sawall

I went into Black Panther with lowish expectations because the hype seemed pretty meta in a similar vein of the Ghostbusters hype. I was also a fan of the 90s version of the comic book so I was really hoping that they would get it right. The Alamo did a mini-feature on the history of Black Panther prior to the film and there have been something like seven reboots of the character since he originated, wow!

I ended up really enjoying it. The art design was fantastic, as were the costumes. I agree that the main character is a little boring but that was also accurate to the comic. They did a lot of great things with the prominent female characters as well as some of the side characters that made things stand out well and kept me caring about what was happening. To some degree the plot was by the numbers but I was actually surprised by the last half hour or so of it; I didn't expect some of the twists that led to it lasting as long as it did. It definitely stands out and I'd enjoy going back to see more Wakanda. I'm less interested in seeing Black Panther in an Avengers movie because the geopolitical angle is what makes the character extra interesting to me. 4/5

I finally got around to seeing Homecoming and liked it pretty well. I was definitely a little worried about how Tony Stark would fit in but it wasn't too much. Solid coming-of-age story all around, decent acting, and a good villain. Tom Holland is maybe closest to the original comic book Peter Parker out of any of the Spider Man movies that have been produced in the last couple of decades. Great visuals and pacing. A lot of it wasn't super-memorable but definitely fun. 3/5.

That's fantastic. Any idea how much you've saved people over the years? I bet it's a lot.

Where's that robot?

Heather and I actually both made the same comparison to Amélie; it felt more like that to us than any other del Toro film that we'd seen. The story is mostly in the context of a quirky, whimsical, romantic spinster who interacts with everything on her own fantastical way.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Jenkins get an Oscar, his performance stands out. I immediately looked him up afterwards because I couldn't quite place where I had seen him before but I knew I had. Turns out he's got a MASSIVE resume including Six Feet Under and Cabin in the Woods.

I badly need to unsubscribe from the Humble Monthly. My Steam backlog is starting to feel like a giant todo list. I actually like my Switch as a relief from that since my laptop is absolutely full of giant todo lists.

The Shape of Water (2017)

This was way less weird than I was expecting, for a Guillermo del Toro movie. In fact, it's a great date movie about a mute woman who falls in love with a hunted fishboy. I can see why it's been nominated for so many Academy Awards, it's an amazingly well-realized artistic vision. The film is oozing with nostalgia for monster films of the 50s but it was also able to sneak in some more modern critiques about how race and sexuality was treated at the time. There is not much violence in the film, but when there is, it's extremely realistic and sometimes brutal, which helps ground this otherwise fantastical story in reality. The acting is great all-around. The cinematography and sound is top notch, and I recommend seeing it on a big screen. 4.5/5

After a couple months, I am still loving my Switch, and I am not the only one. In the United States, it's selling faster than the Wii did, which was the top selling video game console of all time. This has resulted in a whole host of game announcements from producers that seemed on the fence about whether or not they'd support the Switch.

I was expecting to mainly play attached to the television as a console but, for some games, I've grown to really love its portability. I'll play on the TV when we're doing multiplayer but I can also pop it out and hang out with it on the couch if I'm playing a single player game. The switchover is totally seamless and I've never seen it get confused by a context switch.

I've explored some additional controller options since as I'd mentioned the joy-cons are tiny. I highly recommend the official "pro controller". There are also some off-brand plastic handles that you can buy for single joy-cons that work great for games with more than two players. I own two sets of joy-cons, the pro controller, and two holders for single joy-cons for when we're running four-player.

multiplayer highlights

• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: Definitely better than the Wii version, possibly even better than the DS version.
• Rocket League: Great port. Not a super high polygon count but it looks great and plays smooth.
• Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime: 2-4 players drive a spaceship together by controlling different posts (guns, piloting, shields, etc).
• Snipperclips: Cute two-player puzzler where you cut each other into shapes to solve puzzles. Hilarious because it's ridiculous.

single-player highlights

• Super Mario Odyssey: Similar to 64 and Galaxy but with a more open world feel. Really well done.
• Stardew Valley: Surprisingly addictive farming/fishing/social/mining/etc sim. Based on Harvest Moon, which I've never played. I've logged waaaay too many hours into this.

Lots of people love the Zelda game but I've had nothing but meh experiences with the franchise, so I remain dubious. I'll eventually cave in at some point and try it out. Other games on my radar: Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, LEGO City Undercover (GTA for kids?), and Overcooked.

I played through the demo of Dragon Quest Builders, which is Minecraft with a RPG plot. I didn't have very high expectations for it and it's surprisingly entertaining. Humanity is in decline and you're the prophesied "Builder" who is there to help rebuild ruins back into some semblance of civilization.

