Gism Butter

I love Rifftrax. We’ve bought about $12 worth now, all money well spent. Buuuuuuut, their server is sooooooooooo slow! Took 20 minutes to buy three, and that’s not including download time. Downloads were actually very fast. But I think their catolog is clogged with shitty SQL, or something. God knows. It’s horrible!

Still, I highly endorse buying their tracks. I’m not ashamed to admit that we have many bootlegged, highly illegal copies of non-distributed MST3K movies in digital form. Those that have been published in VHS and DVD, we have purchased. Those that haven’t, we’ve downloaded from a now-in-trouble torrent site.

One thing we’ve discovered through Rifftrax: the Malayan edition of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is cut differently than the American edition. Specifically, the pod race scene is about 3/4 the length of the US edition. A reprieve!

Go buy Rifftrax. The price point is right. Most of these movies should only cost $3, anyway. They’re either god awful and not being bought anymore (Roadhouse, Over The Top), or were so popular that any printing makes three times it’s worth (Matrix, Predator, Star Trek 6). The only real downside to Rifftrax is having to own shitty movies to go along with them (Aeon Flux).

I also wish there was an easy way to burn a dvd of the movie + trax, without having to iMovie of Final Cut.

As if James Burgett needed to find his voice… He was featured on Voice of America, the government funded international radio station that’s broadcast in a number of languages, I believe. Congrats, James.

While I can’t reveal my sources, I have a pretty reliable report on what’s coming from Sony this fall. The embattled company is said to be working on a next-generation PSP which will contain a hard drive. In addition, it will be identical to the existing PSP, though it may be larger and suck down significantly more power.

The primary reason Sony’s adding this hard drive is to ramp up the market for downloadable content. I think Sony’s seen the dollar signs coming out of Xbox Live Arcade, and wants a piece of the action. Unfortunately, that’s not a forumla that’s going to work for Sony. Currently, the company’s PS3/PSP connectivity is a shambles of hard-to-use interfaces and monolithic waiting periods. It’s an overall debacle that doesn’t show any sign of changing in the future. Sony’s largest problems, of late, seem to stem from the company’s upper management being unwilling to listen to outsiders. This is probably why Kutaragi left a couple weeks ago.

Anyway, my source also left the company due to the mass disintegration of the company. According to my insider, Sony plans to launch around 100 games into it’s online marketplace, and many of these will target the PSP. Unfortunately, my source says only around 3 of these games are even worth playing, let alone worth paying for. A third party in our discussions pointed out that this is basically what killed Atari: flooding the market with craptastic titles.

Don’t expect the new PSP to offer anything aside from an alleviation of the need for hackers to buy memory sticks. Ironically, this could have been a great source of revenue for Sony: selling more memory sticks to the enlightened PSP hardcore, all of whom have hacked their firmware and currently spend money on memory, not games. Unfortunately, Sony’s lost the memory stick market, too, because it’s media is too expensive to compete with Sandisk, the current reigning champ of the memory card market.

The memory bus of this as-yet-unnamed PSP ++ isn’t getting any reprieve either. Many developers have been complaining about how slow this bus is right now, and, true to Sony form, the company has completely ignored the call for improvement.

Sony’s banking on building up a mass of independent developers to sell their warez on its online system, but it has already lost this battle. Xbox’s XNA Studio is way eaasier to use than anything else in the market right now, and Sony has a reputation for offering up obtuse API’s and tricky mechanics. Oh, yeah, plus the fact that every Sony PSP game is made with Visual Studio.

So, there you have it, the juiciest of juicy details on the platform that’s only popular because it’s hackable.

I joined Eve Online today. Paid for the first month. I got myself a cruiser, and I’m loving how easy the earlier missions are now. I’m gonna bang these out while waiting for the next level of drone control. I do so love my Valkarie drones…

Ok, what on Earth am I blathering about? I’ll explain what’s appealing about Eve, thus far.

The vastness of space is quite overwhelming, indeed. But the shear magnitude of the gamespace and the size of the player pool is only the beginning. Here, death is permanent. Here, every ship counts.

