Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
Yesterday was… well, yesterday was. And now today is. And today being means that there should be a bit of writing here. There isn’t. Sunday, I think, is going to be my cheat day for writing here. I don’t quite know why. Ah well, instead, I bring you The Deranged Millionaire:
Yes, I have officially jumped the shark if I’m posting goddamn YouTube videos. The last one out, please remember to turn off the lights.
So, Crest of the Stars 2. It’s difficult for me to put into words exactly what I liked about the novel– or, perhaps, fragment of novel that the book presents. Maybe I really ought to address that element, first and foremost. The Crest of the Stars books– collectively known as Seikai– are an on-going run of books in Japan. The first three make up a single tale, while the remainder tell of an ongoing struggle between two vast interstellar nations. The most obvious thing that I could complain about is that the individual volumes themselves are extremely short. Both of the English-language books that have been released so far took me on the order of about four hours to read each (which is tempered, of course, by the fact that I tend to read very quickly). That said, the story is only about two-thirds of the way through, and so far both ‘endings’ have been extremely abrupt. The one major caveat I would offer to anyone looking to read the books would be to wait until late May, when all three will have been released. Less frustration that way.
I suppose complaining about the somewhat limited vocabulary used and the occasional typographic error (which belie the translator’s attempts to ’spice up’ the narrative; a character yells, “Shut your tmouth,” with the unintentional “t” indicating to me that some draft along the way meant for the dialogue to read “Shut your trap”) is a little silly for me to do, as I haven’t actually read the original Japanese (though, once I do finally get around to learning the language, I welcome the challenge that the books provide). However, they’re legitimate concerns, even if ultimately they don’t detract too much from an otherwise enthralling story.
That’s what it boils down to, for me, anyway. Morioka has taken a somewhat cliched premise– ordinary guy is assimilated into a massive, overpowered space empire in a somewhat transparent wish-fulfillment scenario– and infused it with a particularly voracious enthusiasm. It’s hard to fault him for the somewhat “done that” nature of the plot, especially considering that later stories move towards a more Clancy-esque military-political yarn (as evidenced by the anime adaptations of the remaining books); this is just the setup, the appetizer before the real meal. What Morioka’s initial premise lacks in plot is more than made up for in the detail with which he paints his view of the universe. Everything has a place, everything has a purpose. Nothing is extraneous or there simply for the sake of being there, to fill some unspecified or falsely-obligatory quota. It’s actually quite fascinating.
I suppose that the case could be made– what with the synthetic language and the elvenesque appearance of many of the protagonists– that Morioka is trying almost too hard to be another Tolkien. The thing is, whereas the story of the hobbits is a pretty straightforward good versus evil scenario, it’s hard to pigeonhole one side or another as being genuinely evil within the Crest universe. Both the Abh Empire and the United Mankind have good and bad traits in almost equal parts. Crest 2 paints this picture pretty clearly. On the one hand, you have the four ambassadors who genuinely don’t want open war, but simply pushed the Abh harder than they expected they’d move. On the other hand, you have the MP Captain Kyte, a man who in the parlance of modern Earth politics could reasonably be called a ‘true believer’ in the states causes of the United Mankind. Morioka actually offers the best description of Kyte (through another character): ‘actively good’; Kyte isn’t content with only doing good in his own actions, he believes that other people can be ‘fixed’ to do good or to better themselves, and that it’s his responsibility to do this fixing. The Abh, too, have their sins and salvations. Their bloody and violent past is undeniable, and unwritten simply because there is no need for it to be written; their xenophobia and ultranationalism brought them to a horrible decision which backfired severely. Thus given wisdom, they now seek to unite humanity, both natural and Abh, by providing protection and liberty.
Any novel with a significant amount of politics in its pages is difficult to read without attempting to make analogies to the modern state of the world. And, realistically, perhaps Morioka had something to say in the mid-1990s about the state of the world. It’s not my place to judge the author’s intention. All I can offer is the belief that I know a good book when I read it, and that Crest of the Stars is a good tale, but partly told. I’m looking forward to the final act. Once that’s done, I’ll gladly go into a little detail as to how the story held up in relation to the anime adaptation.
(Oh, the title of this post? Just a little pun on one of the closing events of this particular volume.)
Burning Crusade. As I’m not yet even Level 20, my level of excitement for the expansion is coming in slightly behind running out and buying toilet paper. However, reports that the pre-expansion patch is full of bugs makes me feel a little better about not actually logging in within the past couple weeks. I still enjoy it, I still like the game on principle, but I’ve just had no drive to continue it when I’ve made such good progress on FF12. And now, with five books on my plate– Snow Crash, Crest of the Stars 2, Kino’s Journey, re-starting American Gods, and finishing GTD– game progress might be slowing down a bit. Might.
Of course, then there’s also the announced Double XP Weekend for City of Heroes/Villains. So maybe reading won’t quite be on my list.
