A Clear Choice
A couple of months ago, we talked about boosting our WiMax internet signal by using aluminum foil. Getting home internet from Clear was a very hit-or-miss affair, with the signal fading or dropping in poor weather (keep in mind that we’re in the Pacific Northwets, and no that’s not a typo), but by constructing a sort of tinfoil reflector dish around our WiMax modem we were able to improve both signal strength and reliability… at least at first.
The signal was noticeably stronger after construction of the aluminum dish, and this fact impressed us enough that we were excited to share this news with the blogosphere. The idea that one could take a common household material like aluminum foil and build a device to boost one’s wireless internet service seemed so cool, so… taboo. It gave us a geeky feeling of resourcefulness, like we were on the verge of discovering a plethora of other cheap, alternative ways of improving our quality of life.
You mean all I have to do is eat vegetables and I'll never have to get a flu vaccine again?
However, our inventive euphoria did not take long to fade, and within a couple weeks of building our aluminum dish we noticed a severe drop in our signal strength. I should note that our internet service was still technically better with the tinfoil than without, although at its worst the signal had become so weak that the difference was hardly noticeable. Bizarrely, this drop in service quality coincided almost exactly with a timetable given by Clear in previous weeks to improve signal strength in our area by building new towers nearby. Despite their promises to the contrary, however, our service began an extreme downward spiral in the weeks following our last post on the subject. It appears that our failure was not to trust in tinfoil to improve on Clear’s hardware, but to trust Clear to provide a reasonable service in the first place.
Had we zoomed in closer on Clear's service map we might have noticed the tiny gray area over our 800 square foot apartment.
The service actually got worse and worse, as if the Clear Gods were punishing us mere mortals for attempting to exert some control over the realm of invisible WiMax signals, with our pagan aluminum technology. In the last couple of weeks, it was taking up to 2 hours to load a 10-minute video on Youtube. At one point, attempting to download a multi-gig file, we determined that it would actually, literally be faster to buy a plane ticket, travel to the home of the person who created the file, load it onto a flash drive, and fly back. Even at it’s best, our service was rarely better than that offered by a dial-up connection with a 28 kbps modem. I nearly jumped for joy when my download speeds peaked at 30 or 35 kbps, a fact to which no human should ever have to admit in this day and age. We were paying $35 per month for service that was slower than dial-up. It was clear that something would have to change.
How many people under 20 even know what this is?
Unfortunately, in our folly we had agreed to a long contract with Clear, and in order to get out of it we had to set up an appointment with a service technician whose job seemed to consist entirely of (1) asking us stupid, generic, and insulting questions over the phone, to the tune of “Is your modem plugged in?” and (2) asking us stupid, generic, and insulting questions in person, while simultaneously ignoring our responses because he was right goddamn there and could see with his own eyes how shitty our service was, through no fault of our own. It was a hassle, but by the time the Clear representative had actually come out to our apartment and verified the lack of a reasonable internet experience, getting out of the contract wasn’t really far off.
The moral of the story? Even creativity and tinfoil can’t solve every problem. Unless you need internet access on-the-go and you plan on “going” mainly through large sunny fields within range of Clear’s towers-or-whatever-it-is-they-have, just go with Comcast, Verizon, Qwest, or one of the other umpteen Cable or DSL internet providers in your area. It may cost a little more, but we’re willing to pay $10 a month extra for download speeds which are literally 750 times faster than what we had with Clear.
Lipstick on a pig
Categories: Adventures, Random Tags:
Gotta Love Spam!
We think it’s great that people leave comments on our posts. Some of these posts are from real, interested people with something constructive to share. Those are the ones you can see in our comments section. The vast majority of the comments, however, are spam. Fortunately WordPress has a great function called “Askimet” that is designed to capture spam, and it’s quite good at it! Currently we have over 100 comments in it’s que. Below are four of the more recent ones that I find the most amusing.. I’ve removed any links to their site, as 90% of them are plugs for some random site or another (110% of them are for porn, I’m sure).
First up, we have someone called “Sovi”…
“It is nice to be able share many things here…. Hopefully our post make the world better”
What is he sharing? He doesn’t have any other comment, I guess he’s just sharing his bad grammer.
Number 2 :
“Diana Duby” Left this gem on one of our coffee reviews (Woodstock Coffee House). My favorite part about all of these posts are that they are completely unrelated to whatever blog post they commented on. Like this :
Thanks for the post that you have. I found a new one the other day. They look open for business, but very similar to linkedin.com with more of a social business directory look and feel. Nice easy interface though.
I don’t think “linked in.com” appears anywhere on this blog…
Chase Bank has decided to chime in on our Dutch taco posting. I’m not sure why they think it’s helpful info, does Chase invest in Dutch tacos?
“Chase internet banking” – Thanks for sharing this helpful info!
This last one I find hilarious mainly because of the website “Willie Feck” left as a contact. Seduction666.. Quite obviously porn.. Or maybe devil porn? People seducing Satanists? Oh, yeah, and “Willie” left this comment on our Gears of War review. I’d like to think I’m that good of a writer, but somehow I don’t think so..
“Hi – it’s great to read such interesting writing on the web as I have been able to find here. I agree with much of what is written here and I’ll be returning to this website again. Thanks again for publishing such great reading material!!!
I’m glad Sovi, Willie, Diana and Chase Bank found our site so interesting! I hope some more of you leave comments, we always love reading the sincere ones.. And the spam!
Two Games, One (Grand Prix) Cup
This week, two kart racing games enter, but only one can leave. It’s time for a cartridge cage match… A sixty-four bit showdown… A Nintendo… knife fight? That’s enough alliteration for 9:00 on a Saturday morning.
In this corner: Our reigning champion, having sold over nine million copies worldwide, its titular character appearing in over 200 video game titles since 1981… the Red Menace… the King of Kart Racing….
