Space Elevator going up
The prototyping for the construction of a space elevator is well underway. Good. Excellent…
Add comment November 28th, 2005
Archive for November, 2005
Movie Directors on TV
Numb3rs is a TV show produced by movie directors Ridley Scott.
House MD is a TV show produced by (among others) movie directory Bryan Singer.
Both are excellent directors. Both are quite excellent shows. Ya think there’s a connection?
(oh – and yay BitTorrent!)
Add comment November 28th, 2005
Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room
The Enron scandal is still not finished (Ken Lay and Skilling are up for trial next month) but the documentary makes for interesting viewing. The California energy crisis gets a bit of coverage, but it (naturally) is one-sided look at how Enron mis-used the rules to its own advantage. The tapes from the trader desks about how they would shut off power plants in order to raise the price would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. That California shot itself in the foot when it made the rules is mentioned in passing. The theory that Enron helped bring the Governator to power is too delicious not to be true.
The movie draws a link to the Milgram experiments – that people at Enron become evil because they were told to by the top brass – but I think Enron was more akin to Tulip fever, or Lord of the Flies: without an authority at the top, chaos and savagery quickly rose to the surface in the corporate culture.
Definitely worth seeing – it is very much a tale of hubris and tragedy. The trader who closes out the movie is right on the money when he says that people should have asked questions, but no-one dared to. The follow-on collapse of Andersen and the investigations into several of the worlds largest banks also underlines that Enron was one of many problems. It was a sympton, not the disease itself.
Add comment November 25th, 2005
Global warming has come to Oslo. The sno
Meldingen er sendt fra mobiltelefon og kan kun besvares med mobiltelefon. Nummeret finner du i e-postadressen.
Add comment November 25th, 2005
Darwinia
I finally finished the last level of Darwinia – it was easier than I feared. The second to last level (Biosphere) was much harder. Darwinia was immense fun to play – the mix of indirect and direct control made for great fun. It reminded me of the original Myth, and Lemmings, and Syndicate – but it combined all three so seamlessly. The retro TRON look is just icing on the cake.
Darwinians flock around mindlessly, but pick up the ability to defend themselves after a few upgrades. Later on in the game you can give them armour and gun turrets, which suddenly turns some of the most annoying enemies into swiss cheese. As new enemies are introduced, they force new tactics on you. Armies of little ants can’t be mowed down by gunfire like the enemies you’ve faced early on. You need to ignore the ants and attack the nests. These changes and shifts in balance make exploring the possibilities interesting. The exploration is so much fun because programs don’t cost anything. If something isn’t working, you cancel the program and try again with a new one.
The 1.3 Patch is vital — the early version used a gesture recognition system like Black-and-White. It’s was an interesting idea, but in practice you want a button to press — the stress of battle is not the time to start cursing the pattern recognizer, plus it’s difficult to remember whether the symbol for “airstrike” started from the top-left or bottom right…
The game is coming to Steam, so go buy it when it’s released there next month.
Add comment November 24th, 2005
Mirrormask
Mirrormask is a work of art by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. It manages to hang together in spite of being a structured around a dream, although the absurdity of dream-logic means that the story does jump around in fits and starts.
The good thing is that there is a sensible explanation to what’s going on, and it does come together. The best thing is the consistency of the visual style — McKeans disjointed drawings and acute angles along with Gaiman’s schools of fish floating through the streets make for a visual treat. There are quite a few sequences which remind the reader of the visual style of Books of Magic: life during wartime — although this is probably more coincidence than intent.
Add comment November 20th, 2005
Wallace and Gromit and the Were-Rabbit
Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit — brilliant. A laugh a minute, with jokes of all kinds flying past. Sign gags (like the box around Wallace that “may contain nuts”), visual gags (the church’s painting of the baby Jesus screaming so hard the three wise men cover their ears), puns (”Toupé” “You want to pay? We take checks”), names (”Call me Totty”) and more and more! Definitely worth seeing twice just to catch all the references.
The basic Hammer Horror structure is there, but it’s subverted and made fun of at every turn. Along the way they also manage to poke fun at/pay homage to war movies, King Kong and Frankenstein.
Add comment November 20th, 2005
Half-Life2 mod: Minerva
Minerva: Metastasis is a very well done mod that plays out in the HalfLife2 universe. The map is a bit like Silent Cartographer in Halo — an island with a secret base in the middle. Also a snarky god-like voice pops in during the game to offer enigmatic hints. I really enjoyed it - it builds up tension and has some nice set-pieces along the way. It has some great music at key moments, and the quality of the map is really great.
It’s a nice example of how a little can go a long way. A headcrab is scary when it pops out at you in a tight corridor. A few dozen headcrabs are scary if you are stuck in a lift with them (think of the huge lift at the beginning of HL1) — but this mod plays it quiet. A deserted warehouse is creepy. A deserted warehouse with a dead headcrab in it and an unknown number of live ones is terrifying — even if the actual number of live headcrabs turns out to be one.
Most of the action is focused on combine forces, not zombies or headcrabs, so you get a nice variety of tactics to fight against. The AI is good enough to give rise to those emergent little moments of genius. Towards the end a few bucketloads of soldiers land and start tromping through the base. The multitude of corridors means that the direction of attack isn’t certain. I ended up in a dark little room off to one side, and watched in amazement as a platoon jogged right past me, heading for their destination. As long as I didn’t draw attention to myself, they carried on. They weren’t psychic. They didn’t turn and attack for no reason. A sweet little moment.
Anyway - go and download it — you’ll need to restart STEAM in order for it to pick up the new module after you’ve installed it.
Add comment November 20th, 2005
