Blame This on Juno

So, I've done this with a few of my movie commentaries before, but it's going to be standard now, so I'm gonna give you a heads up. I'm pretty much done "reviewing" movies. When I talk about movies from this point on, I'll give you a quick summary of what I thought and then I'm going to proceed to delve into whatever issues it got me thinking about and how they are pertinent. So, here goes this one:

Simple introduction: Juno rocks. I'm glad I saw it today so that I can legitimately put it on my top 5 for the year. It's sharply written and features stellar performances by a few of my favorite actors (Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, and Allison Janney). People seem to like comparing it to Little Miss Sunshine, but that's just because people like making comparisons. The two have little in common beyond being incredibly well written independent comedies that like to ignore most of the standard formulas. Juno is more accessible in style...but Little Miss Sunshine was very dark and more than a bit absurd, and as such, certainly not everybody's cup of tea. I'd say I like Little Miss Sunshine more (I don't think Juno will quite make its way onto my Top 10), but that's because I the subtext of Little Miss Sunshine (the frailty of humanity; the hollowness of being a "winner" and leading a self-seeking life; and the necessity and healing power of love) is a little bit more important to me.

That said, the subtext of Juno deals with another issue that has become incredibly important and intriguing to me in recent months: relationships. What we build them on; what we expect from them; what they mean to us...we live in a backwards society in a lot of ways, not the least of these is the way we look at relationships of all sorts. We're so obsessed with this idea of "falling in love" that we forget what love really is. We get so caught up in the ideas of romance and passion that we don't remember that the cliché of your spouse being your best friend is supposed to be true.

Relationships in any sense, whether it's a normal friendship or a marriage/dating relationship, should be rooted in the same basic principle: love. Caring for the needs, desires, and dreams of another individual as much as for our own is what creates the sense of security and comfort that allows us to feel close to one another. As such, common sense says that the chief difference between close friends and a spouse, fiancé, or committed boy/girlfriend shouldn't be the physical relationship or the observance of other societal norms so much as the devotion and openness of the love between the participants. A truly devoted couple can't just hope for the dreams of their partner to come true; they need to incorporate their partner's dream into their own.

The problem is that it's so easy to let the social/physical aspect - the "romantic" aspect - of an intimate relationship become its defining portion that forgetting the depth of the love that a successful relationship requires is easy. Not to mention that the popular semantics of "falling" or "being in love" has so much more to do with physical arousal and passion than with actual love that we, as humans, constantly attempt to enter into relationships with people with whom we have no basis for a normal friendship, and you've got a recipe for the cultural disaster we live in.

I'm going to try and relate this back to Juno now as I finish. Spoiler warning and all that.

Vanessa and Mark's relationship failed for one simple reason. They were committed to the idea of a relationship and not to each other. Vanessa was ready to be a mother, not a wife; but in order to be a mother, she felt that being a wife was necessary. She didn't appreciate her husband's dreams and did her best to try and replace them with her hopes for a picture perfect family. Mark was resentful of his wife's treatment of his goals and couldn't bring himself to appreciate hers as completion of her dreams would do nothing to restore his. Neither was willing to embrace and commit themselves to the dreams of the other; they were unwilling to love each other for who they were, so they failed.

Juno and Bleeker will succeed because they understand the truth behind the opening lyric of the song they sing right before the credits roll. "You're a part-time lover and a full time friend". It worries me a lot that so many people I know tend to forget the order of importance of those things...but there are a few of you in my life who seem to have it right, which is a cause of regular celebration for me, so thank you.

Something new.

I'm in Winona, which is unexpected and awesome, but it's 2:30 and I'm not quite what could be called tired. There are issues running through my head that I've been wanting to try to explain to somebody for the last God-knows-how-long, and I feel like I should start to get them out. I don't know if I'll actually post this, but if I do, those few people who I know occasionally read this tend to be among the group I trust to know me this well, as well as to think and talk with me about these things. Also, I generally trust you to not think I'm crazy.

First thing first:
What's up with the traditional view of heroism in our society? With a few exceptions from actual history, it seems like the notion of heroism (at least of the more adventurous variety) is inexorably linked with violence. Call me crazy, but this strikes me as a bad thing for a few reasons.

For one, when you spend so much time being told that problems can be solved through direct confrontation, improper expectations are built; expectations in which helping people becomes less important than solving their problems. I don't think I've fallen completely into that trap (or, at least, I like to think I recognize it when I do), but it's there, and I know I'm not the only one.

The second worry is more personal. Maybe it's just the fact that so much of my worldview is wrapped so strongly in the escapist media that's been such an important part of my upbringing...but every time I think of adventure - which, due to said overexposure, I occasionally look at as a necessity for happiness as opposed to contentment - it always winds up being linked with physical conflict. Even though my own experience shows elation in mere exploration and great sorrow in causing pain; there's this part of me in which longs for some sense of physical confrontation; that longs for a palpable, tangible source of evil that can actually be stopped by humanities oldest and least effective method of problem solving. The sheer number of people I know who "joke" about anxiously awaiting a zombie apocalypse makes me feel like I'm not alone here, either.

I think that this is the real allure, and the real danger, here. The path of Cain comes so naturally to us that we'd all love to think that, ultimately, it will at some point be the right one, even though we all know that deep down it never will be. History shows us time and time again that the only way to really bring about change is by adherence to the great commandments given us by Christ: to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourself. It's a damnable shame that it's such a hard calling to adhere to (pseudo-pun pseudo-intended).

Second mini-rant picks up near where that left off:
The Golden Rule seriously needs to be rephrased. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is meant to embody the basic tenets of "Love your neighbor as yourself"...but it seems to me that it fails miserably. I started having this conversation with a couple of my roommates the other day, but one of them wouldn't hear it, simply because he was so used to relating the first as being equivalent to the second. I think the linguists and semantic nuts among you will agree with me that it's not.

The Golden Rule is, by its very phrasing, self centered. It asks you to think of how you feel, or believe you would feel given a certain circumstance. Well, guess what, that other person isn't you, and at least 50 percent of the time, what makes you feel better probably isn't gonna do the trick for another person. The great commandment is, by its nature, focused on the other person. We are to love them to the same extent we love ourselves. It says nothing of the manner, just the amount because Christ, being, you know, omniscient, understands that the manner must vary. By its nature, Love has to be expressed differently between different people; certainly there are universal acts that can be used to express it, but if I'm truly trying to show my love to my mother and my father, I can't treat them identically. That would be not only inconsiderate, but it would be dehumanizing them by ignoring their individuality. How then, in choosing to treat everybody as we would like to be treated, can we follow the Golden Rule as traditionally told, and retain a respect for the humanity and individuality of all? We can't.

My initial response is to say that the Golden Rule should read "Treat others as they would have you treat them"...but that leaves elephant-sized gaps for people who are disturbed or depressed to justify or encourage mistreatment. So, I don't know what we can really use as an entirely secular rephrasing of the Golden Rule, but we seriously need one, or else we'll never advance beyond this cultural overemphasis on "how I feel". Any ideas, fellow postmodern linguists in the audience?

I had one more thing to rant on, but I seem to have forgotten it, so I'll leave it at this for now. If this generates some discussion, either just with me or through comments, or whatever, maybe I'll make writing out these sorts of rants and ramblings a greater priority.

Just Because

So, I feel like I should write something. I don't know why, but I do. There isn't a lot going on these days for me to write about...I saw American Gangster and No Country for Old Men. Both were good movies. American Gangster makes me sad mostly because Ridley Scott just seems like he's trying to win an award these days instead of making quality cinema. No Country for Old Men was brilliant. Saying more about either would be doing you all a disservice, either because I'd be spoiling Old Country for you or because I'd be wasting your time telling you things you could have guessed about American Gangster with only minimal knowledge.

