My last Grand Writing Decision (GWD) of 2011 is to pull the plug on my moribund site thenwrite.com. Thinking it over, I’m just not prepared to give it the effort it needs to get rolling again and with the hosting due in a few days I’d rather put it on ice for now and mull its future over than re-commit and produce lots of nothing.
I may revive the short story exercises I did on the Martian Cartel forum. They worked fairly well overall and produced some nice results. Or maybe I will become a hermit and write haikus on the insides of clam shells while living under the pier at Jericho Beach.
What better way to get wet than to go outside in December in Vancouver?
Today Jeff and I decided to get wet in style by hiking up Burnaby Mountain with his Vancouver Mountain Biking group. There were nine of us altogether and we started out near the base of the mountain on North Road. As with the bike ride yesterday the sky was again filled with clouds and the promise of much rain to come. As we headed out the weather held, though. Those of us dressed in cotton were thankful.
Burnaby Mountain is not exactly out in the boonies but the trails can still be rugged and demanding. There are points where the hydro wires are tucked out of view and the latest condo developments can’t be seen and you can almost believe you’re truly out in the wilderness. It helps if you stumble across a bear, too, which Jeff has done. The bears are smart enough to sleep through a Vancouver winter, though.
The ascent was on trails rated from easy to advanced. The easy stuff is just that — the grade allows for a leisurely pace and lots of idle chatter. When we reached Velodrome Trail (handy PDF of Burnaby Mountain trails) a sign at the bottom notified us that there were 500 wooden stairs leading up. Way up.
500 stairs is a lot of stairs. My excellent math and engineering skills tell me it worked out to the equivalent of 20-30 storeys. It took me back to the one time I walked up to the 15th floor of the apartment building I lived in ages ago. The one time.
When we reached the top we took a few minutes to pose for pictures, take in the totem poles and look up to the oh-so-expensive Horizons restaurant. That wasn’t what a bunch of sweaty, grubby hikers want so we continued on to the SFU campus in search of a simpler cafe. The SFU buildings were eerily quiet given the semester break and one hallway was completely unlit, as if it was auditioning for a part in a horror movie. We continued on until we got to Renaissance Coffee. They serve their free range/organic or whatever it was beverages in cups that feel all comfy and quilted. Jeff and I had hot chocolate, me going for the small, Jeff opting for hill giant size. I added a chocolate chip muffin, convinced I had burned sufficient calories on the way up.
Sated, we headed out and the rain had returned. Those of us who had brought non-cottony jackets donned them, the others prepared for The soaking. We headed down an unofficial trail that required lots of skidding, jumping and light praying. We all made it down intact, fortunately.
All told, it was a fun combination of easy and hard, everyone was friendly and chatty and no limbs were broken.
The stats:
Total distance: 11 km
Average pace: 3.7 km/h
Total elevation gained: 1132m
Total descent: 1201m
Total time: 3 hours
If fish could ride bikes they would have had a very fun time riding today.
Jeff and I set out on Bike Ride: The Sequel. I approached my (borrowed) bike with trepidation, my butt recalling just how sore it had been after riding it last time, the seat being made with US technology (Uncomfortable Sitting). The sky was overcast but ominous. We took the bikes out to the parking lot and a light rain had begun to fall. Dodging the rain in December is a tricky thing at best so we shrugged and headed out through Hume Park and down the Central Valley Greenway, following the river until we came out near North Road. I managed to spectacularly misread Jeff’s directions at one point and headed off in an entirely different direction while he patiently waited for me to realize I was cycling alone. This is what I get for deciding to ride ahead when I don’t know where I’m going.
By the time we started retracing our route the shower had turned into a mini-monsoon, with the rain coming down heavy and hard. With the bike fender-free, I watched as water zipped off the front wheel and into my face. If it was summer it might have been somewhat refreshing, almost.
Speaking of summer, it was not only mild as all get-out, Vancouver airport reported a new high temperature for the day at 11.6ºC, making it the balmiest December 28th ever. This after Environment Canada predicted our winter would be colder and drier than normal, naturally.
