NBC does not like cable cutters

I am a cable cutter. A cable cutter is someone who doesn’t pay for cable for their entertainment. My family gets more than enough entertainment by recording Over the Air TV shows on our Windows Media Center, or streaming shows from Netflix, Vudu or other websites. There’s no need to pay for cable. Earlier this week (before the London Olympics started) I saw that www.nbcolympics.com would stream every Olympic event live. This is wonderful! Traditionally watching the Olympics on TV means that there are lots of commercials, there isn’t time to view every event, and most of the time is taken up by human interest stories (ech!). I was worried that they were going to stream only live events, but when I went there today I saw that they had links to play back the full events whenever. Finally, I could watch the Olympics without the human interest stories, and see events that I rarely get to see.

When I tried to actually watch an event (mens archery US vs Mexico) I ran into a snag. To watch video on www.nbcolympics.com you have to sign in using your cable providers credentials. In other words, if you’re someone who doesn’t pay for cable, you don’t get to stream the Olympic events online. Cable cutting defeated!

Of course there’s bound to be some way to illegally view the events online, but I’m not one who does that. While I do wish the copyright/IP laws where changed, I’ll upload and respect the current laws.

We are recording all OTA instance of the London 2012 Olympics, so we’ll get to watch whatever we want to from that selection. It won’t be everything, but at least we’ll be able to skip the human interest stories. NBC would have probably gotten me to view more ads with legal online streaming, than they are by having me skip over commercials in Windows Media Center.

Summoner Call Review

Summoner Call is a game for Windows Phone 7 that makes a fun play. Most of the games to be found in the Marketplace are junk, and sometimes it takes sifting through a lot to find something work playing. If you like Magic the Gathering, Summoner Call is worth playing.

Summoner Call is basically a stripped down Magic the Gathering. The game play is that you’re a wizard/magician going up against other wizards and you have five cards in your hand at any given time and up to one creature card in play. Unlike Magic the creatures can’t die, their kind of used as a team player to take some damage for you, and return some attacks. In addition to the creatures the other big difference is that you can only play one card per turn, and besides that you pretty much have Magic.

There are two kinds of attack spells; normal and unstoppable. The difference is that normal damage can be reduced by the strength of a creature and the armor you have. Unstoppable spells are direct hits to you life points.

One downside to the game is Poison. In my opinion the game is weighted a little too heavily towards the power of poisons. It seems like the way to win a game is to get lucky with playing more poisons than antidotes that the opponent can play. Even though I’ve won many a game by draining my opponent down to 1 life (poisons can’t finish off a player) and then hitting them with a lightning (or other attack spell), it doesn’t make for a rewarding game. On the flip side it’s very frustrating to be hit with poison and never get dealt a card that can cure you of it.

So the game isn’t perfect but it’s still pretty fun. I recommend it for anyone looking for a non-crappy game for their Windows Phone.

Mystery Date is a good movie poorly executed

Having recently watched Mystery Date I find it more enjoyable to remember the movie than it was to watch it. In full disclosure I didn’t see the movie unadulterated, I saw it on the “This” TV network which may have removed scenes and bleeped out inappropriate words.
The movies premise is that the main character wants to take out the girl who’s house sitting the house across the street, but doesn’t have the courage to walk across the street and ask her out. His older brother shows up and sets up the date for him. During the movie a bunch of interactions happen between the main character and people who think that he’s his older brother. There are many plot twists and there are a few characters who’s “character” changes.
So with all of the twists and turns it makes for a fun story to think about and retell. The problem is that it wasn’t that exciting to be watching it. It’s kind of hard to pin down exactly what I would change if I was in charge. Different actors, different director, perhaps another twist? I don’t know. It does seem like the story deserves better treatment. If you stumble across it while channel surfing I recommend giving it a shot.

Wherefore art thou named Watson?

One of the exciting pieces of technology right now is IBM’s Watson. Watson is a computer system that pulls in information from trusted sources, analysis it, and answer questions asked to it. According to Wikipedia, Watson is named after IBM’s first President: Thomas J. Watson. But I don’t find any other references to this, and I suspect that it may not be whom Watson is named after. I propose the Watson was actually named after Bunny Watson, the reference librarian in Desk Set.

