I haven't quite finished this epic solo RPG yet, but am confident I can give others a pretty fair rundown on the thing. Bioware spent 5 years making this product, targeting older gamers like me who are fans of the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series. And, given that they did so without any D&D licensing, I can say they've done a pretty good job. I'll break my opinions down into categories that really matter.
Characters & Classes:
DAO keeps this part simple - you start off with a choice of 3 races and classes (Human/Elf/Dwarf, Warrior/Mage/Rogue). You gain points per level to spend on stats, skills, talents and spells, but the selection isn't huge and uses a 'skill tree' style of progression. What you do get, though, is the chance to choose specialisations within your class (similar to Prestige classes in NWN). These specialisations aren't unlocked by pre-requisite stats or skills, though. Instead, you have to find a special book or NPC in the game world to unlock them for you. Each of the three classes offers a character up to 2 specialisations, meaning that if I found the right teachers or (very) expensive books, I could make my Rogue a Rogue/Assassin/Ranger, or a Rogue/Duellist/Bard.
Party Play:
DAO is optimised for you to play a party of up to 4 characters (your primary PC + 3 others). You encounter several party NPCs along the way, allowing you to build a pool of characters to choose from. This means flexibility for different missions (do I take a rogue or another tank?), and even your reserve characters level up while siting on the bench. One thing is definite in DAO - you will not get through quests by trying to go solo. The bad guys scale up to your level too, no matter which quests - or order therein - that you do.
Combat:
It's all pause n' play, though you can't chain series of spells/attacks like in NWN. To compensate for this the game give each character 'tactics slots'. Depending on skill choices and level, the more slots each gets. A tactics slot allows you to set a combat parameter for a character (eg: when ally's health drops below 50%, heal them). At higher levels you can feasibly set 5-6 different conditional actions for each party member, and that's not including general 'aggressive vs defensive' behavioural attitudes as well. I still prefer to micro-manage battles, though, because the fights are fast and furious and demand the type of constant attention no AI can compensate for.
Quests:
There is a main story arc over 4 long quests, with plenty of side quests (both during and in between). The developers have poured a fuckton of effort into the stories and it shows. This is both great and annoying. Why?
Cutscenes:
It feels like half the budget went on voice actors. Seriously, I switched to subtitles after the intro quests because of this. Find a clue? Cutscene. Approach a boss fight? Cutscene. Accidentally click on a merchant or party member? Fucking cutscene. You can skip through the dialogue by pressing 'esc' a dozen times, and you will. Constantly. The worst bit is when you approach big bosses. The game feels that villians should be given equal air time, even when my Rogue is trying to tactically place tanks, mages and archers before stealthily back-stabbing the sonovabitch in the neck. And when this sort of cutscene triggers it automatically undoes all that effort and places your entire party bunched together in full view within a circle of rape-hungry henchmen. For this reason alone I turned off the 'Friendly Fire' difficulty option because AoE attacks became redundant.
Downloadable Content:
This is an inceasingly worrying trend among Western game developers who stole the idea from Eastern MMORPGs and started back with NWN (Kingmaker) when Bioware packaged the best open source modules into mini-transaction products. The first release of DOA comes with a couple of download codes for extra DLC - a suit of special tank armour, and an extra quest that nets you a new NPC for your party pool. Personally I suspect these initial 'freebie' extras serve as a tutorial on how to acces and use the DAO site and it's points based currency system (US $10 = around 600 points, which can be used to buy special quests or gear). There's only one other official DLC quest so far (Wardens Keep), and the cheeky bastards actually advertise it in-game - some dude approaches you with a mission while you camp and tries guilt-tripping you into buying it online. Penny Arcade sum up this encounter perfectly.
Still, gaming communities being what they are, all this 'premium content' stuff was leaked on all sorts of torrents within a few days of release.
Conclusion:
Despite some criticisms, this is a good game for old school, dungeon-crawling traditionalists that boasts 80 hours gameplay (especially if you include the 20 hours of cutscenes). The DLC is okay (Wardens Keep only lasts an hour, but you get the only item bank in the game which is cool), but it's a concept I don't necessarily agree with - decent, NWN-style expansions would be better. Dunno if the game's worth $110 (unlike BG and NWN products, there's no multi-play), but it sure is addictive.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Forget The Forgotten
I found out what Christian Slater has been up to lately by trying to watch the pilot to the new crime drama, The Forgotten. 18 mins in and I had to stop. This show runs along a similar vein to Cold Case, Bones and the whole CSI "scientists who think they're real cops" kinda deal, only one step more ridiculous. In The Forgotten, the unlikely team of sleuths have about as much credibility as the team in Scooby Doo. Here's the premise: they are meant to be volunteers who dedicate their spare time to identifying unknown murder victims after the police give up on the case. Read that sentence a few times and you should come up with a few questions, the far from least important being "What the fucking hell?"
When the cops decide "Aw, fuck it, we'll never ID this corpse" they turn the case over to a bunch of unqualified, amateur citizens who have zero resources, no formal investigative training, not a forensic degree between them, and who only work out of hours due to their normal day jobs. If it was a show about volunteers helping to track down missing persons I could buy it, but we're talking about unidentified murder victims, murder being the one kinda case the cops are never meant to give up on. That's kinda what 'no statute of limitations on murder' means.
And how do these private citizens go about identifying homicide victims that the cops can't? Website postings? Public awareness campaigns? Billboards? Fuck that shit. One's a sculptor who, using only crime scene photos of a decomposed, partially devoured corpse, faithfully reconstructs a bust of the victim overnight. Because, of course, cops don't know how to do that sort of thing, having never attended art college. Meanwhile, the rest of the team chase leads, question suspects and chronicle the circumstantial evidence because cops never ever do that shit themselves.
You know what the cops are like: they get to the crime scene, find a body and ask "So, does anyone know who this is and who killed her? No? Damn, we've hit a brick wall. Better hand this over to Christian Slater and some other well meaning citizens. Maybe they can solve it, though if they do we'll look a bit silly cos we're meant to be the experts when it comes to the whole 'solving crime' thing. Oh, and if they do find the killer the courts might go tell us to fuck ourselves for letting amateurs abuse all that evidence we just arbitrarily handed over for no good reason. Oh well."
It's almost as though US crime drama is trying to ret-con the good old days when the Hardy Boys and Jessica Fletcher were the only ones supposedly qualified to solve murders. They're already doing it with that show Castle (a true waste of Nathan Fillion, though Stana Katic is super hot) but at least it's still cop based. It was old and boring then, and now it's old, boring and quantifiably insane. The beginning of the 21st century saw crime shows go high-tech, but producers weren't satisfied with just the nifty tech bit, so scientists were given guns and ambiguous law enforcement powers too. Now you don't even have to be on the police payroll, not even as a janitor, to solve crime. But there's actually several good reasons why psychics, stage magicians, novelists, sculptors and Christian Slater aren't actually allowed to investigate fatal crimes in real life, one of which is their habit of ignoring the fundamental 5 step process employed by just about all law enforcement agencies in the Western world:
1. Investigate the scene: the first thing a detective or investigator does when they arrive at a crime scene is put their hands in their pockets. This is to limit the chance of them actually touching anything while they survey the place and stop other people who aren't specially trained forensic techs from fucking touching shit like bullet casings, the body, cigarette butts and the like.
2. Investigate the evidence: once all the scene evidence has been secured, the photos taken, the reports from the FOS (first on scene) cop compiled and so on the detectives then review that shit to keep in mind for step 5.
3. Interview the public: ie any potential witnesses, being careful to record their statements in detail.
4. Review all documentation: this includes all that stuff recorded from steps 1 - 3 (and subsequent 'lab reports'), as well as any other relevant records that may pertain to the actions and whereabouts of any viable suspects.
5. Interview the suspect: when, and only when, has all relevant and expected evidence been collated and consulted will the police actually formally interview their suspect(s). The possible perpretrator may have been apprehended at the scene or soon after, but they wont be formally questioned until all this other data has come in, because cops need facts to form those questions. Also, suspects hardly ever confess on the spot or even in interview rooms, especially in cases as complicated as murder.
