Binary Bonsai

I just uploaded several hundreds new Star Wars photos to my flickr account, included the above, which stands out I think. Enjoy.

I have to begrudgingly admit that I’d never heard of seen anything from or about this short film until yesterday, when Cedric left a comment on a Battlestar Galactica concept painting by Ralph McQuarrie I had uploaded to flickr¹.

On the one hand, this is bad, because I truly love this sort of grandiose fantasy film-magic that has been so instrumental in shaping my interests and longings, and not having heard about this until now seems to indicate that I don’t know anything! But it’s also good, because it promises that despite having combed for years and years through the fantasy and science fiction genres, there are still blank spots on the map. And that is very comforting.

Quest is a short film by Elaine and Saul Bass (yes, that Saul Bass), which was released in 1983, based on the Ray Bradbury story Frost and Fire. And it is, thanks to the wonders of the internet, of course available online in part one and part two (or in a lower quality 16mm ‘print’).

Despite being a bit toe-curlingly dated in some parts, I actually found it to be very enjoyable. Not least because it falls into the ‘undiscovered wondrous worlds’ box o’ sci-fi, which is truly my favorite playground. You can almost see stories like Shadow of the Colossus, Forbidden Planet, TRON, The Neverending Story and even Cameron’s Xenogenesis echoed in its aesthetics and overall feel.

Unfortunately, other than an interview snippet about its music, and a suspiciously empty IMDb entry, information about it is rather scant. But isn’t that part of the fun? Now I can spend the next decade keeping an eye out for more information about it; and that is, after all, what I do…

1. Flickr has shown itself to be by far the best social media site for meeting similarly minded people. Especially science fiction minded ones, which has been a great fortune for me. ↩

On an average day on my flickr account, I’ll have anywhere between 3000 to 5000 views. Three days ago, when a set of Star Wars storyboards hit kottke.org and Digg on the same day, I had 357.000 views. Since then the set has gone around the blogosphere, hitting Wired earlier today, and the views have settled into a more reasonable 90.000 views a day.

Yikes.

Them being so popular now, I’m actually surprised they weren’t ‘discovered’ earlier, since they’ve been up there for nearly two years now. But also, I’m pleased by how happy people have been with seeing these nuggets o’ nerd gold. No hate, no ‘blah blah prequels, blah blah Banta pudu!’. Just pure nerd love.

On that note, by the way, if you’re interested in more Star Wars drawings, paintings, memorabilia and background information check out the list at the end of this post for some books to pick up. And also, be sure to check out my other Star Wars photos on flickr.

May the force be with you. Always.

Update: I’ve uploaded a a new batch of about 20 Empire and Jedi storyboards to the set.

First of all, I’d like to express my elation with Barack Obama. And I really mean that. Even here, half-way around the world, in a country so liberal your scale doesn’t even go that far left, this will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of a reign of incompetence and negligence and will soon see the rise of what I truly believe to be not only a good man, but the right man for the job as president of the US.

Secondly, I have certainly been, if not incompetent, then at least somewhat negligent, namely in writing for this site. But there’s just been so much to see to lately. First I had a driver’s license to take — nailed it by the way — and then the gates of Hades opened up on the unprepared masses and unleashed not one, not two, not three… No, one BILLION games.

So I’ve eagerly been playing as much as I’ve been able to, so far making headway in Dead Space, Farcry 2 and Fallout 3. Tomorrow Gears of War 2 is coming out and I just got word that Little Big Planet shipped. And later, there will be cake. And more games. So…

This is all largely spoiler free, but not opinion free, so beware.

Dead Space

Oh dear Science. It’s so derivative. It’s sooo been done before, that it’s really kind of embarrasing to sit through the story as it unfolds exactly as you’d expect. System Shock meets Alien meets Event Horizon meets Bioshock. It’s like eating pre-chewed food; fairly unsatisfying.

I don’t like the whole ‘look, I build this power suit out of copper, and my guns look stupid and can rotate’-look, but that said, it’s very well-crafted and highly polished, which is more than can be said for so many other games these days, so…

I hope I can muster up the drive to play through it, but I’m not entirely sure on that one.

Farcry 2

I didn’t like the first Farcry. Luckily the sequel has pretty much nothing to do with it, so that’s something.

For the first few hours I really didn’t like it. It was confining and annoying and felt very unfocused. But then it slowly started clicking for me. I had some moments, the likes of which only a sandbox game like this can give. And then I loved it. And I loved it for a good 8-10 hours or so. The mechanics are great, the AI pretty nice and some of the landscapes are just downright gorgeous (even if the PS3 does start sounding like a jet when I take a boat down river and it needs to stream data faster than it wants to). The setting certainly has its moments, and it’s just great to see Africa portrayed so well and put to such good use.

But when you get the 10th ‘go across the map and do X’, and you know that doing so means passing through 5-6 checkpoints, all of which are hostile and all of which you’ll have to fight, after which you’ll have to find a place to stock up on ammo and maybe new weapons… Well, it loses some of its charm.