The final stats for the ride were:
Total distance: 14.58 km
Duration: 1.1 hour
Average pace: 14.2 km/h
Max. speed: 34.9 km/h
Much of the trip was uphill (yes, both ways!) so while the pace seemed leisurely the workout was not. I was proud to (barely) make it up the steepest hill without stopping. Even screwing up the gear changes couldn’t stop me.
UPDATE: A day later and my legs are not sore, though my hiney is still feeling hatred toward the world’s most uncomfortable bike seat. I am getting ever-so-slightly closer to being confident enough to move beyond the granny trails. And hopefully get a chance to ride when the sky is not dumping water on me.
As we near the end of the year I am indulging my penchant for lists. Here is Box Office Mojo’s 2011 Worldwide Grosses. It’s interesting to see how little North America played in the success of some of these films (eg. Kung Fu Panda 2 made over 75% of its take overseas). More interesting (or less interesting, perhaps) is how sequels have taken over:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 No surprise on this one as all the HP movies have done well and this one wrapped things up. Spoiler: Everyone dies.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon The third Transformers movie provides some evidence that there may be a deity as it did not finish #1.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Who knew Johnny Depp with eyeshadow could result in multiple billion dollar grosses?
Kung Fu Panda 2 It was only a so-so hit in the U.S. but people everyone outside of North America love them some fat cartoon pandas.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 Vampires, sparkling, teen melodrama and yes, a sequel.
Fast Five The fifth Fast and Furious movie. This thing has legs. Or wheels. Or something. Will Vin Diesel use this as leverage to get another Riddick movie made? You know he wants to!
The Hangover Part II A movie that didn’t need a sequel gets one, sequel is huge hit. This is why we can’t have nice things (or original movies).
The Smurfs Wait a minute, this isn’t a sequel! But it is licensed, so it’s almost the same thing. It made over $500 million. Why? WHY?!
Cars 2 Uninspired sequel to another movie that didn’t need one. This time Pixar got a pat on the bum for being naughty, as it was their lowest-grossing movie to date. A sequel to anything but Cars would have been nice.
Rio This isn’t a sequel. How did it get here? It’s anthropomorphic cartoon animals so it’s almost like a sequel to one of the thousand or so movies that can be described thusly.
Extrapolating, I am predicting that by 2015 all movies will be sequels and no new stories will be told. I look forward to Cars 7: Out of Gas in 2022.
I am a mere 23 days away from completing my 12-week sabbatical from running. I have a tentative plan on where and how far I will run on January 17th (Day 85). I confess that I shall be utterly crushed and dismayed if I go out on my wee run that day and my ankle starts to hurt. I may have to seriously consider learning how to swim if that happens, the thought of which gives me the cold sweats.
In the meantime I continue to go on walks, hikes and bike rides to keep myself in reasonable shape. I’ve also vowed to go back to a more sensible diet come the new year to help improve my overall health. Hooray for me, or something.
I’ve seen Twilight Zone: The Movie before (in the theater when it came out in 1983) and recently watched it again. It doesn’t hold up.
I had forgotten that the opening is a literal update of the final few seasons’ intro sequence, complete with the Scary Door, floating eyeball, shattering window, human figure and clock, all given a nice modern sheen. What this does is underline how silly the whole thing was to begin with, and I’m not convinced that was the intent here. When CBS revived the series two years later, they wisely jettisoned this for completely different opening credits that call back to the original without aping them.
The movie is framed by a character played by Dan Aykroyd. In the movie’s first sequence, he is a passenger in a car driven by Albert Brooks. They exchange banter for a bit before Aykroyd talks Brooks into pulling over in order to show him something ‘really scary’. This turns out to be Aykroyd done up with make-up effects worthy of the original Star Trek. The main problem here is that they apparently could not budget a movable mouth, so Aykroyd’s monster face looks like a mound of blue plaster topped with a fright wig. Maybe it was meant to be an homage to Creepshow and other cheesy horror movies/comics, but that’s not what The Twilight Zone is about, so it would have still missed the mark there.