MARIO KART 64
And in this corner: Our challenger, a spin-off of a spin-off, never having achieved quite the popularity of our champion despite selling almost a million copies in two weeks before Christmas 1997…
DIDDY KONG RACING 64
Both games featured cutting edge graphics, both were for the Nintendo 64, and both came out in 1997. Because Mario Kart hit shelves first, however, and because the N64 Mario Kart was a remake of an SNES game with the same name, people had more time to get used to it, and grow accustomed to the cutesy go-kart racing style. When Diddy Kong Racing arrived in November, nearly nine months after Mario Kart 64 dropped in North America, nearly everyone saw it as a cheap knock-off. However… I will attempt to make the case that Diddy Kong Racing is the superior game. If Mario Kart is Cheers, Diddy Kong Racing is a show about Norm’s long lost son Billy who happens to own a bar. And that bar is better than Cheers. I know I won’t convert the die-hard Mario Kart fans, but let’s look at the facts.
1. Diddy Kong Racing has an Adventure mode.
Sure, it’s a racing game, but in addition to all of the race tracks available in multiplayer mode, Diddy Kong racing also features a single-player Story mode. All the tracks available on multiplayer are also unlockable or discoverable in the Single Player adventure, and the adventure mode also features several extras, such as difficult races against several “Bosses,” quests to find and collect items on the various race tracks, and somewhat non-linear world design which encourages exploration. Granted, the story is geared towards eight year-olds, and the world is fairly limited, due to the fact that most of the game’s memory went into the racing gameplay, but I don’t see Mario Kart having an Adventure option.
2. Diddy Kong’s Power-ups Aren’t Based on Race Position
In both games, there are items strewn about the various race tracks which your racer can pick up and use. Generally speaking, the different types of power-ups in one game serve a very similar purpose to their counterparts in the other, with some being unique to each. There are items you can pick up and shoot at other racers to slow them down, items you can activate to give yourself a speed boost, items you can drop behind you on the track to try and trip up your opponents, etc.
In Mario Kart, all the various power-ups come from little question-mark boxes placed in strategic locations around the courses. You never know quite what kind of item you’re going to get, and the quality of the power-ups you’ll receive depend on your place in the race. If you’re in first place when you drive over a power-up box, be prepared to groan as you consistently get shitty items. If you’re in dead last, get ready for lots of golden mushrooms (extremely powerful speed boosts), stars (speed boost + temporary invulnerability), blue shells (missiles that specifically target the guy in first place) and the like. Why does Mario Kart use this asinine Socialist reward system? My guess is that there are two reasons – (1) To make people who suck at the game feel better about themselves, and (2) Mario is a goddamn commie.
Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed the similarities before. Why do you think Mario wears red? For more proof, just do a Google image search for Stalin Mario, like I did. Goddamn I love the internet.
In Diddy Kong racing, you know what power-ups you’re getting. Red balloons will always give you missiles. Blue balloons will always give you speed boosts. In total, there are 5 categories of useful items, and if you hold on to an item received from one balloon type and drive over that same color of balloon again, it will “power-up” your item. Each type of item can be powered up twice, meaning each category has 3 levels of strength, for a total of 15 items you can use to get ahead of the other racers. Because they’re not randomized like in Mario Kart, you can strategize appropriately, and because the quality of the item doesn’t increase the worse you’re doing, it forces you to actually actively improve your gameplay rather than count on charity-based handouts.
3. Diddy Kong Racing has More Tracks
It’s time for some math. Mario Kart 64 has four “Cups” you can race for, and each “Cup” features a set of race tracks on which to play. In addition, the game has an unlockable “Battle Mode” with its own set of tracks where you and other racers can go head-to-head in a competition to be the last kart standing. Each “Cup” has 4 tracks, for a total of 16 normal race courses, and in addition there are 4 courses specifically for the Battle Mode game type. It is also possible to unlock “mirrored” or “flipped” versions of the original 16 race tracks, giving us a grand total of 16 + 16 + 4 = 36 tracks
Diddy Kong Racing features 25 normal race tracks, available in both Single Player Adventure and Multiplayer modes. As in Mario Kart, you can also unlock mirror-image versions of each of these tracks. There are also 4 “Battle Mode” style tracks. This gives us a total of 25 +25 + 4 = 54 tracks available for Single or Multiplayer. In addition, because Diddy Kong has an Adventure mode which Mario Kart lacks, the game also features 6 Boss tracks + 6 mirrored versions of these Boss tracks, or 66 total Single Player courses. Both of these numbers, you’ll notice, are higher than 36.
4. Diddy Kong Racing has More Vehicles
Although both Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing are essentially similar go-kart racing games, we’ve already seen that the latter has several features not found in the former. Not only is there an entire extra game mode, there are more tracks on which you and your friends can play. One of the biggest disparities between the two games, however, is the fact that Diddy Kong Racing far exceeds our kart-racing expectations by giving us an additional two vehicle types we can race in: A hovercraft and an airplane! Not every track supports all three vehicles, but most tracks allow you to choose between at least two of these, and probably 50% or more give you the option of using any one of the three.
Total vehicle types in Mario Kart = 1 (kart)
Total vehicle types in Diddy Kong = 3 (kart, hovercraft, plane)
If you count each track + vehicle combination as a separate race course experience, that brings the total number of playable courses in Diddy Kong to well over 100. I don’t even want to do the math.
5. Diddy Kong Racing has More of… Well, Everything Else
Diddy Kong Racing features more playable characters than Mario Kart. Both start out letting you choose between 8 playable racers, but Diddy Kong has two extra characters which can be unlocked during the course of play. Ten is more than eight.
Diddy Kong Racing has more multiplayer-friendly cheat codes than Mario Kart 64.
Diddy Kong (in my opinion) has better music, better graphics, and smoother gameplay than Mario Kart 64.
What is Mario Kart left with, in the end? Nostalgia? More familiar characters? The fact of the matter is, when all is said and done, it can’t stand up. And I’m not a Mario Kart hater! I love Mario Kart 64 – it’s a great game! However, if you haven’t given Diddy Kong Racing a chance – pick it up. It’s even better.
Mario Kart is down for the count! The title of Champion, and our Grand Prix cup, go to the spin-off of a spin-off.
