christopher's lives (v5.3)

i used to make this post every year and it’s been awhile since i did but, this year, i have an updated version of it… mainly because i found that the message board the links went to is no longer around, but, the internet archive still has copies…

so, here is a copy/paste from the 2004 version of the post, now with archive links… btw, i would now add that, if you just want to get the story without reading every post, scan through the first thread, watching for the posts by user “blueseed” as they contain all the updates… on the second and third thread, the posts by “z167704″ are, of course, the most relevant… ctrl+F on most browsers will let you search the page… of course, all the posts are meaningful, so, i recommend at least scanning… anyway, here’s that copy/paste:

in the Dreamcast Technical Pages message board archives (now known as the AlwaysGame.com SEGA Forum), i found this thread about a regular of their board, Thomas Vazquez, aka “z167704″, with whom they had shared many hours playing PSO, Quake, and other Dreamcast online games, turning up missing right after the september 11th attacks… in fact, they had played Daytona USA with him the night before…

it all makes for a rather long read, but, this is some heart-wrenching, unbelievable stuff and there is not exactly a happy ending here…

i think the whole ordeal is relevant to everyone…

it all starts with this thread

and then, on september 25th

october 12th, aftermath and more of what the future may be like

and you could have a look at this

and this all has to do with a subject i yell about quite a bit…
the people who say that we should all “get off the internet and go out and meet some REAL people” or that you do not have “real” relationships on the internet…

tell THESE people about “real” and how these are not really “real people” they know and how they don’t really have “real relationships” between each other…

i also wanted to add something new that i find quite gripping…

in 2006, a couple released their own home video of the attacks from a breathtaking, but, of course, horrifying perspective… i don’t live in new york, so i don’t know where “41 River Terrace, the tallest building in Battery Park City North, about 500 yards northwest of ground zero” is (the location they give on their site where the video is hosted), but, it is a perfect view to see the entire nightmare unfold – this is unlike any video i have ever seen and odds are you have never seen it, either… most people have not, for some reason…

“What We Saw” By “Bob & Bri”

be sure to check out the FAQ on that page, as well…
(btw, i have a fairly high-quality conversion of this video i made for my psp and it should work on most small media devices – if you are interested in a copy, contact me using the info at the top of the right sidebar of this page…)

just a few links, not a comprehensive list… i was just going to add these links to the sidebar “looking at” list, but, they are scattered and there seems to be no one gateway point to get to all of them, so, i’ll put them together here…

most people know what i have to say on this subject, but, i will point out that it is important to remember that “video games” (i prefer something more like “the current generation of popular interactive entertainment“) are still growing up and the truly great artists are yet to emerge, even if we see a few pioneers… this is much like film was in the 40s and 50s, where many movies out there were trying to capture the stage experience on film, bringing broadway shows to those who could not go to broadway shows, for example… few people yet knew what to do with this “new artform”… but, flash forward to the late 1970s and we enter the age of the blockbuster… and today, there is no shortage of cinematic visionaries…
we will someday be at this point with interactive entertainment… and, even in the present, if one hears the phrase “video game” and think of a joystick, some bleeping, shooting aliens, or maybe munching blinking dots, they are at least twenty years behind in their understanding of the subject…

and i am now going to digress and move onto the links before i start getting into lists of examples :P

04 December 2005 – Next Generation – Why Ebert Was Right

rogerebert.com :: commentary
Dec6,2005 :: Gamers fire flaming posts, e-mails…
Dec8, 2005 :: The Art of the Game 2
Dec14, 2005 :: The Game of Art 3

blog: scanners :: Jim Emerson / January 23, 2006 > Kojima: ‘Games are not art’

PointlessWasteOfTime.com » A Gamers’ Manifesto

or “20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles” and wow, this guy nails it, even if he spends a lot of time being comical…

(warning, language that some may find offensive…)

this was in the march 2004 issue of Nybble, and it has taken me this long to post it…

Hey, since we’re now living in the time of e-mail and the more common use of the written language, it is time for an English lesson, mmmkay.

