theMediaman.com

Just cleaning up my desktop and I found this link of Movie Sound Cliches. All I can remember about finding this page was that I was looking for an audio clip of one such cliche!

I don’t want to spend too much time ranting about the babies playing basketball… “Oh! He threw a beer in my face so I punched him!”, “Oh! My coach called me names so I choked him!”. After all, the jackass has a CD to promote. That punch was the best thing to happen to Artest’s agent’s career!

If I were being paid $6 million a year to play games, you could kick me squa’ in the nuts with steel-toed boots and I wouldn’t respond in such a neandrotholic, barbaric way.

…I might take a hit out on you, but again, that’s because I’ve got $6 million to do it with!

I’d rather talk about Vince Carter. Here’s a guy who wants to leave a Toronto team, as so many successful players have in professional sports. The difference between him and whiny bitches like Cujo, David Wells, Roger Clemons and (biggest bitch of them all) Roberto Alomar, is that Vince is being civil about it. There’s been no whining about how the team isn’t good enough for him, no complaints that the ‘fans don’t care’.

There was the controversy over the weekend that he ‘would not dunk’ the ball in games, even though that’s the move that made him a star. However, either he received a stern talking-to, or it truly was taken out of context as a mental meandering said out loud (which seems more likely). Either way, he was dunking the ball in the Raptors’ latest losing game, and he’s still acting civil.

When Vince’s popularity soared in 2001, I started counting the months before he was shipped off to a more appreciative city… by ‘more appreciative’, I mean more money and a better team. The ironic situation here is that lack of controversy is the news item at the same time as being the reason it’s not an interesting news item…

…and that’s why you hear about nothing but Artest’s temper tantrum on ESPN.

Finally, another quiet eye-in-the-storm of work today, so I’ll take some time and grace you with an update to my Blog.

Lucky you.

Saturday, Reg, Kendrick, Hwan, Pops, Orbhead and I sat around playing Halo 2 on a projection screen. Way too much fun. We chose the “Kill of the Day” (involving a rolling Banshee) and the Quote of the Day - which didn’t come until the very end of the event, when playing “Capture the Flag” inspired the Star Wars Geek quote “Almost there…. Almost there……”.

Jenning showed up near the end, and after another hour or so of bringing ourselves down from a larger-than-life version of 4-player Halo 2 (by playing another hour on a ‘regular sized screen’) we joined Gina for sushi. It seemed pretty good to me, but I’m hardly an expert on Japanese food, even after all the raw fish that I’ve consumed over the last three or four years. However, Reg’s journal pointed me to a good rant that describes How To Tell A Japanese restaurant From A Non-Japanese Japanese Restaurant.

The weekend also granted me the luxury of watching The Matrix Revolutions again. I think I’ve only seen it once up to this point. Ever since leaving the theatre, my expectation was that I would enjoy it better after some time. The movie was just too hyped up, and had a lot to live up to. The first movie was revolutionary in design, storytelling and style. The second and third were too much the same movie.

Personally, if I were responsible for the design of the campaign, I would have chosen a crimson red as the primary colour for the third movie’s ads, completing the RGB (in reverse order) of computer light. With the red light, they could have pushed more machinery in the posters… reminding the viewer of the other side of The War.

…but that’s just my opinion. Now everyone’s going to have a purplish-blue box for The Matrix, and a green box for The Animatrix, Matrix: Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. Too bad.

Alberta is voting today and will re-elect Ralph Klein. Most ironic quote has to be from the Big Bully himself, saying that “elections are not just about making promises. They are also about listening to people and learning where they stand.”

Unfortunately, while we’ve been listening (yes, ‘we’… I’m including us other Canadians) he refused to release details about Health Care reforms until after the election. It’s difficult to believe that this is from a province next door to the one that created The Greatest Canadian, Tommy Douglas.

Perhaps it’s a bit premature to declare Douglas the winner, but he’s led the list in votes since week one, when George Stroumboulopoulos made his case. George is the only DJ/VJ in the last five years (besides Josh Holiday) that I’ve respected, and after watching that particular special, he gets yet another gold star from me.

They’re showing the final one tonight (Trudeau), but there will be a Greatest Canadian Marathon playing Saturday on CBC Newsworld. Remember, you can vote after every episode, but you have to sign up at the web site first.

