Here, I got you this nightmare.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
The Rarity of Rarities: My Journey Through The Internet
So I did what anyone my age would do - I immediately jumped on the Internet and began to search. But I soon faced something that I have rarely had to deal with in the past decade or so - the bootleg was not immediately available. Searching the standard torrent sites revealed nothing, and even the Kraftwerk fansites only offered old cassette tapes of the event for hundreds of dollars. No one, it seemed, had put this 1975 concert on Internet for general consumption. This was not exactly a surprise - most of Kraftwerk's hits came later, and this concert was considered of pretty poor quality in any case. But it still came as something of a shock - some kind of media that exists, but is not available online? There weren't even any burned CDs for sale on Amazon. If I wanted this, I would have to cough up hundreds of dollars to sketchy record collectors for what may or may not be a legit recording of the concert in question.
What To Do Now That PSN Has Been Hacked
Last week, Sony’s Playstation Network went down. The company remained tight-lipped on the matter for a few days, leading to rampant speculation. It didn’t help that last Tuesday was one of the various days Skynet was supposed to go online, and Amazon cloud servers were degrading into failure cascades, disabling popular sites like Reddit and Foursquare. The Internet was breaking, and Sony was at the heart of it.
Last Friday, Sony admitted that the outage was due to an “external intrusion.” That’s suit-and-tie for “We were hacked.” Very little else was said, again leading to rampant speculation re: the extent of the hacking. Everyone circled round to the same question: was my credit card info stolen?
Early this week, Sony finally answered the question with a resounding “Maybe.”
Hit the jump for what you should do next.
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Thursday, April 28, 2011
Netflix To Offer Original Programming
Not content to kill the dated Blockbuster Video model by sending DVDs straight to your house, Netflix is now hoping to succeed in creating original, Internet-only content that it can stream directly to subscribers. The company is perhaps the first with the infrastructure, business model, and subscriber base to make this feasible - in its most recent earnings call, Netflix claimed to have 22.8 million subscribers in the US and an additonal 800,000 in Canada, for a combined total of 23.6 million. As some sites have noted, this makes it larger than any US cable provider (Comcast, the largest of those, claims 22.8 million subscribers).
I can't really say anything about the show itself (a David Fincher-Kevin Spacey drama called House of Cards, based on a BBC miniseries and book of the same name), but I can talk a bit about the implications, both good and bad, of this move. Put your hand down, and I'll meet you after the jump.
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Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Album Review: Beastie Boys - "Hot Sauce Committee Part Two"
Let's get this out of the way early: I'm as happy as you are that the Beastie Boys are back. From the probably not ironic party-hardy Licensed to Ill to arguable creative high water mark Paul's Boutique and on to their latter years, where they alternated between a groovy Boho jazz sound and attempts to recapture the clowning atmosphere of their biggest hits, the Beastie Boys have remained cultural fixations, if not always for the music they were recording at that moment. Adam Yauch (MCA), Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), and Michael Diamond (Mike D) have consistently displayed a laudable willingness to make their fans happy, either by touring incessantly, releasing fan-shot live DVDs, or offering post-modern takes on their greatest hits. And the Boys have done all of this while still exorcising their creative demons, continually putting out albums that pushed their signature sound forward in one way or another.
Their new material, however creatively satisfying it must have been to record, hasn't always been all that much fun to listen to. 1998's Hello Nasty was probably the last time the band really captured the attention of the wider public, and the monster-movie sonic pranksterism of "Intergalactic" deserves all the accolades it's received.
The best one can say about the Beastie Boys' late-period material is that they don't sound like they're going through the motions. A cursory listen to their last proper album, 2004's To the 5 Boroughs, might've left you with the impression that the band had recaptured their former glory. Sound-wise, the album managed to channel the insane sample casserole of Paul's Boutique without arousing the ire of every music publisher on Earth. (It just sounded like they were using a shitload of samples.) Lyrically, though, the album felt a bit tired. Though the Boys sounded righteously indignant on album centerpiece "An Open Letter to NYC," they sounded more like three unmistakably talented veterans goofing off at their home studios.
So when I heard that the long-delayed Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 1 would finally be released as Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, I proceeded with caution.
Was my wariness warranted? Or should this old horse just stop saying neighs?
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Royal Love Fast Food Style
In all this fervor there are a few important items of note. Major fast food chains made food based on the wedding. I'm going to show you three of them, starting with the most sane and delving into the pits of insanity.
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Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Insidious: A Scary-o-typical Horror Flick
There is a third class of horror movies not characterized by convoluted plot devices, tricky twists and turns, or painful self-reference - they just present you with good, clean, old-fashioned horror situations, and challenge you not to be scared by them. I find these types of movies to be the most effective if done right. Such was the case with Insidious.
The movie is not overly clever or subtle or thought-provoking. It doesn't ask the big questions or make you question everything you thought you knew about horror movies. What it does do is make you jump out of your seat and prevents you from sleeping for nights on end.
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Anomaly: Warzone Earth, or The Best Defense is a Good Offense
Tower defense as a genre has exploded in the last ten years. Map mods for Blizzard real-time strategy games like Starcraft and Warcraft III afforded people to rapidly iterate on a simple formula: build stationary defenses to stop enemies from progressing across a map. The simplicity of the basic idea means it can be taken in a variety of directions, but it’s rare that a game puts the whole thing in reverse.
11 bit Studios’ Anomaly: Warzone Earth tasks you with investigating alien crash sites in Baghdad and Tokyo. You guide a convoy of military vehicles down the rubble-strewn streets, picking routes on abstracted city grids. Alien towers soon begin springing up, and you must take them out to continue. Of course, this is all set just dressing for an innovative inversion of tower defense.
