Here’s an interesting report on Sony’s cloud gaming initiative, PlayStation Now. It sounds like for the moment it is a backwards compatibility play, allowing PS4 owners to insta-stream PS3 games. However, as I wrote in Portagame, “Well, at least Sony kinda has a leg up in the TV set business.” The service was demoed on Sony’s TVs, and would theoretically allow the owner of a Bravia set (or a Sony phone or tablet, control issues notwithstanding) to play a rather respectable library of games without actually buying a game console. Another layer of hardware vanishes.
Another thought: this idea of streaming could carry over to Apple TV speculation. Part of the issue with an Apple TV set is that people don’t upgrade their TVs that often, leading to less upgrade money for Apple and a potentially frustrating experience for owners as Apple improves the product every year, marketing new hardware features and speeds that aren’t available to those with old devices. However, if the hardware that was rendering the interface was actually in the cloud, as it will be with Sony’s service1, the user experience could be upgraded independently of the client hardware. Like an OS upgrade but with faster speeds part of the deal too. Not that Apple is any good at cloud stuff, of course.
1 In that the cloud will be rendering the game interface. Not sure about the game selection interface, but that’s beside the point. If lag with PS Now is acceptable to gamers, it should be more than responsive enough for other interface interactions.
I was off on a shoot yesterday and the volume of Ford news that has passed since my last writings is truly staggering. I’ve read some of the unredacted police interviews with Ford staffers, which are amazing. And then there’s “I have more than enough to eat at home”, and the council proceedings today.
But I don’t really have time to unpack everything, and you presumably know all about it anyway, so I just want to reflect on one aspect: I’m definitely feeling pity for Mayor Ford, in a manner I did not expect. This guy is the worst mayor in Toronto history, maybe in history general. He’s a liar and a hypocrite and a bully. But I also think of how he just wanted to play football and him as a teen huffing around the track alone, trying in vain to lose weight. How it seems he has always been bullied by his brother. How he must have felt obliged by his father’s legacy as an MPP to enter politics. How his family has misled and enabled him.
Most of all though this is a story of denial, both Ford’s self-denial and his followers’ denial about him. Ford is led astray by two primary self-delusions. The first is that he has a political future, and the second is that he doesn’t have an alcohol abuse problem (and perhaps other substance abuse issues). If he disabuses himself of the first delusion while holding onto the second, he could be in a lot of trouble and this could end very badly. I don’t want this to happen – partially because of some shoots of humanity yet emerging from my charred and blackened heartscape, partially because if he died it would really take the glow off all of the fun we’re having.
Funny that I thought I could “deal” with this matter, in terms of posts to the site and in terms of time spent, by updating once a day. The story is too unstable though, unscripted, as unpredictable as a… well, as a crackhead. Notes made early yesterday seem almost quaint by the end of the day, after Doug Ford’s attacks on Police Chief Bill Blair, Rob Ford’s stunning admission of crack use, and then a teasingly dramatic press conference in which Ford failed to resign. Good summary of the day here, but odds are you know what happened.
What happens now? When Ford made his admission after months of stonewalling and lying, it came to mind that the timing must indicate some upcoming disclosure he was trying to get ahead of. There was news from the courts indicating information gathered in the wiretaps of Projects Traveller and Brazen 2 could soon be released. This would include alleged Ford dealer Lisi’s cellphone wiretap transcripts, so that will almost undoubtedly be more bad news for Ford.
City Hall is essentially trying to route around Ford at this point, with two different motions proposed – one that would strip the mayor of his powers to appoint the executive and committee chairs, essentially demoting him to lone-wolf councillor status. The other would force him to take a leave and seek help. Both have the support of his once-allies, but the former seems more likely to work. The longer he stays in, the more dirt will surface, the more negative international attention will accrue to our city, and the more unanimous the desire to get rid of him will be.
One last thing: will Ford get re-elected? A lot of people are worried about this because there was the Forum poll that reported his support had gone up since Blair confirmed the crack tape exists. That was a 5% increase, within the margin of error and part of a poll that also reported a majority wanted him to resign. There is a more recent poll that has Ford losing all hypothetical 2014 races. Yes, Ford Nation still exists, but the borders are receding as time and dirt wears on. Ford won election with the support of a number of visible minorities, to say nothing of soft support across Toronto (including some 30% of downtowners who may not have realized just how much he was at war with them). As the dirt in the news wears on, no longer dismissable as some bizarre conspiracy, the contradictions in the Ford myth become harder to sustain.
The Star has a couple good ones: Rob Ford may have paid bills for 15 Windsor Road, the crack house, and a mysterious email gap in Ford’s office in the days after news of the crack tape broke. Also, Ford was encouraged not to attend the police chief’s annual gala. That’s what happens when you dare the police to arrest you, I guess (although wouldn’t that be a nice spot for it?).
The story is back in the international media and figures heavily in US talk show monologues yesterday, although I don’t have video for any of those yet.
