Things You Don't Care About

"I'm calling zombie bullshit on that!"

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:44:53 -0600

Left4Dead, Valve's latest release, came out a few weeks ago, and while it's been on my list of things to get, I wasn't ready to pick it up yet, mostly because I was still messing with Fallout 3. However, the wonderful Deidei bought it for me off Steam a couple weeks ago for Christmas (thank you, Deidei!). I didn't get it installed until last week, since I didn't have the hard drive space for it. For the last few days I've been playing the hell out of it, and it is a heck of a lot of fun.

You've probably heard the basic premise of the game -- you are one of four survivors of the zombocalypse, and you need to fight through a series of levels in one of four scenarios, until finally you are rescued. Opposing you is a horde of more mundane zombies, as well as special types -- the Boomer, which can cause you to be mobbed by the normal zombies, the Smoker, which can lasso you with a ludicrously long tongue and pull you away from your friends, the Hunter, which pounces on you and tries to claw your intestines out, the monstrously huge Tank, and the Witch, which is completely harmless, until you wake her.

The game is made intentionally to evoke the feeling of a classic zombie movie, ala Night of the Living Dead, albeit with the more currently in vogue 28 Days Later-esque "fast zombies" (which, as we all know from The Zombie Survival Guide, are a complete Hollywood fabrication). They do this in a variety of ways -- each scenario's loading screen is a movie poster, listing the players "as" the character of the game (ie, "[RPGnet]BlackIsis as Zoey"), and during the game the characters exchange quips (like the one in the title of this article).

The best part, however, is how the game uses its mechanics, such as the "AI Director," which controls the zombies and the distribution of weapons, ammunition, and first aid items, as well as the various arenas that tend to host the main battles (especially in the showdowns right before your rescue) to force the players to work together cooperatively. The special undead are geared towards this -- the Hunter and Smoker especially, which immobilize one of the group and require someone else to rescue them. Unlike a lot of other FPSes, you're really forced to work together, or you won't succeed. Unlike, say, Day of Defeat, or even Team Fortress 2, your team cannot succeed with just one or two really good people.

While the AI Director does make every play through somewhat different, it isn't completely unpredictable -- Tanks, especially, tend to show up in the same general places, and there's a few places in every scenario where obstacles are set up that force you to alert the thronging masses of zombified humanity. While I am pretty happy with the experience so far, despite the fact that it tends to be fairly repetitive, it would be nice to see some new maps or a little more variation in the levels -- like Half-Life, there does tend to really only be one way to go through each level, so you'll get to know the maps pretty quickly. I'm really getting a little tired of the No Mercy scenario, for instance, which seems to be the default map everyone plays online.

Speaking of the online play, the game seems pretty good about adding players into a game in the middle, and dealing with people who drop out. This is extremely important in Left4Dead, where cooperation is key and being a man down can seriously screw over your team. While the bots that take over if a player drops out or goes idle are not as good as a real player, they aren't too bad. And when a character dies, they can rejoin the game within a short while (a couple minutes usually, not the 20 seconds of a TF2 game) by being rescued from a closet.

Versus mode I haven't played with as much; in this mode, two teams of up to four players switch off between being Survivors and Infected, and play through the stages of one of the scenarios, trying to do better at each one than the other team. The Infected players spawn as one of the special undead (with the exception of the Witch), and can decide where they appear in the level, as long as it is out of sight of the Survivors. They can also climb up a few things that the Survivors can't, like drainpipes and such, which gives them more avenues of attack. Actually, as Infected, it felt very much like Natural Selection, the old Aliens-esque Half-Life mod (albeit with far fewer players).

The game does fall a little short in some areas; while gunning down heaps of undead has a certain appeal, the fact that you blaze through scores of zombies in some places (especially the final showdowns) feels a little...lacking, in a way, especially since a common tactic in those types of fights is to hole up in a closet with two people crouching in front, constantly doing melee attacks, while the people behind blaze away and keep the special undead away, which tends to feel considerably less epic than what Valve is probably aiming for. I sort of wish the mechanics here worked a little differently, to encourage people not to hide in the tiniest space possible; part of the problem, I think, is that unlike the rest of the game, where you're trying to make progress forward, you're just holing up and waiting for ten or fifteen minutes.

The game is definitely a lot of fun; if Valve does as good a job as they've done with Team Fortress 2 lately of adding maps and new fiddly bits to the game, it can really rise to the level of a great game. As it is, I don't know if I agree with people trumpeting it as Game of the Year; it has some tough competition, and I think it's a little too early to know if it has the legs to stay fun for the long haul. However, I certainly recommend it, and I'm looking forward to playing it with people other than random strangers, since I know there's a couple other friends of mine who will be picking it up later.