Seeing as I'm starting to get a vague idea of who reads this thing, I'm even more torn as to what to write, as there isn't a whole lot of interest overlap. This being the case, I'm going to ramble a bit about something that's been running through my mind since about 2 a.m. this morning that only a couple of you will understand: Concurrency in Object Oriented Design.

This is one of those entries that's going to be edited, heavily, when I come back and read it in a few days and realize how incomprehensible it all is. Keep with me for now if you care...

So, first of all, thank God that my High Performance Computing class is over. Starting to understand how to write procedural code in parallel was well worth the time and effort, but I think that bigger things are on the horizon. Primarily, I don't think that parallelization is going to be the primary route taken in writing applications to take advantage of multi-core processors.

Why do I think this? Well, mostly because I don't see anybody giving up their objects anytime soon. As much as I'm starting to appreciate functional programming, I still love Object Oriented design. It's just so much easier to perceive interactions between elements of a software system when you're dividing them up logically from the get go, that the time penalty is well worth it. The problem here is that it's difficult to parallelize an Object Oriented system because you've got such a strongly heterogeneous mixture of operations going on in any given interaction between objects. Certainly, if you're performing simulations where you have large aggregate groups of similar objects interacting with each other over either several iterations or under slightly different circumstances, you can break up this problem...but if you've got several dozen different types of Objects, all having their interaction being controlled by some central, generally procedural method, you're going to have to combine flat parallelism over looping constructs all over the place with functional decomposition of different object-set interactions with god knows what other types of algorithmic tomfoolery to "optimize" your problem.

This just doesn't seem worth it.

I've recently been doing a bit of reading on a language called Erlang. Erlang is rooted in the concept of "concurrency oriented design". Now, when most people think of concurrent operations, they think of multi-threading. When most people think of multi-threading, they think of shared memory accesses, critical sections, and notoriously instable and unreliable performance. Erlang sheds all of this.

Instead, Erlang structures programs around "processes". Not OS processes, light-weight processes managed by the Erlang RTE, each with its own unique memory and variables, all communicating with each other through asynchronous message passing. Having not done any actual programming in Erlang (a deficiency that will be rectified soon), I don't honestly understand yet how programs are structured around these processes, but I see a LOT of potential in this.

Imagine, a combination of Objects and Erlang style processes. You build an Object, and gets scheduled to run as its own process on one of the cores or nodes of your system. Each object exists as a unique process in this way, waking up and doing work on its core when requested, and sending that data back to whatever other Object requested its services, and going back to sleep. It doesn't sound a lot different from Object Oriented design as we know it, it just scales objects and their computations across a system. Obviously, we would need to write interactions between objects in a less traditionally procedural manner. "Controllers" in the traditional sense would certainly see a massive overhaul. Right now, it seems to me that Object Oriented programs are essentially procedural programs with a lot of the mess filtered out into objects and the remaining mess existing in the controller, managing their serial interaction, but any step towards truly efficient parallelization would require as much.

I've lost my train of thought for now. Maybe when I come back to make sure the above statements are actually understandable, I'll be able to remember what I wanted to say. For now, though, I'll just ask, would this concept of Objects existing and communicating concurrently, largely independent of a serialized controller be the fastest way of spreading code across multiple processing elements? No, probably not. But, if you're really looking for speed, why are you looking at O-O in the first place? I honestly can't think of anything right now that has the potential to be as easy to understand in design terms, easy to extend across and arbitrary number of processing elements (distributed or symmetric), and as potentially robust as this solution. It's something to think about and hope for in the future.

Defending My Top 10's: Part 2

Well, once again, I find myself not wanting to do work, so I'll take some time to explain why I like some of the things that I like. Continuing down the list, I'll cover soundtracks. A few notes I'd like to make here: these are, videogame/anime soundtracks. There really aren't enough movie soundtracks to which I listen with any regularity to make the list, and they would seem somewhat out of place with those represented here. And, once more, I tried to limit things a little bit by including a maximum of one entry per series/composer. Again, while the list isn't presented in any meaningful order, I'll tackle it in the order in which they appear, anyway.

Chrono Cross:
Choosing a favorite from the body of Yasunori Mitsuda's work was a feat. I'm not going to lie. Choosing the best single score from among the Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenosaga Episode 1 soundtracks isn't fun. For me, Chrono Cross wins out for two reasons:
1. It's largely quite mellow, which is something I enjoy in listening music.
2. Of the soundtracks he's written that hold nostalgic value for me, the sound samplings in Chrono Cross are of the highest quality. With a few exceptions, things sound like real instruments and not mediocre MIDI samples.
Unfortunately for people playing the actual game, the only real dud in this collection is the battle music, the theme that's probably heard more than any other. In any case, the OST itself is a more than worth addition to your music collection.

Cowboy Bebop
I don't know how to begin to describe the body of work written by Yoko Kano for this series. Catchy is really about the best I can do, but that doesn't begin to describe it. The sheer variety of musical styles represented is astounding, and all of it, from the big band jazz and western guitar pieces to the vibraphone march and whacked out electronica is of excellent quality, even if many of the vocal pieces are incredibly derivative of late 90's American pop. Honestly, if you're skeptical and you know anybody who has access to a decent chunk of the soundtrack, ask them to make you a mix of their favorite pieces, and prepare to be shocked by the quality.

Earthbound
Earthbound is a quirky, light hearted game, and its soundtrack fits the mood perfectly. The various battle music tends to be just as odd and captivating as the enemies you'll face, dungeon tracks leave you with a relaxed sense of urgency, and the various town themes will relax all of your fears away. It's really the perfect soundtrack to the game and makes for great listening on its own. I've recently started playing Mother 3 (the sequel to Earthbound which was only released in Japan), and it seems like its soundtrack could accomplish the difficult task of being even better.

Secret of Mana
Few games have soundtracks that do as much to imporve the game experience as Secret of Mana. Though the actual presentation of the story in Secret of Mana is fairly lax, the music does as much to instill a sense of adventure and sorrow as any that I've ever heard. Honestly, if the soundtrack didn't do so much to set the mood, the hours of grinding required to keep all of your weapons and spells up to max level would be next to unbearable. Instead, every time you enter the wild, you feel like something amazing could happen at any moment, and it provides the same sense of excitement to make grinding through text books tolerable, as well.

Okami
Okami's soundtrack is just...good. I don't know what else to say about the general quality beyond this. It's really amazing that audio is just as vivid, energetic, and distinctive as its visual style of this game. It really remains so memorable through the use of traditional Japanese instrumentation and musical structure, which keep it fresh to my American senses.

Shadow of the Colossus
Dramatic is the best single word to describe Shadow of the Colossus' aural component. It takes an excellent and dynamic score to keep your ears as engaged as your eyes when you're desperately struggling to stay atop and kill a moving mountain, but Colossus does it. Swooping scores that swap between movements dynamically, becoming more and more grandiose as you approach your ultimate goal and reverting back down to a foreboding sense of mortal danger as you fall to try again. It really is a treat for the ears.