Categories: Random, Reviews Tags: video game
2012 – Disaster Porn
Last November’s 2012, the movie inspired by the supposed Mayan prophecy about the end of the world, came out on DVD this week. Rob and I had a chance to see this film in the theater back when it first came out, and as soon as we arrived home we turned on a tape recorder and started chatting about the movie. I had all but forgotten about that conversation, but with the release of the DVD just two days ago, I figured I should finally get the transcript of our musings online. Here is the full 25-minute conversation between Rob and myself regarding 2012, when it was still fresh in our minds:
Rob: November 22, 2009 – We just saw 2012 in the theater. This is Rob and Andy. So where do we start?
Andy: Well, this is basically disaster porn, as you said, right?
Rob: Yeah, that’s what I heard it described as… and it really is. The plot… there’s a plot somehow. The world gets destroyed essentially is what happens.
Andy: Well, there’s a plot like any disaster movie, you know – there’s some bunk science, and it causes the oceans to rise, or the ice caps to melt, or, you know, earthquakes or whatever – it’s typical disaster stuff, except of course this is more global and more large scale, since it is the end of the world. But it’s the same basic formula – there’s some crappy science that kind of makes you giggle at first, followed by the introduction of all the characters, and they all have family conflicts and things, and…
Rob: Why don’t we start at the beginning, as far as main characters… what the fuck was that guy’s name? Adolpho or something?
Andy: I don’t know – John Cusack?
Rob: John Cusack. No no, the black guy – the scientist, who had a change of conscience or some bullshit.
Andy: Adrian.
Rob: Adrian, there we go. So Adrian goes to… India? Someplace…
Andy: Yeah, India. Really though, the details aren’t even relevant, that’s the thing.
Rob: Well no, here’s what happens – he goes deep underground, and like, the Earth is getting microwaved by neutrinos or… Q-particles, or… Q from Star Trek is doing it… we don’t really know what the fuck is happening. And yeah, it’s bizarre.
Andy: Well yeah, but I mean at least you know what to expect. I don’t think anyone is walking into this movie expecting it to be a great plot, or the tear-jerker of the century, or the, uh…
Rob: I cried.
Andy: Yeah, uh-huh. So it’s a typical disaster movie. It’s a “feast for the eyes” as far as special effects and everything – wasn’t this the highest budget movie to date or something like that?
Rob: Oh God, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Andy: I think I heard something like that; I may have been thinking about another movie. Maybe I was thinking about Avatar, actually – that wouldn’t surprise me either.
Rob: oh, Avatar is the one, yeah. Avatar was in the previews.
Andy: Okay, okay. Well, I’m sure that this was similarly very high budget, not only because they had a few good actors in there, who they probably had to pay a lot, but also… Well, all the actors really haven’t had good jobs in a while, but…
Rob: John Cusack? C’mon.
Andy: Well, I think maybe he was a higher-paid actor ten years ago. But anyway, you know what you’re getting. You know you’re going to get a lot of CGI, a lot of big scenes of people falling off cliffs, and things blowing up, and volcanoes, and tidal waves and everything… buildings falling down, that sort of thing. Like I said, you know what to expect. There aren’t going to be any surprises, really. You can predict right off the bat which characters are going to die, basically – I mean, we had walking in there and sitting down a debate as to…
Rob: …which tertiary character was going to get his ass handed to him.
Andy: Yeah, like… of the so-called main characters, the central cast of the movie… who’s going to be dying, who’s going to be living.
Rob: Well, you had your normal stereotypical American family – 2.3 kids… oh yeah, his son’s name is Noah, like the Bible…
Andy: Of course. There were all sorts of fun things like that, that were very obvious, but were clever in some sense… in a gross sense they were clever. You know… they had “arks;” the big ships to save everybody were “arks,” and then “Noah” was the guy’s kid… stuff like that. But we had a discussion as to which characters would die, and we pretty much called it. We knew right off the bat… as the movie started and as the characters were being introduced we could basically point up at the screen and say “That guy – that guy’s gonna live, or that guy’s gonna die.
Rob: The step dad, the bimbo, and the Russian guy. Both Russian guys.
Andy: Exactly. It followed a very tight formula for the most part, which is good and bad. I mean, it wasn’t a great movie, in any sense of the word, but it was kind of fun. I don’t know if I’d want to see it again…
Rob: It’s like a porno, you see it once and you know what happens.
Andy: Yeah, it was entertaining, it was a feast for the eyes, and it was very funny, too – there was a lot of comedy, which I think actually worked. There were a lot of scenes… whether they were intentional or not, I feel like a lot of it was fun and funny. And, you know, when you’re following a track like that, you don’t have to think as much, and the people making the movie don’t really have to put as much effort into it, which is good in the sense that they focus more on the aspects of the movie that you’re supposed to enjoy – the action scenes, and the…
Rob: The shit exploding…
Andy: Yeah, the explosions, and that kind of stuff, and all the funny ways they kill off characters – you can focus on that kind of stuff, and you don’t have to worry about the plot, or worry about the character development or anything because it’s not important, and they know it’s not important, because it follows a formula. So that’s good and bad – it’s not a great movie, but it was a solid, one-shot, um… pornographic, excessive disaster entertainment. So… what about specifics? You were taking notes during the movie, Rob…
Rob: Um… wow.
Andy: If you can make any sense of your notes.
Rob: Oh, I was keeping track of blatant product placement.
Andy: Oh yeah, that’s another thing – yes. I was thinking about that too; there is so much. Not only all the stuff in the store, because they go through a grocery store and there’s close-ups of…
Rob: Vault Cola…
Andy: Yeah, Vault, and all sorts of things… There was, um…
Rob: Caesar’s Palace…
Andy: Caesar’s Palace, Bentley… what was the other one towards the end…? There was another very obvious one… anyway, very very blatant stuff. And you see that a lot in these big budget, CGI disaster movies nowadays… Transformers, too, a kind of similar sort of thing, a similar movie in some sense – a big budget blockbuster with a lot of CGI – and there’s product placement all over the place. Very similarly, this was… every other shot was like a close-up of a Coke bottle or something. What else? What else do you have in your notes?
Rob: Never live in California.