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Monday, April 25, 2011
Rumors of Nintendo Wii Successor Prove True
Nintendo released a rather dry statement to its investors today, confirming the existence of a new console currently codenamed Project Café. Now isn’t that something? An Internet rumor that isn’t a hoax or mistake or some conflation of the two?
As the rumors claimed, Nintendo plans on unveiling the machine at this year’s E3. The statement says that the company plans to “show a playable model of the new system and announce more specifications” at the expo this June. They will not be pulling an Xbox 360 Slim Oprah moment, giving everyone new consoles at the time of announcement; they are planning on a 2012 launch.
After the initial story broke almost two weeks ago, I wrote about the challenges Nintendo’s next console will face. What will its online service be? How powerful will the hardware be? Will it be attractive to third-party developers?
That last question becomes increasingly important as Apple’s presence in the gaming space continues to grow. Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference will occur simultaneously with E3, and it’s quite possible they will unveil a new iPhone at the event. Nintendo clearly views iOS gaming as a threat, and it may be recalibrating its approach to better satisfy the core gamer.
For more context, Nintendo concluded its third-straight fiscal year of declining profits last month. Announcing a new console certainly wouldn’t be the worst way to reenergize investors and distract them from waning interest in the Wii.
We’re a little over a month away from E3. That means a little over a month of controller mock-ups and anonymously sourced photos before Nintendo shuts us all up at their press conference.
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A Decade of Dreck #51: Yours, Mine, and Ours
Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.
Half a lifetime ago, I reviewed a quaint little family comedy for this project called Cheaper by the Dozen 2. The premise was fairly simple: funnyman Steve Martin has a lot of kids, isn't that hilarious/touching? I came to realize pretty early on in the film that only the elder third of Martin's brood were going to be given enough attention and screentime to have actual characters; the rest would just largely be defined by superficial qualities or interests (Has glasses! Likes sports! Plays bassoon!).
Hell, at least that Bataan Death March of a film had only twelve kids. Today's has eighteen goddamn kids. What the hell caused this movie to be made? Did nobody realize that within the past two years there was already a veritable franchise of too-many-kids movies? Was there a demand for Dennis Quaid to be repeatedly assaulted in the privates without end (answer: of course there was)?
What's really bizarre about this whole phenomenon is that both Yours, Mine, and Ours (Oxford comma mine) and Cheaper by the Dozen were remakes. That makes for a grand total of sixty superfluous film children out there.
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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob:
Week 104 - Joni Mitchell
Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.When I cued up the Indigo Girls three weeks ago, it was the first time in one hundred and two weeks that I had listened to an all-female group. Hell, I hadn't even listened to a lone female performer in the past two years. The best I had done is listened to a few bands that had a lone female member (more recently the Pixies and Yo La Tengo), but I suddenly realized my project had a very serious blind spot, even more so than the rap music I'm still hesitant about fully embracing.
My girl power marathon of the past three weeks - the Indigo Girls, the Bangles, and now Joni Mitchell - has been somewhat of an attempt to remedy this. But the previous two groups were somewhat overshadowed by other forces - the Indigo Girls are lesbians, and the music of the Bangles is more a product of the coke-fueled eighties than representative of their actual gender. Listening to Joni Mitchell this week, at times personal and revealing, at times cryptic and coy, it was the first time I felt I was listening to music made by a woman for other women.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
After the Jump: Bear Semen
Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, find us in the iTunes store, or download the MP3 directly!
It’s a two-man show this week. This Easter Bunny and his holiday cohorts conspired to make scheduling a third participant difficult. But that doesn’t mean Andrew and I slacked off!
Topics include white supremacy (I know, right?), the titular energy drink, Sony’s troubles, Alec Baldwin, the mortal dangers of sitting and more!
Thanks for listening! We hope you’ll tell a friend. See you next week!
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Sunday Reading: RUMOR - Large Hadron Collider Finds God Particle (Whatever That Is)
The Large Hadron Collider occupies a unique place in popular culture. Most of us have heard about CERN’s massive scientific endeavor in some capacity, yet few of us actually know how it works, why it works, or what it’s even supposed to be doing. All any layman knew when they were turning on the Giant Machine With A Crazy Name was what they’d heard on NPR: this thing could cause a black hole!
Then it broke. Then they turned it back on. Still no black hole. But now there’s something more exciting. Rumors!
The Telegraph is reporting that the LHC may have found the Higgs boson, or “God Particle.” According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs is an as-yet-unconfirmed particle that gives mass to atomic building blocks. (If you’d like a headache, you can read more about the Higgs boson on Wikipedia.) The LHC primary objective is to confirm the existence of the Higgs (and other neat new things for scientists to debate over) by smashing particles together or something and oh god my head’s starting to hurt.
Of course, this discovery of the Higgs may be a false alarm. Manchester University physicist Brian Cox said on Twitter, “The Higgs rumours are from an internal, unchecked ATLAS document. Very bad science to leak it.”
I love that this part of science can have rumors and leaks. What if the LHC straight-up finds God? Will anyone tell us? Will there be a cover up? It’s the stuff of science-fiction.
You can read more about the LHC and this microcosm of sci-fi nonfiction here and here. You can even follow CERN on Twitter.