The two-part finale (leave it to CBC to draw something like this out) will air at 8 PM - 10 PM on Sunday and Monday, November 28 and 29.

But if history isn’t your thing, you can take a look at an interesting twist on the special series, called The Roundup’s Greatest Fictional Canadian. I’m kind of surprised that Bob & Doug McKenzie didn’t make the finalists’ list, but I’m sure that there were others who couldn’t believe that Mr. Canoehead didn’t make the list either.

The article on the front page of the Globe and Mail today is for a Canadian scientist who plans to go diving in the Indian Ocean. He plans to use a special submarine that will let him go 200 metres below the surface off the coast of Africa. He’s looking for a fish called the coelacanth that’s supposed to be at an evolutionary standstill for the last 400 million years (kind of like Conrad Black, the paper’s other front page news).

The trip will involve tracking and tagging the fish by “stamping their bony, limb-like fins with acoustic transmitters”. I didn’t think much about it, until the end of the article.

Coelacanths live at the bottom of the Indian Ocean in caves, and it’s believed this deep-water habitat - still largely uncharted by humans - has protected them from extinction.

So what are we going to do? Just go right down there and check them out! I hope they grab a few and put them in zoo’s first, or else we’ll have another dodo extinction on our collective consciences.

Speaking of species extinctions… I want to play Halo 2. Reg ran through it in “about 15 hours” which kind of disappoints me. He calls the two games “Halo Classic” and “Team Halo”. I like sitting in a livingroom, playing multiplayer games on one console, or shared over a LAN, but I just don’t get the same thrill out of whipping some newbie’s arse in online gaming (nor having some 12 year old kick my arse).

Halo (Classic) was one of the most involving storylines I’ve experienced in a game since Final Fantasy VII. While reports have been made that FF7 can be done in eleven hours, the usual experience I’ve found on the chat forums is that it takes no less than 70 hours for the first time through the game. Now THAT’S a storyline!

I’m sure the story is still quite good, but I feel as abandoned by the gamemakers now as I did when Quake 3 came out as “Multiplayer Only”… aka no single-player mode (except for “player vs. bots”). I’ve also received this kind of emotional abuse from the death of Sierra adventure games, and how LucasArts cancelled the Full Throttle 2 game (which looks like it might have had a multiplayer component in development as well).

In fact, if you look at the game history on LucasArts’ site, they’ve only produced about five non-Star Wars licence games since 1997. Seems to me that you risk monotony in game design when you do that. LucasArts used to be known as The Company to take a gaming genre and perfect it. Now they can’t even get out of their own slump.

Electronic Arts is to gaming what Microsoft was to Operating Systems around 1999. There was Microsoft, and then no one else. Sure there were the straggelers, but BeOS was dead, OS/2 was dead, all desktop AltOS’s were dead. Microsoft was THE company to build your Operating System. EA has that monopolistic status in the gaming industry, and they know it. They’re now suffering from a class-action lawsuit saying that they force their employees to work unreasonable hours.

Really, it doesn’t seem to be anything different than what has been going on since the 70’s, except that code-monkeys are a lot more disposible now. They get paid about 10-25% of what they did just five years ago (before the Bubble burst) and they fear losing their jobs because there are a hundred unemployed coders out there ready to take their job.

There are small throwbacks to the classic era of Adventure Gaming, like Homestar Runner’s Peasant’s Quest, and most Sierra “-Quest” games on eBay for under five bucks. However, if you still have your discs (or diskettes) lying around, let me know. While they aren’t considered Abandonware yet (and hardly anything legally is), you can usually trade around. Someone who used to have a 386 is likely to have had one or more of the Kings Quest games.

I’m going to see if I can find that Sherlock Holmes game. I’ve already played through it about five times, but that was back when the 30 MB install took up a third of my dad’s hard drive!

So, any good geek has seen the movie trailer already. However, I’ve found that you can actually pick up a few cool things from the trailer for the video game

http://www.lucasarts.com/ep3/

Looks like there might a scene that is the precursor to the battle between Luke and Darth. If you were to watch the movies in chronological order to the Star Wars Universe, then the final battle between father and son would be even more suspenseful!

You have to check it out! (geekgeekgeekgeekgeek)