sawall

I really don't know what the hell is going on anymore. The court appointments are potentially the most damaging in the long run. Republicans keep doubling and tripling down on Nazis, rapists, and probably even zombies.

Victoria Sponge! I only know what that is because I've been watching the Great British Baking Show... looks pretty tasty! Happy belated Birthday

I'm pretty settled into a yearly rhythm of SXSW and Moogfest. I've decided to splurge and upgrade my 2019 SXSW Interactive badge to a full Platinum badge to see what it's like to do Music with full access rather than just catching all of the free shows. I'll report back after.

This year was my third Moogfest. It's still great but my first time seemed like a peak as far as the lineup was concerned. I like the acts but there haven't been too many big names. In some ways this is a good thing - it's definitely still a gathering for music nerds more anything. They lost at least one act this year when there was a kerfuffle over how they were showcasing the fact that they have a lot of female and minority performers. There's apparently a new production company in charge so I'm wondering if they'll get some bigger names in.

I decided to check out a couple of LEGO games on my Switch so I got City Undercover and Marvel Superheroes 2. CU's pretty fun - it's basically GTA for kids. The writing is funny with jokes that are sometimes a bit painful since I'm not the intended audience. There's a mechanic where you acquire different costumes over time which give you different powers. This means that you can revisit areas later on and do new things in them because you can enter spaces that were blocked to you before. Some of the costume acquisition is really great - there's a bit where you train in kung fu and I felt like I was in an 80s training montage. I've played about 16 hours worth of content and think I still have a ways to go.

I'm less excited about MS2. It has an extremely chaotic start and then you have to switch between multiple characters on the screen to get anything done. The controls are the same as with CU, but I find the switching really awkward. It also dives you right into the deep end and it was pretty confusing to figure out what to do because there wasn't any coaching. I actually started out with it, couldn't figure out what was going on, then played CU and got a basic understanding of the "knock things down, build new things in their place" core mechanic. It also leads in with the Guardians of the Galaxy which were not the characters I was most excited to spend time playing. I had been sort of hoping to get to play a specific hero that I wanted to, not just bounce around between every single person who has been vaguely associated with the Avengers.

"illegal solar immigration"

The last food festival I went to was a horribly planned event in Austin where they had 30 food trailers show up in a big parking lot and then all offered tiny tastes for $10+ a plate. Food trailers are notoriously slow so it was basically a parking lot full of intertwined 45 minute long lines of people waiting for a scrap to eat, none of whom were able to stand with anybody who they knew because they all had the idea to divide and conquer.

unenthused early look at Magic Leap:

Everywhere I've been in the last couple of months seems to have wildfires or dust storms that are tanking the air quality. Austin had dust from the Sahara, then Tokyo had Gobi desert dust. Las Vegas had an extreme dust storm during the last night of DEFCON that kicked piles of dirt into casino lobbies, then Phoenix had whiteout conditions that delayed my plane by 5 hours. Meanwhile, my friends and family in Washington and California are being constantly affected by wildfire smoke. I've been rocking a Vogmask and I'm seeing more and more people wearing filter masks, Asian-style.

At least it makes for lovely sunsets.

Thank you so much for writing this up, it's a fascinating, riveting read. I just came to it today and during this last bit of scroll I came to the sinking suspicion that you hadn't quite ended yet.... I will be back soon!

Huh, that sounds pretty meh.

I spent a couple years playing way too much WoW. It's a really fun game I found that, in the long run, most of enjoyment was derived from the people, not the game itself. I tried it out again a year ago and none of my old WoW friends were around and it quickly started to feel grindy and boring.

I think they actually ruined WoW by making it easier and more user friendly; I made friends on long slogs with fellow masochists but didn't really get to know anybody because they took away almost everything that forces you to need to talk to other people to succeed. As an example, to do a dungeon without RL friends who were playing, you would have to go to a city, find a few people who wanted to go to the dungeon, take a few minutes to travel to the thing, then actually do it. After all of this you'd usually meet a person or two who you liked. In modern WoW you just sign up for a dungeon, it randomly assigns you to a group, then it teleports you to the dungeon when it's ready, you do it, then get teleported back to wherever you were before. It's totally immersion breaking and there's no benefit to meeting anybody.

I'd be curious to know what your MMORPG friends think a modern "good" game is these days.

How'd you like it? I've actually NEVER played Skyrim before. I was somewhat tempted to get it for my Switch, but Zelda Breath of the Wild is already ridiculously huge.

Playing older games has made me appreciate advancements in UX, especially for slower-paced games. There were some bad, bad interfaces back in the day which I was blissfully unaware of since most games were uniformly terrible. One of the biggest shifts is just from joystick to mouse, but I've gone back to some of my all time favorite games that used mousing, like Ultima VII, and found them virtually unplayable because things like inventory management feels brutally painful and slow to interact with now compared with games that have this dialed in perfectly like WoW and Skyrim.