So, where were we? When he was tailed by a news helicopter on Friday I thought we were in the climax to Goodfellas and figured he would get busted soon, ideally after a horse chase with the Mounties. But no, he stopped to get a pepperoni stick and pronounced it “hot” and “good”. His executive council held a press conference where they basically said they were worried but wouldn’t say what they were going to do. Then on his radio show sunday he apologized, but not for what you were thinking maybe? Seems like he was apologizing for public drunkenness and distracted driving, but won’t quit drinking, isn’t an alcoholic or a drug addict but won’t say whether he’s ever done drugs, or what was in the packages he exchanged with Lisi in parking lots, forests and gas stations across Etobicoke.
What happens now? First off, the Lisi ITOstill contains some crazy redacted stuff, including the actual transcripts of Lisi’s wiretap and the interviews with the mayor’s staff. And, while the police can’t release the crack video while it’s evidence in a court case, there is another video that could theoretically be shown. Blair has said that Brazen 2 is still ongoing. This matter will hang over Ford and City Hall and indeed Toronto, until Ford is history.
Here’s a fun transit construction doodad that allows you to participate in the great lines-on-maps-that-never-amount-to-anything fantasyland of Toronto transit planning, by choosing which Toronto transit lines to build, talling up the cost, and then getting discouraged and building nothing. Mine is below, and is fairly conservative, if a complete pipe dream – all currently underway Big Move projects, replacing the Scarborough subway extension with the originally planned LRT, and adding the eastern jag of the DRL. So really only $5-billion of extra construction, despite what the thing says. The big question mark is what in the hell we are doing building this Pearson-Union Express nonsense when it could probably function as a proper transit line and do a lot more good.
Riding a bus with you is like riding a bus with a rock star.
You never “made strange”. You’re almost the opposite – you go out of your way to attract strangers’ attention. You wave, you make that awesome throat-clearing sound. You laugh a lot. You might be anxious and a little screamy at the start of a meal – I feel you, kid – but later on you’re trying out some new sounds, trying to make us laugh. You’re working on your material.
You seem to like music, and dancing. We danced a lot early on, when you needed a lot more calming down. I would hold you face down, my hand around your tiny head, bundled up in your swaddle. Your feet would just reach my elbow. Now, you need very little soothing. You suck your thumb when you need it.
I remember the first time you really made eye contact with me. I was changing you – maybe we shouldn’t do this, but we change you on the dining room table. It’s huge, your grandfather made it. You have his eyes now. You looked at me, held the gaze, and smiled. You are quite alert, which people often comment on. In the hospital, just after you were born, I carried you around the room. You didn’t cry – you just looked around.
You look around like that still, but you can now move about, and you do it with assurance. You grab things, you know what you want to do with them, and you do it. Admittedly, that’s mostly put in mouth or throw, but I admire your confidence.
Sometimes I try to separate the things that all parents must feel from those that I feel. Being a father for only a year so far, I keep on feeling new things, then realizing how utterly common those feelings are.
But it’s foolish to think like that, ultimately. It’s some kind of cool-kid reflex, an aversion to common things. That every parent feels them makes them more valuable, not less. By feeling them I am sharing in something huge, with strangers from all avenues of life, with my own parents, and their parents. I know the pride, the fear, the love. The pride at your accomplishments. At showing you off to others, at seeing you make strangers smile. The fear when you slipped and bashed your gums and blood flowed from you for the first time. The love that squeezed me from your first ultrasound, somehow, and has yet to let go. I pray it never does.
The biggest enemy of LRT in Toronto isn’t Rob Ford, or some suburban subway fetish, or a mistrust of surface rail. It’s the technology’s own vague identity.
In Toronto, we know what subways are, and we like them. That’s because we have two well-run lines that are the backbone of our aging transit network. The trains come frequently, and they run fast. Given traffic issues, the subway is often more reliable than driving.
We have less of a sense of what LRT actually is. Wikipedia has a decent definition: “typically an urban form of public transport using steel-tracked fixed guideways that operate primarily along exclusive rights of way and have vehicles capable of operating as a single train or as multiple units coupled together.” When the technology was proposed back in the 60s, it was differentiated from then-unpopular trolley/tram/streetcar systems by the following features –
having the capacity to carry more passengers
appearing like a train, with more than one car connected together
having more doors to facilitate full utilization of the space
faster and quieter in operation
Dedicated rights of way, multiple cars and low-to-the ground operation tend to be important. Wider-spaced stops and all-door boarding are other common features of LRT lines. LRT speeds average 27km/h, closer to that of subways (32 km/h) than streetcars (17km/h). Many LRT systems operate off-street, in their own corridors and with their own stations, more like a subway than a Toronto streetcar line. Essentially, LRT is something you can build in areas with less density, areas which don’t yet need the expense of the subway, but need something better than buses or streetcars.