Andy: Oh yeah! That’s right, it pretty much reinforces all of the things you hear about how California is going to fall off into the ocean if there’s another big earthquake, that kind of stuff. Which is, again, a strength of the movie – they play off a lot of stuff like that which people already know… most people don’t know about neutrinos and all that “science crap,” so they can get away with talking about all this bullshit physics that doesn’t make any sense…
Rob: Remember, the Earth is getting microwaved.
Andy: Right, I mean, they can get away with stuff like that, and that’s fine, because most people aren’t going to be bothered by it. But at the same time, they do run with these things that people do know, fears like “if California has all these earthquakes, there’s this fault line, and it’s going to fall into the ocean,” and they play off of things like that, and make it actually happen…
Rob: It didn’t fall into the ocean, it got swallowed wholesale.
Andy: Well, whatever. People feel… people can follow it a little easier. And so that’s smart, it’s smart movie making – it makes it much easier to write, because you can just focus on the other things if you’re following your track.
Rob: I also got… “crazy old man… Woody Harrelson”
Andy: Oh, Woody Harrelson, oh yeah. There was just a glimpse of him, through the woods in this one scene, and I turned to Rob and said “is that Woody Harrelson?” And it totally was, because he’s so recognizable, even when he’s in a wig and he has a full beard and this crazy get-up. He’s so instantly recognizable as “the crazy guy” that it really worked out well. He was just in Zombieland recently, too. Kind of a similar character.
Rob: Oh yeah. He was good in Zombieland.
Andy: Yeah. He wasn’t bad in this either – he was in this movie doing what he does very well, being the crazy guy.
Rob: Hiding in the bushes eating pickles and watching people take off their clothes.
Andy: Being the badass wild man, so it was interesting. Again, it was a character that fit a formula, it wasn’t really anything new, but he did it pretty well.
Rob: Oh, uh, maps. So they have to find this map to find out where the arks are to save their family or some bullshit, and he runs into the RV, or the minivan or whatever, as it’s on fire… it’s on fire, and there’s a stack of maps, and he goes through them one by one, looking for the right map. Is there a reason he doesn’t just grab the whole stack and run out, since he’s about to die?
Andy: There were lots of things like that…
Rob: The plane is about to take off and they’re about to say “fuck you, we’re going to leave you…”
Andy: As any typical “bad movie” or any typical disaster movie (of course all… well, not all, but most disaster movies are bad), there were a lot of things like that. Besides the science, there were a lot of moments where you just thought “what the hell?” Things like when the President says he’ll stay behind and the others are like “we respect his decision…” no, what the hell. You club him over the head and drag him onboard, like fucking B.A. Baracus trying to get on an airplane – you’ve got to drug him and put him in the cargo hold – you’re not going to leave the president behind. ”Oh, it’s okay, I’ll stay here and go down with the ship.” What? That doesn’t work. The White House is not a ship, you can’t go down with it. He’s unfit to command in that moment, and someone else should take over and drag him onboard. There were all sorts of ridiculous things like that which broke the suspension of disbelief or whatever, but again, who cares, really? You don’t have to really get into the movie and feel for the characters or believe what’s going on… you just want to see shit blow up. And along those lines, I think that the movie was fun, but it wasn’t very good… I think that I would much more enjoy 2012: The Video Game, or even more so, 2012: The Ride…
Rob: Yeah!
Andy: I want to go to Six Flags and I want to see 2012: The Rollercoaster, or even like the virtual thing where you sit in the thing that moves around with the screen, you know? One of those 3D theater rides where the seats move. That would be cool. And you know, I felt like I was in one of those theaters where the seats move around to the action on screen, only my seat wasn’t moving – that’s what it felt like. It was one of those kinds of movies. There were a lot of shots where you’re basically following behind the car or the plane…
Rob: And they’re flying under this stuff or over it…
Andy: Yeah, and the camera’s right behind the plane and you’re following it around as it’s barely missing things, flying under collapsing buildings and bridges, and it felt like my seat should be moving to the action. And I think it would be enjoyable, I think it would be a lot of fun to experience 2012: The Ride, or whatever… the motion simulator event. That seems like it would be more enjoyable than the movie. Same thing with a video game… I’m sure there’s going to be a video game tie-in, there almost always is with this kind of thing… but I don’t think it’s going to have a lot of replay value, probably, but it might be fun the first time, with a lot of near misses trying to escape from exploding shit, which is always fun. I think I would enjoy those more than the movie, is basically what I’m saying.
Rob: I’ve also got “cheesy love story between the main scientist and the president’s daughter.”
Andy: Yeah, of course, they had all sorts of ancillary love stories, and tried to have character development and have all these stories play out, but…
Rob: Why the fuck do we care?
Andy: Exactly. You don’t end up caring about any of the characters, really, you don’t feel for any of the characters… they could have just killed off one of the main characters randomly and no one would care. You’re not going to shed a tear, because you don’t really get into these characters enough to really care for them. And so I don’t know why they even felt it was necessary to have all these plot development moments. Except that, again, they’re following a track, and they’ve got to have the characters doing something, and interactions and conflicts and things – that’s just what they’re supposed to be doing.
Rob: Okay. So in Signs, the little girl has this thing where she puts glasses of water everywhere, in this one the main girl has a thing for hats. Again, why the fuck do we give a shit?
Andy: Yeah, there are little character quirks to try and flesh out the characters… by giving them quirks and personality traits and things, but no one really cares in the end. It seems like that’s wasted time. The time that’s spent explaining why this little girl likes to wear hats could have been spent showing more things blowing up.
Rob: Or not making it a three fucking hour long movie.
