Look. I’m sorry. I know. I get it. But I have to do these things for …you. YOU!
Via DangerousMinds
The Death Of Liberalism
“My dad use to say: If you don’t like the noise coming out of someone’s mouth, put your fist in it.”
Okay that got my attention.
I’m sitting beside two 50-somethings at the Starbucks up by my work at Yonge and Lawrence. If you don’t know the area, it’s mostly populated with upper middle class, stand alone house owners with two cars and 2.5 kids, cared for with some South Pacific/Asian nanny. These two guys are right beside me in the busy cafe and prior to that sentence I was successful with my ignorance of them.
“You know what I hate…?”
Oh please do tell.
“These lefty Liberals at fucking city hall. They need to be cleared out, all of them. A fucking waste of money and time. I called city hall this morning and I got someone at 9:45am… 9:45 am!! And asked them about something and do you know what they said to me?? ‘Wait a minute, I need to turn on my computer.’ They had 45 minutes to turn it on!!”
My back arches. My eyes go to the window so I can see his reflection. If I had not heard this garbage I would have assumed he was a nice, almost kind looking older guy. But after hearing this, he’s super ugly. I’m about to say something, the sentence forming in my mouth, when his friend speaks up:
“Well, maybe he had some paper work to do before starting his computer? It is a bureaucracy, you know.”
That shut him up. On that topic. I leave these two dicks before I get a fist in my mouth.
Kill All Humans Xmas!
Best husband EVAR!! PS: I’m on Tout now too.
Making the Rounds
Via email, via BobaDoug (thankyew!) comes this ad I think would still be around today if you slap a WalMart logo on the bottom:
Uncharted 3
Not Drake. Not Jason Statham either, but rrrarrr!
Drake is back! Drake is back!! GASP DRAKE IS BACK!!
No not some Toronto rapper, foos, Nathan Drake, from Sony’s potboiler game series Uncharted. We’re at #3 if you’re counting. And if you’re not, this post will be like jibberish to you, postbear.
Lets get right to it, WITHOUT ANY SPOILERS…
Uncharted 3 is tops in the “game as movie” genre. From the beginning we’re treated to establishing scenes of how Drake and his faithful manfriend, Sully playfully interact while kicking ass in a London pub. A cut scene of dialogue and some bar-breaking rough housing, more characters show up and bla bla bla – things happen. Suddenly we’re whipped back 20 years to see the origins of Drake (something U1 and U2 never really touched upon, other than Drake telling us he’s a descendant of Sir Francis Drake) and how he teams up with Sully. This turns out to be some of the most clever writing/game production I’ve seen in a long time. Oh and all that I just described? It’s basically the tutorial for the game, hidden cleverly inside the prologue. Brill!
With Drake’s and Sully’s backstory established we jump back to the present day and continue on with the action. Without ruining anything, the game hits all the points you’d expect in an adventure movie: discovering long lost secrets, hidden cabals, pirates (modern day, vaguely Somalian – very topical) and treasures that may not actually be physically obtained. ooo! And while this is all going on we’re treated to themes of trust, revenge, hubris and even defeat – something hard to do when the purpose of a game isn’t to make the player identify with a character’s will to stop, to end. But yet they manage to create feelings of finality in some scenes – and yet you’re still mashing buttons. And wanting more.
One section of note in the game comes right after a spectacular plane crash in the desert. Juxtaposing action to calm, like we’ve seen in countless desert movies, Drake must make a long, hot journey through miles of desert. You’d think this would be extremely boring for a video game, but the designers manage to interweave dramatic cinematic elements into play. The developers succeed in engaging the player in what could have been a really risky element in an action game, which makes me love the game on so many levels. Since the movie/game genre is still in it’s infancy, the designers are able to use these well-heeled movie cliches to it’s advantage – almost like they were new.
A whole lot of nothing. But it's freaking amazing nothing.
Here’s where I go apeshit over the beauty of the game. I… Its… beautiful. Many times I stopped what I was doing just to spin the camera. I suggest you do that too. The developers Naughty Dog create such stunning environments that you forgive them the 3-4 year wait time between games. Every time I finish an Uncharted game I wonder how they’re going to outdo themselves in the next game, considering the platform hardware stays the same. I keep wondering if Naughty Dog is pushing their games up into the top levels of processing speed. Yes the environments are that impressive.
Everything is punchy, well lit and on fire.
What didn’t I like about U3? The fight mechanics were redundant. Punch punch dodge punch punch – NPC is down! That’s pretty much the extent of close combat dynamics and it gets a bit repetitive at times. The character modeling during the cut scenes felt odd too, in terms of rendering. In some cases the eyes and expressions were spot on but then suddenly you’d get a character who moved their hands like they were wearing mittens, or their mouth looked like Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy. Minor points but I am sure Naughty Dog had to make concessions on some things to cram all that atmospheric goodness into one game.
