As I work my way through a three-year-long wishlist back-catalogue of Xbox games, there's a strong danger of everything I say being a discussion of my emotional response to Game Z and no-one wants to read that shit. Well, not every day.
So today, a post about UFOs.
It was probably an early sign of future geekiness that I was a fan of UFOs during my turgid early years.* I read and watched everything I could get my hands on concerning Unidentified Flying Objects, because the idea of Aliens was cool (obviously at this point I was unacquainted with the works of Ridley Scott and James Cameron).
These days I am of a much more sober disposition, reluctant to see evidence of extra-terrestrial involvement in every light that blinks after dark. My family's native skepticism has soaked deeply into my judgement. I take great care to subject all observed phenomena to rigorous testing.
To date I have seen three things that I could explain by no means within the realms of our day-to-day experience and knowledge. The first was as a child, in the back of a van on its way into town. The second was biking home from Capping Show rehearsal. The third was very recently, at the last of the great Campbell St parties.
The party had spilled onto the deck, as it tended to do, even in winter. I had taken a step away from the group to look at the stars. They were very clear that night. Something tweaked my peripheral vision, and I spotted a light moving toward the zenith from the north-west. "Oh, a satellite," I said, "I haven't seen one of those in ages." King Richard was the only person who heard me. He turned to watch.
Every satellite I've seen has displayed identical behaviour: they trundle across the stars in a straight line, never in very much of a hurry. The observation of a couple of seconds indicated that this light was moving at a real clip, much faster than a satellite, yet slower than a meteor. Furthermore, the light was very clearly moving on a curved path, arcing around toward the south.
The real kicker, however, took place a second or so later. Now heading very much toward the south, the light's path abruptly angled about 30 degrees to the left. It continued in this new direction before fading from view in the manner of something that's really far away. King Richard confirmed that he'd seen the same thing as I had.
OK, checklist time. Things that it could not have been: plane, meteor, satellite, atmospheric disturbance, cloud or other weather effect, reflection, swamp gas, weather balloon. So what was it?
This is often the point at which people launch straight off into the deep end with something like "OMG IT MUST BE ALIENS." I'm not prepared to make any definitive statement about what it was that I saw. I just know that it was damn fast, possessed a not inconsiderable agility, and was completely silent.
There's a change that has overcome the term "UFO" in the last ten or fifteen years, one that has delegitimised it and turned it into a flag for mental fragility. It's assumed that "UFO" automatically means some 1950s vision of Little Green Men, or big-eyed folks with smooth skin and a penchant for violating oroficial privacy, and that the folks who see them are a little on non-linear side. It certainly no longer means that for which is is an acronym, i.e. thing in the sky which cannot be readily explained away.
Dennis Kucinich, candidate for the Democratic nomination in the last US election cycle, got a pretty raw deal from the media along these lines. Besides appearing more obsessed with his wife Elizabeth than with his progressive policies, they also brought up his admission that he'd seen a UFO, with a definite "surely a prospective candidate for the US Presidency cannot seriously believe in such crazy things" angle. Kucinich was rightly all "I just meant I saw something I couldn't explain, fucking duh. Jimmy Carter saw one too, where's the media hackjob on him?" but the damage was done.
Anyhoo. If anyone's got any good Stories of the Inexplicable, I'd love to hear 'em. And to nip this one in the bud, the identity of whoever let the dogs out will likely remain one of the great mysteries of our time.
* "turgid" is just the greatest word.
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Media roundup
It's been a busy and exciting time. Loads of new things to take in! I reckoned I'd let you know what I thought about them in descending order of relevance to the common man.
Music!
It's been really ages since I listened to any new music. No, yet another Halo soundtrack and ripping the game music out of World of Warcraft don't count. I had a crack at a method that's worked in the past: keep the Recommended Listening page on Questionable Content open in one tab, the City Library online catalogue open in the other. What I ended up with was this:
Royksopp - Junior
Who would have thought pop music could be so enjoyable? Lots of bright cheery sounds and lady vocals. Great stuff.