I can’t explain it nearly as well as this blog does. I found it on GameSetWatch, of course. Let me say this plainly: GameSetWatch is the best videogame blog on the Internet. Period.

And thus far, Eve Online is the best damn MMO on the Internet. Period.

Yesterday, V took me to the Chapel of Chimes’ in Oakland. Or, I guess that’s Piedmont. But then, Piedmont and Monte Claire are just posuer cities that want to escape the association with Oakland… I digress. The Chapel of Chimes was originally designed by Julia Morgan, Hearst’s favorite architect. She really did an amazing job on the Chapel of Chimes: it’s like a maze, and urns and bronze book-shaped urns are tucked into every possible corner of the place. The new additions to the facility are not at all up to her quality, though John Lee Hooker does reside inside those new spaces.

Any-hoo, to explain. The Chapel of Chimes is, essentially, a mausoleum nextdoor to the fabulous Mountain View cemetery. As a mausoleum, the place has amazing acoustics. Thus, for the past ten years, on the day of summer solstice (yesterday), the Chapel of Chimes fills its halls with musicians and charges $12 for people to wander through and listen.

The music, this year, was decidedly noise-like, which actually worked very well. Lots of people made for a clausterphobic environment, but the spooky noises around each corner made the place that much more serene.

A highly recommended destination, even if you can’t make it on the Summer Solstice. Definitely drop in and wander the halls. It’s open to the public every other day of the year. It’s even free to get in. And while you’re there, you should wander through the Mountain View Cemetery. Every nook andcranny is packed with urns, many in the shapes of books. I’m hoping to be packed into one of these someday.

Anyway, V took lots of pictures. She’s getting very good with our crappy Nikon. I didn’t notice just how many times the star shape appeared in the architecture, in the sculpture, and even in the plant life until I looked at her shots. Kudos to my lovely wife for her terrific eye.

I took some video, too.

Peter Van Kleef, of Cafe Van Kleef fame has tipped me off to a nefarious plot, hatched by do-gooders and underaged minors to make cigarettes and tobacco harder to enjoy in Oakland. The proposal has all sorts of draconian provisions, like prohibiting smoking in duplexes, smoking within 36 feet of the doorway of a building, and some other nasty stuff. I hate smoking too, but these are some nasty rules, and way unconstitutional.

The hearing at City hall in front of city council in scheduled for June 26, though I’m not sure the exact time of day. Peter would appreciate it if everyone in the Cafe Van Kleef fan club would show up and raise hell in front of these elected officials.

Just stumbled across this fellow’s Youtube Site. Basically, he signs into Ventrilo servers used by MMO gamers and then harasses them with sound clips. Quite funny, though childish. I think he signs in multiple times and uses a couple IP’s. Who knows, maybe he’s port scanning looking for open servers…

Playing a lot of Battlefield 2 recently. Probably because this is a game that Travis and I can play together. We’ve had some great moments, most of them Travis saving my ass from some hidden vantage. But last night I was the last insurgent on the board, and the Americans had taken all the victory points. I ran my ass off to the upper right corner of the map and captured a point, all the while hiding in a corner, surrounded by claymores.

I took the point, and Travis + company came rushing out immediately from the now captured spawn point. But, boy, the Americans were everywhere and they still ended up winning 10 minutes later.

A great game, and likely to be one for just about all time. If only they could clean up the underlying network code…

I’ve also been playing a great deal of Eve Online, though that game went down for a 24 hour server upgrade recently. It takes a page from Clan Lord, in that characters gain experience while offline. Or rather, they gain skill points, which is like experience. However, you gain this xp at the same rate, whether online or off. Thus, everyone got a free day of XP on Tuesday while the server was down.

Yes, it’s basically a spreadsheet, but even a spreadsheet can be fun when it’s collaborative!

It’s a brilliant example of the serious games movement. The Redistricting Game came up today at SuperNova’s open session day. Basically, you draw lines on a county map to redistrict the voters, just like a real partisan senator! Go play it now.

As for the rest of the day, ran into Tony Wasserman, the bright bulb behind Bluestone. Too bad HP destroyed that company. A good day of talks, though only one or two sessions were really relevent.

I look forward to seeing Paprika tonight. It should be a mind blowing experience.