BBelief 2008 – Looking for Testers

I’m looking for a few brave men and women (5 or so) who want to test a semi-finished version of my Beyond Belief 2008 Quake level. I’m expecting some brief feedback about difficulty, level flow etc. You need to have a beefy system since the level only has a “vis -fast” and is a total resource hog. You want to be a good player, as well, since I only have hard difficulty implemented right now.

If you’re interested please leave a comment with your email address (make sure to “encrypt” it so that spam bots don’t harvest it). I’d like to test the map in as many Quake ports and configurations as possible (classic plain vanilla Quake is out of the question), so please let me know what port you’ll use. I’ve mostly played and test in DarkPlaces, I’m interested to see how FitzQuake etc. perform.

World Builder

If you have a bit of extra time this weekend, I recommend that you watch Bruce Branit’s World Builder video.

“A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves.”

Many have hailed this video as a look into the possible future of 3D apps (I think that a comparison to level editing tools like UnrealEd would be more fitting). But to me World Builder is something much more important: it’s a testament to what a committed, talented artist can achieve on modern home computers. This short was created by a single guy over the span of two years, and the results are top notch. The tools that he used are accessible to everybody out there with a bit of industry experience. Sure, some of the acting in this film falls a bit flat, but that doesn’t detract from the overall quality of the movie – it’s “professional grade” through and through. And beneath the shiny VFX surface there’s a neat little story, as well. Highly recommended!

Best of Oscar, The Conclusion

Well, we did it! Victoria and I finally followed through on something that we’d been talking about since we started dating over four years ago: watch all Best Picture nominees of the year before the Oscar telecast, hoping to gain some real investment in the awards show. If you haven’t read the reviews yet, you can follow the links below:

Series introduction
Part 1: The Reader
Part 2: Slumdog Millionaire
Part 3: Milk
Part 4: Frost/Nixon
Part 5: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

It was a great experience. And we learned a few things along the way: for example that watching five movies in three weeks is quite a bit of work. That abiding by somebody else’s (the movie theater’s) schedule doesn’t come as natural as it once did. We watched two of the movies during the week, and working through lunch just so that I could leave on time to meet Victoria straight at the theater felt positively anachronistic.

But even in the age of home theater, 60 inch TVs and Blu-ray the experience of watching a memorable movie in the theater is still unmatched. It creates memories. A theater becomes synonymous with a certain movie. Especially when you have access to smaller, “art house” type cinemas. We watched Slumdog Millionaire and Milk at Sonoma’s Sebastiani Theater, a small, single-screen affair where we also watched Little Miss Sunshine and Cars. We were just as lucky to catch Frost/Nixon at The Lark, an restored non-profit theater in the heart of Larkspur. They serve alcohol! I remember watching Rent, Juno and a re-run of Donnie Darko there while drinking my beer.

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Best of Oscar, Part 5: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Written by Eric Roth, directed by David Fincher, and starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson and Jared Harris.

(Mild story spoilers follow.)

Benjamin Button is born into truly remarkable circumstances: his body’s internal clock is running backwards. Looking like an arthritis-ridden, old and crumpled baby when he is born on the final day of World War I, Benjamin gets increasingly younger through the years. Abandoned by his shocked biological father, Benjamin is raised by substitute parents at a retirement home instead, where Benjamin’s condition doesn’t easily reveal itself. It is here, at an early age, that Benjamin meets Daisy Fuller. We immediately hear destiny calling: the connection is instant, Benjamin’s and Daisy’s lives become intertwined, and as their paths keep crossing through the decades, the inevitable love affair develops. And of course Benjamin lives a truly extraordinary life. “Young in body, old in spirit” takes on a whole new meaning as we watch Benjamin Button go through the ages, see him reconnect with his estranged father, and, through Benjamin and Daisy, witness a unique split-screen perspective that explores the meaning of growing old.

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Best of Oscar, Part 4: Frost/Nixon

Frost/Nixon
Written by Peter Morgan, directed by Ron Howard, and starring Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon and Matthew Macfadyen.

(Mild story spoilers follow.)

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 35 years since Richard Nixon was forced to resign as president of the United States. We’re trained to automatically rate Nixon as one of the, if not the, worst presidents the US has ever had. But for having made such a long and lasting impression on American politics, many details of Richard Nixon’s ‘crookedness’, as well as the aftermath of his resignation, have been lost in the decades that followed. Several generations are simply too young to ever have fully understood the meaning of the Watergate events, which is certainly true for me. Frost/Nixon, based on Peter Morgan’s play, is doing its part to rectify the situation.

The setup of Frost/Nixon is remarkably similar to modern times: a controversial president has left the office with record low approval ratings and allegations of misconduct; through all this said president never wavered in his uncompromising style or attitude (he most certainly never admitted to errors in judgment or flat out wrongdoing); the American public is coming to terms with an unproductive (and potentially unnecessary) war…; and although a new president is in office and life has supposedly moved on, the nation is still reeling with the distinct feeling of unfinished business, of missing resolution.