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Complex vocal layerings sung from the back of the room create a sound that is as compelling as it is unfamiliar. Held together by delicately sequenced electronic noodlings. This one's been on repeat pretty much since the day I got it.
If anyone's got any further recommendations, I'm all ears.
Film!
House-sitting lets me take advantage of Dad's monster TV and his region-free DVD player. International delights for all!
Mongol
Chronicles the rise of Genghis Khan. Makes him out to be a pretty stand-up guy. There's not much in the way of actual battles, but that's OK: all your attention will be on the mind-blowingly gorgeous Mongolian scenery.
Rec
You might also be familiar with its American version, Quarantine. For the uninitiated, Rec is a Spanish horror flick about people trapped in a building with some kind of nasty infection. We watch through the lens of a news crew following the firefighter who get called out to the scene. It's sort of The Blair Witch Project meets 28 Days Later.
The makers knew what they were doing. If there was a book called "How do to horror movies right," they learned it by heart. Rec hits all the bases, combining "BOO!" frights with the gnawing sort of fear that's much harder to pull off.
Muggins here decided to watch this while alone in a big dark house in the middle of nowhere. Not the brightest move, especially with the last 10-15 minutes being everything the box claims them to be. It isn't as utterly petrifying as the first half of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, but it gets pretty damn close.
As much as I want to, I can't really talk about why it's so scary without spoiling the scares, so just go rent it, would you?
I've Loved You So Long
It's really hard watching the lovely Kristin Scott Thomas, made up like she just emerged from a concentration camp, spending almost the entire film in a blank-eyed fug of emotional self-mortification. The film is right there with you, willing her to believe that she deserves better.
This is another tricky one to talk about, given that the question lending the film its central moral and ethical thrust isn't even asked until the final scene. My review for the paper was singularly hard to write because of this.
My one hint: this is a film probably best appreciated by parents.
Lots of goodies coming to the cinema soon. Coraline, Public Enemies, Drag Me To Hell, District 9, Up.
Games!
Ah, finally we get to it. These are the things that have been provoking all the emotional responses lately.
Statute of Limitations Fair Warning: I'm probably going to talk about the ending of games that are two to three years old. If you're late to the party like me, and don't want to know the ins and outs of these things, now's a good time to stop reading.
Halo 3
There was no way this game would have been able to live up to the years of people telling me how good it was, so I'm not going to mark it down for not blowing me away as much as it should have. Certainly there were a goodly number of "holy shit!" moments, mostly involving colossal vistas a million kilometres across, but the story was only OK and the play ranged from "quite intensely pleasing" to "this is penance for something, I'm sure."
I'm going to skip my more detailed thoughts on the game itself and get right to the good bits: the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana, because secondary to being a "save the world" story, Halo is also a love story.
(There's another thing, but I'll get to it afterward)
Master Chief is a specially enhanced super-soldier (called a Spartan), bred since childhood for war. He can never have true friends, such is the pedestal upon which he has been placed. His few Spartan peers - the only friends he might actually have had - are all (presumed) dead. He's thrown into a terrible war, the fate of not only humanity but the entire galaxy resting firmly on his shoulders.
His only companion in this is Cortana, an AI construct bearing the imprint of the now-dead Dr Catherine Halsey, the overseer of the Spartan programme. She spends most of her time in his neural net, guiding him, warning him and implicitly encouraging and reassuring him. She herself is peerless, having no friends or associates other than Master Chief.
For the first two games the relationship is pretty understated. It's not until the third one that it becomes clear just how much the two need each other (for the super-oblivious, the final video really spells it out). It's there in Cortana's words and Master Chief's actions and body language. It mitigates the punch-in-the-gut ending somewhat, but that in itself is a way of farewelling the two for the time being.
The "other thing" I mentioned above is the participation of the Firefly guys. Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk all voice random marines, and it's a pleasure to listen to them bringing their Firefly characters to the game.