Opponents in Toronto have managed to tar LRT with the brush of two less-loved technologies: streetcars and the SRT in Scarborough. The SRT is a type of light rail, but a very poor implementation of it, based on an unproven (and now discredited) technology, ICTS. It is loud, unreliable, and slow.
Streetcars have been running in Toronto since 1861 and were the backbone of our transit system for almost a century. Their modern implementation, however, is marred by old, unreliable cars, poor route management, and – more than anything else – by their operation in mixed traffic on some of the most congested streets in the country.
The TTC itself has muddied the waters around LRT, often affixing the name to streetcar-based projects like the Spadina, Harbourfront and St. Clair streetcar lines. Combined with the poor state of the streetcar system and of the taxonomically-similar SRT, it’s no surprise that LRT has gotten a bad name.
Things may change once people are able to take a ride on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT (currently under construction), which will run underground for most of its length, and which has subway-like stations (although more closely spaced). Unfortunately, that won’t be until 2022 – and transit advocate Steve Munro is worried that if the current irrational trajectory of transit debate in Toronto continues, even the crosstown line could get torpedoed.
Before then, those who want a rational transit network in Toronto will have to paint a better picture of LRT – or we will be paying for expensive, underused suburban subway lines like Sheppard and the prospective Scarborough extension for decades to come.
I saw Stray Dogs at TIFF this year. If I had actually done my homework and realized this is by Tsai Ming-liang, the director of Face, which I saw at the fest in ’09 and hated, I would have skipped it, which would have been a shame, as it was amazing. It’s tortuous though; much like Face, it’s long take city. Sometimes, 15 minute takes in which very little happens. You will watch a man eat a whole meal in one long shot. You will watch people sleep. Stare at things. Take a piss. But you will also see some amazing things, like the cabbage scene, or the film’s penultimate shot.
I will confess that slow cinema is an idea that does not excite me in the slightest. I would be much more taken by fast cinema. However, when I look into it a little bit, I see that Antonioni is considered a progenitor. I fucking love Antonioni – but I’ve never considered his films slow. There’s a lot going on in those shots. There’s always something to be watching.
I also know I had noted something interesting going on in Asian cinema – extremely languid pacing throughout a film, but periods of frenzied action. Seven Samurai, for instance, takes its sweet time until the end, when it becomes a fast cutting action fest. And the action is all the action-i-er for it.
Stray Dogs has something like this going on. It entrances you. It immerses you in the character’s world, bathing you in the sound. There is a strange phenomenon that is at the core of film: just by watching someone you develop a bond with them. Hitchcock and/or Spielberg would do this with point of view shots, but they aren’t even necessary. It happens in Stray Dogs without you realizing. And what has been left out, when it does show up, takes your breath away.
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism is another film you could call slow cinema. In its case, the characters are often talking about cinema – they’re a director and actress who are having an affair while working on a film. Most scenes are long single takes, albeit stuffed with self-referential dialogue.
How is a film different from real life? How is it different from theatre? A seemingly innocent scene – the character leaves the shower and gets dressed – is rehearsed and debated over and over, and when a character does just that in the “real life” of the film (and not the film within the film, which you never see), you watch it like a hawk. They talk about how it would be better to film an argument as it occurs in real life, over half an hour, than writing a seven page scene of one. When the film ended, suddenly rolling credits, an audience member blurted, “what?!” In a way, yeah – but I’m still mulling it over a couple days later.
In the context of losing a cellphone, doing without all the edits of little electronic distractions every few seconds, I actually find slow cinema kind of interesting. The eye of the slow camera isn’t ours; it doesn’t blink. But it sees different things.
While attempting a classic middle-aged middle-class white person panic tale about how the Internet and smartphones are killing our kids’ brains, the documentary InRealLife manages to sprawl in every direction, like the Internet, without the ability to focus on anything, like our kids’ brains. Almost by accident, it includes some decent sound bites from some Internet luminaries, grazing interesting topics like privacy, advertising, etc. Hey, I guess if you fire off in every direction, you may very well hit something good.
In the bitterest of ironies, while leaving the TIFF screening of this film, I grazed a handrail with just enough force to destroy my pocketed iPhone. So I have been living the past couple days as this film would prefer, as a complete neanderthal. And it has been illuminating.
First off, WiFi becomes as water in a desert. This is apparently what it’s like at tech conferences when the cell towers get saturated and nobody can get on 3G. Thankfully, TIFF had free WiFi networks set up at the Lightbox and at Scotiabank, where it seemed the bulk of the screenings were.
But I think I use my phone for a lot more than that. I was going to walk home, but realized I was unwilling to walk for an hour without any music or podcasts to listen to. So I went to check when the next streetcar would be – d’oh! You realize how dependent you are on these things and no, InRealLife, it’s not all about porn and Facebook updates. I want to research something I saw in a film, make a note of a director. Take a picture! Coordinate dinner with my wife. Basically live my life in the way I normally do – the iPhone has a hand in almost everything.
