Snow is a very harsh mistress when you've just learned how to walk.
Disclaimer: I was told by a friend of our family that, as a child, I supplied "the comic relief," while my sister was the more serious and thoughtful kid in my family unit. My son has apparently inherited my gift for unintended hilarity (though the captioning was provided by the ever-lovin' Tony Steele). Needless to say, it finally snowed here in Missouri, which is kind of a relief. I say that as my own (no doubt inaccurate) opinion is that our eventual opening winter salvo just builds in intensity the longer it holds off. If we don't get our first snow until late January, it probably looks a lot like a glacier is rolling through and bringing a bunch of Canadian skiers with it. This is probably why I can't land a job in meteorology, but a weather program based on the idea that weather is an entity with a personality and the capacity for malicious intent could have a lot of entertainment value. :)
On the topic of entertainment value, the FRACT beta is pretty cool. It's supposed to be kind of a puzzle game done in TRON-like shapes involving light beams, sound effects, and other visual elements. It's also kind of neat to poke around in. It's free to download and it's a simple executable that lets you muck about with what the author has thus far. It's no Minecraft (for which many of you are grateful, I'm sure), but it looks like the start of something interesting and new.
And then there's the new TV program, "The Cape." To its credit, the show wasn't slow and plodding. It was scripted pretty much like a comic book with few scenes that weren't busy moving stuff along. On the minus side, it was pretty much a comic book brought to TV with all that entails: Criminal masterminds have aliases that include masks. Said aliases (in this case, "Chess") also define their persona and how they talk ('move,' 'gambit,' 'you left your king vulnerable,' etc.). I was also reminded of "Robocop," as the villains run a multinational corporation, OCP ARK that wants to privatize a city police force that they'll run. The hero leaves behind a wife and son that he can't reveal himself to (entirely for plot-related rationalized reasons, none of them particularly compelling). Goofy and easily-identified people can manage to have criminal careers without being followed or apprehended. Then you have Summer Glau, who some thought of as the DC heroine "Oracle," but whose internet-oriented attempts to reveal 'what's really going on' reminded me of the "Eyes Only" character from "Dark Angel." On the plus side, it does set up an interesting moral relationship between the hero and his trainers (helping them to steal money, but from the bad guy, in exchange for helping to bring down said bad guy). I also have to admire a show that just jumps in feet-first, requiring the audience to either accept the comic book logic or change the channel. Can it survive after "Heroes" and "No Ordinary Family?" It depends on if a circus-trained magician-Batman armed with cheesy dialog can hit the same genre marks that "Darkman" and Tim Burton's Batman films did. Though I do hope that the fact that "Heroes" ended with a carnival/circus thing going on isn't an omen about where "The Cape" is beginning. I think it'll either need to find a home in a Buffy-like 'goofy yet serious' niche or try to iron out some of the rough patches that make the plots and dialogue a little too much like a Silver-Age first draft script for a certain Caped Crusader.
Speaking of Batman, I'm kind of relieved this animated show about his high school years never came to fruition. Don't get me wrong, the concept could work on its own, but I almost want everyone to take a decade off from retro-fitting existing properties into high school settings and assuming that we need to "go younger" on stuff that's already successful to all audiences already. I mean, what kid who's into comics doesn't like Batman? Besides, I can already hear Alfred: "No, Master Bruce. If I let you attend a public school before you went off to an Ivy League University, especially a public school where psychopaths are among the student body, your parents would rise from their graves and re-enact key parts of 'The Ring' before forcing me to tender my resignation." :)
Not to end on something "serious," but I almost wanted to say something about the shooting in Arizona, but there's really nothing insightful I can offer that hasn't already been expressed elsewhere. However, I did come across another item about a guy who took a bullet to the head (it wasn't intentional) and survived. But the really awesome thing was that he sneezed out the bullet! I have no idea if he's related to Chuck Norris, but they might need to meet up and compare notes.
I suppose that counts winding things up on a "good" note, so I'll quit while I'm ahead and turn things over to:
- Remember Michael Winslow, the sound effects guy from the "Police Academy" movies? Here's a bit of his act (small language warnin'), complete with (starting at about 2:10) him doing the sound effects from Star Wars: A New Hope. This man's greatness knows no bounds.
- Here's another clip with a wee lingo red flag (it's text, if that makes any difference) that presents every episode of 'Voyager,' pretty much. Apologies to fans of the show, but I think it would have been so much better had they embraced a continuity-based plot system instead of an episodic one.
- So someone makes an 'RPG' where all you have to do is press 'space' to win, and then someone didn't quite grasp the joke and left a long, negative review, which then became this epic piece of internet art.
- Behold the Dune RPG that never made it to print. It is by your will alone that you set your browser in motion.
- Bad news for Chuck (or at least, his Nerd Herd colleagues) as Best Buy is shutting down half of its Geek Squad service centers. I'm hoping they got rid of the squad's custom fleet of VW Beetles before they started the layoffs.
- So it's after the apocalypse and you want to go road-racing across the nuclear wastes but you don't have a motorcycle. Here's a possible substitute.
- This next item is 50 of the best comic covers in 2010, or at least, one person's 50 best.
- In the same vein as the "Typing of the Dead" zombie shooter game, here's Z-Type, an HTML-5 game that has you typing words as quickly as you can to destroy the oncoming alien space fleet.
- I don't know why this animated gif was made, what the context of its creation was, or why it exists, but if anyone knows how this hypnotic image came to be, let me know.
- This story is heartwarming in this day and age of employees feeling undervalued: How Pixar saved its employees from being axed when CGI wasn't considered worthwhile.
- I like the fact that there's a Wiki, The Cutting Room Floor, devoted to unused and cut out parts of video games.
- Wednesday is Girl Genius Day! It's also the birthday of real-life Girl Genius Kaja Foglio, so be sure to wish her a happy 28th!
- So a DM introduced Statler and Waldorf as arena-combat criticizing NPCs...
- Bat Country is a strange shooter where your helicopter takes on giant bats, floating demonic pac-men, and other strange beasties. On the plus side, you have an unlimited supply of bullets and bombs, so go nuts.