A Better Pic

I've had some questions about what my handle kog3100 stands for. There's been some inquiry as to just what it is a I look like. I realise the little pic to the right of my blog intro is less than no help in giving readers an idea of just what I look like.

I like to retain online anonymity, but this 'blog really isn't well-known, and we're all good friends here, right?

I won't do this but this once. I'm pasting in a recent pic of myself that ought to clear up the mystery. I'm still being free with my real name and other particulars, but its something.

Scroll down to see it, since I don't really want it to come up on thumbnail previews of this page.

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Hope that clears up any lingering interest.

More Film Bits

Alice In Wonderland. Partly a sequel to the book and Disney film, with aspects of Through the Looking Glass incorporated. The title is almost incorrect. If you like Tim Burton you know what to expect with this film. Highlights for me were the Mad Hatter’s (Depp’s) recitation of the Jabberwock verses, any appearance by Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, and the White Queen’s (Anne Hathaway’s) visceral squeamishness. Anyone notice how much Hathaway looked and acted like Tim Burton’s ex Lisa Marie? I still get a chuckle remembering Depp’s statement about Alice defeating the Jabberwock: ‘On that day, I shall futterwacken… vigorously.’


District 9. I was hoping this would be good, but it surpassed all my expectations. Blackly funny at times, it also contains some of the most harrowing scenes I can remember in any recent film… all due to Sharlto Copley’s incredible improvised performance. The rest of the film is certainly awesome, especially considering the budget. But the lead is such a believable everyman that the film could’ve been about making brownies and it still would have been entertaining. About the only criticism I’d have would be the heavy-handedness of placing a film about segregation and prejudice in South Africa. It makes a great and unique setting visually, but is really REALLY on the nose.


The Taking of Pelham 123. My expectations for this were pretty low, but I wanted to see Travolta’s psycho villain. It was better than I thought it would be and is pretty tense in places. Denzel and Travolta were both good, and both played very flawed, mistake-capable men. The direction and camera work might not be to everyone’s taste, but its Tony Scott, one of foundational directors for the jittery, ‘music video’ film style. Its been done to death perhaps, but he is the master of it.


Lone Wolf and Cub: Final Conflict (In That Little Hand). I had this on VHS ages ago, but bought it recently on DVD, so it got a rewatch. Frequently touted as the seventh and last film in the Kozure Okami film series, this is actually misleading since the film has little connection to the famous series from the seventies that starred Tomisaburo Wakayama apart from the title characters. New leads and a new style for a film made years after the original films stopped being made and the manga had ended. This movie is very revisionist, frequently putting spin on familiar scenes in the story. Even lead actor Tamura Masakazu is a completely different sort of Itto Ogami, making a much more emotional ‘hero’. He’s good but it rather works against the traditional story, which may have been the point. Ogami in the manga and previous films is supposed to be an immovable rock of a man. Centered in honor, but driven by vengeance to the point of being inhuman. The only one who regularly gets Ogami’s humanity to show is his son Daigoro. The kid is the lens through which the reader/viewer gets to sympathize with Ogami’s plight. With a less stoic Ogami, Daigoro’s role is seriously watered down. This film is well-known in cult circles for providing the ending to the story that the original film series never did. The conclusion here is heartrending (as is the whole film) but not a patch on the finale in the manga. I could recommend this film to anyone who wants a very melancholy style of action film, but Lone Wolf and Cub fans will have to be somewhat open-minded.


Ip Man. Donny Yen as the 20th century’s most influential wing chun sifu, who would later gain fame as Bruce Lee’s first formal instructor. This is a great film. I don’t know how accurate Donny is as Ip Man, but he does a good job with both the acting and the action. The fights as expected are awesome (thanks again, Sammo), but as has been common in martial arts films of late, a lot of questions get raised about the reasoning and practicality of their practice. In this case, Ip Man is kind of an idle dilettante just breezing through life practicing kung fu until the Japanese occupation prior to World War 2 crashes down on his reality. As has also been typical in these films recently, the Japanese get a much more even-handed treatment then they did back in the 60s and 70s. The trailers make the sequel to this film look even better, with Sammo actually stepping in front of the camera to fight Donny. Hopefully the results will be as awesome as they were in Killzone.

Ass Worship vol. 11. The level of talent on display in this… what? What the hell is this doing in the list. Uh…

I Love You Man. Paul Rudd doing exactly what you’d expect in this movie. A great premise, and executed pretty well. I’m not sure the character of his new buddy is quite extreme enough, but that probably made this film more believable. Part of the new breed of R-rated Apatow-ish comedies. More heartfelt and a little less about dick jokes. Has a great gag reel in the extras. While it is more of an odd-funny than a laugh-out-loud-funny thing, Rudd’s awkward, attempted-hip phrases were a highlight.