The other bit with these shows - and crime fiction in general - is the emphasis on the 'true motive' of criminals. Police don't really give a shit about focusing on motives. In order to build a case they need to know 'where', 'when', 'who' and 'how'. The 'why' bit is almost irrelevant, either because it's really fucking obvious (eg: biker retaliation killing) or unfathomable (Spenser Spreekill hated the last Star Trek film so much that the audience had to die). Motive never mitigates pre-meditated murder so long as the suspect is culpable (they know murder is wrong outside of video games) and capable (their hands work well enough to operate a gun/knife/chainsaw).
When the cops decide "Aw, fuck it, we'll never ID this corpse" they turn the case over to a bunch of unqualified, amateur citizens who have zero resources, no formal investigative training, not a forensic degree between them, and who only work out of hours due to their normal day jobs. If it was a show about volunteers helping to track down missing persons I could buy it, but we're talking about unidentified murder victims, murder being the one kinda case the cops are never meant to give up on. That's kinda what 'no statute of limitations on murder' means.
And how do these private citizens go about identifying homicide victims that the cops can't? Website postings? Public awareness campaigns? Billboards? Fuck that shit. One's a sculptor who, using only crime scene photos of a decomposed, partially devoured corpse, faithfully reconstructs a bust of the victim overnight. Because, of course, cops don't know how to do that sort of thing, having never attended art college. Meanwhile, the rest of the team chase leads, question suspects and chronicle the circumstantial evidence because cops never ever do that shit themselves.
You know what the cops are like: they get to the crime scene, find a body and ask "So, does anyone know who this is and who killed her? No? Damn, we've hit a brick wall. Better hand this over to Christian Slater and some other well meaning citizens. Maybe they can solve it, though if they do we'll look a bit silly cos we're meant to be the experts when it comes to the whole 'solving crime' thing. Oh, and if they do find the killer the courts might go tell us to fuck ourselves for letting amateurs abuse all that evidence we just arbitrarily handed over for no good reason. Oh well."
It's almost as though US crime drama is trying to ret-con the good old days when the Hardy Boys and Jessica Fletcher were the only ones supposedly qualified to solve murders. They're already doing it with that show Castle (a true waste of Nathan Fillion, though Stana Katic is super hot) but at least it's still cop based. It was old and boring then, and now it's old, boring and quantifiably insane. The beginning of the 21st century saw crime shows go high-tech, but producers weren't satisfied with just the nifty tech bit, so scientists were given guns and ambiguous law enforcement powers too. Now you don't even have to be on the police payroll, not even as a janitor, to solve crime. But there's actually several good reasons why psychics, stage magicians, novelists, sculptors and Christian Slater aren't actually allowed to investigate fatal crimes in real life, one of which is their habit of ignoring the fundamental 5 step process employed by just about all law enforcement agencies in the Western world:
1. Investigate the scene: the first thing a detective or investigator does when they arrive at a crime scene is put their hands in their pockets. This is to limit the chance of them actually touching anything while they survey the place and stop other people who aren't specially trained forensic techs from fucking touching shit like bullet casings, the body, cigarette butts and the like.
2. Investigate the evidence: once all the scene evidence has been secured, the photos taken, the reports from the FOS (first on scene) cop compiled and so on the detectives then review that shit to keep in mind for step 5.
3. Interview the public: ie any potential witnesses, being careful to record their statements in detail.
4. Review all documentation: this includes all that stuff recorded from steps 1 - 3 (and subsequent 'lab reports'), as well as any other relevant records that may pertain to the actions and whereabouts of any viable suspects.
5. Interview the suspect: when, and only when, has all relevant and expected evidence been collated and consulted will the police actually formally interview their suspect(s). The possible perpretrator may have been apprehended at the scene or soon after, but they wont be formally questioned until all this other data has come in, because cops need facts to form those questions. Also, suspects hardly ever confess on the spot or even in interview rooms, especially in cases as complicated as murder.
The other bit with these shows - and crime fiction in general - is the emphasis on the 'true motive' of criminals. Police don't really give a shit about focusing on motives. In order to build a case they need to know 'where', 'when', 'who' and 'how'. The 'why' bit is almost irrelevant, either because it's really fucking obvious (eg: biker retaliation killing) or unfathomable (Spenser Spreekill hated the last Star Trek film so much that the audience had to die). Motive never mitigates pre-meditated murder so long as the suspect is culpable (they know murder is wrong outside of video games) and capable (their hands work well enough to operate a gun/knife/chainsaw).
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Distrct 9 & Inglorious Basterds
Just a quick rap on these hotly anticipated releases. D9 - absolutely brilliant! I did a bit of background reading and found out why. The premise for this movie is not too dissimilar to the 1998 US film, Alien Nation - a bunch of aliens get stranded on Earth and the local govt tries to integrate them into society with xeno-rascist results. Only in D9 we get this concept handled South African style, which means xeno-rascism without any of the US sensitivity or remorse. It's no surprise that writer/director Neill Blomkamp imposed his own experiences of apartheid South Africa so heavily into the film. The result is horrifically hilarious, especially in the portrayl of the reluctant protagonist, Wickus Van De Mewre (played by unknown and hitherto non-actor, Sharlto Copley). There is no way this film could have worked out so well if Peter Jackson tried it in a US setting. Also, this movie would make one badass video game based solely on the action alone.
By contrast, Inglorious Basterds was disappointing to me. I've had a hit/miss history with Tarantino films, though I agree this one was well produced, scripted and cast. The tense dialogues, suspense and characteristically explicit violence all feature in this work, as do certain ironies that play out in this alternate universe where Jewish revenge fantasies see Hitler and his chief cronies meet their grisly fates. But for all that I still didn't enjoy it so much. Why? It was just too fucking long (2 hours and 28 minutes before the credits roll). I could handle such sagas with Watchmen and LOTR trilogy flicks because I knew walking into the cinema that they were based on really long stories, but I expected something tighter with Tarantino. The afore-mentioned tension and blood-work should have made the time fly, but half the film is in French/German/Italian so I had to read over an hour's worth of subtitles to boot. I guess I would have felt the same way if Kill Bill was released in a single volume.
By contrast, Inglorious Basterds was disappointing to me. I've had a hit/miss history with Tarantino films, though I agree this one was well produced, scripted and cast. The tense dialogues, suspense and characteristically explicit violence all feature in this work, as do certain ironies that play out in this alternate universe where Jewish revenge fantasies see Hitler and his chief cronies meet their grisly fates. But for all that I still didn't enjoy it so much. Why? It was just too fucking long (2 hours and 28 minutes before the credits roll). I could handle such sagas with Watchmen and LOTR trilogy flicks because I knew walking into the cinema that they were based on really long stories, but I expected something tighter with Tarantino. The afore-mentioned tension and blood-work should have made the time fly, but half the film is in French/German/Italian so I had to read over an hour's worth of subtitles to boot. I guess I would have felt the same way if Kill Bill was released in a single volume.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Sea Patrol: Red Sky Morning
This episode defies all reason. It's like the writers thought that throwing in a survival horror theme might somehow break the monotony of explosions and illegal immigrants. And to really drive the point home they introduce an expendable reservist officer who knows how to teach karate to Lisa McCune, but not how to use it himself when he gets the axe from a stowaway maniac. There's a whole bunch of cheap editing mistakes that I won't even bother describing, and the shock ending is too stupid for words.
No, the bit that got me - to the point where I replayed the sequences just to make sure I wasn't fabricating this ridicule - has to do with the bridge crew's dawning realisation that the 4 member steaming party they left aboard an 'apparently' deserted ship (the Flamingo Bay) are actually stuck in the floating lair of a psychopath. The plot device for this revelation is the afore-mentioned ship's log book, confiscated earlier. The chain of disclosure runs something like this:
1. The last entry of the log tells of the ill-fated vessel finding a stowaway the day before and putting him to work for the rest of the voyage. No names are mentioned, but the entry is signed off by a Capt Nathan Talbot. Fair enough explanation so far.
2. The navy HQ people later tell the Hammersley crew that the registered captain of the Flamingo Bay is meant to be one John Larson and that a Capt Talbot does not exist. Hmm, mysterious.
3. A subsequent email from HQ (who obviously thought this info too unimportant to radio in) reveals that Nathan Talbot is, in fact, a psycho serial killer who recently escaped from psycho serial killer prison. Dun! Dun! Dun!
