last few chapters of the book are unfortunately the worst. The Revised and Expanded Edition luckily includes a lot of web articles written after the book’s release, providing me with a fix for a short while longer. If you are in the mood to read about social science that will make you think, Freakonomics won’t do you wrong.

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It is time for another year of the Electronic Entertainment Expo and what better way to start than having Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony duke it out with their pre-E3 press conferences. For the uninformed, these are hour long hype machines hosted by the biggest corporate tools you have ever seen in your life. Today was Microsoft’s turn and as expected it was time for them to unveil their motion controller.

While the press conference did start out with glimpses of Gears of War and Halo, nothing was notably wow-worthy, perhaps with the exception of the Metal Gear game. A new Xbox Slim is pretty cool but the announcement of built-in wifi (welcome to 4 years ago) doesn’t deter me from noticing that there was no price drop. This is because the majority of the show was meant to focus on the “next era of entertainment” which is the “evolution of motion control”- the Microsoft Kinect. This is a camera system that plugs into your Xbox and tracks your skeletal movement to allow you to control games without a physical controller at all.

At face value this sounds cool. The thought of navigating menus with your hands a la Minority Report is tasty. The facial recognition and voice command input are logical followups. Saying, “Xbox Pause” to put a movie on hold is actually kinda cool. So how does the Kinect break down?

The good

I have to admit that Microsoft is making a run at the casual market very strategically. There is a dance game that beats anything DDR can do. I don’t need to make a creative leap to imagine junior high kids learning classic dance move and performing on screen to a Guitar Hero like system. The pet sim for little kids, while very limited, may sucker enough parents into noticing the Kinect. There is a fitness program that doesn’t require a pad and can track any motions your body is doing and make sure you are correctly matching a personal trainer onscreen. I’m genuinely curious to see what this technology can inspire in a couple years.

The bad

There are a couple big problems with what Microsoft is selling. The first is that something in automatically easier and more natural to use without a controller, an obvious slam at Sony’s Move motion controller. But this isn’t necessarily true. Easier? Imagine if you walked into a building and wanted to turn on the light and there was no switch anywhere. No problem, just say the right voice command, or make the correct hand gesture, and presto, you’re done! Well, what is the correct thing to do here? The lack of a physical switch isn’t by nature more intuitive. What about more natural? Well, if I am playing a golf game I can hold my hands in front of me and pretend I am holding a club, or I can grip a physical controller with the same form I would use in real life. It is certainly more natural to actually feel a baseball bat, steering wheel, or guitar in your hands.

Another potential issue is the accuracy of the system. While there’s no denying that Sony’s physical controller will more accurately reflect movement, the question is whether or not people will care. If Microsoft is truly going after the casual market then this most likely is not an actual problem. But there were some games being shown that may be approaching the ‘hardcore’ spectrum. The racing game, for example, allowed you to pretend to hold a steering wheel but had no discernible method of controlling the gas. Games that require multiple controls, however simple, will suffer. And any games that require immediate reaction will just not play as well as their controller-driven counterparts.

The funny

A great thing about these press conferences is that, without fail, there is always a new internet meme born. Whether it’s Cliffy B acting like he’s on MTV 15 years ago (“What’s up bitches?”) or a preview of a game billed as having realistic historical battles right before a giant 3 story scorpion boss fight starts, there will always be something Tosh.0 worthy. This time this guy rolled out to present a few games.

Now I don’t know who he is really or why he was wearing sunglasses inside during the day but it was a pretty weird scene. At one point he introduced some people who were gonna play a game and one of them said “Thank you Lorenzo Lamas.” It was a completely unscripted joke as the dude was walking off the stage and he turned around semi-laughing, semi in shock and said, “What the … fuck?” before his mic was cut off.

The end

So it’s hard to say if the Microsoft Kinect will succeed or not. It mostly depends on if it captures the imagination of the populace. And that is the question, since they are shamelessly targeting the Nintendo Wii audience. Not only did they copy their avatars and then actually claim to invent the concept of avatars at last year’s press conference, but they are shoveling advanced versions of Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and Nintendogs. In no uncertain terms, Microsoft is trying to outwii the Wii. The question is, does this casual market really want to buy another console that they will use for a little while before stuffing into their closet? I’m not saying the answer is no because there will be hella marketing backing this thing for sure, but a large part of the Wii’s success was the low price point and that is not something that the Kinect bundle will likely have. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft finds themselves going in another direction with this technology as it matures.

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This post is about something very dear to me – beer. There are all types and qualities of beer but I have settled on ale as my favorite. The full bodied flavor balanced with malt and hops just has no equal. I prefer British style brown, red, and pale ales which have classically been considered bitter beers because of their use of hops. But these styles are not the kings of bitter.