Andy: Yeah, that’s another thing… the movie was, what, two hours and 45 minutes or something ridiculous? It could have been two hours if they had removed almost an hour of footage of all this bullshit character development that didn’t work anyway, and the movie would have been tighter. Although, really, it didn’t feel that long. Some movies I just don’t like sitting through if they’re really long, but this one was long but actually didn’t feel that long, because at least I was enjoying myself – at least I was laughing at the bad things and enjoying the visual effects enough that I could kind of get into it. And I was also legitimately interested to see where they would take it. I actually was interested in the plot enough to kind of wonder about how it was going to end. I’m thinking to myself while I’m watching this if I was going to make this kind of movie – and you already know what the end is… it’s about the “end of the world” – but does that mean that the Earth is going to explode, does it mean there’s going to be a flood, whatever… you’re not really sure as it’s going along, you don’t really know ultimately what the end’s going to be, and so I found myself guessing “how are they going to end this? Are all the characters going to die? Are they going to get into a spaceship and fly off somewhere? What are they going to do? How are they going to wrap this up?” There’s got to be some kind of conclusion, an ending where they can have a final shot, pan out, and something happens. So I found myself want to know. Even if I had hated it and wanted to leave the theater – which I didn’t, I enjoyed it enough to stick around – but even if I had wanted to leave, I still would have been compelled to stay just to see how they resolve this. So it was compelling enough or interesting enough in that sense, where you think about it on a meta level, and go “okay, it’s a big disaster movie, how’s it going to be resolved?” And so that was interesting.
Rob: So what else we got? Oh, it sounded like Star Trek half the time, aside from the techno-babble – they have a situation room, emergency teams, a lot of that. Let’s see… Oh, we’ve got… I was hoping the last president would get crushed to death by the Washington Monument, which gets knocked down by a giant tsunami or whatever…
Andy: Yeah, me too.
Rob: Unfortunately, the last president was not killed by the Washington Monument, he was crushed to death by the John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier as it was flipped on top of him…
Andy: Although that’s also sort of ironic… although yeah, the last president getting killed by the monument to the first president would have been a little bit better.
Rob: I was hoping that would happen.
Andy: But the John F. Kennedy thing is also somewhat appropriate.
Rob: Let’s see, hmmm. ”The crust has shifted.” What is this, a pizza?
Andy: Yeah, more bullshit science… what were they saying about the crust getting unstable – “Oh no, we have to evacuate the Earth’s crust!” I mean, where are you going to go? Oh no, we’re being bombarded by neutrinos! Watch out for the accelerated particles! Try to dodge them!
Rob: The stupid tsunamis… so at one point a cruise ship gets completely flipped by a giant wave in the middle of the ocean, which is complete bullshit since tsunamis are like eight inches high in the middle of nowhere… I suppose if it’s a “super tsunami” or something it might be… ten inches tall? But not big enough to flip a cruise liner. What else… oh, animal air lift. They apparently flew elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses over the Himalayas and they somehow didn’t get killed.
Andy: That was pretty awesome. Again, there was a lot of comedy… I mean, there was some intentional comedy, and there was also some unintentional comedy – I assume it was unintentional, anyway, and maybe a mix of both – like when the characters are in the middle of the Himalayas and have just landed their Bentley basically out of the back of a cargo plane in the snow, and there are these other cars falling all around them… and they’re standing there, and see these helicopters with long ropes and harnesses carrying a giraffe… yeah, you see a giraffe first… this military helicopter with a giraffe dangling in this harness beneath it, flying through the Himalayas – it just comes out of nowhere, and it’s just such a surreal moment. It’s so ridiculous you can’t help but burst out laughing, which I’m sure was partly intentional, but there were a lot of scenes like that. But that’s part of what made it fun… had they taken themselves so seriously that they couldn’t put stuff like that in there, then it would have been a lot more painful to sit through for two and half hours or however long the movie was. But because they could laugh at themselves, and because they just threw ridiculous things like that in there, you know that they were having fun with it, and were just saying “Look, it’s a bullshit disaster movie, have fun with it.” And so that made me feel good, just seeing ridiculous moments like that, that just added to the enjoyment of it. Again, it’s not going to win any awards, except for maybe best special effects or whatever, but it was fun. There were a lot of surreal moments…
Rob: Watching St. Peter’s Basilica crush thousands of worshipers was pretty cool…
Andy: Yeah, there were a lot of ridiculously over-the-top or also just strangely surreal things in it that were enough to break the monotony. You know, seeing things blow up for hours on end can get kind of boring unless you make it interesting… unless you make interesting things blow up in interesting ways, unless you punctuate it with these…
Rob: It’s like a porno… you can only watch some guy having sex with some chick for so long… you have to add midgets, or a fat guy, or…
Andy: Well, a good porno is not just an hour of some guy thrusting into the same hole over and over… that’s not interesting…
Rob: Haha, what’s that quote from Idiocracy… “not just someone’s ass, but who’s ass? And why does it matter to us that we’re watching his ass?”
Andy: Exactly, that’s the thing… a good porno at least tries to have a plot, you need some kind of setup, right, and then also they change things up, you know? It’s not just the same thing, monotonous, over and over. Thirty seconds of that is enough, you have to change it up a bit. And so this movie was punctuated with enough surreal moments, enough humor, and enough little things… like if you look really closely in this one scene with all the CGI things happening, you can see a SUV as it’s being thrown by the upheaval of the street… it hits a pedestrian walking across a bridge or something. Little things like that which you kind of notice in the background… especially seeing it on the big screen… you can tell that the animators working on all the effects had a lot of fun coming up with little things like that, animating every single little thing that’s going on. And so there’s a lot of fun stuff to look out for that actually makes it interesting enough or fun enough to seem like it’s not really as long as it is. I didn’t get bored. It was not a bad experience. I wouldn’t want to see it again, necessarily, unless I was drunk and seeing it on DVD or something, if I could pause it and get up to go to the bathroom whenever I wanted… I wouldn’t want to sit for three hours and watch it in the theater again…
Rob: Oh, another thing that bothered me – the giant ships they all got saved on, the arks… had internal combustion engines… did you see the smokestacks? I’m just wondering why you would build a ship reliant on fossil fuels if there’s no landmass left. Just a question. You can’t really pull up to an Esso station in the middle of the fucking ocean and fuel up your ship…
Andy: You know what I was thinking, before the movie had ended, maybe halfway through, when the main plot had been established – namely, the characters are trying to get to these ships, right? And so the characters are trying to save themselves by getting to these ships and somehow escaping the disaster… once that plotline had been established, I found myself thinking maybe this movie will potentially set up a sequel that could be, potentially, more interesting than this one, you know what I mean? And I still feel that way, even after I was kind of let down by the ending a little bit, even after seeing the whole thing. I can’t help but think that, if done well (which may be hard), this movie could actually set up a sequel that could be better.
