April 2002 Archives

Today's discussion topic: the Scooby Doo movie. My contextual additions are italicized in gray.

Joe: Did a search at Target.com.
Joe: "The search didn't find the "resident evil" you were looking for. Try another search using the hints below."
Joe: Thought that sounded funny.
Matt: That is funny.
Matt: I saw that copy was still going this morning. Hope shines brightly. I'm downloading a huge file from Matt's Mac. This is the third time we've tried it.
Joe: Yeah. 2 hours to go when I left for work.
Matt: Stupid crappy upload DSL speed.
Joe: Gandalf: "Perhaps Matt's server was meant to stay up. Perhaps Joe was meant to download the file. And that is an encouraging thought."
Matt: Hah!
Matt: Good tie-in.
Joe: Help.
Matt: ?
Joe: I saw the new Scooby Doo movie commercial last night, and I thought it looked good.
Matt: Oh dear. Where to start.
Matt: Choice phrases you used on me last night spring to mind. Last night, I declared Matt has an "affection for crap," as evidenced by the horrible sfx movies he insists on seeing... The Mummy, Wing Commander, The Matrix, AI.
Joe: It just looked well done. This was the first I had seen actual characters in action, talking.
Joe: My question is: is this a stupid Brady Bunch deal, where the Scooby characters exist in a modern world, or is the whole thing in a Scooby Dooed world?
Joe: I hope for the latter.
Joe: Because I don't want 90 minutes of the town "normals" constantly rolling their eyes and comedically *not getting* the Scooby kids.
Matt: It's gotta be a Scooby world.
Joe: Unknown.
Joe: I'm sure it will suck.
Joe: But that one guy looks to be nailing Shaggy.
Matt: Ack.
Joe: I was totally convinced. In the <30 seconds I actually saw.
Matt: I'm going to look at the trailer to see what you're smoking.
Joe: This was a regular commercial. I think the trailer is a lame Batman riff.
Joe: Oh shit. I went to Apple's trailer page and ended up watching the trailer for Country Bears instead.
Joe: Man, from what sad Disney exec memo did that monstrosity originate.
Matt: COUNTRY BEARS???
Joe: A concept with potential, taken from the Disney park attraction. Turned into a Very Special episode of Power Rangers. And the trailer nicely presents the entire film, from setup to conclusion.
Joe: I'm especially upset that the movie has nothing to do with the characters from the actual Disney robot show.
Joe: It's like they're making the movie specifically as an eventual "World Television Premiere, Sunday at 7 on ABC."
Matt: I think my brain just exploded.
Joe: Did you find a Scooby spot yet? Apple has the annoying Batman one.
Matt: I'm not looking. I'm writing scripts. Matt is actually attempting to work at work. Sap!
Matt: I did watch the Country Bears trailer to my dismay.
Joe: Yes. I am similarly distraught.
Joe: Scooby Doo appears to contain all sorts of modernized comedy... like gags making Velma out to be a lesbian.
Joe: I'm off it now. Never a good idea to make fun of the original material.
Joe: Remember all those early-internet lists of "Things We Didn't Realize When We Watched Scooby Doo As Kids"? The movie must be based on that list.
Matt: I'm a bit alarmed you're spending this much thought on the whole thing.
Joe: I'm an active consumer.
Joe: Keeping myself informed. I'd like to avoid seeing any bigscreen adaptations of the oh-so-funny "Shaggy's on pot!" joke.

A few months ago, I was innocently finding ways to kill time at work when I get a message from some lady who works for the PA State Attorney General. Seems she wants to see if our business website would be willing to have a "hotlink" to the Atty General's PA health care site. What do I care?, I think. It will take me about 2 minutes to code in a link. So I call her back and get told that they are still in discussions on the matter and she'll get back to me. Weeks pass, but she does indeed call again, this time prepared with some crazy URL and a few graphics. So up goes the link. To her, this was a huge deal. Probably meant she completed X tasks from her Inbox and achieved some kind of bureaucratic coup that rubber-stamped "OK" on a dozen official state documents. To me, it was another boring piece of monkey work that burned me 2 more minutes towards going the fuck home. It's all a matter of scale.