Holy. Crap.

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:48:56 -0600

Some people have way too much time on their hands.

Fallout 3, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Wasteland

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:06:31 -0600

The first time I went to GenCon, back in 2003, I went to a presentation by a game designer from Interplay who talked about how to break into the game design industry and what he did; during the question and answer period, he was bombarded by questions about Van Buren, the not-so-secret codename for Fallout 3 in development at the time. He couldn't talk much about it (even though you could tell he sort of wanted to), but it was easy to see the enthusiasm in the room.

Not long after, Interplay abandoned development of Van Buren and sold the rights to Bethesda. For a lot of people, including me, this was followed by a sense of dread; Bethesda's games, to that point, had a reputation for being very wide open, but pretty shallow in many parts. Now they were taking over what was one of the most beloved franchises in computer RPGs, something with a reputation not only for having a huge world, but one with an incredible amount of depth. Trying to fill the late, lamented Black Isle's shoes would have been a tough job for anyone, but Bethesda's games had been very different -- first-person instead of isometric, focused on world-building instead of depth of writing.

Still, as the years wore on, things began to leak out that gave me some hope -- the first panoramas of the crumbling Capitol Building and the aircraft carrier that is Rivet City, the first trailers, Prepare For The Future, and other bits that made me think "hey...these guys might just get it." I allowed myself to be cautiously optimistic. I wanted to see what they finally made.

The game came out shortly before I left for Iceland, and so I had to sit through my brother and friends talking about it on IRC while I was busy elsewhere. Knowing that the game was sitting on my kitchen table did not help relieve the anticipation. When I finally got home, I didn't waste any time installing the game and jumping into it. And for the last two weeks, I have poured dozens of hours into the game. In short, the game is nearly everything I had hoped it would be. It is not perfect, and the ending falls incredibly flat, but up until that last minute or two, the game fires on all cylinders and it is just that good. I'm going to take a look at the nonspoiler pros and cons here; I will put spoilers for the plotline behind the cut, so if you want to be surprised by some of the story's twists and turns, just read this front part.

What stands out as good?

