In a fit of brainless aquisitiveness, I “pre-ordered” both Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 without really thinking about it.

Well, let’s see. DAO was an unmitigated turkey; a real shitpile trainwreck; deeply, profoundly unfun while retaining the serotonin tickling R accumulation that is the hallmark of these Bioware games. I played it all the way through, even as it was an unpleasant slog, with all the stupid cliches (“DO YOU KNOW WHAT IS MYSTERIOUS ABOUT ME? I DO NOT USE CONTRACTIONS”), poor gameplay, and terrible, terrible artwork that I would expect from Bioware. It looked awful; enemy and friendly AI risibly stupid; and it was “mature”, in the video game sense, which sense is of course as close to “maturity” as commonly defined as is US “liberalism” to that of the Economist.

It was awful. The problem with these games is that they’re degenerate shooters masquerading as role playing games; but the role playing is minimal, foreordained, and overwritten. Without the true freedom that playing with people affords, role-playing on the computer is a joke. I find it aggravating, not enjoyable. And yet, I keep buying the games?

I’m more positive about ME2, because it makes fewer stupid RPG concessions. Also, it involves more directly just blowing shit up. I refuse to try and get laid in the games, because to do so involves getting deeper into the conversation trees than I as a self-respecting adult can afford. Also, they’ve done away with the fucking wretched ground crawler missions, in favor of a much more Starflight like scan/mine experience. My dream game would be one that involved a game as involved as Starflight on a modern engine; ME2 retains too much Bioware crudniks to be truly fun, but it comes closer than before. There’s neurotic ammo bin-packing, which is dreadful, and the GOOD/EVIL crap is no less idiotic than in KOTOR &c.; and the story is dumb. But it’s not as much of a bag of poo as DAO, and it’s better by far than the first one. Qualified recommendation: if you like these kinds of games better than I do, go ahead and get it. It’s well made.

As for myself, I think I should just stop until The Last Guardian comes out. Or until somebody remakes X-COM.

I managed to talk myself into spending some of my rapidly dwindling savings on a car. A cheap car, one likely to break down and become useless, but it fulfills the basic requirements:

• it is not silver
• it has a manual transmission
• it is a station wagon

Given that I am not a lesbian, and the car I bought was cheap, can you guess what it is? Right. A dark blue 2003 VW Jetta station wagon. When I brought it to my mechanic, even before the inspection, he said — “a 1.8T with 100k miles? You like to suffer, eh?” But — knock wood — no problems so far, save that the OEM stereo can’t be cleanly removed, so as to install an iPod adapter, so I ordered a new old OEM stereo. I could’ve gone with a fancy new aftermarket stereo, but really? Have you seen what they look like? Too, the MONSOON stereo has a tape deck, the better to rock out to my old cassettes of Crucial Youth.

Mobile Tony of Tony’s Mobile One is going to come round with a crowbar and an iPod adaptor this week, at which time I can start working through my In Our Time backlog the two hours a week I’m in the car.

To recap then: I quit a highly remunerative job at Apple to start a software company, I commute by trolley to my office, and I have no income, and I rarely drive anywhere. What better time to buy a seven year old finicky German car with a notoriously unreliable engine? You will likely not be surprised that I was also considering an E39 M5, but all the ones I liked were silver.

I haven’t died or stopped blogging; I’m just working like a dog. And learning a lot more about Twitter than I ever expected to. Future updates as events warrant.

I got new glasses, including a pair exclusively for use on the computer. Much like running shoes, I have too many pairs of glasses. I dress like a homeless college student, but dammit I have lots of glasses and shoes to choose from.

On an unrelated note, Christy bought me a “How To Dress Like A Grown-up Person” book for Christmas. I wonder what brought that on?

Cameron is an easy guy to hate; his hubris — perhaps the only one in the world that can literally be described as “Titanic”; his pronouncements about the future of cinema; his preference to be seen as an obsessive world-builder and not a movie director; that horrible scene in True Lies. And the hype about Avatar was pretty nauseous.

But the stuff I was expecting to hate wasn’t as bletcherous as expected; the stuff I knew I was going to have to endure didn’t last as long as I feared; and the visuals and Cameron’s direction of same were absolutely extraordinary. I have not enjoyed 3D in the past, and tend to think of it as less the next phase of evolution in cinema as a cynical and desparate attempt by the studios to combat piracy and lure the public back into the theaters. Also, the eye doctor cabal.

But the 3D in Avatar is well executed as in no 3D movie I’ve seen so far; there aren’t many STABBY SPEARS or GIANT FLIGHTS OF ARROWS or YAWNING CHASMS; it’s just another brush that Cameron uses to paint his pictures with. In that sense, yes, I suppose Avatar is the future of cinema, but it’s simultaneously less irritating to me and of less import to Cameron than expected.

The plot is a shambles; the movie could not possibly wear it’s Democratic Party fundraiser politics any more obviously on its sleeve — the treatment of the military reminds one of nothing so much as John Kerry’s tooth-grinding speech accepting the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination; the dialog is eye-wateringly dumb when it’s not NARRATED BY CAPTAIN EXPOSITION. It’s certainly less ethically compromised than Dances With Wolves or The Last Samurai, but it shares to some degree in their frankly racist belief in the power of ONE WHITE MAN to save an ancient culture by becoming a hybrid, superior in all respects, learning in two weeks everything they know and then leading them into battle.

But Cameron has always been very good on gender politics (the female characters are all strong and relatively interesting, with the emphasis on “relatively”), and the movie is, for being eleventeen hours long, remarkably well paced. Giovanni Ribisi plays Paul Reiser reasonably well; Stephen Lang makes a great villain; it’s got Sigourney Weaver in it and she climbs out of a pod in her underwear!

But enough said about the people. The visualization of Pandora is where it’s at, and is honestly the only reason to see the movie. Therefore, I am happy to report that it is astonishing. The Massive stuff (Weta Digital’s crowd software) is used to great effect; the new motion capture techniques, improved since Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II, are impressive in helping to bridge the Uncanny Valley, albeit trading a real advance in facial expressiveness for a more limited physicality, although that could be just that Sam Worthington is no Doug Jones.

