For the most part I have moved my blogging to Tumblr: http://digital1970.tumblr.com/
I will still post an occasional update here that I feel would be better suited to this, less frequented, blog.
Allergy season sucks. Most days it isn't so bad, but then there are days where I curse the world.
Yesterday wasn't an awful day, but the conditions were just right with the weather and such that when I took my allergy meds, I shut down.
I couldn't concentrate on gaming after taking some Benadryl, so I had decided to lay back and watch a DVD. I passed out about fifteen minutes in and woke up about five hours later.
Greg Dean knows how it feels. Click the image to see the full comic.
I was just going to write a review of Terminator Salvation, but it became more of a rambling about the Terminator movies. Proceed at your own risk.
It's hard to say what the first apocalypse movie I ever saw was (Damnation Alley or Planet of the Apes), but one of my favorites was the Terminator. Sure, it didn't take place in an apocalyptic wasteland, but the Kyle Reese's flashbacks to the resistance fighting the machines set the stage for the movies grand mythos.
The premise that a sentient computer decides that humanity must die isn't anything new. Track down a copy of Colossus: The Forbin Project, Tron, The Matrix, Maximum Overdrive, or any number of old Doctor Who episodes. In most machine vs. man stories the action took place covertly as the computer would create a shadowy cabal to do the machines bidding or quietly close all your bank accounts and register you as a wanted criminal, so the action was usually quite limited to running away from the law or shadow assassins.
The Terminator gave the machine a more substantial means of exterminating mankind. Arnold Shwarzenegger and Robert Patrick did a great job in presenting the T-800 and T-1000 as unstoppable killing machines in the first two movies. Things started getting a little silly in Terminator 3 with the T-X's built-in flame thrower, plasma caster, and its the other gimmicks. One could say that every time Skynet and the resistance sent back their hunter and protector they changed the timeline enough so that the Terminators kept getting more advanced (polymimetic liquid metal alloy?!) as they repeatedly tried to kill or save Sarah and John Connor.
!!WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD!!
Now with Terminator Salvation we are finally in the post Judgement Day, era since Skynet nuked the planet at the end of T3: Rise of the Machines (serves you right for not watching the movie yet), and we get to watch John Connor and the Resistance fight the machine; or so you would expect. The Terminator stories have always been about Skynet vs. the Connors. Sure, John Connor and Kyle Reese are in the movie, but they are more side stories that anything else.
Salvation is really the story of Marcus Wright, a convicted murder who donates his body to Cyberdyne before his execution. We then meet as he drags himself out of the mud after John and a squad of resistance fighters attack the Skynet bunker where he had been stored for the past fifteen years. We then follow Marcus, not aware of the war or that Cyberdyne has turned him into a cyborg, as he stumbles through the apocalyptic wasteland until he bumps into a T-600 in LA and consequently saved by a teenage Kyle Reese. He then fails to save Kyle, and his sidekick Star, when they are captured by a Skynet harvester, but bumps into Blair, a resistence pilot who was shot down by the HK fliers and offers to take him to John Connor and the resistance.
Marcus is exposed to the resistance to be a product of Cyberdyne/Skynet and must be destroyed, but Blair frees him before he can be terminated because she beleives he is still more man than machine. John, who's still got a soft spot in his heart for renegade Terminators joins forces with Marcus who figures he can get inside Skynet, find Kyle, let John in, and destroy Skynet. He does and they do, but in the end, Marcus must make the ultimate sacrifice as a payment for being given a second chance at saving his soul. Thus the title of the film, Terminator Salvation.
The thing that bugs me is that Marcus was a convicted killer on death row, a fact we are made aware of in the opening scene of the movie, but he's suddenly a nice guy after his "resurrected" in the wasteland. The main message here is supposed to be that Marcus is given a second chance to be good, but it's a theme that's never discussed until the end of the movie when he makes the ultimate sacrifice. In my opinion, the scene of Marcus on death row should have been used as a flash back at some point in the story when he has to face a major moral decision (kill or spare the lives of the guys who attacked Blair, save/abandon Kyle and Star, save John Connor). Better yet, just drop the death row element all together. It really didn't play into anything important. Marcus could just have easily been some morally questionable commando who was chosen for the cyberization.
Disappointingly, Kyle Reese is taken by Skynet in the first thirty minutes of the film and really doesn't do much more than that. But he does get to say the line, "Come with me if you want to live".
John Connor isn't totally ignored in the movie. We do get to see how he received the scar over his eye (T2), he gets to fight an unfriendly T-800 complete with Schwarzenegger skin, and blow up Skynet San Francisco (one of the many Skynet facilities around the world) but that's about it. Other than that, he's just this guy bumping heads with the leaders of the resistance and making propaganda speeches to the resistance on the radio.
As far as a Terminator movies go, I'm disapointed in this story. It does little or nothing to adavance the franchise and treats John Connor/Kyle Reese as a sidenote. Hopefully, the next movie will get it right. That or we can see a Terminator v. Predator cross over film. That would kick ass!