Halloween II. Rob Zombie’s followup to his 2007 film. I like Rob. He’s my favorite modern renaissance dude. I’m typically more lenient on his movies than the critics are. This one’s no exception. In the same way Rob transitioned to a harsher, grittier view when he followed House of 1000 Corpses with The Devil’s Rejects, his sequel to Halloween is a bleaker, more violent extension of the story. Michael Myers moves through the story almost as an elemental force (like Godzilla is frequently portrayed) and the story in Halloween II is mostly not about him. It is about the after effects of the first film on almost everyone else that survived. I’m partly convinced the poor reception to the film was its defiance of expectations as a horror film. It examines inherited insanity, the cult of celebrity, efficacy of psychoanalysis, and people putting their lives back together after a tragedy. The version I saw, the director’s cut, is apparently radically different than the theatrical version, including the ending. I’ll need to see the other cut and compare. About the only thing that really bothered me was the overuse of Michael’s hallucinations. In the first film, one of the scariest things was Michael’s descent into insanity as a child, the outward manifestation AND the viewers’ guesses as to what was going on inside. In this film, you see what is going on inside… and it is rather blah and disappointing

From One Who Should Know

This is a list of 'life rules' Bill Gates apparently laid out in a fairly recent High School speech. Sent to me by a friend whose political views on paper wouldn't seem to line up with mine, but in practical terms she and I find a lot to agree upon. Frankly most men would be willing to overlook a lot of differences in opinion given how attractive this girl is. Ahem.

Anyway, the list:

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world doesn't care about your self-esteem.. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault , so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now.. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

The Grail

There are rarer video games. There are more expensive video games. But THIS one is THE one I've wanted most for a long, LONG time. And it has always been more than I could financially justify despite my raving lust for Technosoft shooters. But I landed a good price for one sans a spine card... and had my fingers crossed it was in good shape.

As it turns out, it looks mint.

Now like Wayne Campbell's Fender, it rests at last in my hot little clutches. I don't know if this was actually Technosoft's last game (released 1996 five years before they folded), but it is certainly amongst the last. And a game for that pinnacle of 2d shooting goodness the Sega Saturn, no less.

Can't wait to fire this sumbitch up!

Confession Time

The Devil's Own Box of Colors

Several weeks ago I was on an online gaming forum and confessed a secret shame.

I play Bejeweled 2. On my Xbox 360. And not just a little bit.

If you are not in the video game know, this is shameful because I will now have to go before the Grand Vidyageam Tribyoonal and tender my Hardcore Card.

Normally, I don’t put much stock in labels in general… casual/newb versus hardcore/true doesn’t mean much to me in ANY of the fangeek shit I’m involved in. This includes video games. BUT. In gaming at least most of my tastes tend to fall naturally into the various hardcore-centric genres, with the occasional foray into mainstream games and then, once in a blue moon, a so-called casual game. It is just how my tastes run, being as old as I am, and given the fact that oldschool game genres have acquired the patina of hardcoreness over time… as in, you’d HAVE to be hardcore to still be playing that old/simplistic/difficult shit.

But Bejeweled 2, as a game, dips into a rarely experienced level of casual-ness for me. Let’s put it this way; It is always on those bargain spin racks of jewel-cased PC software that are omnipresent at every electronics store or electronics departments in catch-alls like Target or Walmart. This game is displayed there like gum or mints would be racked up in the checkout aisle at the grocery store. So this thing is an ‘ooh puzzle game, pretty colors’ impulse buy for any grannie or schlub that might have a PC.

I bought it from the Xbox Live Arcade service because I just wanted something to fall back on that wasn’t too difficult, had simple controls, and wouldn’t mean much to me. Sort of video game meditation, in a way. For those times I wanted brightly-colored entertainment that didn’t require any sort of exertion or investment on my part.

The simple and meditative part was (somewhat) correct. Otherwise, my assumptions about the game were a huge error in judgment. Because you see, the other part of the Bejeweled problem is:

I totally suck at it.

There it is. An uber-casual game (but that shouldn’t matter I tell myself) kicking my ass. As an added affront to all things that make me ME, this game is subverting my indifference to the achievements that are part of the current game generation.