Katamari Damacy
Seriously, it's just royally fucked up. Random, quirky, and ultimately one of the most enjoyable experiences around describes Katamari Damacy and its soundtrack to a T. Everything from soft techno to rock ballads to mambo to lounge singers to children's choirs make their way into this soundtrack, and I don't know if I could enjoy it more.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
This game really makes the list thanks to the incredible Hyrule Symphony performance. A lot of N64/Play Station era games made the dubious mistake of trying to use "improved" quality Midi samples in their music. Really, these midrange samples sound just enough better that you can tell they're supposed to be real instruments. The fact that they still don't just causes most of them to grate on my ears a bit. Listening to the Hyrule Symphony recording, though, any woes about sound quality in the actual game fly away as I bask in the beauty of Koji Kondo's impeccable work. Everything in the soundtrack is great, but there aren't many tracks in existence that match up to Hyrule Field, The Gerudo Valley, or Death Mountain as heard on this recording.

Dragon Quest V
My favorite Dragon Quest soundtrack, by far. Why? Mostly because the field and battle themes are just so damn good. When the best two songs on an already excellent soundtrack are the two that the player is guaranteed to hear the most, you've done something very right. The little upbeat in Over The Horizon that gives it the deceptive, almost 3/4 feel just gets me every time I listen to it. Seriously, I think I could listen to the track for hours straight and not feel like I was missing anything besides the adventure right outside my window.

Final Fantasy VI
And the dreaded choice arrives. Which Final Fantasy game makes the cut? As much as I love pretty much all of the FF soundtracks, VI gets it for one simple reason. The first 12 minutes of the 21 minute long ending theme. This intricate medley of character themes flows so perfectly and beautifully, and disguises themes so well as it weaves characters together during the escape from Kefka's Tower that I can't confidently say that any piece of game music has been written better. The passage flowing from the Gau's Theme into Celes' and then Locke's chokes me up regularly and the swell from Relm's theme into the nigh unrecognizable adaption of Shadow's theme is absolutely perfect. I want FFVI to be remade on a new console just so that I can hear this piece being performed by a real orchestra. If I were to hear that, I don't know how life could get much better.

Defending My Top 10s: Part 1

It's closing in on 12:30, my roommate is hard at work on a paper and I'm at a loss as to what to do on the work I have left to do when I can't get into the lab. As such, I'm back again, and this time, I'm going to shed some light on why my favorite albums, soundtracks, and movies...are.

So, going in the order in which they currently appear on the side bar. Before I start, I'll explain some restrictions I imposed on myself. Any given band can only be represented once to prevent me from being to heavily biased towards whatever group or groups I'm feeling at the moment; and "Best of" or compilation albums aren't allowed, as they aren't representative of a single release...

Albums
Nickel Creek - Why Should the Fire Die?
Nickel Creek is just an amazing group. Incredibly talented, young musicians applying their skills to a unique hybrid of bluegrass instrumentation and more standard pop sensibilities create a sound unlike pretty much anything out there. Why Should the Fire Die? makes the list over their other two albums for providing a greater diversity of sound and more poetic, poignant lyrics. "Doubting Thomas" probably ranks in my top 10 favorite songs of all time, and the sudden flood of additional meaning provided by the last stanza of "When in Rome" strikes me every time.

Guster - Lost and Gone Forever
Guster isn't a terribly hard band to describe. Just a couple of guitarists and a percussionist who insists on playing all of his instruments with his bare hands cranking out some of the catchiest alt. rock (read: pop, but we don't want to call it pop) music you'll hear. Guster is just fun to listen to, and Lost and Gone Forever is, in my opinion their most consistently excellent work.

John Coltrane - Giant Steps
If you like jazz, you've listened to Coltrane. If you've listened to Coltrane, you're probably sick to death of the song Giant Steps. Don't let that turn you away from this album, though, as the whole thing is excellent, and of the 6 Coltrane albums I own, it's the only one to contain a few of my favorite Coltrane originals (most noticeably Sayeeda's Song Flute). If you're not a big jazz person and are looking for a start, this is about the best introduction to bebop that I can think of.

Cake - Pressure Chief
Either you like Cake or you don't. If you don't, you probably need your head examined, but that's just my opinion. In any case, while I'm a huge fan of Cake's entire repertoire, Pressure Chief stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality on a single album. I mean, on this one disc, you get Wheels, Dime, Carbon Monoxide, Tougher Than it Is, End of the Movie, and their incredible cover of Guitar Man. This is just straight-up too good to miss if you even kind of sort of like Cake.

Beck - Mutations
I tend to go around and tell people that I'm a big Beck fan. That's not entirely true. I absolutely adore about half of his work and can take or leave the other half. Mutations is one of the few albums where every track lands in the former category. Intensely mellow and very easy to listen to, Beck's acoustic opus stands in stark contrast to the rest of his body of work (minus Sea Change, which is also very good, but just isn't as easy to listen to).

DeVotchKa - How it Ends
Oh. My. God. I love DeVotchKa. How many bands combine Eastern European Gypsie, American Folk, and Mariachi musical traditions all into a single album, much less individual songs. Pretty much just DeVotchKa. I don't know what else I can say, as the sound is impossible to describe; any modern band where you can talk about the song and say "yeah, I just love that driving tuba part" is something that needs to be experienced and not explained. How it Ends, proper, is one of those rare songs that I can lie on my bed, half naked, in the dark and listen to and fall into absolute bliss. I'm really sorry for the visual picture there, but it's true.

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones - Left of Cool
I'm sorry that I seem to keep on running into bands that are hard to describe here. Bela Fleck is best summarized as a New Age Jazzgrass Funk Jam Band. Really, it's just an excuse to listen to some of the best instrumentalists on the planet (banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck, the astoundingly talented bassist Victor Woooten, and an excellent saxophonist who I can never remember) devise melodies that nobody else could. Left of Cool is more melodic than some of their other works, and thus makes the cut.

Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
Sufjan Stevens has been alternately labeled as "indie folk" and "baroque pop" among other things, if that gives you any idea of what he sounds like. It probably doesn't, but that's okay. Stevens and his backup band weave a rich musical tapestry with deeply personal lyrics that are more than worthy of the praise they receive (Illinois was the best reviewed album of 2005). Illinois is an incredibly cohesive album that follows a very strong natural progression, but unlike his Michigan album, it's much easier to listen to tracks out of context, granting it the spot on my list. For reference, my absolute favorite Sufjan song is "For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" from Michigan.

Weezer - Weezer (The Blue Album)
The Blue Album is pretty much exactly what a good alternative album should be. It's catchy, it's not terribly repetitive, and it's relatively short. At 41 minutes, listening to The Blue Album is easy, especially since every song from "In the Garage" to "No One Else" is a winner. While the rest of Weezer's albums show sparks of brilliance in places, none are as consistently impeccable as their first self titled work.

Kansas - Leftoverture
Most of you know Kansas primarily for the first song on this album (Carry On My Wayward Son), but I'm fully convinced that Kansas should be primarily famous for what the rest of this album entails. Songs like "Miracles out of Nowhere" and "Cheyenne Anthem" feature jaw dropping, mind numbing displays of what can only be called a mixture of 70's fusion and Bach. Spectacular passages played out mostly on the synthesizer (with violin and guitar support) as intricate as any Baroque piece will make you wonder why Kansas didn't pursue this unique sound more strongly.

Well, it's now closing in on 1:30, and I don't even want to think about starting in on another one of these right now. You can count on it in the near future though. I hope that my elaborations have encouraged you to check out some of these artists that you've passed on previously. Just for reference, honorable mentions include Ratatat - Classics, Sigur Ros - Takk, Psychograss - Now Hear This, Flogging Molly - Swagger, Mustard Plug - Evildoers Beware, and Seu Jorge - Samba Esporte Fine (released in the U.S. as Carolina).

This is what I do...

So, I'd absolutely love to put a bunch of effort into some long writeup relating to a bunch of crap that only I'd care about, but...I'm just too busy. That said, while I'm not huge into putting personal information about the details of my life online, I'm going to go through and let you all know what I'm doing, anyway. Mostly, I'm busy with classes, so I guess I'll start by describing the basics of what that entails.

