April 16, 2015 Favorite Longreads
I hoped to have another set of Picture Books to share with you all this week, but I am having difficulties getting my hands on a certain book! Hopefully by next week. In lieu of that…
The internet has become a place for quick soundbites or miniblogs, with internet users having the attention spans of toddlers. But some longform journalism persists, and today I’m sharing a few of my favorite longreads with you.
When I was in high school, I really enjoyed Britney Spears’ music. It was fun and peppy and it made me happy. As I’ve gotten older, I find the cult of Britney to be intensely fascinating. Her life is almost a case study of how fame can ravage a person. But someone she’s found a way to still hold on to something resembling a real life.
I had heard of Dave Chappelle in passing a few times, but not much more than his name. This article describes his rise to fame and how he just walked away from it. Incredible article about not only his life, his motivations, and his current whereabouts, but about race and comedy.
The Down and Dirty History of TMZ
I’m sure most everyone here has heard of TMZ and knows what it is, but this was a detailed look at the origins and inner workings of the new style of gossip rag in the Internet Age.
What are your favorite longreads?
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- Posted under Internet
April 15, 2015 Unreasonable Expectations
It’s often fascinating to me to see how games work and why they’re set up the way they are. I don’t remember when I first realized on-rails shooters were set up that way to show you specific scenes in specific ways or that Resident Evil’s weird camera angles were to maximize the chances you’d get scared, but those realizations made me feel like I was more a part of the system. Any time you can understand the way something works it can help you appreciate it more, at least that’s how it works for me.
Understanding how it works ruins the fantasy, of course, but it can make you appreciate something in a different way. Learning how a magic trick (“Illusion!”) works might take away the joy of the surprise, but it can give you a deeper appreciation of the work the magician had to do to learn it and perform it. Since I know it’s not real magic anyway (Sorry, kids! Santa’s not real, either!) knowing how he does it is far more enjoyable to me.
That doesn’t translate the same way in every situation, though. I’ve been playing freemium games long enough now that I know how they work: you do some things, wait, and then do the things again, which gives you access to more things you can do. If you don’t like waiting, you can pay actual money to skip ahead in line. Paying money speeds things up or gives you access to cooler things… just like real life, I guess.
I’ve been playing The Simpsons Tapped Out for over two years. For the longest time I didn’t spend money on it, I just took whatever free donuts (the premium in-game currency) they handed out and saved them up. If I got three donuts for leveling up and it took 60 to buy Otto the bus driver, I just needed to wait for 20 levels. 2.5 years later, though, and I’ve spent somewhere around $30 on it. They offered Harry Plopper/Spider-Pig for 100-some donuts last month, and I’m not made of stone, people. I don’t buy the donuts out-right, I actually by the 99-cent scratchoffs at the Kwik-E-Mart. You’re guaranteed at least 6 donuts, but you might get 100, and I have once or twice. I felt bad about spending money on the game for a while, because it just feels goofy, you know? Spending $30 on a game where you tap stuff. But then it occurred to me: I’ve been playing this game for over two years. I love the writing and I’m enjoying the quests and design. $30 is a pretty good bargain if you look at time spent in-game.
That has not translated into me wanting to spend money on other freemium games, however.
You are also aware that I’ve been playing The Sims Freeplay for 2+ years, with breaks here and there. I quite enjoy the quests and I’ve been a Sims fan for many, many years (having a Sim wash dishes is far more satisfactory than washing my own dishes, for some reason). They, too, have a premium currency: Life Points (and also Social Points, which you earn by interacting with friends’ towns). You can purchase packs of these or earn them very slowly in-game by completing tasks. They can be used to speed up tasks, prevent Sims from aging/dying, or buying special outfits or home furnishings. I’ve talked about this before, I know. Several times. I have not purchased any Life Points for my Sims. I have been able to make do with the ones I earn in the game, so far.
Every so often there is a new quest line added to the game. The most recent one was a Royalty quest, which had me do several things to open a castle, which will then (I suspect) open more quests. It has taken me two weeks to earn all the things I needed to open the castle, because I needed to advance my Archery hobby enough to do so. With two archers going at a time on a 7.5 hour task, I might get six tries in a day. There are 12 goals in any given hobby, in four rows of three. Finishing each row gives a bonus, and finishing all four rows earns you the reward of that particular quest. For the Royalty quest, I had to earn all 12 rewards four separate times (you can reset the rewards after you complete the 12). Furthermore, you are not guaranteed to earn a new reward each time. In fact, you will often earn a repeat award. The Row 1, Column 1 award might show up five times before you see Row 2 Column 3, there’s no way to know until you’ve put in the 7.5 hours. Using Life Points to speed up the task (one LP is needed for every hour left of the task) does not guarantee a new reward, either. You might spend 7 LP to get R1C1 for the 14th time.