[source: Telegraph]
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Saturday, April 23, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Book Review:
David Foster Wallace - "The Pale King"
The Pale King carries the subtitle "An Unfinished Novel." This is fair; after David Foster Wallace's tragic death in 2008, Michael Pietsch took up the difficult task of organizing the author's notes for this book, a project that Wallace had apparently been working on for years. As a result, The Pale King feels half-finished, is overly-detailed in some places, sadly lacking in detail in others, and feels like it was structured to deliberately confuse the reader.
Of course, anyone who read (or attempted to read) Wallace's previous novel, Infinite Jest, knows that these qualities are trademarks of the author's style. Add to that Wallace's own notes about the book-in-progress - he wanted to have a "tornadic" feel and indicated that the plot should be "a series of set-ups for things to happen but nothing ever happens." As a result, while the book is clearly unfinished, the result is still a thoroughly satisfying piece of literature. Wallace's style was such that reading half a book by him still feels like a complete thought. The plot may not go anywhere, but it's unclear the plot was meant to; what's important is delving into Wallace's ideas.
The Pale King is nominally about a group of eccentric workers at an IRS facility in the mid-1980s, and has been marketed as such; Little Brown even took the cute tactic of releasing the book on April 15th. But calling The Pale King a book about taxes is like calling Infinite Jest a book about a video tape; such a claim is technically true but doesn't really get at Wallace's method of writing. His true subject in this book is boredom, and The Pale King functions less as a straight-forward narrative than as a fugue on the subject - themes and subplots interact with each other and, through their conversations, form a larger whole.
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Casting for Political Correctness – Game of Thrones and Fantasy Racism
The first episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones aired just this past Sunday and already there’s controversy brewing: racism.
Our own Jordan Pedersen said nothing about this in his review, but it appears that more than a few TV critics are a little unnerved by the Dothraki, GoT’s barbarian horde. Adam Serwer, writing for the Atlantic, expressed disappointment at the casting department’s choice of “miscellaneous brown people.” TIME’s James Poniewozik wondered if “if it's possible to be racist toward a race that does not actually exist” while calling the Dothraki a “grabbag of exotic/dark/savage signifiers.”
Caveat: I have not read any George R.R. Martin, and I have yet to see Game of Thrones. But this issue is larger than one HBO series (no matter how huge the hype). Racism and other forms of prejudice crop up in fiction because it remains an unfortunate part of society, however veiled it may be.
And while the public seems generally okay with capital-l Literature, etc. exploring such topics (with a few capital-n Notable exceptions), we get nervous when they appear in our pulpier entertainments like fantasy or science-fiction.
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Thursday, April 21, 2011
The Portal 2 Value Equation
But I digress.
The thing I really wanted to talk about was Portal 2, the first-person puzzle game from storied developer Valve. It's the sequel to 2007's Portal, which was originally packaged in The Orange Box along with the entire Half-Life 2 story and Team Fortress 2, and it somehow managed to be the clear standout in this collection of standouts. It inspired endless memes, oft-repeated jokes, and (most importantly) tons of critical acclaim and sales, and its success led directly to the standalone package that is Portal 2.
As of this writing, I'm about halfway through the game, so I don't want to try a proper review of it (and maybe I wouldn't want to anyway), but I did want to talk about the game's value, something that gamers have decided to take umbrage with: since the original Portal was but one slice of a $60 pie, why is Portal 2 a full-price pastry all by itself?
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Wednesday, April 20, 2011
TV Review: Game of Thrones Premiere
Oh damnable hype. The lead-up to HBO's extravagant fantasy serial Game of Thrones has been feverish, with reviews ranging from adulatory (most of the reviews) to glibly dismissive (the ones everyone talks about). It is, consequently, difficult to review the product itself, which premiered last Sunday on the Home Box Office, rather than just run down the hype (which is precisely what I'm doing right now). There's also been a steady stream of behind-the-scenes clips, concept art, and, most bizarrely, stories of environmental atrocities coming from the general direction of the production.
Couple that with the fact that the series is based on an as-yet-unfinished series of novels (collectively referred to as A Song of Ice and Fire) by former Twilight Zone writer and current Psychlo George R.R. Martin, and things get even trickier. After all, I've read a couple of the books myself, which makes it far easier for me to figure out what was going on in the pilot, which was most likely bewildering to anyone who hasn't read the book.
What's a reviewer to do?
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Bad at Science: Particles, Teleportation and Aliens!
It has me thinking that I’ve been hating on science all my life for no good reason. If a teacher in my high school would have just popped an episode of Cosmos on in ninth grade, who knows what my life would be like now. I’m trying to understand the scientific world, and I know we’ve got smarter people doing it better on this site, but for now you’re stuck with me. And two big (or, interesting at least) science stories popped earlier this week, and I’m going to try and explain them with no knowledge of the scientific mechanics behind them. Sound good?
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Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Wow, that's meta: how Scre4m made the Movies self-aware
I was immediately hooked by the meta-tradition, finding it both edifying and entertaining. I gravitated towards meta-works, writing my final paper on Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters (a story about a man in the process of writing a novel entitled "The Counterfeiters"), and studying movies such as Charlie Kaufman-penned Adaptation and Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (both movies about making movies). It wasn't long before meta became a term thrown around by hipsters and pseudo-intellectuals alike to describe anything that was even vaguely self-referential.
But only now with Wes Craven's Scre4m (pronounced scree-FOR-um, according to the posters) has meta-culture entered into the truly public sphere. The characters in Scre4m take meta-awareness to the next level: not only is there constant banter about how their lives follow the conventions of a horror film, but they also make comments about their awareness of their awareness... before getting stabbed in the most predictable ways regardless. Does Scre4m take things too far? How many levels of meta can there be before a work folds in upon itself to oblivion? How deep does the reflextive rabbit hole go?