4. In a quantum leap of conclusion, the Hammersley bridge crew finally figure out that - given the original crew of the Flamingo Bay are dead or missing, and that the ship, along with their 4 member steaming party, are now also missing - the killer may still be at large! Quick, make an inexplicably accurate course for the missing ship before Lisa McCune is forced to employ her new-found, slow-motion karate skills!
Damn, too late.
So, who spotted the slightly confusing error in my plot recital?
That's right, in part 1 the Flamingo Bay's log entry was supposedly written by the killer (Talbot), and not the legit captain (Larson). Hence, Talbot axed the crew and, in his deluded state, assumed captaincy (a point later inferred when we see him dressed in a captain's blazer as he's screaming "Peek-a-boo!" and stalking McCune). That'd be a great twist, but only if it made ANY FUCKING SENSE WHATSOEVER! If this was his motivation to fabricate log entries (using his real name no less), then why also mention the stowaway who is actually himself?
Or maybe that last entry was actually written by the late Capt Larson, only to have Talbot sign off on it with Larson's blood:
Sunday, July 5th, 2009: The crew have discovered a giant, gibbering stowaway eating cat food in the hold. I think his name is Pikabu - could be Hawaiian. We're making him work for his passage by putting him in charge of the fire axe. In between ranting about his whoring mother and his missing medication, he tells me he would "kill to be a captain one day"*. I tell him to never give up on his dreams. Seems a little slow, but I'm sure he means well.
* Lol, when he says 'one day' it kinda sounds like 'Monday'.
Either way, a thrilling race against time ensues. I guess. Lisa, the XO, forgets the fundamentals of handgun operation, Buffer and 2Dads share an intimate embrace in the only walk-in meatlocker in the universe that can't be opened from the inside (or so Buffer would have 2Dads believe - wink), and Seaman Spider defies Darwinism by surviving both coral poisoning and being run over by a ship in the one episode.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Warning labels and stacked zombies
Peacock films is an aussie distributor of straight-to-dvd crap. If you want shitty production values, digi-cam quality cinematography and CGI effects belted out on your nephew's macbook, then be sure to look for the Peacock icon on the back of the cover next time you hit the vid store. I've seen dozens of these efforts, and they're all painfully poor rip-offs of something that may only be B grade to begin with. The thing is, some of the scripts are probably pretty good, but you'll never really know, what with the horrible casting and grade-school production. I realise that the good people at Peacock films have nothing to do with the actual making of crap like Adam & Evil, When Thugs Cry, or Killer Flood: The Day The Dam Broke, but by gods their label serves as a signal flare to anyone who doesn't want to waste $3 on an visual enema. Ever wondered where Corbin Bernsen, Stacy Keach or The Hoff ended up? Neither did I, but I now know anyway, thanks to Raptor, Frozen Impact and Fugitives Run.
The good news is that if you're struggling to get your $12 000 vampire/natural disaster/sci-fi epic distributed just give the 'Cocks a call.
Now that I've got that off my chest, let me tell you about a sci-fi horror called Plaguers. I usually check imdb before downloading any film, and when I read their page on this pulp Aliens tribute it had scored 5.1. Two days later it was rated 4.6 and falling. The first few votes obviously came from Brad Sykes and his extended family, and even they could not, in all conscience, give it more than 5 out of 10. Take a look at Mr Sykes Filmography and you'll soon see he set on becoming the Ed Wood of our age, only without the girlish charm or ironic appreciation from his fans.
Here's the premise: a spaceship called Pandora (uh-huh) is returning to Earth in an attempt to smuggle a glowing alien artifact called Thanatos (uh-oh) which is apparently a powerful yet unconfirmed new energy source. Enroute the ship responds to a distress call and rescues 4 nubile space nurses. BUT, the nurses turn out to be sexy space pirates instead and they set about taking over the Pandora. During the ensuing struggle the green, glowing fishbowl artifact gets cracked and starts turning the dead or dying into space zombies. The surviving crew and pirates team up to vainly fight their undead comrades. The cheerleader-looking ship's captain finally escapes via a lifepod, only to find that the glowy bowlingball thing has inexplicably snuck into the pod with her. And, yep, the ill-fated pod is tumbling towards Earth as the credits roll.
That's the plot. The entire thing is shot on stage - the same gritty corridor accounting for most of the ship's interior in between pianted plywood cabins and bridge (all weirdly different paint styles). External shots of the simple model ships, superimposed over a starscape, come complete with maneuvring jets that hiss smoke in random, contradictory directions, or lazily overlayed CGI lighting for the main drive ports. I love Blake's 7 and it's '70's, low budget space effects, but even that shits all over this.
Now for the Aliens references:
Initial Suspense: 5 minutes in the Pandora's pilot uses his Bluetooth earpiece to call Capt Cheerleader on her 1960's apartment intercom to report: "I've picked something up on the screen - it's a ship 30 000 clicks south-east of here." I had to replay that bit three times. 'South-east?' In fucking space? The same way that the moon is north-west of Canada, right? The computer screen testifying to this contact has all the detail and colour display of an Atari 2600. Anyway, their ship docks with the other ship and the crew's two creepy space janitors (or something, their job titles are never mentioned but they do look like a couple of stoners in overalls) are sent on board with Dolphin flashlights and breathing gear similar to (but less cool than) that worn by Han Solo when he was cleaning Mynochs off the 'Falcon. Tension and suspense apparently ensues until the 4 mini-skirted, high-heeled space nurses/pirates are found and rescued. These two creepy dicks really pissed me off, not because of their creeping dickiness, but because they constantly mumbled their repartee. As far as I cared they couldn't die soon enough.
Tense Combat: When the teen-stripper characters aren't engaging in gratuitous catfights with each other, they're fighting latex and cornsyrup zombies. Hand-to-hand choreography is limited to flailing around or waving sharp things at the undead. There are guns available too, but the props department must have been unfamiliar with the genre because two of the three guns to be had in far future space consist of a Glock semi-auto with half a clip, and the typr of snub-nosed .38 historically popular with 1950's federal agents. Luckily the Glock is enchanted because despite being lost in a fight halfway through it magically reappears in the hands of its owner three scenes later. Only the nubile captain has a real blaster pistol, but the SFX money ran out after the third shot so she has to discard it. And that brings me to the next Aliens tribute.
Welding Stuff in Desperation: remember in Aliens when the survivors of the initial sortie have to hurriedly weld up a barricade with those cool little plasma torches? Well, in Plaguers, two of the characters attempt something similar with equally shrunken versions of oxy-acetylene welders. Only, and this is the kicker, the torch flames are CGI'd. Whether used to pretend weld inconsequential airduct hatches or to wave in the face of unimpressed zombies, the three inch sparkly flames are post-edited on instead of simply using a blowtorch for the same effect. The entire CGI effort was consumed by this, along with three blaster shots, spaceship ion trails, and making an alien snowglobe glow green for a few seconds.
Synthoid: Say hi to Tarver. He's not an aging, blatant Bishop-the-android rip-off. He makes that clear by announcing that, despite trying to emulate the Lance Henriksen character in every way, he's a 'synthoid'. Oh, and the scene where he has to crawl along airducts is extremely different in every way to Bishop's crawl along an access tunnel. To be fair, he doesn't share the complex, bio-mechanical circulatory fluid system of Mr Bishop. Instead when you cut him open you'll only see brightly insulated copper wiring and maybe a valve. Tarver plays a very important role in the film - crap merchant. During a 90 second gap in the action he explains the back-story of the evil, Day-Glo basket ball that's causing all the trouble.
"We found it in a crate that had a letter written on the side in an unknown language. It roughly translates as 'Thanatos'."
Huh? Not only do you somehow translate an unknown language using a single letter sample, but you do so into Greek instead of English? Maybe if you bothered to go all the way and tell the crew that this mysterious, evilish artifact was conveniently labelled 'anthropomorphisation of Death' a shitload of grief could have been avoided. Especially as it's about to be loaded into a ship called Pandora! You'd be better off hopping aboard the spaceliner Titanic for a round trip to an icefield asteroid belt.
But seeing as Steve Railsback won a Science Fiction Genre Award for this role, I now know that this tribute was ultimately a deliberate act of irony. Or not.
