Gno Schitt

I am most definitely a child of the 80's. I think that I was in grade 4 when the first Tron came out and I was blown away by it. I remember playing the light bikes game on the old Vic 20 we had at the time and loving every second of it. Seeing this trailer just brought it all back to me. I know it isn't the best movie ever made, (I believe that honor goes to Maid In Manhattan), but I still enjoy it whenever I catch clips while channel surfing. Haven't seen the whole thing in ages, though. Hmmmm... Perhaps I do that sometime soon.

Upon recommendation, I picked up this graphic novel from the local library on Saturday and finished it Sunday evening. In short, I totally dig it!!!

The images are incredibly textural in nature and concept, and the story very dark and engaging. Pre-photoshop... pre-digital even, the novel was published in 1983 -- vintage! (squee)


I will definitely look for more graphic novels of this nature. Also, methinks I need my own copy =D. If you haven't already, you should most definitely check out this book!

What are your recommendations?

Good to see schitt-heds everywhere!

I rented this movie on Wednesday night in an attempt to forget the soul crushing day I'd just had at work. I was pleasantly surprised upon viewing it; not only did I forget my day (well, mostly) I was really engaged by this story of revenge and redemption.

You see, the movie's hero Kainen (the Outlander, as he comes from another world) must wrestle with the monster of the movie (a very well designed dragon creature) and his own demons (which intertwine with said creature).

The very convincing performance by John Hurt and brief but enjoyable appearance by Ron Perlman add a level of professionalism to this sci-fi/fantasy, that left without, might have left this film seeming like it had not realized it's potential. Instead, it was a very engaging story that had me sucked in right to the end.

I can't comment on the ending without spoiling it other than to say that I'm happy with how it was delivered. James Caviezel (whom I'd previously very much enjoyed in The Count of Monte Cristo with Guy Pierce) turned in a very grim brooding performance that fit his character perfectly.

I'm not going to do something crazy like give this movie a 9.5 out of 10, but I will recommend that you rent it (or check it out using whatever mechanism best suits you). I watched it on BD at 720p, and I noticed that some of the black scenes didn't live up to a hi-def experience - individual mileage may vary.

I finally put the nail in the coffin for Dead Space last night and I can honestly say that this was yet another fantastic game from EA. I know there are tons of haters out there and I guess they can keep hating, but I'd like to fly through this one for anybody who's interested.


1. I Wasn't Sick This Weekend
First, I'd like to point out that I'm doing some writing about games without being deathly sick or down for the count. Usually when I write about a game it's because I've been at home for 3 or more days sick, but this time, it's just because the game was great. I usually also roll two games into a single post but this time around it's just a single with no witty comparrisons (sorry).

2. 4 zombies out of 5
Zombies and gore games are all the rage these days - to wit: Left4Dead, Resident Evil, Dead Rising... and while those games are all neato, I really enjoyed the specific touches in this game that gave me the sense that I was playing some realtime interactive version of Event Horizon mixed with Aliens/Alien Resurrection.

3. If it's Plot or Underwear, I'll take Plot
The story in Dead Space was full of good plot. A decent intro gets you liking the few crew members that are out there with you pretty easily, and you're presented with fragments of some woman that you should ostensibly be able to rescue if you make it in time. Things start to go a bit circus side-ways when, about 3/4 of the way through the game, you start talking to said missing girlfriend (and by the time she shows up, you're already convinced that you didn't make it in time to actually save her). It was very creepy and very interesting.

4. Zero-Grav = 23 Kinds of Awesome
One of the most suprisingly fun parts of hte game was the mix of zero-g and airless zones that you have to cross or explore with the help of your environment suit. Being able to push off of any flat surface and land and re-orient on any number of other surfaces (including a meteor chunk at one point) was super fun. I remember thinking to myself at one point, that a whole game could be based on that movement principle where you'd explore the outside of various ships and bodies of matter - but I digress.