This leads into the first of four stories and the only original one, which on the one hand I find understandable (present the audience with stories they know and presumably love) and mildly puzzling on the other (“I can watch these stories for free on TV, why should I pay to watch them in a theater?”). Sadly, the original story is the weakest of the bunch. A racist man played by Vic Morrow leaves a bar in a huff and finds himself in Nazi-occupied France, where the bad guys see him as a Jew. He then lands at a KKK lynching, appearing as the black would-be lynching victim, escapes again to find himself doing a compelling impersonation of Charlie during the Vietnam War before ending up back with the Nazis. Upon return, he is captured and put into a cattle car and shipped off to the concentration camps because he is a racist and isn’t that ironic?
Granted, the message episodes of The Twilight Zone were never subtle to begin with (in one an American Nazi — played wonderfully by Dennis Hopper — is guided by Hitler himself), but this story is a limp series of sequences that feels rote. There’s no investment in the character — he’s just a nondescript loudmouth with ugly views and an uglier suit jacket (it was the early 80s, after all) and each sequence is too brief to carry any emotional impact. There is a certain ghoulish feeling knowing that Morrow was killed during the shooting of the Vietnam scene (when a helicopter hovering above him crashed due to an effects explosion).
The next story is a remake of “Kick the Can”, directed by Steven Spielberg and is cute enough to be twee and that’s even before you get to Scatman Crothers’ creepy perpetually grinning character. Where the original leaves off with the seniors transforming into kids and running off into the night, the remake brings them back to old age because the object is to be old in body but with ‘young minds’. Having shown everyone how neat it is to be young again but not really so you better climb back into bed and be old, Crothers heads off to the next seniors home to do it all over again. The scene where someone finally punches him in his stupid grinning mouth was apparently deleted.
This story captures Spielberg at his most sentimental. While the actors are fine, the script is mawkish and heavy-handed, once again bent on delivering a message above all else. As you might have guessed, I found Crothers’ character (new for the remake) annoying and unnecessary.
The third story is a remake of the classic episode where Bill Mumy plays an evil kid who can do anything with his mind and occupies most of his time by demanding fealty from his parents and their neighbours as they are forced to endure his childish, outlandish indulgences, lest they get sent to the corn field — or worse. The remake introduces a new character, a young school teacher who takes the boy home and gets ensnared in his bizarre world and changes the supporting characters to be similar victims, rather than his actual family. The rest plays out mostly the same but while the horror of the original was palpable (one character is famously turned into a living jack-in-the-box) it is presented more cartoonishly here (literally, for the most part). The biggest change is the ending, where the teacher breaks through the boy’s loneliness and agrees to teach him to be nice and use his power wisely rather than to put people into cartoons where they are eaten by monsters. It’s a happy thing but makes the story feel a bit too pat. The original leaves one with a sense that these people are going to be stuck in his hellish world for a very long time, the remake seems to sum up with ‘all you need is love’ and while that’s nice, it’s not nearly as fun. Still, this is far better than the first two stories.
The final is perhaps one of the best-known of the original series, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” where a nervous airline passenger (William Shatner in the original, John Lithgow in the remake) believes he sees a creature on the wing of the plane trying to damage the engines. This is the most faithful retelling, down to Lithgow’s character being carted off in a straitjacket and the reveal of actual damage to the plane, proving he wasn’t just seeing things. It differs in a few ways, most notably by eliminating the wife of the character. My biggest problem with this segment is the pacing. In the original, the character seems perfectly normal but nervous about flying (given that his previous flight ended in an actual nervous breakdown). After first spotting the creature, he begins to unwind and grows increasingly hysterical, but there is always the sense that he is trying to maintain control. The remake starts with Lithgow in the washroom, already freaking out. The arc of the character isn’t given room to breathe and is less rewarding as a result. Plus, Lithgow plays nervous maybe a little too well. The creature’s appearance is also changed from a big fluffy something with a kind of ugly face to a hairless, demon-like thing with a mouth full of nasty-looking teeth. While it is theoretically scarier, it also changes the creature’s motivation. In the original, it seemed to be pulling apart the plane out of fun. The remake creature seems more determined to actually bring the plane down, which muddles why it would disappear when Lithgow’s character tries to point it out to others instead of just finishing the job.