Rob: 2016: The Revenge of Man!
Andy: Well, the sequel could be interesting. At the same thing, it’s kind of unnecessary – you don’t really need a sequel.
Rob: Well, look to fanfic for that.
Andy: Well, that’s true. I just feel like you have some questions about “okay, now what?” What’s going to happen now?
Rob: It’s like that fucking one where the world freezes over and now we have to go to these third world countries we shit on all these years… we were bad, but we need to be better, because they took us in…
Andy: Well, see, that ends up setting up all sorts of more interesting scenarios – a sequel like that is not going to happen, I think, for obvious reasons, but a sequel like that I think could be focused less on big explosions and all the CGI and more on what are the consequences, what are the effects of this happening, you know. What happens next? And that could produce some interesting plot points. I mean, some movies – like Planet of the Apes, right, did the same sort of thing. I mean, Planet of the Apes happened, and Charlton Heston is there on the beach, and it’s like “Oh, it’s the Earth! It was the Earth all along! It’s in the future.” And you wonder what next, right? Now what happens? He’s sitting there on the beach… where does he go? What happens? And there were, like, 50 million Planet of the Apes sequels, and it worked for a little while. Some of the later movies, even though they weren’t very good, had some interesting points. And this is the same sort of thing. It could start, potentially… I don’t want to say a franchise… and you know, Hollywood loves to play it safe these days… if this does really well in theaters (which these sorts of things tend to do, at least in the opening couple of weekends), they might actually make a sequel or two… just because Hollywood loves trilogies, they love to make sequels to movies that did well, rather than have new ideas, and so you could see the sequel to 2012, and it could be horrible, maybe way worse than this one, or it actually might be interesting. They could answer interesting questions.
Rob: 2013.
Andy: So yeah, the movie actually made me think, on a sort of meta-level. On a cinematic level. I didn’t really care enough about the characters or the plot to care in that way, but I was thinking “what is Hollywood going to do next? Are they going to make a sequel? How are they going to do that?” And it was interesting. It was pornographic, and excessive, and…
Rob: Disaster porn.
Andy: Yeah, and a lot of CGI, but I still enjoyed it, and I still found it stimulating on some levels.
Rob: See it in the theater just to see it, and then watch it on HBO or whatever.
Andy: Yeah, it’s worth the money. It’s worth the $8.50 or the $10.00 or whatever for a ticket…
Rob: Second-run…
Andy: …if you go with somebody. Yeah, I’d say see it in a dollar theater a few months after it comes out, see it with some friends, you know, have a couple drinks beforehand, and don’t take it too seriously. It doesn’t take itself very seriously. You’ll enjoy it, I’d say. Maybe rent it on DVD and watch it on a big screen with friends, and have some drinks, and you’ll get a kick out of it.
A Better Internet Experience Through Tin Foil?
When the time came for us Disciples of Bloggism to move into our new home in Beaverton, Oregon, back at the end of last year, one of the first decisions we had to make was choosing an internet service provider. Now, we had a ton of different choices, and since Rob and I are the kind of people who need reliable, nearly 24/7 internet coverage when we’re at home, this was a relatively important decision for us. When we last lived together, a couple years back, we had bundled a home phone line and broadband internet together through Qwest. It wasn’t terrible service, but we weren’t exactly blown away, and our main motivation for going with Qwest last time was the relatively cheap price when you bought the phone line with the internet service. However, this time around we both agreed that a landline would be impractical, since we both have our cell phones on us 99% of the time and our coverage in that area is great. Comcast was an option, although we had heard plenty of horror stories from friends and acquaintances with Comcast whose internet connections were less reliable than they would have liked. After some shopping around, we decided to try out Clear, a relatively new service here in Portland, from the Seattle-based service provider Clearwire.
If you’re not familiar with Clear, they offer what they refer to as “mobile internet” through their “WiMax 4G technology.” Expanding on the “access the web through your cell phone” trend that’s been driving the development of new phone hardware and software for the past few years, Clear provides relatively high-speed wireless access to the internet remotely in several cities around the country. They started out in Seattle, then added towers in Portland, and have begun expanding their reach beyond the Northwest, with plans to peddle their wireless wares in almost a hundred more cities over the next year or two. Besides offering wireless-receiving modems for home internet use, Clear provides the option of purchasing little receivers you can plug into your laptops to connect to the Web almost anywhere around town – this mobile option, and the relatively low price of their service plans, were a couple of the main reasons we chose to get our internet access through Clear.
However, this is starting to sound like a paid endorsement for the company’s internet service, so let me get to the point: Clear’s coverage offers both the benefits and downsides of any major cell phone service provider – if you have a mobile access receiver, you can supposedly go all around town with a reliable internet connection, but the service is very spotty once you leave the heart of downtown, and lots of things can interfere with your signal strength, trees and buildings included. We have yet to make use of the supposed mobility offered by Clear, and have only set up a home modem for our local internet needs – and since we’re out West of Beaverton, somewhat in “the boonies” relative to the heart of downtown Portland, our connection has usually been questionable at best. Review after review has said more or less the same thing – that the ability to access the internet at a reasonable speed all over the city is an awesome feature, albeit one with a cost at this relatively early stage of the technological game: put a couple of walls between you and the open air, and the signal goes to shit. Bump the modem or turn the antenna on the receiver the wrong way, and the signal goes to shit. Hell, if you even walk across the street from a high-signal area you may find yourself in a proverbial dead zone. Still, the potential mobility may be worth it for some, especially if you’ll be spending your time mainly in areas with moderate-to-high coverage. We have yet to be so lucky, even though Clear’s map of coverage in the Portland area clearly (no pun intended) shows that we should be doing just fine:
If we put the modem in its most natural position in our home, out of the way of normal foot traffic and out of sight, near the wireless router and next to similar home electronics, our signal is at best one bar out of a possible five. Put the modem right next to a window, practically up against the glass, and our signal increases, perhaps to a peak of two bars, occasionally three (in the best of weather conditions) – however, it is unfortunately unreliable, even peeking out at the blue sky through an open window (and our apartment is on the second of two stories). This has been a significant frustration in the past month, especially after purchasing our brand new Xbox (see a few posts down), and dropping often and unexpectedly from our Halo 3 matches on Xbox Live.