Advanced Conversational Japanese is a lot more intense than the first two years were. After only speaking Japanese intermittently, mostly for the purpose of practicing grammar patterns, suddenly being dropped in an environment where the professor only speaks English when absolutely necessary is a bit of a shift. Also, it seems that, as a class, our handwriting is terrible. We regularly receive packets of sheets for practicing Katakana and Hiraganna of the variety used by small Japanese children. I'm managing well, though. I haven't scored below a 90 on any of our first three tests and I'm exceedingly well prepared for the test I have tomorrow; mostly, though, I'm just reminded on regular basis that I love this language.

Intro to Psych is...meh. It's an interesting enough class, it's not terribly difficult, and it meets a graduation requirement. There's really nothing bad about it, and I'm regularly entertained by my prof., but I feel like it's time that could be spent just as well elsewhere.

Intro to Public Speaking is a joke. Having been involved with theater since I was 11, I'm more comfortable in front of an audience and have a stronger public speaking voice already than 90% of the class. It will be worthwhile to learn to speak better from an outline and to be more physically involved in my speaking, but we haven't talked about any of that, and I doubt we will (in 6 weeks, we've only actually talked about speaking skills twice). Honestly, the only thing at all engaging about the class is going to be speech preparation. This weekend, I'll be hitting the books and preparing an informative speech about the Catholic theology of Intercessory Prayer (to the Saints) and Purgatory and how these beliefs (and the Protestant confusion relating to them) stem from the differing concepts of the Communion of Saints between Catholicism and Protestantism. When time for a persuasive speech comes about, I'll be tackling the much lighter subject of Graphic Novels and why more people should read them.

Computer Science stuff comes next. I'll try and make it as simple as I can for the lay folk in the community.

High Performance Computing is a class I'm incredibly glad I'm taking. Learning how to write code in parallel has been interesting, and once we get to less "embarrassingly parallel" problems, things only promise to get more interesting. So far, we haven't done much beyond domain decomposition of simple problems and being reminded of the intense performance cost of Object Oriented code, but as we approach more fine grained parallel problems, it will become easier to see the attitudes we're going to need to adopt to make more consumer level programs function in parallel.

...Speaking of consumer applications, Software Engineering has also been a real eye opener already. I'm working as a member of a team of 5 to produce a single product by the end of the semester, and it's definitely a more exciting feeling tackling a larger project and starting to understand the work that needs to be done. The project itself takes a bit of work to describe and make it sound as cool as it is, so I'm not going to try now. Once I finish a final revision of the vision statement as well as our supplemental specification, I may post them here. In any case, the most important lesson I've learned (or am learning) so far is that I can rely on other people in group projects, it just requires effective communication of responsibilities and a willingness to trust. I've donned the role of chief program architect for now (once we're building the database interaction model, I'll suddenly become less useful), so I've done a lot more work than the rest of the team at this point, but they all want to be right there and understand how this is being put together so that they can do whatever they do best to help it along, which is awesome.

Anyway, I'm typing this because I really don't want to work on my High Performance Computing code right now. I much prefer C++ to C, but taking incredibly procedural code and making it OO just isn't my idea of fun (right now =P). Unfortunately, we have a strict schedule of access times on the cluster, so I need to get this done if I want to run my benchmarks tomorrow and hand it in on time. So...have fun, all, and thanks for reading.

Once: A Singular Experience

Shortly after I got back to school, I heard from a friend of mine. He told me that he'd been to see a movie the week before, and that he was dragging me and any of our other friends that he could get his hands on to go see it again that week. This movie was Once, and I have to say that I owe Nate a great debt.

A movie about a nameless guy - a 30-something aspiring musician who is living with and working for his father - and girl - a Czech immigrant trying to make a life with her mother and daughter - in Dublin and the impact that they have on each other's lives over the short time they have together; Once is a musical - of a sort - that expresses the human experience more purely and poignantly than any movie I've seen in recent memory.

There's not much else that can be said about the film. It's incredibly simple in scope, being driven entirely by the growth of the relationship between these two rather than the context surrounding it. In this way, it's much like Lost in Translation, but with touching panels of musical performance taking place of Lost in Translation's sort of general meandering and sense of cluelessness in the gaps. It's not an especially good comparison, but it's about the best that can be made.

Ultimately, about the best praise that I can give the film is this: The only music that I have received legally in the last 2 years has been as gifts. I started an account in the i-Tunes store to buy this soundtrack because I felt a desperate need to contribute more than the $3.50 I paid for my ticked to the production. I've also listened to the entire album three times in the last 24 hours.

The film probably isn't anywhere near any of you right now. It started showing in limited release in July, and is more than likely out of your nearest indy theater by now. Nothing on Amazon yet about the DVD release, but you can probably expect it in the next 6-9 months. Do yourself and all your friends a favor and check it out when this happens.

Why did it take me so long?

So, in the last 2 weeks, I've read just over 3000 pages in Harry Potter novels. Those of you familiar with the series will probably realize that, by this, I mean to say that I've read the first 6 books. And I have enjoyed them completely.

I don't have much to say other than that. I've managed to simply borrow books up until now, but my dad doesn't own number 7 yet, and I'm now emotionally invested to the point that I literally can't wait until next week when I'm back at school to finish the series (I'll be shelling out my cold hard cash tomorrow).

I know that Harry obviously defeats Voldemort, and I doubt it will be in some bad-ass wizard's duel in which Harry proves the mightier wielder of ancient megiks, as that would be completely to the contrary of the point that Rowling has been (blatantly) making in the first 6 books: the power of love to conquer hatred and self serving strength. That being love of the variety preached by Christ when he proclaimed the two greatest commandments, not love as found in a dime store Dianne Steele novel.

I will admit that I did cheat a little bit. ***SPOILERS*** I was so pissed that Harry pulled a Peter Parker at the end of book six that I checked the Wikipedia entry on Ginny Weasley's role in the Epilogue to ensure that she and Harry got together. ***END SPOILERS*** I'm a little bit in love with Ginny Weasley right now (3000 pages in 2 weeks will fuck you up a bit), and I'd be royally pissed if she didn't wind up happy. I didn't read any details of the meat of the book though, or the other character's fates, and am incredibly excited to finish it off in the next couple of days.

My question to you all is, why didn't you assholes force this stuff upon me earlier?

Also, to those of you who complain that your childhood ended with the end of Deathly Hallows, be grateful that you at least picked a winning horse. My childhood ended at the age of 12 with The Phantom Menace, and it ended poorly. I've been randomly binging on mediocre Shounen Anime to revive some spark of it ever since. Speaking of which, I still need to acquire all of the episodes of Naruto Shippouden to the present date...


edit: 8-29-07; 10:30 pm
So, I've just finished Deathly Hallows. Very good close. Nowhere near enough Ginny. Sever Ginny deficiency, I'd even say, but it ends the series well enough. Rowling, in never explaining the rules of her universe too much, remained free to abuse the holes she left to provide a fitting ending. Other than more Ginny, I really just wished there had been a bit more between the final confrontation and the epilogue, but it would have been near impossible to do so without depressing the mood, so it was probably a wise decision.

HP5 thoughts

I've got quite a bit to write about the concept of adaptations in general. That's coming in a later post (hopefully this week, as I've been thinking about it a lot). This being the case, instead of filling your heads with all kinds of talk unrelated to the film itself, I'm just going to say a few quick things about this movie that any of you who care about have already seen and any of you who don't probably won't no matter what I say. Alright?