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AMC’s The Killing is a Master Manipulator
Murder mysteries are tricky business. The stakes are always clear and incredibly high, but the tried-and-true machinations of the genre can wear out their welcome fast. Shows trying to escape cliché sometimes stretch too far, sabotaging the believability of their creation just to keep the viewer guessing.
Police procedurals like CSI avoid this problem by wrapping up each case within the hour and occasionally tossing in a meme for good measure. David Lynch’s oft-compared to Twin Peaks got by on sheer weirdness. Scores of others adhere to the predictable routine of Crime-Clue-Clue-Solution.
AMC’s new drama The Killing walks and talks like standard procedural fare, but after only four episodes it’s already showing that sometimes mysteries aren’t so simple. (Minor spoilers, I guess.)
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Monday, April 18, 2011
A Decade of Dreck #50: The Fog
Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.
Fifty down, fifty to go! We're halfway there, Charge Shooters!!!
My bachelor's degree in history essentially limits me to two possible career paths: schoolteacher or old town historian. You know, the old, tweedily impertinent fellow with eyeglasses and a bow tie who tells inquisitive kids about the sinister origins of their small hometown's founding. "Yessir, it's true. 'Round eighteen aught nine, Major Ogden burned down all the Chippewas' wigwams, rightabouts where the courthouse is now. And they say that on a dark, moonless October night...why, just like the kind we're expecting this Friday, the souls of the Chippewas return to the land of the living to terrorize Ogdenville's residents. 'Course, it's only a legend. Have a good weekend, kids!"
Yes, this stock character appears in The Fog, 2005's ill-fated remake of the John Carpenter original. I suppose we can't really chalk up too much originality to the first go through of this story, it seems it might still be your run-of-the-mill "town curse" movie. Still, Carpenter is an unusually talented filmmaker with enough cult classics (and the first and still best of the slasher movies in Halloween) and perhaps we can't count out the original based on the by-the-numbers badness of this one. But that's for another day, right now we have to marvel at the fact that someone bothered to fork up the money to remake a movie you could have straight up stolen the plot from and gotten away clean.
After all, if this story is so overdone, what does a remake of an unoriginal movie end up being (besides bad)?
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My bachelor's degree in history essentially limits me to two possible career paths: schoolteacher or old town historian. You know, the old, tweedily impertinent fellow with eyeglasses and a bow tie who tells inquisitive kids about the sinister origins of their small hometown's founding. "Yessir, it's true. 'Round eighteen aught nine, Major Ogden burned down all the Chippewas' wigwams, rightabouts where the courthouse is now. And they say that on a dark, moonless October night...why, just like the kind we're expecting this Friday, the souls of the Chippewas return to the land of the living to terrorize Ogdenville's residents. 'Course, it's only a legend. Have a good weekend, kids!"
Yes, this stock character appears in The Fog, 2005's ill-fated remake of the John Carpenter original. I suppose we can't really chalk up too much originality to the first go through of this story, it seems it might still be your run-of-the-mill "town curse" movie. Still, Carpenter is an unusually talented filmmaker with enough cult classics (and the first and still best of the slasher movies in Halloween) and perhaps we can't count out the original based on the by-the-numbers badness of this one. But that's for another day, right now we have to marvel at the fact that someone bothered to fork up the money to remake a movie you could have straight up stolen the plot from and gotten away clean.
After all, if this story is so overdone, what does a remake of an unoriginal movie end up being (besides bad)?
Continue...
Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob:
Week 103 - The Bangles
I'm still not exactly sure what train of thought led me to listen to the Bangles all of this week. There was a number of groups that friends had recommended to me, and I decided that April was going to be the month in which I took care of this list. So I listened first to the Streets and then to the Indigo Girls, both of which I enjoyed quite a bit. With this good track record, I welcomed new recommendations.
Then someone suggested that I listen to the Bangles. I think it was meant as sort of a joke - at least, by the end of the week, I hoped it was a joke. The Bangles also had that whole girl power thing going for them, so I thought it would be a nice thematic follow-up to the Indigo Girls.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
After the Jump: I Am British Gay
Another podcast, oh boy!
Giaco joins Craig and me to discuss: breakfast beer, the ad-supported Kindle, the death of the Flip Video, Nintendo's rumored HD console, Minecraft, and more!
Thanks for listening! See you next week! Continue...
Sunday Reading: Is Game of Thrones Fantasy Crap?
Matt Zoller Seitz has some words for his fellow television critics: cool your jets.
Seitz, television critic for Salon, recently took umbrage at some of his critic colleagues’ thoughts on the much-anticipated HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones. He specifically calls out Slate’s Troy Patterson and Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times for dismissing not only the show too readily but the entire genre of fantasy.
Patterson’s review, “Quasi-Medieval, Dragon-Ridden Fantasy Crap: Art Thou Prepared to Watch Game of Thrones?” channels a faux-fantasy voice that Seitz argues is less a parody of Game of Thrones scribe George R.R. Martin and “more like a goof on what Patterson imagines fantasy fiction to be.” It’s hard not to see Seitz’s point when Patterson begins paragraphs with fluff like: “Thus does the reviewer feel daunted to face an old nemesis at a late hour.”
Seitz then derides Bellafante for pigeon-holing Game of Thrones as “boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.” Female audiences are less easily plied, argues Seitz; simply tossing in graphic sex scenes willy-nilly (which Seitz feels Thrones isn’t, anyway) is a way into a teenage boy’s heart, not a woman’s.