Kinda like how the Catholic church is glossing over priests who enjoy diddling choir members. Boy, I'm super proud that the Pope came right out and said pedophilia is wrong. What an amazingly honest and refreshing stance! How brave! I've read all the news reports, and - despite the Pope's assertions - there is still no policy on what to do with sexual predators in positions of authority.

To the Catholic church, protecting the Old Boys Club is more important than protecting the little boys. Once you get past all the crap about eternal salvation, the church is a business like any other. A fraternal business, at that. And they want to protect their own. That's why our good ol' American priests traveled to the Vatican with the hope that the Pope would come up with a creative, multilingual way to squirrel sickos back into their jobs. That's why we've spent decades shifting offenders from one region to another, hiding them in plain sight instead of locking them up in freak prison.

What's this shit about being lenient on the priests who "only did it once"? How does that make a difference? First of all, unless you get notarized statements from every single child he ever had contact with, how do you know it was only once? What, you're going to trust his word? The word of a goddamn child molester?

But more importantly, once is more than enough.

FOX has cancelled Ally McBeal, which is one of the few shows I bother to watch. My wife is going to miss it much more than I will; I usually watched it as kind of a low-impact Twin Peaks (a show I enjoyed mostly for the shockingly goofy moments set against the dark supernatural backdrop.)

I don't know if tv just sucks or I'm just outgrowing it. The one thing that is really starting to grind me is the easy assumption that Television Will Be Tonight's Entertainment. It's like a giant excuse to kill time before passing out for the night, and I'd much rather be doing something else. Fuck, I'm not talking about going skydiving instead, I just don't want to feel like I'm wasting time watching tv simply because there's nothing else worth doing.

I also severely hate being told when tv is going to entertain me. I enjoy ER, but I hate knowing that I have to be on the couch Thursdays at 10:00pm to see it. Again, it's like tv is getting in the way of the rest of my life. I'd say that I'm ready for Tivo, but Tivo is functionally just a VCR, and I despise using the VCR. Taping shows makes me feel like I'm renting something rather than owning it... it always has a second-hand feel to me. Not to mention the terrible quality of VHS tape. Yeah, Tivo would fix the quality, but then I have to commit myself to downloading television shows, which just sounds too pathetic to be worth doing. Perhaps I'm unsatisfiable.

Eh. Goodbye Ally, it was fun. Loved Robert Downey Jr. Hated Dame Edna Everage. Loved Ling Woo. Hated the Dancing Baby. Didn't mind the phasing out of the fantasy sequences. Didn't mind Ally Junior. Loved Cage and Fish. Loved New Man in Town Billy. Hated Vonda Sheperd. Really hated Vonda Sheperd doing the PR tour and being pitched as the soul of the show. Vonda, it's back to the nightclub circuit, girl.

If you were to draw a graph of the United States Postal Service's stamp rate increase over the last few years, it would greatly resemble that old Encyclopedia Brown story where Encyclopedia Brown takes a bet about throwing a basketball 10 feet and having it turn around and come directly back to him, without bouncing or having anyone throw it back, and he wins the bet by throwing the ball straight up into the air. That Encyclopedia Brown was one smart motherfucker.

This June, we get another stamp increase... up to 37 cents. If you check their website, the USPS lays the blame at "increases in costs for fuel and health benefits." I suspect they're just doing it so anthrax mailers now have to shell out 37 cents to kill various American pigdogs. If we could find out the average price point of X grams of anthrax, maybe the USPS could eventually make it wholly unprofitable to poison senators, abortion clinics, and gay/lesbian activists.

Somehow along my life's route, I got on the USA Philatelic mailing list. Actually, I know exactly how it happened: I ordered a set of those Celebrate the Century stamps, which totally pissed me off because you only get one of each design, and they're so goddamn collectible that you hate to use them. But collectible stamps are positioned to be the savior of the Postal Service. (Aha! You thought I was digressing!) The USA Philatelic catalog takes great pains to enforce your enthusiasm (of which I possess exactly none) with commerative frames, books, posters, and first day heirlooms. My personal favorites are the stamps with hidden images, which are so cloyingly collectible they should come with an apology. The postal service is banking on the insane collector to keep the ship afloat.