It's generally pretty close to Minecraft in gameplay, but they've layered in a quest system that you can get to by talking with characters in the game. There's also a "room" system where you can build specially designated rooms based on what's in them. For example, a bedroom is an enclosed room with a door, a torch, and two beds. That provides housing for two villagers to stay. In some cases you are given a blueprint that shows you the exact layout a room needs. There are other room types that become production facilities for various types of goods, in the demo there's a workshop where your villagers build furniture and a kitchen where they make cooked food. These goods build up over the course of time so you can go out and explore or mine and then come back and you'll have food for tomorrow.

It's definitely mostly geared towards kids and the dialogue is fairly vanilla RPG fare. But if you feel like exploring something that's Minecraft-like with a story context, it seems rather well done. I'll probably pick up the complete game once it's out for the Switch and check it out.

In the cryptocurrency space, there's an interesting Ethereum-based system called Blocktix.. Vendors will sell digital tickets to concert-goers which are stored in wallets as unique tokens. The wallet can then be used to generate a QR code at the venue entry to prove that the person entering is the only token holder.

These smart contracts also support completely safe ticket transfers because they operate like an escrow service. The buyer sends currency to the contract, the seller approves the transfer of the ticket, then the contracts handle the transfer and payment processing as an atomic action.

The reason I bring this up here is that one feature they are working on is an option to configure the smart contracts to force accepted payments to be the original face value of the ticket. This means that trades that happen within the system can't be scalped - the contract makes it impossible for a seller to request more money than the original face value. This doesn't prevent a tout from doing something shady in person before they'll approve a transfer but it'll make it a lot more annoying to scalp.

Pretty cool stuff: https://blocktix.io

Let's not forget the rumors that Trump was deliberately trying to lose in order to kick off some sort of "Trump TV" nightmare. Maybe Murdoch wanted him to win in order to avoid that kind of competition.

Farage was in the US for a bit, on FOX. Russia's part of the problem, but Murdoch is pretty high up there too.

That bit on Russia's meddling in the Ukraine and asymmetric warfare that was on the Charlie Booker wipe a couple years back was spot on. Everything he reported on in the Ukraine was then applied to the UK for Brexit and the US for the Trump election. One thing that a lot of people in the US haven't really clued into is that Russia didn't care that Trump was put in power. They were backing extreme leftist candidates as well to create chaos. Trump winning was a big win since it makes massive turmoil and international embarrassment, but they won as soon as stupid memes like "Clinton and Trump are identically corrupt so why vote?" became mainstream.

I loved this! Really great performances all around and heartwarming in the age of doom. I remembered the story of the Eagle from when I was a little kid. I had actually named my long-running Marvel Super Heroes RPG character after him as his main power was flight.

I'm pretty happy with where they left Snoke for the purpose of the story, and there are MANY vectors for them to flesh out the character without it needing to be done in the context of the saga films themselves. I would enjoy seeing it covered in a book, cartoon, or a story film, but it's absolutely not necessary. Apparently some of the cartoons, while aimed at kids, are quite good; I've been half-convinced by my extreme-Star Wars fan friend here in town to check out "Rebels". (She loved Last Jedi, btw.)

You're right that failure was a major theme. I think that ties into what I saw as a genre flip. At the end we do see Luke succeed to slow down Kylo, but at the cost of his own life. (Rogue One / Last Jedi note: the only suicide missions that seem to work out are ACTUAL suicide missions?)

One other random thought is that the Jedi religion is a LOT like Taoism, not only in terms of belief, but also in terms of how there are many different types of relationships that people have with it. Some people are into the folk religion rituals while others have a more direct connection with the force. I'm curious to see how much more they explore it. The Jedi temple was one of my favorite things in Rogue One because we got a much clearer view into how "normals" interacted with the belief systems vs. what it's like for Jedi Knights and Sith Lords.

HO HO HO

We've been burnt out on travel and family so we are having Christmas at home this year. It looks like the Chinese place nearby is open today so we'll be hitting that for dim sum soon! Happy Christmas, all.

I finally got around to seeing The Last Jedi yesterday morning and thought it was great. Sure, there are a lot of little things that I could quibble about but overall it was a fantastic entry into the franchise.

I'd avoided spoiling myself, and my list is actually fairly similar to Chimpy's, with my top complaint also the anachronistic jokes. There were a couple times that I got pulled out of the flow because it seemed like there were sudden sitcom style references to situations on Earth (the 'on hold' prank and something else involving Finn that I can't quite recall now). I would like to see more Snoke backstory but we never got much with the Emperor in 4/5/6, so it's pretty much par for the course. I'm hoping that the third "story" film will cover this time period between 6 and 7, since the first one covered the time leading up to 4 and the second one is dealing with some older history.

