In defense of torture porn

tor' - ture porn - A genre of horror film in which significant portions of the film are devoted to depicting the torture of an individual or individuals, usually in graphic detail.

This is a sub-genre of horror that's come into being over the last five or six years. One of the earliest movies that was categorized as torture porn was Saw. What usually happens in a torture porn flick is someone is captured by the bad guy, and then brutally killed, usually slowly, and with no punches pulled in terms of showing things on screen or showers of blood. After one or two characters are slaughtered, it usually switches to the "hero" character escaping the bad guy after being captured too.

Now here's the thing about torture porn: it's not new. Really, it's not. It's been around for a long time. You can go back to things as early as the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Spit on you Grave, and others that are usually categorized as slasher or suspense flicks and find definite elements of torture porn in them. That's because really, at its core, torture porn is a blend of the slasher flick and the standard abduction suspense flick.

At its heart, torture porn is really all about suspense, and that's where the real guts of its horror elements come from. Of course, while the torture scenes happen, the audience gets a gut sense of "ewwww", but that type of scare is and always has been fleeting. Where the real horror elements of the genre happen are when the hero character starts making his/her escape. Why do these suspense elements work differently than your basic suspense flick? Because we've seen, in detail, exactly what will happen to the main character if he fails to escape from the killer.

That vital difference is what sets the genre apart from the rest of the horror genre. In most suspense flicks, the hero has to escape the villian because the villian will kill him in undefined bad ways, and the mechanics are left to the audience's imagination. Frankly, most people don't bother thinking in detail about what those bad things are, so the sense of danger is fairly non-specific. By showing you that the hero will, for example, be fastened to a table with screws, have their eyelids cut off, then their entrails extracted one by one and shown to them, you feel much more strongly about the hero's escaping.

So how is that any different than slasher flicks, you say? Tone. Most slashers, especially in the later years of the genre's prominence, played things for laughs. The whole thing was about tongue in cheek, formulaic violence. You were never rooting for the characters, you were rooting for the killers, and cheering as they took out the victims in more and more ridiculous ways. Moreover, few of the kills were given a lot of screen time. Yes, Jason just impaled a couple with a harpoon, but the whole thing happened in less than 30 seconds. Your average torture porn killer is utterly unsympathetic, and the killings can take many minutes. These kills are not intended to be funny, and because of that, you automatically sympathize with the victims.

Another vital difference is that it's way more common for torture porns to have bleak endings. Slasher flicks almost always have the last girl emerge victorious (or at least not dead). In tortuer porn flicks, the "hero" has at best a 50/50 chance. Because of that, you can't ever really relax into "well, I know she's going to live".

The problem that the torture sub-genre has is that it's very difficult to make a good one. It's extremely easy to fall off into just showing tons of blood and violence, and ignoring the vital elements of suspense. A perfect example of this is Hostel 2. The first Hostel was a shining example of how the genre can be extremely effective. In the second, the director opted to keep piling more and more bodies up on the screen, and worse, actually tried to make the killers sympathietic. Unfortunately, he lost sight of what made his first film so good, and wound up making absolute dreck.

So what are some examples of good torture porn? The first Hostel is an excellent example, as is the first Saw. The subsequent movies in the series have actually done an admirable job of not sucking, though they're getting too bogged down in their own mythology to really qualify for this list. The first Texas Chainsaw Massacre fits here, though it's almost completely bloodless. Some of the best examples of the genre actually come from France, with High Tension and Inside being amazing.

Now, this genre is absolutely not for everyone. They're incredibly graphically violent, and the good ones have an intensity that simply doesn't let up for the entire movie, which is what makes them so good. You don't so much watch these things as you experience and survive them. You really have to get past the ultra-violence to appreciate them as something other than gore for gore's sake. Even for horror film fans, these things can easily get written off as pure gore. But if you've got the stomach for them, and are willing to stop and consider what the film's actually doing, the genre has a surprising amount of depth. If anyone's interested in a screening, let me know.

Coming soon to Rock Band: your band

This falls completely into the category of shameless self-promotion that you probably won't care about (though Jay may find it interesting), but here it is anyway:

Harmonix announces Rock Band Network

For those who don't want to read the article, here's the gist. We're releasing our song authoring tools to the general public so you can author your band's songs for Rock Band. You need to have the rights to the songs, so what you won't be seeing is five hundred versions of Stairway to Heaven. But basically, you'll use the full set of authoring tools that our audio department uses to make tracks for the game, author the song on the computer (using your master recordings), and then upload them to the community for peer review. If your song doesn't break copyright, and passes muster for playability and content (swears are bad, kids), then it gets uploaded to Xbox Live, and you can set a price for the song. Anyone with Rock Band can buy it, and you get 30% of all the sales.