Character creation. Character creation is done in a way that is a bit like an evolved version of the questionaire you fill out in Jagged Alliance 2 -- in other words, it's integrated into the actual tutorial and gameplay. You start out designing how you look, as a "DNA projection," and then move on through time to being an infant, where you pick your attributes, then you have your 10th birthday party where you get your Pip-Boy, then your 16th birthday, where you take a very JA2-like test to determine your tag skills. During each of these stages, you also interact with the other inhabitants of Vault 101, and the way in which you do so can impact events much further into the game. Then the game fast forwards to when you are 19, and the game really begins. However, just before you leave the Vault, you have the option to go back and change everything but your appearance, just in case you changed your mind about something. The game also autosaves at this point, so if you want to start over, you don't have to go through the entire character creation process (unless you want handle some of the stuff in Vault 101 differently).
The art direction. Fallout 3 feels like a Fallout game. The Capital Wasteland feels like a barren wasteland. Yes, it's mostly brown and dirty colors, but that's how Fallout has been from the start. Irradiated craters are scattered about the wastes, and crumbling buildings (including a battered Washington Monument) are everywhere, many with the retrofuturistic art deco style that is a hallmark of the Fallout franchise. The ads you run into in the game, for everything from Nuka-Cola, to Vault-Tec, to Captain Cosmos serials, evoke that style perfectly as well. And Washington DC locations, while they might not be placed quite right (the world is somewhat compressed), for the most part look like their real-life analogues, down to the ceiling tiles in the Metro stations. It's not really a surprise, I suppose, when you remember that Bethesda is based, well, in Bethesda, so most of these locations aren't more than 20-30 miles away from their offices -- but it is still good to see.
The music and sound design. The ambient music for the game is very similar to the music used in the earlier Fallout games (a bit less guitar than in Fallout 2, though), and the noises for the monsters and other inhabitants of the wastes are good as well (the ant noise is particularly memorable, for some reason), when you can hear them (a bit more on that later). The in-game radio stations, including the two "big" stations, Enclave Radio and Galaxy News Radio, and the various other beacons and minor stations, are well-done and era-appropriate (GNR, for instance, includes a variety of 40s and 50s tunes, such as The Ink Spots). The only complaint I can register about them is that they do get a bit repetitive after a while -- even the "news" that GNR talks about, which gives you feedback on how your reputation is going and plot hooks, repeats a bit much after you've been playing the game for hours and hours (but it hardly seems fair to criticize them for not providing dozens of hours of radio content).
World-building. Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland feels like a living, breathing world. It's not just the art and sound design, but the open form of the game world that makes this a strength. In the previous Fallout games, the world was subdivided into zones; you traveled between them using a separate interface, and if you ran into something along the way, it was basically a random chance and spawned a special randomly-selected "zone" that was basically there for a one-time event (with a few exceptions, where the event would remain there in the game world). In Fallout 3, the whole game world is continuous, so there's much less of a feeling that everything is on hold until you arrived there. People come and go during the day and night, and you can watch them through their daily routine. Trade caravans move between towns on routes that you can wait on and have them run into you (or follow, if you'd like). People have their own (albeit short and generally shallow) conversations that you can overhear when you're near. When you run across a super mutant fighting a radscorpion, it doesn't feel like a randomly generated encounter -- it feels like you happened to run into two independent entities that also chanced into each other. There are tons of little scenes that tell a story, even though it's just a collection of objects. A wrecked Nuka-Cola truck, overturned outside a town. A long-abandoned relief camp outside a decrepit police station. A bathtub with a skeleton and a toaster. Each one tells you something about what once happened, even if there's no written record (and when you do find written records, it's often heartbreaking to read). They all feel unique, for the most part -- it doesn't feel like someone said "okay, we have to put something here -- let's spin the wheel and throw down a random shack." It's very well done, and gives you tons of stuff to explore that has absolutely nothing to do with the main storyline.
VATS. When I found out Fallout 3 was going to be first-person, I was very apprehensive. My previous foray into first-person RPGs (Deus Ex) succeeded in frustrating me immensely because it felt like the RPG skills element was making me much worse at the shooter elements than I was used to. Fallout 3 strikes a much better balance; in non-VATS mode, I don't feel completely ineffective, and my FPS skills seem to translate fairly well, while in VATS mode, my characters skills are an advantage, rather than a detriment. I never felt like I'd be better off not using VATS. The things it lets you do -- snipe, destroy weapons, cripple limbs -- are very cool to watch yourself pull off (blowing the grenade up in someone's hand is especially fun). It's a perfect way to integrate the original Fallout aimed shot system into shooter-style combat.
Set pieces. There are a few action sequences (not cinematics) that I really liked. I'll give more info in the spoiler section of the review, but there are two sequences (probably largely scripted, I'm sure) where you really feel like you're in an epic action movie.
Kitbashed items. The weapons that you can build in the game, like the Rock-It Launcher and Railway Rifle, are pretty cool contraptions that are a lot of fun to make and use. Assembling them out of the junk you find on the road seems very fitting for a post-apocalyptic game where people are just scraping by, and I hope that in the upcoming downloadable content they add more things you can build to the game.

Where does the game fall short?

