pareidolia

omnigrapple

Mister Sinister

frightening special

deepfather horizon

Things about radio commercials I never noticed until recently

I have tried almost my entire life to ignore com­mer­cials of any kind. But, as of late, I have been forced to not only lis­ten, but pay atten­tion to a great deal of radio com­mer­cials. Here are a few things I’ve noticed.

1. You know how in mag­a­zines they have those “spe­cial adver­tis­ing section“s? Well, they do that in radio, too. They try really hard to make com­mer­cials sound like they’re actu­ally con­tent. Often, the hosts of the shows will “tell” you that they really love a prod­uct, but they’ve never used the thing at all. Well, in a mag­a­zine, they put “adver­tise­ment” at the top, but in radio, they don’t. You’re just expected to know. Or not, more likely.

2. They try really hard to make peo­ple sound like they’re being con­ver­sa­tional. But when you lis­ten to a com­mer­cial over and over and over again, the ticks and affec­ta­tions start to stand out. And then you start to won­der if they’re doing it on pur­pose. And then you know for cer­tain that they are because they don’t do any­thing unless there are a mil­lion dif­fer­ent num­bers back­ing their decisions.

3. I used to really be both­ered by the pledge dri­ves on pub­lic radio. Now, though, I will will­fully and gladly take that if this is the alter­na­tive. The peo­ple that adver­tise on radio these days are the worst of the bottom-​​feeding, pyramid-​​scheming lot and it’s incred­i­bly insult­ing to any­one with at least two brain cells.

cleopatra hair

I made this at work today. I couldn’t use it, but I liked it too much to just let it die.

wig

I need a word for this

I love wikipedia. I enjoy read­ing an arti­cle, and then read­ing other arti­cles that relate to it. Tonight I watched The Foot Fist Way, a very funny movie about a Taek­wondo instruc­tor. I didn’t know any­thing about Taek­wondo, so I looked it up on wikipedia. Some­how, I ended the night read­ing about sex­ual slav­ery as prac­ticed by the Japan­ese dur­ing the first part of the 20th century.

But I’m not here to talk about the bor­ing ways in which I spend my free time. There is a ten­dency, in wikipedia arti­cles, to be less and less accu­rate when the topic of the arti­cle is less and less gen­eral. For exam­ple, dur­ing my read­ing adven­ture tonight, I was read­ing about break­ing in regards to mar­tial arts demon­stra­tions. At a point, the arti­cle starts to make ques­tion­able statements:

Peo­ple often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven scientifically.

In most other wikipedia arti­cles, it would prob­a­bly look like this:

Peo­ple [who?] often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven sci­en­tif­i­cally. [cita­tion needed]

This amuses me. I know I’m pretty much done read­ing wikipedia for the night when I start to encounter these.

I have a the­ory for why this phe­nom­e­non exists. I read a lot of arti­cles tonight about Japan­ese war­crimes dur­ing the 20th cen­tury. Those had plenty of sources and were very clearly writ­ten. I think many peo­ple are inter­ested in these top­ics. They are his­tor­i­cally significant.

But break­ing boards and bricks for mar­tial arts demon­stra­tions is, to say the very least, less sig­nif­i­cant. I imag­ine that far fewer peo­ple read the board break­ing arti­cle than read the war­crimes arti­cle. And the peo­ple that are read­ing the board break­ing arti­cles have no prob­lem with claims of dubi­ous qual­ity. I’ve seen this when­ever I come across an arti­cle that seems to have lit­tle pos­si­bil­ity for gen­eral inter­est. Arti­cles about anime, musi­cal gen­res that I’ve never heard of, and fanboy-​​inspiring top­ics in general.

It’s really easy to imag­ine the guy from The Foot Fist Way read­ing and pos­si­bly con­tribut­ing to the arti­cle on board break­ing. In fact, I can’t imag­ine any­one else read­ing it, really.

