Archive for July, 2004

Tour de France Primer, part 2

July 31st, 2004 by psu

With the race over, this is obviously a good time to write the second part of my little stage racing primer. This part focuses primarily on tactics and strategy.

Each rider and team goes into the Tour with different goals and expectations. Most teams are there to try and win a couple of stages and get into breakaways so their sponsor logos are on TV for a while. A few teams with strong sprinters will try and win the Green jersey. A few other teams with strong climbers will try and get the mountain jersey. Finally, a few teams will have riders that they think can win the overall.
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That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore, Part 1

July 30th, 2004 by peterb
apb

APB

APB (”All Points Bulletin”) was an Atari arcade game designed by Dave Theurer, who also made the classic games Missile Command, Tempest – the best arcade game ever made, for my money — and I, Robot. It was the forebear of the original, overhead view Grand Theft Auto games. It was primarily a driving game; you were a police officer, and had a certain amount of time to arrest a certain number of miscreants (hitchhikers, litterers, speeders, etc.) while avoiding getting demerits. It was fairly challenging. On each round, there was a special “super villain” you could arrest to end the round immediately and get bonus points.

The game was published in 1987, also known as “a few years before the Rodney King incident.” If you caught the super villain — the first one was a hippie — the view switched to an exterior view of the interrogation room, with you and the suspect visible in silhouette. Your fat, stupid, donut-eating sergeant was slowly walking down the stairs. You then slapped the buttons fast and hard to “interrogate” (read: beat up) the suspect. If you beat him up enough before the sergeant came in to the room and witnessed the rights violation, he would confess.

It was popular at the time for Congressmen, Senators, and other idiots to complain about the values that videogames taught “our children,” but I never once heard a Congressman or law enforcement official complain about the values taught by a game that gave you points for beating up a suspect.

Time Travel

July 29th, 2004 by peterb

HOUR 1: Hey! Guys! I got DOOM 3! Whooooooo!

HOUR 2: Stupid installer erased my datebook.

HOUR 3: OK, it’s running. Why is everything so slow? What the hell?

DAY 2: Got new videocard at CompUSA. Runs OK now, when not crashing.

DAY 3: Couldn’t take crashing. Bought new computer.

DAY 3: Still crashing. Hate everyone.

DAY 4: No friends playing; computers all too slow. Maybe play with strangers?

DAY 5: 13 year old kids humiliating me. Hate everyone and everything.

DAY 6: I will master this. Stayed home from work to practice.

DAY 7: Boss called. Told him I had plague.

DAY 8: Lost to Estonian third-grade girl, 16-0. Hate everyone and everything in the entire universe.

DAY 10: Stopped playing stupid game. Will wait for Halo 2.

Ultima

July 28th, 2004 by peterb

Nostalgia, in general, is an emotion that I am suspicious of. We grow by moving forward, and though sometimes that involves looking back introspectively, nostalgia is the opposite of introspection: it is the fetishism of the past. Some part of the past is thought of as good because it wells up nostalgic feelings, rather than because of anything one can qualify objectively. I try to consciously choose introspection instead of nostalgia whenever I can. However — as the regular reader may be able to guess — when it comes to obsolete videogames, I am completely in thrall to the teenager in my head.

I don’t think this is uncommon. If you ask people (or at least American men) who grew up in certain eras what the best video game consoles were, you will get different answers — I’m in the Atari 2600 camp, those about 5 years younger than me will talk about the original Nintendo Entertainment System, those a few years younger than that will talk about the Sega Genesis or the SNES, and so on. Basically, whatever your first console was (or, whatever the first console that your best friend had but your parents wouldn’t get for you was, so later in life you feel compelled to buy them on eBay. Er, not that I’d know), that’s the one that you feel nostalgic for. This works for old home computers, too, and of course computer games.