Well, by far the most disappointing part is the ending -- even more than the ending of KotOR2, it feels like it was tacked on and railroady in the extreme. It's only the last two minutes of the game at most, and the sequence up until that point is hilariously awesome -- but the end of the game makes it very hard to really feel happy with how things turned out. You also don't get the ability, as in previous Fallout games, to keep playing and further explore the world, and the hallmark of the Fallout ending sequence, Ron Perlman's voiceovers telling you what happened in the various locales of the game, is only there in a vague and somewhat unsatisfying form. However, the fact that there is downloadable content being released which apparently continues the story makes me wonder if that is going to be changed. We'll see, I guess. The ending also comes up very quickly; I finished the game without really realizing I was that close. Vault 87 marks the beginning of the end, and you don't get much of a chance to deviate from the main plot after that point.
The game seems to need some work in balancing the pace of advancement. The level cap is easily attainable well before getting close to the end, assuming you do even the smallest bit of exploring. It seems like it would have been better to adjust this so that you don't hit the level cap unless you do more exploring; that would encourage people to have a look around the world a little more, instead of going headlong down the main quest and missing most of the rich world that they've developed, like some people seem to have done (and then complained about how short the game is).
If you're playing a good karma character, it's rather difficult to get a companion until quite late in the game. There's one character you can get towards the middle (at a hefty price), but after that there's no way to get one until the last third of the game. This is in contrast to evil characters, who can pick up an ally in the very first town you visit. It'd be nice if there was a bit more parity -- after all, in the first two games it was fairly easy to pick up a friend early on, and it's very nice to have one watching your back, though at times they can run off to engage an enemy upstairs or somewhere "close" but not easily accessible. This can result in them being trapped and killed while you hunt frantically for them.
I'm not sure I liked the escalation of equipment in the game. In Fallout 1 and 2, you had to suffer with your 10mm pistol or a double-barrelled shotgun for a while in the game, and getting better armor took even longer. In Fallout 3, I managed to get a hunting rifle or an assault rifle pretty early on, and didn't have to wait too long to upgrade to combat armor either (thanks to the mercenaries coming after me). It almost seemed a bit too easy, and once you are running into super mutants you rarely have trouble keeping your weapons in good shape. Ammunition can be tight -- assuming you don't do much exploring. Once you find a couple bandit camps or hidden stashes, you won't have too much trouble finding ammo for small guns (assuming you have a couple different kinds on hand, just in case). I would have liked to feel like I was in trouble a bit more, stuck with pistols and sawed-off shotguns instead of assault rifles and combat shotguns.
Some of the quests can get a little bugged if you do them out of sequence; for instance, early on you are told about Rivet City, which is in the downtown DC area. However, if you go there before completing part of the main quest in the middle, you end up breaking one of the set-pieces, forcing you to fight a super-mutant horde all by yourself, among other things! You can also pick up some quest items before actually getting said quest, and then get dialogue options to ask characters about the quest even before you know to ask them about it, which is a little weird. These are a relatively minor issue, but can be annoying; my advice would be to not delve into downtown DC until the main quest actually sends you somewhere in there, since that is where most of the problematic quests come up. There's plenty to explore outside the city anyway. The worst part about this problem is that you can end up missing out on a ton of good content without even knowing! I suspect for some people who've played the game and thought it was too short or unfulfilling, this may be their problem.
Some of the extra dialogue options you get from having high attributes or skills don't seem to make much sense, and while it's nice that you're rewarded for having a high Speech skill in many places, the fact that you can bypass entire parts of the game simply from making a Speech check or having certain perks is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you can progress along the quest faster -- on the other hand, you're missing out on some pretty fun game content that way. This could use a little work later -- Speech checks should give you an advantage, or a new way to finish the quest (a la the final showdown with The Master in Fallout 1), but I don't know how I feel about it basically cutting out an hour of the game.
Your situational awareness at times is not the best. While your Perception stat determines how far away enemies (and locations) will pop up on your radar, if they aren't in front of you, you won't see them. Some of creatures don't seem to make any noise until they are right on top of you (notably Yao-Guai, Giant Radscorpions, and Deathclaws, some of the most dangerous creatures in the game). This means that you can be charged from behind and not know it until you're getting battered across the ground by giant paws. At times, I ended up sneaking everywhere, because at least then you get a "[CAUTION]" or "[DANGER]" warning when someone is shooting or coming after you, even if you can't see them. It'd be nice if you could hear the 700 pound mutant bear running through the grass behind you. This is one of the reasons I liked having a companion, because Dogmeat will growl or your other friends will say they hear something when there's hostiles near, giving you a chance to look around.

There's some continuity issues with the rest of the Fallout series too, but I was so absorbed into the game I didn't really care that much. It does, as someone on RPGnet pointed out, feel like the Great War was much less than 200 years ago; on the other hand, I liked Fallout's setting much more than Fallout 2's setting, largely because it was much more bleak -- for that reason, Fallout 3's tone sits right with me even if it might not be completely in line with what you might expect after 200 years.

For all its flaws, Fallout 3 is probably one of the best games I have played this year -- it is an impressive feat of world-building and its plot, while it may not be the best ever, is strong enough to carry the weight of the expectations that have been placed on this title. You will feel like you have been dropped in a post-apocalyptic wasteland when you play and leave the real world behind -- it's one of those titles where you will look up at the clock and wonder where the time went. And really, that is all you can ask for from a game like this. Just do yourself a favor and don't rush through the main plot; take your time and explore, as the game is meant to be played; once you enter Vault 87, you sort of hit the point of no return -- so keep that in mind.

My spoiler-inclusive review of the plot is behind the cut, so if you want to know more about that, keep reading.

Boston in Pictures

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:32:39 -0600

So here's the second part of my trip from earlier this month, the week Marc and I spent in Boston. There's probably not going to be as much text in this one, but there should be a fair number more pictures than the Iceland entry. Unlike my trip to Reykjavik, this was really a tourist thing only; I've been to Boston before, but Marc hadn't, so we spent a lot of time seeing things in the city as opposed to me spending all my time in Iceland at the convention.

I'll start off with this view of the Boston skyline from one of the sightseeing ferries, to contrast with the Reykjavik skyline; everything else I'll stick behind the cut so I don't clutter the front page.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about other stuff I want to write about either. Look for a Fallout 3 review later this week.