The world as envisioned is convincing enough, although there’s a bunch of stuff that irritated the ecology nerd in me. While the look of the flora and fauna is well-integrated, and there’s nothing too terribly jarring, I was not impressed by the idea that everything has six limbs except the people. I question the ability of a huge herbivore horse creature to derive enough energy to carry a twelve foot tall humanoid at 30mph from drinking nectar. Even in low-grav the flight seems improbable. Some stuff is too solid seeming for being low-grav (giant flower rhinos?); and yet, the low-grav effects aren’t explored where they might be interesting (the humans are just as weaksauce when faced with alien monsters as on LV-426, for instance). And what’s Cameron’s obsession with waldos, anyway? But never mind. I’m a nerd.

When it comes right down to it, it’s a movie that ends with a giant set-piece of dinosaurs fighting helicopters. My 38 year old self surrendered to my 12 year old self and just sat back, grinning.

Highly recommended; sure, it’s a different movie than The Man Without A Past or The Eel but so what? A man ought not live by esoteric foreign fare alone.

Pretty stock stuff, but well executed, as one would expect from Raimi. Alison Lohman is a very appealing protagonist; the plot is nicely put together, ad the ending is great, although telegraphed pretty obviously.

People have said it’s a “return to form”, but I would argue Raimi’s style has been evolving pretty consistently, big-budget spectaculars or no. Certainly nothing in “Drag Me To Hell” would have been out of place in “Evil Dead” or “Darkman”, but you can say that about a lot of “Spiderman”, too.

It’s also nice and short, always a positive. Rent it if you like Sam Raimi pictures, or reasonably gruey spooky supernatural tales of horror.

It’s stylishly put together and reasonably compelling, at least so far. There are some striking visuals, and the lead (Clovis Cornillac) has a nice physicality to him. The plot is not particularly crystalline, but the limited color and light palette and particularly the sound design lend the movie a nice distinctive aesthetic. Being French, there is also a dash of nudity, and a distressing sex scene that is hard to parse.

The overwhelming aesthetic is that of a survival horror video game. But it’s not bad. I’d recommend a rental if you like strange non-Hollywood sci-fi.

I don’t share my favorite movie critic’s fear and loathing of Guy Ritchie (hey, I liked Snatch well enough), but I was concerned about this one. I’m no Holmesian or whatever the hell they call themselves, so fidelity to source material wasn’t particularly important to me (although is there really so much single-stick in the stories?), and I quite like Robert Downey Jr.

The problems going in for me were Jude Law, who can be as dead a fish as ever flopped onto the screen; the slow-mo stuff in the trailer; and the constant quippery. Happily, Law was excellent — he played the respectable Army doctor straight, but with a wonderful sense of timing with the down-market Robert Downey; the slow-mo stuff actually is a useful cinematic device; and the relationship between Holmes and Watson is so well acted and developed that the quippery works.

I would have cut McAdams, whose character appears to be only there to reassure us that Holmes is straight, and it goes on a bit too long, but the balance between comedy and action is well handled, Eddie Marsen and Mark Strong are both great, and the evocation of the time and place is very well done. They’ve also set up the whole business for a sequel in the most obvious way possible; cut the McAdams and about 25 minutes, and it could be fantastic.

Until then, I highly recommend it.

Oh, Dischord, why do you want my monies so? 12” LPs and EPs include a free MP3 Album Download.

An old one, but a good one. I listened the hell out of Spiderland Back In The Day, and as much as I love “Breadcrumb Trail”, or indeed, the rest of the record, this is It. I don’t know what got me onto it this morning, but I’m glad I did. This is sort of the apotheosis of “post-rock”, a genre of which I dispute the very existence, and no number of shitass emo bands aping the last ninety seconds (when the “awesome pedal” kicks in) can undo the greatness of the achievement.

I’m also really glad they didn’t find a female vocalist.

The exemplar of what I described before as Skynyrd-meets-Helmet. Christy visibly shuddered at that description, but I think that it’s a) apt and b) actually pretty flattering, both because Helmet (at least Meantime era Helmet) were a really great, unconventional metal band; and Skynyrd … well, “Working For MCA” is a really, really, really great guitar song. And there’s nothing wrong with a little deep-fried boogie.

I realize that for some this may lead to hideous memories of a childhood in broiling hot Floridian parking lots, getting stoned, eating boiled peanuts and listening to Black Oak Arkansas or something, but for those of us raised in the anomic generic suburbs that surround (insert city here), with nothing to call a culture of our own, well, excuse us for our search for meaning, even as we find our way to the works of the Van Zants, rather than say Thomas Merton or the Gotama Buddha.

Ok, so I’m less than 10 seconds in and the game has already failed, contemptibly — I can’t skip the asinine frame story cut-scenes. Holy Christ, people, your writing is terrible, your plotting is terrible, and the whole idea is sub-Mario Brothers in terms of narrative. Can’t I just get on to the running through Florence stabbing dudes in the face?

Also, terrible uncanny valley problems; bad movement animations, and I’m still in fucking Canada. People, I bought this game because it’s not a standard stupid third-person solipsistic One Lone Twenty Year Old Saves Creation, but rather because I can climb around the buildings of a neurotically reproduced sixteenth century Italy. The longer you subject me to the former before I get the latter the MORE I HATE YOU.

So Thomas and I rent a space in a converted warehouse in the Mission to work in. Aside from being cold, it’s great — cheap, close to good food, easy parking and public transit. The problem is the network. It’s not that the setup is slow (it’s not), or that it’s expensive (it’s not); it’s not even that the hardware is a hideous anxiety-provoking rat-king of cabling and superfluous switches.

No, the problem is that if anybody in the building logs into Windows Messenger, the whole stinking network goes tits-up. What are the hell? How is that even possible?