After my last few bad experiences with this I've mainly given up on trying to revisit vintage favorites with the exception of ones that are based on keyboard controls. Typing a few letters to do something isn't so bad, but waiting for my pointer to slowly drag across the screen and then having to click my new sword EXACTLY into the right outline in my weapons slot can feel like forever.

I finally made it to Solo. It's solidly enjoyable and ticks off all the boxes that a Han Solo origin story needs to tick. I'm not sure why fans were expecting more depth - this film's is about a rogue, not a Jedi. I am pretty sure that the writer's goal was "a heist movie set in the Star Wars universe" and that's about what we got. The film was a string of thrilling action sequences loosely connected with a bit of plot. They even did a train robbery, which was quite well done. In some ways that actually felt more like they were doing Indiana Jones than Han Solo.

I was totally ok with Alden Ehrenreich not strongly evoking Harrison Ford. If he'd been trying too hard to do a Ford imitation, I bet it would have been absolutely terrible. He didn't always seem all that Solo-ey and that was fine. There were lots of great shout outs to various things in Solo's backstory and we got to see major moments like how Han Solo met Chewbacca, Lando, and obtained the Millennium Falcon. Highlights were Donald Glover and their socio-political spin on robot rights.

Riffing off of Ebert: for the genre, I thought it was great. I liked Rogue One, Force Awakens, and Last Jedi more, but that's because I like straight Star Wars films more than I like heist films. I don't need to watch Solo again but it was good for what it was supposed to be. 3.5/5

I liked Isle of Dogs pretty well and agree it felt like a kid's movie. If anything, it's a love letter to Japanese culture, it didn't seem at all appropriative or disrespectful.

Anyone see Solo yet? I was thinking about seeing it this weekend but didn't get around to it.

The current mess in the U.S. is in part because so many people are single-issue voters on abortion. The Christian right has a significant population locked in to vote for people like Trump because at least he's against killing babies.

The Disaster Artist (2017)

A tale of a timeless friendship between two aspiring Hollywood talents who make a pact to push each other until they succeed. I was expecting it to be a bit more like Spinal Tap with on-set hijinks while one of the worst films ever is being made, but it's much more focused on the relationship between the two leads and their realistic life struggles. It's alternately heartwarming and cringe-inducing, and overall I was happy I saw it.

Disaster Artist is rather meta: Tommy Wiseau was director, producer, writer, and the star of The Room and James Franco was director, writer, producer, and the star of the film about the film. At times the performance seems weird, but James Franco is doing Tommy Wiseau perfectly. That actually reminded me a bit of Macaulay Culkin's spot-on performance in Party Monster -- it seemed totally strange but was also an accurate portrayal of someone with a bizarre manner and accent. (3.5/5)

I've been going to DEFCON and a couple other 'hacker' cons for a few years now and keep meaning to write something about why I love it. But I've been lazy so I'll just share this wonderful talk from three years ago as an example of the attitude and content you can encounter there.

Riffing off a prior talk on hard drive destruction in general, this speaker challenged himself to determine the most effective way to quickly destroy hard drives in a 1U server in the event of a high speed law enforcement attempt to snatch-and-grab while not impacting the data center the server is in. There's a lot of engineering diagrams and discussion about the pros and cons of the use of various thermal (including a plasma torch and thermite), kinetic (including high explosive), and electrical approaches. It's a great talk and there's lots of videos of all of his attempts with occasionally unexpected results.

Speaking of DF, I just checked the site and it's still in active development with what looks like more frequent releases. A couple months ago some major improvements were made to the world map. More recently, a deeper memory/stress system went in. Really fascinating stuff, but still a meh UX: https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/16/17242932/...ixar-inside-out

The last couple times that I came back to DF I found the UI too painful to play for a long period of time. I wish that Tarn would make the UI moddable - I am sure there are a ton of people out there who would love to take that on, which would give him a chance to focus on what's more important to him and his brother.

I'm mildly excited to see Donald Glover's Lando. I have trouble getting too much enthusiasm together for action origin stories like this because there often isn't a lot of tension. Usually they'll deal with that by adding in some more characters that we don't know so we can worry about THEM, but I don't see signs of that here. Will we get a final explanation of what the Kessel Run is and why it's measured weird?

What black magic is this? I can't even get my TV remote to turn on and off my television anymore.

I did write a bot in Slack that lets me chat at it to change the color my my Hue lights in various rooms, so my home automation is not a total loss.