FanFest in Review and Reykjavik in Pictures

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:09:00 -0600

All right, I know this is long overdue and I apologize; Fallout 3 has been devouring my free time this week, I have to admit (I'll post a full review later, after I have played through the game entirely, but the short version is that it's very good -- the Zero Punctuation review sums it up pretty well). This is going to be a big article, and I'm going to put most of it behind the cut, but I think I'll start with this picture to whet your appetites. You can see the full size version in the photos panel to the right -- sorry this is a little clumsy, I'm still working out sticking stuff like this into MoveableType, so I'll try to go back and fix these later.

These are the mountains rising up over the sports complex where FanFest was held, with a gorgeous cover of clouds hovering over them. This was a pretty breathtaking view, and I took this picture at around 1000 on Friday, so you can tell how long it takes for the sun to actually rise in Iceland during the waning months of the fall.

Okay, real coverage of my trip is behind the cut, so let's get started....

Back in the States

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 07:53:59 -0600

Just a quick update -- I realized I hadn't posted yet this week updating my status -- I'm back in the States now, in Boston, after what was an uneventful flight. I think I've recovered quite nicely from jet lag, though I'm still a little worn out. Yesterday Marc and I went to the Constitution Museum here as well as the Museum of Science, both of which were pretty neat (though I'd seen the Constitution before).

Then we went to Legal Sea Foods for dinner -- eventually at the Prudential Center, after giving up looking for the Benoc-recommended Copley location. I had a really good lobster, but I had forgotten what a complete pain in the butt they are to eat. Marc had a just as delicious grilled assortment which in retrospect I wish I had gotten. After trying a little of it, I think I've realized that I just don't like fish when it's not fresh and well prepared, not that I don't like fish in general.

Today, I think we'll be walking the Freedom Trail. Hopefully it won't be too cold and windy today, but we'll see...

My last day in Iceland

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 05:01:45 -0600

Today is my last full day here in Iceland, which gives me a little time to reflect on the last few days (but a full roundup of FanFest will have to wait until I get back and have some time to go through my pictures). It's actually sunny today for the first time since Wednesday, though I've spent almost all my time over the last few days either inside the FanFest venue or out with various people around here.

Visiting Iceland has been a really interesting and fun experience, especially being here and spending time with people from all over the world. While GenCon always has a lot of people from outside the US, here at FanFest, the attendees are mostly from outside the US -- I've heard people speaking dozens of different languages, not to mention English with as many accents, and it really gives you a feeling for the fact that the world is a much bigger place than you can possibly realize when you spend most of your time in a single place. I've been able to meet a lot of people I have considered friends here, even though we'd never met in person before, and I will be taking home a lot of great memories.

The most fascinating thing about being in another country has been seeing all the little differences between being here and being in the US. Nearly everything here seems a little smaller (including my bed in the hotel room and the bit-too-small duvet), the smell of sulfur when you run the hot water (due to the fact that hot water here comes from geothermally-heated springs under the ground), the fact that you get a yellow light before a green light on the traffic signals, and the way cars actually expect to cede the right of way to pedestrians (quite a change from the mess on campus, for sure). I think just being exposed to a different way of doing things and a different environment has been incredibly healthy for me as a person.

The worst thing about this trip is that it really hasn't been long enough for me to really feel like I have learned as much as I should about this place, and I wish I had time to learn the language and culture here. I was really excited about coming here, and it has not been a disappointment; I can't wait until I get the chance to take a trip like this again.

It is way too early to be so late.

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 02:57:59 -0600

Good morning ladies and gents from Reykjavik, Iceland! I got in here about 3 hours ago now after my 5 hour flight from Boston, during which I don't think I slept nearly as much as I should have. I wanted to take a nap, but I can't check in to my room yet, unfortunately. So for now, I'm camped out in the lobby with some other FanFest refugees and waiting to get in.

Right now, it's almost 0900 local (which is also GMT), and the sun is just starting to creep up -- I'd say it looks like it does around 0630 or 0700 does at home. Streetlights are all still on and you can't see much other than a blue-tinged grey sky (though that may be because of the overcast skies). So far, Reykjavik does not strike me at all like a city only a bit larger than Champaign-Urbana; it seems almost like a Chicago suburb in terms of the traffic, the road structure, and a lot of the architecture, with modern glass and steel mixed with smaller buildings that seem a lot like older buildings I've seen in New England.

