July 31, 2003

uk shenanigans f'sure..

No doubt a little more detail when we return, but it's been really nice for us to get back to England. Highlights so far:

- Hampton Court Palace: in which we were entirely too successful going round the maze, and didn't make a wrong turn all the way in to the middle and out again. I'm blaming it on my dad, since my pathfinding skills are hardly legendary.

- wandering around many local shops, checking out yummy chocolates and crisps, which we've purchased about a hundredweight of, and buying lots of fun UK magazines - ok, Edge is still slightly pretentious, but it's also v.good, also Heat is the undisputed king of gossip for Holly, plus pretty much every single UK videogame magazine has a give-away DVD or CD on the front, why not in the States? Also, why do many UK versions of popular console/PC games have cooler-looking front covers? Honestly.

- trip to Wales with Holly and my parents, where-in we stayed at a crazed/nice Welsh-Japanese medieval country house, complete with Blade Runner-style Origami on every available surface, and then explored the frankly amazing Portmeirion, and took lots of pictures (to appear here soon-ish) in '60s cult TV wonderment.

Anyhow, now it's time to go update the Slash and wander off to see some old workmates - more updates when San Jose is again our home, next week, yay. Be, uhh, cool 'n things.

Posted by h0l211 at 05:52 AM

July 22, 2003

who watches the puzzle pirates?

Almost ready to leave for England, which is lucky because, well, that's what we're about to do. It'll be the first time I've been back in 18 months, and me and Holly are going to run around eating lots of sweets and crisps, drinking lots of pints, taking a holiday-within-holiday with my parents, and generally causing localized and negligible havoc in the South London and North Wales areas. You'll likely to see a few less ffwd updates, too, since I'll be popping online periodically from the UK, but mainly to update Slashdot Games in a panicked fashion. Yay.

In other, vitally important news, anyone with a Windows or Linux PC and some brain cells should check out Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, a massively multiplayer pirate-themed puzzle RPG (stop snickering at the back, there!), which is actually freakin' excellent, with all the good bits of Super Puzzle Fighter, Chu Chu Rocket, the PopCap games, and added pirate-y goodness. You get to do puzzles to fight enemies, duel other people, get money, buy your own ship, and you can even purchase your own island. Welcome to Half Man Half Biscuit Cove, may I help you, arrharr?

Finally, started re-reading Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, and I'd almost forgotten how startling it is, even now. It's amazing to think that Alan Moore broke through into mainstream comics with what must be one of the best pieces of creative writing in the twentieth century. Hyperbole ahoy, f'sure, but from zero to hero in no time flat, even if his 2000AD material had been on the boil for a while. Even if you don't read comics (and I didn't, up to a certain licensed title), you owe it to yourself to buy a copy.

Posted by h0l211 at 08:43 PM

July 19, 2003

golfing johnny englander?

Wandered out to the movies to catch Johnny English, which opened in the US yesterday, and.. yep, disposable, dumb, and reasonably hilarious, just the way I like it. Naturally, Rowan Atkinson does things right, but top marks for the sly plot, the use of corgis as hostages, and John Malkovich's accent _and_ haircut.

On the videogame bargain front, watch out for the GameCube title Swingerz Golf, otherwise known as Ace Golf in the wife-swapping-unfriendly European lands, which is an entirely fun Hot Shots Golf-style super-deformed, uhh, golf game, and can be picked up for the princely sum of $10, at least at my local KB Toys. Interesting control method, too, pushing the yellow analog stick back and then forward in a straight line at the right time. Now I just need to find the time to sit down for a round.. And if you're in the US and are looking out for videogame bargains, Cheap Ass Gamer is a great help nowadays. Not that I'm a cheap ass. No, honestly.

[Oh, and thanks to Loonyboi for hooking me up with a source for the comments RSS addition - seems to be working now. But now I have no excuse like 'they can't see the comments box' when people don't comment. Curses, foiled again.]