Why is this awesome? Because it allows a ton of small, unsigned, indie, etc bands access to the platform. They can take it upon themselves to use it as a marketing tool, or just use it to get a bunch of free exposure to a huge audience.

Basically, it's a really cool opportunity for a lot of smaller artists to get involved and get their music out into the world. And it's way better than MySpace.

Babylon 5: WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME?!

Did you know that I watch TV shows? Holy hell, it's true! Did you also know that I'm a giant geek? No, the full-size replica of Sting (the sword, not the singer/actor/addonis) hanging on my wall isn't for home defense. So it follows that I probably like sci-fi (not SyFy, as certain networks have been forced to call it) shows.

Why then has nobody told me before now how incredibly awesome Babylon 5 is?

What TV does far, far better than movies is long form narrative. If you have a two hour movie, you can only tell so much story. Even if you have three three-hour films, you're still limited in scope. However, if you have multiple 13 or 22 hour-long episode seasons, you can tell a crap ton of story. I like story, so I like TV that tells long stories.

Of course, most shows don't. If you sit down in front of an hour of Law and Order from season 8, then watch and episode from season 3, it probably won't matter. They'll probably also be the same episode. Good TV will tell a story over the course of the season. Things change in meaningful ways between the first and last episodes.

Great TV tells stories that have implications across multiple seasons, but not always in the same way. Think of a story as an arch. Most TV (think Law and Order) has an arch that stretches over a single episode. That's fine, but those kinds of shows are like popcorn, and ultimately, they're forgettable. Even excellent shows like The Simpsons do this.

Shows that tell a season-long story still have the short, episode arches, but each of those small arches also goes into a bigger, season-long arch. Buffy and 24 are examples of this. You really can't watch those shows out of order, or you start to miss things.

Which brings us to Babylon 5. This show was on for 5 seasons. One guy wrote them. The amazing part? He knew how the series was going to end before he wrote the first episode.

Think about that. This guy must have had a massive pair of brass balls. I can't imagine walking into a network exec's office and saying "I have an idea for a sci-fi show that's not Star Trek that will last for five seasons, and tell one complete story in that time." It would never happen in today's landscape. It's a minor miracle that it happened back in 1994. But someone gave him a tiny budget and Bruce Boxlietner, and let him have at.

It's brilliant. This show is essentially one large story arch that extends from season 1 to season 5. At first blush, a lot of episodes in the first season come across as one-offs that don't tie in. Then, two seasons later, something that happened in the first season suddenly turns out to be a pivotal moment. Because he planned everything out, he's able to do actual, honest to God foreshadowing in ways that are just never seen in TV. It's like reading a well-constructed novel over the course of five years.

Of course, it's not perfect. The show was done in 1994 on a budget of $5 and baling twine (they couldn't afford shoe strings). The acting is sometimes iffy (though often brilliant), and the special effect are...well...quaint. But once you get past all that, it's one of the best TV shows I've ever seen. Just thought you should know.

Apocalypse groceries

I'm a big fan of post-apocalypse fiction. For some reason, seeing what happens after the world ends is really interesting to me. I've read books and comics, and watched movies dealing with the end of the world by way of:

-zombies

-aliens

-earthquake

-flood

-asteroid

-vampires

-meteor

-blindness

-fog/monsters

-nuclear war

In most of them, the survivors wind up scavenging food from the remnants of human society, usually in the form of canned goods. Seems that produce and freeze pops don't keep well.

It occurred to me this morning, that not a single one of the apocalypse scenarios I've ever seen has had its characters resort to eating one particular item: pet food.

Now, given how many pets there are out there, and how much of their food is canned, there should be tons of the stuff hanging around. It's mostly meat, so should be very edible. Furthermore, it's not generally seen as "people food", so it would be one of the last items scavenged, and thus one of the more likely items for scavengers to find. Even better, being reduced to eating dog food would be a great illustration of how desperate the characters are.

Yet, I can't think of a single time that I've seen a character scarf down a can of Fancy Feast or Alpo. Very weird, and something that's lacking in apocalypse fiction.