Yesterday was not without it's troubles, unfortunately -- my flight out of Chicago got cancelled due to mechanical problems, so instead of getting to Boston at 1330, I ended up getting there closer to 1700. In retrospect, that 7 hour layover I was griping about ended up being a good idea.

Anyway, not too much to report yet -- I haven't taken any pictures but hopefully I'll be able to do some of that later today and tomorrow and get those up here. I just wanted to make a quick post before I forgot to let everyone know I got in okay.

With Fallout 3 Coming Out...

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:20:31 -0600

...I thought it might be neat to mention a website that a friend of mine so helpfully pointed out today where you can get the first two Fallout games for cheap (six bucks a pop). Good Old Games is a pretty spiffy new place where you can buy old games for cheap, download, and install them with no launcher, no DRM, and they work on XP and Vista (which was a problem for the old Fallout games). It looks like they are just rolling out, and their catalog is a little limited so far, but if it catches on, I can definitely see myself spending quite a bit collecting some old games this way. One of the best parts is that, like with Steam, you can always go back and download the game again if you have to reinstall or if you want to put it on another machine of yours (still with no DRM).

And while the catalog is small, the fact that they have the three older Fallout titles (1, 2, and Tactics), as well as the Freespace games (the best space sims ever) is a good sign. If you have never played those games, you should definitely look into grabbing them.

Elite is not a negative attribute.

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:35:24 -0600

I have probably missed the boat on talking about the election at this point; with only a few days to go, almost everything that I've wanted to say about this has been said by someone else (Todd Alcott's endorsements of Obama here, here, and here sum up a lot of what I think). However, it's worth saying that for me, the most surprising part of this two year long campaign has not been the ascent of Barack Obama, but the complete collapse of John McCain.

In 2000, I remember thinking that I really wished that John McCain had gotten nominated instead of George Bush; aside from not coming across as a barely literate moron, McCain also seemed more thoughtful and more willing to call out people that others in his party were kowtowing to, such as the religious right. Sadly, over the last eight years, he seems to have lost that edge, and decided to embrace more of the standard Republican line, and it seems like that very thing may have cost him this election. I have no idea why he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate -- if you name any of her attributes, it seems like there's someone more qualified he could have picked. It's less a question of experience than a question of intelligence, of introspection, of analysis. The feeling I get from Sarah Palin, when she is talking about a subject, is like a student in school who simply memorizes something to pass a test and has no deeper understanding of the topic, even on subject she's supposedly an "expert" on.

I don't expect a politician to know everything on every subject. I don't expect to agree with a politician on every subject. However, I do expect politicians -- especially ones that are running for a national office -- to display some amount of thought on a subject, even one they don't know much about. I expect them to be able to tell me why they hold their opinions in a way other than circular logic. During the second debate, when Obama explained to one of the members of the audience what the credit crunch meant to him, that was something that really stuck with me because it showed a level of understanding that I didn't get from either of the Republican candidates.

I tend to be rather liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal ones -- if the 2000 election had been between Gore and McCain, it would have been very hard for me to choose between the two (and I suspect I'm not alone in that). This year, the choice is trivial, which is disappointing. While I think Obama is probably the strongest presidential candidate from either party in a long time (at least in my voting lifetime, not that that has been all that long), McCain is incredibly weak, simply because his campaign has shown a lack of intellectual fortitude that I consider horrific. The most despicable part of it has been seeing McCain (and even moreso Palin) mock the idea that we might want someone who is smart, who is eloquent, who is thoughtful, who is diplomatic, who is better than the average American to be the most powerful person in the world.

Last time I checked, it's generally a good idea to hire the best candidate for the job.

The countdown continues....

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:50:33 -0600

Well, with less than two weeks now until I go to Iceland I realized that I am long overdue for posting again, especially since I've only posted a handful of times since getting back from Arizona. It's not like nothing has been going either; Marc came down a couple weeks ago, and last weekend I went up to Chicago.

First off, as far as recovering from surgery goes, everything is going well on that front -- healing is going very nicely and I'm back at work again (unfortunately). I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything will be just fine while I'm away -- I admit that having some sort of horrible medical problem thousands of miles from home gives me the willies, but I realize how irrational that really is.

So what've I been up to for the last couple months? I have to admit, a lot less than I'd hoped. I did manage to do a fair bit of writing, but between taking care of things post-surgery and just generally feeling a bit of a malaise I probably squandered an opportunity to push through a lot of things I really should have. I have continued to watch a lot of movies, and I'll try to post some short reviews in a bit. Marc also got me to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I had never seen (it was good, obviously).

