dan.brakeley.net

Been too busy/sick/lazy to post much lately, but this is just too awesome:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nYSbPthEfAg

Harmonix had a bit of a party this past weekend in celebration of Guitar Hero 2’s vast awesomeness. There were 600 tickets out there, and it was packed. We booked the downstairs at the Middle East in Cambridge, and also the bar/cafe thing at above it. It was packed. There were a multitude of bands playing from 8pm to 1am, all of whom had at least one member from Harmonix. It was really crazy.

Here’s some relevant links:

Also, we tried to get a Wii Sunday morning, but we didn’t start until 8am, and by then everywhere was either already sold out, or the lines were too long. We searched for two and a half hours before giving up. We were fifth in line at a Sears that only got 3, and 19th in line at Micro Center, which only got 12. Today I just gave up and got one on ebay for $350 (including two day shipping, here’s hoping I get it Wednesday before the holiday!).

It was raining, I was tired, still a bit hung over, but bored with sitting around my apartment. So I decide to drive to the mall. This is the first time I’ve driven to this particular mall, and I end up a block down the road at a $2 an hour parking garage. Whatever, I didn’t want to drive around anymore, so I pulled in, got annoyed by the friendly automated voice at the ticket machine, and parked. This parking garage was small, mostly empty, and had just two lanes to the street, one going in and one going out. The incoming lane had a ticket dispenser, and the outgoing lane had a ticket reader, and the whole thing was completely automated. I thought that was kinda cool, cut out the poor bastard who is freezing his or her ass off and sucking exhaust all day.

So I walked to the mall. I schooled some punks on the Best Buy Guitar Hero 2 demo. OK, really I was just hoping for a good schooling, but in reality the people there must have been playing there all week, because they were pretty good.

Anyways, eventually I’m done with the mall, I wander back out into the rain and wind, and I claw my way back to my car. The parking garage is still mostly empty. I don’t remember how many cars, exactly, there were when I pulled in, but there were two there when I tried to leave. There are a lot of details about that garage that I learned while trying to leave.

The automated payment system involves paying for your ticket at a machine before trying to drive out. I’ve seen this at parking garages before, and was not intimidated. What supposed to happen is that you give it your ticket, it tells you what you owe, you pay, it spits you back your ticket, and you feed the ticket into the reader at the gate on the way out, and if you’ve paid, then the gate lets you pass.

Of course, traditionally, the payment machine doesn’t eat the goddamn ticket.

By “eat”, I mean it took my ticket, told me how much I owed, but then decided to shut down the money and credit card readers. They didn’t even try to take my money, just just ignored it as I jabbed and poked.

At this point, I took stock of my options, and I found there were three buttons I had to play with: “Intercom”, “Reciept”, and “Cancel”. “Cancel” did absolutely nothing. “Reciept” yielded a change in the display screen to say “Reciept Printer Error”. And “Intercom” caused a speaker to click, like when people in movies press the button on a walkie-talkie. I tried holding it down and speaking into it, but never got a response.

Well, screw it then, I’ll just try leaving, maybe it’s free on the weekends or something. Nope. I got to the ticket reader at the exit gate, and an annoying automated voice started going on about how I needed to take my ticket to the payment machine first. Great. There was another “Intercom” button, and it to gave me a another direct line to nobody.

Now, I like a good challenge, and I play a lot of video games, so I was not without hope at this point. First, I played with the system a bit, tested a few theories. I tried walking over to the entrance gate and pressing the ticket button, hoping I could get that gate to open, and then drive through that way. It, of course, had a metal detector, or pressure sensor, or something that let it know that I wasn’t a car, and my actual car was on the wrong side of the gate to trigger the sensor, so that didn’t work. I looked around for something metal, and managed to drag a big sign with a heavy metal base over, but it still didn’t think I was a car.

At this point I found another sign on the wall, describing how if you needed a reciept, you had to go to the parking office. Sweet! That sounds like where real people might hang out. I found the door described in the sign, and there was another “Intercom” button by the door, which of course, made that wonderful click noise, and that’s it. I tried the door knob (it was locked), and I tried knocking and yelling. No people. I found a security camera and tried waving at it, but if anyone saw it, they didn’t bother to let me know.

So I finally just walked over and tried lifting the gate. It was a long piece of wood, and it hinged in the middle so that as the base turned from horizontal to vertical, the top half remained horizontal. With that hinge point in the middle, plus the hing point where it was mounted to the machinery, I found I could lift from the end of it and get it up a good two feet without much trouble. So I pulled my car as far to the opposite side of the lane as I could, and I inched up on it, and before lifting it, I was able to get the hood of my car safely under it. Then I reached out the window and lifted the gate up above the roof, and continued to inch forward.