It’s quite frustrating.
Here’s the math on the Royalty quest:
- 12 rewards times 7.5 hours (if each attempt yielded a new reward): 90 hours (3.75 days)
- 4 sets of 12 needed: 48 rewards
- Total time needed to get all rewards, assuming each attempt yielded a reward: 360 hours (15 days)
- We can cut that in half, though, because there are two participants: 180 hours (7.5 days)
Now, granted, I don’t have to be hovering over my Sims as they work, but I do have to keep to a schedule if I want to maximize their output. And if a quest gives me 14 days to finish in order to earn a special bonus, you can see how ridiculous it all can get.
I’m currently on a Sleepwear quest. I have one Sim who started a Modelling hobby. Every time she earns all 12 rewards she opens a new set of sleepwear. The quest started with a 14-day timer. I currently have 8 days left and have only earned the first set and am not quite halfway through the second set. I don’t see how I’ll be able to do it. I can only have one Sim modeling at a time, and it takes 3.25 hours each time. There are five total sets to earn, so that’s 60 rewards I need to earn, which would take 195 hours if got a new reward every time. It would also require me to wake up in the middle of the night every 3.25 hours to set the task again. I really don’t think this one’s going to happen, and it’s upsetting. I get how freemium works, I really do. But in this case it doesn’t work for sure, so there’s no incentive to try it. My poor Sims are just going to have to go without the new fancy sleep duds.
I’m learning something from this experience, but I’m not sure what yet.
Tags: Simpsons, Sims, Tapped Out
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- Posted under Videogames
April 14, 2015 Tuesday 10: Movies of 2001
I have seen 70 of the 400+ movies that were released in 2001. Looking through the list revealed only a couple other ones I’d actually be interested in, but when you consider movies like A Beautiful Mind and Training Day didn’t even make my list of favorites for the year, maybe it’s for the best I didn’t see some of the other ones.
Here’s my list of favorites for the year, which I think would have been pretty easy for you to put together, given my history up to this point:
10. Jurassic Park III – I’ve heard a lot of griping about this one over the years, but I’ve always liked it. We just watched Jurassic Park the other day, and are hoping to get through the next two before Jurassic World comes out this summer.
9. Ocean’s Eleven – I don’t know if we needed a modern day Rat Pack, but we got one and it was pretty fun. I also liked Ocean’s Thirteen, but haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaated Twelve.
8. Shaolin Soccer – If real soccer was like this, more Americans would watch it.
7. Shrek – A slightly-twisted take on fairytales with a sweet heart at the middle of it, mixed with great performances. This one holds up pretty well.
6. Zoolander – They’re making a Zoolander 2 and I’m more excited about that than I should be.
5. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – A pretty good translation from game to movie, I thought. I wish they had made more of these.
4. Monsters, Inc. – I remember thinking “That was okay” the first time I saw this one, but over time I have come to like it more and more.
3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Or “Sorcerer’s Stone,” if you’d rather) – I’ve never read the books, but I really enjoy the movies.
2. The Royal Tenenbaums – There’s pretty much only one Wes Anderson movie I didn’t really like, and I need to watch it again to see if my opinion has changed on it. My favorite story about this one, though, is how grumpy and hard to work with Gene Hackman was on it. I don’t know why that amuses me so much.
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – My favorite of the LotR movies, especially if we’re talking about the extended edition. I love the optimism and camaraderie.
Other Mentions:
- A.I. Artificial Intelligence – Boy, people sure griped about this one a lot. I liked it well enough.
- Donnie Darko – I liked it at first, but got irritated with it the more I thought about it. It’s the ultimate teen angst movie, I feel.
- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within – People griped about this one, too. It sure was pretty, though, and the DVD had a special feature where the characters did the Thriller dance.
- Planet of the Apes – I thought the portrayal of ape culture was fantastic, but no matter how many explanations I read about the ending, it still doesn’t make any sense.
- A Beautiful Mind – This movie worked really well for me the one time I saw it. Knowing how it goes made a second viewing not all that desirable for me, though.
- Ghost World – I think I’d like this more if I watched it again, but I took to its attitude pretty well.