Normally I think achievements (or trophies on the PS3) are okay, not something I’d go out of my way to obtain unless they were adjacent to my own personal goals in a game, ie in Bayonetta I really want to explore the game world, so the achievement for finding all the Alfheim Portals lines up with that. I’ll make the effort to backtrack and do what is necessary to get that achievement. It isn’t much extra effort. Many achievements are tied to finishing the game or beating a boss or whatever. That’s all good, but really no big deal since that stuff is usually part of successfully playing most games.

Bejeweled is giving me such a hard time that the basic achievements for each game mode (but particularly the standard Classic mode) are now looking like badges of honor that I really need to claim to justify the time I’ve spent. And I have been blown away by how utterly I fail to even get close.

This has made me re-assess a few things about myself, puzzles, and puzzle games in general. Trying to discover what made this game so difficult for me is leading, inexorably it seems, to the conclusion:

I may be shitty at all sorts of strategic/thinking person’s pursuits.

Now this particular revelation may not seem like much of a big deal. So what, yeah?

The big deal is that I always kind of assumed… for all of my not-inconsiderable years… that I was smart enough or clever enough to just be ‘naturally good’ at puzzle games or strategic thinking stuff all around. The full assumption is like this; puzzles and strategic pursuits (chess, RTS video games, etc) are in the ‘realm of the intelligent’ and that one’s ability to ‘solve’ these sorts of things is directly proportionate to one’s intelligence. The smarter you are, the easier puzzles and brainy pursuits as a whole should be.

Now objectively that may not actually be true. I’m sure there are plenty of intelligent people who are shite at puzzles or certain strategy/cerebral pastimes. But for me, and the type of intelligence I’ve prided myself on having, this correlation has always been assumed… even if mostly subconsciously.

While I don’t think I lord it over people and I do TRY to be well-rounded and well-grounded enough not to come off as some elite intellectual tit, I still take a certain pride in my education, my desire to continue to learn, my ability rapidly assimilate and retain information and my logical approach to problem solving. It is what has allowed me to do well most any place I’ve been employed of course, and it is what allows me to traverse a lot of different fanboy arenas, material from which frequently surfaces here on this ‘blog.

So it might not be accurate, but it has always SEEMED, that with that sort of brain thinky type games should be (generally) a snap, or at least a modicum of ability would be natural. Now that I’ve discovered I may be crap at this sort of pursuit, it is making me call into question just how smart I am REALLY.

Have I overestimated myself? Am I guilty of pride and arrogance over my own smarts? For years and years?

There wouldn’t be quite this deep a personal examination over just the one casual puzzle game, Bejeweled 2. But in asking myself the question ‘why is this so hard?’ after a particularly grueling session of having my ass handed to me, I was trying to think up similar instances where I DID perform to expectations, I started to realize there may not be any. Or very few.

Through my kid and teen years I tried my hand at go, shogi, chess, on-paper puzzle games (crosswords, word searches, etc). Remembering back, I think I’m realizing I was never good at any of it. I have always played, losing or failing to finish most of the time, but always moving on with the dismissive thought ‘well, I could win if I really put my mind to it’. I have since that time just assumed I didn’t make time to practice that stuff because there were so many things to be interested, but that if I HAD practiced, it would’ve been almost record time that I would’ve gotten proficient or competitive. Shit, I LEARN everything else in short order, why would this brainy game stuff be any different?

I don’t think I believe this anymore. I think that on some level, I realized that it was going to be a lot of work to get good at ANY of it, and I justified not putting the effort in by labeling it ‘easily do-able for my big brain’ and moving on. It may not be important in a real sense, but it is rather disturbing to find something you’ve taken for granted about yourself to be fundamentally untrue. Cripes, its taken this long to figure this out? Or rather be honest about it?

In my early adult years, I had a friend who really liked chess. I thought I did too. But looking back on all the times I played and lost (usually badly), and all the many more times I put off having a game with him, I think I liked the IDEA of chess… what it is, a strategy game about a stylized battle with medieval trappings… but I was not keen on how I sucked at it (understandable) but was in denial about how much work I’d have to do to overcome the suckage because obviously if you’re smart there shouldn’t be that much work.

Maybe I’m being silly. Maybe I’m sort of stuck recalling only the incidents in which I failed or ducked, and not remembering times when I did fine. Maybe even performed as expected. I CAN come up with a few successes.