This is going to be sort of post-and-run, but holy jeezum crow, “Don’t Change” is a great, great, great song. It sort of re-entered my consciousness after we watched Adventureland, where the music is deployed in a fashion such as to pierce right through my heart and leave me unmanned. Kristen Stewart in a Hüsker Dü t-shirt, riding in a car listening to “Don’t Want To Know If You’re Lonely“? Opening to “Bastards Of Young“? “Just Like Heaven“? I mean, come on. It was nice to have a movie that was aimed dead-center at my demographic, for a change.

Full soundtrack list here.

So Uncharted 2. What to make of it. Let’s get the positives out of the way first. The visuals and particularly the environments are very well put together; it’s not simply that they’re lovely, or large and reasonable immersive, but that there’s a clear and strongly stated aesthetic at work. The art direction is superb. This extends to the audio, which is consistently excellent — ambient noises are appropriate to the story, and are well executed. The game itself does have a quality of immersion that I felt missing from the first one; I found myself surrendering to the game world more often than usual.

Even the voice acting was well done; well varied and competently executed. The game is a third person shooter with some agreeably minor platforming elements. That’s fine, as the genre conventions are adhered to none too slavishly. I also found it fairly easy, meaning that there were few punitive dick-waving IN YOUR FACE sequences designed to frustrate the more causal gamer. It also resists the plague of “open-world” non-sense; it is nicely linear and progressive, meaning that you are never at a loss as what to do next. This is becoming increasingly important to me as I realize that the world of games is splitting into those designed as social media — the online-only titles like Halo; those meant to express underlying OCD by introducing unholy quantities of programmatically generated “content” to appeal to the completists and autistics who chase achievements; and those games that have a narrative focus and try to involve the player in a non-coercive guided experience towards a conventional narrative resolution. I throw my lot in largely with the latter, although all games can bring pleasure.

But the unquestioned progress made by Naughty Dog in squeezing high-quality visuals from their engine has released them from the bounds of a healthy, natural humility, and the cutscenes are an unmitigitated horrorshow. You have never been down in the bottom of so uncanny a valley. It is horrible and makes me hate hate hate hate hate all of the characters with a kind of wild Bacchanalian frenzy. I want to see them torn to pieces by a horde of wine-crazed Maenads. I want to see their rubbery greasy faces melted off by the Arc of the motherfucking Covenant. I want in short the ability to play the game completely through in the over-the-shoulder third-person.

The story is also mediocre. You hit some excellent set pieces, and some beautiful environments, but the whole is much less than the sum of the parts. The connections between set pieces is thin, and the overall story is too baroque to not distract. It’s hardly terrible, and I give Naughty Dog considerable props for not resorting to standard video game puerility; think of the movie it could be made into as a bad straight-to-DVD sequel to National Treasure 2.

I would also venture that the control system could stand to learn from Gears Of War, which retains the state of the art in the over-the-shoulder gameplay, and the camera still makes bad decisions, leading to the Long Walk more often than one would like. I may be just being nostalgic, but I seem to remember that this problem has been solved. Why the continued trouble, video game companies?

This is not to run the game down; it’s excellent, if derivative stuff, and I would recommend it as a mild purchase/strong rental. Naughty Dog’s commitment to cinematics is to be admired, if not commended, and currently, there’s nobody doing a better job at aping cinema.

Recommended, but it makes no waves. It is no closer to a new aesthetic than Doom III, albeit much better executed. If you’re looking for a predictable, bland gaming experience that will not even attempt to stretch the boundaries of what video games are, this is as good a choice as you will find.

So my trusty Shure canalphones SE530s bit the dust — for a fantastically great audio experience, they sure skimp on the physical manifestation, with shoddy plastics and poor solder. I have replaced them with a pair of Westone UM2 ‘phones. I think they’re likely slightly worse, from an audio fidelity standpoint, but they are clearly better constructed. The leads are tightly braided, there are strong collars at the base of the earpieces and at the 1/8” plug at the end. They just feel less fragile, which is crucial, as the primary applicaiton here is as an adjunct to my portable listening devices, which often get jammed into pants pockets or dumped unceremoniously into the backpack.

An entirely unexpected bonus is that they can take the Shure soft-foam tips (the ones like nice high-end noise blocking earplugs), which yields fantastic audio isolation. I recommend these headphones unreservedly, especially if like me you are deeply suspicious of active noise cancellation and want to be able to listen to your music in noisy environments.

Who voted for Cabrera? I mean, really? Happily, the Baseball Robot (.365/.444/.587 — 170 OPS+) failed to fail, and the BBWAA, fumbling around, finally made a non-idiotic TWINT related decision. Perhaps I will attend opening day next year; after all, I’m committed to being in the country until April.

We’re in! Paul called me at about 7 with the offer, and I accepted immediately. We head back at 10am tomorrow. This is WILD! Yay, us! Particularly, yay Thomas!

By the way, the quotes are randomly selected; I wasn’t trying to be some kind of horrible suck-up.

So Thomas and I are waiting for our YC interview, and it’s been surprisingly low stress. We’ve talked to a bunch of other groups, both interviewees and alumni (all male, so back off grammarians). People are cheerful and open and friendly. There are short-boy Diet Coke cans and snacks.

The demo is working, so we’re pretty ready. Now, we have an hour or so to wait.

I have been hooked on the BBC Radio 4 show, In Our Time; the wildly varied subject matter, engaging guests, and fluid, effortless erudition of host Melywn Bragg combine to make me feel good about being ignorant — if I was a know it all, I wouldn’t have In Our Time to look forward to every week.

However, their archive is terrible. It’s all there, yes, but in human-hating Real Audio format, not the useful MP3 that the podcast is delivered in. It’s also unhelpfully broken up by subject matter, where a sensible person wants to hear them in the order broadcast. I would like to create a complete archive, and thanks to friends, I have the following available. It’s incomplete, only reaching back to 2003, and there are some shows missing from 2008, as well, but hey, it’s a start. They’re zipped up by years, because it’d be too much of a pain in the ass to try and download the episodes individually.