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a very competent film. The acting is probably as good as the series has been thus far, and the visual direction is very well done. It has been about the poorest rated of the HP films thus far critically, but I believe that has more to do with the source material than anything. Not having read any of the Potter books beyond the first one (which I read at the height of my Tolkien fanaticism in late '99 and thus didn't much care for), I can't say for sure, but trying to take a 1000+ page novel filled with important characterization and condensing it into a 2.3 hour film just, generally speaking, doesn't always flow terribly well. Certain, seemingly important characters (Luna Lovegood, Cho Chang, and a few others) just don't get the time to be properly fleshed out, and seem somewhat forced in with an otherwise outstanding primary cast when their relevancy to the plot deems their presence necessary.

That said, the primary triumvirate of Harry, Ron, and Hermione have grown to be quite excellent young actors under the impressive tutelage they've received on the set. Gary Oldman is one of the best actors around (and seems to be part of the reason that our heroes have grown so much) and Imelda Staunton's performance as Dolores Umbridge was absolutely incredible. The story flows well enough despite the slight character foibles mentioned earlier, and it sets up nicely for what I imagine is to follow (hopefully within the next two to three months, I'll actually know what, exactly, that is). I'd also like to say that Yates and Radcliffe did a wonderful Harry seem suitably ornery and mildly angsty without going completely overboard and turning Harry into the screaming emo child that some people seem to have interpreted him as in the book proper. I never once felt that Harry was out of line in his reactions, and, indeed, a couple of times was wondering why people were so shocked by him instead.

8/10
Notwithstanding the fact that I feel like the absolute creepiest person alive every time I'm made to realize that both Emma Watson (Hermione) and Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley) are growing into attractive young women in their own rights.

Ratatouille is a Treat

I'm going to keep this short, because there's not a whole lot to say.

I really enjoyed Ratatouille. It's visually stunning - I'm talking about the direction and the cinematography more than the animation, which isn't anything we haven't seen before - its simple story is impeccably told; and while the it may be an age old practice, I've rarely seen cooking used as a metaphor for life so well.

It's a somewhat subtler (note the somewhat) film than previous Pixar entries. It generally lacks the gushing sentiment and blunt repetition of its underlying moral present in 99% of animated films, choosing instead to make strong use of its romantic, in every sense of the word, setting to evoke an emotional response. It's due to this manner of allowing you to forge your own attachments rather than forcefully building them up for you that this movie may not appeal as strongly to children, but it's genuinely refreshing to see an animated film geared towards adults with some laughs for the kids rather than the opposite.

Go see Ratatouille when you get a chance, worst case, you should leave with a smile on your face. Don't go into it expecting a traditional Pixar film a la Toy Story or Finding Nemo and you may recognize it as one of their best.

10/10

Also, I'm incredibly excited for WALL*E

Why I Feel That the Spider-Man 3 Hate was Completely Excessive

I want to start out by saying that I think that Spider-Man 3 is almost exactly the film that Sam Raimi wanted it to be. Whether this is good or not depends on how much you like Sam Raimi; how much you like Spider-Man; and how much you're willing to let these likes conflict.

Spider-Man 3 isn't a perfect film. It's at times disjointed, it takes strong liberties with its characters' cannon, and, of course, Venom proper wasn't handled well at all. Perhaps the biggest - but least consciously recognized - issue that most people take with the film, however, is that the general atmosphere is just so much different from Raimi's past two Spidey entries. While Spider-Man 1 and 2 were very much movies about Peter Parker and the Spider-Man character, Spider-Man 3 is a love song to both the good and bad of comic books in general.

I picked up on this notion while trying to explain to my dad why I didn't think it was any near as bad as critics were saying after my first viewing of the movie. It was, and remains, my belief that Spider-Man 3 isn't any sillier or more contrived than the previous entries, it's just more upfront about it.

You see, comics are a medium with a history incredibly rich in melodrama, cliché, and archetypes. In Spider-Man 3, Sam Raimi embraces all of these traditions, from the amazingly melodramatic panning shot to Harry in the balcony at the theater during the opening scene to the manner in which the majority of the cast joined J.K. Simmons in playing perfectly into their characters' archetypes.

For better or worse, though, Peter and Mary Jane didn't seem to get the same face-lift, and their characters retention of their more "realistic" personalities tends to ruin the fast paced, highly entertaining, if generic, interactions of the rest of the cast. Having the two most critical characters in the film trying to portray real people amid a cast of one-dimensional clichés drags at the proceedings and makes the shift hard to recognize. It's for this reason that I would have liked to have seen more interactions between "evil" Peter and the rest of the cast, because it was only when Maguire was overacting and trying to milk what little material was given to this part of his character that he seemed to fit in with the over-the top melodrama of the rest of the film.

I don't believe that Maguire isn't primarily to blame for most of his issues in this regard. I think that, were the Peter Parker character written to more accurately reflect his comic book persona, Maguire would have had a much easier job of things. Unfortunately, Peter Parker was irreparably altered for the movies from a wise-cracking genius with some of the world's worst luck to a meek, introspective genius with some of the world's worst luck.

And yet, despite being this incredibly meek character, Parker needs to stand toe-to-toe with a bunch of larger-than-life personalities all focused on tearing him down. In a world of archetypes and walking clichés, a meek character can't do this and remain believably in the same world as the rest of the cast, or the illusion is broken. As the hero, he can't back down; but left without his wit and smarmy remarks as a verbal weapon to combat this personal oppression there's not much he can do to remain in the same one-dimensional reality as the rest of the cast.

Dunst played her part well enough when Maguire wasn't on the set, but when the two were together, things tended to fall back into the mood of the first two films; again causing a rift in the atmosphere in the film.

There's not a whole lot more that can be said about this aspect of the film. In trying to transplant the characters of the first two films into a largely different environment, the writers missed some key issues. Peter's inability to hold his own with the rest of the cast on their terms makes the flimsiness of the film's conceits more visible relative to its predecessors. This is unfortunate because upon multiple viewings, the films are all equally ridiculous and contrived, just in different ways.

Whether you're willing to forgive the flaw in favor of the goal is up to you. Generally speaking, I am, simply because it's not a new problem - I've been craving a truer-to-form Peter Parker from the beginning - and it's about time it bit them in the ass properly anyway. If Raimi, Maguire, and Dunst return for the fourth installment, maybe a Peter with a freshly bolstered sense of confidence will start to develop the proper attitude of his canonical self.

The other major problem that Spider-Man fans have with this film is Venom. Symbiote-Spidey was generally handled excellently, probably among the best parts of the film; Peter should have rid himself of the Symbiote, we should have seen it begin to attach itself to Brock, and that should have been it for Venom until the next film. Instead, we got a super villain that was completely untrue to cannon and did nothing to differentiate itself from Spider-Man in terms of movement and ability.

This is especially sad since this film showed that Raimi was finally up to the task of visualizing these character's abilities. The scene of Spider-Man rescuing Gwen from the crane accident showed the movement of Spider-Man as well as I think is possible. Sand Man, similarly, was incredibly well portrayed visually. Having Venom be as blah as he was was a huge disappointment, as watching a hulking Venom bound 5 stories through the air, pin Peter to a construction girder, and try to split Parker's skull open with his tongue to get at his brain would have been a real treat.

I don't know what else I can say. Spider-Man 3, for me, is a lot like [Star Wars] Episode 3 was. Every time I watched it, I became more forgiving of its flaws in favor of its root material. This doesn't mean that the flaws don't exist, but its charms are just more substantial. So, go watch it again when you get the chance (it's out of most theaters by now), and try to appreciate what Raimi was attempting to do. Maybe you'll enjoy the movie more now that you know what disappointments to expect, maybe you won't, but please stop the hate.