For every success however, it appears there are two or more failures. I got through World of Goo in record time. Portal, no problem either. No hints, no guides, no walkthroughs. But let me boot up Braid, and I’m totally lost. I can’t believe how incredibly obscure this game is to me. And looking about on the internet it seems I’m just about the only one! I’m also working on a color matching puzzle mode on the DS game Magnetica. I’m appalling at it. This game should’ve clued me in that I’d suck at Bejeweled, but I just didn’t ‘get it’ back when I started it. I’ve tried a few Sudoku puzzles. I can do the easy ones no problem, but once I start getting into middle difficulty (of course what constitutes what difficulty is probably widely variable) I get stuck like a dingleberry on a sheepdog.

And I can literally remember thinking ‘enh, I don’t have time for this kid stuff, but I could totally dominate if’n I wanted to.’.

I’ve always wanted to learn shogi. I’ve owned a set for years. But it is so much like chess that deep down I’ve probably avoided it like I have chess. When an XBLA version came up, here was a chance to play this game and learn it without embarrassing myself with real players. Not that there is a surfeit of shogi players where I live. There’s even awesome, detailed tutorials, and CPU players to practice with.

I can’t even get close to beating the level one rube CPU guy.

This discovery about myself isn’t life-changing. Really, it isn’t even as big an event as the existence of this ‘blog entry is making it out to be. Mostly it’s humorous to me. But there is still a mild level of shock, bewilderment, and disappointment at this. There shouldn’t be a lot of stock put in ‘puzzle skills’… but to find out you’ve got nothing where you always assumed there was something… man. Especially if, like me, you were so sure… you had so totally assumed. Its like finding out a bank account doesn’t really have any money in it, and what’s more the firm you assumed was paying a dividend into it really wasn’t!

I think it fair in the cosmic sense that I have to work to be good at these things. There isn’t truly some law or logic to thinking that because one is reasonably intelligent, or educated, or intuitive that you should just naturally be good at anything. I’m certainly not entitled to a natural skill. If asked directly I wouldn’t have said a smart person ‘HAS to’ be good at puzzles. At most I’d say ‘it wouldn’t surprise me’ if a smart person tended to be good at puzzles. But at heart, I’d say I believed the first quote. It isn’t so easy to shake that conviction, if you’ve held it all your life, no matter how untrue.

Failure to stop believing it also leads me to believe maybe I ain’t so damn smart. I don’t think I ever was. Huh.

Postscript:

After my forum confession I was pointed to a site dedicated to acquiring achievements. The site tells you how to win by any means necessary including various forms of cheating or subverting the designers’ intentions.

Now some achievements and the methods expected to get them are stupid. Stupider than stupid. So some fiddling with fairness might be justified. But for someone like me… who cares? I don’t care about right and wrong in getting achievements because I’m not in it to collect the damn things anyway! I think my online buddy’s point was to just let me acquire the damned thing and put Bejeweled 2 behind me, but doing that just isn’t my way. Using underhanded means would just rankle and eat at me. Like I hadn't really gotten the better of the game, and that is the whole point of frustration in the first place. I’d be far more likely to get satisfaction out of taking a game disc outside, breaking it, then setting it on fire. I may not be smarter than the game, but I can still kill it. Who has the power now you little plastic fuck?

I looked at the site anyway. I’m not averse to getting strategy tips and advice on how to be a better player and I knew that for some achievements you just need to be good. Lo and behold, the achievements I wanted were exactly like that. You can’t really fake your way to them.

There was a perversely comforting aspect to the site's comments about the game. They rated the game 9 out of 10 for difficulty in acquiring the achievements in Bejeweled 2. Not only can you not cheat, but the goals set by the designers require a ton of practice, time, and luck to get! Quote: ‘If you are looking for a quick set of points to boost your Gamerscore, look elsewhere.’.

Now I don’t feel quite so much like the grannies and schlubs can do it but I can’t.

THIS

From an article on Yahoo! News this morning:

"In some respects, GenMe seems to want to have their cake and eat it too. That is they want high pay and status but aren't as interested in burning the midnight oil. "Given that GenMe values extrinsic rewards more than Boomers did, the combination of not wanting to work hard but still wanting more money and status verifies the sense of entitlement many have identified among GenMe," researchers write in an article published online this month by the Journal of Management.

The fact that GenMe individuals tend to dislike working overtime while also expecting higher status and compensation at work shows a disconnect between their expectations and reality, one that indicates a sense of overconfidence and even narcissism, said Twenge, who is also an author of "The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement" (Free Press, 2009) and "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before" (Free Press, 2007)."