Something outrageous happens, and there's Fillion yelling self-aggrandisingly, "That's right! That just happened!" Conclude a firefight and you hear Tudyk, in a very Wash-like fashion, ask for a check-up, or comment about how awesome he is - or about how awesome Master Chief is. Baldwin just channels Jayne the entire time, talking about wanting steak, or, you know, quoting Firefly directly. There are Firefly references ("shiny," "Gorram," etc) scattered throughout the dialogue.
The three of them have big parts in the upcoming Halo: ODST game too, which looks like crazy amounts of fun. Of course it helps that Fillion is a Halo 3 nut.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat
Brilliant, beautiful and yet awful at the same time. The full power of modern weapons directed against human beings is on display here, whether it be snuffing out men with a sniper rifle or annihilating their little glowing heat signatures during the utterly chilling Spectre gunship sequence (actual Spectre footage is...Christ, it's just ghastly). The Middle East street battles evoke the terror such fights must inspire; if it was anything like that over in Iraq, it's easy to see why kids with rifles went sailing right off the edge and shot anything they saw.
Visceral personal reactions aside, the game is made by the high-velocity, no-punches-pulled story and matching gameplay, as well as the gorgeous scenery. There's a flashback level set in Pripyat, Ukraine - the city right next to Chernobyl - which is all long grass, abandoned buildings and shadows. Can I have an entire game like that, please? Oh wait...
Gear of War 2
Blerg, I'm running out of steam here. Mallen and I have been playing through this co-op, and it's top stuff. I thought it would lack the punch of the first game, but Epic upped the ante with loads of challenging new monsters and some great level design: the Riftworm was a good idea executed dully, but the level following was the creepiest a game has been since System Shock 2 - and given that SS2 set the bar for creepiness and horror in sci-fi shooters, that's high praise.
OK, I've written myself into a stupor. Time to go pass out.
Music!
It's been really ages since I listened to any new music. No, yet another Halo soundtrack and ripping the game music out of World of Warcraft don't count. I had a crack at a method that's worked in the past: keep the Recommended Listening page on Questionable Content open in one tab, the City Library online catalogue open in the other. What I ended up with was this:
Royksopp - Junior
Who would have thought pop music could be so enjoyable? Lots of bright cheery sounds and lady vocals. Great stuff.
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Complex vocal layerings sung from the back of the room create a sound that is as compelling as it is unfamiliar. Held together by delicately sequenced electronic noodlings. This one's been on repeat pretty much since the day I got it.
If anyone's got any further recommendations, I'm all ears.
Film!
House-sitting lets me take advantage of Dad's monster TV and his region-free DVD player. International delights for all!
Mongol
Chronicles the rise of Genghis Khan. Makes him out to be a pretty stand-up guy. There's not much in the way of actual battles, but that's OK: all your attention will be on the mind-blowingly gorgeous Mongolian scenery.
Rec
You might also be familiar with its American version, Quarantine. For the uninitiated, Rec is a Spanish horror flick about people trapped in a building with some kind of nasty infection. We watch through the lens of a news crew following the firefighter who get called out to the scene. It's sort of The Blair Witch Project meets 28 Days Later.
The makers knew what they were doing. If there was a book called "How do to horror movies right," they learned it by heart. Rec hits all the bases, combining "BOO!" frights with the gnawing sort of fear that's much harder to pull off.
Muggins here decided to watch this while alone in a big dark house in the middle of nowhere. Not the brightest move, especially with the last 10-15 minutes being everything the box claims them to be. It isn't as utterly petrifying as the first half of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, but it gets pretty damn close.
As much as I want to, I can't really talk about why it's so scary without spoiling the scares, so just go rent it, would you?
I've Loved You So Long
It's really hard watching the lovely Kristin Scott Thomas, made up like she just emerged from a concentration camp, spending almost the entire film in a blank-eyed fug of emotional self-mortification. The film is right there with you, willing her to believe that she deserves better.
This is another tricky one to talk about, given that the question lending the film its central moral and ethical thrust isn't even asked until the final scene. My review for the paper was singularly hard to write because of this.