So I pretty much had freedom at this point, except that there was a point after which I couldn’t continue to hold the gate up, and I didn’t want it scraping my roof, or slamming down on my trunk (a gate like that is not a light thing). So I pulled the e-brake, gently set the gate down on the roof, and pulled an old blanket out of the trunk, and put it between the gate and the car. Then I got back in and inched forward until I was clear.

Having finally emerged victorious, I gave the security camera one last smile, and I was off. I hope someone actually views those tapes, because I bet it’s funny as hell to watch. Also, at one point when the automated voice came on describing the payment machine (for the nth time), I distinctly remember giving it the finger.

Important tangent: the EB at Cambridgeside Mall blows. I was totally in the mood for some Fire Emblem or Advance Wars or something, and all they had for gameboy was one narrow chunk of wall filled with movie licenses and sudoku and games I’d already played. Lame.

One thing I hate more than going to the dentist is having to reboot. I just upgraded from Winamp 5.24 to 5.30, and the installer is telling me I have to reboot. I hate that. I have 2 gigs of ram and a UPS and I just leave my computer on 24/7. I wander between my computer and the rest of my life seamlessly, with no waiting for startups or shutdowns. On average, I probably have Visual Studio, Azureus, Trillian, a sticky note program that I never use, a multitude of Explorer windows, a bunch of web pages, Steam, Thunderbird, Excel, Crimson Editor, Calculator, and a wide variety of system tray utilities and custimizations, all idling away ready to go. Actually turning off my machine requires me to wade through all that, making sure everything is saved, all the web pages that I hadn’t gotten around to reading are bookmarked or ignored, and then I have to sit and wait for it to shut down, reboot, wait for my USB hub to hang at POST, tap the reset button, wait again for it to reboot, then finally start Windows back up, and then start re-opening stuff. Lame.

Ahhh, the self-serving pointlessness of a personal blog…

Well, in regards to Jack Thopson’s case against Rockstar’s Bully, it seems the Florida judge is a reasonable man, and Bully is cleared for release in Florida. Jack, take a hint. Your one man crusade against video games is starting to get a little creepy. Relax, have some mineral water, and get to know some gamers, and remember that the “these kids today” routine is unbecoming.

Jack Thompson has foretold the future, and it is that Bully will be a “public nuisance.” How does he know this? Because it was made by Rockstar, of course, and the makers of Grand Theft Auto are guilty until proven innocent. Jack, you are the picture of irony: you don’t understand it, so you push it around and steal it’s lunch money. You’re like that crazy congress guy from Alaska who was going on about the tubes in the Internet.

Here’s some links:

The executive summary is that a judge has ruled that the game (and a person to play it!) must be flown in from the publisher (Take-Two) within 24 hours, and the judge will review it, and decide if Jack’s case has any merit. Review for days, if need be. The game is supposed to hit shelves next week, hence the urgency.

Of course, this is all happening amidst federal crackdowns on the ESRB. But Jack’s little sideshows are exploitations of primal fears and paranoia, and are not going to result in any real step forward. People instead should listen to people like Aaron Ruby, who, in his An Alternative ESRB?, actually has some valid complaints. And this opens the floor to some real dialog that could seek to find improvements to the system.

…Instead of just harassing Rockstar again. If the judge dismisses the case, I hope Rockstar and Take-Two sue Jack for harassment. That guy is a real dick.

And in the ESRB’s defense, the only big news items in the past few years relating to insufficient ratings were cases where the user could not get to the questionable content within the confines of the game. They had to alter the game externally, either through a third party piece of software, or, for Oblivion’s topless females on the PC, some simple file trickery. And these are things that would not be caught by simply having the ESRB play the games. People assume that because the ESRB doesn’t play through the games, that the publishers and developers will then try to abuse the system to sneak content through. But what this line of thought neglects to take into account is that the publishers and developers have no incentive to do that. Both are in the business of making money by selling games, and if the ESRB finds a game has been misrepresented after it’s shipped, then the game will be pulled form shelves, and the publisher will find themselves paying to cart off the old copies and printing up new ones with the new rating, and that’s a lot of wasted money. Hot Cofee cost everyone involved a lot of money. If they are smart, then they’ve made changes to their development pipeline to make sure that that will never happen again.

Anyways, I’ve strayed from my point. Jack Thompson is a dick. Make sure you’ve got that down, as there will be a test on this tomorrow.

UPDATE: Arstechnica has been following this for a while now. They note that Jack is trying to (ab)use Florida Statute 823.01. After some searching, the best description of how that statute relates to the case is found on Jack’s own web page. The laws stated in their case all revolve around the notion of a place becoming a “public nusiance” when it becomes a place where acts that “corrupt the public morals” are allowed to take place. Although the intent seems to be aimed at drugs, gambling, and prostitution, Jack is claiming that by selling copies of Bully, the stores implicated in the law suit, which are Target, Wallmart, BestBuy, Toys ‘R Us, Circuit City, and Game Stop, will all become places of public nusiance, and thus his case is against all of them, and not against Rockstar or Take-Two directly.