Share, and enjoy.

Think Helmet + Skynyrd. This Blue Record is pretty damn good, but I think the Red Record is better. chugga chugga chugga.

So Thomas and I were granted a Y-Combinator interview. I can’t help but feel that this is a good thing, but I am getting a little nervous about the process. Working on the demo stuff now — it’s hard to do solo, but I persevere.

For some reason related to my encroaching Google-paranoia, I have decided that my IM system will be Jabber; and the server will be one I run and pay for myself. This is not merely paranoia; it borders on disassociative psychosis. But nothing stupid and pointless ventured, no holes punched in drywall gained.

Software: it all really, really, really sucks. I decided that I’d use “Prosody“, because hey why not, it’s less monstrous than installing Erlang just to fucking chat. But, never one to do things easily, I maintain a separate build root that’s not /usr/local (which for reasons that are lost to me in the dim mists of time, I hate). But! In order to install “Prosody” one has to install Lua — NOTE TO SELF: INSTALLING A LANGUAGE INTERPRETER WHO’S DOCUMENTATION IS IN PORTUGESE IS THE FIRST SIGN THAT YOU’VE MADE A GRIEVOUS MISTAKE — and then a whole giant whack of dependencies, like sockets (apparently, Brazilians don’t care for their sockets) and, more depressingly, expat. Yes, this process involves XML.

There are many things I hate, most if not all of them software related, but there is little I detest quite so pointedly as XML. And now I have to go find a stupid goddamn XML library so this IM system can talk to other people? Is this protocol not self-describing? Are we not men? Have we fallen to the level of dumb beasts? And then, as if I hadn’t been worked over enough by the preceeding, I have patch Makefiles to get the fucking Lua expat wrappers to build.

Why? Why? Why?

Usually at this point I give up, but I had some strong Oolong before bed so I powered through it. I even went to a certificate authority and got a signed XMPP certificate! Yes, I am part of this oily web of XML based trust.

sigh

The strict aceticism of the world of Dijkstra becomes more attractive with each passing softwaer-related blow these days. Those of you interested, however, can reach me here.

Just watching out our 9th floor window in Wan Chai for 15 minutes or so:

• F430
• DB9
• Panamera (barf)
• R8
• GTR

… and countless big black Mercs. I get the F430 or the DB9 — those cars are dead sexy; but it seems looney to drive a car as hyperbolically fast (if desperately ugly) as a GTR in a city with traffic this wretched. I mean, a GTR isn’t even that stupidly expensive — but I guess that’s the way the sexual selection cookie crumbles. Gotta keep impressing those peahens.

• Me: What’re we having for dessert?
• Thomas: How about turtle jelly?
• Me: Sure, why not?

Later:

• Me: Huh. Bitter. Hand me the syrup.
  
• Amy: Yeah, it’s more medicine than dessert.
• Me: What’s this made of, anyway? If it’s made of turtles don’t …
• Thomas: Turtles, of course.
• Me: …

WANT WANT WANT WANT

Spent the day today recording and rerecording a video for the Y Combinator folks. I think it came out pretty well, but it’s longer than a minute. I’d post it here but I want to make sure that Thomas is cool with that. We’re going to go get some BBQ pork to celebrate.

How I know that I’m being sensible, now that I don’t have a job: I haven’t made an appointment at my tailor to get any new clothes made. OH, THE SACRIFICES WE MAKE.

Yesterday we got started a little late — I didn’t rewake until 8:30 or so, so we didn’t get to the office and started until 9:30. Still, we made good progress on the application. Future directions are starting to become clearer. Some conceptual fuzziness I was grappling with has receded. Seeing other people’s successful y-combinator applications was very helpful.

For lunch we went to a BBQ place around the corner: I had some pretty delicious pork:

Mmmmmm rich in porkly goodness. The restaurant was totally awesome, too; we got seated, Thomas ordered, we got the food — all in 30 seconds. I wolfed down my plate and ordered some extra BBQ; a Yakult was definitely in order, but man was it delicious.

Then, back to the grind. The office is tiny and way too cold, but they’re turning off the A/C this weekend, so it’s going to get a lot warmer. I’m hoping to get the answers in our app tightened up a bit so I can go to the beach on the day after we submit it.

After work, we had a bowl of noodles and then hit the Cocoaheads meeting at a local Mac reseller. I have to apologize to George the speaker, because I was disassociating from jetlag and basically incapable of standing up straight. But I met some of the local nerdery, who seemed cool, and learnt some about the app advertising business on the iPhone — not directly relevant to what I want to do, but useful and intelligently presented. What I can remember of it, that is. I made Thomas take me back to my room, because in my fugue state I was as likely to end up in Macau as the Yesinn if I wasn’t being shepherded about. But now I have the route back from the MTR burnt into my brain, so I’ll be OK.

Last night went much better vis á vis the sleeping; I powered through until about 10:15 and slept to 6am. Gonna take a shower and go get a coffee and a paper.

Arrived yesterday at noonish; Thomas picked me up and we grabbed some lunch in the IFC mall — wonton soup and pig’s knuckles. Then, off to the room I rented for the duration. The office is right near the Fortress Hill MTR stop, but they put me in a room in Causeway Bay; it’s tiny, but has a private toilet/shower, free WiFi, and plenty of room for what I need (read: sleep the sleep of the dead; change pants). Awesome! And $55USD/night! Thank you, Yesinn!

After checking in, I took a quick shower, and felt much more human. We went SIM card shopping. US people, imagine if you could actually shop for a phone — on features — and then shop for wireless service — on price. It all felt a little The Gods Must Be Crazy to me, coming from a third-world telecoms market to a first-world one. My shiny new iPhone (provider unlocked, naturally) works fine on my shiny new Vodaphone pay-as-you-go plan. Of course, the needs of Qualcomm’s lobbyists for new yachts and a slavish boot-licking deference to the 19th century business models of convicted monopolists are more important to USAn regulators than, you know, serving the public, so don’t expect a mobile phone unfucking any time soon, America!