So, with tongue firmly in cheek, here are some rules to keep in mind when using the Queen’s Engerlish:

1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat).
6. Always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also, too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments. No comma splices, run-ons are bad too.
11. Contractions aren’t helpful and shouldn’t be used.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. One should never generalize.
15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
16. Don’t use no double negatives.
17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be ignored.
21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
23. Kill all exclamation points!!!!
24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
25. Understatement is probably not the best way to propose earth shattering ideas.
26. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
27. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
28. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
31. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
32. Who needs rhetorical questions?
33. Exaggeration is a million times worse than understatement.
34. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

first, the various…

Ender’s Game
“Intruder Signal” on 40 Meters Remains a Mystery for Now
Creepy crawly blanket
apod: Above the Eye of Hurricane Ivan
me with my LaserDisc evangelist hat on

karl sent me these months ago… yes, i am just now getting to them…

MetaSpy
OpenDiary.com
Web FTP Client Version3.5.0
Phone Phreaking Trips [RealAudio]

these links with descriptions are copied from three RefDesk’s Site-of-the-Day email newsletters i have had sitting in my inbox, meaning to check them out…

MIT OpenCourseWare
   ”Welcome to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare: a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership. With the publication of 700 courses, MIT OCW offers educational materials from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT’s schools.”

Time Capsuler
   ”To begin your trip in this Time Capsule enter a date. You will be presented with your own customized page that includes all the information you’ve chosen, plus typical consumer prices from that year, Academy Award winners that year, etc. Site has data online for the years 1800 through 2002, although data for the years 1800 – 1875 is probably spotty.”

The Yahoo! Buzz Index Weekly
   ”Check out the top 20 search subjects on Yahoo!, complete with a sardonic round-up of all the newsmakers that are moving and shaking web traffic this week.”

and i am posting these specifically for members of my family…

one for mary, one for mom, and one for jeff (i have been meaning to point this one out to him for something like three years)…

every year around 9/11 i have posted this in various places… now i have a blog to post it to, and i decided to post it early this year…

here is the latest version of it…
for those who have read it before, there is a chronology fix and i added a follow-up thread that i had somehow missed before that has important info…

in the Dreamcast Technical Pages message board archives (now known as the AlwaysGame.com SEGA Forum), i found this thread about a regular of their board, Thomas Vazquez, aka “z167704″, with whom they had shared many hours playing PSO, Quake, and other Dreamcast online games, turning up missing right after the september 11th attacks… in fact, they had played Daytona USA with him the night before…

it all makes for a rather long read, but, this is some heart-wrenching, unbelievable stuff and there is not exactly a happy ending here…

i think the whole ordeal is relevant to everyone…

it all starts with this thread

and then, on september 25th

october 12th, aftermath and more of what the future may be like

and you could have a look at this

and this all has to do with a subject i yell about quite a bit…
the people who say that we should all “get off the internet and go out and meet some REAL people” or that you do not have “real” relationships on the internet…

tell THESE people about “real” and how these are not really “real people” they know and how they don’t really have “real relationships” between each other…

http://features.engadget.com/entry/1882345133499767/

there is much to agree with in both the article and the comments thread…

as an added bonus, there is a great anti-microsoft rant in a user comment…

among the highlights:

If you told a stranger to Earth what they get away with on the desktop, they’d think their babelfish was broken.

When DVD Spells B-A-D
Some Great Films Suffer in Transition To New Format
November 12, 2003
By FRED KAPLAN
The New York Times

a great article about things that drive us nuts about the dvd industry/format and why we are not giving up on our laserdisc collection any time soon…

for instance, here he adresses a great example of some of the issues at the very heart of the matter…

Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames.
This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it’s a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects.

while ld video definitely has its own issues, it is NOT compressed and cav laserdiscs even store actual individual frames of film, something no other format does even today…

If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will “read” random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine’s operator doesn’t pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is subpar, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
Similar problems can plague color or, if it’s a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of “color timing.” The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly.
“The main reason a lot of DVDs are so bad,” says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, “is that the people making them don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care what they’re doing.”

well, why should they care??? they are going to price these things to sell to any shlub, so, they will not bother… dvd regularly cheaps out, while makers of ld knew they could not sell them at the prices they were asking unless they threw in GOOD extras… Boogie Nights is a great example… criterion paid for the john holmes documentary the film was based on, but when the dvd came around, new line was not willing to pay for it… the dvd was around $30, the ld was nearly $100… but, you get what you pay for… and, right now, many ld collectors are selling off their discs at insane prices, therefore, now is a great time to buy…