My one hint: this is a film probably best appreciated by parents.
Lots of goodies coming to the cinema soon. Coraline, Public Enemies, Drag Me To Hell, District 9, Up.
Games!
Ah, finally we get to it. These are the things that have been provoking all the emotional responses lately.
Statute of Limitations Fair Warning: I'm probably going to talk about the ending of games that are two to three years old. If you're late to the party like me, and don't want to know the ins and outs of these things, now's a good time to stop reading.
Halo 3
There was no way this game would have been able to live up to the years of people telling me how good it was, so I'm not going to mark it down for not blowing me away as much as it should have. Certainly there were a goodly number of "holy shit!" moments, mostly involving colossal vistas a million kilometres across, but the story was only OK and the play ranged from "quite intensely pleasing" to "this is penance for something, I'm sure."
I'm going to skip my more detailed thoughts on the game itself and get right to the good bits: the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana, because secondary to being a "save the world" story, Halo is also a love story.
(There's another thing, but I'll get to it afterward)
Master Chief is a specially enhanced super-soldier (called a Spartan), bred since childhood for war. He can never have true friends, such is the pedestal upon which he has been placed. His few Spartan peers - the only friends he might actually have had - are all (presumed) dead. He's thrown into a terrible war, the fate of not only humanity but the entire galaxy resting firmly on his shoulders.
His only companion in this is Cortana, an AI construct bearing the imprint of the now-dead Dr Catherine Halsey, the overseer of the Spartan programme. She spends most of her time in his neural net, guiding him, warning him and implicitly encouraging and reassuring him. She herself is peerless, having no friends or associates other than Master Chief.
For the first two games the relationship is pretty understated. It's not until the third one that it becomes clear just how much the two need each other (for the super-oblivious, the final video really spells it out). It's there in Cortana's words and Master Chief's actions and body language. It mitigates the punch-in-the-gut ending somewhat, but that in itself is a way of farewelling the two for the time being.
The "other thing" I mentioned above is the participation of the Firefly guys. Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk all voice random marines, and it's a pleasure to listen to them bringing their Firefly characters to the game.
Something outrageous happens, and there's Fillion yelling self-aggrandisingly, "That's right! That just happened!" Conclude a firefight and you hear Tudyk, in a very Wash-like fashion, ask for a check-up, or comment about how awesome he is - or about how awesome Master Chief is. Baldwin just channels Jayne the entire time, talking about wanting steak, or, you know, quoting Firefly directly. There are Firefly references ("shiny," "Gorram," etc) scattered throughout the dialogue.
The three of them have big parts in the upcoming Halo: ODST game too, which looks like crazy amounts of fun. Of course it helps that Fillion is a Halo 3 nut.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat
Brilliant, beautiful and yet awful at the same time. The full power of modern weapons directed against human beings is on display here, whether it be snuffing out men with a sniper rifle or annihilating their little glowing heat signatures during the utterly chilling Spectre gunship sequence (actual Spectre footage is...Christ, it's just ghastly). The Middle East street battles evoke the terror such fights must inspire; if it was anything like that over in Iraq, it's easy to see why kids with rifles went sailing right off the edge and shot anything they saw.
Visceral personal reactions aside, the game is made by the high-velocity, no-punches-pulled story and matching gameplay, as well as the gorgeous scenery. There's a flashback level set in Pripyat, Ukraine - the city right next to Chernobyl - which is all long grass, abandoned buildings and shadows. Can I have an entire game like that, please? Oh wait...
Gear of War 2
Blerg, I'm running out of steam here. Mallen and I have been playing through this co-op, and it's top stuff. I thought it would lack the punch of the first game, but Epic upped the ante with loads of challenging new monsters and some great level design: the Riftworm was a good idea executed dully, but the level following was the creepiest a game has been since System Shock 2 - and given that SS2 set the bar for creepiness and horror in sci-fi shooters, that's high praise.
OK, I've written myself into a stupor. Time to go pass out.
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