I credit the fact that Lawrence of Arabia is in my top 10 half-way because of David Lean’s audacious cinematography and half-way because of Maurice Jarre’s sweeping score. Rest in peace, thank you for the music.
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
Disk space, like puberty, is a problem that’s unlikely to disappear until we see some major technological revolutions (holocubes and voice-modulators, respectively), and for my money, again, as with puberty, life’s too short to worry about these things when there are other, bigger and better things to focus on. Like food.
If you don’t follow gaming news, this may have slipped by you, but trust me when I tell you that it’ll blow up everywhere in a day or two.
OnLive is basically a platform for playing a game that sits on a remote server, streaming the video to you over the internet. It sounds fantastic, awesome, revolutionary in a big way, and entirely implausible. At first I dismissed it, but the more I hear about it, the more I believe in it. Unless Sony and Microsoft manage to cock-block it, it’ll absolutely change the gaming industry.
If you’re even remotely interested in games, you owe it to yourself to check out the press conference video.
If this works — and that’s a big if, mind you — you’ll virtually never have to worry about upgrading your console again, because everything is run server-side. Games will be cheaper, faster delivered and you can’t lose or scratch the disc! As a developer, depending on how the OnLive business model will end up working, we also are no longer shackled by system specs. Piracy goes out the window. Noisy or defective components? Not a problem. And it works on your TV, your PC or your Mac! You can literally be playing on the TV, the wife comes in to watch Oprah, and you just flip up your MacBook and continue! The implications are absolutely mind boggling. And that’s just games; how about on-demand films and TV?
This is a game changer, pun and all.
Dear Microsoft,
Fire you OS designers and have your visualization department do the OS interface instead.
… No, scratch that.
Dear Apple,
Hire Microsoft’s visualization department.
Bought Company of Heroes off of Steam this morning. I’m generally an RTS hater, but since everyone around me seems to be playing it constantly, I thought I’d give it a try, so that if nothing else, I would be able to whine about specifics, rather than just in general. And Relic did Homeworld, the only RTS worth playing, so…
As it turns out, the game needs to authenticate itself against THQ’s servers, which would be fine, if we weren’t behind a firewall. And since it can’t phone home to mama, it asks me politely to insert the disc… Wait, what?
As it so happens, I happen to have a disc I can use, which I promptly put it in… But, of course that doesn’t work.
Horror stories of copy protection schemes are abundant. It’s a sad state of affairs, when I would have saved both money, time and a headache by downloading the game illegally. And let’s face it, it’s a 4-year-old game; if you’re still worried about copy protection, you’ve got your priorities wrong.
Can we please get past this? How can the experience of buying a game get worse as our technology gets better? It makes no sense.
Update: Tried authenticating via a cellphone instead, to bypass the firewall. Still no luck.
This is too good to leave on my shared Google reader items. Somehow, through some obscure channel, obtained from the final resting place of some Sumerian God by the man in the hat himself, a full 125-page story conference transcript between Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan from Raiders of the Lost Ark has surfaced as a PDF. Get it while it’s hot!
Stanley Kubrick died today, 10 years ago, on March 7th, 1999 at the age of 70. It’s a strange tradition, to remember someone on the anniversary of their death, but it beats not remembering them at all. Luckily, Kubrick is most certainly worth remembering.
On my desktop I have an entry-draft of considerable length concerning Kubrick, which I had intended to publish today. However, instead I fell into writing on a science fiction project I’ve been working on for a while (making significant headway I might add), and I like to think that writing is something Kubrick himself wouldn’t have minded taking precedence over me idolizing him and his work; he after all held the act of creation in particularly high regard, and considering the problems I’m having writing my project, I see what he means.
In reality, idolizing Kubrick is probably better done simply by watching or re-watching one of his films anyway, any one of which speaks volumes more about the man than I ever could.
‘I used to want to see almost anything. In fact, the bad films were what really encouraged me to start out on my own. I’d keep seeing lousy films and saying to myself, “I don’t know anything about moviemaking but I couldn’t do anything worse than this.”’- Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, softcover edn., Mississippi, p. 103.
It being Kubrick appreciation week, it seems fitting Matt let me know that somebody went ahead and named their dog after Kubrick. Not the man though, but the WordPress theme I did!
Kubrick is named after the default WordPress theme, Kubrick! It’s a really nerdy way of naming our new pup, but my husband wanted to name him with something that’s related to web design and development. #
On the 7th, it’s a decade since Kubrick’s death, and so I wanted to spend this week tributing my favorite director, by leading up to the day with some small pieces from or about him. This first one comes from Michael Herr’s excellent ‘Kubrick’ book:
He viewed the telephone the way Mao viewed warfare, as the instrument of a protracted offensive where control of the ground was critical and timing crucial, while time itself was meaningless, except as something to be kept on your side. An hour was nothing, mere overture, or opening move, or gambit, a small taste of his virtuosity. The writer Gustav Hasford claimed that he and Stanley were once on the phone for seven hours, and I went over three with him many times. I’ve been hearing about all the people who say they talked to Stanley on the last day of his life, and however many there were, I believe them all.- Michael Herr, Kubrick, hardcover edn, Picador, 2000, p. 3.