I want to come up with a word for this drop in qual­ity. It is the point at which wikipedia stops being use­ful and sim­ply elic­its a cho­rus of “yep, that’s pretty much how it is.” And it will never get any bet­ter for these kinds of arti­cles because nobody who knows any­thing about writ­ing or truth will ever read them.

Grim Fandango

So, after all these years, I finally com­pleted Grim Fan­dango.

I love the char­ac­ters and the set­ting. I even think some of the puz­zles are pretty good. Cer­tainly it’s a very good game. I love adven­ture games, and I would even say that it’s a rel­a­tively good adven­ture game. But Grim Fan­dango is not the best adven­ture game ever. Lots of peo­ple seem to think so. It even tops a lot of best-​​of lists.

Appar­ently, Lucasarts was in a tran­si­tional period when this game was made. It ended up being their second-​​to-​​last adven­ture game, which is a shame, because they made some really fun adven­ture games over the years. Most of this is due to the writ­ing and game design of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert. Ron Gilbert left the com­pany before Grim Fan­dango was made, and this game served as Tim Schafer’s last hur­rah. It seems that Lucasarts used Grim Fandango’s per­for­mance as a way to test the mar­ket waters. If it didn’t make a boat­load of money, then they would stop focus­ing on adven­ture games. And, well, it didn’t make a boat­load of money, so they stopped focus­ing on adven­ture games. I assume that some of the dif­fer­ences between Grim Fan­dango and other Lucasarts adven­tures, then, were because they knew that the genre was close to death, and they were try­ing like hell to attract new play­ers. So they debuted some new exper­i­men­tal features.

The trade­mark Lucasarts writ­ing remained excel­lent. The puz­zles remained excel­lent. But the graph­ics were con­verted to 3d. I know this was 1998, just into the Playsta­tion era, but holy hell, these graph­ics are ter­ri­ble. They did the best with what they had, I guess, but the char­ac­ters are blocky, and the pre-​​rendered back­grounds are, well, I guess they’re fine for pre-​​rendered back­grounds, but even the art from Myst looked bet­ter, and that was 5 years before. I admit that the idea of using tra­di­tional Mex­i­can art is quite inspired. I can only imag­ine what the ini­tial con­cept art looked like.

Even though I gen­er­ally dis­like 3d graph­ics, that’s not the game’s biggest down­fall. That dubi­ous honor is reserved for the hor­ren­dous fuck­ing con­trols. There were so many times play­ing the game that I would attempt to walk some­where, but couldn’t, because the Resident-​​Evil-​​style-​​rotating-​​point-​​of-​​view move­ment is so incred­i­bly bro­ken it makes Res­i­dent Evil seem like Super Mario Galaxy. Once, I acci­den­tally went up and down the ele­va­tor by the Blue Cas­ket in Ruba­cava four times just try­ing to walk past the god damned thing.

So, with the graph­ics kind of suck­ing and the con­trol really suck­ing, I couldn’t help but think that this game should have been made in the style of Lucasart’s other graphic adven­ture games, like Full Throt­tle or Day of the Ten­ta­cle. The art in those games is far supe­rior because it’s based on actual draw­ings instead of poly­gons. It has char­ac­ter and warmth.

Just try to imag­ine a Grim Fan­dango that looked like this:

Calav­era Drawing

instead of this.

Manny Calav­era (aka ol’ block­head) from Grim Fandango

I think maybe I will always pre­fer pens to poly­gons. I believe that the tran­si­tion to 3d did more harm than good. I guess it’s just hard for me to shake the idea of Grim Fan­dango look­ing as good, as, say, Sam & Max Hit the Road.

And the con­trol was so much eas­ier in those games. You just clicked on things instead of mov­ing your char­ac­ter around with the arrow keys.

In most types of games, I pre­fer a direct approach to game con­trol. For exam­ple, in role play­ing games, I pre­fer games like The Leg­end of Zelda where you push a but­ton to swing your sword, to command-​​driven RPGs, where you push a but­ton to con­firm that you want to swing your sword. It’s more vis­ceral and it feels like you’re actu­ally doing some­thing instead of just trig­ger­ing cutscenes.

