It’s somewhat incredible to discover that the “Revenge From Mars” pinball table, which is one of the four machines that I’ve ever played to the point of intimate knowledge and quasi-expertise, now is the subject of a full-length documentary film. I knew the game was noteworthy for its hybrid nature — part traditional pinball, part videogame — but I had no idea it represented a revolutionary (and controversial) attempt to save the doomed pinball industry.

I played on this table over a multi-year period in college at the Gatekeeper, a dive bar in Middletown, Conn., also notable for its steamed cheeseburgers and homemade beef jerky. I was decent at “Mars,” but a woman in the class ahead of me was far superior. I eventually owned the top score on “Theater of Magic,” which was installed at Wesleyan’s campus center and became an obsession over  the course of my senior year.  The other two pinball tables that have figured  prominently in my life are, above all, the “Comet” table by Williams, which my uncle owned and left at my family’s house for a few years when I was 7, and “Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure,” which the local hotdog resturant had in residence for many years when I was in middle school and high school.

I’m sure there are pinball obsessives who know about the personalities and achievements of the legendary pinball designers. This documentary, “Tilt,” looks like it’ll give me a taste of that world.

The plan is to suspend the usual stuff-I-saw-on-the-Internet blogging for the next two weeks in order to do as much stuff-I-saw-in-China blogging as time and Web access allow. If all goes well, it should be more photos and less links.

I’m getting on flight to Beijing (via a Tokyo pit stop) in four hours. More when my brother and I reach the other side of the world.

Had Dino Run been released during the actual 8-bit Atari age, I do believe it would’ve been a hit. The gameplay is silky smooth, the constant running pace is excellent, and the balance of priorities (outrunning the black smoking fallout of dinosaur extinction vs. finding eggs to preserve your species and earn continuations) is a great stress enhancer. Plus, the music! Why don’t do they do music like that any more?

My favorite details: the running dino visibly craps himself as the wave of doom approaches, and surviving a close brush with death is considered an achievement (”doom surfing,” my best time was seven seconds).

Here’s the review from Play This Thing. And here’s the game itself.

via FFFFound

New feature here at OSP. Over on the right-side hyperlinkalley, you’ll notice a new entry that takes you to my shared items on Google Reader. I guess you’d have to term that feed a blog of all blogs I read, with a notability threshold that keeps out the riff raff. A meta-blog, in other words. In a way, however, its more honest than my prime blog because it shows even better than a “via” link where I do my reading. Although far from transparent, I think the online world would be a better place if eveyone offered an RSS consumption digest like this.

Thank you, Google Reader, for continuing to be the best application ever. (If you use Google Reader yourself, which you really ought to, then by all means add me as shared item-friend and let me know in the comments so I can add your items to my feed.)

1. “Lie Down in the Light,” Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy

Will Oldham is freakishly prolific, and this is very possibly his best album since 1999’s “I See a Darkness.” (Side note: it’s been freaking nine years since “Darkness” came out?) Couldn’t find a playable link for “So Everyone,” my favorite track at present and a song described by a half-sleeping Claire as “very romantic.” Here’s a download link.

2. “Arm’s Way,” Islands (listen)

The previous Islands album, “Return to the Sea,” flew completely under my radar until fairly recently. This one is better all around. Much to like on “Sea,” but many of the songs suffer from quasi-annoying interludes sandwiched between killer fragments. A lot of the stuff didn’t quite gel. The new album is much more cohesively poppy and, although somewhat slipshod at times, also more slickly produced. Here’s a winning upbeat track:

“Creeper”

As long as we’re on the subject, I find this Islands performance video transfixing (in part, I admit, due to the very attractive female singer in the band). That link is from La Blogotheque, which is fantastic and something worth exploring thoroughly.

A robot conducting an orchestra, with life-like hand gestures that will terrify and astonish.

Almost through Charles Stross’ “Accelerando,” a fantastic singularity sci-fi novel. I’m really enjoying this book, to the point where I’ll likely start writing a slew of half-baked posts about the singularity. I guess I’ll hold back until I’m done. If you want to read along at home, which is totally in your interest, since the book is so good, find the entire thing here for free. (Open your heart to the free e-books, people.)

On Mr. Stross’s blog this week, he’s got some incredible material on the current thinking into the Fermi Paradox (i.e. we’re intelligent, and that means intelligence is possible, so how come can’t we observe evidence of alien intelligences?). Here’s one of the ideas he brings up:

But the Great Filter argument isn’t the only answer to the Fermi Paradox. More recently, Milan M. Ćirković has written a paper, Against the Empire, in which he criticizes the empire-state model of posthuman civilization that is implicit in many Fermi Paradox treatments. As he points out, for a civilization to be visible at interstellar distances it needs to be expanding and utilizing resources in certain ways. There is a widespread implicit belief among people who look at the topic [] in manifest destiny, expansion to fill all possible evolutionary niches, and the inevitability of any species that develops the technology to explore deep space using that technology to colonize it. As Ćirković points out, this model is based on a naive extrapolation of historical human models which may be utterly inapplicable to posthuman or postbiological societies.