5. Back to that Plot (spoiler warning)...
Right, so, as the game draws to a close you realize that this setup throughout the game of zealots vs. corporate whores is really just a ruse. During the reveal you find out who the real evil is - and while it's definitely unexpected (I bought the 'zealots are the bad guys' bit a little too easily I guess) it was a bit disappointing.

6. A Huge Finish
The final fight is great fun - and not every game can honestly boast that as a selling feature. Often great games have lack luster finales (Uncharted) or repetitive boss fights (Heavenly Sword) or bosses that are just plain too difficult (Lost Planet) - but Dead Space has none of these problems. The end cinematic is short but really catches you off guard in a good way.

7. Other Mentionables
Time to complete: 12 hours, 32 minutes on difficulty setting Easy.
I'm going to replay it on "Impossible" now that it's unlocked (you get to start with lots of stuff, so I think I should be able to do it). Oh, and the weapons are fantastic in this game, a good mix of standard shooter stuff (the pulse cannon) and unique weapons that are really 'tools' repurposed to be weapons. Variable fire modes for weapons expands the limited selection set nicely.

Anyway, I'm done with this one now for a bit, so if you'd like to check it out, just ask and I'll gladly hand it off to you - it's definitely worth the look.

As most of you guys know I'm getting married soon. We've run out of invitations so I'm simply posting a mass invite on here for any of you guys that want to come. The wedding is pirate themed and it sounds like a ton of people are dressing up. Further details can be found at http://wedding.technoplunk.com, or you can simply harass me if you have any questions.

So, I'm well past the deadline when I found this, but I LOVE the title track from this game, so I'm going to start working on a remix and see how it goes.



I'll post around here somewhere when it's done ;)

Hey, anybody around here interested in seeing me and Terry absolutely RIP IT UP on May 29th? We'll be using 8 sources in the mix - 2 vinyl, 2 mp3/digital (serato+ableton), 3 CDJs and 1 drum machine (that's right - that just happened).

This mix won't make it in time, but my Technologic one will be played for sure, and maybe some other surprises.

I do believe that this image says it all...

But you can read Wil Wheaton's (pronounced Weat-on, not Whee-ton) initial thoughts at his most excellent blog.

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

The advice on how to recognize toxic people really grabbed me but there are some other interesting thoughts in here as well. Worth a read.

And no one cares...
Universal Soldier 3... Return of the Has-Beens
And yes, that really is Dolph Lundgren and JCVD - dressed to kill at this years Masochist Mash-Up!

After fighting with a corporate inbox chock full of junk (500+ messages) all the time, I've come to the conclusion that the only useful inbox is an empty inbox*. So, I took the bold move yesterday of archiving everything in my inbox to a local trash, and clearing my todo list.

The thinking is this: if any of those items are super critical, I'll get pinged again. If any of those items were actually no-ops or low priority, then they shouldn't be competing for my time with the other stuff that is higher priority.

This all works fine as long as the inbox does not get out of control again. To that end, I've decided to implement a personal policy that my inbox MUST be totally empty when I leave the office each night**.

For EVERY inbox item:
1) Is this high priority? Does it need to be dealt with immediately? FLAG IT AS RED, immediately take action to complete it. If I can't complete it by the end of the day preserve the message in my HIGH PRIORITY folder.
2) Is this informational or of medium to long term consideration? Immediately archive it using the appropriate mechanism (sometimes, this will be the trash). If a follow-up item is needed, immediately schedule it.
3) Is it irrelevant? Immediately delete such messages after reading.

Rules of Thumb***
- don't let messages sit unread, process them all when they arrive
- keep the items todo well organized, clear them when they complete, review regularly
- respect the awesomeness of the empty inbox
- be ruthless about deleting the chaff
- if I can't keep up to my inbox, it means I might need help, monitor this and inform my immediate report that the workload might be too high

A valid question here is: why the hell is Kyro bothering to write about this? I'm glad you asked. The answer, is that it is much easier to make a habit out of something that you write down. Now I can refer back to this and refine my process, to hone the skill of effective email communcation management.