On one final note, I want to yell at those of you who are upset and think that Sand Man's origin was contrived. The afternoon before I went to see Spider-Man 3 for the second time, I swung by a local comic book shop with some friends. While there, my friend Peter picked up a Super Man comic. This particular issue involved a conflict between Supes and Bizarro. From the back of the Car, Peter made a comment as to how he'd forgotten that Bizarro had Ice Vision. Almost everybody in the car looked at him as if to exclaim, "Ice vision? How can he have ice vision?!" because, somehow, it was somehow more absurd than the heat vision we're all so comfortable with. Sand Man's origin as opposed to Spider Man's is exactly that same situation. Calling Sand Man's creation contrived is asinine when you're going to see your third Spider-Man film.

edit: I will admit that the convenient proximity of the testing facility is stretching things a bit, but seriously, just roll with it.

Transformers: Less Than Meets the Eye

Two things to start. First, I legitimately enjoyed Transformers. Second, I'm sorry for the title, but it's almost a necessity given the situation. Onto the meat...

Transformers is exactly what everybody else has been saying: A fun pop-corn movie and an amazing overall spectacle. I would say small on the plot, but it tries to have a more elaborate plot than it needed to, and that's really its failings. It's an immensely entertaining film filled with explosions and giant robots, but if you go in without a preexisting appreciation for said robots, the fun isn't nearly as infectious.

Bumblebee is the only Autobot that the viewer will have any inclination towards liking based solely on the material in the film. And if Bay hadn't made the obvious choice of casting Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime, even transformers aficionados would be lacking the much needed emotional connection to this important canonical figure.

That's the real problem with Transformers, and since the good parts are fairly obvious, that's what I'm going to devote what little I have left to say too. Bay spends far too much time setting up the plot lines for the human characters and not enough time on the Transformers themselves; especially considering that almost all of the human plot line is devoted towards explaining how the humans can fight the Decepticons in the closing minutes of the film. Sure, Shia LaBeouf is a great young actor and he deserves screen time, but certainly not at the expense of the titular characters.

That LaBeouf's plot line didn't even need to be reduced to improve the end result is even sadder. The other two concurrent plot threads could have been completely replaced with more Autobot and (especially) Decepticon related story and improved the movie significantly. If Michael Bay didn't feel he had to whore out his military connections at every opportunity, not only would there have been easily an extra 40 minutes to flesh out both sides of the Transfomers crew, but the final showdown would have been much more climactic. Human intervention greatly detracted from the grandeur of Autobot on Decepticon action, especially in the case of the showdown between (a woefully under addressed) Megatron and Prime.

The worse offender, though, is the entirely unnecessary "signal analyst" plot line. All that these guys did that affected the ending in any way was tell the Air Force where to go at the end, and we wasted a good 20 minutes to half hour with a slough of characters that were absolutely terrible and provided only one mildly amusing scene.

Long story short, Michael Bay, if you're reading this, the next time you make a Transformers movie, try to actually devote an acceptable length of the movie to, you know, Transformers.

That said, it was a fun movie. Shia LaBeouf is a great young actor who's a lot of fun to watch, and when the action sequences get going, they are very well done. If you go into it with a love of Transformers and/or a desire to enjoy the movie, you will. If you go in skeptical with an overly critical eye, there's a good chance you won't.

Final score(s):
9/10 for die hard Transformers fans
6/10 if you've got no clue who Optimus Prime is
somewhere in between for everybody else

Why Watchmen is Truely Graphic Literature

It took me a lot longer than it should have to give Watchmen a read. I'd been hearing comic aficionados reference it as one of the pinnacles of comic writing for years, and even ignorantly expounded its virtues upon others when hearing the comic format come under attack. It was just last summer, though, that I finally decided to spend the money and finally give it a read; and what I saw blew me away.

I knew that I wanted to use mixed verbs in the above sentence, but I honestly couldn't decide which order to put them in.

You see, in terms of narrative, Watchmen is far deeper than your typical comic book, and is much more similar to a traditional novel. For one thing, it's not high in action. It's primarily a study on the psychological effects of vigilantism on its practitioners and the general public. For another thing, it lacks an easily identified hero. Sure, there are protagonists, and they happen to be (mostly former) masked crime fighters, but it's not purely a strong sense of justice that motivates their exploits. Watchmen makes no qualms about the fact that many in its cast took on this burden out of a desire to feel power over others; a grating sense of paranoia; desire for money or fame; and even a sense of sexual freedom. Watchmen's cast is adult. It is resonant, and honest, and refreshing, and it really makes you think about yourself.

If this wasn't enough to differentiate Watchmen from your typical comic fare, Watchmen also takes time to touch on the unimaginable ramifications of even a single "super being" coming into existence and the exceptional costs of true peace.

At the same time, Watchmen's visual aspect is far too powerful to ignore. It's not a work that would retain its full impact without its graphic component. There are portions of the book, for example, Walter Kovac's Rorschach test, where Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons juxtapose text and imagery in a way that invokes an intense response. The inclusion of the pirate comic that just wouldn't make sense in a purely textual format, and long, wordless passages that do as much to help us understand the characters and world better than any other possible method could also require that Watchmen be a graphic novel.

There's a Watchmen movie in production right now (I believe the picture I used is from its viral marketing campaign), and despite the incredibly promising nature, I don't think it will work. There's too much content in Watchmen and too many shifts in style to jam into a two, or even three hour movie; and there's not enough action to make it the type of special effects blockbuster that the general populous will expect from a comic book adaptation.

I feel that, if Watchmen is to be brought into cinema in any way, it needs to be in the form of a Band of Brothers style mini-series. Ideally, it could be 12 chapters, one for each original issue. It shouldn't need any storyboard beyond the comics, and it would need to incorporate material from the Pirate Comic and the between chapters material. It would need to remain adult (pretty much relegating it to HBO/Showtime, the only corporations that would touch it anyway). Steep orders, but it's what's needed to truly pay tribute to this masterpiece.

And I do feel comfortable calling it that. I've lent my copy to three friends, none of whom are involved with comic books. Two of them now own their own copy, and we reference it frequently. It's that good. Watchmen reinvigorated my faith in the graphic medium. As I get money, I fully intend to delve into other important bastions of this hobby (starting with some of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series). You owe it to yourself to check it out.

Thoughts on Knocked Up

You're all capable of heading over to Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic and finding out that, much like Judd Apatow's last film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up is an excellent comedy and a generally better than average movie. Saying that Knocked Up was a funny movie and one that I enjoyed seeing really doesn't help anybody, because most of you have already heard it from a number of other people.

I will say that while it's similar to 40-Year-Old Virgin, the two are very different films. The humor in Knocked Up is more refined. The obscenity has more edge while seeming less extreme (any time you can get the 50 year old women behind me in the theater laughing at masturbation jokes, you've done something right), and the situational aspects are handled superbly. I loved the scenes between Alison and her higher ups at E!, granted, I love pretty much any scene with Alan Tudyk.

However, without Steve Carell's sincere, personable screen presence, the storyline and schlock elements don't come across with the strength of 40-Year-Old Virgin's. Don't get me wrong, I love Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd. They added a lot to 40-Year-Old Virgin and they do a wonderful job in this film, but neither has the presence of an experienced leading man that Carell has. Part of this relative deficiency may be attributed to the fact that there isn't as much of a moral as 40-Year-Old Virgin had. The inherent irony of 40-Year-Old Virgin in the manner in which Andy's friends were telling him that he was "putting the pussy on a pedestal" when he had stopped giving a damn and society was the one forcing it up there wad delicious to me. Knocked Up just lacks that sort of message more than anything.