Of course, you also never see anyone find any Twinkies, which would obviously survive the apocalypse. Maybe the whole genre is just screwy.

From flying to first downs

For the first time this year, I'm giving up on a game. That's sad, but I'm kind of glad that it's taken me six months to have that happen.

The casualty is Prototype. On the surface, karate kicking helicopters is awesome, as is elbow dropping tanks. But after around 10 hours, which is about halfway through, I realized that I spent most of the previous five hours of playing being very frustrated. I think that right now, I want something a little slower paced than Prototype's balls-to-the-wall karate kicking choppers and hacking dudes in half. Hopefully I'll be coming back to it in a few months.

What's usurping it? Blood Bowl. What is Blood Bowl? It's what geeks play instead of Madden.

The short version is that Blood Bowl is what you get if you take a really violent fantasy universe and have them play football. If the old Genesis game Mutant League Football rings a bell, well, that was a ripoff of Blood Bowl. It's very similar to football, except that there's no downs, killing players is a valid strategy, and having the play by play announcer say something like "The goblin looney Grimnak just pulled out his chainsaw, and is chasing the elf across the field and...OH! The crowd just threw a huge rock at Grimnak, knocking him unconscious! Now the rest of the fans are charging the field! They're going to have some trouble with that tree man!"

Of course, the whole thing plays out in turn-based format, because the video game is a faithful translation of the original board game. The real meat of it is playing in leagues, where your players can earn extra skills (or in the case of some teams, extra heads and limbs), injuries can knock players out for several games, and the road to the playoffs is paved with the bodies of your opponents.

So basically, it's just like rugby.

Ten down

Last night, I finished my tenth game of the year. That's probably some kind of record for me. I'm not sure what kind, but it's got to be some kind.

Amazingly, the game I finished last night, Uncharted, was done in two days. Total playtime was 7 hours, 51 minutes. That's probably one of the shortest games I've played, and absolutely the shortest game of the year for me. Contrast that with Persona 3 that clocked in at 103 hours. Fun fact: Persona 3 cost $30 brand new. Uncharted cost $30 used, and that was a good price, and sold for $60 new. Wut?

Of course, the catch is that I played the game on Easy difficulty.

I know, I wussed out. Instead of manning up, setting it to Normal or Hard, I decided that replaying all of the many, many combat sections over and over and over again in order to prove that I'm tough, I decided to save myself the frustration and set it to a reasonable level. Yeah, that means I probably finished the game faster than I would have, but if the extra two hours it might have taken would have involved having extra holes punched in my lungs, I can live without that.

So my gaming life has gone from demolishing buildings on Mars (awesome) to killing non-white people in the jungle (not so awesome), and now I think I'm going to play Prototype. This game casts you as a guy who has been infected with a mutagenic virus that's running rampant through Manhattan, turning everyone into monsters. Many games would task you with saving the city. Prototype says "well, they're all fucked anyway, so go get revenge!"

Literally everyone and everything that's not you is expendable. Bystanders can be slaughtered in huge numbers if you want. They can also be picked up and consumed to regain health. Basically, they're amulatory, screaming health packs. An indication of the mindset of the game: once you pick someone up, there is no option to set them back down. Your only option is to consume them or throw them 100 feet. You cannot play a good person in this game.

New tattoo!

So I've been wanting a new tattoo for a while now. Really, ever since I got my first one. But I've been holding off getting the next one because I haven't known what to get. Well, I figured it out.

When I thought about it, it was obvious, really. I've been a Pats fan for a long time, and I don't see that changing, no matter where I end up living. So I started thinking that the Pats logo would be a good choice. However, I didn't want to simply follow the crowd and get the current swooshy, Nike-looking logo. I wanted something classic, timeless.

So I decided to get the old school, football-snapping Pats logo. It says "Pats" without saying "I've only like the Pats when they're winning." So over the weekend, I went down to the guy I know at Regeneration, and told him what I wanted. A few hours later, I've now got my new tattoo.

I'm really happy with the way that it turned out. It looks exactly like I pictured it in my head. I can't wait to show you guys! Here's a preview from this morning. I'm wicked psyched about how well it's healing up.

Wide open spaces

It's been far too long since I've written one of these.  Fortunately, things have been slowing down at work, so here I am.  Hooray.