The most recent wave of nostalgia to overcome me is the “Ultima Classics” package put together by one very obsessive-compulsive fan. It’s floating around the ether, and if you have a Windows PC and are at all interested in classic games I recommend you track it down. I actually already own all of the Ultima games — some in their Apple ][ incarnations -- but the sheer comprehensiveness of the collection inspires nothing short of awe. Included are every version of every Ultima game (except Ultima 9) for the PC, Apple ][, Commodore 64, Vic-20 (!), and Amiga platforms, along with emulators to run the non-PC native ports. Also included are various fan-authored remakes and ports (such as Exult and XU4), full documentation for every game, and just to add insult to injury a series of videoclips of Richard Garriott (a.k.a. Lord British) talking about his work.

This, therefore, seems like a good time to talk about the Ultima games and their progress through the years.
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DVD Menus: A Desperate Plea

July 27th, 2004 by psu

Here is what happens to me on a regular basis when trying to access the various “extras” on a DVD release:

- Put DVD into player.

- Watch the FBI warning for 5 minutes while the controls on the player are locked out.

- Watch 5 minute cut scene from the movie or whatever.

- Watch for 5 minutes as the menu animates into the screen.

- Click around at random with the arrow keys on my DVD remote and squint at the screen to see if the state changed at all.

- Hit Play at the wrong time. Watch another little canned animation that means the track I picked is about to play.

- Hit Stop, then Menu, watch 10 more minutes of cut scenes as the menu comes back to the screen.

Rip DVD player out of the wall and throw it through a window.
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Hockenheim: Quote of the Race

July 26th, 2004 by peterb

Heinz Pruiller, a commentator for ORF TV in Austria was asked “How many more races is Michael Schumacher going to win before the end of the year?”

He looked at Speed TV’s David Windsor as if he were daft, and answered: “All of them. All of them.”

He paused, briefly.

All of them.

Latter Days

July 23rd, 2004 by peterb
Latter Days

Latter Days

For those unfamiliar with it, Cerebus is mixed-media pictures and text, black and white ink on paper, originally released as 20 page bound pamphlets, periodically bound into folios referred to as “phonebooks.” That’s how you’d describe it in a museum, anyway. A more concise description would be “Cerebus is a graphic novel.” A less pretentious description would be “Cerebus is a comic book.” The most recent “phone book”, covering the penultimate chapters of Dave Sim’s epic work, is entitled Latter Days.

This by itself guarantees that practically no one will read it. The American literary establishment is composed of people who are, by and large, afraid of visual art; unless the art is safely caged within a gallery or a museum, its presence is threatening, intimidating, confusing. Every ten years or so The New Yorker or some similar arm of the prep-school cultural politburo will publish a brief item by some bewildered trust fund baby who just discovered that maybe Art Spiegelman’s Maus isn’t really for kids. They talk about the article at a gallery opening. “Well, of course, I’ve known about Spiegelman for years, darling. I met his wife, Françoise, in the Hamptons last summer.” Even more galling to me are the articles about Japanese manga and how adults in Japan read them, completely ignoring the vibrant work, such as Cerebus, that you can find right here.

Then they ignore the medium for another ten years.
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The Tour De France, a Primer

July 22nd, 2004 by psu

Now that we’re more than two weeks into this year’s race, I thought I’d write a short primer on the basics of what is going on in the race so you all can keep it in mind for next year.

I know I should have done this before, but I was busy. Sue me.
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The Problem with Data that is Meta

July 21st, 2004 by psu

Talk to geeks the world over, and they will wax lyrical about all the ways in which meta-data will save the world.

It will make your disk searchable.

It will provide a semantic framework for WWW content.

It will allow tools from different vendors to manage your workflow and asset files.

It can form the basis for archiving your digital life.

Sadly, it’s all a lie.
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The Spice Must Flow

July 20th, 2004 by peterb

If there’s one annoying trend that has permeated Asian cuisine as prepared and served throughout America, it’s that I can hardly find a place where a server doesn’t ask me “How spicy? 1 to 10?”

You don’t ask me how much salt I want in the dishes that come out from the kitchen. You don’t ask how much sugar you should put in the cheesecake. You don’t offer me a choice of an omelette fried in yummy butter, healthy duck fat, or disgusting institutionalized margarine. Why do you ask about spice? A simple reason: people are stupid.
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