Doing a DVD right takes time and money. A good Telecine machine, which transfers film to an image suited for television, costs about $2 million. Use of an outside lab’s Telecine facilities can cost up to $1,000 an hour.
The Criterion Collection, which produces some of the finest DVDs of classic films, routinely takes months to make a digital transfer. Lee Klein, Criterion’s chief technician, says: “If there’s a scratch, we draw it out frame by frame. When there’s 12 pieces of debris on each frame, it takes a long time.”
Most studios don’t bother.
Some simply take the master that was made for laser disc, or even for VHS videotape, and transfer it to DVD. This was an especially common practice in the infancy of DVD, four to six years ago.

and he gives a few good examples in the article of lousy dvd’s, showing the widespread apathy of dvd makers… their attitude is getting better, so, i hope by the time hd-dvd is the standard, they will have learned and can offer a consistently worthy product…

i am NOT saying that laserdisc is necesarily better in every way to dvd, my point is that laserdisc is still a viable format today, for those willing to pay, and should not have been discontinued so early (the last u.s. laserdisc release was in 2000)… many ld collectors out there are already regretting selling off their collection when they are left with substandard dvd’s, or even no dvd release available, such as the theatrical cuts of close encounters and star wars… and those two are great examples because there will NEVER be a dvd release of them…

laserdisc is a format for the serious film lover, dvd is the next vhs, the format for the masses…
what hd-dvd will be remains to be seen…

seems every time we meet someone that actually has a real interest in movies, it is always horror… usually cheap, sleazy, b-grade horror… we try to be open-minded and go with the idea that maybe there is just something we don’t know and perhaps it is simply a matter of broadening our horizons, so, we decided to try a couple of horror classics to see what might be there that we never saw in horror before…

so, we have the criterion laserdisc of halloween and a standard laser release of the omen and we watched them both the other night…

first up was halloween, the film credited with starting the “slasher” genre…
and, it was not long until we were wishing it would hurry up and end…
of course, after starman, the thing, escape from new york, and now this, i think we are ready to really and truly give up on john carpenter…

the only good thing i have to say about it is that the music was very good…

one interesting device i noticed was that, as the movie built up to the climax, it seemed to me that the director was intentionally using a lot of shots to show the time of day… no indoor shots without plenty of windows and most shots prominently showed the placement of the sun, like a ticking countdown to nightfall… in fact, at one point, it is suddenly and abruptly night, which gave me a feeling of “it’s night already!? they’re out of time!”…
while this kept me (almost unconsciously) estimating how much time was left, i really could not care less if these people were actually going to survive or not… we were hardly told anything about them, so, they really did not seem like real people, just actors doing what the director told them to…
and, as is always the case, the characters seemed to behave in very unbelievable ways… i know this is a staple of the genre, but, that is one of the things that alienates me from the genre… too much of having to give up reason to follow the story… not that there is usually much of a story… i often hear horror described as a sub-genre of sci-fi, but, to me it seems more a sub-genre of action… any film where you can relate pretty much everything it covers as just “this happened, then that happened, etc.” is an action movie… no concepts to ponder, no characters to get to know better, no reason to care WHY things are happening, most of the time… all of that comes in scarce tidbits, which is why, to be totally coherent, you need a whole series of films… maybe by die hard 3, i might care what happens to john maclaine, maybe by halloween 9 i might know why michael myers killed his sister and all these others…

if they were better movies, i might take that journey…

or maybe i will listen to the commentary on halloween and see if john carpenter can reveal to me the subtle intricacies…

then, with a bad taste in our mouths, we took a chance on the omen…
this one was much better, but, there was very little action, just lots of dialogue and concepts… it was more like a mystery to be solved…
now, i must say i thought the dialogue was very weak… it got the point across, but, there was no personality, no cadence, no art… with good dialogue, you can take a line out of context and, if you know the characters, you can usually deduce who said it… and this is true of life as well… the omen is one of countless movies where you could have mixed and matched the dialogue between characters… the characters were definitely not defined by how they said what they said, they were just telling us what we needed to know to advance the plot… in a movie filled with dialogue, you need more personalized speech to really carry it, or at least to keep it interesting… (cf. david mamet, btw…)
but still, it was a good movie… pacing was good, i was never really bored, the material was great, and the music was superb, even though it was mono… the actors were varied; the kid was great (not that it was a demanding part), the various clergy were good, and the nannies were great, but, too many other parts seemed totally interchangable…

we liked it… it does not go on “the shelf”, but, i will definitely watch it again sometime to look for other nuances… i just don’t expect much from donner in that area…

i just have a hard time calling it “horror”… it was more of a mystery, as i said above… yes, there were horrific IDEAS, but, again, that makes it a movie of IDEAS, not actions…