Lately (as in the last few weeks), there have been a bunch of open world games released.  An open world game, as defined by Chucker's Dictionary, is a game where instead of levels, the player is plopped into the middle of a big city/planet/galaxy/Sea Monkey farm, and allowed to do whatever they want.  Usually a number of different missions are available, but those can be undertaken in any order, at any time, and usually allow the player a lot of options in how to do them.  The poster child for open world games is called Grand Theft Auto.  Perhaps you've heard of it?

Now, not all open world games involve hooker killing.  In fact, none of the games I referred to earlier have any hookers at all, yet they don't suck (see what I did there?).  In fact, they all wind up being very different games. 

The first is Fuel.  This is an offroad racing game, and takes place on a map that is literally the size of Connecticut, weighing in a 5,000 square miles.  The map is crisscrossed with roads and trails, and covered with races and new vehicles and paint jobs to find and collect.  One of the downsides of most open world games is that while you explore them, you're usually being attacked periodically.  Fuel does away with this, letting you just wander around if you want, or go run a race while avoiding a tornado.  It's a good feeling.

The second one is Prototype.  This takes place in Manhattan.  The gist is that you wake up with no memory, but with the new ability to leap 30 feet, run up buildings, transform your arms into Wolverine claws from hell, and consume other beings.  This is all due to an experimental mutagen virus that was being tested out on you.  As these kinds of things are wont to do, things go wrong, and while you set out to find out who did what to you, and kill them, the virus starts spreading in Manhattan.  As you progress, you gain new abilities, like being able to glide like a flying squirrel or transform your hands into giant hammers, which allows you to elbow drop tanks.

Let me restate: YOU CAN ELBOW DROP TANKS.  Obviously, this is the best thing ever.  You can also do all manner of other incredibly violent things like charge down the road, do a flip over a cab, grabbing it on the way over, and throwing it at a helicopter before you land, but really why would you do anything besides the elbow dropping tank thing?

The third game is called Red Faction Guerilla.  In this one, you arrive on a terraformed Mars, and are greeted by your brother, who turns out to be working for the Red Faction, an insurgent group fighting against the Earth Defense Force, the military organization that came in to liberate Mars from the oppressive Ultor corporation, and who are now violently repressing the people in the name of social order.  Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with the current situation in Iraq.  NOTHING!

Thinly-veiled political commentary aside, the game's hook is that every building can be destroyed.   The game starts you out with a sledge hammer in one hand and a fistful of remotely detonated sticky bombs in the other.  Virtually every mission can, if you're creative enough, be accomplished by destroying a building.  Need to take out a building? Make the smokestack next to it collapse onto it.  Or maybe you'd prefer to simply drive a mining truck through it.  Or plant a bunch of bombs on said truck, park it next to the building, then blow up the bombs.  Need to eliminate some snipers? You could plant a bomb under their position on the ceiling of the floor below them.  You could also knock a hole in the ceiling above them and fall on their head.  Or just plant a singularity bomb, sucking the building and all of its contents into a single point before exploding it back out.

There's also a multiplayer mode where everyone has to cause as much destruction as possible with limited time or ammo, highest score wins.  There's also Aliens-style walking loader things.  Awesome.  We will be playing this at the next movie night.

So after many months of role playing games, I feel the time for conversation, leveling, and careful battle strategy is over.  If I can't run it over, slash it in half, or blow it up, I don't care.  At least for the time being.

Quick self-promotion

Still not much time at work for blogging.  In case you want to see what the hell's been keeping me so busy, check out www.thebeatlesrockband.com.  The front page has a sweet trailer of gameplay footage, and the even sweeter (and incredibly trippy) intro video.  In case the style looks familiar, that'd be because the director of the video is the same guy who did the videos for Gorillaz.

Woo!

Do you like 30 Rock?

This guy does too!

Okay, aside from the inherent strangeness (and that he looks a bit like Crypt Keeper), just some befuddled guy on the internet, right?  Well, now check out this one, and you start to realize that maybe he's not quite right, like he should be wandering around Central Square and laughing at the pavement. 

Now watch this one, and you start to think that this is the kind of guy who your parents warned you not to take candy from.  Picture him driving down the road in his van, doing this routine out the window.

Turns out you'd be right.

Now try and watch 30 Rock without picturing this guy in your head.  I sure as hell can't.