I will say that without question I managed to be more present than I normally am. I observed things, eavesdropped. It probably made me more relaxed. But in no way would I suggest giving up your smart or even dumbphone. The monkey mind will look for distractions no matter what, and getting it to chill is about mental discipline and not about banning hardware. A smartphone diet or fast, though, like what I accidentally did, might show the kind of discipline you’re gonna need.
If you shy away from the Toronto International Film Festival because of the hype, buzz, red carpets, star wattage or any of that shit, I feel you. Or, the lines. The lines! Sometimes it seems TIFF isn’t really about films, it’s about lining up.
There is a lot more going on behind the flashbulbs though. Midnight Madness with its rowdy crowds. The dedicated Torontonians of every possible ethnicity who come out en masse to see the films from their country of origin. The film tourists who fly in from all over the US to spend a week in our city and see tons of films. It’s a good time, and I’ve had the week off from work, taking in a ton of stuff, so I feel I should get around to writing something up.
Here’s how I do TIFF. I get the daytime package, which lets you see anything that airs before 5:01pm for about half price. I use the amazing TIFFR to go through the catalogue and make my shortlist. I pick stuff that I don’t think is going to get a theatrical release any time soon. I do it solo style. I show up 15 minutes before the start of the films, which is after all the ticket holders have been seated but before the rush line has been let in. If you’re solo style, you’ll find a seat in between someone somewhere. You may have to sit near people, but hey, it’s TIFF – that will happen anyway.
(A note about the daytime package: last year it was nerfed so that you don’t get an advance ticket selection window, you pick after single tickets have gone on sale. When I realized this, I had already bought the package and I thought that would wreck everything – but I still got 19 of my 20 films. Keep in mind I chose a 9am screening of a film that retold the ravages of Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime using dioramas of clay figurines. If you’re going for more mainstream fare than I did, you may want the Flex Pack or something else.)
This year I went a little more obscure n’ arty than I normally would. My favourite festival sub-brands are Midnight Madness and Vanguard, which are the genre-iest – but the last times I did TIFF, I found a lot of the films reasonably accessible in the months that followed, whether on Blu-Ray or whatevs. This year, I confess that current events made me a lot more interested in the films of the Middle East than I normally would be. Also, the doc lineup seemed pretty strong.
I’m almost done now – two days left – and the fest started out weak but gained strength. The last two days were full of kickass. I think I’m going to write up individual films where I was really into them, and then do a list of stuff I don’t have too much to say about. Or maybe I’ll skip that part.
We is moved. Shouldn’t mean much to you now, Dear Reader, other than the site should feel a little snappier, no? All systems go except my cantankerous little javascript bookmarklet that I use to post links, which has broken inexplicably with the move. So, links may be light until that thing learns to play ball, goddammit.
I’m at the TIFF starting tomorrow, and may or may not write up the flicks I see there.
On another note, moving hosts indicates a rather sad end to my adventure with TextDrive. It’s been about a year since TextDrive was relaunched, and things haven’t worked out as planned. Communications from management were exciting but fitful, and support and uptime had huge holes as well. The home page promises paid plans with advanced features “returning Summer 2013”, a ship which, according to the date and the chill in the air, has sailed, with no word from the captain. I’ve left my other sites there for the time being, as I still hope against hope that the journey will resume, but The Robot is now safely ensconced at A Small Orange.
UPDATE Mar 4: Sadly, Textdrive is shutting down. And, this site is no longer at A Small Orange – now we are at Dreamhost. Could never get that javascript working at ASO despite there being nothing wrong with it, and they refused to help. Dreamhost is perfect so far.
As you maybe noticed, this site was down for about four days there. That’s not good, and it’s not the first time this year. So, I’m moving hosts. If things get weird over the next couple days, that’s why.
There is a Patton Oswalt joke about the Star Wars prequels – go ahead, give it a listen – in which Oswalt berates Lucas for making the dull origin stories of exciting characters. “Hey, do you like ice cream? Well here’s a big bag of rock salt.” It concludes with Oswalt ranting “I DON’T GIVE A SHITWHERETHESTUFF I LOVECOMESFROM, I JUSTLOVETHESTUFF I LOVE.”
It’s not that the new NBC show, which recently concluded its first season, is better than Manhunter, Silence of The Lambs, Hannibal (The Movie), or Red Dragon, although it may indeed be better than some of those. It’s that show runner Bryan Fuller realized that a three-page bit of back story from the Thomas Harris novels was actually more dramatic than the front story. Hannibal was, at one time, a psychiatrist consulting for the FBI with his arch-nemesis Will Graham. He was also an active cannibal. It’s almost funny to realize that before this show, the character had spent most of his fictional time in jail.
Hannibal in this series is a different creature from the increasingly hammy Anthony Hopkins. At first, I found Mads Mikkelsen wooden. Gradually, I realized he was actually extremely subtle. The moments that Hannibal expresses emotion are notable for their extreme rarity and telling context.