Posted by h0l211 at 10:18 PM

July 17, 2003

babylonian feeds

So, finally finished the 2nd season of Babylon 5 on DVD, and.. I'm still floored. Forget what you think you know about science-fiction on TV, all those Klingons and Tribbles and whatever else ails you - Babylon 5 is beautiful, touching, absolutely resonant with the real world, and possibly the best television show I've ever watched - it feels almost mythical, and intentionally so. Again, I couch this in terms of somebody who is absolutely not a sci-fi geek - in fact, I read/watch very little of it. Just believe me - it's worth your time to explore the universe J. Michael Straczynski has so carefully created. Wonder what his new show, 'Jeremiah', on Showtime, is like?

I just spent a few minutes hacking around trying to get comments added to my RSS feed in MovableType, but didn't manage to do it with the default install - can anyone point to a step-by-step guide to doing it? I don't want to have to install extra plug-ins to do it, ideally.

In other news.. I'm dawdling on overnight Slashdot updates. Must get to it.

Posted by h0l211 at 09:34 PM

July 16, 2003

tonik nick bot action..

The rapidly diverging methods of downloading Monotonik net.label material seem to be working fairly well - we've done over 130gb of tunes from the BitTorrent links, and the Monotonik section at the Internet Archive is also getting some attention from people who wouldn't normally see our material. I'm almost up to date on listening to submissions from artists, too (well, only 30 left :P), and work has commenced again on getting the mythical Monotonik mix CD out onto the actual physical dammit streets - more info soon.

Oh, and random link time - at some point, the link to portraits of you with Stevie Nicks was so loved by my online friends, they proposed getting some money together to commission a _really_ stupid portrait - Stevie with a monkey at a tractor pull, stuff like that. Unfortunately, they're quite expensive, so we haven't got round to it yet - but isn't the one of Stevie with someone's _cat_ just divine? :P

In other interesting news, I just found out the pet Slashdot IRC bot, Spr0ul, seems to be English (at least, he spells 'rumour' with a u) - at last, a kindred spirit from my home country! Even if he is robotic and prone to remembering and regurgitating random conversation, as well as giving us the latest stock prices. Not so unlike me after all, then, minus the stock tips bit.

Posted by h0l211 at 09:06 AM

July 13, 2003

loeg kwak..

I really should be writing interviews about now, but just a quick note about the "League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" movie. I enjoyed it. Although it definitely had some pacing problems, and deviated significantly from the book, there were some good, nuanced performances, a striking look to the movie (with some impressive special effects, though the jury is still out on Mr. Hyde's rubbery look), and Sean Connery was a strong and noble Quartermain. I also thoroughly enjoyed Stuart Townsend as Dorian Gray. But in the end, this is a movie that's gonna divide a whole lot of people. Look for the credits page from the comic series, Victorian-poster style and mentioning Moore and O'Neill, pasted on a London wall a few minutes into the flick, btw. Oh, and although Pirates of The Caribbean still trounced it at the boxoffice, LOEG made $23.5 million, significantly better than I ever expected.

On a slightly related note, look at this preview for a forthcoming Simpsons comic - a scratchy black+white From Hell spoof with Monty Burns as the Ripper himself? Oh joy that is geekdom, embrace me now.

Posted by h0l211 at 04:08 PM

tom green wakeboarding..

So I zoomed through this week's episodes of MTV's The New Tom Green Show on TiVo, and it's turning out pretty good - still by far the most watchable latenight show, imho. Highlights this week? Glenn Humplik has taken his weblog down (or actually, just the link from glennhumplik.com, the site is still available on Livejournal), because Tom raided it for comments and made fun of him on the show about it (doh!), the show got an ad deal with Quizno's Subs, so Tom did an item where he tried to make ducks eat from his sub-filled Quizno hat (they ignored him and ran off round the set, naturally), they finished off the 'Tom and Glenn's Hitchhiking Adventures' clips and have started the ones set on their USO tour in Kosovo, Glenn had to sleep in a bear suit at a porn star sleepover, and lots more randomness.. the show's only let down by occasional awkwardness and sometime lack of decent guests. But yeah, it's sad that the show doesn't have an official (besides the sparse MTV one) or even unofficial website right now, especially with guest lists and episode info and suchlike. I'd love to do it, but don't have the time :(