One thing I particularly appreciated is how they flipped the script and broke genre expectations. I'd quibble with Chimpy about the "single fighter against large object" issue because I think they addressed this repeatedly. Poe's run against the dreadnaught was successful, but the Vice Admiral later pointed out that it was at the cost of all of their bombers, which screwed them over later. The very Star Wars small team's heroic excursion to the casino planet not only failed but actually made things worse, and led to the Resistance's survival hinging on a BSG-style "screw the weapons, sneak out the transports" survival plan. Similarly, the heroic run against the cannon on the ice planet completely failed to slow down Kylo.

Other genre/script flips that I liked:
- Rey's mysterious parents were dead nobodies instead of some fan theory favorite.
- The Del Toro character turned out to be an opportunistic criminal rather than a "smuggler with a heart of gold" type.
- We saw Luke, as the master, struggling with faith more than his student.
- Luke and Kylo were essentially arguing for the same goal - to tear down light and dark, Jedi and Sith, and start over. This led to the best argument to join the dark side that we've ever seen in a Star Wars movie as well as some legitimate questions about who we should be rooting for.

Not quite sure where to put this, but this gave me a laugh: Noel Gallagher answering weird questions about himself and Oasis on reddit, Quora, and elsewhere, as well as editing his Wikipedia entry.

http://video.gq.com/watch/noel-gallagher-g...eddit-and-quora

Picked up Wasteland 2 on a recent Humble sale and it's really quite good. It really reminds me of the original but with vastly updated graphics and UX. I especially like how it keeps giving me impossible choices based on the brutality of the wasteland - "doing something good" will often have longer term unfortunate implications (as a made up example, saving a beggar's life from a mugger might just lead to them starving to death next week). Early on you are given the option to save one of two places from attacks, and what you choose impacts nuances in the narrative after that. Your actions affect many lives, including people who you may see repeatedly in different locations, and how you interact with them will affect what happens later on. The major story arcs are all basically the same but there is definitely a greater sense of your actions making a difference in outcomes that directly affect your character than I usually get in games like this because doing it right like this is generally too expensive for most studios.

Bethesda did a great job of bringing in a lot of characters and locales from the original while adding new things in a way that preserves the story. It's set 20 years after Wasteland and the radiation clouds are becoming a little less dangerous, which means that new areas are opened up to the Rangers that were previously thought to be completely inaccessible and uninhabitable. The voice acting is good enough that I often pause to listen to the characters talk rather than just speed read and click through. This game is no slouch in terms of scope; based on a walk through I skimmed I think I'm about 1/3 of the way through and I've already put 20 hours in.

In my attempt to avoid the ongoing Microsoft vs. Sony war for serious hardcore gamers, I am the proud owner of a Nintendo Switch. This is my third Nintendo product after having previously owned a DS and a Wii. I skipped the horribly named Wii U because I couldn't figure out what the hell it was trying to be, and my Wii was still fun enough.

I bought the Switch mainly as a console but was excited about the possibility of it being a portable gaming device as well. I've only had it for a couple days with two games (Rocket League and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe) but here are some initial impressions:

• The system is super simple to set up.
• The graphics are a huge improvement over the Wii. Mario Kart looks spectacular compared with the Wii equivalent. This is of course predictable given it's been over a decade.
• The Switch behaves pretty well as a tablet. I'm intrigued to see how the software ecosystem evolves because the hardware could definitely replace an iPad.
• When using the Switch as a handheld, the screen quality is great. It feels kind of like having a giant DS. Battery life is good - I saw someone using one on a several-hour flight a couple weeks back.
• Single Joy Cons are way too small for my hands. Luckily there are good add-on options including a nice grip and alternate controllers.
• Online setup is convoluted. It feels like there's Nintendo legacy with different accounts in different places and it kept double-checking to make sure I didn't have certain kinds of accounts that I didn't have. I got it sorted pretty quickly but I bet the workflow will be confusing for less technical people.
• There are a lot of weird things in the Nintendo Switch ecosystem that aren't explained but are in top level menus, like amiibos (physical figurines with chips in them that can give you costumes / bonuses in games).
• The Joy Cons are somewhat more limited when compared with the Wii controllers. There's no sensor bar in the system which means that there won't be games based on aiming by pointing a controller. I think this is a trade-off that was made with portability in mind, but I know that Heather is going to be sad that there won't be any light-gun style games and I'm never very excited about FPSes with joystick aiming.
• Some devs are going all-in on it as a portable console; I downloaded a demo of a rhythm game that only works using the touch screen. I'm glad to see that Nintendo isn't blocking apps like that, it's the kind of thing that I could see Apple disallowing.