I managed to get passes to the Westworld exhibit during SXSW and it was amazing. There's a "ghost town" about 30 minutes outside of Austin that they converted into Sweetwater and populated with 60 actors playing hosts. It was an immersive theater piece that was on a 90 minute cycle - if you stayed around you could see different parts of it play out.

They started us out at a rooftop bar that looked similar to the slick white glowing train station from the show. We were both given white hats and enjoyed cocktails from white-clad, amazingly well cast 'hosts'. After a "train" ride to the main site we entered through a reproduction of the hat-picking room and then right into a narrow space that looked just like the railway car from the show and we were surrounded by actors playing 'hosts' and a ton of guests like myself who were playing along.

At this point it was a lot like walking into Sweetwater - there were a number of hosts interacting with each other and it was fairly easy to get their attention. I got to play blackjack in the Mariposa and have a drink and some beef jerkey in the Coronado. The Post Office had letters for everyone that gave a hint as to how they could proceed if they wanted to find easter eggs. Mine led me to have a discussion with several hosts about the local women's suffrage movement, which culminated in me getting a poetic hint from the leader of that bunch (who I had to find based on a description) that led me to a hidden shed in the back of the park where you could look through a hidden window where scientists were working on android repair. Heather got a really creepy bloodstained letter threatening her life for returning to Sweetwater and she was able to track down some information about where it came from from a bartender at the Coronado, which is how we got the code to the door to the shed. Apparently they even hid things in some people's hats (which we got to keep!) as additional easter eggs, with their letters telling them to look in their hats.

The team that put this together was really creative about creating ways and reasons for people to interact. Going up and talking to the hosts was always fun and usually resulted in some clues or other payoffs as well. For people who needed more of a reason they gave hooks like posting wanted posters with photos of newcomers on them and encouraging people to round them up to get rewards from the Sheriff. There was a barber doing old timey straight razor shaves. There was a dug up grave that turned out to be Delores'. The cocktails were excellent; when you did quest things you'd often get a coin that you could exchange for one.

The piece culminated in some drama and a shootout in the town square. The writing and acting were fantastic and the end awesomely broke the fourth wall; it turns out the shooter was a 'guest' and as soon as he shot the host he broke character and went all exuberant because it was his seventh time there and he had finally beat the narrative, and asked people to take his picture. Shortly after there was a malfunction and white-clad QA people came in and "reset the hosts to first positions". At the end of the night when the park was closing, all of the hosts went blank and stood repeating "Thank you for visiting Westworld," over and over again.

All in all it was really fantastic. We got to spend about 2.5 hours in there before it closed, so we were able to see the end twice and different parts of the story from some different perspectives but I could easily have spent several hours there.

There's a bunch of articles online on this, here are a couple of the better ones:
https://theoutline.com/post/3708/westworld-...amp;zi=4yra566h
http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/03/11/we-...as-bonkers-sxsw
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a1...orld-sxsw-park/

I'm excited to see this but haven't gotten a ticket yet. During SXSW they converted a big restaurant into a Ready Player One space and it was pretty cool. They had 80s trivia kiosks all over the place and a big scoreboard with trivia winners in the middle. There was a Back to the Future Delorean that you could get your picture taken in (sadly their system mucked up and lost my photo). There was a big Iron Giant sculpture, a weird party room with flashy lights, and a pop up Hot Topic store selling all kinds of RPO branded items. The level of detail in the space was fantastic - in one corner they had a couple couches and chairs set up along with a TV, radio, bookshelf, and coffee table that were covered with things that made it feel authentically 80s. They must have had a great period propmaster bring a bunch of things in.

The main feature was some sort of VR experience that I didn't have time to wait in line for that involved them dressing people up like the bad guys, marching them all around downtown Austin, then having some sort of a VR battle at the end.

I use email services provided by the web host that I've been with forever for a lot of my personal email. One reason that I do this is so that I can create tons of email addresses under one domain so that I can nip off spam if one of the addresses gets compromised.

That said I've also been using gmail for a while for professional email and it's pretty solid. I'm also a bit paranoid of Google's tendrils, which leads me to keep them at a distance. But they really are hard to avoid these days, especially since their email offering is pretty solid.

One outcome that's a bit concerning is that PGP and other secure email is almost nonexistence these days. I actually use mutt at work for occasional PGP email, but that's super fringe and only people in certain lines of work still think about doing that.

If I were to follow my own advice I'd be using an Apple email service since they sell hardware not adverts. I'm very aware that *I* am the product when I'm using free services like Facebook and Google. But everybody is there and nobody seems to care. Almost everybody I know uses Facebook for party invites -- if I took a hard line on that it would suddenly be a giant pain to invite me to anything. I have a friend in town who refuses to use Facebook and I've seen her slowly fall off of guest lists to various things because people always forget to shoot her an email.