as far as “horror” goes, we have only really seen a few and disliked most of them… (btw, remember, we pretty much only count what we have seen since we started into the world of dvd and home theater, since we now “see” movies differently than we used to… i have seen literally thousands of movies, but, i know a lot more about movies now and feel i need to give them all another chance…)
i will briefly touch on a few and try to avoid sci-fi horror, like alien, forbidden planet, or event horizon, just to try to prove we are capable of contemplating another genre…

we have seen a nightmare on elm street and wes craven’s new nightmare and only new nightmare was any good to us… i guess because it was likeable even if you scoffed at the genre… hell, it scoffed with you… but, even new nightmare is in “the pile”, not on “the shelf”… it was good once, may be again, but, we are not in any hurry… the next viewing would probably be for the commentary…

poltergeist IS on the shelf… now that is one creepy film… the chair-stacking scene chills me every time… in fact, there is so much good about that movie, i will not even get started lest i go three paragraphs…

then, there is that “m. night” dude or whatever… we have seen both signs and sixth sense and disliked both of them… and there was very little that we found disturbing, creepy, and very very little that was anything like scary… sure, a few disturbing concepts, no action movies here, but, still, they are old concepts and the films really brought very little, if anything, to the genre that we had not seen before…
and, btw, we generally despise surprise endings… in fight club, it explained a lot, in sixth sense, it seemed just a gimmick… (iow, with the former, you want to watch it again more to understand the symptoms better now that you know the cause, in the latter you want to watch again to see if the film is internally consistent with the ending…)
[must've re-written the last two sentences twenty times to ensure it was spoiler free :P]

now, one horror movie we really liked was the others (and, no, not because it had our beloved nicole in it, though that doesn’t hurt it any)…
that was one SCARY frickin’ movie!
i mean, it was disturbing!
and, one of the best uses of surround that we have ever heard…
we were jumping, cringing, hoping that what we knew must happen next would not happen; i think the others, so far, is the only movie to actually put a fright in us…
it was just plain well-directed… the kids, the rules of the house, the cinematography, including the overall look, the time setting, it just starts pulling you in to an alternate reality, so, you already have no idea what to expect and it unhinges your mind from the everyday, emptying it, so it can fill it up with what the director chooses, hopefully freeing you from expectations of normality… like misdirection… and the unfamiliarity
means it will be more unpredictable, which means it has the potential to be scarier… and the director did not disappoint, though, admittedly, the first half of the movie is much much better than the second half…
it is a dvd, not a laserdisc, so there is no “shelf vs. pile” issue (all our dvd’s are in one place), but, if there was a choice to be made, it would go on the shelf…

so, anyway, next in our horror education will probably be clive barker… we have nice laserdiscs of the serpent and the rainbow, hellraiser, and lord of illusions (or is it the frighteners? can’t remember)… i read the great and secret show and loved it (though, more fantasy than horror)… i found it to be very original, creative, and interesting, so i figure i will like more of his stuff… having seen some clive barker long ago, i think it is safe to assume it will be truly horrifying stuff, with more in common with event horizon than the other stuff i have been covering here…
hopefully in a good way…

i doubt it…

this article is much more optimistic than i am, though, i agree that a large part of the battle is educating the cinematically ignorant…

Last year, something remarkable happened in the world of cinema. Blockbuster Video, the country’s dominant rental chain, announced that from that point on it officially preferred widescreen DVDs to pan-and-scan (also known as “full screen”). For those movie buffs who had been eagerly watching this battle, the news came as a shock. In the fight for the hearts and minds of viewers, widescreen and its film-geek adherents had won an unexpected and glorious victory. Just a few years earlier, Blockbuster had discouraged widescreen DVDs, on the grounds that customers confused by the letterbox format thought they were defective. Now, the chain was conceding what cinephiles had argued for years: that widescreen was the superior way to watch a movie at home, even if it left black bars at the top and bottom of your television screen.

Anyone who scrounged for widescreen tapes during the VHS era will understand the historic nature of the announcement. Back then, widescreen tapes were tucked in obscure corners of the video store. When film buffs advanced the moral argument against pan-and-scan—that it butchered the filmmaker’s vision and cut out as much as half of the picture—they were met by a blank stare from store clerk and casual fan alike.

the rest is here…
How Widescreen Won – The way we watch movies at home has changed. What happened? By Bryan Curtis

(it even mentions laserdiscs and Criterion, properly crediting the format and company with the initial victories in the original-aspect-ratio-vs.-”foolscreen” war…)