Last weekend, I went up to Chicago and Marc and I had dinner at Giordano's with Sam and Gracie on Friday. Saturday, unfortunately, Marc had to do some work so we went downtown and I spent a few hours at a coffee shop doing some writing while he was working on his rollout. I was surprised how much I got done really -- I think leaving myself disconnected from the internet actually got me to focus on my writing -- a trick I'll try to put to good use in the future. I even managed to get back and work on some projects I had left a while back; I'm thinking that maybe this weekend I'll try heading out to in the morning and doing the same thing and see if I can't get more done.

After that, we went to have dinner at the Twin Anchors, which is, I gather, a bit of a Chicago institution. It certainly had the crowd to match -- we had to wait about an hour and a half for a table, so we spent most of that time wandering around the neighborhood it's in, which is really pretty neat. In addition to a beautiful cathedral -- the first real cathedral I think I've ever seen, as opposed to just a church (Edit: Evidently they call it a church, I'm not sure what actually makes a cathedral a cathedral) -- it had a lot of the kind of old architecture that I'd really like to live in someday, and the kind of neighborhood close to the heart of a city I'd like as well.

The restaurant was very good, though it is small and cramped. Marc's ribs were probably the most tender I've ever had, and were very good (he let me have a few), though I can't speak for the sauce (I prefer my meat without sauces usually). My steak wasn't mindblowingly spectacular, but it was pretty good, and the ambience at the place is pretty hard to beat. It was evidently a big hangout for Frank Sinatra back in the day, and a ton of other celebrity photos and news clippings and other assorted accoutrements cover the walls. A scene in The Dark Knight was also filmed here, although in the movie it is nearly empty, which is hard to believe considering how crowded it was when we were there!

After that, Marc surprised me and took me to the last Second City show of the night, which was my first time to Second City and really I think the first real live show of anything I've seen in a very long time. The show we saw was Campaign Supernova, and it was pretty good -- there were a few kind of meh sketches, but the good ones were really good, and I had a lot of fun. The only bad part about it was that we went to the late show, which has some extra improv and sketches being tested out for the next show stuck in it, so we didn't get out of the theatre until almost 0200, which was a little later than I had expected! Well worth seeing though and I would definitely like to go there again and see another show sometime.

This week, heading back to work has been a little tough -- it hasn't helped that I seem to have either come down with bad allergies or a cold, though. This morning I woke up and felt like I'd been run over by a truck, so I actually called in sick -- something I'm pretty loathe to do when I'm trying to get back in the swing of things as best I can before I fly off on another two weeks of vacation!

Speaking of which, I'm getting really excited about going to FanFest the closer it gets, despite all the recent craziness in the Icelandic financial sector that the CCP CEO felt necessary to calm fears about in a dev blog. Despite the fact that the last time I spent any time around Eve devs I came down with a terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease, I really am looking forward to hopefully talking to more of them, and with any luck making a better impression this time. I am also promising to take lots more pictures, both there and in Boston on the way back, and I'll be posting those here so everyone can see what it was like.

Look for at least one or two more posts this weekend, and then I'll probably try and get something up next weekend before I depart. And, while I can't say I'll be liveblogging from FanFest exactly, I will try to post regular updates while I'm there!

No Maps For These Territories and More

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:27:00 -0600

So over the last few weeks I've been watching a fair bit of movies and TV simply because I have to spend about 4 hours a day lying in bed doing nothing. In addition to watching all of the commentaries and extra features in my Freaks and Geeks boxed set (which, by the way, is well worth it -- I'm still horribly disappointed I never caught it when it was first airing and that it got canceled), I upped my Netflix subscription to two movies at a time to try and fill the hours.

The first bunch of DVDs I got were the third season of Forever Knight. I'm more than willing to admit that the first two seasons of the show were a lot cheesier than I remembered (though I don't really regret having them on DVD), but the third season really struck me as a very Silk Stalkings-ified version of the show when I saw the first few episodes on USA (and promptly gave up on it, after staying up at weird hours to watch the second season). I figured I might as well watch to see if it was as bad as I thought (and see the last episode, which I had never seen). On the whole, it ended up being probably a little better than what I expected, but I think it was definitely still a big step down from the first two seasons, which had quite a few episodes that were far better than the usual late night syndicated junk. Probably the worst change was the loss of John Kapelos and Deborah Duchene (Schanke and Janette) for Lisa Ryder and Ben Bass, something that always struck me as kind of a lowest-common-denominator move. And the last episode was....well, really pretty disappointing and a definite downer.