Conclusion: open ended, like I said before. The life pod hurtles towards Earth with its blonde, nicely-racked captain screaming at glowing, spherical zombie maker rolling around her feet. There could be a sequel, but only if the perspex pod survives re-entry and a terminal velocity impact. Or maybe a space coastguard will pick it up and, through a chain of well-intentioned yet fateful events, unleash hell.
Like the movie's tag says: In space, nothing stays dead forever.
I can't wait to find out, so I won't.
UPDATE (5 May 2010): Plaguers has now fallen to 2.3 out of 10 on IMDB.
The good news is that if you're struggling to get your $12 000 vampire/natural disaster/sci-fi epic distributed just give the 'Cocks a call.
Now that I've got that off my chest, let me tell you about a sci-fi horror called Plaguers. I usually check imdb before downloading any film, and when I read their page on this pulp Aliens tribute it had scored 5.1. Two days later it was rated 4.6 and falling. The first few votes obviously came from Brad Sykes and his extended family, and even they could not, in all conscience, give it more than 5 out of 10. Take a look at Mr Sykes Filmography and you'll soon see he set on becoming the Ed Wood of our age, only without the girlish charm or ironic appreciation from his fans.
Here's the premise: a spaceship called Pandora (uh-huh) is returning to Earth in an attempt to smuggle a glowing alien artifact called Thanatos (uh-oh) which is apparently a powerful yet unconfirmed new energy source. Enroute the ship responds to a distress call and rescues 4 nubile space nurses. BUT, the nurses turn out to be sexy space pirates instead and they set about taking over the Pandora. During the ensuing struggle the green, glowing fishbowl artifact gets cracked and starts turning the dead or dying into space zombies. The surviving crew and pirates team up to vainly fight their undead comrades. The cheerleader-looking ship's captain finally escapes via a lifepod, only to find that the glowy bowlingball thing has inexplicably snuck into the pod with her. And, yep, the ill-fated pod is tumbling towards Earth as the credits roll.
That's the plot. The entire thing is shot on stage - the same gritty corridor accounting for most of the ship's interior in between pianted plywood cabins and bridge (all weirdly different paint styles). External shots of the simple model ships, superimposed over a starscape, come complete with maneuvring jets that hiss smoke in random, contradictory directions, or lazily overlayed CGI lighting for the main drive ports. I love Blake's 7 and it's '70's, low budget space effects, but even that shits all over this.
Now for the Aliens references:
Initial Suspense: 5 minutes in the Pandora's pilot uses his Bluetooth earpiece to call Capt Cheerleader on her 1960's apartment intercom to report: "I've picked something up on the screen - it's a ship 30 000 clicks south-east of here." I had to replay that bit three times. 'South-east?' In fucking space? The same way that the moon is north-west of Canada, right? The computer screen testifying to this contact has all the detail and colour display of an Atari 2600. Anyway, their ship docks with the other ship and the crew's two creepy space janitors (or something, their job titles are never mentioned but they do look like a couple of stoners in overalls) are sent on board with Dolphin flashlights and breathing gear similar to (but less cool than) that worn by Han Solo when he was cleaning Mynochs off the 'Falcon. Tension and suspense apparently ensues until the 4 mini-skirted, high-heeled space nurses/pirates are found and rescued. These two creepy dicks really pissed me off, not because of their creeping dickiness, but because they constantly mumbled their repartee. As far as I cared they couldn't die soon enough.
Tense Combat: When the teen-stripper characters aren't engaging in gratuitous catfights with each other, they're fighting latex and cornsyrup zombies. Hand-to-hand choreography is limited to flailing around or waving sharp things at the undead. There are guns available too, but the props department must have been unfamiliar with the genre because two of the three guns to be had in far future space consist of a Glock semi-auto with half a clip, and the typr of snub-nosed .38 historically popular with 1950's federal agents. Luckily the Glock is enchanted because despite being lost in a fight halfway through it magically reappears in the hands of its owner three scenes later. Only the nubile captain has a real blaster pistol, but the SFX money ran out after the third shot so she has to discard it. And that brings me to the next Aliens tribute.
Welding Stuff in Desperation: remember in Aliens when the survivors of the initial sortie have to hurriedly weld up a barricade with those cool little plasma torches? Well, in Plaguers, two of the characters attempt something similar with equally shrunken versions of oxy-acetylene welders. Only, and this is the kicker, the torch flames are CGI'd. Whether used to pretend weld inconsequential airduct hatches or to wave in the face of unimpressed zombies, the three inch sparkly flames are post-edited on instead of simply using a blowtorch for the same effect. The entire CGI effort was consumed by this, along with three blaster shots, spaceship ion trails, and making an alien snowglobe glow green for a few seconds.
Synthoid: Say hi to Tarver. He's not an aging, blatant Bishop-the-android rip-off. He makes that clear by announcing that, despite trying to emulate the Lance Henriksen character in every way, he's a 'synthoid'. Oh, and the scene where he has to crawl along airducts is extremely different in every way to Bishop's crawl along an access tunnel. To be fair, he doesn't share the complex, bio-mechanical circulatory fluid system of Mr Bishop. Instead when you cut him open you'll only see brightly insulated copper wiring and maybe a valve. Tarver plays a very important role in the film - crap merchant. During a 90 second gap in the action he explains the back-story of the evil, Day-Glo basket ball that's causing all the trouble.
"We found it in a crate that had a letter written on the side in an unknown language. It roughly translates as 'Thanatos'."
Huh? Not only do you somehow translate an unknown language using a single letter sample, but you do so into Greek instead of English? Maybe if you bothered to go all the way and tell the crew that this mysterious, evilish artifact was conveniently labelled 'anthropomorphisation of Death' a shitload of grief could have been avoided. Especially as it's about to be loaded into a ship called Pandora! You'd be better off hopping aboard the spaceliner Titanic for a round trip to an icefield asteroid belt.
But seeing as Steve Railsback won a Science Fiction Genre Award for this role, I now know that this tribute was ultimately a deliberate act of irony. Or not.
Conclusion: open ended, like I said before. The life pod hurtles towards Earth with its blonde, nicely-racked captain screaming at glowing, spherical zombie maker rolling around her feet. There could be a sequel, but only if the perspex pod survives re-entry and a terminal velocity impact. Or maybe a space coastguard will pick it up and, through a chain of well-intentioned yet fateful events, unleash hell.
Like the movie's tag says: In space, nothing stays dead forever.
I can't wait to find out, so I won't.
UPDATE (5 May 2010): Plaguers has now fallen to 2.3 out of 10 on IMDB.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
The Realme & New Heaven
I'm racking my head trying to piece together a comprehensive back story for an entire fictional city set in an alternative, modern Earth where people with paranormal abilities have manifested. Writing about paranormal people used to come a lot easier to me, but nowadays I'm all too mindful of that sceptical monkey on my back, so I'm constantly having to tell myself that fiction is important too. Previous projects based on high fantasy or advanced sci-fi were much easier - poetic licence and illogical plot devices are necessary when dealing with magick or super-luminary travel.
THE REALME
But as I look back at these imaginary settings I realise that even then I imposed certain constraints. The Realme - a medieval fantasy setting - is a prime example. As much as I admire Tolkien and the generations of dragon n' sorcery epics he inspired, I have much more empathy for the late, great David Gemmell and his sagas of heroic fantasy that somehow distilled and rationalised the pulp concepts of Robert E. Howard into a far less misogynistic yet equally manly portrayal of valour. While drafting the imperfect and incomplete RPG of The Realme, I focused on what made a human-based fantasy world fun and scary. Demi-human species were more or less shunted into the annals of mythology from whence they spawned. Dwarves, goblins and elves were actually just races distinct from the anglo-european based peoples. The closest thing you would find to a halfling was a race of forest dwelling pymies, for instance. Magick, too, was conveyed in more of a sense of the strange and inexplicable, because I couldn't reslove a universe where (unlike so many commercial versions) there seemed to be as many warlocks as peasants, wandering the countryside chucking fireballs and summoning demons.
I broke one of the unwritten genre conventions by introducing primitive firearms, albeit with the inferred disclaimer that gunpowder was tantamount to witchcraft. Alchemy played a much larger role than ritual magicks too, a concept shamelessly borrowed from the classic Darklands PC game. Religious evocations were also applied, but only in the sense that if your prayers happened to coincide with a favourable outcome then a preist-like character was likely to assume divine credit (much like the real world). Villains in the somewhat improvised plots I contrived to face our heroes during gaming sessions were less likely to be dragons or arch-mages and more so corrupt aristocrats and megalomanic cultists, or even each other*. Minions were more likely fur-clad bandits, not werewolves, but in such a superstitious setting who could tell the difference? In short, I wanted a D&D style game that took the mythology back to the ambiguous analogues of its historical origins.