OK, so the level one Maslow needs having been met (shower, pig’s knuckles, mobile phone), Thomas and I set out to rent a service office for the two weeksish I’ll be in town. We got a place in Wan Chai; it’s tiny, but servicable, and we got started writing stuff last night. Rock! Mostly we sorted to-dos and got stuff up and running on various Linode systems. Next up: serious work on the y-combinator application process, and application architecture. Too, learning Ruby.

Dinner was at a Shanghainese place around the corner, where we had some hairy crab, among other delicacies. It was pretty goddamn good, but maybe I’m just feeling the HK euphoria, wherein everything tastes good because I’m so excited to be in HK. Dinnae. I started to fade out around 8:30, though, so I walked back from the office to my room, stopping in Wellcome for water, soda, and Yakult.

Woke up this morning at 3:30, wide awake. Sucks, but I got some blog software development time in. We’ll see how I do today.

I anticipate jetlag. Still, it’s the first concrete step — well, other than quitting my job — towards the Glorious New Future. I just hope Thomas has something restorative lined up when I stumble off the Airport Express, barely alive.

I did get comped into the EVA VIP Lounge, which is a nicer place to sit and wait than at the gate — free booze! fresh fruit! Friends reruns on the TV! — but it’s just whistling past the discomfort graveyard as near as I can tell. I’m going to try and stay up until 4am SF time, so as to sleep fully through the rest of the flight. Melatonin is strongly indicated. Either way, I’ll be a shambling wreck when I get off the plane. Of course, all jetlag from flying east to west pales in comparison to the misery I suffer coming back, when I am a disassociating, shivering, zombie-like wreck for the better part of a week.

Could this be the least interesting blog post ever? Only time will tell, but it certainly has to be a strong, strong contender.

Boyko, Welles and Ms. Welles, and I went to see The Jesus Lizard last night. It was at the Fillmore, which is a nice room, albeit a stupidly expensive one ($6 for the privilege of printing my tickets at home? Fuck me blue!)

Right off the bat, I was wronged by the non-presence of openers Killdozer, who’s absence was noted by a small sign on the side of the venue. FAIL. However, the Jesus Lizard delivered in spades. They were tight, they were brutal, they played “Mouth Breather“. I was happy. It was largely the same cohort what showed up for Shellac and Arcwelder, unsurprisingly, and, although the years haven’t been particularly kind to either David Yow, or, to be perfectly honest, most of us in the audience, Duane Denison was looking quite dapper, and I deeply, deeply, covet his guitar (a semi-hollow body Travis Bean with a Bigsby, if you must know.)

And they rocked out, although Yow cock was not out. He was interactive, but again, the years have definitely taken their toll. Still, it compares favorably with seeing them in 1993, especially as this time I didn’t have to freeze my ass off waiting for the Garfield bus at 2.30am.

Very, very good. Slightly longer than necessary, but a great central performance from Damon; good work from Bakula and Joel McHale; and, of course, the gripping real life story of international conspiratorial lysine price fixing! Be still, my beating heart!

Also of note is the slightly anachronistic music by Marvin Hamlisch, which was slightly disorientating, in a good way. I have to admit that I generally prefer the conventional Hollywood style work that Soderbergh does (The Limey, Out Of Sight, Erin Brockovich) to his more obtuse efforts (Solaris, Che, Bubble).

I build Emacs obsessively; running it as I do on OS X, which is a supported but honestly not really first class platform, there are often niggling little fixes that appear in the CVS tree for annoyances that are more apparent on OS X than say Lixnuxis or whatever.

So I wrote a script. My Emacs setup is as follows:

• the .app bundle is in ~/Applications;
• Emacs is built --disable-ns-self-contained, because I want a stable site-lisp — I have a bunch of third-party packages that I don’t want to have to reinstall into a self-contained app bundle each time;
• I have a /usr/gnu hierarchy wherein I build GNUish stuff like “aspell” &c.

Ths may come in handy, or maybe not. Regardless, here you go: build-emacs.zsh

OK, so it gets pretty bad. Once you knuckle down and get into the meat of the game, the main play mechanic is a series of encounters structured as RTS-lite battles. The framing is clever, of course — this is one of the cleverest games I’ve played in a while — but the implementation of the RTS elements is pissweak.

You have a few units, a unit cap, a resource to be harvested, and waves of enemies. The problems are legion; unit-level command controls are bad (expected on a console controller); the units are messy — when should I use roadies? when should I use headbangers?; there’s some conceptual difficulty with your avatar — should I fly around the battlefield directing traffic? Or land and kick ass? Neither is particularly well executed, and what you don’t have that any sort of RTS game requires is a view of the entire battle theater. This decision, to base the game narrative in terms of this poor play mechanic is really a serious weakness — there’s nowhere to go with it; you stomp from one stage to the next, meeting these dumbass encounters with controller-mashing, because there’s no depth to the play.

Too! The side missions are really not missions; there’s a sit in a bucket and shoot at things one; a chase down overworld creatures one; an ambush opposition metalheads one. They’re clearly throw-ins to pad completion length, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they were programmatically generated for all the thought that’s gone into them.

So what’s good about it? There’s surprising depth to the story, given that it reads like a stoner metalhead just pulled his most ridiculous albums off the shelf and arranged them by theme. As I said before, there’s a respect for the source material that I think is rare — I may occasionally listen to Hydra Head pseudo-metal but I have a strong core belief in the redemptive silliness of “The Thing That Should Not Be“, and the last metal show I was at was The Haunted. In other words, I may not be a lifestyle metallist, but I’m no Ritual Roasters-style bike messenger poser, neither.

The voice acting is very good; it feels much more like movie dialog, with characters interacting in a way that seems much more like actual dialog than the typical disconnected stream of words you get in video games.