Frustrated, I refused to accept that there was nothing we could do to cheaply and easily increase our signal strength at home, and so Rob and I tried to come up with possible solutions. Perhaps, I suggested, we could rig some sort of antenna with a coat hanger or similar object and attach it somehow to some internal part of our modem, and run the contraption out the window. However, this idea was quickly vetoed, due to equal parts (1) uncertainty about how exactly these electronic thingamajigs work; and (2) unwillingness to go fiddling around with something we’d probably have to pay to replace (especially if the fiddling around presented the potential to burn our apartment down or cause grievous bodily injury to ourselves in the process). Perhaps we could buy a commercial signal booster or other such item, but if we were willing to spend money on one of those, we might as well spend it switching service providers. Was there nothing we could do?
Then, an idea came to me in the middle of the night (as ideas are wont to do), fueled perhaps by a few fingers of Scotch and an evening of cheesy 1950s Sci-fi movies. What if I made a deflector dish of sorts out of aluminum foil, and placed it behind the modem, facing out the window? Could such a thing work? I had never heard of this sort of thing being done before, but based on my rudimentary understanding of scientific principles, I figured it was worth a shot. I resolved to try out my crazy scheme the next day.
After heading out to meet with some friends over coffee the next morning, I returned home and hopped online, finding the signal as finicky as ever. It looked to become a dreary day, with some potentially serious weather looming on the horizon, and apparently the signal had been iffy all morning. As I sat at my computer, testing the signal strength and testing my patience for about an hour, the best our modem was able to manage that day was a measly one bar, and even that for only a few minutes at a time, before going out again and searching for a signal. I decided that now was the time to test my idea, and so I bounded into the kitchen seeking our handy roll of aluminum foil. Admittedly, I felt very silly tearing off sheets of foil and shaping them ever-so-carefully around our modem, and I’m glad no one was around to see. It felt like superstition, pseudoscience, but I felt that it had potential so I had to give it a whirl.
It keeps the gub'ment from reading my mind!
Lo and behold, as soon as I put that tinfoil dish behind our modem, the signal jumped from an unreliable one bar all the way up to FOUR BARS, higher than I think we had ever received before, and it didn’t go down all day. Had my crazy idea really worked? Could three cents worth of aluminum foil really give us such a drastic increase in signal strength and stability? Our connection remained strong the rest of the day, but I was still unconvinced – it could have been a coincidence, or there could have been a hidden variable I was failing to notice. That night, around midnight, as I was preparing for bed, I decided to carefully and delicately remove my two-sheet addition, doing so without touching the modem, and see whether its absence would affect the signal. As soon as that foil was away from our modem, the signal strength immediately dropped down from four bars to two. Eureka!
Since that night, I’m still working on perfecting the shape/placement of our tin foil dish for maximum effect, but I have to say I’m generally impressed with the results of my crazy experiment. Our signal is still often at four bars, a strength we never achieved before, and although there are still occasionally days and times of weak connectivity, in general I think I can show that we do better with the foil than without. And apparently other people have come up with similar ideas: Science is so… fucking… cool.
Categories: Adventures, Random Tags:
Alpha Omega Elite. Supergate II. Superyard XT.
What do these names bring to mind?
A : Some futuristic device?
Or
B : Safety products for children?
If you guessed “A”, you’d be wrong.
The Alpha Omega Elite appears to be some form of restraint system for use with small children. We have no idea why it’s called this. I would, however, purchase this if someone said “You too can protect your childw ith the Alpha Omega Elite”. I wouldn’t even ask what it did, I’d buy it. Is there a regular Alpha Omega? If there were, I wouldn’t want to buy it if the “Elite” version was out there.
Next we have the “Supergate III”. We couldn’t find Supergates I and II, so we assume they were total failures. But Supergate III must be good… right? What does it do? Does it keep Superman in? Or out? Does that mean it’s made of Kryponite? I don’t think’d want my kids exposed to that…
And to round out the triumverate of awesomely named children’s restraints we have:
Now, the Superyard XT (We assume the “XT” stands for “Xtrememly Terrifying”). It appears to be a playpen of some sort, but why is it “Super”? Does it contain the Superfriends? Does it make your yard award winning? And why the XT? The box itself brings up many questins, I wonder what it’d be like to set up.
Anyone have any other awesomely named products to share? If so send them our way!
disciples.of.bloggism@gmail.com
Random Item of the Day
I found these wandering around vancouver. It’s a “Toy Bricks Set”…. that looks remarkably like a Lego set. Although i’m sure it doesn’t cost as much as real Legos do. A quick scan of the Toys “R” Us site shows several Lego sets at over $120. I’ve heard of some sets costing over $600. Which is insane. But, then again, some guy is locked in a room somewhere with lots of coffee and a pile of Lego’s designing the darned things.
Some other fun factoids about Lego:
The produce roughly 600 pieces a second.
Worn-out molds are encased in the foundations of buildings to prevent them from falling into competitors’ hands.
The former is just crazy, and the latter seems a tad paranoid…
Can’t sleep… molds are gonna get me…
Categories: Random Tags:
Random Item of the Day
Not as much of a random item, more of a ripoff! I found these toys in a Dollar store in Vancouver BC. They’re obvious ripoffs… lets see if you can figure out what they’re ripping off…
Here we have “Air Battle” and “Land Battle”. Look familiar? Unfortunately there wasn’t a “Sea Battle”. I wonder why… Oh, right, that product already exists!
Close enough.