That was followed, however, by probably the best find I've come across in quite a while, No Maps For These Territories, a documentary that's basically an hour and a half discussion with William Gibson on his writing, information age society, futurism, and a variety of other topics while he rides around in the back of a limo. If you are a big Gibson fan (and I am), you will probably enjoy it; if you aren't that interested in William Gibson, there's no reason for you to see this movie (well, duh). He talks about almost every aspect of his life, and his discussion of Neuromancer was especially interesting for me, going a long way towards explaining why it is so different from most of his other books. I'll probably end up buying this one actually, simply because I didn't get enough time to really digest the movie or the associated extras (including more interview snippets that didn't make it into the body of the movie itself). The only thing I can say is that the movie is made in such a way that it is a little more "artistic" than it had to be for me, since I was mostly interested in what he was saying and not the visuals of the movie.

The next on this list is Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone. Honestly, if I hadn't been told that this was his first movie as a director, I would never have known. Almost every aspect of the movie is done in a way that really shows a good eye for the camera and for getting the actors to really bring their characters to life. I suspect that the fact that the movie takes place (and was shot in) Affleck's hometown of Boston helped contribute to this in the same way it did with Good Will Hunting; many of the people in this movie are simply residents of the Boston neighborhood where it was being shot. The plot is well-written, and while I may agree slightly with Chesnut, who said it seemed a little convoluted for his tastes, I did not feel like the "twists" were just thrown in to be twists -- each one highlighted the moral choices the characters had to make. Really, without them, the movie would not have been worth making because those twists are in the movie to highlight the central point. I highly recommend seeing this movie, though I will say it will probably not leave you with a good feeling at the end.

Michael Clayton is a movie that probably won't leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling at the end either, but it too is a good movie. Unlike Gone Baby Gone, though, this film feels a bit more formulaic and not nearly as authentic (but maybe it wasn't trying to be). The performances, by George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, and Tilda Swinton most notably, were as good as I'd expect from actors of that caliber, and the writing for each scene was well done, but the plot that holds it all together, as Chesnut wrote in his capsule review, seems kind of like Another Lawyer Movie. Still worth watching, though, and I think the actors and writers probably deserved their Oscar nominations, but on the other hand, I am glad that it didn't win the Best Picture Oscar, though so far I've only seen one of the other nominees.

Last for this installment was The Golden Compass, which I just watched the other night. Obviously made as a Narnia-like attempt to cash in on the Lord of the Rings' success (which doesn't necessarily make it bad), this suffers from the fact that it feels like half of a movie and there was no guarantee the other half was going to get made. The film's climax seems like should be about where the Mines of Moria scene was in Fellowship, but instead it ends with the film's real conflict hanging in the wind. That being said, I didn't think the movie was really bad, it just felt like it fell short of what it was trying to be. The CGI, which was a large part of the movie, was competently done, and for the most part looked real, and I liked the sort of Victorian steampunk style aesthetic. It sounds like the sequel is still going to be made (largely due to its strength overseas, it sounds like), so maybe I'll like it more with the next part. I was disappointed by how bare-bones the DVD is though; there's no commentary, no deleted scenes (and I know there were quite a few), no behind the scenes stuff. For a movie like this, you'd think there'd at least be a little of that on the DVD, but maybe with the perceived failure of the movie at the box office no one wanted to put any money into it.

A long overdue update....

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:52:48 -0600

So it's been over three weeks since my last entry, and that's pretty unacceptable, at least for me, so I'm going to try to bring everyone up to date with how I'm doing and what I'm up to since I got back. In short, things are going pretty well, I'm recovering nicely from the surgery, but I'm not completely back up to 100% quite yet.

Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig.

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:18:26 -0600

Well, I apologize for being so remiss for the remainder of my Arizona trip, but the hospital's network didn't want to cooperate with MoveableType and at the hotel....I was just lazy. So, in an act of contrition, here's an attempt to bring everyone back up to speed. I fear it might be a little long, so I'll tuck it behind the cut.

For the record...

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:55:24 -0600

...magnesium citrate is not as bad as it was built up to be. Kind of like flat, too-old lemon-lime. I was expecting something on the order of the fermented shark Anthony Bourdain had in Iceland from the way my mom was talking about it.

I've been fasting all day, basically, and it's starting to drive me a little bit batty, especially since the hotel we're staying at has a reception between 5-7 every night, and I can smell the popcorn drifting from the lobby in our room. Still, there's not much longer to go -- in 14 hours, we'll be heading to the hospital, and 6 or 7 hours after that it'll all be over. Pretty hard to believe really.

Anyway, I'm hanging in there. Thanks for all the well-wishes I've had the last few days, and I'll try to let everyone know how I'm doing as soon as I can.