I'd like to take some time now to discuss something else, though, and that is what makes these two films so much better than the majority of mainstream comedies . I've heard a few people refer to some of the more mediocre movies of late as being in the spirit of the screwball comedies of the 30's and 40's. While they may have been written to replicate aspects of this amazing era of cinema, I feel that Judd Apatow's previous two films are much more in the spirit of these great films than the mimickers that flood the markets.

There are a few main reasons that I say this. One thing is the overarching style. Most Screwball Comedies derive much of their comedy from the interactions of realistic characters and those that are larger than life and the antics that ensue when these groups come together. Knocked Up has this, with Ben and Allison being, with the possible exception of their occupation, realistic people surrounded by friends and family that are just too crazy to be real. The fundamental problem is very real, but the pit stops along the road to its resolution can only be called zany.

The biggest thing that Apatow does and most comic directors fail to do, however, is to speak in the language of our time. Most comedies that try to mimic the old screwball ones try to hard to remain in their language. They're like the King James Bible in that way. While the language and situations of the Screwball Comedies or the 30's and 40's spoke excellently to their generation, trying to transplant that exact mindset into more modern situations just seems fluffy and weak.

In their time, many of the Screwball Comedies had strong topical elements. They often gave a cast a strong eye at class relations and gender roles, and people frequently forget this when trying to pay them honor. They focus on the farce and the romance and forget that there was still often a relationship to be shown. In the meantime, both 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up try to show how modern society relates to sex and the awkward standards (typically doule standards at that) that exist.

The concept of virginity as something to be ashamed of, the idea of having sex with a stranger as opposed to raising a family with one. Even in the visual department, while most people are perfectly comfortable with blatant sex in movies, a half second clip of a baby crowning is enough to disgust most people. Apatow is trying to make us think about sex as a part of sexuality and how human sexuality fits (or doesn't fit) into human society.

It's the willingness to be confrontational, both ideologically and within the narrative, that makes films like Knocked Up superior to your average fast talking comedy. It's also what, in my opinion, makes them the true legacy of the golden era of the Screwball Comedy.

Also, the scene where Pete and Ben are tripping on 'shrooms in Vegas is the best comic scene were drugs or alcohol are used to further the plot since the scene The Philadelphia Story.

Why Even Non-Anime Fans Should Check Out Cowboy Bebop

Anime is something I generally try to stay away from. This is mainly for two reasons:

One is the fact that, due to my love of video games and the fact that I'm studying Japanese, I'm always wary of being mislabeled as a member of that group of people. You know the ones. Those kids who are obsessed with anime and run around talking about how wonderful Japan is and spouting out random Japanese vocabulary without knowing what it means or anything else about the country outside of its pop-culture.

The other is simply that, like most American TV, most anime just isn't that good. Sure, it's often times novel and occasionally refreshing when you're used to American television, but compared to itself, it's comprised primarily of the same sort of mediocre derivative trash that we suffer through. However, just like some American television is just too good to miss, every now and then, there's an anime series that's a real gem. Cowboy Bebop is one such example.

To the anime loving public, and indeed, to more than a few of you who may be reading this, Cowboy Bebop is nothing new. You're already well aware of just how good it is, but there are a lot of you who most certainly need to give it a chance, and it's my mission now to explain to you why you should. The best way I know how to do this is to lay out in a straight forward fashion what Cowboy Bebop is, and what it is not.

Cowboy Bebop is a short series. It's only 26 half-hour episodes (or sessions). Cowboy Bebop is not a strongly connected narrative. With the exception of a few two-part episodes, each session is its own self contained story. What narrative there is is entirely character driven. When the series begins, we meet these characters, and their attitudes and dialog let us know that they have a past, but we don't know what it is. Over the course of the series, hints are dropped and information is revealed so that you begin to understand why they've chosen the paths they have.

Cowboy Bebop is not a space opera. It isn't epic or grandiose in any sense of the word. There's no climatic struggle between good and evil going on, and while the characters may be larger than life at times, they aren't out of the ordinary for the world they inhabit.

Cowboy Bebop is a space western. While it doesn't directly address the issue, it strongly shows the struggle of justice and injustice and the blurry line that forms between the two as one exits civilization. It's a story that shows how the pursuit of freedom affects people.

Cowboy Bebop is also about the ideals of jazz lived out. Its characters live within a thin set of rules that are made to be stretched and toyed with while new ideas are moved between freely.

Cowboy Bebop isn't preachy. There's none of the monologuing about honor, justice, friendship, or meaning that you find in so much mainstream anime. The Bebop's crew lead individually sketchy lives without any apology.

Cowboy Bebop is subtle. Through depiction of action, and not by words, it shows how people living outside of law and society cling to a law of their own making, no matter how fragile.

In many of these characteristics, Cowboy Bebop is a lot like Firefly, another show I'll probably write about later, even though most of you know and love it. Though completely distinct in style, their purpose is in many ways similar. The most important quality that both seem to share, though, is their desire to use their visual nature to show you their purpose instead of shouting it at you through a megaphone.

With its incredible sense of style; enjoyable characters; first rate soundtrack (Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts are an amazing band and some incredible music was composed for this series); and even a near perfect dubbing (with very few painfully translated lines), Cowboy Bebop is a series that can be watched and enjoyed while missing all of these elements. I know that I probably watched the entire series twice before I picked up on just how nuanced the whole thing is. But, as is always the case, the whole subtle depth to the series is what makes it a true classic and something worth every discerning person's time.

See you later space cowboys...

Why the Wii and DS deserve your respect

I'd like to state right now that I'm not writing this to be an idiot fanboy and declare Nintendo the winner of the current console war. I don't own a Wii of my own for a reason, and it's the same reason I don't own a PS3 or a 360. The software isn't there, and most of the software that would make me buy any of the systems for myself isn't even in the pipeline. I also know that nothing I'm going to say here is revolutionary. It's all stuff that I'm sure has been said before, but I've talked to a number of people lately who still didn't get it, so I'm going to throw it out there for anybody else in that boat.

I am writing this to try and explain some of what makes these two systems so popular with the general public. It's not Nintendo's hype. They've talked about how they're revolutionizing the way people play games, but the people who are important in this discussion haven't heard any of that rhetoric; it's all aimed at jaded gamers who've been screwed for supporting Nintendo two generations in a row now (though much more by the Gamecube than the N64).

What really makes the Wii and the DS so amazing is the same thing that made the mouse amazing. It's the shift from instruction to interaction and the elimination of the whole hurdle of perception that comes with it.

Those of us who are long time gamers may not get this. Playing a game with a controller is the most natural thing in the world. Yet, to a computer enthusiast, so is manipulating Linux through the command shell. To the uninitiated, both are incredibly esoteric and don't do anything to ease you into the process. There are very few people who start playing console games as adults for this very reason. As children, we're more open to ideas that don't make logical sense, so learning to manipulate a distant character through arcane series of button presses isn't as hard to cope with. To somebody who has lived sufficiently long though, the concept begins to grow ridiculous.

Nintendo is changing this. Much as the mouse (and, thus, the Graphical Operating System) opened the world of computing to the masses by creating a more intuitive sense of navigation through physical motion and interacting with data, the WiiMote and the DS's stylus based controls allow gamers interact with a game in a way that makes logical sense. If I tap the bubble, it pops, if I swing my arm, my character swings his bat. It's a direct correspondence of motion that has been missing in the past and that has left the unexposed scratching their heads in confusion.