Speaking of cram… I’d be happy if Naughty Dog/Sony left off the Online Gaming/Multiplayer aspects of this game to swap out more story or an extra scene here or there. I’m not an online gaming kind of guy and this part of the game will never be used by me. Considering the game is established as an adventure game, why not make the Multiplayer part be optional, paid DLC?
Okay so to sum it up… Best game I’ve played in a long time.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Overlords
A (airquotes)psychologist(/airquotes) over on Fox News tells us that the iPhone’s Siri will dehumanize us to the point of not caring about human interactions.
No, seriously. He means it. It’s a damn funny read! And then it gets sad when you think he might actually believe the crap coming out of his mouth. I mean horror-hate-fear-techno-blog.
Snip:
To the small extent that we say we “love” Siri or use “her” name or rely on her to get us out of a jam (even if it is just being lost), we cut ourselves free from the interpersonal tethers that bind us, one to another, and which act as insulation against acting toward one another in dehumanizing ways.
Yes, Siri is to blame for us becoming unsociable zombies. Oh hey, my Ford Focus (which I LOVE) just told me to drive away from you, you ambulance chasing quack.
What’s Going On, Indeed
Fake or not, the message and delivery is pretty powerful:
Design By Committee
College of Dental Hygienists, 3pm.
“Alright people! Our ad is due today. We have to create something that says who we are and get more people to visit their dentists! To not be afraid of tooth health. Also enrollment is down and we have to make the public aware that Dental Hygiene is a viable career choice. Or something… We need to get the artwork to the printer by noon today and we’re still no further along on what we’re going to say. So I’ve called in the designer…”
“PLEASE KILL ME!”
“…and we should be able to stand over him while we create this ad. Ideas? Go!”
“I saw The Grunge last night on TV… that chick in it was pretty scary!”
“Good! Next?”
“Yes, ‘scary’ is good – a lot of people equate dental check ups with fear so we should shock the viewer into going to the dentist.”
“But we should be gentle, of course. No punctuation or capital letters in the copy…”
“Except the first word!”
“Okay, you scamp! Good! Next?”
“I heard on the radio this morning “Now with More Ham!” –can we use that?”
“No, but we can say how ignoring your mouth health will KILL YOU! Put: 3rd most chronic illness right below the main image. No other explaining copy around it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense…”
“Shut up, designer fag! Who asked you? Make the words appear!
“…this job is chronic…”
“Great! Next?”
“I like “disorder” – can we use it?”
“Yes! Right under the main copy!”
“What we have now sounds a little weird when you say it in your head…”
“I don’t so think no not all at!”
“Okay, then the main copy is fine. Oh… And we need a “non-equal” symbol in there. That will make us L337.”
“I don’t know what you just said but you’re brilliant! Do it!”
“Okay – happy ending… we need something to bring them back into our arms, from all this horror – words?”
“Pickle!”
“Koala!”
“Victory!”
“NO!! DEFENSE!”
“Winner! Okay designer, show us what you got!”
The Poster Looked Good
SharkBoy and I had an “OMG I DID TOO!” moment the other day.
An old truck drove by us and I commented that it looked like the truck from “Sorcerer”. At the time I said The Sorcerer, but the movie’s name is actually without the The. Anyway, SharkBoy’s eyes light up and he says “I remember that movie!”
Well actually we both don’t remember a single thing about the movie itself but we do remember the movie poster. What kid wouldn’t want to see a movie called Sorcerer with a guy facing off against a truck on a rope bridge? Seriously!
I remember I wanted to see the movie The Hindenburg because as a kid, I was drawn to disaster films and I knew how this particular movie would end, but I wanted to see a spectacular blimp model being torched.
I also wanted to see Chinatown, even though I was too young to get in, but the font they used and the fact that Nicholson’s cigarette smoke curled into Dunaway’s hair was pretty cool. I didn’t care about what the movie was about at all (thankfully I watched it for the first time recently and have a much better appreciation of it, instead of being potentially confused by it as a kid). As an aside, No movie poster would ever be made like Chinatown ever again. Look at that vast expanse of nothing in the bottom left corner. For a designer to show this kind of layout to a movie Exec today would probably give the Exec a heart attack and the designer a pink slip. MUST FILL ALL THING!!
I’m not going to generalize and say that movie posters have lost their charm, there are a lot out there that are interesting and cool but these are usually indie/low budget films that aren’t created with a board room of people standing around judging everything that goes out the door.
The Money Men
I really have to get Steve Job’s bio… quotes keep coming out that make me go…OH! I RELATE!
Like this one, which could totally equate to what’s happening around my office lately:
[Steve Jobs] has a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.”
Daily I have to defend design choices from managers who say “I know this business and I know what’s best… put a damn smiling kangaroo in a cartoon car into our ad!” The weird part is that this is becoming more and more frequent purely because our (and I am sure this is happening to a million companies around the world) are freaking out about sales.
When a manager calls up and asks for the internet on CD (Yes, one did), I want to go work for nobody.