Eventually, you're just not going to use paper mail anymore. Are you going to send out 30 Christmas cards when it costs 50 cents apiece to mail them? Maybe we should let third parties come in to break the USPS's monopoly. Sure, it might take three times as long for your letter to get there... but it'd only cost you a nickel. Plus, there'd be great fistfights when all these cutrate carriers try to park their little electric cars outside your mailbox at the same time.

A pair of gaming industry articles surfaced recently... Naturally concerned with Important Ethical Issues facing the gamer population. Aren't they all?

Gamers' Perks, or 'Playola'? (thanks Penny Arcade): The gist here is that game reviewers get crazyass free trips and prizes from game companies. (As you well know if you've been watching those terrible movie segments on the monthly PS2 demo disk.) Yes, they do. It's common practice for any promoter to give away free stuff to reviewers/buyers. It's why I have a Jerry Springer keychain and a Jamie Foxx Show baseball cap.

The only bit that sucks is that the extravagance and the expense far outweighs the rewards. What exactly is Sega going to get out of paying $100,000 to send some monkey boy up in an F-14? Or sending several monkey boys? Hopefully a cover feature, but they probably just get a 4 star review instead of a 3 star review. "Review" being one paragraph in the ass end of the magazine. Generally, the reviews I read are very quick to point out what sucks in a game, and I innately believe that the respectable publications (primarily the EGM family) don't let Barnum's ballyhoo trump up a lousy game.

As for the less respectable press, well, only twelve year olds pay attention to them anyway. Who decided that website journalists have any kind of reach? Who is this "Tom Ham," whom the article describes as "one of several dozen opinion makers in the $20-billion global games industry"? Sorry LA Times; never heard of him. That's like saying Harry Fatass Knowles is one of several dozen influential Hollywood magnates.

Death of a Game Addict (thanks again Penny Arcade): This one is a hoot. Some idiot blew his head off right after playing EverQuest. Honestly, that'd be my response too.

We should all be thankful that this moron was satisfied with merely offing himself, and not one of those extroverted killers. A world with one less EverQuest player is a better place. Some great excerpts:

"She has a list of names her son scrawled while playing the game: "Phargun," "Occuler," "Cybernine." But Woolley is sure if they are names of online friends, places he explored in the game or treasures his character may have captured in quests." (I guess "Cybernine" isn't cooperating with investigating authorities.)

"Shawn was playing 12 hours a day, and he wasn't supposed to because he was epileptic, and the game would cause seizures," she said. "Probably the last eight times he had seizures were because of stints on the computer." (Uninvolved parenting. Nice work, Mom.)

"Woolley knows her son had problems beyond EverQuest, and she tried to get him help by contacting a mental health program and trying to get him to live in a group home." (But that pesky guilty feeling isn't going to stop Mom suing Sony.)

"The social component is big because it gives players a false sense of relationships and identity," Parker said. "They say they have friends, but they don't know their names." (This one takes me right back to my MUSHing days. It was true then and it's truer now, since games like EverQuest have so much play in them that you can skip all the boring MU-style conversation time.)

"Elizabeth Woolley remembers when her son was betrayed by an EverQuest associate he had been adventuring with for six months. Shawn's online brother-in-arms stole all the money from his character and refused to give it back. "He was so upset, he was in tears," she said. "He was so depressed, and I was trying to say 'Shawn, it's only a game.' I said he couldn't trust those people." (Geez, if you can't trust polygonal virtual anonymous avatars named (KL)PornKilla7401, who can you trust?)

Mom was obviously very familiar with what was going on with her stupid, lonely kid. What he needed was forced therapy then, not painful guilt-ridden lawsuits now.