*The adventures in The Realme were both perilous and hilarious. In one module our heroes explore a vast wilderness and find a lush waterfall. They strip off for a swim, during which one naked character discovers a small secret tunnel behind the fall. Unfortunately he manages to fumble his exploration roll and his upper body becomes wedged in the hole. In a Brokeback Dungeon moment one of the other heroes declares "Me first!" and the rest of the skinny dipping party starts fighting over who gets to push their trapped comrade through the hole with their penis. Hey, what happens in module stays in module, alright?
NEW HEAVEN
And now I reprise the other draft I started over a decade ago - the super-powered world of New Heaven, named after an imaginary, independent city-state in which the canon characters operate. I've always pictured it as a cross between Hong Kong and Monaco, a thriving, advanced city wealthy enough to stand apart from the rest of North America, but corrupt enough to invite the worst of capitalist traits - a near future noir setting where paranormally afflicted characters fight to survive the machinations of well resourced criminals and shadow agencies amidst an ignorant general public. This world is devoid of the ideological subtext of the Heroes tv series or the public political pressures of the Wild Cards books edited by George RR Martin. It's not about 'mutants versus humanity', let alone superheroes versus supervillains. What it is about is a group of loosely associated individuals, gifted or cursed with special abilities, who must work together in order to protect themselves from the clutches of those who would exploit them. Think of an anti-Watchmen place where socio-political issues are substituted by the mundanely evil motives of silent selfish needs.
We had a lot of fun with New Heaven back in the days of our pen and paper rpg sessions. (We even experimented with a historical spin-off of an 1860's version which met with a great reaction from my peers.) The characters became defined more by their variety of incredible personality quirks than their powers*.
Ed The Ferret's 'kryptonite' for instance was a rare psycholigical disorder that compelled an irrational urge to attempt to fly helicopters at any given opportunity (despite no training to do so whatsoever). The one and only scenario in which such an improbable opportunity arose led to the near death of the entire team and millions in property damage.
Scalpel the illusionist assassin would literally stab you in the back for the right price, and could probably get away with it by blaming someone else.
Molly the psionic barmaid preferred to telepathically assault foes by making them shit themselves, while Barfly's teleportation powers were either inert while sober or dangerously unreliable when drunk.
I'm currently in the process of refining the origin stories of each character as well as the city in which they live. I just hope I can do it justice.
*One game concept we had was a 'Cool roll' whereby whenever a character sought to say a memorable quip or catch-phrase or witty come-back during a high tension moment the player had to roll to see they pulled it off. The player would first draft their character's phrase (eg: Scalpel - "I may be small but I'm tough', or Kid Vengeance extolling "Prepare to suffer my Justice!") and if the roll failed they would screw it up George McFly style ("I may be tough but I'm small!" or "Prepare to suffer my Jaundice!").
THE REALME
But as I look back at these imaginary settings I realise that even then I imposed certain constraints. The Realme - a medieval fantasy setting - is a prime example. As much as I admire Tolkien and the generations of dragon n' sorcery epics he inspired, I have much more empathy for the late, great David Gemmell and his sagas of heroic fantasy that somehow distilled and rationalised the pulp concepts of Robert E. Howard into a far less misogynistic yet equally manly portrayal of valour. While drafting the imperfect and incomplete RPG of The Realme, I focused on what made a human-based fantasy world fun and scary. Demi-human species were more or less shunted into the annals of mythology from whence they spawned. Dwarves, goblins and elves were actually just races distinct from the anglo-european based peoples. The closest thing you would find to a halfling was a race of forest dwelling pymies, for instance. Magick, too, was conveyed in more of a sense of the strange and inexplicable, because I couldn't reslove a universe where (unlike so many commercial versions) there seemed to be as many warlocks as peasants, wandering the countryside chucking fireballs and summoning demons.
I broke one of the unwritten genre conventions by introducing primitive firearms, albeit with the inferred disclaimer that gunpowder was tantamount to witchcraft. Alchemy played a much larger role than ritual magicks too, a concept shamelessly borrowed from the classic Darklands PC game. Religious evocations were also applied, but only in the sense that if your prayers happened to coincide with a favourable outcome then a preist-like character was likely to assume divine credit (much like the real world). Villains in the somewhat improvised plots I contrived to face our heroes during gaming sessions were less likely to be dragons or arch-mages and more so corrupt aristocrats and megalomanic cultists, or even each other*. Minions were more likely fur-clad bandits, not werewolves, but in such a superstitious setting who could tell the difference? In short, I wanted a D&D style game that took the mythology back to the ambiguous analogues of its historical origins.
*The adventures in The Realme were both perilous and hilarious. In one module our heroes explore a vast wilderness and find a lush waterfall. They strip off for a swim, during which one naked character discovers a small secret tunnel behind the fall. Unfortunately he manages to fumble his exploration roll and his upper body becomes wedged in the hole. In a Brokeback Dungeon moment one of the other heroes declares "Me first!" and the rest of the skinny dipping party starts fighting over who gets to push their trapped comrade through the hole with their penis. Hey, what happens in module stays in module, alright?
NEW HEAVEN
And now I reprise the other draft I started over a decade ago - the super-powered world of New Heaven, named after an imaginary, independent city-state in which the canon characters operate. I've always pictured it as a cross between Hong Kong and Monaco, a thriving, advanced city wealthy enough to stand apart from the rest of North America, but corrupt enough to invite the worst of capitalist traits - a near future noir setting where paranormally afflicted characters fight to survive the machinations of well resourced criminals and shadow agencies amidst an ignorant general public. This world is devoid of the ideological subtext of the Heroes tv series or the public political pressures of the Wild Cards books edited by George RR Martin. It's not about 'mutants versus humanity', let alone superheroes versus supervillains. What it is about is a group of loosely associated individuals, gifted or cursed with special abilities, who must work together in order to protect themselves from the clutches of those who would exploit them. Think of an anti-Watchmen place where socio-political issues are substituted by the mundanely evil motives of silent selfish needs.
We had a lot of fun with New Heaven back in the days of our pen and paper rpg sessions. (We even experimented with a historical spin-off of an 1860's version which met with a great reaction from my peers.) The characters became defined more by their variety of incredible personality quirks than their powers*.
Ed The Ferret's 'kryptonite' for instance was a rare psycholigical disorder that compelled an irrational urge to attempt to fly helicopters at any given opportunity (despite no training to do so whatsoever). The one and only scenario in which such an improbable opportunity arose led to the near death of the entire team and millions in property damage.
Scalpel the illusionist assassin would literally stab you in the back for the right price, and could probably get away with it by blaming someone else.
Molly the psionic barmaid preferred to telepathically assault foes by making them shit themselves, while Barfly's teleportation powers were either inert while sober or dangerously unreliable when drunk.
I'm currently in the process of refining the origin stories of each character as well as the city in which they live. I just hope I can do it justice.
*One game concept we had was a 'Cool roll' whereby whenever a character sought to say a memorable quip or catch-phrase or witty come-back during a high tension moment the player had to roll to see they pulled it off. The player would first draft their character's phrase (eg: Scalpel - "I may be small but I'm tough', or Kid Vengeance extolling "Prepare to suffer my Justice!") and if the roll failed they would screw it up George McFly style ("I may be tough but I'm small!" or "Prepare to suffer my Jaundice!").
Monday, June 8, 2009
Sea Patrol: protecting our borders from....stuff
I'd never watched this show before, and I certainly don't know anything about naval procedures, but I came away feeling a little concerned, like the subtext was an attempt to lull our enemies into a false sense of security by portraying patrol boat crews as guillible idiots.
In amongst the rest of the plot - something about weapon smugglers hiding on an island - there's a supposedly wronged innocent party (whose obviously a secret bad guy), who claims to be ex-navy and hence is inexplicably given the run of the ship.