So now there's hard data being collected on young peoples' laziness. Awesome. Whole article here:http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100310/sc_livescience/biggenerationgapsinworkattitudesrevealed

Calling kids these days GenMe is lame though. I'm not sure I like 'millenials' very much, but its better than GenMe. Blech. But the topic is relevant given this 'blogs previous mentions (okay, rants) about entitlement.

Alone In The Dark

Watched almost all of a DVD set of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. I have one episode left, the last one… one of my favorites. Or I recall that it was.

I remember being a kid staying up late all alone (Mom and bro already off to bed), lights out watching this program before the CBS Late Movie came on. Kolchak’s whistle and the rest of the ominous theme song usually heralded some pretty good scares for the school age kid I was back then.

I wasn’t expecting the shows to be particularly scary watching them as an adult. As a child in the mid-70s I bought into the production values, the appearance of the characters and monsters, and the various traditions and tropes in television at that time. Buying the set recently, I knew this was going to be more of a nostalgia trip and not so much to actually re-experience those old thrills.

I also had the side mission of hopefully providing more fright show fodder for my own kids. If you’re a sadist like me who wants to put their kids through the horror grist mill, you probably know that scary shows that are kid appropriate can be pretty thin on the ground. I’d been letting them watch the occasional Hammer horror film but I needed more material.

As expected, Kolchak didn’t turn out to be very scary. There were moments where I definitely could see what was scary about them… what would definitely have been frightening to a kid but were more on the level of 'creepy' now. Spoiler: Kolchak sewing up the mouth of the sleeping zombie, or the old crone demon leering out of the dark… yep, those would have a kid lying awake in bed. But some of the monsters are dumb or crippled by bad makeup and effects. I might not have rolled my eyes at the time (there wasn’t much that was a lot better) but MY own kids brought up on Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter sure might. They’ll still be scared by some of it, but for them the monsters will alternate episode-to-episode between comedy and terror I think. The budgets for each episode seemed to get smaller as they went along. In early episodes there’s dudes fighting armies of cops, and invisible entities powering through concrete walls in slow motion. Later, the adversaries are all various types of ‘human’...that is, no-makeup-involved villains with various mind powers that take no money to convey on screen.

Couple the okay scares with the limits television programs had in terms of what they could show and this probably is a good go-to series to show my kids. I really only found some prostitution and massage parlor references in one or two episodes that might be objectionable.

What DID surprise me was how good all the rest of the show was. McGavin’s work as Carl Kolchak and all the other regulars on the show are excellent. I mean REALLY good. It is kind of a given that when you watch an older show, you are going to have to accept certain conventions of the time if you want to get any enjoyment out of it. This includes character types and a lot of the humor that goes with them. Watch an old Jerry Lewis show and you probably will find that a lot of what was funny then isn’t so funny now. I didn’t find that to be the case with Kolchak at all. The shit still plays. It still comes across as well acted and genuinely funny. This show is a really good case for a certain something… charm maybe… that is all but lost in modern film and television. Carl Kolchak is an everyman schlub, but a reporter with balls of steel, too. He brazens his way into everyone’s business, makes enemies all around… yet you can’t help but like him. And McGavin pulls this all off almost effortlessly.

Although aspects of the show make it a good window into the period, it is amazing how much has stayed the same in contemporary life between then and now. Even the clothes and hair in some episodes doesn’t give too much away, like the producers almost shot them with timelessness in mind. In those installments, if you just gave everyone cell phones it could have happened today. Chicago, setting for the series, doesn’t look much different in the present. There are quite a few references to, and use of computers (or workstations). Kolchak comes off as something of a luddite even at that time, so his use of a typewriter and old cameras doesn’t really date the show all that much to me. Sometimes the automobiles are the biggest visual clue to the show’s airdates.

I’m going to have to round up the two movies to go along with this set. I saw them as a child and remember them being more frightening (and being made for TV movies, slightly more ambitious) than the series. I’ve read some buyer reviews for this set saying the picture is dark and nigh unwatchable. I didn’t find that to be the case at all. Thank goodness I didn't listen to them. It obviously hasn’t been meticulously restored… it looks like ‘old show film stock’… but the color was pretty vibrant, and I didn’t lose any action in the shadows. I didn’t fart around with the settings on my TV either, a 48inch Panasonic plasma screen. Customers at Amazon need to upgrade their damn televisions or something.

There are only twenty-two episodes. And the two movies. The last episode that I haven’t watched here yet goes back to being more ambitious with the effects and such, if I remember correctly. Like they blew a final wad on the final installment. Can’t wait to watch it, but it’ll be sad when I’m done.

Until I re-watch it when I force it on the children.