That Game of Thrones has elicited such tepid and generalized responses from Patterson and Bellafante is intriguing. That their responses have so incensed Seitz is no less intriguing. It may, in fact, boil down to genre. I know people who can’t get into fantasy because they’re put off by all the funny-sounding names. Seitz believes that such an excuse is just that, an excuse:
“Imagine if a review of Deadwood had mocked the very idea of a Western series telling morally complex adult stories, or if a review of The Sopranos proceeded from the assumption that gangster tales are inherently worthless as popular art. You can't. It's unthinkable.”
We’ll surely have some Game of Thrones coverage over the next few weeks. Be sure to sound off in the comments if you think it’s just fantasy fluff or riveting drama that meets the bar built, set, and raised by HBO.
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Saturday, April 16, 2011
Saturday Morning TV: Star Wars the Musical
CALIFORNIA, 1996 – An intrepid cast of students and musicians has recreated the entirety of Star Wars onstage in the form of a musical.
Star Wars the Musical: Act 1, Part 1 from Funny Farm Films on Vimeo.
If you feel so inclined, check out the rest over at Salon.
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Friday, April 15, 2011
The Huffington Post Lawsuits: No Heroes Here, Only Villains
Let's get this straight - no one aspires to become a writer, let alone a blogger, for the money. Tasini himself had been blogging for the Huffington Post since its infancy in 2001, and many others have voluntarily elected to do what he does. Unpaid blogging can be done for any number of reasons - padding for the resume, experience in the field, a way to increase one's readership, a forum to voice one's opinions, or (in my case) a hobby and creative outlet. Tasini knew from the start that he would not be getting paid for his work and, as his decade-long connection to the Huffington Post demonstrates, he must have been okay with this.
It is unlikely that Tasini is going to walk away with any money, let alone a third of the profit from the Post's sale. And Tasini himself understands that; he acknowledges that he is not suing because of a breach of contract. In fact, it's sort of unclear what Tasini's actual argument is, besides the fact that its unfair that Arianna Huffington walks away with so much money on the backs of her unpaid writers. What is his game plan here? Does he have a strategy?
What Nintendo Needs From Its Next Wii
One in eight Americans own a Wii. That means that one in eight Americans may be disappointed/excited to hear that a new Wii Sports machine might be on the way in 2012.
Game Informer reported yesterday that, according to multiple sources, Nintendo will be announcing a new HD console in the next month or two, with a full unveiling likely at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.
Word on the street is that a price drop for the current Wii may also happen as soon as May 15, which would make sense if Nintendo’s gearing up for a new console launch. Unfortunately, that means a dry spell for primo Wii content is likely (assuming you don’t think we’re in one already).
Last time new hardware rolled out, Nintendo arrived late to the party, touting innovative motion controls as an alternative to cutting edge graphics. It worked for a good long while, but Microsoft and Sony have since caught up in the motion control department. The Wii’s growing stagnant and its flaws more glaring.
If Nintendo’s truly determined to kick off a new hardware cycle, there are some things it desperately needs to get right this time around.
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Thursday, April 14, 2011
ABC Discards Some Old Soap
Get your stories in while there’s still time: ABC just announced plans to end long-running soaps All My Children and One Life to Live within the next year. They will be replaced by lifestyle shows about food and fashion.
All My Children, winner of over 30 Daytime Emmy awards, first premiered in 1970. One Life to Live hit the airwaves back in 1968. That’s almost 85 years of amnesia, pregnancies, car crashes, and ineffectual murder trials combined! On a serious note, both shows also broke ground in daytime television by being among the first soaps to address sensitive issues such as interracial marriage, teen pregnancy, and homosexuality. Their ability to navigate these landmines while still providing daily melodrama of the zaniest variety imaginable is to be commended.
Both shows recently surpassed the 10,000th episode mark, but now neither will have the chance to supplant the now-cancelled Guiding Light as the all-time leader (15,762 episodes on CBS). Of the soap operas with 40-year-plus histories, only NBC’s Days of our Lives and ABC’s General Hospital (home of James Franco’s character “Franco”) remain.
I watched All My Children for a month or two once and Days of our Lives holds a special place in my family, so I have an oddly familiar relationship with soaps. I’m constantly amazed by their consistency despite how shoddily produced they feel. The episode counts alone prove that this is some kind of entertainment by attrition. It’s sad to see the dwindling daytime audience claim more victims.
The Internet’s forever changed our relationship with television. Endless serialized content just doesn’t have the audience it once did. Reality/talk show programming is also cheaper to produce and more readily adapted to changing tastes. I would not be surprised to see other titans of television fall in the coming years.
Just – no one touch Sesame Street, okay?
[via LA Times]
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Windows 8: What's Next for Windows?
This will involve a bit more mystery and conjecture than the OS X preview, not because Microsoft has suddenly become as secretive as Apple but because Windows 8 is at least a year and a half away at this point, and as such most of what we know about it has either come from Microsoft shills who don't understand how "marketing" works or dubious Russian websites that aren't exactly known for their fact-checking.
That being said, as far as I can tell Windows 8 is shaping up to be quite the release. Let's have a look.
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Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Art House in the Middle of the Street #10: Rashomon
There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.
Ways to be philosophical with your movie:
Way 1: Talk about philosophy a lot. Quote from the Bible, preferably the book of Revelation. Have your characters discuss the meaning of life and death. Include a character to personify the latter. Have the death character and the main character interact in some achingly allegorical way. See Seventh Seal, The.
Way 2: Talk about philosophy less. Put together a film that has some philosophical weight but could just be a romping good action movie. Make sure the sum total of your plot points form some kind of coherent philosophical project. Co-opt a beloved modern folk hero. See Dark Knight, The.