On an unrelated tip, Activision's Wakeboarding Unleashed Featuring Shaun Murray is the best extreme sports title I've played since the original Tony Hawk, unexpectedly. There were such a glut of random half-assed extreme sports titles that the populace got burnt out, and wakeboarding isn't the most immediately exciting-sounding pastime in the first place. But the game, much-delayed since a kinda pedestrian playable demo failed to impress on one of the Tony Hawk releases, is super-addictive, with some really interesting play mechanics (you can let go of the line and then grab it again at a later date to go round obstacles and find secret areas), and the basic trick gameplay is great fun in unadulterated chunks. Surprising stuff.

Posted by h0l211 at 09:17 AM

July 12, 2003

moore shou swimsuits..

The full transcript won't be up til later today (Saturday), but there's a Web feature and some Web-exclusive snippets from an Alan Moore radio profile up on the NPR site, seeing as the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie is opening this weekend. Being a rabid Moore fan, I'll be checking it out (unlike Moore himself - he hasn't even seen 'From Hell' yet, apparently), even if it's clearly been mangled in translation, with the addition of fairly random characters like Tom Sawyer and, uhm, Dorian Gray, and general Hollywood-ization all round.

Also this week, I've been trawling, in some depth, Shou-sama's personal videogame website - go into the 'library' section, and you'll find one of the best and most obscure import game library sites around, with screenshots and info available almost nowhere else in English, from a hideously indepth collector (who used to be associated with GameFan and the short-lived GameGO! magazines.) Obviously done for his own personal categorizing, it helps everyone else too - at least, if you want to know about obscure Japanese mahjong quiz games. Which I do.

Oh, and I really haven't got too far on swimsuit unlocking (ahem :P) in Dead Or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball for Xbox, but for those who want to know what all the fuss is about, turns out the DoAXcess site is a seriously good and detailed destination for you. And I'd always heard people talking about the 'fabled' Venus swimsuit, so naturally, they have a gallery (semi-work-safe?) with all the digital characters modeling it. Remember, kids, Microsoft published this game. :)

Posted by h0l211 at 09:23 AM

July 09, 2003

interviewing gamasutra and archiving monotonik..

So, more seemingly exciting and/or random stuff going on, as follows.

Firstly, I'm going to be doing a pretty-much regular monthly interview series for Gamasutra, the online part of Game Developer magazine, after the Chris Crawford interview I did a few weeks back. The first of these interviews is with Valve writer Marc Laidlaw, who is a former cyberpunk author, and contributed greatly to the wonderful Half-Life and its upcoming sequel - I also have only good things to say about his novelization of the 'Gadget' CD-ROM, a neglected but beautiful book. Anyhow, look out for that sometime in the next few weeks..

In other news, I'm delighted to announce that the Internet Archive has gone live with its addition of our net.label, Monotonik, as part of their audio archives. So you can go there, download our releases via a variety of methods, comment on them, and generally be happy. As you may know, I help out there with a digitized book collection and software archiving research, but I'm not forcing the collection on them through extreme nepotism - they were looking for any test collection to expand their audio archive, so it turns out Monotonik was a good test case. Yay.

Finally, I'm pleased that this Slashdot post of mine about violence and videogames has got a lot of attention, at least in the comments, and hopefully, at some point, in the wider media. When I read the story in the San Jose Mercury News yesterday morning, it said nothing about the fact the videogame connection had been made by an outspoken videogame critic and litigator, and honestly, I'm not sure I believe him at all, especially as the game is a tiny, broken, browser-based fantasy RPG. It saddens me when problems of (imho) gun control are translated into problems with media - but that's spoken as a true Brit who doesn't really understand why anyone should have guns, except possibly a SWAT team and Solid Snake.