The crew even take him on a guided tour of engineering and brief him on the fire control systems. Then some chromosonally challenged night-watch sailor lets this dodgy dude take over control of the bridge while Disable Seaman Douche Bag pops out for a coffee. Surprisingly (?), Mr Dodgy frees his fellow gun-runners and they nearly all escape. Dammit, but we trusted this dishonourably discharged total stranger!
As penance for simultaneously deserting his post and all but handing the keys over to a terrorist, Deckhand Douchebag (DB) is severely punished by...by not being allowed to play with the other boys and girls during shore leave for a few hours. I guess I'd handle it a bit differently:
Cap'n Kidd: "Okay, crew, you can all go enjoy your shore leave.....Douchebag! Where do you think you're going?"
DB: "On shore leave, sir?"
Cap'n Kidd: "You've got to be fucking kidding me. You'll report back to the ship for watch duty."
DB (shrugs): "Okay, captain, fair enough."
Cap'n Kidd: "Until SIB get here and put you in a naval sodomy prison for ten years."
DB: "Aw, captain -"
Cap'n Kidd: "After which you will be shot as a traitor."
DB: "Oh."
But, in all fairness, DB doesn't have the best of role models onboard.
The Commander of the HMAS Hammersley, whose name may be Captain Dick Bukkake for all I know, hardly inspires command confidence. After he initially foils the weapon smugglers on the island by unnecessarily dive tackling one off a hover craft as the baddies try to escape, he returns to the ship and orders an ensign or someone to deal with the contraband in a somewhat impractical way. Here's my version. See if you can pick which sceptical yet over-endowed ensign I'm playing.
Capt Dick: "Ensign?"
Ensign Megapecker: "Sir?"
Capt Dick: "I want you to put the ordnance we captured from the hovercraft back on the beach and post a couple of sentries. The Feds will be here tomorrow to pick it up."
Ensign Megapecker: "Let me get this straight, sir. You want us to take the anti-tank launchers and military grade explosives back out of our fortified arms locker and return them to the indefensible, deserted beach and then split our man-power by having to guard it out in the open?"
Capt Dick: "Um, yes, that's right. Then the Feds can get it from us tomorrow."
Ensign Megapecker: "Uh-huh. So, rather than simply rendezvous with our heavily armed patrol boat, the Feds would prefer the added hassle of having to get to the beach and haul the stuff away?"
Capt Dick: "Absolutely, ensign. Now, any other questions?"
Ensign Megapecker: "Only one, sir: whose side are you on?"
Crew look on in horror as their zealous captain conducts an impromptu, wrist-deep cavity search.
In amongst the rest of the plot - something about weapon smugglers hiding on an island - there's a supposedly wronged innocent party (whose obviously a secret bad guy), who claims to be ex-navy and hence is inexplicably given the run of the ship.
I too was once a sea soldier for the Water Army. Mind if I take your boatship for a spin?
The crew even take him on a guided tour of engineering and brief him on the fire control systems. Then some chromosonally challenged night-watch sailor lets this dodgy dude take over control of the bridge while Disable Seaman Douche Bag pops out for a coffee. Surprisingly (?), Mr Dodgy frees his fellow gun-runners and they nearly all escape. Dammit, but we trusted this dishonourably discharged total stranger!
As penance for simultaneously deserting his post and all but handing the keys over to a terrorist, Deckhand Douchebag (DB) is severely punished by...by not being allowed to play with the other boys and girls during shore leave for a few hours. I guess I'd handle it a bit differently:
Deckhand Douchebag, now with a screw-top lid.
Cap'n Kidd: "Okay, crew, you can all go enjoy your shore leave.....Douchebag! Where do you think you're going?"
DB: "On shore leave, sir?"
Cap'n Kidd: "You've got to be fucking kidding me. You'll report back to the ship for watch duty."
DB (shrugs): "Okay, captain, fair enough."
Cap'n Kidd: "Until SIB get here and put you in a naval sodomy prison for ten years."
DB: "Aw, captain -"
Cap'n Kidd: "After which you will be shot as a traitor."
DB: "Oh."
But, in all fairness, DB doesn't have the best of role models onboard.
The Commander of the HMAS Hammersley, whose name may be Captain Dick Bukkake for all I know, hardly inspires command confidence. After he initially foils the weapon smugglers on the island by unnecessarily dive tackling one off a hover craft as the baddies try to escape, he returns to the ship and orders an ensign or someone to deal with the contraband in a somewhat impractical way. Here's my version. See if you can pick which sceptical yet over-endowed ensign I'm playing.
Capt Dick: "Ensign?"
Ensign Megapecker: "Sir?"
Capt Dick: "I want you to put the ordnance we captured from the hovercraft back on the beach and post a couple of sentries. The Feds will be here tomorrow to pick it up."
Ensign Megapecker: "Let me get this straight, sir. You want us to take the anti-tank launchers and military grade explosives back out of our fortified arms locker and return them to the indefensible, deserted beach and then split our man-power by having to guard it out in the open?"
Capt Dick: "Um, yes, that's right. Then the Feds can get it from us tomorrow."
Ensign Megapecker: "Uh-huh. So, rather than simply rendezvous with our heavily armed patrol boat, the Feds would prefer the added hassle of having to get to the beach and haul the stuff away?"
Capt Dick: "Absolutely, ensign. Now, any other questions?"
Ensign Megapecker: "Only one, sir: whose side are you on?"
Sunday, June 7, 2009
I'm Just Not That Into The Movie
2 hours and 11 minutes just to remind us that guys are assholes and girls are crazy. Oh, and that Ben Affleck's gormless, smug mug makes me want to kick nuns in their redundant ovaries. What I hate most about this flick is that there's actually not too much to criticise - the camera work was okay, the script wasn't too loose, all the cast were veterans who knew their jobs. And I only needed a couple of shots of insulin to endure the ordeal. I didn't laugh or cry. I think the most I managed was ".........." (a mental shrug at the highly predictable third act twists which weren't particularly twisty). Even the crazy women and asshole men didn't act all that crazy during their histrionics or ass-like during their lechery. Just the same old, mediocre, middle-class white america going about its business.
Score: M (for 'meh').
Score: M (for 'meh').
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
The Govt wants to control everything including your weight.
Today the local rag ran a front pager on obesity, or rather what the govt wants to do about it. Accessible bariatric surgery seems to be the main suggestion. Of course, the vast majority of such stomach stapling procedures currently occur in private hospitals (96% is the figure quoted). Not surprising given the $15k price tag. And that's why the govt was talking about it - pushing accessible and available gut jobs into the public health system makes this a generic tax payer issue rather than an elitist elective option. Now, whenever our sagacious leaders want to sell us an idea they have to convince the audience of the benefits and savings that are sure to eventuate (reduction in medical costs to treat physical and mental conditions associated with obesity). Of course, there is no way in hell we know if this will pay off like they say - a simple google search will tell you that morbidly obese patients are prone to surgical and post-procedural complications at the best of times, complications that also cost a shitload of money to treat.
But Australia is urged to do something about being too fat. The above-mentioned article states that :
"The 2007-08 National Health Survey (which measures the exact height and weight of adults and children using the Body Mass Index approach) found that 68 per cent of adult men and 55 per cent of adult women are overweight or obese."
It's just a pity that the difference between being morbidly obese, obese or just overweight was not clarified (it's explained wiki-wise here). Or that the method used (BMI) is over 160 years old and the least accurate way of determining actual obesity. I'm not discounting the issue as being over-represented (hell, for all I know, it's underestimated), just that these sorts of vague generalisations when it comes to stats that are meant to support huge tax investments should be better researched.
If the govt does go ahead and offer eligible obese folk the chance to have surgeons to play balloon animals with their guts, I wonder what some borderline problem eaters will do? "I'm currently sitting on 33% body fat. I could diet like hell for 12 months and reduce it to a healthy 20%, or I could double-up on Macca's for only 3 months and hit the magic 40% that'll get me a free lap band and let me then reach my ideal weight in half the time!" Yes, that's exactly how my mind works.