Hannibal isn’t the main character, though. That honour goes to Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), who is as I mentioned a consultant; in the pilot, he’s lured from his teaching job by Larry Fishburne because he has an uncanny ability to empathize with serial killers. Hannibal becomes his analyst. Those two points – Graham’s empathy and his psychopathic shrink – become this series’ greatest strengths. When he struts onto a crime scene, Graham enters a kind of Empathy Mode where he gets into the killer’s mind. This allows the show some great liberties with visualization that it exploits adroitly. Furthermore, Graham’s empathy with horrible minds makes him increasingly fragile as the show goes on, an arc that propels a lot of drama, and keeps visual interest even away from the crime scenes.
But if Graham’s visions lend the show its visual flair, it is grounded in riveting dialogue, thanks to the emphasis on talk therapy. The Graham-Lecter discussions are captivating, but many other shrinks are in play: Graham has a crush on a co-worker who is also a shrink (Caroline Dhavernas), and many amazing scenes are of Lecter visiting his own therapist, played by Gillian Anderson. The dialogue is generally very strong; it reminded me of the late, great In Treatment.
I suppose I shouldn’t conclude without mentioning dramatic irony. It’s interesting to see a whole show powered by it. We know going in, by the name, that this show features one of fiction’s most renowned killers. How frustrating, then, to see so many lawmen completely unaware of it. It makes you want to yell at the screen at times.
You might assume, like I had, that a show with this name on NBC had to be a G-rated candy-ass cynical cash-in. It is not. It will surprise you. Watch it.
I suppose it’s no surprise that the internet would change cooking. Cookbooks are a type of book, after all, and one that contains recipes, which are hard to keep contained when there’s a whole internet out there perfectly suited for sharing them. Living or dying by a collection of cookbooks seems not only old-fashioned, but positively missing out on a better way of doing things.
What I’ve found myself doing is roughly as follows. I get some kind of notion in my head (I’m going to make ribs!). I search for recipes. I clip them all to an online notebook (Evernote, in my case), and I compare them. I see what aspects are common to all (remove the tough skin, dry rub, etc.), and I pick and choose from the other ingredients and techniques, depending on my tastes, whims and ingredients on hand (Tuscan Ribs with Mayonnaise and Mouthwash!).
I never dealt well with the perfection in cookbooks. I would inevitably miss some ingredient, or mistime something, or run up against badly written instructions, and the results would be mildly disappointing. This reinforced in me a sense that I should not stray from the written text. Cooking became about following orders with maximum precision, which is to say not fun at all.
This new internet way is much better suited to me. It involves research, and perhaps some dulling of novelty via averaging, but the results tend to be personal in a way that is impossible with the old way. Of course, that makes it fun. So I have been cooking tons more.
The similarities to music struck me. We have an old model where an official version of The Music exists; we buy it, and listen to it, and that’s that. When I google folk music lyrics, however, I soon realize there are no official versions, just many different takes I can choose from, which only encourages me to make my own version.
This is the part where I would share a recipe but doesn’t that go against my point? So go make your own!
Remember the news that Google Reader was going to shut down? Well, the end is nigh. July 1 is the feed rapture. I went over some options in my previous post on the topic, but it’s worth checking in to see where everyone stands.
Feedly seems to be the majority choice, touting that “more than 3,000,000 Google Reader users have switched to feedly”. They just announced Feedly Cloud, which is “a fast and scalable infrastructure to seamlessly replace Google Reader”. The good news for Reeder users is that Reeder and feedly will soon work together. The bad news for some of us is: like google reader, feedly’s business model is not clear. In this interview, the CEO says:
Our business model has both short-term and longer-term revenue sources. Feedly revenue today is derived from user content discovery and product discovery. Additional revenue channels will be introduced over time.
So, who knows. It sounds vaguely suspicious, but I’m not great at parsing tech CEO-speak. It is interesting to note that Feedly already had 4 million users so the RSS market is at least 7 million strong – Google said it wasn’t worth it for them because it was only a million. YOULIE!!
Here are some other ones: NewsBlur, The Old Reader, Feed Wrangler, and FeedBin. Reeder supports FeedBin now and soon Feed Wrangler as well. Feedbin looks the prettiest to my eyes but I haven’t looked at these very hard – I’m going to give Fever another shot first, and if that doesn’t work, I may give these other options a better sizing up.
The games industry is stranger these days than I’ve ever seen it. At the root is technological change, as always: the kind of tech needed to present a passable modern game experience is now so cheap it shows up in phones, TVs, watches. The game console makers have tried to branch out and present their machines as “everything boxes” which mostly means they help you watch things. But the technology needed to watch things is even cheaper than that needed for games: witness the sub-$100 Roku and of course so-called smart TVs, which come with streaming and social apps built in.