Overall, I’d back off a purchase recommendation. I haven’t had any real technical issues with it yet, and the aesthetic is as good as any I’ve seen in a game this year. If you can just sort of button-mash through the encounters, you’ll see and hear a lot of cool stuff. Perhaps this is the very definition of a rental title, then.

This morning, at the Chinese-run donuterie, the doucebag in line in front of me was using babytalk with the woman behind the counter. Hey, asshole: just because she doesn’t speak much English doesn’t make her an infant.

So far, it’s great; for all the humor, they’re taking the goofy metal aesthetic at face value — sure, it’s dumb, but it’s also epic, a combination well understood by c.f. Mastodon, or Judas Priest; but one that leaves the Mission hipster ironist largely unmanned, without a wink-wink nudge-nudge surface to grasp on and sneer off of.

The game mechanic is a little USPS for my tastes, with mild pursuit of R. Jack Black actually lends some character to the big budget voice acting, which is rare and welcome. The overworld is a bit dry. Haven’t found many “side quests” yet. Still largely unconvinced by the genre of “open world” games, which worlds tend to be cramped small and boring. More direction in a better crafted experiential environment, please (see, Mass Effect vs. Bioshock, for an example.)

Overall, though, it’s pretty enjoyable in the three or so hours I’ve farted around. Almost no penalty for dying, which is good because the car controls are pretty much just pants.

More later, but it’s a welcome surprise.

So as of October 19th, I will no longer be an employee of Apple, Inc., where I’ve worked for the last four and half years as the senior software engineer on the iTunes Store, responsible for video quality and processing. It’s a bittersweet moment for me; I’ve had a hell of a good time — I’ve earned a great deal about digital video, the movies and TV businesses, and my own capabilities. And I’ve met a whole group of great people.

I was hired to bring some kind of sense to the iTunes content database, a task that I spent about 30 seconds on before being pulled over to help launch the iTunes Video Store. I had done some simple MJPEG streaming stuff with a Giant SGI Power Challenge, but that was back when a Giant SGI Power Challenge was actually an impressive piece of kit. In other words, my sole digital video experience at that time predated Fast Ethernet.

All credit to my boss, then, who asked me if I thought I could do it, and who believed me when I said I could. Since then, the video product has grown horizontally — movies, TV shows, high-def, rentals — and vertically, with a much deeper and more sophisticated set of tools. I feel honored to have been given the chance, and I’m very proud of the work that I’ve done.

So why leave? I’m leaving because a friend in Hong Kong has an idea for a startup business that I feel has legs, and the timing was right — my work at Apple had entered its maturity, with incremental improvements and bugfixes the foreseeable future. I have no beef with the problems of maturity, but I am ultimately more excited about starting something new. Also, Christy and I would love to live in Hong Kong — it’s like living in Blade Runner, with (hopefully) fewer replicants and (undoubtedly) better public transit.

My advice to anybody considering a job at Apple, or at the iTunes Store — do it. You may or may not end up with your dream job, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a better environment to work, and your coworkers will be outstanding.

Boyko turned me on to these fine Canadian fellows, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. There’s sort of a flirtation with Gravity Records at their least irritating. Happily there are also odd little excursions from what you expect; unexpected little spandrels of melody pop up in the course of 18 minutes of brutality. But make no mistake, this is hardcore punk rock in the 90’s American vein, owing more to Victory records than maybe say Matador.

Worth every penny, especially The Chemistry of Common Life, which I am quite enjoying. Rock on, Canada.

Right. You’ll have noticed tags, too. Soon, of course, this blog will be able to receive mail.

So one of you what shall remain nameless — one of the, what, three of you? what read this blog — wants to know why no comments. I don’t have comments mostly because this blog is completely static; it’s compiled from data that I have locally and shipped up to my hosting service. I’m not paranoid about security, really, nearly as much as I’m irritated by complexity.

Why have a totally dynamic web application when all I’m doing is spouting gibberish, right? Well, as you may have noticed, I’ve added an RSS feed, and now I’m giving some thought as to how perhaps to add comments. Via email? Probably too much overhead, and latencies far too great to allow for actual discussions. A third-party comment system? Creepy data slurping and lame implementations, as far as I can tell. Roll one’s own? Eek. I mean, I’ve got some free time, willol having left my job on the 19th of October and all, but … really? I mean, I’m not opposed to reinvention, and I have to admit that there’s a “blog_comments” table already in the database that I store this blog in, but it seems something like a nerd too far.

If people care, I’ll get on it, I guess. This is in your hands, gentle readers.

Ricky Gervais is surely a genius; but this movie is baggy, overlong, and tedious. Too, Jennifer Garner is as dead a fish as you can find for a romantic lead. The idea is never fully explored, and everything just sort of goes all saggy and moist about half-way through. Skip it, and rent Ghost Town instead; superior in concept and execution, and with a much more interesting cast. Greg Kinnear was excellent, and Tea Leoni is far and away a more gifted comic and romantic actress than Mrs. Ben Affleck.

Stay away.

We walked into this little gem with basically no expectations. It turned out to be excellent, much funnier and more gruey than I had expected. Horror comedy seems like a particularly difficult combination to get right, but I felt that Zombieland struck pretty much the right tone. Also much in its favor is an 81 minute running time. Not a lot of fat to be cut out of this one.

My only concern is that Jesse Eisenberg will end up typecast in -land movies; he was great in this, and really great in Adventureland, but I’m not sure how many more mopey over-educated Jews he needs to play in movies that take place in theme parks.

With that caveat: Highly recommended.

I liked this rather a lot; it’s a good natured documentary about some Canadian metal lifers who were reasonably big in the early ‘80s and have, in defiance of God and man, continued to make mediocre metal records for thirty years while living the lives of decent working-class Canadians.