Desk Set is a movie which deals with the issue of technology advancing into the workplace and replacing human jobs. Bunny Watson (played by Katharine Hepburn) is the head of the Reference Department for the Federal Broadcasting Company. Her job primarily involves knowing everything. She (and her coworkers) sit at desks and anyone can call them looking for information, and the Reference Department answers their questions. I imagine this was very important back in the days when there was journalism integrity, and facts were more important than sensationalism. While watching one of the exchanges at the beginning of the movie, where Ms. Watson is asked a question and spits out the answer I think to myself “Hey, that’s just like Watson”, referring to the modern computer system. The role that Watson has in the company is to answers people’s questions (both the computer and the reference librarian).

The primary point of conflict in the movie is that the company has hired International Business Machines to install their latest device in the Reference Department; the Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator (EMARAC). Everyone in the department are worried that they’re being replaced by this “electronic brain”, and get very worried at the demo when the machine answers all of the questions that the company executives ask it. Later in the movie things go catastrophically bad for EMARAC as it prints out incorrect answers to questions. The reason why it gives wrong answers is because the answers it gives out are close, but not quite what the people are asking for. Any human can see that while the words in the answer match words in the question, the context is wrong. There’s no way a machine will ever understand the context. Humans rise to the task to save the day, where the machine fell short.

The movie may have been 54 years too early. IBM is at it again, but instead of making a movie prop, they’ve made the real thing. It’s still a large, multi room monstrosity, but it’s not EMARAC that’s answering the questions, it’s Watson, doing exactly what Bunny Watson was doing in the 1950’s. Why not keep the name?

Clone Wars Season 4 is avoidable

I really like the Star Wars Clone Wars series. The first season started off uninteresting, a bit childish (which is its targeted demographic), but then started to become interesting. It became interesting on an adult level without being inappropriate. The first half of season two wasn’t great, but the second half was amazing; the entire third season was amazing as well (besides the Children of the Force story arc). So far only the first half of the fourth season has aired (I’m assuming we’re at the half way point given that there have been 11 episodes and there are usually 22 episodes in a season), and I haven’t found any of the episodes all that intriguing.

The first story arc of three episodes started off with potential, even if the setup was Clone Wars stereotypical. A planet has two species and even though the planet is a member of the Republic it feels that it’s okay to have an ambassador from the Separatists there. The Separatist ambassador gets the two sides to fight, but turns out to be back stabbing in the end. What made these episodes boring was the constant back and forth fighting; one side wins the battle, then the next pulls a trick and wins, and back and forth and back and forth. It got dull. The main victory in the end was that the story arc was over.

The next episode was the same stereotype setup, but thankfully made for a single episode story arc. It felt like some Clone Wars story generator website must have spit up.

The next two episodes made up a unique story arc which was imaginative, but don’t fit in with the rest of the series. C-3PO and R2-D2 go trundling along with a series of adventures happening around them. I don’t dislike the producers of the show for doing these episodes, they are targeted for a younger audience, but they seem to have lost their touch in doing shows which were both childlike and still interesting.

The next four episodes made up a promising story arc, but took too long to tell, and feels really out of place with the entire series. The Umbra story arc is very dark, and for the first time too violent. While the conclusion was interesting (a Jedi turning because he sees the Jedi falling apart as an organization), the overall violence of the story arc made me dislike it. I realize that this series is about war, but the series traditionally keeps the action to acts of heroism. Not in Umbra though, the violence seemed repetitive, senseless and extreme; not something I would be comfortable having kids watch.

I don’t know if they shifted around writers, or what, but I sure hope that Lucasarts brings back the writers from the second and third seasons. Those episodes were very entertaining and well worth watching. So far the latest episode in season four is “Kidnapped”, and it was a good episode. Hopefully it’s a good sign of the Clone Wars getting back to good story telling, and entertaining action.