I would bet that this generation, the machines we have thought of as consoles (dedicated games hardware costing $300+) will be essentially core gamer boxes. Only the hardcore will spend money on something that plays games, when everything else already plays games. The casual players that fueled success in the previous generation will have no need to buy consoles this time around, and even the hardcore themselves will start to question their utility. As the years pass, the game abilities of non-consoles (multi-purpose devices like tablets, phones, TVs, streaming boxes, clothes? who knows!) will only grow, while the consoles stay the same for five to eight years at a time.
How do the major players stand now?
Nintendo is not doing well. I expect the 3DS will chug along, but the Wii U is confusing to non-gamers and unappealing to core gamers – sales will get even worse. Nintendo is like Keith Richards: they may last a bit longer, but it’s not gonna be pretty.
With the Xbox One’s price, used games fiasco, and creepy always-snitching Kinect, Microsoft basically chugged poison, tripped, fell into a hole filled with spikes, and set themselves on fire. The used games issue will scare away hardcore gamers, while the $500 price makes it pointless for casual or non-gamers, despite the heavy TV pitch.
Sony will do well. They kept the PS4 price down, made the thing easy to develop for, and lured indies as well as the AAA publishers. Plus – amazing that this is a bragging point and grounds to “win” E3 – you can play used games on it.
But as time passes the new players will make things even more interesting.
As I have written before, Apple could disrupt the games industry by doing barely anything: opening the AppleTV to third party apps, and maybe making a dedicated controller / new remote. Interestingly, word out of WWDC (probably muted because of non-disclosure agreements) is that they are working on a spec for game controllers. May be nothing, but it may be a huge deal.
The Ouya, an open $100 Android-based system, is already out, although it will probably struggle to attract developers. I know little of the Android games ecosystem, but from what I read on Pocket Tactics, it doesn’t sound that robust – and it presumably takes at least some extra work to make a stock touch-based Android game work a system with a tiny install base.
Valve’s still-mostly-theoretical Steam Box is another big question mark. It’s as open as the Ouya but would have access to everything in the Steam store, which means basically all PC games. The idea of playing PC games comfortably from my couch is very enticing to me. But the only example of one so far – there may be many different models made by different manufacturers – costs $1000, which isn’t going to set any markets on fire.
Another interesting idea? Sony touted new cloud gaming features coming to PS4, PS3 and Vita. But that technology isn’t limited by the capabilities of the hardware, since the processing is happening on a server, and only the video and user input is happening on the device. This means that Sony could equally bring cloud gaming to their line of TVs that isn’t doing that well. It’s probably unlikely unless they’re really backed against a wall, but it’s an interesting thought.
Read a couple great articles this weekend. In the Globe, How Brampton demonstrates the new vision of Canada argues essentially that Brampton today is your town tomorrow. It’s the first part in a series of articles about the city, which is now the country’s ninth-largest city, thanks to an influx of South Asian immigrants that have made visible minorities the majority. All sorts of things happen as a result, from the South Asian interest in hockey to the surprising density and resource-sharing that come from a different model of family tackling a low-density suburban sprawl.
Something that had been marinating in my Instapaper queue finally came out and got eaten: First Do No Harm, the engrossing, tragic story of a coroner’s inquest into prescription narcotic abuse in Ontario. While telling the story of two victims of the crisis, it mentions “a prescription narcotic–related death occurred almost every day in Ontario in 2008” and that the medical establishment is dangerously wrapped up in things. In fact, I learned a new word: iatrogenic, “induced by the words or actions of the physician”.
It’s on iOS. It’s a turn-based strategy game. With flying. From Civilization creator Sid Meier. Adding giant robots and hamburgers would be unnecessary at this point, as it’s already a must-buy for me. Er, if it wasn’t free… more on that later.
Ace Patrol is a hex-based strategy game of WWI dogfighting. You have a squad of four procedurally-generated pilots, and you play through a procedurally-generated campaign, adding maneuvers, bonuses and planes as you advance. It’s not the grim-swamp-of-death-and-malaise WWI that inspired the dadaists, it’s more the “spot-on flying, good chap” jaunty cap-and-scarf WWI of… other WWI games. The graphics are slick yet board game-ish, a bit of accessible 3D gloss on 2D gameplay, much like Civilization Revolution.
It’s a fun, easy-to-pick-up game that nonetheless has a fair amount of complexity lurking petulantly under the surface. Depending on a few key variables (your altitude/speed, angle of approach, enemy’s angle and speed), your attack may do 4% damage, or 90%. Learning these variables is key, as is making use of anti-aircraft batteries, and clouds (which hide your position from the enemy). In general, the gameplay feels true to the real-life activity it is based on, while being abstracted enough to make it easy to get into, and with short enough feedback loops to make it compulsively playable.