India Pale Ales came into being in the 19th century. They were created as an export version of a pale ale meant to be shipped to, you guessed it, India. In order to preserve the beer on such a long journey the brewers had to use an excessive amount of hops which unfortunately made the beer overly bitter. But hey, if you wanted good beer and you were in India I guess you couldn’t complain about hoppiness. The problem is, at some point, people started drinking these export beers locally. A beer that admittedly tasted bad and was over-hopped started catching on. And thus the IPA was born.

Fast forward more than a hundred years. Americans are avidly brewing ales themselves. While there are many good American ales, many of them make heavy use of plentiful hops in the country and end up more closely resembling IPAs. I like bitter beers like Bass Pale Ale but the hoppiness and unbalanced bitterness of an IPA or your average American ale are not as palatable.

There are a lot of beer microbrews in California trying to do for beer what the region has already done for wine. You can imagine my opinion of all the local ales I have tasted since I moved to Los Angeles. And you can imagine my shock when I tried several American IPAs and found out they were a lot hoppier than normal American ales and even British IPAs. It is actually somewhat disgusting to try and drink an entire pint of one of these. I can’t think of a conceivable reason to over-preserve a good drink like this.

So that’s my rant. Ale good. Pale ale good. India pale ale bad. And Americans should stick to wine and booze.

Tags: Food // 1 Comment »

Iron Man 2 is about as good as the first. Maybe better in some ways- the villain isn’t as cheesy and there are two of them, it has more and funnier jokes, we get War Machine, and it explores the political ramifications of an actual Iron Man suit existing. It also has many of the same faults- namely cookie cutter character development and surprisingly limited and impotent action scenes.

So while I completely hated the first movie why is it that I think the sequel is up to the standard of ‘ok’? Well, it all has to do with where both movies start to fall apart. The original had a solid and exciting opening but then abused the timeline and common logic so much that anything after the first 30 minutes ended up being complete garbage. The sequel has many story problems as well but at least it waits until the climax to start self destructing. Historically it is usually the ending of movies, when things need to be wrapped up, that bad writing rears its ugly head and takes a fat dump on the audience.

So on to some spoilers (and some nitpicking). In the sequel, the villain Whiplash is contracted to build competing Iron Man suits by Hammer, Tony Stark’s business rival. Instead of building suits he builds unmanned drones which gets Hammer understandably upset. Predictably, Whiplash takes control of the drones and the War Machine suit and attacks Iron Man. Scarlett Johansson, whoever she is supposed to be, busts into the computer lab and frees War Machine from the villain’s control leaving both good guys to defeat him. End of story.

But there are so many problems with this scenario that make it feel generic and toothless:

1. Why does Whiplash create drones instead of military armored suits like he is contracted to do? He can take control of War Machine with someone inside it – certainly he could do the same with other soldiers and keep Hammer from getting upset with him for building the wrong thing. It would also make Iron Man’s job a lot more difficult if he had to fend off attacks from innocent people without killing them. The obvious reason for this change is so we could get a lot of CG explosions everywhere.
2. When Scarlett Johansson breaks into the computer and reboots the War Machine suit, why not also disarm all of the drones? The obvious reason for this change is so we could get a lot of CG explosions everywhere.
3. Seriously, 10 second warnings on bombs? How successful would the Taliban be if they used timers? After a year where The Hurt Locker won Best Picture, can’t the movie industry grow up already and realize that people don’t put bright red blinking lights with warning countdowns on bombs? It sort of defeats the purpose.

Once again, the writers are treating us like complete morons. How else can they allow such glaring oversights? It’s like they bought some B-Roll for the plot.

We got that B Roll

Believe me, I work in an entertainment studio. I know how these things work. When you don’t have a smart visionary spearheading the direction you end up with something very vanilla. This write by committee approach results in the very safe, paint by number storyline. And in generic plots like this one it is more important to have iconic moments than to make sense.

So the sequel is more interesting because of specific events and a longer period of plausibility. Watch it and have fun- just don’t dig into the script too deeply. Otherwise you might get so enraged that you feel compelled to start a blog just to bitch about it.

Tags: Movies // 2 Comments »

I just watched this quality documentary about the hunting of dolphins in a Japanese town. The original Flipper trainer became an anti-dolphinarium activist and is trying his best to make sure dolphins have the same international protections as whales and don’t get hunted. A team of environmentalists gets high tech in a real life special ops mission that proves to be interesting viewing.

The Good:

The Cove doesn’t use a lot of the cheap documentary tricks that usually make me hate the form of film. They don’t play horrible music and show people in unflattering slow motion clips if they want you to dislike them. Sure, it is a documentary, and sure, they are trying to push their beliefs on you. While they don’t go out of their way to show the Japanese side of the story I think they do a good job of not being overly unfair like most documentaries. And there does appear to some shadiness with the town of Taiji.