Way 3: Don't talk about philosophy. Assemble a beguiling, mysterious scenario. Let us see it from four different perspectives, each as plausible yet doubtable as the next. Give us no hint as to which one is the truth. Tinker with the way we perceive the language of film. See Rashomon.
Seriously, see Rashomon.
Continue...
When “Silly Remake” Met “Wait, What?”
My previous life as a student in the art of screenwriting left its mark on me. I always think about the dramatic structure of a film. I’m constantly worrying about the “want” or “need” of a character on television. And, most loathsome of all, I still peruse the trades every week. Reading sites like Variety, I’ve learned all types of stupid things I wish I could unlearn. Did you know that the new Pirates of the Caribbean is going to have its international premiere at Cannes Film Festival? Or have you heard about the arena show Batman Live? It all sounds like pretty rough stuff, but that all pales in comparison to what I read today.
Bradley Cooper is in talks to star in a remake of The Crow.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
MLB 11 The Show (ing you all the possibilities!)
The same is supposed to be true of baseball games such as MLB 11 The Show - it can act as a sort of virtual reality simulator of what it's like to occupy the skin of a professional ballplayer. The new "pure control" system (a feature borrowed from the competing 2K Sports franchise) attempts to further physicalize/virtualize the game more than timed button-presses are capable of doing. Now, pulling back on the analog stick is a digital stand-in for a pitcher's windup or a batter's stride toward the ball, and pushing the analog stick forward is akin to taking a mighty hack or delivering a pitch. Convinced? I didn't think so...
I'm not completely sold on the game's ability to imitate what it feels like to actually play in a major league game; at least not in the same way that Arkham Asylum actually - in a sick, twisted, nerdy way - makes you feel like Batman while he beats the tar out of Joker's thugs. Maybe I just haven't logged enough hours to get the hang of it, but so far The Show lacks a certain "organic" quality of the gameplay that lets you really lose yourself in the world of playing the game - that certain way of controlling your players and making team decisions that goes beyond hand-eye coordination and starts to become instinct.
But what The Show does provide is threefold: an up-to-date (and updatable) database of rosters; a pretty decent visual simulator of what it's like to watch a game; and a mostly-fun RPG-like single-player create-a-player mode. More information ahead for those who care to hear more...
Continue...
The Grim Fairy Tale of Hanna
Kids kicking ass are all the rage these days. You’ve got Kickass, of course, with its blue streak-swearing preteens. There’s the lovable forever-teen Michael Cera punching fools until coins come out in Scott Pilgrim. And let’s not forget Harry Potter and his magical mates, who banish unnamed evils from Britain with a wave of their wands.
Harry Potter is the only one of those examples actually tailored for children. Kickass and Scott Pilgrim were intended for older audiences, the manchildren and the aging geeks that comprise the majority of that prized 18-34 male demographic. Child or teen (or – shudder – tween) action stars excites because of their implausibility, the disconnect between their youth and their ability to punish more thugs than the Governator in his heyday.
The marketing behind Hanna banked on this excitement: “Come watch that girl from The Lovely Bones deliver severe ownage! Also Cait Blanchett’s in it!”
Theatergoers will get the action promised in Hanna. They’ll also get a fairy tale about childhood, family, and the importance of innocence. One guess as to which is more effective.
Continue...
Monday, April 11, 2011
We're as Sad as Hell and We're Not Gonna Take This Anymore! - R.I.P. Sidney Lumet
By now any of you out there with any sort of connection to the wider world will have heard the news that legendary director Sidney Lumet passed away this weekend at the age of 86. He leaves behind one of the most solid and astonishing filmographies of any Hollywood director in the past half decade. 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, the list goes on. Lumet established himself as one of the best directors for confronting capital i Issues through the use of cinema. And yet he never won an Oscar (except for a lifetime achievement award from the Academy a couple years ago, which is nice I suppose).
By far the most iconic and oft-referenced of Lumet's movies is 1976's television satire Network. Owing much to Peter Finch's famous-for-a-reason "Mad as hell" speech, you see this one get brought out every couple years or so at Oscar montages, and like I said, it's famous for a reason: it's so damn good.
Network is centered around the story of Howard Beale, the primetime news anchor at "UBS" the lowest-rated network in the country. When he receives the word that he's been fired, he suffers what seems to be a nervous breakdown; or is it a prophet's revelation?
Continue...
By far the most iconic and oft-referenced of Lumet's movies is 1976's television satire Network. Owing much to Peter Finch's famous-for-a-reason "Mad as hell" speech, you see this one get brought out every couple years or so at Oscar montages, and like I said, it's famous for a reason: it's so damn good.
Network is centered around the story of Howard Beale, the primetime news anchor at "UBS" the lowest-rated network in the country. When he receives the word that he's been fired, he suffers what seems to be a nervous breakdown; or is it a prophet's revelation?
Continue...
Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob:
Week 102 - Indigo Girls
"I wish I was a nomad, an Indian, or a saint," Amy Ray sings on the Indigo Girls' second album. It's a line that's simultaneously poetic, corny, and a pretty good summation of the group's aesthetic. Their music feels folk-y, folksy and home-grown, but with a particular brand of spiritualism and introspection that pushes them a little beyond the standard "girl singer-songwriter with a guitar."