I love technology

These are amazing.  The dude uses the magic Auto-Tune voice altering software (think Cher in Believe) to make news caster types sing.  The first one gives you the idea, and then the second one brings it home.  Watch out for the amazing duet with Katie Couric toward the end of the second clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bduQaCRkgg4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBb4cjjj1gI

Playing with yourself

Lately, I've been playing through Half Life 2.  In fact, I finished it over the weekend (hooray!).  It was a very good shooter, but sometimes I felt like I was forcing myself to play through it.  I recognized that it was a good game, and I was enjoying it mostly, but some parts were just dragging.  I figured out that I was mainly playing to get to the next story segment.

So here's what happens in the game, and really, in most shooters: you get a story segment explaining why you need to go through this level killing everything.  Then you leave the dudes who you were just talking to behind, and go through the level killing everything until you get to the other end, where some more dudes meet you and point you to the next batch of things to kill.  Some games give you and AI buddy or buddies.  These buddies fall into two categories: cannon fodder that gets killed 10 seconds into the level, or a story-relevant character who follows you, sometimes assisting, and yelling at the enemy.

I've long since accepted that I really need storylines in my games.  I can enjoy the gameplay, but I need a story to give me a reason to keep going when the game gets hard.  Because of that shooters can be tricky because of the formula mentioned above.  Generally, once you get into a level, the story stops.  It's kind of like a Broadway show, where the story gets put on hold for a musical number, except shooters replace jazz hands with flying lead.

So what the hell does this have to do with Half Life 2? Last night I started playing the follow up, HL2: Episode 1.  At least in the early going, you're accompanied by Alyx, a character that you ran into occasionally in HL2.  What sets her apart from other AI buddies, besides the normal-sized, fully covered chest, is that she f-ing interacts with you.  She comments on what's going on, asks how the hell you're going to get past this barrier, and generally behaves like a person.  What winds up happening is that this interaction gives me the human element that I miss during the majority of shooter levels.  While the story itself may not be advancing per se, at least I get someone to talk to.

I think it's the same thing that leads to so many buddy comedies in movies.  If you were just watching Tom Hanks trying to solve a case by himself, it'd be boring.  Give him a slobbering dog to interact with, and it's awesome! Hell, even Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball on a desert island managed to be entertaining for a while (though I could've done without the dentistry scene).  Either Tom Hanks is simply enchanting to watch (possible), or movies/games are simply better when there's some kind of interaction going on.

For a perfect example of this, play Left 4 Dead in a room by yourself.  To take this a step further, kill your AI buddies and don't rescue them.  Now play it with four other live people.  Which experience did you enjoy more? Same game, but I bet you liked the version where there were people.  Proof positive that even something as inherently awesome as shotgunning zombies in the face is improved vastly by adding other people.

For realsies.

We just announced a new project.  Rock Band + Legos = Lego Rock Band.  Oh my.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/04/21/lego-rock-band-real-coming-holiday-2009/

Some highlights from the songs that have been announced: Kung Fu Fighting and The Final Countdown.

Where have I been?

I don't know!

Oh wait, yeah I do.  That whole crunching thing.  Well, that's done with now, at least for this week.  After that, anything goes (and probably will).  It wasn't too bad, but I'm glad it's over.

I did manage to finish off two games during it, with Half Life 2 finally getting finished and Lego Indiana Jones getting played all the way through over this past weekend.  That one actually got finished at 100%.  I think that's the first game in my life that I've gotten to 100% on, in the subset of games that give you a completion percentage, usually because of copious hidden goodies.

I got to thinking about why I felt the desire to finish this particular game to 100%, while I haven't with others.  I think there's a few factors.  First, the way that you find hiddent things is to go back through the stages a second time with abilities you didn't have the first time, giving you access to areas you had seen the first time through, but couldn't get to.  That's a mechanic that plenty of other games, like the Metroid and Zelda series, have used before.  

Where the Lego games differ is that they also tell you explicitly that there are 10 of one type of goody and 1 of another hidden in each level.  Why is that important? Because it gives you explicit goals to fulfill and a set area in which to search.  In other games, like Grand Theft Auto, they might tell you "there are 100 packages hidden in the city", and only award 100% completion for finding all of them.  How is that different? The goal in GTA is far less attainable or trackable. 