This is a trend that should have been noticed years ago, as this sense of intuition is the exact same reason that DDR and other Bemani style games were such a cross over success all around the world. When you eliminate the curve of learning how to play a game instead of just playing it well, you open up its appeal to a market that traditional games can't even imagine.

This is why the Wii will continue to sell well, and will probably dominate the console sales market, much as the DS has (in Japan, the number of DS's is about to surpass the number of Playstation 2's, an incredible feat considering the market saturation and age of that old juggernaut). Despite these strong console sales, though, Nintendo won't post the profit numbers of either Microsoft of Sony, because their hardware to software sales ratio won't look at all similar once the two traditional game makers big war horses come out to play in the coming years. The type of people who buy just a Wii aren't going to buy all of the games that we consider "good". Whereas 90% of 360 owners will buy Halo 3, I'm willing to bet that only somewhere around 40% of Wii's will be accompanied by copies of Metroid Prime: Corruption, maybe less. It's all in the demographics.

The shift is important, though, as the Wii's hardware sales, and the sale of it's casual and "non" games, will be staggering, and it will make other companies take note. As time goes on, the system will become refined, and video games will become truly main stream. Temporarily flagship genres such as the RPG will fade back into cultdom as the video game console is brought into the open and multiplayer gaming makes a shift back from the internet back to the living room (with online elements still in tact, I'm sure), the entire demographic of gaming will shift.

I'm certainly not proclaiming the death of traditional videogames. There are some experiences, especially the more cinematic ones, that benefit little from a truly interactive control style. The biggest system sellers of this generation, and more than likely the next, will remain in the style to which we are accustomed. But the winds have begun to blow, and those of us interested in the industry, seriously or casually, need to be prepared.

Work

So, I'm at work right now. My boss is out, as he usually is, and I've got no real projects to work on until he gets back, so I may as well let you kiddies know what it is I'm doing this summer.

I'm working as an IT intern for Trustar Federal Credit Union in glorious Int'l Falls, MN. Because this is a small town with a stagnating economy and shrinking population, nobody that needed computer work actually had the money to pay me themselves. As such, I'm actually working here through the workforce center, and instead of making $9-10 easily for as many hours as they need me, I get the privilege of making minimum wage for a maximum of 32 hours a week.

The main IT issues they have here deal with a piece of software that they run pretty much the whole organization through and that only two people in the office really understand at all (fortunately, one of these two people is my boss). Because he's always running around fixing people's problems, I've had no time to learn a damn thing about this service and have been pretty much relegated to sorting through old paper work and running the odd wire through dropped ceilings (along with whatever grunt work anybody else in the building needs; I am an intern after all).

Another thing that's bad is the paperwork, at least in the IT department. We offer dial-up internet access and email to credit union members, and I spent a large chunk of my first two weeks trying to sort through that paper work to see what was out of date and make sure everything was together. It wasn't uncommon for me to find a member's records in two year increments in three or four different places, meaning I had to meticulously comb through them all to compare dates, find out if they were still connected, determine if some of the unowned accounts belonged to them during past periods of connection, and then clean out the superfluous, supposedly unused accounts. Any time I did this however, I got calls the next day from 70-year-olds who had signed papers to permanently disconnect a year ago wondering why they didn't have internet access!

That's pretty much over with, now. I gave my boss, Keith, the list of out of date accounts and owners and told him that the final calls were up to him. Now I've got no projects, so I'm using work time to do things like, well, this, and to start learning Visual Basic under the premise that I need time to write up some completely unnecessary VBA Macros for some Excel spreadsheets to help saving the accounting folks all of five minutes every few days. I guess I shouldn't complain, though. I mean, I'm getting paid right now, and nobody knows the difference (yet).

edit: I removed my complaints about the security because I am a bit paranoid about the world of the web. Suffice it to say, it's terrible.

What Makes Chrono Trigger so Amazing

In recent months, I've realized that if I actually want to consider a career in game design (a real career, not the sort people who go into game design programs outside of DigiPen wind up in), I need to consider what makes a good game. Chrono Trigger has been my favorite game probably since my first hour with it back in...oh...1998? It makes as good a starting point as any.

For those of you reading who are video game dorks of my magnitude (of which there are few), I think that the simple reminder that it was worked on by both Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii should really be enough. Most of you don't know what that means, though, so I'll go into some depth.

Hironobu Sakaguchi is the father of Final Fantasy. I'm sure that most of you have at least passing familiarity with that name if nothing else. The Final Fantasy series is the global de facto series for Japanese Style Role Playing Games. Epic, cinematic stories of a small groups struggle for personal freedom and the fate of the world are what really defines the Final Fantasy series.

In this case, the important aspect is the personal one. In order to involve the players in the game, the Final Fantasy series has, starting with entry 4, tried to emotionally attach the players to the characters they are in control of. Everything is about the tribulations of the protagonists, and if they didn't have their own reasons to be on their quest, nobody would do anything about the world's crisis (granted, the world would rarely be in its sad state of affairs without the player characters' actions in the Final Fantasy series, either).

Yuji Horii, on the other hand, is the creator of the Dragon Quest series. Even more popular in Japan than Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest takes a vastly different approach to story telling. With few exceptions, the characters in Dragon Quest games take a back burner to the world the games take place in. As you explore the world, you get to know its citizens as you help them to put their troubles to right. While the plot may have reasons for you going to each place, as soon as the next town needs your help, the overarching quest takes a back seat to the immediate needs of the world's common folk.

Slowly, trends emerge and it's made apparent that whatever being or force you were out to put to rest is the same one responsible for everybody else's troubles, but you as the player want to beat him not because of your characters' vendettas, but because he, she, or it is posing a menace to a world that the designers have shown you is worth saving.

Simply put, Chrono Trigger combined these elements. The cast is colorful, fleshed out, and ingrains itself within you. Each member has his or her reasons for wanting to be a part of the journey, but each character's personality and goals are also deeply ingrained in a place that you have visited. Their quest isn't for their own behalf, so much as that of their time. While they have their own personalities that you grow to care about, they aren't out to save the world to fulfill a personal grudge, they're out to do it for the people and places close to them. Because of this, in caring about the characters, you necessarily come to care about the world that is so dear to them.

There was no way this game would have been a failure, even without the joint direction of these two incredible individuals. An amazing score that first introduced the considerable talents of Yasunori Mitsuda to the world at large, an innovative combat system involving combination attacks and area of effect attacks that others have been failing to improve on ever since, one of the first uses of the New Game+ concept along with over a dozen endings to make said New Game+ worthwhile, and some of the best art of the SNES era would have easily cemented its place as one of the great games of the 16 bit era. Ultimately, though, its success and legacy as an RPG can't be contributed purely to these superficial facts.

What makes Chrono Trigger the enduring classic and the gold standard to which modern J-RPGs are still compared is is the simple fact that, by working together, Horii and Sakaguchi make you care about the whole package more than you knew a game could. And it is in your love of these characters and the world they so desperately want to preserve that the incredible bonuses become even more awe inspiring.

In case you didn't already know, I'm a loser

So, I've got a blog. But, I'm not really a blogger, because I don't expect anybody to give a damn about what I think. This is just here so that I have someplace to let people know my thoughts about movies, music, games, TV, and to keep up do date on important goings on in my life. I haven't been very good at keeping up with folks, so here's a way for you to maybe keep up with me.

I hope that my ramblings are of amusement to those of you who read this, and more importantly, I hope it sparks some dialog. If you're intrigued by anything I have to say, please, for the love of God, email me or catch me on AIM (assuming I actually know you and you're not some creepy ass stalker who gets his or her jollies by reading random people's blogs).