On the downside, it’s marred by a far too cursory tutorial that hides the aforementioned complexity altogether. That’s all well and good until you get to later, harder missions where you start dying all the time and don’t know why. And dying: no pilot ever really dies (“well done, old chap!”), but depending on the circumstances of their would-be demise – injured, crashed, behind enemy lines or not – they are taken out of commission for anywhere from one to six stages. You can’t replace them – why not? Insurance reasons? Union rules? The fading morale of a populace drowning in death? Who knows, but every lost pilot means one less you can choose for your next mission. This can potentially be catastrophic as this game auto-saves and doesn’t let you try a level over again. You can free up all your pilots and have them ready to fly by paying $1. This isn’t the only IAP play, but it is the sleaziest. If it wasn’t an actual business model, it would seem like something that should be fixed in an update. Or at least you could respect the policy of risk-mitigation and pretend-human-life-valuation it would seem to endorse.
So that’s a bummer, but other than that, the IAP is quite reasonable. You unlock the full British campaign for $1, and $2 for the other nations piecemeal (France, Germany, US), or $4 for everyone. You can also buy “pilots” which are really packages of skins and skills tied to each nation. Note that the procedurally generated campaigns are different every time, so even paying just $1 for this game gives you a lot of potential gameplay. All in all, probably worth the pocket change you flip at it – just fly safe or you’ll wind up in a spot of bother, old chum.
Here are a few notes on Upstream Color, the second feature from Shane Carruth (director of Primer). It’s an exceptional film for many reasons, one of which is how willfully obtuse it is. I’m lucky and/or obsessive enough to have seen it twice, so I may have a leg up on plot comprehension. I’ll try to explain it now, and will follow with some other thoughts.
Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the film – this is spoiler time in spoiler town.
What happened?
There is a character credited as “Thief”. He has discovered that a certain slug, when fed a particular plant, and ingested by a human, leaves that human in a state akin to hypnosis, completely open to suggestion. This is strongest if the subject does not eat or sleep.
The Thief uses this knowledge to rob people. One of his victims is Kris. He robs her of everything of value and gets her hopelessly in debt by making her take out a home equity line of credit. He keeps her busy, starved and awake the whole time. The mindless busywork involves copying out pages from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and making links of these pages into chains.
When the business is done the Thief leaves, making Kris aware of her hunger and fatigue. When she has eaten and slept, she sees the slugs inside her body reacting to the changes. Horrified, she tries to cut them out with a knife.
Enter The Sampler. The Sampler is also aware of the properties of this slug – however, there is no evidence he knows of or works with the Thief. The Sampler tries to help victims of the Thief. Sound has a big influence on the slug, and by playing sounds, The Sampler can manipulate those whose bodies contain slugs. He plays sounds through huge speakers into the ground, and this lures Kris to him.
The Sampler “helps” Kris by performing a procedure that removes the slugs from her body and places them into a pig. He then labels this pig and keeps it at his farm. Kris is now psychically linked with the pig. The farm is full of other pigs, all linked to other people (all presumably victims of the Thief), and pig Kris meets pig Jeff.
Months later, having lost her house and her job and with no memory of why, Kris has put her life back together somewhat. She meets Jeff, and because of their connection as pigs, they fall in love. (Man what a silly sentence that was.) Kris tries to discourage Jeff’s interest in her by disclosing that she is undergoing treatment for mental health problems, and Jeff counters that he’s a divorcee. Guess they’re both damaged goods.
Both exhibit strange behaviour. Kris fetches rocks from the bottom of a pool while quoting Thoreau. Jeff forms chains out of straw wrappers. It seems there are still slug aftereffects.
Their current behaviour can also be manipulated by The Sampler. Via the pigs, he is able to share consciousness with any of their linked humans, without their knowing it. Playing sounds near the pigs has an effect on the humans’ behaviour and memories. In one sequence, when he learns that a subject’s wife has attempted suicide, The Sampler tries to rewrite that subject’s memories so that he doesn’t blame himself.1
Pig-Jeff gets pig-Kris pregnant, which releases hormones in human-Kris’ body, but when she sees a doctor and gets an MRI, they tell her there is no way she could be pregnant. That’s because of damage to her internal organs (not sure if that’s because of the slugs or because of the procedure The Sampler gave her).
Back on the pig farm, pig-Kris gives birth to a litter of piglets. The Sampler is not happy about this – he drowns the piglets in a sack in a nearby river. Discharge from the corpses affects the growth of nearby orchids, which are picked by the mother / daughter team of E&P Exotics – the company that supplies the plants used by the thief.
This trauma in the pig world is felt by human Kris and Jeff, who become disoriented and paranoid. Their memories are blending; Kris remembers things that happened to Jeff, and shows up at his workplace, not knowing where she is. Jeff witnesses her Thoreau-pool ritual and they figure out that the source text is Walden.
They buy a car at her urging, and as if by instinct, Kris gets them close to The Sampler’s farm. Jeff sees a mailbox labeled “Quinoa Valley Recordings”, which releases The Sampler’s musical works.
Using the recordings somehow, Kris and Jeff become aware of The Sampler’s presence in their consciousness. They find him on his farm and kill him. They find records of all the victims, and mail them these details along with copies of Walden. The other victims come to the farm, and together they take over its management, caring for the pigs and their offspring.