I suppose, really, that the fact that I’m really not all that excited about the announced iTV and iPhone is a good sign. Despite the initial reaction of “oooh, shiny” (which– admit it– everyone had), both products simply aren’t in a niche I have a need to fill. Technically, I already have an iTV– my Mac mini, purchased back in ‘05. It had gravitated towards a media center machine kind of slowly once I’d done my upgrading of my gaming rig, so I have no need for a dedicated media box. And paying $500 to get locked into a two-year contract with a different cell provider for a phone that has just over a tenth of the capacity of my current iPod is not worth it to me, no matter how absolutely spiffy the “smart phone” features are. (Though, if I could make the jump with a little less cost– or, more specifically, if the phone were available for Sprint– I would so be all over it.)
Now that’s not to say that Apple has done some bad things here. I like the products, even if they’re not for me. By getting more higher-function capabilities into a consumer-oriented mobile phone, it could (stress: could) kick-start a new generation of cell phone competition, which always results in the consumers winning. If, and this is a big if, the major manufacturers got together and built a solid and interoperable platform for advanced-level programs to run on their hardware, they could seriously get US-based cell technology caught up to the rest of the world. Apple would lose, of course– which isn’t quite blasphemous– but it would be beneficial for everyone involved. Especially the consumers.
Why would Apple lose? After all, the iPod has most of the same problems that the iPhone would face– lock-in, somewhat inferior technology hiding behind the ‘cool’ factor (I will be the first to admit that encoding your own movies onto the iPod is a pain in the ass that is done MUCH better on other devices), and an almost prohibitively-high price point. The iPhone has a couple advantages over the iPod, however; it runs on OS X, so coding for it could hypothetically be opened up (but don’t hold your breath), and out of the box it offers a bit more over the Blackberry and its ilk (at least, more to my estimation; the last I’ve touched a Blackberry was in May of ‘06, and that was a lower-end model). The iPod has been a great success and nobody can really deny that; but the biggest credit to its success was the relative novelty of the device. When it was introduced, MP3/music players were relatively new ground. Since that time, each continual iteration of the iPod has been an evolutionary alteration, increasing bit-by-bit the capabilities of the machine. A completely “new” iPod simply won’t sell if it were introduced today; people already have theirs. The only reasons I would ever buy another iPod are if this current one broke, or if the new one added significant features without removing features I enjoyed from the existing one.
That’s the big problem I have with the iPhone. Granted, you don’t want a hard-drive-based cell phone. That’s just ASKING for trouble. But 8GB capacity?! When your primary iPods start at 30GB? When you are trying to sell movies that routinely consume upwards of 2GB of space each? Let’s go ahead and overlook the read/write degradation of flash-based drives for a moment. Regardless of whether or not it’s widescreen, no iPod with less than 30GB of space can be called “the true video iPod”. I think that’s what a lot of Appleologists were looking for when they heard about the iPhone’s wide screen. It’s just not going to happen.
I would personally love a “convergence” device. I would love to graft a high-capacity iPod onto a palm-top OS X computer. If it had a comparable capacity to my existing iPod, then I wouldn’t be wavering over this decision; I’d be scanning my pre-order receipt for you folks and updating everyone with my new phone number. As it stands, the iPhone is simply not what I’m looking for in a “convergence” device. Ask me again in two years– if the iPhone lasts that long, or if a better device isn’t available.
Now, the iTV. In principle, I like the device. A set-top box that can play stored or streaming media, with a 40GB hard drive that can connect directly to any iTunes-capable computer and makes theater-style display of iTunes Store content easy will always be a good idea in my book. The biggest problem I have is that it’s basically the same as a set of AirPort Speakers, only with an HDMI output port and some component outputs. Now don’t get me wrong. If I did not have the Mac mini (which I can expand endlessly by virtue of external hard drives), I would again be all over this. My mini does have some problems– it refuses to output a widescreen signal to my HDTV’s PC port– but it works. I do not feel a need to lay out $300 for a device whose functions I already am capable of in a machine that I purchased for other purposes.
There is one very big glaring thing that, in the interests of playing nice with certain parties who know who they are, I can’t come out and say is something that the mini can do that the iTV can’t. Of course, if I happen to drop that the iTV won’t let me play World of Warcraft on a monitor twice as big as my PC monitor, then you might get the idea. But sssssh. We’re trying to be subtle about this.
It kind of comes down to this: I want both of the things that Apple announced, but I by no means need either of them. And apparently, I’m not the only one of that opinion.
On Wednesdays, in the absence of actual content, I bring you Unpaid Advertising. Basically, this is a listing of things that have caught my eye over the past week. I hope you find it agreeable.
I used to really dig the old AudioGalaxy piracy music sharing service for one reason which I have yet to see anywhere else: I could order my home computer to download files from any other web-enabled computer in the world. AG relied on a “satellite” application which pulled data from a web front-end. So, let’s say I was in the radio studio on-campus. If I heard a song I really wanted to keep, all I needed to do would be to log into AG and pick out the file. By the time I got home, the song was on my hard drive, all downloaded and awesome. While I know for a fact that the music industry would get the world’s largest collective case of explosive diarrhea if iTunes ever implemented that, the next best thing would be this little trick, which more or less does the same thing but for torrents. If IM file transfer wasn’t ridiculously flaky (as LifeHacker reminds me) I’d be more psyched about it. Oh, don’t let the Mac-ness scare you; I’m sure it’s a trivial change to do this on a Windows-based machine or even a comparable Linux client.