Dinosaurs is still an insightful watch

ABC’s Dinosaurs first aired in 1991 and ran for three years. I remember watching it as a kid and really liking it. It was fun to see live action dinosaurs doing entertaining things and things which I knew must be funny (even if I wasn’t old enough to get the joke). I recently re-watched the first two season and was surprised by its intelligent humor and how they addressed modern day issues. The show obviously had what most would consider a liberal message (or as my Mom put it “is very democratic”), but the way Dinosaurs was able to portray their messages is very entertaining (and hopefully thought provoking) for pretty much everyone.

One issue which Dinosaurs hit on a lot was the corruption which exists in large corporations. Since corporations do exist to make a profit (which inherently isn’t a bad thing), leave them to their own devices and they’ll take actions which are destructive to society as a whole. The plot device for the show is that Dinosaurs had decided a few years earlier to stop being wild animals, build homes, get married, settle down, and build civilizations; as an “experiment”. So entities like government, businesses and schools were all very new and a work in progress. The other key to the corporation plot device was the WeSaySo corporation (took me a while as a kid to get that one). WeSaySo was the biggest corporation and had its hands (or claws) in everything. Everything was built, manufactured, torn down, or sold by WeSaySo. The audiences primary interaction with WeSaySo was the carnivorous Triceratops Forman B.P. Richfield; who is larger and meaner than all of the other dinosaurs. He sat behind a disk, was in a state of constant anger and was always disappointed when he couldn’t eat anything which was bothering him. WeSaySo embodied all villainy and corruption that the shows producers perceived existed in our modern day and age.

Another clever running gag was the puppet show. In Dinosaurs there’s a kid show of sock puppets that baby occasionally watches. The protagonist (Earl Sinclair) finds it entertaining and “really works on two levels”; where as his wife (Fran) finds it to be a silly kids puppet show. It’s obviously a reference to how some critics would view Dinosaurs, and addressing that criticism in that way was smart.

If the show was being made today there would have been at least one episode dealing with big finance and big banks. I don’t know how Dinosaurs would have gone after the injustices they obviously would have seen, but I know would like to see it. Even without an episode like that most of the episodes are still very relevant and quite entertaining.

The Three Musketeers Movie, isn’t

“The Three Musketeers”, produced by New Legacy and Impact Pictures, set to be released 21 Oct 2011, looks like an exciting adventure movie, but it isn’t The Three Musketeers! There are flying airships, super assassins, tremendous explosions, and our hero’s aren’t saving France, they saving Europe! I think the movie was started by a producer who wanted to create a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, without it being too obvious of a copycat. I realize that original story lines are hard to come up with (don’t want to make Hollywood writers work too hard), and that they wanted to make something really exciting, but they don’t need to call the movie something it isn’t. Copy the Three Musketeers story line, no problem; while it bugged people that Avatar was Dancing with Wolves in Space, audiences were still happy to go and see it. I also find offence that they mention Alexander Dumas in their adverts. Keep his good name away from this film!

I’m sure this will be an exciting film and that audiences will flock to it, but couldn’t they have given it a different name to avoid confusion? They could have called it “Extreme Musketeers”, or something like that. I’ll let the flying airships go, I’ll let the fact that Lady D’Winter has become Black Window or Laura Croft slide, the National Treasure-esque puzzles will be entertaining, but if you’re going to change everything give the movie a different name! Half makes me en-angered enough to demand government oversight of offences to our cultural heritage. Ahhh!

How to create a party in Age of Empires Online

To create a party in Age of Empires Online (or AoEO) select the brown button in the top left hand corner of the screen with a yellow person character and a green plus sign. This should open up your list of friends. Then left click on the right side button of the list and one of the context menu options will be invite. Click on invite and you should see that a party has been formed.

If you do not have a premium civilization the only thing (that I’ve discovered so far) you can do with the party is have them participate in co-op quests. If you do have a premium civilization (which I currently don’t have, but kind of had during the beta) then you can host matches in an arena, where you can select which members of the party will be in teams and you and your friends can face off against each other. If you don’t have a premium account you can still do Player vs. Player (either PvP 1, or PvP 2) by going to Sparta and the servers will select a random player for you to play against. You can’t pick who to play against.