Anybody else out there in big corporate email land have tips for fighting the ever growing inbox?


* unless we're talking about your gmail inbox, in which case, it's best to just leave everything where it is and use the searching...
** or if a few build up during the week, I must at least have it sorted by Friday before I leave my desk
*** and no, that has nothing to do with a stick the width of your thumb that you can use to beat... that's just urban myth

Right now my entire creative team is thinking up ways to reintroduce some of this drek into a current ad...

I just saw that both Liam Neeson and Raf Finnes are slated to be in the upcoming remake of that classic 80's Greek fantasy flick Clash of the Titans.

I guess if they are going to continue to rape all of the films of my childhood, they might as well use good talent. I'm betting this remake can't suck as much as the new Transformers did.

Since these games are clearly in the same genre, I felt that this would be a perfectly valid comparison. A completely reasonable, totally neutral set of categories will be used for this assessment. I'll be abbrv. in the artcl. so I don't have to type words lngr. than 5 ltrs; ME = Mirror's Edge, NFSU = you get the point...

Hotness of Main Character
In ME, you get to play Faith. She's got this cute Eurasian look going for her and a twin sister. In NFSU you're you. That's right, you never actually see yourself in the cut-scenes so you can suspend your disbelief of the fact that you'd never be caught dead in any of the situations the game puts you in. In NFSU's defence though, you do get to work with an attractive undercover policewoman played by Maggie Q, none-the-less, advantage ME.

Cut-scene Wickedness
In NFSU the cut-scenes drag you through this plot about gangs of master auto-thieves and illegal car smugglers etc... It's straightforward and comes across very dryly, especially compared to the actual driving which is very exciting and rip roaring (like a good NFS game should be). ME is unfortunately pretty similar, predictable story with an obvious double cross you see coming from about 24 miles away - maybe from those vantage points you can see everything coming... hm.. What ME has going for it though, is a neat delivery using a cel animation style that sets is apart. Maybe the next NFS game should have cel animation cut-scenes (ironically, the characters might seem a little less cardboard). Advantage ME.

Longness of Section That I Wish Was Shorter
This always happens to me in every video game, a section of the game that I feel has been made long or difficult just to lengthen the game play (okay, maybe not every game, Heavenly Sword had no such section, nor did Little Big Planet, but those are exceptions). In NFSU, somewhere around driver level 10 or 11, I was sorta wishing I magically had more game money so I could advance quicker and buy some faster wheels and bloody beat the game already. Thankfully this was a very short lived feeling in NFSU (around an hour or so of play), and quickly I was into a decent Lamborghini and on the way to wrapping up. Sadly, in ME, there were two such sections (SPOILER ALERT). The first was the atrium in Chapter 8. I must have fallen 30 times trying to figure out the intricacies of how to get up to the top. To make it worse, sometimes I'd fall and NOT die by catching some piece of girder when trying to grasp an edge. This would result in my having to re-do sections I had JUST completed. This went on for hours. The second section was one of the very last bits of Chapter 9 - where you must dodge an assault team AND a sniper team to reach the objective which is itself one of the smallest ledges you have to jump a distance to in the whole game. Again, this took me over 90 minutes and replaying the same section of a level 20 times to get and by the end I was pretty frustrated. Advantage NFSU.

Tag Line Bizarreness
ME: Once, this city used to pulse with energy... blah blah.... can you get any more pretentious?
NSFU: You're not good, and you're not bad, you blend and you listen... WTF does this crap even mean? I had imagined this section being a longer diatribe about the senseless little bits of text that end up in games, but I don't feel like it. As long as my complaint about that weird shit in NFSU about "you're not good, and you're not bad..." is out in the open, I'm good.
Okay, the lines in both games have issues, PUSH.