What does it mean?
This is One Reporter’s Opinion, but I see it as a metaphor for capitalism. The Thief is Capital, exploiting workers for financial gain and leaving them broken and alone. The Sampler is government: he enumerates Capital’s victims, and tries to “manage” them; he’s sometimes well-meaning, but always controlling. And he really has his own interests at heart, not his subjects, who are animals to him.
I’m sure there are other interpretations, and I’d love to hear them. Maybe get at me @dsankey on Twitter, that’s probably easiest.
One thing I’m interested in is the relationship of Walden / On Civil Disobedience to the themes of the film. While I’ve listed Walden as the book the Thief has his victims copy out, it is notable that the copy that is used contains the other text as well, especially considering the third act symbolically portrays a revolution. I’ve actually read Walden but it was so long ago that I don’t have anything to bring to the table here.
About the form
I saw Upstream Color the day before I saw Spring Breakers, and the comparison was interesting, despite being very different films. Both films cut freely forwards and backwards in time. The film I would consider as the precursor is Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, with its flashes forward, but I am sure there are many other films one could cite. Upstream Color also reminded me of David Lynch in a way Primer never did, as Primer didn’t truck in symbols and emotion. It also reminded me of Lost and a bunch of other sci-fi that doesn’t really feel like sci-fi.
The form of this film is fractured, like the consciousness of its subjects. Typically when a film jumps in space or time there is some effort made to indicate this to the viewer – fade to black, or a title, or different colour grading. Not so here. The film cuts between remote time periods and different locations in the exact manner it cuts between shots within a scene. Since some of the things that actually connect these cuts are atypical and theoretically require some explanation (psychically linked to a pig!), it requires something like a leap of faith to overcome the cognitive dissonance and see the connections between the shots. The connections are there, and that’s what makes this film so great. Everything has a reason. if it didn’t, this film would be awful.
Another difficult thing about this film is its sheer density. It’s almost all montage. Montage is an incredible tool, allowing whole stories to be told in 30 second commercials. However, it’s mentally taxing. I’ve seen hour-long presentations of promos and commercials, and you walk out of there wanting to rest your optic nerve, and if you’re lucky you remember two or three spots out of a hundred. That Carruth has made a feature with this information density is ballsy, questionable in its wisdom, and quite possibly the step forward that film needs to take to remain relevant.
1 This is the part I am least sure about. Perhaps The Sampler is just playing back memories, not reprogramming them?
Notes
There is some further reading in this link post I put up shortly after writing this article, including an interview with Carruth in which he’s surprisingly forthright about the meaning of the film to him. Note that it’s not specifically about capitalism in his eyes, but rather, more broadly, forces of which we are unaware that affect our behaviour. Worth reading!
… if you haven’t run into their paywall (what a pain in the ass). There’s one about changing TV viewing habits that probably isn’t news to you if you read this site regularly, but is still interesting to see fleshed out. And there is this article about the fight for mandatory carriage. TV channel owners want the CRTC to make a bunch of channels mandatory for cable distributors to carry in their basic cable package.
Subscriber growth has slowed but hasn’t yet gone negative, so cord cutting isn’t as rampant as one might think. But I’d wager that TV subscription prices are also going up, and that’s the issue with mandatory carriage. The BDUs (broadcast distribution units – Bell, Rogers, Shaw etc.) will want to pass any mandatory carriage costs on to their subscribers.
Let’s just say it. What everyone wants is a cheap, all-platform, on-demand net-TV package with a-la-carte channel add-ons. Make it $20-30 for the base, or free if you have cable already. Like Netflix, except with new shows. Simple.
(Aside: I love retired and “sunsetted”, but at some point could we also try “horse doctored”, “old dogged”, and “behind barned”?)
Perhaps there aren’t that many of us any more who rely on feeds. I understand the twitter and that other, blue-thumbed, oversharing service are often used to “curate” and “discover” links to web sites. But I’m guessing there are a few million of us diehards still, all thinking over our options right now.
Option one for me is to try using Fever again. Pluses: it syncs with Reeder, and I already bought it. Minuses: it’s probably not for you unless you’re in the habit of installing software on servers.
Option two appears to be Feedly, which has built a clone of the Google Reader API, which theoretically means that all the apps that used GReader as a back end could easily switch to Feedly. However: the developers of said apps would have to do that first. Also, Feedly looks like another free service with no apparent business model, which I’m guessing means ads or data mining at some point. That or a sudden shutdown.
There are some more options and thoughts here. I agree that it’s a good thing for the category; Google basically did a Microsoft Internet Explorer with the feed reading market, wrecking anyone’s chance of making money by being huge and free. Let’s hope that readers find new options and are willing to pay some money to create some sustainable businesses.
Anyway, given this news, I suggest we bloggists start to get worried about Feedburner, another critical piece of infrastructure that is free, niche, owned by Google, and hasn’t seen an update in ages.