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- Posted under Movies
April 13, 2015 Movie Monday: Furious 7
I have seen exactly two of the Fast & Furious movies, so I don’t feel I can weigh in on the whole series, but I do want to say a few things.
First, this naming scheme rivals the Rambo series for pure awesomeness/insanity:
1. The Fast and the Furious (2001)
2. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
3. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
4. Fast & Furious (2009)
5. Fast Five (2011)
6. Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
7. Furious 7 (2015)
Now take into consideration that The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift takes place chronologically after Fast & Furious 6 (and before Furious 7), and I think it’s clear we’re all the subject of some sort of experiment. But, hey, mice get cheese after navigating the maze, and we get some crazy driving and some A-1 nutso stunts, so it all works out.
A friend of mine dragged me to the sixth movie, and I agreed to go because I had dragged him to some pretty terrible things and because it had The Rock. You can have a pretty terrible movie and have The Rock and he’d still be pretty great in it. Scientists are working on why that is, exactly, but the results have been repeatable and predictable, so it’s probably true now.
The sixth movie was a lot of fun. There’s car chases and fights and they don’t worry a whole lot about things like physics and gravity, and it’s fine! No one worries about it. Seeing the sixth movie in the series had not yet caused me to go back and watch the first five before the seventh one came out, and I think maybe that’s a problem, because there’s this whole “we’re a family” undercurrent that doesn’t really hit with me and I wonder if maybe it would had I ingested the whole backstory. Seems to me you can have a team without it being “family,” and growling about it (Vin Diesel) isn’t going to change anything. But whatever! They’re family and that’s how they’re doing things.
Furious 7 picks up where 6 left off: Jason Statham is mad about what Vin’s family did to his brother (either hurt him real bad or killed him, I honestly don’t remember) so he wants to hurt/kill all of them, and since he’s ex-British military he’s pretty good at doing those things. From there it’s a matter of finding things/people before he does and it all involves a lot of driving. The main takeaway from these movies is that most problems can be solved by driving, and no one in these movies ever heard the word “carpooling” before. Everywhere they go, they take 5-8 cars.
There are two sequences that deserve special mention, and I guess these could be considered spoilers, only one of them was already in the trailer and the other one you could probably assume was going to happen if you knew anything at all about how fast and furious these people are/were:
- They jump a car between three towers of those really tall building in Dubai.
- A dude runs up a bus that is falling off a cliff and jumps but isn’t going to make it, but then another driver spins around fast and near the edge of the cliff and he’s able to grab hold of the spoiler (alert!) on the back of the car and he’s fine.
Also, The Rock does his signature Rock Bottom move on a guy through a glass table and that was pretty sweet.
I’m never going to love these movies – I’m not a “car guy” even a little, unless we’re talking Batmobiles – but I’m never going to hate them, either. They’re fun enough, but I’m not going to get emotionally invested in them.
That said, they do a tribute at the end of the movie (as part of the movie, not a separate thing) to Paul Walker and his character. As you no doubt know, Paul Walker was killed in a car crash before filming was completed, and the filmmakers decided to work around that as best they could. There were some changes to the script, and they used a combination of CGI and Paul’s brothers to add a few more shots of his character in the movie. Again, I’m not emotionally invested in the series, but I thought they handled it very well. It was very touching.
At this point, I’m probably committed to Fast and/or Furious 8 and whatever’s after that, but I’m still not sold on going back to the beginning of the series. Convince me otherwise!
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- Posted under Movies
April 3, 2015 Seeing Letterman
Last week my wife, her sister, and I drove to New York City for a couple of days (Sunday evening through Wednesday morning), and it was mostly because I wanted to see a taping of The Late Show. My wife and her sister had no desire to see The Late Show (yeah, I don’t get it, either), but they found plenty of other things to do and see, so don’t you worry about them.
I had filled out the form online to get tickets to the show, but I never heard back from them. I had also filled out the form for tickets years ago (seriously, like… 15 years ago?) and never heard back. I don’t know what it takes to hear back from the online form, but I apparently don’t have it. I was talking to a friend about not hearing back and he told me that he got standby tickets years ago when he was in NYC. He had to stand in line a couple of hours, but it worked for him. I hadn’t really considered that before, but I thought it was worth trying.
Just to be clear, yes, we went to NYC specifically so I could maybe get tickets to see The Late Show. It’s only a 12-14 hour drive from here, depending on stops and traffic, no big deal.