I was struck by a resemblance to Some Kind Of Monster; the dynamic between Lips and Robb Reiner (Anvil) was much the same as that between Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield; except that whereas the latter live the life of the untrammeled Id; the Anvil guys are basically just a couple of Canadians. They don’t have the corporate structure that gives Ulrich and Hetfield a scaffolding in which they can freely be abusive to each other. Lips and Robb just have to sort of figure it out like any two friends.

This was excellent, if a little light-weight. Much of the movie is constructed around the narratives of This Is Spinal Tap, and the haplessness of the band probably overstated to some degree. It’s forgettable, but I admit I misted up a bit during “Metal On Metal” in front of 2500 dutifully excited Japanese.

Recommended.

I like Jason Statham fine, and I have no real problem with lousy movies. But right off the bat, I discovered Issues, mostly to do with liquefaction, and a poster of The Great Helmsman in the backalley surgery? Unlikey. But the problems continued.

What aesthetic it has (no different from the first picture) is clearly informed by video games, for better or (more likely) worse. What it really reminds me of is Timur Bekmambetov’s Nightwatch and Daywatch pictures, with a less interesting sensibility — rather than a dissociative world of post-Soviet Russian paranoia and Orthodoxy, expressed as a fable of vampires and ghosts, Crank 2 is the fever dream of a 10 year old priapic crank addict, weaned on extreme amateur pornography and Gears Of War 2.

The most pressing thing you’ll notice, then, is that this movie, while at first sort of amusingly puerile, quickly becomes deeply, deeply unpleasant. For starters, the scene where the stripper has her breast implants shot out. Too, Bai Ling makes an appearance. Against her, all incoherence and plotlessness fade quietly into irrelevance. I’ve never been one to complain about violence and sex in a movie (far from it) but the strictly punitive nature of the latter and the incompetent editing of the former just blend into an incomprehensible sludge of tits and guts, rapidly becoming so insubstantial as to lose any power to offend.

Avoid. A real fucking turkey.

I use only two operating systems with any degree of regularity; Mac OS and Emacs. The former, because I used to work at Apple, and still maintain a nostalgic fondness for pre-Unix Mac OS; and the latter because I have twenty years of muscle memory stored up and my fingers just can’t learn new tricks at this point. Too, I’m hooked on Gnus. However, I have been seduced by my phone (two guesses), and am now hooked on using the MobileMe-synced calendar and address book — OTA sync is just too damn useful.

To begin bridging the gap between worker and parasite then, I’ve written a hacky little script to turn my OS X address book into a BBDB database. I don’t require the contacts utility like some other solutions to this problem I could mention; I just use PyObjC to call into the AddressBook framework directly. I have to point out here that PyObjC really is the tits.

Note that this is not two-way syncing; anything that finds its way into the BBDB database will get blown away by the next invocation of the script. Two-way syncing is probably too ambitious for me; that way lies SyncServices and automagic and I think my brain probably just needs a good lie down from the thinking, to say nothing of the doing. Multiple phone numbers are supported, but they’re currently US format only. Addresses are sketchy; longish ones might break the BBDB format. Caveat emptor &c.

Still, I like it. Share and enjoy

Yeah, yeah, I went ahead and wrote a little “blogging” “system”, but I’ll still be damned if I ever actually involve a database. Or comments. Or a host anywhere but on this laptop. Or, God forbid, an “About Me” page. Remember, I’m doing this for you, dear reader.

STOP USING FTP.

In trying to find a home for this stupid blog, I’ve discovered that the hosting service I pay for (Dreamhost, if you must know) has some wildly overcomplicated Apache configuration that seems custom designed to make it as difficult as possible to just serve webpages, forcing you into the slimy grasp of PHP and MySQL and thuswise into agony and perdition and as far as I can tell sheer utter world-cracking madness.

I of course would rather eat a steaming plate of stab-me-in-the-face than have anything to do with PHP (still less MySQL) so I’m sort of at a loss. What I want is a stable system (virtual is fine) that will let me serve up static pages (and nothing else) from port 80, via HTTP. And they have to support mail, so I can maintain a homonculus.net email address that I’ll never check; and they should have Postgres installed, because I’ll be Goddamned if I use the products of a company that doesn’t recognize the utility of “ON UPDATE CASCADE”.

And, please, a pony.

One supposes that one could rent an entire virtual Linux machine from e.g. Linode, but I’m too proud to deign to actually run a machine; dammit, I want somebody to DO THIS FOR ME.

I have decided to abandon “content management systems” and “blogger” and whatnot, and just do what little public writing strikes my fancy via the world of static HTML. I hope you’re happy, interweb. This way I don’t have to worry about “markdown” and “css” and shit; I can just use the damn font I want to see and the rest of the world can go spit.

I may at some point write software (spits) to assemble the various bits into the static HTML page; but that’s a bridge I’ve yet to decide to cross. Too, at some point, maybe comments? Probably not. That would involve work.

• A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889
• Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

I always think that fin de siècle Vienna must have been the most amazing place in recent history; the music, the philosophy, the weird neurotic Hapsburg culture. Hungarian! Gödel! Wittgenstein! The logicial positivists (sheepdip). These two books, although very different than what I was expecting, were both outstanding. They’re written in an almost conversational style, where I was expecting something much drier. They also convey a sense of the fabulous lunacy of the whole Austro-Hungarian enterprise, and make me, at least, want to learn more about the five hundred years of Hapsburg history that preceded the moment when Everything Went Horribly Wrong. Thanks, Gavrilo.

• Bite The Hand That Feeds You

Political and cultural essays from an Oakeshottian perspective. I never read Fairlie when he was alive, but he is a near master of the short political essay, and this collection has some real gems in it. Of course, I feel that way partly because of an incipient Toryism in myself, so there’s the whole reinforcing pre-existing bias factor to be taken into account; but Fairlie is a marvelous writer, and there are one or two pieces in here that really make me proud to be an American. Make of that what you will.

• Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius Of Dutch Football

I had ordered this on JLAC or Walewander’s recommendation, which recommendation turned out to be excellent. There’s something so appealing to me about the hyperintellectual way that the Dutch play football, and more particularly, in how the Dutch and the commentators on the Dutch talk about Dutch football; this book is an exploration of an Englishman’s relationship to the lunacy of Dutch football, particularly the early ‘70s Ajax teams, and the ‘74 and ‘78 National teams. Lots of good stuff in here; the book is brilliantly written, concise, and hysterically funny. One of the best sports books I’ve ever read.

• Mountains Beyond Mountains

A nuanced and intelligent look at Dr. Paul Farmer, an infectious disease specialist who sets an impossibly high bar for basically everybody. You get progressively frustrated with Kidder, then Farmer, then yourself. It is sobering and for someone with a dilettante’s interest in epidemiology like myself, something of a call to action. The dispiriting series of questions, when faced with the brutal truths of health inequalities, for me read like: Well, what can I do? Well, what can anybody do? Well, look at what Dr. Farmer does — can’t we at least do that?

And the answer, of course, is no — Farmer sets an impossibly high standard, and I don’t exaggerate; his commitment and his abilities, as delineated by Kidder, are far beyond the capabilities of any normal mortal. But the ethical questions raised by his overpowering commitment to the lives of others are troubling, in the best sense of that word.

This book, of all the books I took, will live with me.

Thanks, Mark S.

Linux is only free if your time has no value

あなたの時間の値がないLinuxの場合のみ無料です

No time value of Linux is free only if your

Linuxのない時間の値は無料です場合にのみ

Linux is not only the value of the time when free

Linuxではないだけの時間の値の場合は無料です

If Linux is not only the value of time is free

もしLinuxの時間の値だけではありません無料です

If Linux is only free time value not

場合、Linuxのみの自由な時間値ではありません

If, Linux is only free in no time value

場合は、Linuxだけの時間の値に無料で

Cases, Linux on the value of free time to

場合によっては、Linuxの自由な時間にの値に

In some cases, Linux on the value of free time

Elegantly stated, intarweb!

Strangely, or not so strangely, really, blogger.com is blocked by the Great Firewall, so I wasn’t able to do anything, and yesterday I was just too wiped out. Briefly:

Beijing was a lot nicer than the last time; the weather was spectacular, and our guides were fantastic. The Chinese could still use some museum science graduates to go over their palaces and whatnot, because shabbiness isn’t quite a sufficient word. The food we ate at the Great Wall was the best of the trip, until we got to Yangshuo (more on that later).

The overnight train to Xi’an was pretty great, although the bunk was unsurprisingly too short for me. Our guide in Xi’an, however, was pretty much straight out of the “take the tourists to bad tourist restaurants and feed them through crap factories before letting them spend too little time with the genuine sights” school. Distressingly, my camera took a tumble while I was biking around the Xi’an old wall, ruining the 18-200 and leaving me with a 90mm macro. I’m also skeptical about the body, which is now cracked, and the eyepiece is perpetually out of focus. However, the old wall and the Ming tombs, and especially the terracotta warriors museum are really, really impressive. Xi’an is sort of dire, in a coal dust and 10 million people slowly choking to death way, but the wall is really stupefying.

I wasn’t able to replace the big lens until we got to Yangshuo, and then I was stuck with a 55-200, so no wide-angle shots of the one part of the trip that really cried out for them. We stayed in a hotel in a small village about 7km or so from Yangshuo town itself; it was really rural, quiet, and spectacularly beautiful. It was hot as a bastard, but that’s not really a surprise, given that it’s the tropics in August. We rode bikes, took raft trips, went to one tourist cave (which was really excellent), and ate the food that our proprietress and her husband cooked every night, which was uniformly excellent.

Of course, we came home today, and now I’m as sick as a dog. I’ve completely lost my voice and I have a crazy head cold. Some of this is related to the rapid changes in air quality and humidity, I’m sure. I’d rather be voiceless and tired than wracked with bone-break fever, so minor blessings and all that.

Getting on the plane tomorrow early to arrive in Beijing for a few days of tourist stuff (Great Wall, Summer Palace, Forbidden City, &c.) Possibly try and squeeze in a fascist architecture tour, both past and present. Also, a sulphur dioxide tour and possibly a traffic jam experience.

I am not really looking forward to it, thanks for asking.

I was bitten two days ago by what was a no doubt 100% Aedes albopictus Dengue, can you be far behind? Happily, I’ll be traveling in the mainland, where great care and discretion is taken in the matter of travelers with rapidly progressing fevers. My next blog post will likely be from a quarantine hospital in Yunnan or something.

The Colcords and Dekkers have arrived, signaling the family portion of the trip to begin. In short order, Ngong Ping 360 to the Big Buddha, delayed only slightly by the eclipse. Selected pics here.

We decamped back to the Y — the greatest deal in HK accomodations, I think. $140 for a view of Victoria Harbor, and best of all, a thumb in the eye to the folks in the Peninsula behind. Regrouping, we trekked up to the Peak for a nice meal and a sunset. Also, more giant insects.

We’ve been here for three days; hung out with friends, went hiking on Lamma, ate a spectacular Sichuan meal (beware cruddy Flash website), visited Cheung Chau and ogled the view of HK and Lamma on a clear day. There’s been a typhoon so the air is clear, if thick as library paste, and pretty much everything about being here is fan-fucking-tastic.

I did run into the last fucking child of Ungoliant while hiking, however, and so I don’t maintain sole possession of spiderthing related night terrors, here’s a picture:

Off to China (HK, Beijing, Xi’an, Yangshuo county) for three weeks. While I am excited, dengue, malaria, and schistosomiasis are all “hyperendemic” in Yangshuo. Oh, the irony of my love for vector bourne infectious disease. I will doubtless be laid low, expensive and hideously psychoactive prescription for Chloroquine or no.

But I’m taking a bunch of complicated and difficult books, as well as Brilliant Orange, so I’ll be all up on computability theory and the tactics of Ajax, 1968-1976. What better combination? None.