Here's an example.  Let's say I told you to find 100 hobos in all of Boston.  You go out and find 90 hobos.  Now there are only 10 left, except that you have to look through every inch of the entire city to find those last 10.  That's a pain in the ass, since those hobos could be anywhere from the Financial District to JP, or anywhere in between.  Contrast this with the Lego game.  In this case, I'd tell you that there are 100 hobos in the city, 10 in Allston (camoflauged to look like BU kids), 10 in JP, 10 on the Common, etc.  If you've found 90, you can look at how many you've found in each area to figure out where you need to look for the last 10.  

In addition to making things easier on you, you get the side benefit of having a series of small victories ("Yay, I found all the hobos on the Common!") as you progress toward the big goal of finding all Boston's hobos.  In GTA, you get the frustration of not knowing where the last 10 hobos are without the breadcrumb victories.  Of course, at the end of the day,  you have to figure out what to do with 100 hobos, and the inevitable questioning of your life's direction that brought you to your current occupation of hobo hunting.  I would suggest a bath, and then starting the reality series "America's Next Top Hobo."

In other news, kt is still buried under schoolwork.  Once she'd un-buried herself, we'll resume our regularly scheduled Sunday movie days.

When a computer is like Jersey

Kt has a Mac (we know, neither of us is happy about it).  In order to do fun things with it, like play games (something that Apple conveniently forgets about as it continually portrays PCs as boring business machines), she boots into Windows.  Two months ago, the DVD drive stopped working.  Last night I worked on fixing it.

As with so many problems in life, solving this o

ne started with checking the device manager.  Windows was reporting a problem with the driver for the DVD drive.  Here's where I made my first mistake: I believed it.  

Of course, the problem with that message is that Windows hasn't needed a driver for a CD/DVD drive since the mid-90s.   Still, because I'm dumb, I started my search for a solution with the driver.  Of course, this was fruitless.

My next step was to apply my ninja-like Google-fu, using the model number of the drive and various combinations of words like "Windows", "Mac", "shitty Mac", "not working", "not recognized", "broken", "busted", and "busted-ass".  I can't remember which of these combinations worked, but I'm pretty sure it was "Mac" and "busted-ass".  It turned out that the solution involved removing two Windows registry keys.

Now, there's a good chance that you may not be terribly familiar with the Windows registry.  This is not surprising.  The registry is like the PC's version of New Jersey.  It sits in the background, and its job is to act as a holding area for all the nitty-gritty files that New York (Windows) needs in order to do all the awesome and fun things that it does.  You know that it's there, but really it's not someplace you want to go unless something has gone terribly wrong in your life.

When you actually go into the registry (or New Jersey), you'll find that it's filled to the brim with strange files and other things, all nested within byzantine family/file structures, and they're all very hard to understand.  Thus, getting anything useful done in the registry/Jersey is very difficult.  There's the added side benefit that if you do something wrong while in the registry/Jersey, very bad things will happen, like your computer suddenly no longer working/you get whacked.

Here's an example of a registry entry that you might find while visiting: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Settings.  Imagine a few thousand of these, all with the power to make your computer explode.  Hell, give that entry some big hair and a few Jaeger shots, and it'll be slurring Bon Jovi at the top of its lungs for the rest of the night.  Basically, you want to go into the registry very infrequently, do what you need to do quickly and carefully, and then return to the relative safety of Windows/New York, so that you can get back to your regular routine of killing zombies/walking fast and being fashionably disaffected.

So after discovering this solution, I made the changes, and then went to reboot Windows so that they would take effect.  Then I realized that I didn't know how the hell to convince the Mac to boot into Windows.  

When you set up a PC to dual-boot operating systems, perhaps because you're a rebel and want to have the option to run Linux so that you can feel like you're fighting the evil MS empire, but still want to be able to, you know, use your computer for things without resorting to black magic, the computer very nicely asks you which OS you'd like to use when you turn it on, assuming that since you went to the trouble of installing two OSes, you might want to use both.

In Mac-land, as I found out, you have to hold down the Option key (that's the Alt key for those of us with real keyboards) while it boots in order to get the option to choose your OS.  Apple assumes that installing Windows must have been some accident on your part, or maybe some drunken dare that went horribly wrong.  Either way, it does what it can to protect you from yourself by making the option to use the non-Apple OS a hidden and obscure process, while simultaneously making it simple enough to do with one finger so they can say "Oh, all you have to do is thing x.  See, easy!"  