The Bad:

Sure, dolphins are cool and all and I don’t believe they should be killed but it is really hard to be too judgmental over what another country chooses for food. Yes, a lot of dolphins are dying and yes, there is a lot of blood in the water. I am sure there is a lot of blood at cow and pig slaughterhouses as well. If you look around the world you will find a lot that disgusts the average Westerner. Cats and dogs are eaten in China. Monkey brains are a delicacy in Indonesia and China. Horses are eaten in parts of Europe. And China. Actually, in case you didn’t know, Chinese people eat pretty much anything. So when it comes to whale and dolphin hunting it’s just really hard to hate on the Japanese unless you are a vegetarian and believe that no animals should be eaten at all.

All said and done, The Cove is a well made film with good pacing and direction. At only 90 minutes it is very easy to watch and you will no doubt learn at least a few interesting things from it. Check it out.

Tags: Movies // 1 Comment »

There are very few reasons you are allowed to punch another man and not fear repercussions. It’s their birthday, they flinched, you see an old-school Volkswagen Beetle before they do. What you can not do, however, is punch someone because you see any Volkswagen at all. That, my friends, is grounds for a beatdown.

The new Volkswagen ad campaign is playing off the spirit of the old punch-buggy road game. Except the whole point was that VW Bugs were a dying breed and seeing one was a big deal, even several years ago. Is Volkswagen trying to tell us something about their future projections of success?

I don’t know why such a little thing makes me so upset but I can’t watch one of these commercials without hoping that one of the characters, upon being punched, loses it and starts flailing on the other screaming, “THAT’S NOT THE WAY YOU PLAY THE GAME!” Maybe it’s the way marketing campaigns insidiously try to become a part of pop culture. I just can’t wait for the Punch Dub Facebook game.

Tags: Tv // 2 Comments »

I have long told people that I don’t believe in pennies. Many might agree that, sure, these coins don’t serve a useful function in today’s world, but with me it is different. I literally do not believe in pennies. I liken it to a child finding out that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy don’t actually exist- of course something so ridiculous isn’t true. Of course a fat stranger doesn’t climb down my chimney and give me gifts. Of course there are no such creatures as teeth hoarding sprites. Of course millions of people don’t go around keeping clunky metal in their pockets, taking time out of their days to obsessively count over them and worry about fractions of transactions.

If you open your hands for change and get back a bunch of pennies you may as well have just been given a fistful of rocks. You can put them down, throw them on the floor, collect them in a pile – you can do all manner of things with them except spend them on anything. Ironically, the only reason to have any pennies on you at all is so you can make exact change to avoid getting more pennies. Why bother with the overhead of managing them when the return is so low?

This is a great question. And why doesn’t the government answer it despite the fact that pennies have cost more to create than they are worth for several years already? Sure, Sony sold PS3s at a loss for a few years but their end goals were to also sell a bunch of games and to wait until the technology was cheap enough that they could make a profit on the hardware. Instead of sound financial foresight, we are paying people to design a myriad of commemorative pennies and mint them, all for a net loss. Yes my friends, it looks like the penny is sticking around for a while longer, and I am sure you can imagine my views on change in general.

Any change I do get I just drop in a pile in my car. The only reason I dig through that is to get quarters (unless I pick up a fucking nickel by accident). The rest of it gets cleaned up once in a while into a jar in my house. What do I intend to do with that? Maybe one day I can cash it in and see years of dedication translated into twenty dollars.

Nickels are annoying because they are so big almost to the point of tricking you into thinking they are quarters. It is not much of a surprise that these hefty coins have more worth in metal than in monetary currency. Nickels should be close to the chopping block as well but simply making them the little guy would be enough to appease me. I am thinking some sort of smaller sized penny-nickel hybrid.

It is hard to get mad about dimes. Besides being worth an imaginable fraction of a dollar they seem to realize their place in the currency hierarchy. They aren’t worth much and they know it and they are small and unassuming for it. I don’t generally use dimes but it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility, and aside from getting 5 at a time instead of a couple quarters I think they are generally a helpful unit of currency when dealing with change.

Even the mighty quarter has the hang up of still being change. It’s not that I care about their value as much as their practicality though. I need to do laundry every week and that is more than enough to justify their existence, but loads upon loads of machines across the country accept these as their only form of payment. Once these machines start taking bills or credit then I may form a different opinion, but there is still more fun to be had with quarters. You can play drinking games with them. You can flip them to determine the outcome of binary situations. You can play table basketball. You can pull them out of children’s ears. Really, have you ever tried to do any of these things with other coins? The results can be disastrous.