Overall I am pretty happy. There are a few more titles that I want to explore (Mario Odyssey, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle) and I am also intrigued to see how that AAA PC titles are being ported, including Skyrim and Doom.

I picked this up a couple months back and feel pretty much the same way. I like some ramp up time to set up infrastructure before things get too crazy. I may just need to read some more guides but I went through a couple starts where my colonists got totally jacked up within minutes of attempting to do much of anything. I want pacing more like Dwarf Fortress and less like Don't Starve.

It's fascinating to see how different pacings appeal to different types. I enjoy building out infrastructures that can help me survive. I think people who like Rimworld, Don't Starve, and Rust prefer games where they are constantly in survival mode and that building up things isn't as important to them.

I do get bored if my infrastructure gets too powerful too fast. The first night or two in Minecraft can be pretty edgy but basic base survival is easy after that (obviously there's a lot of other things I like about Minecraft than the survival aspect). Same goes with Factorio where the enemy ramp up isn't too extreme once you get modest defenses in place.

I haven't had a gaming PC in a while (hence my usual focus on web, mobile, Mac games) but we just got a Nintendo Switch. First thing I downloaded was Rocket League and I am having a blast with it. The gameplay is smooth and the details are pretty good given that the Switch is basically a specialized tablet. Apparently it's possible to play online cross-platform too! I'll be trying that out soon with some local friends who still play a lot of it.

I've been to a few of these and it's been interesting to see how diverse they can be:

Out of the Box (Austin): My first escape room heavily leveraged an improv actor who had designed and was running the entire game. As we opened new rooms he played different characters that we had to interact with to make progress. Fun puzzles, weird costumes, and in general a blast. It was a pretty unique with the acting angle, although I didn't realize that at the time.

Wizard School (Austin): Obvious riffs on Harry Potter. Cleverly crafted so that a diverse audience could work on it - there were brain puzzles like matrix logic, and there were also dexterity puzzles like using wooden tools to get a 'dragon egg' out of a chamber. The structure was fantastic and was set up so that people could break off into small groups and then combine their answers to get to the next steps. I did this with a team from work and everyone seemed happy with it by the end. The coolest puzzle was one where one person looked into a crystal ball in one room and had to direct someone in another room who was using a magnet to run a steel ball through an upside down maze that was on camera via the crystal ball.

Spy Safe House (Austin): One of the most immersive escape room environments I've seen. You're a FBI agent and suspect that the 60's apartment you are searching belongs to a Soviet spy, and have to prove it before the target gets home. They went all out with the theme and there was codebreaking, a cleverly hidden secret door, a radio station playing numbers, and so on.

Reason (San Francisco): This escape room focuses on "future technology". There's fun tech bits including a VR game that you had to explore for clues, a quadcopter obstacle course, a key that had to be created using 3d printing, and a RC car in an adjacent room that you have to pilot while wearing a headset that shows you the POV of the car. The theme was ok and some of the parts were definitely a little experimental and uneven.


I've been getting really interested in interactive alternate reality spaces and performances. Jejune and the Latitude Society were interesting examples in the bay area. I also went to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe last week (and am doing some contract work for them!) which is another take on this emerging genre that manifests in the form of an interactive art exhibit backed by a cohesive narrative.

This is so forgettable that it completely left my mind almost immediately after seeing it in the theater several months ago until I came across this review here. The bit with Rhianna is fantastic and the entire film is EXTREMELY PRETTY. I definitely remember enjoying myself at the time but zero specific lasting impression.

I think the magic (art?) is in understanding how the techniques work, selecting video inputs that are likely to work well with those techniques, and then cherry-picking the best results after experimentation. To draw a musical analogy, creating glitch art is more like performing experimental sound design than carefully composing songs.

I dug into how this is accomplished. Most of those effects come from removing the "I-frame" from compressed videos, which is the frame used at shot transitions to redraw the entire video stream. Most of the video file are "P-frames" which are deltas from each "I-frame". So that's why you see the new scene get slowly drawn in.

Another glitch technique for images is called databending, which involves loading up uncompressed bitmaps into programs that aren't intended to deal with them, applying transforms, then saving the raw stream back out. Last night I mucked around with a common databending technique which is to load a bitmap into the audio editor Audacity and apply effects that are intended for sound files. I came up with a few pleasing results, including:



The tutorial I used for this: http://www.hellocatfood.com/2009/11/16/dat...using-audacity/