Music (or, What Really Makes Any Game/Movie)
I'm sure it's no surprise to anybody who knows me that music makes a huge difference to me. I've often found that my opinion of entertainment properties is strongly influenced by the quality of the music (and the amount of fromage/action content vis a vis Bruce Willis/Liv Tyler scenes, which I also go for). Okay, enough pre-amble, onto our competitors. In ME the music is a completely original score complete with fully developed character themes (the city even has it's own theme and is treated like a character, how cool is that?). The music is deeply engaging and feels strongly influenced by modern electronic scoring (Mark Snow, etc...). NFSU has some original background music, but what stands out is the cleverly inserted cuts by (wait for it!): Nine Inch Nails, Recoil, Puscifer (the legendary Maynard from Tool) and Pendulum. The cuts used are not the standard radio edits, but super wicked (rare) remixes and b-side cuts that stand tall above the bland typical use of pop music in movies and games these days. Wow, this is a super tough one because ME was so well scored, but I'm going to have to say advantage NFSU.

(hey, it's got NIN -AND- the main guy from Tool, what am I supposed to do?)

Relative Fun Index on the Latex Scale
Jeez, what am I supposed to put here? First of all, I LOVE racing games, and NFS:III was one the first 3-D games I was ever able to run on my old 16MB Voodoo Banshee AGP card (wow, talk about ancient history). NFSU has all the thing that made NFS games of yore great - sweeping courses through awesome looking locales, cop chases, thin plots. I knew what I expected with NFSU, and I got what I wanted. ME took me to new gaming heights (literally) even making my balls ache in parts when I was dropping from high areas to other less high areas. It was thrilling in ways I didn't think games could be - dodging bullets (seriously, I'd be ducking in my chair when the shots would start going off in 5.1 Dolby Surround cranked up) while vaulting over obstac... okay, you get the point. All my bullshit criticisms aside, both of these games were fantastic to play and I loved them each a shit-ton. I can't pick, PUSH.


The Big Lebowski (aka "Conclusion")
Well, when I add it all up it's a tie. That's a damn good thing too, because I don't think there's a sane argument I could make about either game that would clearly make it better than the other. Lots of haters out there gave NFSU a really hard time about something or other (the police SUVs are an easy target). An I've heard critics of ME bitch about linear this and that (which is crazy, there is multiple ways across all the roof-top levels). I think people have just become desensitized to awesomeness in general (I could go into this, but if you know what I mean then you probably already agree to some extent).

Why oh why the head to head you ask? Well, I've been deathly sick* for most of this week and found time on my hands where I wasn't able to do anything actually productive, so instead I started writing this and today I felt well enough to finish it.

* sick enough that I wasn't able to go to D.C. this week as planned freeing me up to write bullshit video game reviews :P

PS: If you have a PS3 and want to try Mirror's Edge, I'll gladly lend it out (but I'm keeping it since I doubt they'll sequel such a unique game and I'd like to have this one to refer back to). I've already sold my copy of NFS:Undercover though and I'm excited for the next installment (hopefully they don't change too much b/c of the haters that crawled out of the woodwork for this iteration).

Are all Americans this egocentric and moronic? Or just the ones who work for Fox?

Are you tired of iTunes?
Have you been feeling blah about all the heavyweight bloated mp3 apps you have to slog through just to quickly listen to a little mp3 file?

To the rescue, comes AleNofx, with two fantastic little apps to make your quick mp3 browsing on your mac totally painless.

Toolplayer - as light as they come, this ultra small player literally plays only the mp3 you double-click on, and when you go 'next' and 'prev' the smart little thing just uses the folder that the currently playing mp3 lives in. No tricks, no playlists, no 'store' to auto-connect to, just your music playing from you directories.

VOX - the 'larger' of the two programs, work just like the toolplayer, but adds some neato little bits like AudioScrobbling (cool if you have a Last.fm account and want to output what you're listening to).

This post is the fault of the person who posted about the six-pack bit. How could I not end up trolling that site looking for something else roxxor?