Spooks has crept quietly back onto the swedish broadcasting calendar without me noticing. Argh - missed the first episode! Still, this stuff rocks. Spy drama with brains and guns instead of just guns.
An this coming weekend 24 season 4 starts up. Not so smart, but lots of fun.
With the CSI: Las Vegas season coming to an end, this fits in just perfect.
Heh - I can quit anytime I want.
Yeah… suuuure….
Add comment March 30th, 2005
Star Wars: Republic Commando is fun, but ultimately not very challenging. The recharge and resurrection of your team ends up making the game a test of stamina and rejuvenation rather than skill. The team commands are easy and fun, but the fact that everything is pre-programmed for you makes it a game of connect-the-dots. You can only place your team members where you are intended to. The game stops you making mistakes. It’s like playing with the training wheels on.
Brothers in Arms is playing with the training wheels off. Confusion, the fog of war, mistakes are all part of the gameplay and the challenge. The game can be frustrating but it (mostly) plays fair, making your failures primarily your own fault. You can’t play this game as a run-and-gun shooter. Planning and coordination are required to succeed. Find, Fix, Flank and Finish. The initial levels act as a gentle tutorial that get you used to commanding troops to support each other.
The user interface is pretty clever, but it takes a little getting used to. It is all too easy to almost finish a level and end up slaughtering your team due to an errant click — you meant to say “fire on” rather than “move next to” the machine-gun nest. The satisfaction of completing a mission with your squad still alive is so much the sweeter for the challenge. The command interface is fairly similar to the approach used in Republic Commando, but with fewer affordances to cue you to the “correct” selection.
The lack of health packs, ammo bonuses, in-game music, not to mention the screaming and the blood makes for a game that sits well alongside Spielberg’s movie and the Band of Brothers series. Gritty and gruesome.
Add comment March 30th, 2005
Steamboy by Katsuhiro Otomo - the man behind Akira. Oh dear…
Disappointing really. The steampunk setting is really well realised, and features R. Stephenson as a hero, which should get it bonus points. Unfortunately the story suffers from Anime exposition - we can’t have a plot without explaining it to you. It would be horrible if someone misunderstood the imagery. Explain explain explain. Instead of showing you - which is what a good film is all about. Show instead of tell.
So when the beautifully hand-drawn steam engines are exploding, the characters are having deep and weighty discussions on the evils of science driven by capitalism, the audience yawns and looks at its watch - waiting for something to happen.
A much better exploration of the same themes is Miyazakis Princess Mononoke, which has the added benefit of not beating you over the head with its conclusions. Science, capitalism and nature are not necessarily opposed. Nature is not universally good and pleasant (ask a herbivore). Science and progress are not uniformly evil (fire keeps you warm at night, wheels make transport and commerce possible).
Add comment March 28th, 2005
The unofficial Paul Krugman archive - better than his official Paul Krugman page.
Add comment March 27th, 2005
Burning Man in Geneva - at easter… This seems like an idea worth pursuing.
Consider: a big ass snow-man, doused in petrol, covered in fireworks. On fire. At night. In the middle of a frozen lake somewhere outside Oslo. Music, campfires, tents, grilled food.
Could make for an interesting weekend event.
Add comment March 27th, 2005
Billmon’s blog: the Whiskey Bar - savage dissection of the state of the world by quoting history back at us. (via Tim Bray’s ongoing). A great illustration of Santayana’s dictum that some are doomed to repeat the past.
Add comment March 25th, 2005
Picked the album up on a spur-of-the-moment impulse yesterday.
M.I.A’s Galang music video - catchy combination of dancehall, hip-hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms. Punk rock all grown up.
Also picked up Jack the band’s LP after hearing a track somewhere. They play rock with lots of enthusiasm and some charming lyrics. They’re not a million miles away from Surferosa or The Donnas.
Jack is a horny band. With songs praising cunnilingus and sex, they’re probably not the band you bring home to meet your mother. But they are fun to listen to - they bubble with energy and enthusiasm.
Add comment March 25th, 2005
Finished Raw Spirit by Iain Banks. (Note lack of middle initial M in author’s name, indicating that is not a science fiction book). A very friendly, pleasant romp around the Scottish countryside, searching for the perfect dram. The biggest problem with the book is that you start to get cravings for bottles of whisky. The quest is mainly an excuse for Banks to tell stories and bring his friends along for a good party. He talks about his love of driving, his penchant for climbing bits of architecture (Banks should learn more about Parkour - urban climbing.)
Reading it is like hanging out with friends who enjoy a good curry, strong wine, strong ale, a good tale, and whisky in all its glorious shadings. I rather enjoyed it, possibly because I like these things too. It confirmed my suspicions that Talisker is one of the best drinks in Scotland, and has piqued my interest in the Macallan.
The book should come with a packet of aspirins - and a reminder that it’s time to stock up the bar again. The book’s definitely worth a read if you’re planning a driving holiday to Scotland.
Add comment March 25th, 2005
There’s a lot of heat and noise over Microsoft’s changing “Universal” to mean “mostly Universal”. I haven’t got any idea how this affects SuperOffice - I think we’re covered as a Gold Partner, but who can tell.
VSTS will integrate a whole bunch of useful things into the dev environment: bug tracking, source control, project management (task tracking), unit testing, build and deploy scripts. This being a Microsoft product, the whole thing is built around more MS products than you can shake a stick at: SQL Server and Sharepoint Team Services in particular.
So the demos I’ve seen seem spiffy enough, but Sharepoint leaves me cold. It’s too amorphous for me to get a handle on.
What interests me is that the new hooks and integration points in the Visual Studio environment should make building your own bug-track and project-task integration much easier. I think any supplier who doesn’t show up with plugins within the next year will struggle to stay alive. The big question is to what extent will Microsoft publish all the necessary APIs. The Visual Source Safe source-code-control API’s are still licensed only under heavy NDA restrictions. (I suspect this is because they are worried that people will laugh if they see how badly designed they are.)
I hope this stuff opens up - I’d love to have better DevTrack integration from within Visual Studio. Having access to the x-planner task list from within my main programming environment. Being able to check things off without switching tools would be very nice.
Add comment March 25th, 2005
Watched Closer with Dag Thomas and Bjørn. This is the anti-date movie. This is the movie you bring your girlfriend to if you want to break up.
In this movie - everyone lies, everyone cheats, everyone is an asshole.
Much like real life some would say (usually after a few glasses too many).
Jude Law is a real prick in this film, but when Clive Owen sticks the knife figuratively in his back about three quarters of the way through, I didn’t feel satisfaction at the karmic justice, but rather pity for both of them for being unable to stop fucking each other over. The women are no better: Natalie Portman’s character pulls off the biggest surprise (and the strip club scenes pull off the trick of making a semi naked Portman appearing un-erotic). Julia Roberts plays a woman who uses her role as a victim to get what she thinks she wants, while also struggling with not knowing what she wants.
It’s a tragedy - even though no-one literally dies, they die emotionally. Sex and Love end up being prizes to be won, escapes from reality, rather than being moments to be shared.
Well worth seeing - the characters beat each other up emotionally - in some ways this film is more violent than Million Dollar Baby.
Add comment March 23rd, 2005
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