In other words, the answer to Fermi is we don’t see evidence of other intelligences because advanced minds aren’t raw-material consumers like us primitives. When we project an idea of an advanced civilization, we make it look just like us but on space steroids. If getting advanced means using resources differently, which seems likely enough, all these projections based on human evolutionary history up to now may not be quite accurate.

I’ve not been much into string theory, outside of a stray episode of NOVA or something, so I can’t tell you if this video is good on the merits. But I confirm that this 12-minute animation, which takes you step by step through visualizations of all ten known dimensions, is a kick. My mind, after watching, is pleasingly boggled.

Has anyone else ever seen this video before or know much about how it jibes/doesn’t jibe with mainstream ideas about string theory?

Here’s the trailer for the new Joss Whedon show. Eliza Dushku stars as a programmable hottie-for-hire, but we also get Helo, cranky Zion military commander guy from the shitty Matrix films, and sexy British love-interest lady from Rushmore. I liked most of Buffy and loved Firefly, so I’ll give this show a spin, but I’m not convinced ahead of time that it’s going to be great.

Believe me when I tell you to read this book. If you don’t believe me, ask Noah. You might think: But I don’t like sci-fi, and dear god look at the cover, man. Also, screw this Noah guy. Even if you don’t think you like sci-fi books per se, “Star Fish” still deserves your attention. In fact, I think it’s the perfect sort of sci-fi book to suggest to people who don’t read those books, because it doesn’t much follow the standard shapes and rhythms of the genre. Which is not to say it’s an easy read — far from it. “Star Fish” is a difficult book in a lot of ways. A hostile book, you could say. But the payoff is huge. Peter Watts’ debut novel is a fearsome thing, a really huge technical achievement. There is no skimping on science here, but it’s pretty seamless and important to the story.

This is not the first time I’ve hectored you to read “Star Fish.” It’s been free for a long while, but Tor is just hyping that fact now (on their excellent free e-book email list) presumably because the paperback reissue is due out. Hopefully, once you confirm the book’s quality, you’ll buy the other two novels in the Rifters trilogy. And “Blindsight,” which is also a killer book.

A new version of Google Reader made specifically for the iPhone? Talk about killer app. Debate is over. Sorry, Google Phone and OpenMoko. As soon as those 3G fuckers hit the market, I’m an iPhone owner. And then I will be one step closer to completing my iLife.

Via Reihan at American Scene, the online intellectual/quasi-celebrity I’d most like to meet, here’s a “Silence of the Lambs”-themed mashup that I must have missed in its active viral phase

Catchy. I may have a thing for pop songs whose lyrics are based on film lines. Take, for instance, Aqueduct’s “As You Wish,” which is adapted from “The Princess Bride.” Also excellent.

This torrent archive specializing in radio programs, particularly stuff from the BBC, looks incredibly promising. Now all we need is a handy best-of-the-BBC list or other such index. Anyone have any listening suggestions? (via)

This post is about an episode of The Twilight Zone called “Two.” It can be watched in full on a very nice videoplayer right here.

A young Charles Bronson encounters a woman while both are foraging through the creaky rubble of a post-apocalyptic town. They each wear tattered but unalike uniforms, and they begin wrestling fiercely over food at once. Let me state, for the record, that the star of Death Wish II had striking ethnic features as a young man. Bronson knocks the woman out cold with an awkward takedown move. Poorly staged action, sure, but also somehow realistic: if I ever knocked anyone out, it would be awkward indeed. Naturally, Bronson and the lady are last two people on earth or something like that.

Bronson, discovering his humanity, tries to establish a bond with the lovely foreign solider, a young woman with dark hair and long boots who rarely speaks. Things proceed apace – a budding romance? – until they see rifles lying in the debris while walking the town. An instinctual paranoia strikes them both and we’re back at war.

From there, nothing worthwhile happens. See for yourself here, but I’d pass. This episode is a clunker – heavy-handed script, no tension at all, and with an anti-war message that is extraordinarily broad and toothless. Hope for better luck next time.

MINUTES LATER UPDATE: Ha! Thought the hot girl solider looked eerily familiar — it’s young Elizabeth Montgomery, who would become the non-brunette star of Bewitched. Thanks, internet.