In a related topic, my prime compadre was telling me last week that he was watching a local ep of Today Tonight all about fat kids. He's a bit of an armchair sceptic like myself so he had a few questions about the program. After watching it myself, so do I. The segment was fuelled by a recent CSIRO study into children's health and eating habits, stating that 25% of the little shits were overweight or obese (once again, no distinction between the two). They also said kids eat too much sugar and fat, and not enough fruit or milk (ironically kids probably think that milk will make them fat). Some paediatric doc from the Women's & Children's Hosp also appeared to tell us that bad things happen as tubby sprogs become tubby grown ups. Bad things also happen for a lot of skinny kids come adulthood, because apparently another 43% of us inflate to unhealthy proportions anyway. Then there was the comfortably middle-class mum of 3 kids (none of whom seemed even a little tubby in their private school uniforms) squealing her alarms from her tv quality kitchen.
But what Shane was curious about (given his kids are lean and mean despite eating like machines) was how the CSIRO got these stats in the first place, as he couldn't recall his kids recently being sedated long enough to be weighed and measured by a lab-coated stranger in the first place. Electric scales hidden under the classroom seats? he suggested. Or, as a friend of ours pointed out on FB, maybe they got hold of some PE records with said measurements. Given the reported combined data (that also measured food intake habits and exercise) presented by the CSIRO, I'm guessing a survey was conducted at some random schools. Regardless, the facts are once again so watered down and generalised as to be rendered meaningless for anything less than a basic and unoriginal health message - if you keep eating crap you'll end up crap.
To me the answer is simple: tax people according to their body fat score in proportion to how much it exceeds the norm. Oh, and have a similar penalty for those significantly underweight too so as to discourage eating disorders.
But Australia is urged to do something about being too fat. The above-mentioned article states that :
"The 2007-08 National Health Survey (which measures the exact height and weight of adults and children using the Body Mass Index approach) found that 68 per cent of adult men and 55 per cent of adult women are overweight or obese."
It's just a pity that the difference between being morbidly obese, obese or just overweight was not clarified (it's explained wiki-wise here). Or that the method used (BMI) is over 160 years old and the least accurate way of determining actual obesity. I'm not discounting the issue as being over-represented (hell, for all I know, it's underestimated), just that these sorts of vague generalisations when it comes to stats that are meant to support huge tax investments should be better researched.
If the govt does go ahead and offer eligible obese folk the chance to have surgeons to play balloon animals with their guts, I wonder what some borderline problem eaters will do? "I'm currently sitting on 33% body fat. I could diet like hell for 12 months and reduce it to a healthy 20%, or I could double-up on Macca's for only 3 months and hit the magic 40% that'll get me a free lap band and let me then reach my ideal weight in half the time!" Yes, that's exactly how my mind works.
In a related topic, my prime compadre was telling me last week that he was watching a local ep of Today Tonight all about fat kids. He's a bit of an armchair sceptic like myself so he had a few questions about the program. After watching it myself, so do I. The segment was fuelled by a recent CSIRO study into children's health and eating habits, stating that 25% of the little shits were overweight or obese (once again, no distinction between the two). They also said kids eat too much sugar and fat, and not enough fruit or milk (ironically kids probably think that milk will make them fat). Some paediatric doc from the Women's & Children's Hosp also appeared to tell us that bad things happen as tubby sprogs become tubby grown ups. Bad things also happen for a lot of skinny kids come adulthood, because apparently another 43% of us inflate to unhealthy proportions anyway. Then there was the comfortably middle-class mum of 3 kids (none of whom seemed even a little tubby in their private school uniforms) squealing her alarms from her tv quality kitchen.
But what Shane was curious about (given his kids are lean and mean despite eating like machines) was how the CSIRO got these stats in the first place, as he couldn't recall his kids recently being sedated long enough to be weighed and measured by a lab-coated stranger in the first place. Electric scales hidden under the classroom seats? he suggested. Or, as a friend of ours pointed out on FB, maybe they got hold of some PE records with said measurements. Given the reported combined data (that also measured food intake habits and exercise) presented by the CSIRO, I'm guessing a survey was conducted at some random schools. Regardless, the facts are once again so watered down and generalised as to be rendered meaningless for anything less than a basic and unoriginal health message - if you keep eating crap you'll end up crap.
To me the answer is simple: tax people according to their body fat score in proportion to how much it exceeds the norm. Oh, and have a similar penalty for those significantly underweight too so as to discourage eating disorders.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Free Advertising
Last week my boss went to some conference interstate to do with human services and IT stuff and returned a convert. Prior to this enlightenment she viewed Facebook and similar social networking services with cynical distrust, convinced that it would forge unhealthy relationships between staff outside of work and breed counter-productive gossip mills. Or something. Anyway, now she's extolling the possible benefits of business related forums where clients can have open and productive discussions while also feeding us, um, feedback without having to resort to the far less reliable process of rusting suggestion boxes and posting out evaluation forms that rarely get posted back. The Gen Y's of Headspace must have made a pretty good impression because she also told us about the potential of peer to peer, 'word of mouth' online promotion of our services that would spread as a result of client stories.
Millions of businesses and causes promote their sites through FB, and their popularity are, indeed, as result of P2P viral marketing. This is not a bad thing, because it relies on self-formed, self-regulating online communities to spread the word rather than traditional advertisng. I mentioned that the other appeal about offering such a forum is that it gave people the confidence to speak publically (under optional anonymity) without actually having to speak in public. A form of virtual empowerment with the added bonus of seeing one's words in virtual print.
After the boss's evangelical spiel, I caught up with our IT guy who also happens to be my best mate. He had attended the same conference. His views on the subject were characteristically more cynical and tempered. He explained the the two girls who held the Headspace promo session had achieved great things with the nation-wide site, but also had to be on 24 hour call to moderate and vet any client stories, blogging or articles as they were submitted. The site was devoted to mental health, so any material that might, say, evoke suicidal ideation or unhealthy coping mechanisms had to be wiped asap. Such a site required constant attention to security and content. It would be a lot of hard work, and he already had a lot of hard work to do as it was.
Promoting such a site via FB was also fraught with peril, he continued. More than a few staff have FB accounts (including me) and while our internet-capable clients might welcome the chance to join our buisness group they may also mistakenly feel entitled to then try to befriend any staff linked to that business. I can see the potential problems there, but I can also see that they could be curtailed by sensibly advising staff not to 'become a fan' or 'friend' of their own workplace business FB page in the first place. Hell, we could even treat them like functional adults and let them make up their own mind. I mean, who would want to anyway, seriously?
I had a search on FB for Headspace (found the Freemantle branch) and then added it as a friend. Not because I'm a suicidal adolescent, but because this is one way to assess just how effective such a move is. At the time of me joining there were 181 friends there. I'll monitor it over the coming weeks and see what sort of growth occurs.
UPDATE (5 May 2010): Headspace now has 1278 'friends' on FB. That's a huge improvement on 181, but it's still pretty low in the greater scheme of things.
Millions of businesses and causes promote their sites through FB, and their popularity are, indeed, as result of P2P viral marketing. This is not a bad thing, because it relies on self-formed, self-regulating online communities to spread the word rather than traditional advertisng. I mentioned that the other appeal about offering such a forum is that it gave people the confidence to speak publically (under optional anonymity) without actually having to speak in public. A form of virtual empowerment with the added bonus of seeing one's words in virtual print.
After the boss's evangelical spiel, I caught up with our IT guy who also happens to be my best mate. He had attended the same conference. His views on the subject were characteristically more cynical and tempered. He explained the the two girls who held the Headspace promo session had achieved great things with the nation-wide site, but also had to be on 24 hour call to moderate and vet any client stories, blogging or articles as they were submitted. The site was devoted to mental health, so any material that might, say, evoke suicidal ideation or unhealthy coping mechanisms had to be wiped asap. Such a site required constant attention to security and content. It would be a lot of hard work, and he already had a lot of hard work to do as it was.
Promoting such a site via FB was also fraught with peril, he continued. More than a few staff have FB accounts (including me) and while our internet-capable clients might welcome the chance to join our buisness group they may also mistakenly feel entitled to then try to befriend any staff linked to that business. I can see the potential problems there, but I can also see that they could be curtailed by sensibly advising staff not to 'become a fan' or 'friend' of their own workplace business FB page in the first place. Hell, we could even treat them like functional adults and let them make up their own mind. I mean, who would want to anyway, seriously?
I had a search on FB for Headspace (found the Freemantle branch) and then added it as a friend. Not because I'm a suicidal adolescent, but because this is one way to assess just how effective such a move is. At the time of me joining there were 181 friends there. I'll monitor it over the coming weeks and see what sort of growth occurs.