And it’s such a shame. Such a shame. Maybe I’m simply not far enough into the storyline for me to make alliances or something like that, but I would love to be able to pay off someone so I could be granted free access through certain areas, or something similar, which would make the world seem so much more alive. Hell, they even do it in the intro!

Furthermore, for such a cool world, it’s a damn shame that there are no civilians. Everybody has a gun, and everybody wants to kill you.

Ugh.

I don’t know that I’ll make it all the way through this one. But they do have some very cool stuff going on.

Fallout 3

This is what I’m actively playing at the moment. I’m some 18 hours or so in, and despite all of the ugly characters, horrible lighting, ‘animation’ and whatnot, really really enjoying it.

And it has made me realize just how much I’ve missed playing an old-school sci-fi RPG, like the old Fallout’s. How much I love getting lost in the story and the characters and the far-out world.

It’s far from perfect, certainly. As mentioned, it’s ugly as sin itself at times (though it does have its moments) and lacks the humor of the old games. But it just doesn’t matter when you lose yourself in the world of it.

And I really didn’t like Oblivion. I wanted to. But when I after 8 hours found out that the entire world kept leveling up as I leveled up (‘click’, now you never see a wolf again, it’s too low-level), I put down the controller, ejected the game, and never looked back.

But so far I haven’t been disappointed. And luckily, despite the game having a certain feeling of having been rushed, I’ve mostly seen aesthetic bugs, and not gameplay-related ones.

Gears of War 2

I’m not going to buy it. I’m simply too cynical and annoyed at the whole concept. Yeah yeah, the first one was entertaining and all, but I have to face the fact that I turn on to the fiction of a game more than I do the gameplay, and I cannot deal with the pubescent hyper-masculinity of Gears. It’s just too much for me.

And hey, I grew up with Commando and Cobra. I swam in testosterone. And then I kept growing. And hey, I love me some Predator and all, but haven’t we at least come to a point where we can do a game like that of Gears, and not have it be as ‘erect penis’ as it is?

It might even be better if the first one didn’t actually try to seem as if it had some kind of a story beneath all the pumped, oiled muscles. Or if Cliff Blezinski in all his rockstar developerness wasn’t also pretending just that.

Gears also contains what Bleszinski calls a “going home” narrative: “There’s a sublevel to Gears that so many people missed out on because it’s such a big testosterone-filled chainsaw-fest. Marcus Fenix goes back to his childhood home in the game.

And

When you start to peel back the layers of the Gears world, Bleszinski told me, “there’s a lot of sadness there.” #

Dudes, the emperor has no clothes! Give it up! Gears of War is space marines vs aliens. And not even interesting aliens; but the same ol’, same ol’ ‘uuuuh, teeth and mean eyes and uuuuu’-scary. Yeah, the setting is nice, but the fiction of the world has no more layers than Pacman, it’s just wrapped up nicely.

Sure, it’s a relentless, stupid action game, and I understand that. But come on. It’s style over substance to the nth degree, and I’m just too old and too cynical for it.

E-Day. Give me a break.

Yeah, I’ll probably borrow it and play it eventually, but I just can’t get my manly panties in a bunch over it.

But yeah. Busy days and so many games to play.

I have quite a few British friends and readers, and I thought this might be of particular interest to you. A good friend of mine, Bjørn, an ex-pat Dane who is married to a Brit, and living and working in England, raised the alarm flag on a subject which should be very close to the heart of anyone living in Britain, whether they know it or not.

The UK government is planning to track everything you do on-line and on the phone. Even if you have done nothing wrong, every e-mail you send, every website you visit, every text you send and every call you make will be tracked, logged, categorized and stored for years.

Through an innocuous sounding “Intercept Modernisation Programme”, the government wants telephone and internet companies to send all their logs to a centralized system where it will be made accessible to law enforcement and military agencies at will.

Read more about the threat here, here and here.

Now that your car numberplate is scanned daily and CCTV tracks you up to 300 times per day, the government wants to invade the final bastion of privacy – the sanctity of your own home. In an effort that mimics George Orwell’s dystopian book 1984, it now wants to log all electronic communication between everyone.

Neither terrorism nor crime poses a threat big enough to warrant such sinister intrusion into the daily lives of innocent citizens. While targeted monitoring of potential criminals can be justified in many cases, instantly turning 61 million citizens into suspects is not British, not moral and not befitting for a democracy no matter the threat. Irrespective of the moral implications of this proposed tracking, do you really trust the government to keep all this information secure? How many times have we heard about supposed private information being dropped or intentionally leaked in the last year alone?

We do not want to live in a society where innocent people have to worry about what they say, what they do and how they act. If the Intercept Modernisation Programme, or any programme like it, goes through, it will kill the democracy it is trying to preserve. Even the Information Commisioner, Richard Thomas, has described this as a “step too far”.

Please sign the petition against these plans on the Prime Minister’s website.

If you feel strongly about this, please consider forwarding this information to your friends or tell them about the threat in some other way.

Thank you.

And thank you.