So, even if it's a little hokey at times, this gives the Indigo Girls' music an innocent kind of sincerity that is absent from a lot of music I've been listening to lately. The recent acts I've covered tended to go for self-congratulatory braggadocio or wry self-deprecation, always through the lens of a layer or two of irony, so this week was refreshing. The lyrics of the Indigo Girls are often opaque, but they're sung witb such a straight-forward, anthemic sound that I can't help but believe this women mean what they're saying, even if I have no idea what that is.
The Indigo Girls get a lot of press for being lesbians, but as far as I could discern, their sexual orientation rarely informs their actual music. Instead, I hear a lot more of the American South in this band (the group hails from Georgia). The song "Southland in the Springtime" falls into their "nomad" vein of music, but hits the nail on the head when it comes to describing a nighttime road trip through the South, right down to the roadside boiled peanut stands, and the odor of diesel and black coffee at truckstops. Is the song corny? Of course. But, while I can only speak with two years of Southern living under my belt, there's something about a lot of Southern music that embraces this kind of corniness. And I think a lot of Indigo Girls songs are corny without being kitschy because they whole-heartedly embrace the kind of music they want to make. They're southern lesbian rockers who don't cater to anybody but themselves, and the strange paradox is this makes their music sound more "Southern" than hundreds of Nashville acts who try too hard to cater to the redneck demographic.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
After the Jump: The Governator
Boivin joins us for another Really Big Show! On tap: Arnold Schwarzenegger (right, looking like Jon Voight) and his weird-ass cartoon, Doritos tacos, Amazon's Cloud music service, The Kills' new album Blood Pressures, Glenn Beck's departure from Fox News, and more!
Thanks for listening! See you next week! Continue...
Sunday Reading: The Minecraft Teacher
There are times when I wish I was in elementary school again. It’s not because of the absence of “adult” responsibilities (though I’d gladly trade those in for another shot at multiplication tables). And it’s not because I miss cafeteria hot dogs (urban legend held that you could bounce my school’s rubbery faux-meats off the floor and they’d hit the ceiling).
I want to go back to computer class.
Well, this guy’s computer class, anyway. Joel Levin, a computer teacher at Columbia Grammer and Preparatory School in Manhattan, uses indie gaming sensation Minecraft in the classroom.
Minecraft bears a lot in common with Legos and building blocks. Its nearly nonexistent rule set allows for immense creativity within the rigidity of its mechanics. And unlike many modern games, its open-ended gameplay is focused on creation, not destruction.
The students traverse specific tutorial worlds that Levin crafts and perform different tasks such as build structures with limited resources or solve environmental puzzles. Completing the lesson isn’t the only goal, Levin told Ars Technica:
“They must share resources, take turns, work together, and, frankly, be nice to each other. This is usually the first time these kids have had to think about these concepts in a game, but it goes hand in hand with the big picture stuff they are learning in their homerooms. It's amazing to see how many real world issues get played out in the microcosm of the game.”
Number Munchers this is not. Read the full interview with Levin over at Ars Technica, and stop by Levin’s blog to see how the project evolves.
Continue...
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Friday, April 8, 2011
Artists and Critics - How Much Contact Do We Want?
There have always been publishing companies that charge a writer to publish their own work. The rise of the Kindle and other markets for ebooks have made this even easier to do. Most people refer to these companies as "vanity presses," though some of the more optimistic writers refer to themselves as "indie authors." This method is either a great way to build a fanbase, or a total scam, depending on whom you ask.
Few of these authors ever achieve anything close to mainstream success. But sometimes they stumble into fame in other ways. Most recently, self-described "author, poet and artist" Jacqueline Howett managed to create quite a bit of a stir online when she took to responding to reviews of her book, The Greek Seaman.
A small, humble blog titled "Big Al's Books and Pals," which dedicates itself to reviewing independently published ebooks, published a review of The Greek Seaman on March 16th. Big Al gave the book two stars, but he was not necessarily mean-spirited. The review acknowledged that the book had an interesting plot that was marred by a large number of grammatical and spelling errors, rendering the story almost incomprehensible.
You can read what happened yourself - Howett appeared in the comments section, apparently incensed that Big Al had dared to give her book two stars. She posted copies of other, more favorable reviews, and then started to attack Big Al personally, with a grasp of the English language that did nothing to combat Big Al's criticisms ("...if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected" reads one typical Howett response). By March 28th, Howett was calling Big Al "a big rat and a snake with poisenous venom [sic]", before leaving with the final, exquisitely professional, request to "Fuck off!"
Continue...
Dialing Back in Time with Digital: A Love Story
Do you remember your first time on the Internet? Was it on AOL? Did you dig through keywords and other nonsense until you found an IRC client?
What kind of computer did you use? Was it an IBM? Your dad’s old Apple?
Were you actually allowed on the Internet? Did you stay up way later than you should have, covering your modem with a blanket so the blaring noises of the Future wouldn’t wake anyone up?
Christine Love’s 2010 indie title Digital: A Love Story weaves together technonostalgia and point-and-click adventure gameplay into a unique, touching piece of interactive fiction.
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Thursday, April 7, 2011
Yellowed Pages: God of Tarot by Piers Anthony
Buried under piles of pulpy, yellowed copies of sci-fi and fantasy lit. Giaco reads and waits. The first Thursday of every month he’ll attempt to review an ancient relic from an ancient time (aka crappy genre fiction from the 70’s and 80’s). Stay with him as you journey into space, caves, voids and dungeons. Unfortunate side effect: from this point on you’ll smell of old books.
Origin Story
Oh, God of Tarot, where do I begin with you? For starters, let’s talk about where I actually picked up this book. I didn’t find it on Amazon, though it’s available there. I didn’t get it from a used bookstore. This literary prize I found in a box marked “FREE” outside a house in Center City, Philadelphia. So I more or less trash picked this first entry into Yellowed Pages. How fitting!