UPDATE (5 May 2010): Headspace now has 1278 'friends' on FB. That's a huge improvement on 181, but it's still pretty low in the greater scheme of things.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Making and taking money
I'm really lousy at economics - as a list of my creditors will tell you - but this Stimulus package being forced upon us has me stumped. It's hard for me to see $900 as anything more than a new computer, the same way that it doesn't seem like anything more than an eight-ball of drugs to a tweaker. None of us will refuse cash, but few of us will take it without feeling a little bit weird either. Not that it's free money from the government, of course. It was our money to begin with in the form of taxes. But the reasons for it still seem strange. "You can use this money to stimulate the economy by spending it on Australian businesses," explains the govt. But why not then just inject it straight into those businesses? "This money will encourage people to keep spending in these hard times." But wasn't over-spending the reason we're now in trouble? Exorbitant lines of credit, deposit-free real estate and so on was lapped up by too many people who then couldn't foot the bill. I do understand that the main purpose of money is to be circulated, like a hot potato, with the govt skimming off some of the skin each time it's passed along. When I receive my wage some of it is taxed. When I buy anything with it that gets taxed too. Even when I selfishly spend my stimulus package on a foreign built piece of hardware some of that will also end up taxed.
It's a real capitalist dichotomy: spending money makes you feel rich, while saving money makes you actually rich. Hence the govt wants you to feel rich rather than be rich, because the economy relies on you spending, not saving. You'd never catch the current govt saving money, so why should you. So much so, that they'll front you the money to do so. But money is not wealth. Wealth is based on the relative worth of something real (land, gold, bushels of tea, barrels of oil etc). If Rudd was giving me $900 worth of gold then I'd be extremely happy, but he doesn't have $900 of gold, only $900 in cash. Money - be it cash or electronic - is only an abstract representation of wealth that changes all the time, depending on supply and demand and how much of the stuff itself is printed. It's basically a govt printed voucher that's easier to carry than real wealth, only I can't drink it or pour it into my petrol tank.
See, I'm even lousy when trying to explain basic economics. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if Captain Rudd hands me a life jacket, chances are it's not because we're sailing in fime weather.
It's a real capitalist dichotomy: spending money makes you feel rich, while saving money makes you actually rich. Hence the govt wants you to feel rich rather than be rich, because the economy relies on you spending, not saving. You'd never catch the current govt saving money, so why should you. So much so, that they'll front you the money to do so. But money is not wealth. Wealth is based on the relative worth of something real (land, gold, bushels of tea, barrels of oil etc). If Rudd was giving me $900 worth of gold then I'd be extremely happy, but he doesn't have $900 of gold, only $900 in cash. Money - be it cash or electronic - is only an abstract representation of wealth that changes all the time, depending on supply and demand and how much of the stuff itself is printed. It's basically a govt printed voucher that's easier to carry than real wealth, only I can't drink it or pour it into my petrol tank.
See, I'm even lousy when trying to explain basic economics. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if Captain Rudd hands me a life jacket, chances are it's not because we're sailing in fime weather.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
To Boldly Go...Snikt!
Okay, so I saw the new Star Trek film last night. I'm not exactly a purist - unlike one of the peers who accompanied me - but I do know that the movie was a damn fine example of entertainment. Fast paced, tight scripting, and the production values were exemplary. The visual effects were superb and highly detailed (now I know what a ship's phaser cannon looks like, as well as how they load the things).
The best bit about the whole deal, though (warning: spoilers imminent) is that the premise of the story allows for both trekkies and non-trekkies to get into the adventure without crying about canon. Characters in the film clearly state that it is the beginning of an alternate ST universe from the moment that JTK is born. Leonard Nimoy is even on hand to make this fact very clear. And good for them, I say. Rebooting worked extremely well for BSG, so why not Trek? From what I can tell, a similar bend in the trousers of time is in store for the Terminator franchise when Salvation is released. And why not? Canon purists (and pedantic nuts like me) love deconstructing continuity-flawed sequels, so I welcome this trend of well-branded fictional icons stepping up and declaring: "This is a new spin on an old idea!".
On the other hand, I liked X-Men Origins: Wolverine not so much. Once again the production was pretty cool, but Marvel is one canon that I'm pretty familiar with, especially when my fave is Deadpool. Wade Wilson is the merc with the mouth who kicks down the fourth wall. Although he was portrayed well enough by the equally alliterative Ryan Reynolds, what was with turning him into some mute, composite franken-mutant with 3 foot katana claws? I'm aware that in some releases there's a post-credit snip of him reclaiming his severed head and talking to camera, but c'mon, where's the contant banter and insanity?
Overall, I'm giving ST an A+ (A++ being the highest), and XM:W a B+ (mainly for Liev Schreiber and Ryan Reynolds).
The best bit about the whole deal, though (warning: spoilers imminent) is that the premise of the story allows for both trekkies and non-trekkies to get into the adventure without crying about canon. Characters in the film clearly state that it is the beginning of an alternate ST universe from the moment that JTK is born. Leonard Nimoy is even on hand to make this fact very clear. And good for them, I say. Rebooting worked extremely well for BSG, so why not Trek? From what I can tell, a similar bend in the trousers of time is in store for the Terminator franchise when Salvation is released. And why not? Canon purists (and pedantic nuts like me) love deconstructing continuity-flawed sequels, so I welcome this trend of well-branded fictional icons stepping up and declaring: "This is a new spin on an old idea!".
On the other hand, I liked X-Men Origins: Wolverine not so much. Once again the production was pretty cool, but Marvel is one canon that I'm pretty familiar with, especially when my fave is Deadpool. Wade Wilson is the merc with the mouth who kicks down the fourth wall. Although he was portrayed well enough by the equally alliterative Ryan Reynolds, what was with turning him into some mute, composite franken-mutant with 3 foot katana claws? I'm aware that in some releases there's a post-credit snip of him reclaiming his severed head and talking to camera, but c'mon, where's the contant banter and insanity?
Overall, I'm giving ST an A+ (A++ being the highest), and XM:W a B+ (mainly for Liev Schreiber and Ryan Reynolds).
Saturday, May 16, 2009
The Mind of He Who Rants
This blog is more or less a thought experiment, or it will be when I manage to devise a hypothesis. What it isn't is important, at least not to anyone else. Merely a platform of catharthis that I can access and add to wherever I may be. An oulet of structured expression, if you will.
I haven't even done my profile yet, so I'll jot down a few notes regarding that now. That way anyone who accidentally stumbles across this will be able to put my rantings into a vague frame of reference.
I am an atheist. Not just because I'm too lazy to attend church or just because I gave up on a particular god, or just because I tire of the hypocrisy of religious icons. I simply do not believe that a single entity or partheon thereof could have planned and created the amazing universe in which we live.
I am a libertarian, an initially strange political choice for one who works in human services as part of a welfare state. However, my job is to help people understand that welfare reliance = disempowerment and that dole = dependency. I also opine that the freedom of the individual is worth more than being baby sat by a government.
Lastly, I am a skeptic. Not militantly so, but just enough to know that anything of importance (be it medical, political, sociological or spiritual) should be critically analysed rather than assumed off the bat. Just like a court of law, I require evidence beyond reasonable doubt before I believe something.
So, there you have it. Three personal facts regarding the mind of this particular ranter.
I haven't even done my profile yet, so I'll jot down a few notes regarding that now. That way anyone who accidentally stumbles across this will be able to put my rantings into a vague frame of reference.
I am an atheist. Not just because I'm too lazy to attend church or just because I gave up on a particular god, or just because I tire of the hypocrisy of religious icons. I simply do not believe that a single entity or partheon thereof could have planned and created the amazing universe in which we live.
I am a libertarian, an initially strange political choice for one who works in human services as part of a welfare state. However, my job is to help people understand that welfare reliance = disempowerment and that dole = dependency. I also opine that the freedom of the individual is worth more than being baby sat by a government.
Lastly, I am a skeptic. Not militantly so, but just enough to know that anything of importance (be it medical, political, sociological or spiritual) should be critically analysed rather than assumed off the bat. Just like a court of law, I require evidence beyond reasonable doubt before I believe something.
So, there you have it. Three personal facts regarding the mind of this particular ranter.
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