Aaarrrhhhgggg. Man, how did he find a judge to take him seriously? And he hasn’t even played the game, and yet he is acusing them of all sorts of atrocities. Not to mention single handedly corrupting public morals.

Well, at least Ars Technica had the decency to play it first. As I read their review, I find I’m actually interested in this game, where before I wasn’t. And assuming Jack doesn’t get the game banned in Florida, all this free PR will probably be good for the game…

Arstechnica has an article entitled The Daily Show is as substantive as the “real” news. The results of a study apparently indicate that the Daily Show has as much substance (?) as real news, and on average had longer stories than real news, but with less proportion of the time in a story given to substance (?). I’m not entirely sure what is meant by “substance”, although I haven’t read the actual study itself, and hopefully they define what they mean somewhere.

The author of the study seems to think this is more telling of how poor TV news broadcasts are instead of how good the Daily Show is. I would imagine that this is a key point that many will overlook. Don’t think the Daily Show should be your news source instead of network news. I think the bigger deal here is that TV news in general should be avoided as a source of fact and information. I personally recommend NPR. Maybe news channels on cable should just be an NPR news feed, with pictures of kittens or puppies or naked hotties or something.

Apparently our new overlords (MTV bought Harmonix, remember?) have a show about games entitled the G-Hole. The show has a monicker of “Ultimate”, but if you can get by that, the show linked below manages to show even more content that has hitherto been kept hidden. Wikipedia’s GH2 Page has been trying to stay abreast of information that is official, vs. unconfirmed reports (check out the history for the back and forth that Wikipedians love so much). I don’t know if stuff in this video counts as official or not, but they show a lot, especially a lot of the song list.

Anyways, here’s the link:

http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?name=games&id=1542218#/overdrive/?id=1542218&name=games

So here’s an interesting thought:

<thought>

If you are to take the Never Ending Story metephorically, it is a story about Bastian, a boy who, after the death of his mother, the lack of compassion from his father, and the harshness of school and his peers, decides to forgo reality and abandon himself to an entirely fictional world. The mysterious bookshop, the book itself, and the quest detailed within the book, are all constructs of Bastian’s mind to help him transition from reality to delusional fantasy.

The school itself provides a telling backdrop for Bastian’s transition, including his disdain of the people and pain they represent. He starts out late for a math test, which drives him away from class and to the attic, which is symbolic of a retreat away from the pains of the world, and into the comfort of his own mind. Later on, the bell rings and school is let out, yet Bastian doesn’t leave. He has found comfort from within, and doesn’t seek it anywhere else (friends, home, after school sports, etc). As the day turns to night, and a storm begins to brew, Bastian is almost driven out by his own fears, but he stays in the attic; he has nowhere else to go.

Bastian creates the magical book and it’s story as a way to comfort himself, since he does not find comfort in the world around him. As Bastian progresses through the story, it slowly leads him to the conclusion that the story is reality, and that in order for the story to have a happy ending (and thus bring him the comfort he so dearly wants), he has to admit that fantasy is reality, which in turn releases his last grip on his own sanity.

It is at this point in the story, when he screams his mother’s name out the window and towards the heavens, that all the light in the scene is extinguished, and he finds he can finally interact with his fictional characters face to face. They need him, they respect him, and he is one of them. The final scene, where the two worlds collide, and Bastian uses the devices of his own fictional world to enact revenge on the real world, is merely an example of both how he no longer is able to see reality as it is anymore, and why he is happier living in his made up world.

It is left up to the viewer to imagine what has befallen the body of poor Bastian. Is it still lying unconcious in the attic? Or did the extinguished light from that final climactic scene at the window symbolize Bastian throwing himself to the pavement below, ending the remaining ties to reality by ending his own life?

</thought>

Yeah, ok, that’s kinda depressing, but I guess I was in a low mood. All this makes me think of Silent Hill, actually. Both the games and the movie. The movie, by the way, is by far the best movie adaptation of a game ever, despite the excessive gore. If you want to see Silent Hill, pay close attention, because often Silent Hill involves metaphors and thinking, which may be why all the film critics didn’t get it. I will have to have another viewing and see what I come up with. Also, fyi, Silent Hill has horrific violence, so be aware of that. In fact, you should keep Never Ending Story handy to help you recover afterwards. And maybe a big plush Care Bear, possibly Funshine Bear (ok, I had to wikipedia that, i couldn’t remember any care bear names).

FINALLY.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70wOzCkWN5g&eurl=

MY FAITH HAS BEEN RESTORED.