The movie ends with Lithgow in the ambulance and Aykroyd revealed as the driver, offering to show him something ‘really scary’ (I’m guessing bad make-up effects).
On a scale of 1 to 10 Serlings, Twilight Zone: The Movie rates 6 Serlings. Individually:
“Time Out”: 4/10 “Kick the Can”: 4/10 “It’s a Good Life”: 6/10 “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”: 7/10
GoG is not the only site having a sale as Steam rolled out its annual holiday offering yesterday. The sale runs until January 1st. Either my tastes have become more picky or I’ve already bought every damn game I want because two days into the sale and I have purchased nothing save for the DLC for Dungeons of Dredmor. It was on sale for 75% off, resulting in a price of 74 cents. Yes, 74 cents, less than the price of a cup of coffee (the go-to item for comparing how cheap something is).
There are a couple of titles I have my eye on that I will consider if the price is right but I’ve already passed on a lot of bargains. Who knew that Duke Nukem Forever would actually be released in 2011? Who knew that it would be such a crappy game that even a price of $4.99 isn’t low enough for me to check it out? Well, it’s possible some of the more honest developers who worked on the game had an inkling as to its relative value. I might bite at $2.49 (probably next summer’s sale price).
Other notable bargains I’ve passed on include Amnesia: The Dark Descent (by all accounts an excellent adventure game but also scary as all get-out and I play games to relax, not wind myself up), Quake 4 (wouldn’t mind having this on Steam but not for $9.99), The Witcher (already own it), various Half-Life 2 titles (own all of ’em, still haven’t finished Episode 1) and as they say, many more.
It’s clear people like their bargains, though, as the Steam store is still having intermittent issues and was mostly down over four hours after the sale started. Peak users was over 4.4 million. That’s a lot of people mulling over whether or not to buy Duke Nukem Forever at $4.99 (apparently quite a few did as it’s listed at #6 in today’s top 20 bestsellers).
Good Old Games is in the midst of its 50% holiday sale and I took the opportunity to pick up a game I had on my first PC back in the olden days of 1994 when PCs still came with floppy drives and monitors were massive 14 inch wonders.
That game is Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos and when I first had it I made it all the way to the climactic battle against the evil Scotia but never quite finished the game. I’m not sure why. It may have been that I ended up getting a new PC and moving saved game files was sometimes a tricky thing back then. Or it could have been an obscure, game-stopping bug that was never patched (that was also a tricky thing back then. I still recall 1998’s Baldur’s Gate as being the only computer game I owned that truly and utterly defeated me. It would consistently crash 10-15 minutes in no matter what I did. I eventually gave up and shipped it off to a friend who, of course, played it without issue). Whatever the reason, I didn’t complete the game and used this as a handy excuse to justify the nostalgia in picking it up, knowing full well the chances of me completing it now were pretty darn slim.
Much to my surprise, once I set the game to windowed mode and shrank it down to 800×600 it ended up not looking too bad. The pixelated graphics are quite acceptable when shrunk down appropriately. Even better, the actual game is is easy to pick up. The interface is clean and straightforward and the copious voice work helps to compensate where the graphics falter. For example, most signs are just a bunch of VGA scribbles (unreadable) but clicking on one results in your party leader reading it aloud in a crisp tone. Handy!
I still don’t know how far I’ll get. As you can see in the shot below I am just starting out and only have one of the eventual three party members. At this point I’ve solved one simple puzzle, beat up an attempted thief, beat up a mean boar and had the castle guards tell me to get lost. Not bad but not exactly saving the world — yet!
I’ll follow up within a month’s time to report on whether the purchase (a whopping $2.99) boiled down to an hour or so of play or whether I’ve actually made real progress. Odds are it will be the former but every once in a while you can go back.
