Metaplanar Babel

Oro.. just happened to run across a link to this over on Brendan’s blog. I know at least a few of you readers like Star Wars, so I suggest you go read through some of the entries at that first link. Hilarious! As if Vader himself weren’t funny enough, but some most of the commenteers join in the fun too. Hell, they’re almost funnier than the original posts. Go, read, laugh!

Edit: after thinking about it some, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some of the in-character posts were actually done by the same person as the actual blog. Whether they were or not, they’re still funny~

So Jon and I went to see Kung Fu Hustle this evening. (Why do I start these posts off with So.. so often? o.O) I expected it to be somewhat stupidly silly (which it was) and funny (which it also was), but what I didn’t expect was a horde of Axe Gangers in black suits doing what had to have been a scene in tribute to the Neo vs the many Smiths fight in The Matrix Reloaded. Of course, in the credits I saw that Yuen Wo Ping choreographed the martial arts sequences, so it all makes sense now. Anyway..this movie was like a live-action anime. Sweatdrops, absurdly fast chase scenes, ridiculous characters and all. Awesome. My only real complaint is that there was this bizarro character who spent the entire damn movie with his ass hanging out of his pants. Well, half of his ass, anyway. And I’m not talking baggy-pants-down-his-knees-but-still-covered-by-boxers here either.. Not really so much that I mind, but it was a little jarring at times. The romantic element was a little..different..and seemed to be mostly an afterthought, but that’s cool. Anyone expecting a good romance from a movie with a name like Kung Fu Hustle has to be delusional. Still, good movie. Well worth the price of admission (though I have to admit that we didn’t actually pay for the tickets since we had passes that were a Christmas gift.. ^-^;;). It was good enough for us that I suspect we’ll be checking out Shaolin Soccer before too long.

In the course of surfing around a bit this morning, I came across a couple of interesting articles. One, a semi-transcript of a presentation given by Raph Koster a couple months ago, is about the theory of fun - basically what makes something fun. Incidentally, Raph’s written a book about this same topic. The other, a recent Gamasutra feature, is about the psychology of gaming. Similar topics, and again evidence that more people take gaming more seriously that I would’ve expected.
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Where the hell was this when I went to high school? Ignore the fact that it’s run by EA..

Work on the new design continues - slowly, because Jon’s dragged my interest back into WoW, but it continues nonetheless. It’s still got a lot of work left. It’s been interesting though; as always, theory and practice are very different things.

We watched Finding Neverland last night. It was incredible. (Continued..)

Found a link to this video on another blog, and just had to share it with you guys. This is a college a capella group singing a medley of Nintendo theme songs. To add to the geek factor, they’ve added some movements to go along with the theme songs that perfectly suggest the games they go with. Great fun - enjoy.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I really wanted to design my own template for my site, rather than adapting someone else’s to fit. I’ve been poking around in CSS for a while, but I’ve never really done a full page with it, so this will be a great learning experience. Mostly, though, I just want a change, and none of the ready-to-go templates out there quite have what I want. Plus there’s always this drive to actually add something of my own, rather than simply borrowing someone else’s work. I’ve done a fair amount of work on the ‘zen’ theme that I currently use, but it’s still mostly someone else’s design.

I found a nifty photo yesterday over at the stock.xchng that I’ve fiddled with and like a fair amount, so I’ll probably use that. Managed to get a very basic 3 column layout up and mostly running last night from scratch (gotta love notepad, ya?), so I’m pretty confident that I can actually do what I’d like to do. What should be fun is looking into all the template tag options in Wordpress and seeing if I can come up with something a little more interesting/readable than what I have now. Coincidentally, Brendan posted an article yesterday about his recent site update that has a few resources that I think will be quite helpful, as are his own insights into how his new design works.

Anyway, if you happen to drop by and things look a little weird, that’s just because I’m fidding around with stuff - don’t worry, it’ll get cleaned up soon enough.

Mischiefblog » Blog Archive » Doing one thing and doing it well

Hrm.. interesting article. I suspect that he’s probably right. The problem is that specializing loses players, as he stated near the end. Honestly, I think that might be a good thing, so we don’t end up with more games like WoW, which flat out has more players than they know what to do with. Of course, creating games has a large cost attached to it that would need to be recouped, so losing players is a Bad Thing ™, but things are just too big right now.

This is why Guild Wars will probably be a good game, though. It’s relatively specialized (Group v Group combat), with a small nod to PvE that I think is really there more for learning purposes than any real attempt to be a PvE game. Supposedly, though granted I never got past level 5, GW does what it does pretty darn well. I guess we’ll see for sure when it goes live next week (whee).

I especially liked the following sentence from the article:

…Katamari Damacy-ing game features would be closer to what actually happens, since every loose concept seems to be picked up.

Brendan over at centripetalforces recently redid his blog layout and completely deleted his old blog, thus allowing him to start fresh. I’m in no hurry to do that (hell, this blog is only 2 months old), but it got me thinking a little bit. I wonder how many people get stuck into a rut and never find the wherewithal to get out of it? And I don’t just mean with a blog. I myself have this propensity for starting over whenever I get bored with something - you just have to see my list of past MMO characters to see that. But then you have people like Jon, who stick with something far past any point of having fun, in hopes that it might get better or because they don’t want to lose the time involved. I can understand that determination in the face of difficulty is a good thing, and sometimes sticking it through can be good, but sometimes we just have to move forward. Life should be about seeking new experiences or, at the least, enjoying the old ones - not beating unenjoyable ones 6 feet under in some attempt at continuity.
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Jon and I went to see Sin City last Friday. Great movie. Extremely violent, but great movie nonetheless. Elijah Wood seems to have this goal of distancing himself as an actor as far as possible from Frodo - he’s played a weird/freakish character in every movie I’ve seen that he’s been in since LotR. The gleam of his glasses was superb though; that’s so comic bookish.
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