Moving on. The rules for “Air Battle” are as follows…
Object of the Game :
To Destroy your opponent’s hidden plane fleet (four planes).To Play the Game:
1. Each player secretly puts his own 4 planes either horizontally or vertically inside his own sky grid. After the player placed all planes on the sky grid he cannot change the position of his planes anymore.2 Each player calls out one shot on his turn turn and aims at one position of his opponent’s sky gird by using a letter and a number (e.g. D6)
3. After your opponent fires a shot, you must immediately tell his whether his shot has hit or not. If his shot is a hit, mark your own sky grid with a red peg and declare which plane is hit. Otherwise mark your sky grid with a green peg.
4. The player who fires the shot records the result on his target grid using a red peg for a hit and green peg for a miss.
5. When all holes of a plane have been hit, the plane is shot down and it will be removed from the sky grid.
6. The first player who destroys all his opponent’s planes (totally 12 holes) will be the winner of the game.
I love the “Totally 12 holes” part. No, that isn’t a typo. That’s just what it says. I didn’t get the rules for “Land Battle”, but I’m willing to bet they’re the same…
Categories: Random Tags:
Things to Do in an Airport
So you’re stuck in the airport with three hours before your flight takes off because of increased security. Or maybe someone just had a bad burrito for lunch. Whatever the reason, you’re required to be there. What can you do to pass the time? With the new security measures in place, you can’t bring any carry-on’s, so rule out books, magazines, or any other traditional distraction, except maybe your laptop if you get lucky. That leaves you with…
1. Write a blog entry. Use this time to update your friends, colleagues, and random strangers on your life. Or on whats going on in the airport. Did you know that flight 87 is now on final call?
I’m sorry I haven’t updated in a while, but now that I have the time…
2. Go through security for several times just to get pat down. Gives you a bit of exercise, lets you meet new and exciting people (like that family of seven from Nebraska visiting great Auntie Izzie). And hey, some of these guys are pretty friendly… maybe a bit too friendly…
Sir, i’m going to have to ask you to remove your pants.
3. As the clerks in every store how much everything costs. Everything. Because hey, they’re just as bored as you are. Their job is to stand there and watch people not buy things since they can’t put them anywhere. Seems like a sweet job until you realize they have to stand there all day.
“What? No I don’t work today, I’m playing hockey at two.”
4. Count the tiles in the bathroom. When all else fails, go lay down in the restroom and count the tiles on the ceiling. Once you’re got an accurate count, give them all names.
There’s jim and.. uh.. alex.. no.. dammit!
A Sign of the Impending Zombie Apocolypse?
While at a popular bookstore the other day, I couldn’t help but notice an interesting trend while perusing the New Fiction table. See if you can spot it:
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Need a hint? Here’s the same photo with some red circles to help:
Still need some help figuring it out? Notice how it says “New” fiction hardcovers on that little black sign there. Amazingly, the authors of all three of the circled books are dead! To be honest, I think the authors of at least a couple other books on the table are deceased too, but at a glance I only noticed the three. Let’s see just what they are.
Book 1: The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
The Gathering Storm is the latest in a long-running epic fantasy series known as The Wheel of Time. The first volume of the series was released in 1990, and the latest, published this October, was #12. The brainchild of James Oliver Rigney, Jr., writing under the pen name Robert Jordan, the series is known for its length, girth, breadth, size, mass, wordcounts, and weight. Originally intended as a 6-book series, Jordan soon realized that the story he set out to tell could not be wrapped up in six volumes, due in part to his long-winded writing style and the massive scope of the complex plotlines he had created in the first three or four novels. He soon doubled his estimate, intending to end the series in twelve novels. Volume eleven was published in 2005, after which Jordan promised his faithful readers that the next book in the series would be the last, no matter how long it turned out to be. The only problem is, Mr. Jordan died in 2007 from a rare blood disease called cardiac amyloidosis! After some scrambling on the part of his widow and publisher, it was decided to pass the torch for the final novel to another fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson, who began his work assisted by the copious notes left behind by his predecessor. However, due to the amount of material still left to write, it was decided that the “final” novel be split into thirds, released one each year in 2009, 2010, and 2011. The Gathering Storm represents the first third of that meganovel, essentially.
Book 2: Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton, king of the airport bookstore and crown prince to the page-to-screen blockbuster empire, medical expert and creator of the smash television hit E.R., died of throat cancer in 2008. However, as I am beginning to learn, death is no barrier to getting your work published, at least if you have (had) the right credentials! Pirate Latitudes was discovered on the late author’s computer, unfinished but more or less whole, by one of his personal assistants. The book is set in the 17th century Caribbean, and features (you guessed it) everyone’s favorite scurvy scourges of the sea, pirates! Need we say more? Well, I will. There was another more-or-less finished novel on Crichton’s computer that is slated to be released in 2010. And if that wasn’t enough, the film rights to Latitudes have already been optioned by… Stephen Spielberg! How droll. I suppose it would be more appropriate if Spielberg were dead.Book 3: The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov
The third of our zombie authors with new books out probably stinks a bit worse that his compatriots; he has been dead since 1977. Vladimir Nabokov, part of a proud literary tradition of mad Russians, is often cited as one of the most important authors of the last century, which might be how he can get away with putting out new material 32 years after his death. He is perhaps best known for his Lolita, but I’m waiting for the sequel which he’s undoubtedly working on as we speak. If only we could all be so productive after our lives have been extinguished. The Original of Laura was actually the novel Nabokov was working on when he died, but all that existed of it at the time of his death were a series of handwritten notecards with a very rough version of the story written on them. Although the author asked his son to burn these should he pass away before finishing the novel, the cards instead sat for the past 30 years in a safe-deposit box in Switzerland, until the son decided to publish the fragmentary manuscript and frighten us all just a little with another new novel from an old dead guy. Interestingly, the published hardcover book is page after page of high-resolution scans of the actual index cards, accompanied by the printed text of each. Why it was published this way and not as an actual novel is somewhat of a mystery, but it is sure to be a work of great curiosity to any Nabokov fan. Michael Crichton was apparently one of those (a Nabokov fan) by the way. If it turns out that Nabokov was Robert Jordan’s long lost uncle our little macabre circle will be complete.
So we’ve moved from novels about zombies to novels written by zombies, and judging by the popularity of Stephanie Meyer books recently, novels read largely by brain-dead zombies as well.