The cover features and handsome young man wrestling with what looks like a Chinese dragon. This dragon, it turns out, is an embodiment of temptation. This man is Brother Paul, our protagonist the warrior monk. So that should set the tone for this whole endeavor.
Zoinks! OED update includes OMG and LOL
Time to get annoyed when your spellcheck scribbles red underneath your 21st-century vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary now includes several words popular with millennials, surely to the ire of English professors everywhere.
The latest update legitimizes initialisms (abbreviations consisting of sequential first letters from a name or expression) borne out of online interaction. That’s right, OMG and LOL are now totally viable words according to the OED. But it’s not just their useful on Twitter that earned them passage into everyone’s favorite English lexicon.
Such abbreviations are cropping up in print and everyday speech, and convenience isn’t the reason, say the OED folks:
“The intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes appear in online discourse, while at the same time marking oneself as an ‘insider’ au fait with the forms of expression associated with the latest technology.”
For a generation that grew up in AOL chat rooms and now groans every time their parents text them “LOL u r so funny,” this is exactly the usage of Internet initialisms. Writing for Thought Catalog last November, Leigh Alexander called for an end to online use of LOL, citing ironic use and the fact that it’s rarely ever true. Think about it. I’m more likely to type “hahaha” to friends online than LOL, unless I’m being cute or snarky.
There’s a hope (or perhaps fear) that the inclusion of OMG and LOL will open the OED floodgates for more Internet speak. Ben Hardwidge over at Bit-Tech asked OED principal editor Graeme Diamond if we’d ever see l337 in the dictionary. “It’s got a good chance, but it may not quite cross the line yet,” says Diamond. The inclusion of numbers won’t prevent it (check out 1471), but its niche usage might.
What other Internet words should we see in the OED? ROFL? idk? Butthurt?
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Voting Extended for Smithsonian’s Art of Videogames Exhibit
In February, I wrote about the Smithsonian’s plans to curate a generation-spanning videogame exhibit. Despite my concerns about its treatment of genre, I still believe The Art of Videogames to be an exciting and worthwhile venture.
Fitting for an exhibit about interactivity, the games included in The Art of Videogames will be decided by popular vote. Popular demand has dictated that the Smithsonian extend the voting deadline until midnight on Sunday, April 17.
That means you still have time to head on over to the website and cast your vote. You need to do this. Star Wars: TIE Fighter and Diablo II are in direct competition. Someone has to help the Smithsonian make the tough decisions.
Find out more about the exhibit here, and book your tickets to D.C. to catch it at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in March 2012.
Continue...
Art House in the Middle of the Street #9: Loves of a Blonde
There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.
What a wonderful world we see in Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blonde, a seminal artifact of the Czechoslovak New Wave. It's a world where a shoe factory owner lobbies a Czech colonel to station his troops in the factory town so that the girls who work in the factory will have men to love them. (The women, after all, outnumber the men sixteen to one in the town.) Where three army stooges argue like little boys over how to approach a table of cute girls. Where a soldier sees a girl putting a tie on the tree and says, "If you keep doing that, you'll dress up the whole forest."
There aren't even any stunning beauties to intimidate us. Forman's film evinces the same free-form quality as the works of Godard or Truffaut, but there's nary a supermodel or foppish midcentury Bohemian in sight. Instead, we get a bunch of grubby, homely teenage girls working at a shoe factory during the day and hoping to find love at night.
Brigitte Bardot would probably vomit. Too bad for her.
Continue...
The Funniest Kids in the Class: Podcasters
The first podcast I ever listened to was ours: After the Jump. Seriously. Before I was a writer for this site I was a huge fan of the site. My favorite installment was always the podcast, or as it used to be called, the podshot (what a great name). I didn’t understand what a podcast was back then. Was it free? Did I have to download each one individually? Could I burn it onto a cd? (Yes. Kind of. No.) And this, it seems, is the way it goes with podcasts. You either get it and love it and can’t keep up with all the great podcasts out there or you’ve never listened and the thought of diving into a new form of media seems too taxing.
Well, either way, if you’re a fan of comedy (stand-up and otherwise) you really need to be on the podcast train. Los Angeles has always been in competetion with New York for comedy kingship. But (in my humble opinion) in the world of podcast comedy only the L.A. guys are doing things the strange and experimental and hilarious and new way.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Reinventing the Reboot (or, How Movie Studios Make the Most of their Intellectual Properties)
According to the article, Nolan's Batman films were one of the sticking points preventing the Justice League from moving forward. Warners (understandably) didn't want conflicting versions of DC's flagship hero hitting screens simultaneously, especially when the first two installments of the currently-airing version of Batman grossed nearly $1.4 billion between them. But this unbelievable success of the Batman reboot is why Warner Bros. Pictures Group President Jeff Robinov can't afford not to have a Batman-related film on his slate for the foreseeable future.
This marks a distinct departure from how reboots, remakes, and retellings have been treated in the past. Back in the day, if someone made a good, marketable movie based on a previously existing Intellectual Property, it became a franchise. Enter various sequels, prequels, and spin-offs until people became sick of it. Then, that property was considered covered, until some visionary director comes in with a new spin on the property, and it gets rebooted. Nowadays, though, the focus is much more on how to milk as much as possible from the properties owned by the studio rather than making the most effective film adaptations of these properties.
As they say, if you follow the money, you'll get a much better idea of why these films get made than if you follow the artistic merits of the films themselves... Continue...
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