I bought an 5 gig iPod, Apple's answer the the MP3 revolution, a few months ago. Overall I'm quite happy with it. It syncs superfast with iTunes the second you plug it in. It doubles as an external hard drive. It's tiny. It sounds great. It has a "Cool Factor" of about 100. Why then does Apple insist on messing with consumer confidence by releasing poor "updates" for it? The newest firmware, 1.1, now doesn't let me play ANY tunes when I unless I reboot the iPod every time I turn it on! Guh? Quality Assurance at Apple seems to have taken a turn for the worse over the last few years. And getting updates out the door on time seems to be problematic as well. My month-old-near-top-o-the-line Dual 800 G4's Superdrive could sure use an firmware update (that the PC world has enjoyed for more than 6 months.)
Rock on, Apple. I love you.

I hate you.

I was successful in ignoring the first wave of Rumble Robots, but this "Invasion" set I had to get. Armies of RC robots who battle with infrared beams? Excellent.

Naturally, you've got to be skeptical. Any RC toy under $100 has to be of questionable quality. Plus, the Invasion robots claim to let you control multiple robots with the same controllers... and there's this whole weird bar code scanning element. This could be very very bad.

But it's not as lousy as it could be (although I haven't tested out the multi-bot angle yet.) The RC is fine, within a limited range. The robots themselves are pretty cool looking... but - as the packaging is free in pointing out - they could certainly look cooler if you buy additional plastic weapon and armor kits.

In preparation for buying my Rumble Robots (King El Smasho and King Slugnut, if you must know), I did some half-assed web research. Take it from me: Don't let anybody tell you that there's a Collectible Card Game attached to Rumble Robots. Although they sell extra bar code cards in starter boxes and booster packs (just like Pokemon, so Grandma will be easily fooled.)... don't fall for it. There's not even rules for any kind of game included in the "starter" box. They're purely a tool for increasing your robot's abilities. This is both interesting and aggravating. On one hand, you get to define your robot's attributes before each battle by selecting specific cards - fairly strategic, I suppose. On Hand Number Two, once you have all the high level cards, your robot's powers are so inflated that any opponent who didn't buy a lot of cards might as well put his RR on the top shelf with the Tamagotchis. And it doesn't help that card-swiping can get frustrating if you don't get the technique down. Kids, make Daddy do your scanning. (Aside: these cards are going to get beat up from all the scanning and re-scanning, so I'd suggest sleeving them.)

One way to clean this fault up is to agree to a numerical limit before scanning. You can only scan three power cards (of values 1 to 5), so limiting the total points to 10 or 12 makes it fair. Alternately, I worked out a quick drafting card game that deals out cards randomly, which is nice for an even distribution of the special cards (Superpowers and Repair cards.)

An incredible annoyance is that you have to re-scan before every match. Sure, this makes for a sideboard-like style, but I'd rather have the option to start a new battle without having to rescan my cards.

Also, the poor robots have no way of knowing when they've won. Given all the pre-battle trash talk, it's pretty lame that they have no celebratory audio samples. (Future versions ought to have PC compatibility, so you could record your own voice tracks and download new abilities.)

My biggest complaint is that the voices are a pair of sad ethnic stereotypes; the kind of stuff I thought the US toy industry was past by now. Slugnut calls himself "the crusha from Russia" and speaks in a thick slavic accent. El Smasho is even worse: he's the very aural equivalent of an overdone Taco Bell Chihuahua parody. I'm pretty disgusted hearing a spanish accent used for comic effect in a friggin' kids toy. I'm just glad they didn't have the other one call Smasho a s**c.

Still, this is the kind of shit I dreamed of as a kid. Given the reasonable pricing ($30 for the top-of-the-line model), the technical weaknesses are acceptable. I'll be buying the rest of the army soon. I'm sure more embarrassing ethnic slurs await.

This weekend I installed Movable Type 2.0 on fourhman.com, which means that these news posts are now being served to you through a complicated cgi process. Which automatically creates archive pages... allows for the kind of blurb links like at the bottom of this page... and can have multiple authors.

So, prepare yourself for other voices here at fourhman.com. This just makes it easier for me to justify not posting new content, because now it's also somebody else's job.

In the construction phase, the games page is a bit of a mess. I took away the video game-specific posts and integrated them into the main news log; leaving me scrambling for video games ideas at 2am. I should smack the page into some semblence of content by the weekend.