While it’s not strictly a link, per se, I have to say that I picked up a copy of Getting Things Done, the by-now-famous productivity manual by David Allen that has been nearly a staple of the OCD-super-geeky-crowd. Why I’ve resisted joining the movement before now is painfully unclear to me from this side of Chapter 3, as quite frankly it’s f%$#ing brilliant. Most of it’s common sense, yes, which probably answers my question about resistance; but it presents it in a wonderfully programmer-oriented way (completely unintentionally, apparently) that so far has really helped me figure out that even though I have WAY too many projects on my plate right now, I can and will get a handle on them– and it’s oh so hackable, judging by how many PDFs and ‘here’s what I do’ guides are out there. Expect more logorrhea about GTD from me in the future.
And now, cheap laughs that make me feel better about my past job hunts.
I suppose that in the absence of an actual blogroll, I should at least point out that I kind of miss working with Joel Pan, back when I was assisting with RPGamer. Though now that I think about it, the blogroll is on my “Projects” list.
Box art for FFVI Advance was released over the weekend. I’m definitely waiting for the reviews to come in (based solely on how badly IV Advance burned me and those I know– I haven’t even touched V Advance, partly because I never liked V but also partly because of this), but in my best estimation I don’t recall seeing that particular Amano sketch of Terra before.
Finally, the man who contributed in large part to feeding me in the last half of my college career has died. I’d make a gag about it, but honestly, there wouldn’t be much to it. So, yeah.
I, uh, actually haven’t seen any recent anime. Well, I think maybe I saw AMV Hell Championship Edition. But I’m still a little behind (read: a lot). Haven’t watched more of Fate (though I did find my disc, finally); haven’t seen more Ichigo; haven’t managed to watch more of Kanon or Mai-Otome Zwei; haven’t re-started Banner of the Stars 2. This is mostly due to trying to get through FF12; despite making a pretty good chunk of progress (I’ve unlocked the second story-required Esper, with levels in the 27-28 range) the end is still a pretty good ways off.
At the same time, though, I’ve had a huge desire to re-watch Fruits Basket. Which is something that can’t be done until, y’know, I first reclaim Fruits Basket. Meh. All things in time.
EDIT: Oh yeah, today’s the MacWorld Keynote by The Jobs. While tomorrow’s post is going to be a Link Wednesday, there’ll be something on Thursday about it. Unless, y’know, it’s really, really earth-shattering.
This morning, in the shower, I briefly thought about some of the services that have come up in the last five years, and how they could be applied to my life to maximum enjoyability. I also started thinking about how Pez recommended to me Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, and how I wanted to pick it up. For a brief moment, I thought, “There ought to be a NetFlix-like service, but for books.”
At that moment, my sister– who is a librarian, and in Buffalo– telekinetically dope-slapped me.
Well, I still have nothing interesting to say today. I mean, yeah, I did stuff yesterday and almost undid the dieting I’d done over the previous week. I learned that while I still have some of the energy needed to do DDR, I need to do it more consistently and frequently to get back to the level of progress I was at even just six months ago (oh, and that I totally need to work on the songs I used to be able to do). And I learned that with a good concept and a good group, even just standing around and talking can be fun in City of Heroes.
But aside from saying I’ve made some progress in FF12 (it’s amazing what fighting stuff much higher level than you can do for raising your levels, though I really freaking hate fliers), I’ve really accomplished next to nothing this weekend. I don’t much expect that to change, but we’ll see.
A couple of days ago I had lunch at KFC (where apparently the word “chicken” is no longer taboo), and the drink cup offered a code for the “Ultimate Gamer’s Sweepstakes”. I figured it was worth a shot, so I entered the code on the website and was informed that I was an “instant” winner. Of course, the e-mail confirming the win didn’t arrive until last night. Here’s the entirety of the e-mail:
Dear [John's e-mail],
Congratulations!
You are an instant winner in the Mountain Dew Ultimate Gamer’s Sweeps!
Your prize (One (1) Complimentary KFC Snacker valued at .99) will be delivered to you in about 8-10 weeks.
Congrats on being an instant winner.
Your friends at
Mountain Dew and KFC
First off, this is some strange new definition of “instant” that I was heretofore unfamiliar with. Secondly, while I can appreciate the luck involved in winning the default “you lost but we want to keep taking your money anyway” prize, I am not entirely sure that I want a KFC Snacker that has been 8 to 10 weeks in transit. Finally, if I ever had friends at Mountain Dew or KFC, this would pretty much be the end of the friendship.
…….I’m still gonna eat there. The Bowls are tasty and relatively cheap (in terms of calories and money). I just don’t really like “instantly winning” something that I don’t want and won’t get until it’s too late.