Once I figured that step out, all was well, and the DVD drive was once again working, which means that kt can return to playing Sims 2, and is all set for when Sims 3 comes out.  I also thought I'd share this, which I love:

It are done

Finshed! Friday night, I got through the finale of Persona 3.  The final fight was stupidly easy, entirely due to me putting in way too many hours making my characters absolutely, completely, hideously overpowered.  Some people would say that the final fight should always be challenging.  I disagree.  If I spend the extra time improving my character beyond what's strictly necessary, I should be rewarded, and that reward should come in the form of being able to crush supreme evil beneath my bootheel like an emo-haired god.

Final tally on the game was 103 hours.  That brings me up to three games finished this year, with a total of approximately 163 hours played.  For those of you playing at home, that apparently averages out to 13.5 hours a week.  That's some scary shit.  

Of course, the gods of fate decided not to smile on me last night.  I was cleansing my palatte by playing a dopey (but pretty good) casual game.  I was about 2/3 through, with maybe three hours invested, when I ran into a crash bug that makes it impossible to continue.  It's a known issue and there's a fix, but it looks like I'll have to restart.  I like the game, but I'm not convinced I want to replay the whole thing just to work around their bug.  I do enough of that crap at work.

Speaking of, today's our first day of crunch on the Beatles game.  That means working 10am-9pm Monday through Thursday, and 10am-6pm Friday and Saturday.  This goes on for three weeks, then we have a week of regular schedule, then supposedly we're done.  Of course, crunch schedules are fluid things, so I'm pretty much planning on crunching until mid-June, and if we're done sooner, awesome.  So if you don't see much of me, or if movie days become slightly scarcer, that's why.  Pray for Mojo.

I feel like I'm in college again

Last night I stayed up until 3:30am playing a game.  I did this because I'm stupid.  I got up four hours later.  Now I'm at work, and I can't believe I have another three hours to go.  I'm doing that whole light headed, nothing makes a lot of sense thing.

Still, in college, I wrote some of my best papers when I was pulling all-nighters, and those felt a lot like this.  My most epic one was a paper I wrote on Seven Samurai.  I needed to re-watch the movie and take notes (as I do just before writing all my film papers), but I had to work until nine the night before it was due.  I got home at 9:30, took a half hour to unwind, and put the movie on at 10:00.  Of course, it's Kurosawa, so I didn't finish it until 2am.  the paper was a minimum of eight pages, and was due in eight hours.  Got that sucker done (I think it weighed in at 12 pages, because I'm stupid), and got an A.  Reading through it after, I had no recollection of writing the last five pages, but whoever did it was an excellent writer.

So now I'm on four cups of coffee, about to go get my fifth, and remembering that I'm now old, and shouldn't do that kind of thing.  So sad.

Huh

So tomorrow, someone famous is coming into the office to see where the magic happens.  We've all been placed under strict instructions to "be cool".

I'm not sure what to make of the whole thing.  It's a strange job that I have.

I'm surrounded by assholes

I ride the bus to work.  I'm amazed on a daily basis at how completely oblivious people are.  If the seats fill up, people have to stand.  It's like there's a force field halfway down the aisle that people won't cross.  Almost every day, I see people stop at that point, and not move.  The entire back half of the aisle will be empty, and the people at the front will be falling out the door, and that jackass in the middle will not go to the end.  Sometimes, they'll even look around, assessing the situation, and then decide that they're in a good spot, and not move anyway.  Sometimes they'll move two steps down and stop again, satisfied that they've done their part to improve the world.

I swear to god, if I had a cattle prod, it would be used judiciously on these jackasses.

Networking still sucks

The other night, I was doing some mild mucking about in my PC case.  Somehow, even though it wasn't involved in the mucking, my network card decided to start acting strange.  I can sort of connect to our network, but the connection would be beat in a race by an anemic 56k connection.

Of course, this isn't so bad.  It's not like I use the internet for anything on my...oh fuck, I use the internet for everything!

Needless to say, there has been a great gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and rubbing of dirt into my hair.  Of course, troubleshooting network problems is only slightly easier than diagnosing chronic stomach pain in an angry horse.  There are no pleasant experiences when trying to figure out why something isn't working.

I have some help from the internet people, and some things I'm going to try when I get home.  If that doesn't work, I've got a 30' network cable coming tomorrow, and I'm just going to say screw it to these invisible magic waves that bring the interweb to my computer box, and go with the reliable old cable that just works, and can also be used to hang myself with when I'm unsuccessful at troubleshooting other network problems.