In 1974, it felt like Richard Nixon got off the hook.

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How We Met Their Mother

Victoria and I agree: How I Met Your Mother is the best sitcom currently on TV. ‘Til Death held the distinction (at least in our minds) for a while, but apparently the writers decided that it was time to systematically destroy that show, instead.

So HIMYM it is. It’s funny, it’s life-assuring, it has that extra little bit of mystery (who is Ted going to marry?), and it has an attractive cast that we’re familiar with from other movies and TV series. Not since Friends has a sitcom assembled a group of actors with such great chemistry. Victoria and I aren’t exactly long-time followers of the show, though. I do remember watching a few of the early episodes (how can you forget a show with an episode called “The Slutty Pumpkin“?); but we only started watching all the DVD sets a few months ago, after Victoria caught one of the later episodes on TV and luckily insisted that we watch it.

Now we’re all caught up with the show’s mysteries and storylines. The writers have been battling with one fundamental problem from the start, of course: to stay true to the premise of the show, we cannot meet Ted’s future wife until the series is closing in on the end – the question of who will turn out to be the future Mrs. Mosby is one of the show’s big overarching themes, after all. The show’s source of information (the future Ted Mosby) is intentionally written as an unreliable narrator, which keeps doors open (and seasons flowing). Many of the romantic interests that Ted meets turn out to be flukes, if simply by necessity. But as a self-proclaimed HIMYM geek, I think I already know who Ted is going to end up marrying! And I will happily present that theory behind the cut (which, RSS readers should know, is right here). Think of it as a SPOILER barricade for everybody not caught up on seasons 3 & 4.

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Best of Oscars, Part 3: Milk

Milk
Written by Dustin Lance Black, directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin and James Franco.

(Mild story spoilers follow.)

In 1970, on the eve of his 40th birthday, Harvey Milk tells his soon-to-be boyfriend that he hasn’t accomplished anything yet in life. This will certainly change over the next 8 years, as Milk moves to San Francisco’s Castro district and works on becoming the first openly gay elected official in the US, championing civil rights in a time when American gay rights were virtually non-existent. The biopic Milk documents Harvey’s rise: from the early days when he was simply “the mayor of Castro Street”, through several elections, his eventual appointment as one of 11 San Francisco city supervisors, to his untimely death in 1978.

Harvey Milk’s life is very well documented, so let’s focus on the movie instead. I’d heard of Milk way before the movie was ever advertised, when my friend (and then co-worker) Wolfi took the day off to work as an extra in the film’s crowd scenes that were being shot in San Francisco. To be honest, I didn’t know anything about Harvey Milk or what he stood for until I watched this movie. As I expected, Milk educated me very well in that regard and gave me a lot of appreciation for the history of the American gay rights movement.

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NASCAR Hauler Timelapse

Now that the 2009 NASCAR season is officially underway, I want to kick off my own season by posting the 2nd timelapse that I recorded when NASCAR was at Infineon Raceway in 2008.

This took about an hour in realtime.You can watch the other timelapse (filmed concurrently on the dragstrip) here.

51st Daytona 500

The 51st running of the Daytona 500 is in the books, and it was a decidedly lackluster affair. A rain-shortened race, overly aggressive “Digger” merchandising by Fox, a terrible rendition of the national anthem by Gavin DeGraw… and the general feeling that it’s starting up all too soon. Maybe with the ailing economy, NASCAR can finally get to shortening their 36 race season to something more compact that people look forward to when it’s all coming back after the break.
Congratulations to Matt Kenseth! Unfortunately, these are the two pieces of TV that come to mind first when remembering this year’s race:

That’s not good, guys! Not good at all. Let’s see how the rest of the season unfolds, though.

The Book Draught

I realized something as I was driving home last night: it’s been ages since I finished my last fiction book. In fact, I can’t even remember what it was. I’ve read some non-fiction in the meantime, for example The Elfish Gene, which I finished in December. But good novels? Not really. The last 5 months have been filled with books that I just couldn’t get into. Just look at this list of books I stopped reading:

Anathem
Boy did I have high hopes for this book. It was supposed to be my first Neal Stephenson experience since Snow Crash – 8oo glorious pages of it. And then… this. I don’t know what happened in the last two decades, but everything that made Snow Crash great is missing from Anathem. It’s slow. It’s cryptic. It’s boring. After 110 pages, I started skipping ahead. Still not finding anything that resembled drama, I put the book away. I guess between Snow Crash and Anathem, Neal Stephenson’s taste took a 90 degree turn from my own.

World War Z
Yeah, it’s neat. Well written, too. It’s still sitting on my night stand, and I’m sloooowly nibbling away at it. But reading World War Z made one thing very clear to me: I’m sick and tired of zombies. Really tired. The scenario is so old and used up that even a clever book like WWZ has little to add to the genre.

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