The standby ticket process is a little different than it used to be. Instead of queuing up at 6a outside the theater, these days you call (212) 247-6497 starting at 11:00a on the day of the taping you wish to attend. We were at the 9/11 Memorial Museum at 11a, and I feel a little bad about making the phone calls there, but at least I went to the lounge/dining area.
I called 65 times in the space of about a half hour and got a busy signal 64 of those times. On the 65th time, a woman answered, asked me my name and where I was from, and told me I was 34th on the list. Then she told me to show up at the theater at 1p.
At the theater, we were asked to get in line according to our number, and the pages went through the line to make sure who we were (we needed photo ID) and where we were, numerically speaking. After a little while they took us inside to a hallway to wait, since it was a little chilly outside. While we were waiting, I happened to see Alan Kalter going into a passcarded door around the corner and further down the hallway. That was kind of exciting.
Pretty soon they let some people from our line into the theater but also let us know that those were the only ones they needed that day. Much sad, very bummer. But! The main page (her name was Beth) asked if any of us were available the next day. There were 6 or 7 of us that were, so she asked us to wait and everyone else left. After they left, she got our names and gave us tickets for Tuesday’s taping, and since they were actually doing two shows, we had to choose between the earlier one or the later. I chose the earliest one. The most exciting part was that these weren’t standby tickets, they were actual tickets. If we showed up, we were in!
So, yes, I showed up the next day. We lined up outside according to ticket color (mine was red), and the pages would come by every so often to tell us what was going to happen next. I ended up in line behind a couple who were also from Indiana who had also driven to NYC specifically to come to the Late Show, but the difference was they had actual tickets – apparently the online thing does work for some people from Indiana.
After a while they moved our lines into the building, where there were many signs up that said “No pictures!” which was pretty disappointing. I should mention that all the pages (I saw 7-8 different ones over the course of the two days) were very nice, very helpful, and seemed to be really happy to be there. They were all a pleasure to deal with.
After a half hour or so of standing in line in the lobby area, we were let into the theater, where more pages directed us to specific seats. When I told her it was just me, she showed me to the third row on the orchestra side on the main floor, and made everyone move down so I could sit on the aisle:
Screenshot of me in the audience, wearing my N7 Mass Effect hoodie.
Alan Kalter came out on stage to welcome us and asked us to watch an “audience expectations” video on the monitors. I wish I had a copy of the video to show you, because it was pretty funny. Alec Baldwin narrated and it was helpful and humorous.
Then Alan introduced each member of the band as they came out. I have to say, I haven’t watched the show much in recent years, mostly because it’s not on until 11:30p. Central Time is the best for TV shows, let me just say: Prime Time is from 7 to 10, then the news, then your Late Show at 10:35. Anyway, I hadn’t seen the band in a while and it was really cool to see that most of the members I remembered from way back when were still in it. They played some great music for a while and also played during commercial breaks. There was some question as to whether or not Paul Shaffer would be there, as he’d been out sick for a while, but he did show up and it was great to watch him
Then Alan introduced Dave and he came out. It was so surreal to be 20 feet away from him! He talked a little and then took a few questions from the audience. At one point he asked a guy to stand up who was wearing a Late Show hoodie. “Did you buy that at Hello Deli?” he asked. “Anyone else get something from there?” Hello Deli is the only place that sells licensed Late Show apparel, and I had bought a T-shirt there earlier, but didn’t wear it to the show. That turned out to be a bad choice, as Dave had Alan go around and give money to the folks who had worn their shirts in to the show. “We can’t have these people paying money for these things,” he said.
Then they started the show, and it went pretty much like it does when you’re watching. The commercial breaks look a little different, of course, and during some of them the band played, and during a couple they just paused for a little bit and then started back in. The guests for the evening were Bill O’Reilly and Aubrey Plaza, and they were both okay, but I was more just fascinated by being there and seeing the whole process after 20-some years of wanting to do just that.
After the show was done taping they opened the side doors and asked us to head out and that was pretty much that.
I saw my first episode of Dave on his original NBC show some time in late 1986 and liked his style and humor right off the bat. Over the years there’ve been times when I watched the show all the time and others when I didn’t see an episode for months. I’m one of the few I know who enjoyed his hosting of the Oscars, and it’s weird that he’s retiring soon and won’t be on the air anymore. Being in the Ed Sullivan theater (where the Beatles performed!) was a dream come true for me and I’m glad it worked out the way it did.
Tags: Letterman
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- Posted under People, TV