Maybe if they had spent more time work­ing on the con­trols, I wouldn’t be com­plain­ing so much. I played Escape from Mon­key Island, which was a later game built on the same engine, and I didn’t have nearly as many problems.

In this arti­cle, Tim Schafer talks about their intent with the con­trols. They wanted to min­i­mize menu screens so it looked less like a com­puter game, mak­ing it more immer­sive. And they changed the con­trol scheme from mouse based to key­board based for the same rea­sons, I guess. If you see a big crosshair cur­sor in the mid­dle of your screen, that makes it harder to sus­pend your dis­be­lief. Their inten­tions were good, but they fell short. Mov­ing around is frus­trat­ing, manip­u­lat­ing your inven­tory is annoy­ing, and, for me, this made it nearly impos­si­ble immerse myself in the story.

I do want to reit­er­ate, though, after all this crit­i­cism, that I really liked the game. If it had been made maybe 3 or 4 years pre­vi­ously, or maybe 10 years after, I think it would have been one of the best games ever made. But, I guess it’s bet­ter that it was released than being shelved, like Full Throt­tle 2.

Comments Off

Any time I’m read­ing a long arti­cle on a web page, I’ll occa­sion­ally glance over at the right side of my browser win­dow. I’m look­ing for the scroll bar, try­ing to fig­ure out how much longer this thing is. Some­times it’s because it’s bor­ing, some­times it’s because I have to go to the bath­room but I’m really inter­ested in it and want to fin­ish read­ing it before I go.

This behav­ior isn’t lim­ited to the inter­net. I do it when read­ing books, too. When­ever I eat at a restau­rant by myself, I bring a book. Often, I’ll stay much longer than the time it takes to fin­ish the meal, just because I want to fin­ish the chap­ter. Some­times chap­ters are long. If it’s more than 10 pages or so, I’ll usu­ally just call it a loss and leave.

In any case, I often try to assess the length of what­ever it is I’m read­ing. I think it’s use­ful, and you prob­a­bly do it, too.

And now I finally come to my point — any­body who makes a web page with com­ments, please make the com­ments a sep­a­rate page. Or make them hid­den until you click on “reveal.” Or just turn them off. I don’t care how you do it — but they need to not add length to the page.

Like I said, when the arti­cle is long, I’ll look at the scroll­bar. If it looks like I’m halfway through it, I’m usu­ally wrong, because there are com­ments at the bot­tom and some­times they’re as long or longer than the orig­i­nal arti­cle. This is bad.

In my mind, the page does not exist for the sake of leav­ing com­ments — it exists so you can read the words of the orig­i­nal author. Now, let it be said that I think com­ments are are a good idea. I under­stand their rel­e­vance, but they are cer­tainly not as impor­tant as the orig­i­nal arti­cle. News­pa­pers don’t print ever sin­gle let­ter they get. The have a spe­cial page for let­ters and they only print a few.

Unless the pur­pose of the site is dis­cus­sion, com­ments should be de-​​emphasized. And, also, they tend to be poorly writ­ten. So I make it a point not to read them. Some­times I do, when it’s tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion or it’s a site where the com­ments have a decent rep­u­ta­tion, like Slash­dot or Metafil­ter. But usu­ally they’re bad and not worth reading.

If what I’ve said before hasn’t con­vinced you, think of all the lost pro­duc­tiv­ity. If com­ments on inter­net were mag­i­cally turned off, we’d have entire com­mu­ni­ties look­ing up, blink­ing their eyes and stretch­ing, and going out­side to paint the shed.

Cer­tainly you’re as sick of all those unpainted sheds as I am.

Hey Headline People

For the love of god please stop ref­er­enc­ing old song titles as news arti­cle titles. If I have to see “The X are alright” at the top of an arti­cle one more time I think I might vomit.