You know what the Internet has now? A very well-executed video mashup of Miss Piggy singing the Peaches hit “Fuck the Pain Away.” Oh, the nostalgia! This song was a college-party staple. Miss Piggy, with her sexually aggressive muppet persona, is perhaps the ideal choice of cover artist. (via)

I was remiss yesterday in not remarking on the ten-year anniversary of Kerry Wood’s 20-strike out game. Sports trivia, to be sure, but also — let us not mince words — one of the greatest individual performances in the history of baseball, a game with an epic and obsessively quantified statistical history. It is, arguably, the single most dominant display of pitching.

For perspective, consider this: He faced 29 batters and defeated 20 of them with strikeouts. No one else has ever done that, despite many thousands of attempts. This happened in the fifth game of his rookie season. Ten years later, Kerry Wood’s career has been marred by physical misfortune and failure, which makes his long-ago achievement all the more poignant.

On a personal level, this event is interesting because I absolutely remember it as if I had watched the game on TV. The memory is as determinate as could be in my mind. The facts, however, make my viewership vanishingly unlikely: May 6, 1998 was a Wednesday, my mom’s birthday, and the game started at 1:20pm. I must have been at high school, right? But I would swear on the memory!

This would hardly be worth mentioning at all, but for the existence of photographic images. And yet photos exist, so I mention — a common phenomenon.

A city-owned Access-A-Ride van bursting into a massive fireball on the West Side Highway:

Photo by co-worker Keith Huang.

Unlike almost every New Yorker in my age group, I know a good deal about the city’s Access-A-Ride service, having written more than a few “action desk”-style items on the subject. Never once did I get to tackle it from the coveted “burst into deadly flames” angle. In case you’re wondering, the van took virtually no time to go up, and there was nothing like the shrapnel-producing explosion movies teach us to expect in these situations. (Also, no one died inside.)

Here’s me (left) and co-worker Roy watching from twelve floors up:

Also Keith

More action-packed photography of the incident can be seen here and here and particularly here, where the fireman is brandishing that battle ax tool. Always loved those, never seen one in use before. These are from co-worker Kurt’s Flickr stream, which is highly recommended. His non-emergency work is even better.

Never been the biggest fan of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. At bottom, despite the open-world sandbox element that everyone always goes on and on about, the games to me have been marred by a completely retarded targeting system. And this problem never seemed to improve with the sequels. What’s the point of game where you can massacre civilians and whatnot if it’s impossible to aim at any one person on the screen? Call me a stickler, but I like to try for the occasional proper headshot and not stagger about like a spastic sociopath during gunfights.

Looks like GTA IV has finally — finally! — fixed this crippling bug. According to IGN’s review, which awarded the game a rare 10.0 score:

A great deal of that pleasure is due to the refined combat system. Though Grand Theft Auto has always been about action, it has never provided a great targeting system. That has finally, truly changed with GTA IV. Hold down the trigger and you can lock on to an enemy (or civilian). You’ll see an indicator of their health. You can adjust your aim slightly with the thumbstick so that nudging up a little can help you earn some headshots. Partially depress the trigger and you have free aim, which is great for targeting tires or specific body parts. With skill, you can take down enemies faster in free mode.

In another helpful change, the newest game in the franchise takes a fictionalized and somewhat compressed New York City as its setting — and I happen to know my way around New York! As a result, I’ll get to avoid the debilitating sense of being lost all the time when playing a freaking videogame, which has never been a formula for fun in my book. This is the downside of the open-world concept that’s clearly become the ne plus ultra of modern game design: I’m not 14 any more and I don’t have endless consecutive hours in which to internalize fictional game maps. When trying to get into a GTA game, I inevitably find myself feeling like a tourist in a foreign city. Maybe a week has passed since I last played, but I shouldn’t be made to feel like an imbecile because I can’t remember where my safehouses are in relation to the latest crime caper.

On a side note, not matter how incredible the GTA version of the Big Apple proves to be, it seems like the folks at Rock Star Game have nothing on these guys. Man, Prototype looks amazing, eh?

It doesn’t seem that anyone much cared for my archival research on Randy Newman from last week. At least, no one clicked on the links to the BBC documentary. But I think you, hypothetical reader, deserve a second chance. Here’s one of the best video series I’ve found to date: Roy Orbison in concert, Holland 1960.

This sequence has a few big factors going for it. Clearly, Roy is in top voice and at the peak of his otherworldy powers. The band, it should also be said, is fantastic. But we’ve also got some non-canonical songs that are real gems. “It’s Over,” which the Danish host describes as Roy’s first success (in Denmark?), is mini-operatic pop with bombast that’s worlds apart from the sounds of today. Sweeping melodrama in under three minutes. “Goodnight,” another slightly lesser known song, has that same structure and has become a fixation of mine lately.

• Opening: Only the Lonely

• It’s Over

• Oh, Pretty Woman

• Goodnight

Roy Orbison is the musician I listen to the most frequently. By far. Not sure how or when he superseded other iPod mainstays, but it’s been quite some time. If anyone out there has found any sources of Orbison online, please share.