Another way to create a party is by looking at the different gamer tags in the chat window, click on their tag, and in the context menu select invite. However, inviting random strangers probably won’t result in many accepted invitations, but I could be wrong.

Movies shouldn’t pretend that the conflict was resolved

Due to a Netflix recommendation a few weeks ago we watched Origin: Spirits of the Past, and this past week we watched Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Both movies are quite similar: both are anime, both are based in a post apocalyptic world, both have young adult protagonists, both have the protagonist living in a society that’s chosen to be isolated and yet is still in the middle of everything, and they have so much in common that watching one really reminds you of watching the other. To be fair Nausicaa came out in 1984 and Origin came out in 2006 so Origin should remind one of Nausicaa. One thing that strikes me about both of them, is that it seems to be really hard to find someone, online, who doesn’t like them. Nearly everyone who reviews either of these movies, really, really loves them. And yet, both are obscure, and aren’t really ever recommended in person.

I think part of the reason why people love either of the movies, do so in part because the animation was good, the stories are uniquely creative, and your imagination can be left in awe with what’s happening in either of the worlds. But there’s more to a good movie than those things. I did not love either Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind or Origin: Spirits of the Past. I kind of like them, but I kind of don’t. They are fun to watch, but they leave the viewer wondering “why did I just watch that?” and the primary reason for that is that they both end as if the conflict had been resolved even though the conflict wasn’t resolved. And quite frankly, that’s really confusing.

Nausicaa ends with Nausicaa (the protagonist) nearly killing herself to stop all of the senseless violence, and a stampeding herd of giant indestructible woodlouse’s from smashing up the valley of the wind. This is wonderful and you really love the integrity and sacrifice that she shows in accomplishing these tasks. Once it’s shown that Nausicaa is okay, everyone cheers, including the Tolmekia who have been actively trying to take over the world and kill everyone who tries to oppose them. Then the credits roll and things get more confusing: we see pictures of Tolmekians, in larger than heretofore seen numbers, happily leaving lands which they were occupying. We then see some people being peacefully exploring the beauties of the toxic jungle without their protective gear. This greatly conflicts with the rest of the movie where the audience is constantly reminded that anyone who breaths the air of the toxic jungle will die, and that giant insects are actively trying to kill every human who makes a disturbance in its growing boarders. Nothing is ever brought forth as to how the toxic jungle stopped its active slaughter of mankind. The ending just shows that it has conveniently happened.

Origin ends with the E.S.T.O.C. (a giant, man made contraption with the purpose of purging the entire planet of life) self destructing, and everyone cheering and going home. But how does this resolve the struggles which have been building up during the entire movie? The Zurids still control all of the planets water and want to kill all of the humans (they should even especially want this more, now that they know that humans are capable of building something like the E.S.T.O.C.). The Ragnan’s (pretty much all of the humans on earth) haven’t been given a reason not to defend themselves, destroy the Zurids and try to gain some water rights for themselves. Plus the protagonist, Agito, comes back from the dead and says that he has learned how to live in balance with nature. Which in principle is a good idea, but doesn’t really work when “nature” consists of genetically engineered plants whose whole aim is to wipe out humans and claim the planet for themselves.

So both movies end without having given reason to the audience as to why the conflicts of the movie came to a resolution. It’s as if the writer had come up with such an over-comeable paradox that they couldn’t resolve it themselves. So they wrote a climax and ended the story there because a climax had happened, and the movie was starting to go long anyway.

Another egregious point are the movies environmental messages. Not that there’s nothing bad, per se, in the idea that humans need to learn how to sustainably live on the earth, but neither of the environments featured in the films are anything like the environment. In Nausicaa the plot device representing nature is referred to as the toxic jungle which made the only human habitable parts of the planet (besides the valley of the wind), desert. In Origin, it’s the “Forest” with its power to creating animal like plants which are actively trying to kill off humans. Neither of these feel like the nature I want to learn how to be in balance with. The result are environmentalist messages which are strong enough to repulse those who don’t like being told those things, and un-relatable enough to anyone who really tries to think about the message that’s trying to be conveyed.