The current issue of The Georgia Straight has a story on the Top Albums of 2011. Almost without exception I am not only unfamiliar with the albums, I’ve never even heard of the performers. Looking through each critic’s selection (nine critics, ten albums each), here are the artists I actually recognize:
Tom Waits
Jay-Z and Kanye West
Paul Simon
Foo Fighters
George Thorogood & the Destroyers
The Jeff Healey Band
Wilco
Tori Amos
Björk
PJ Harvey
I have never owned an album from any of these people. Actually, looking over the list I’m surprised that there were that many names I recognized. Still, with 90 picks, I only recognize 10 artists, cementing my place as musically out of touch. Hey, I bought an Animal Collective album last year, that has to count for something, right?
Combined, these threads add up to somewhere around 10,000 or more posts. That is a lot of words for one game. It currently rates 94 out of 100 for the PC version on Metacritic (96 and 92 for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, respectively) and has spawned no less than two annoying memes, making it the Portal of 2011 (even moreso than Portal 2, which also came out this year):
Do searches on these phrases, if you dare. The Internet will obligingly turn up many examples for you to enjoy(?).
The game is still listed at $59.99 which is way beyond my current gaming budget, plus I know that I wouldn’t do more than piddle about with it if I got it now, anyway, as I have a gaming backlog that stretches nigh unto infinity as is. Still, as a pop culture event, there is no denying Skyrim has left an impression. And made moneyhats for Bethesda.
I recently jumped back into City of Heroes as it’s gone free-to-play and my vet status meant most of the game’s features were unlocked right up front. CoH is an MMORPG that launched in April 2004 and as anyone who has played one of these games will tell you, MMOs are designed to be massive time sinks. It gets even worse because the typical $15 monthly fee makes you feel obligated to login and do something even if you don’t particularly feel like it because, dammit, you’re going to get your money’s worth! That’s what’s nice about free-to-play (F2P) — you can play as little or as much as you like and saunter along at your own pace. There are usually some things you can’t do without paying (obviously the publisher needs to generate revenue somehow) but it’s easier to fork over $5-10 whenever you feel like it instead of being on the hook for $15 every month or no super hero (or villain) for you!
The best part of the game is probably still the character creator. Here are a few I’ve made recently, as making endless alts is pretty much a required part of the CoH experience. I’ll elaborate a bit on the game’s current incarnation in another post.
Punch Bull
Punch Bull continues the fine tradition of names based on terrible puns. He’s a level 20 super strength/willpower brute. His specialty is punching things really hard. As you can see, his main costume is a boxing outfit, a raging bull, if you will. His tail wags.
Mint Laser
My latest in a series of robot-like characters, Mint Laser is a level 20 beam rifle/electric manipulation blaster. His specialty is shooting things with extremely loud beams of energy. If those things get up in his grill he can switch to punching them with glowing fists of electricity.
His second costume will be something delightfully retro (and extra minty).
Frank Lee Feathered
Finally (for the moment) there is Frank Lee Feathered, a level 14 plant control/earth assault dominator. I originally had given him wings but I found them a bit distracting, so while he looks like an eagle he acts more like an ostrich. Further underlining that is the fact that most of the earth powers require him to be on the ground to work. His second costume will probably have wings.
More on how these kooky characters play and what the game is like with the hybrid F2P/subscription model soon™.
I am officially 33 days away from my next run. I’m pretty certain I will not be trying out a test run two months in (which would be just a few days from now) even though I’m sure my ankle is recovered, mainly because I want to get better at cycling first. I mean, I can cycle, of course but this crazy bike and its fancy braking system are still very new to me and I still feel far from comfortable changing gears and such. I want to become one with the bike. In a zen monk way, not a ‘bike wrapped around me after slamming into a pole’ kind of way. To that end, I am going to avoid cycling near poles.
Jeff’s schedule is all clogged up over the next few days so I’m contemplating heading out on my own on one of the nearby granny trails. I fully expect it to snow if I do so.