Posted by h0l211 at 10:25 AM

July 05, 2003

spy what karaoke?

So, seriously, Spy Kids 3-D is out in a couple of weeks, seemingly without fanfare, and it looks to be pretty much wholly kickass. I know, I know, it's allegedly a silly kid's movie, but Robert Rodriguez knows what he's doing, and the first two Spy Kids movies were seriously good fun for adults too, with some inspired casting choices (c'mon, Ricardo Montalban as the kids' grandpa, Alan Cumming and Tony Shalhoub in the first movie, Steve Buscemi and, of all people, Mike Judge in the second one?), and this new one - well, it's filmed in high-definition 3D, so you need 3D glasses to watch it, it's set in a videogame world gone bad, and the bad guy? None other than Sly Stallone. I'm elbowing aside the toddlers to go check it out.

Otherwise, a very pleasant July 4th was had by all, tooling around the East Bay, right up North as far as the Delta to check out some fireworks, and the customary bad karaoke (this time, De La Soul's 'Me Myself And I' and Rolf Harris' 'Jake The Peg' were slaughtered by, uhh, me myself and eye - 'Jake The Peg' to special hilarity since Rolf Harris is persona non grata in America, or more accurately non known-a.)

Posted by h0l211 at 03:22 PM

July 03, 2003

christlike video behavior

Currently on heavy rotation in the ffwd household is Christ.'s Metamorphic Reproduction Miracle album, which is so so so Boards Of Canada that it's not surprising to learn that Christ is heavily affiliated with the legendary Scottish idm duo - either an ancient ex-member of BoC, or maybe even more. Anyhow, it's delicate, echo-ing fields of mellow idm, and it works wonderfully.

While wandering around the Boards Of Canada fansite at the excellent We Are The Music Makers supersite, was delighted to see the official winners of a BoC music video contest are available for download there. The contest was judged by the super-reclusive BoC chaps themselves, and the three winners are all great, particularly the super-abstract beauty of June 9th by Sam Smith.

Oh, and talking of music videos, WATMM has a link to more info about the amazing Chris Cunningham DVD that's upcoming from Palm Pictures, alongside similarly great Spike Jonze and Michael Gondry retrospectives. September can't get here quickly enough.

Posted by h0l211 at 12:50 PM

July 01, 2003

greatest wario cha cha cha

Managed to get round to playing a bit of Wario World for GameCube, finally, and it's a slightly-retro blast, a 3D platformer often using stylish left-to-right scrolling with added screen depth for level structure. I hear it's far too short, but Treasure have made it simple and fun, and you gotta love 'em for getting back to the basics in an ever-stylish way. Plus, it's definitely more fleshed out than Stretch Panic.

Was stuck for literally hours at Circuit City last night trying to take advantage of their 'Buy Two Get One Free' offer on Playstation 2 Greatest Hits titles. My dream combo was Hot Shots Golf 3, Tekken Tag Tournament, and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, but they didn't have Baldur's Gate, and try as I might, I couldn't find a replacement I really wanted and didn't already have. So I left with nothing, nothing, I tell you.

Got hold of the new Lisa Carbon album, Standards, which has a beautiful samba cover of Bowie's Space Oddity on it. Lisa Carbon is, of course, definitely _not_ German/South American electronic music genius Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom Heart. I've been enamoured of his insanely prodigous output for years now, and actually wrote a little feature about the catalog of his Rather Interesting label which is available on subscription music site Emusic. Plus, his amazing Senor Coconut project has a new album out, including cha cha cha covers of Smoke On The Water, Riders On The Storm, and Beat It - I saw them at Ars Electronica in Austria in 2001 when they were augmented to a full band and just did Kraftwerk covers, and took some pictures. Anyhow, Atom Heart in all his guises = v.v.good, the official Atom Heart site has clips from his Martin Gore (Depeche Mode) remix as AtomTM, and that's amazing click-vocal-house, too. Goodstuff.

Posted by h0l211 at 07:22 AM