Nausicaa has an amazing protagonist. She’s daring, resourceful, kind, and brave (she also talks to herself a lot). She is the type of leader any organization would love for a leader, and her character development is a joy to follow. Also, she doesn’t have a coming of age story in the move, which would have really drug the the whole thing down. Sadly a good protagonist isn’t enough to carry a science fiction like Nausicaa from kind of okay to amazing. In Origin, Agito is a good protagonist… for the first half of the movie. In the first half the audience comes to relate to him, like him, and are impressed with his ability to handle the pressures of the world in lives in. Then half way through the movie he effortlessly becomes invincible (to everything except tranquilizer darts), and leaves the movie with no interesting characters to cheer for. It’s sad that you can’t really get behind or really relate to any of the characters for the whole second half of the movie.

Nausicaa does leave the audience wondering why any of what they say even happened at all. I love it how both movies drop the audience into the middle of the “universe” and as it’s necessary to the plot, explain what happened. But Nausicaa doesn’t fully explain what actually happened. The audience learns (when an old woman is justifiabley retelling their history) that a thousand years earlier, there were giant, fire breathing, monsters who wiped out most of mankind, and then their rotting corpses decayed into poisonous jungles full of strange new life. What the movie doesn’t explain is how giants came to be. Were the giants aliens? Did Ra’s al Ghul finally defeat Batman and unleash environmental revenge on mankind? Where did the giants come from? Why do they dislike humans so much? Origin, on the other hand, explains where the “Forest” came from. Plants, genetically engineered on the Moon became sentient and were so powerful that they split the moon apart and rode down on giant chunks of the moon, causing massive environmental damage, but were able to recover before the humans could gain an upper hand over them. So Nausicaa gets a point for having a good protagonist and Origin gets a point for at least explaining why the Apocalypse happened.

Neither of the movies are painful to watch, have interesting setups, have some great art work, but both have well-that’s-kind-of-dumb moments, and don’t really leave the audience thinking that the ending shouldn’t have happened. People may complain that The Empire Strikes Back, doesn’t have an ending, and just kind of ends, but it does have an ending. The movie starts with a battle, then there’s a chase, and when the chase is over, the movie ends. There are still unresolved issues, but the movie doesn’t pretend that there’s not. In Nausicaa and Origin, the movies do pretend that all of the conflict has ended, even though nothing happened to have ended it. While I am glad I did see both movies – they’re not a total waste of time – , I’m not going to go out of my way to watch either ever again.

I’ll be your cashier when you’re ready

Something that I really dislike about our American society is having the waiter/waitress be “my” cashier. The vast majority of the times when I go to a “nice” restaurant I’ll finish with my meal and want to leave. I’ve eaten and I usually have some place to go. At this point I sit and wait and sit and wait for the waiter to bring me the check. Then when they hand me the check and before I can hand them a payment card, they disappear. It takes about ten seconds to scan over the receipt and see that everything is correct. Why they disappear between handing me the check and me pulling a card from my wallet is beyond me?

Five minutes later (during which time I can only think about how dumb this is and get angrier at the waiter) the waiter comes back, grabs my card and goes back to some cash register somewhere. I’m told this is a uniquely American custom. The reason why is because some stranger now has my payment card and I can’t see what they might be doing with it. Apparently in most countries they bring the credit card reader out to the table because someone paying with a credit card does not want a stranger to be copying down their credit card information; for nefarious uses later.

Then when the waiter finally comes back – way later than what should have been necessary – I can finally sign the receipt and leave. Is this system really desirable? It causes me to hate going out to eat at “nice” places; it seems to waste a good portion of the time it takes to go out to eat. Would it really be so hard to get the check and pay as we leave? It would be a lot faster? Would it really be that hard to bring a credit card reader to the table? It sure would be more convenient (and safer) for customers.

How can I go about getting this American custom to change? The only way I can think of would be forcing me to enter a pin with the transaction. That way it would be quite burdensome for the restaurants to take my payment card away from me. They’d either have to take me to the back, bring the payment device to me, or let me pay on my way out. I’m happy with any of these options.

Sadly I don’t see change on the horizon, forcing me to be stuck in a bothersomely slow and inefficient system. Grrrrr.