Last week I decided that I was going to learn how to play real Mahjong - not that solitaire tile matching game you're probably used too, but the real deal.
Why? Well, much like how LOST got me interested in learning how to play Backgammon, I stumbled onto an Anime series (Saki) that was about Mahjong and was rather technical about scoring and other aspects of the game. So instead of just walking away from the series because I didn't understand what was going on, I decided that I should just learn how to play the game.
I found one, FunTown Mahjong, on XBox Live Arcade and downloaded it. The scoring system boggles the mind, and while looking it up on Wikipedia I found that there are multiple variations of Mahjong; each with it's own rule variations and scoring methods.
It turns out that the XBox game I bought uses the Taiwanese variation which uses 16 tiles, while most other variations only use 13. I figured there was something different after I went back to the Anime series and noticed they were using different terms and scoring, but now I know. So now I've found a site [GameDesign.jp] that uses the Japanese variation and have been trying to learn that as well. If I thought the Taiwanese variation was mind bending, it was nothing compared to the Japanese variation...
Still it takes a lot of practice to learn a new game, and I'm up to the challange. I just with there was a club around here that could teach me more...
#10: Red Matter - Just a drop will do yah, but Spock brings a shit-ton?! #9: Nero's plan to destroy Vulcan and all Federation plants, instead of just saving Romulus. #8: The engineering decks on the Federation star ships. #7: Spock's 'blender' ship #6: Antenna's on the bridge of the USS Kelvin. WTF? #5: This version of Kirk's Kobayashi Maru solution. In the Novel, The Kobayashi Maru (1989), Kirk reprograms the simulated Klingons to be afraid of "The Captain Kirk," arguing that he expected to build a comparable reputation. (NOTE: This is the only Star Trek novel I've actually read) #4: Spock marooned on the same planet Scotty is stuck on, and Kirk get's cast away upon. What a convenient coincidence! #3: Shamelessly vomiting old catch phases, trying to sound like the original crew. #2: OSHA would have a field day inside Nero's ship #1: Star Trek fix-all, TIME TRAVEL! ARGH!!!
I saw Star Trek on Friday. Visually the movies was Awesome, but I really wish that they would STOP doing time travel stories! Star Trek has trivialized time travel to the Nth degree: Whipping around a star, through a black hole, countless space anomalies, etc...
I probably would have preferred J.J. just do a 'Batman Begins' to Star Trek instead of the whole, "this is an alternate time line" BS. Watching this, I felt like I was watching a bunch of role players trying to pretend to be younger versions of the original characters by rehashing their infamous lines to death: Damnit! I'm a doctor, not a [fill in the blank]; I'm giving her all she's got; and Checkov's weven worse Wussian accwent.
And for the life of me I'll never understand what was going through their heads as they felt that they needed more lens flares! "It needs more Cow Bell" ARGH!!! Were they trying to cove some poor shots? Are we supposed to be impressed that the future actually IS so bright we have to wear shades?! Sure, J.J. admitted that he may have overdone it in a couple scenes, but really! WTF!
So, is this a reboot or just another dimension/alternate timeline/reality in the Star Trek universe like the Mirror Universe with Evil Kirk & Spock? I'll go with alternate reality, and stick with the fact that the original ST Universe is still alive and well.
Here's a request to any future Sci-Fi screen writers out there. Please stop fucking with the classics (Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica) and create something new for a change! Riding on the coat tails of the genre's greats is one thing, but trying to join should be what you should really be trying to achieve.
I'm cursed. Well, maybe not, but it sure feels like it some days.
Saturday, after returning from a Mothers Day/Mom's Birthday lunch in the cities, I had a accident while heading over to a friends house. I was entering an intersection when another driver drove through a red light. Quick reflexes allowed me to break and turn so that what might have been a T-Bone ended up with only my front bumper being torn off by his rear bumper. That is itself would have been bad enough, but it didn't stop there. Actually, the other driver didn't stop there. He kept on going. Hit-and-run; great... So I chased after the car honking my horn with my front bumper hanging and swaying in the wind. It must have been quite an interesting scene to everyone else on the road.
The driver finally turned off onto a side street and then an alley. Here, most people would probably just drive on and call the cops from the nearest pay phone (I didn't have my cell on me (a first)), but I stopped, got out, and survey the damage. The driver was Hispanic and didn't speak English. Thankfully, the owner of the car (not in the vehicle at the time, but at the location we stopped at) let me use his cell phone to call my friend to come over and bring his camera so we could take some pictures of the damage (I'll attach those later).
When he finally arrived, I used his phone to call the police to make an accident report. When they arrived, I found out that the driver didn't have any ID and the owner didn't have the car insured. Everyone was civil and calm throughout the series of events. Unfortunately, the driver was arrested for leaving the scene of an accident and not having any ID, and the owner was cited for not insuring the vehicle.
So, now I'm stuck covering my deductible a third time for damage done to my car.
