I Don’t Think It’s Too Soon!

In this four-minute clip, Cloverfield looks 9/11-tastic.

And Then You Die

As virtually all the cool game-oriented blogs have already noted, the 8-bit download game Passage is very much worthy of the few minutes it takes to play. Or maybe I should say “play.” Passage has the formal structure of a videogame and it is interactive, but the play is not the thing. Unlike conventional games, Passage’s play mechanics and graphical presentation serve the expression of a much larger point — a statement about, uh, the human condition. It is the first time I have been moved by a game.

I don’t want to say more. Play for yourself. It takes less than five minutes, has the distinction of being one of the most visually spectacular 8-bit games I’ve ever seen, and the music is just great too.

 

Even the Hangman Has Friends

Found a remarkable song thanks to this wonderfully short review on the Onion’s A.V. Club site.

“Hangman,” Fire On Fire (download)

Funniest Thing I Read in 2007

‘Tis the season for sweeping superlatives and list-making, which is actually the only thing I like about the putrid month of December. I figure I’m good for a few, now that I’ve created this self-important self-publishing platform for myself.

Funniest Thing (Written):

This won’t be much of list since, in my book, there’s a hands-down winner: Simon Rich’s “The Wisdom of Children,” from the Shouts & Murmurs page of the March 26 New Yorker. And it’s brief. Even if you caught it on the first go-round, try it once more:

I. A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table

MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.

DAD: O.K.

GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.

DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.

UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.

DAD: We all are.

MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best.

DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won’t tell.

MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell.

FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!

DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.

MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden!

DAD: I’m angry, too! We’re angry at each other!

MOM: Now everything is fine.

DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.

MOM: There was a big sex.

FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!

(Everybody laughs.)

MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy!

GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like?

ALL: Yes.

GRANDFATHER: Don’t tell the kids.

There’s more at the link.

‘Lost’ Must Go On

Here’s the new trailer for the upcoming “Lost” season — or at least the ~40% of a season for which scripts had been written pre-strike.

I will be blogging at least three TV shows in this space over the coming months: “The Wire,” “Battlestar” and “Lost.” Not recaps, more like spoiler-laden riffs and gripes on the storytelling. For “Lost,” expect almost entirely gripes (baring some unexpected return to Season 1 form, when the soap opera/bad dialogue/heavy-handed theme elements passed as an aesthetic choice, not incompetent writing, and the B-stories were still engaging for the most part).

First-Person Pinball

 

Some Scandinavian geniuses have gone and created a pinball machine with a first-person perspective, eliminating the traditional seen-from-above vantage point in a clever mash-up of pinball and first-person shooter videogames. That image you see above, that’s the viewpoint from which you play the table. Behold, The Furminator:

I’ve been in love with pinball ever since a three-year period in elementary school when my Uncle Harry moved to Philadelphia and left his awesome Williams Comet table at my house. I also graduated from Wesleyan University with the high score on the campus center’s very active Theater of Magic table. After watching this video, my mind is blown. The tears I am crying are of joy and sadness both. For never had I imagined such a machine could exist — but now that I know it does, I am crushed by my inability to play it. Now. I want to play it now.

The accent of the Furminator creator is somewhat hard to decipher, but I do believe he describes the in-machine gameplay experience as “mechatronic.” Which is great. What I like best, however, is how this invention elevates pinball’s intrinsic stakes. In the standard variation, the onus is on the player to keep the ball on the board — and what a grave and infuriating onus it is. In first-person pinball, that task is made all the more engrossing by the impression that your actual face will be smashed by weighty metal orbs if you fail.

Here’s the website for this project, along with a link to more photos.

I say it again: genius.

Paper, Animals, a House

David Byrne Self-Interview, circa “Stop Making Sense” tour

1. In between bursts of insightful, prepared responses, David Byrne mostly dodges his own questions with replies like “I’ll tell you later.” In other words, he inhabited the persona of chatbot before anyone really knew what those were like. Very prescient.
2. His response, near the end, in defense of poor singing voices — “The better the singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying” — is wonderful.

Why Does This Give Me the Creeps?

Full disclosure: I had an early teenage Pez dispenser phase.

(Image taken from FFFFound!)

Not-So-Great Moments in Sci-Fi Politics

Bill Clinton vs. ‘Robot’ Heckler (Video)

The protester said he wanted Clinton to apologize for a comment he made in 1992 about a rapper named Sister Souljah, and then threw colored cards into the air.

As the protester was being escorted out of the room, Clinton told him he needed to find a more environmentally-friendly way to protest. (link)

Rudy Giuliani on Preparedness for Attacks by Aliens (Video)

During a town-hall meeting in Exeter, Giuliani assured a young questioner that preparedness will be key for all crises, including those from outer space.

“If (there’s) something living on another planet and it’s bad and it comes over here, what would you do?” a boy asked.

For what it’s worth, Mr. Clinton seems incapable of taking robotic protesters seriously. And thus, should sapient machines emerge during any potential Hillary Clinton administration, we may very well have an “A.I.”-style civil rights issue on our hands. I would score this episode as a point deduction, if only this particular robot hadn’t been asking the former president about the amazingly trivial and outdated Sister Souljah episode. Who among us could take such a robot seriously?

Mr. Giuliani, on the other hand, gets major points off for his naive — and patronizing! — assurance that terrestrial attack preparedness might somehow be a match for an assault by bellicose aliens. Now I’m not suggesting we make military superiority in a “War of the Worlds”-type situation a matter of national policy. But you can’t stipulate the boy’s sci-fi premise, as Mr. Giuliani seems to do in his glib response, and honestly believe that we’d somehow come out OK merely by taking a vigilant approach to national security issues. If an intelligent, extraterrestrial species with aggressive intentions had the technological mastery to cross the vastness of space in order to squash us, there is no way that we wouldn’t get squashed. By definition, these hypothetical “bad aliens” would have a nearly infinite edge over us, no matter how much of the budget we invested in defense.

Any casual reading of the genre tells you that, in such an event, the devastation will be immense — even if some plucky human hero ultimately rises up to miraculously throw off our alien oppressors. We’re talking way worse than 9/11 here. So I guess what I’m saying, despite my avowed intention to not tackle explicitly political issues on my blog, is this: “Rudy Giuliani — Wrong on Alien-Attack Preparedness, Wrong for America.”

P.S. Quick question: In the history of the sci-fi genre, has there ever been a story in which hostile aliens come to earth, only to find themselves overmatched by human technology? I’m not talking about the “hero-saves-the-day” scenario, where humans triumph against all odds. I want to know if there’s ever been a story — even a satire — in which the bad aliens arrive to find we’ve got their number. Leave any candidates in the comments, if you please.

P.P.S. I’m not addressing Dennis Kucinich’s UFO claims. Because unlike the sci-fi genre and its devotees, people who earnestly think they’ve seen UFOs are just too lame and unaccountably self-important to be interesting. Much like the Kucinich campaign itself.

(Image from Flickr user arimoore.)

The Wire as a Sitcom

Yes, it seems I’ve devolved into a YouTube blog for the moment, but this was too good not to post.

Season 5 can’t start soon enough. (via)