What a joke these are. It’s bad enough that the kids at Taco Bell think you are trying to screw them by slipping them Canadian currency, but who thought that Americans should have to lug around more change? Are we all just supposed to carry little sacks around everywhere we go? How many strippers need to be knocked out before we discontinue these abominations? And please don’t tell us that we are actually expected to start using 5 dollar bills to snort cocaine. The one dollar bill is a mainstay – don’t mess with a good thing.

But back to pennies. In the store today I got change of $2.15. I put the two dollars in my wallet and was disappointed to see I got 5 pennies instead of a nickel. This is the worst way to receive pennies because you have 5 times as many coins that are 5 times as useless, and you didn’t even really want the nickel to begin with. I put the change on the counter and walk away and an old lady behind me kindly informs me that I forgot my fifteen cents. I told her I left it there for other people to use. Hopefully that change can save somebody else from getting pennies. Then I went to the grocery store and got $3.04 back in change. I put the dollars in my pocket as the 4 cents came out of one of those change machines. I was again warned that I was leaving pennies behind. This is a regular habit of mine and I was surprised that I got called on it twice in the same outing.

I wonder what these people think of me. Am I ignorant of the value of money? Am I an asshole for snubbing my nose at society’s conventions? I had long thought that others had come to share my disbelief of pennies. Maybe it is a childlike case of me closing my eyes and hoping they would go away but I prefer to think of everyone else as the children, finding magic in the simplest of things. And who am I to tell them that what they believe doesn’t exist? I’ll leave that for their mothers.

Tags: Idiocies // Add Comment »

Truly, this is the most refreshing game of 2009. All the Game of the Year awards are well deserved. If you have a chance, play through the first 10 minutes of the game and see if you aren’t hooked. Batman feels tough as you walk into the famed Arkham Asylum but it is immediately apparent that he is in a dangerous place surrounded by dangerous criminals. And the prisoners are the true stars of the game- you will come across quite a few classic villains and you will want more.

The recent Batman films were amazing. It makes sense for a AAA video game to take advantage of that success with a tie-in but Batman: Arkham Asylum has nothing to do with the movies. This is gaming asserting itself as its own medium. This is a strongly themed Batman game with its own flavor. It would be easy to lean on elements prevalent in the latest films but this game is showcasing its own version of the Batman universe.

Developer Rocksteady did an amazing job with very traditional Intellectual Property. They could have just spit out another superhero game and nobody would have blamed them but they wanted to create a cohesive experience that shows great respect for the source material. This isn’t just a generic Batman game- it is a well-conceived struggle within a defined world. Arkham Asylum is the backdrop to the entire story and it is with this incredible strength that the game derives so much of its character. Themes of danger and lunacy loom as Batman tries to contain the chaos on the island. And of all the places to be, he is surrounded by many of his worst enemies, in the prison he confined them to.

From the beginning you will immediately notice the cinema scenes are treating us to classic Batman. While the in-game movies are rare, they are cool when they happen. Getting to see the Batmobile and the Batwing are nice rewards but the cinematic nature of Arkham Asylum doesn’t stop there. The voice-acting is excellent and much of the talent from the popular cartoons was retained. Seeing some of the villains up close is reminiscent of modern films. The Joker is a cruel, deranged psychopath. Croc is a terrifying monster. Scarecrow pulls some neat tricks on you before you really know what you are dealing with.

The gameplay doesn’t borrow from the popular titles of the day. Instead, Arkham Asylum was thought out and designed from the ground up. The combat is fluid and satisfying. The stealth combat is interesting with a nice design mechanic to punish the player for failure without immediate death. The core mechanics of Batman were well designed and supported various secondary features that could be used repeatedly throughout the story. Sure, there were a couple of gameplay segments that were a bit less polished or otherwise not perfect but it never brought the whole thing crumbling down. The development team fearlessly gave us a wide variety of play mechanics- I was pleasantly surprised enough that it was hard to notice if a couple didn’t cut it.

All the bios, interview recordings, upgrades, and extras keep the game from being overly linear. It is rare for me to be motivated by finding collectables in games. In fact, I usually hate on them for being useless (I’m talking to you, Mirror’s Edge). Batman has a few different collectable types that range from finding hidden objects to solving slightly more obscure riddles hiding in plain sight. Players find themselves rewarded with experience, health, background info, challenge modes, and other goodies. There are even a couple of additional subplots that you can take to the end. I have to admit, even after I beat Arkham Asylum, I went back and finished finding all the riddles.

I need to give major props to the Rocksteady team. Time and again I will gripe about a good game not living up to its potential. This is one case where I can not do that. As a game developer myself I am just so impressed with the complete package of Arkham Asylum. Anyone who does not give this game a chance is doing themselves a disservice. Being recognized as Game of the Year is great but I believe Arkham Asylum surpasses even that honor. In many ways it represents the pinnacle of our young industry and I am excited at the thought of the positive influence it will have on many teams going forward.

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