I’ve been spending my days finishing up a big wall tiling job in a house without air conditioning. I’m too fried to pull off what I did yesterday with 5 posts added through 11PM. Starting fresh tomorrow.
Rich Juzwiak looks at the resurgence of quality pop music in America. Blame it on Gotye? Blame it on Adele. Her Adult Contemporary crossover magic raised the songwriting bar on Top 40 again. Gawker
I wasn’t aware that a few of these books were unfinished. I also don’t understand why everyone focuses on the international version of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger. Team Satiric Cozy with the Students and the Priest. BuzzFeed
Won’t you help the creators of Jesus Camp launch a 25 city independent distribution deal for their new documentary about Detroit? Kickstarter
I’m sorry, but Mr. Sinclair Lewis has already filled those positions. Letters of Note
Well, isn’t this manga just so cheery. Hell Yeah Horror Manga
Everybody now! Always look on the bright side of life. ::Whistle::
And we need a Leprechaun reboot because…Cinema Blend
Come to think of it, I can’t think of too many optimistic science fiction stories. Does Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy count? io9
Can you imagine being trained to fear donuts at your workplace? The Trenches
Finally, let’s give it up for the creative camp counselors who decided a Helen Keller musical using unlicensed songs from Bat Boy and Legally Blonde was worthy of the highlight reel treatment on YouTube.
On this edition of Play It, we look at two static shooter games that are worth a try for online gamers looking for something a little out of the norm.
First up is Orange Roulette. This is a dark and disturbing static shooter about an anthropomorphic orange forced to play a series of Russian Roulette games to earn his freedom from jail. The style of the game is undeniable. The content is questionable but surprisingly engaging.
What would you do to break out of prison in Orange Roulette?
What sells the game is the level of suspense. You only have three possible moves in a turn: spin the wheel, shoot yourself, or shoot your opponent. The entire time, the two competing oranges are eyeing each other up, grimacing, or losing their minds. One of them will be pulp on the walls of the jail. The other might get to walk out alive. I never thought I could empathize with a piece of fruit. Now I know I just hadn’t been forced in the right circumstances.
The downside to the game is the randomly generated stages. The constantly shifting story–each time you lose, you basically get a new identical orange with a variant storyline–is intriguing. The inability to know for sure what the pace of the match is becomes frustrating. It’s not like you can memorize the sequence of events and play to the end. It changes every time.
It’s a tense and quick diversion that’s worth a look if you can handle the subject matter.
The second game is Last Guardian. This is a bit more traditional only in its framing as a tower defense game. You are an archer defending the castle from wave after wave of mythical beasts.
Think before you loose your arrows in Last Guardian
The novelty comes in the mechanics. This is not a “close enough” shooting game. Placement and power will are the difference between a high scoring headshot against a flying dragon or losing the kingdom. Though you only use the mouse, the combination of power and angle seems unlimited in the game.
Then you start to upgrade your arsenal. Will you focus on better arrows for stronger attacks? Faster reloads so you can take more shots? Or will you spend your experience on magical spells that call upon mythological creatures to defend the gate while you aim for trickier shots?
There is no right or wrong strategy because no method is easier than any other. That’s the novelty of the game. You can’t go wrong unless you don’t experiment with how to shoot the arrow. Everything else is at the mercy of a very tight and balanced game design.
What do you think? Will you be giving either game a shot? Orange Roulette is a bigger draw for me, but I do like dark content. Share your opinions below.
Selling Shakespeare to a wide audience is tough. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say most people are first exposed to Shakespeare in a dry English classroom with rote analysis and forced participation in an unstaged reading. That’s not the kind of environment that breeds lifelong admiration for the Bard.
When someone comes up with a great angle for selling Shakespeare’s work, I like to applaud them. The Great River Shakespeare Festival have done just that.
Their original comedy sketch called “The Real Housewives of Shakespeare” is funny. Take the terrible NJ cast’s disastrous first season dinner party and recast it with some of Shakespeare’s most memorable wives and lovers. Titania (feuding with lover Oberon over an orphan), Goneril (conniving married daughter of doomed King Lear), Queen Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother and the new king’s trophy wife), Juliet (of your worst two weeks of HS English class), and Lady MacBeth (of could have done it better without her husband fame) are all present. The blend works well and builds to a nice comedic climax before the credits roll.
The video has just under 4000 views right now. It’s also a promotional video for a two play Shakespeare summer season in Minnesota and only got published yesterday. That’s pretty good for reaching a small market. Let’s see if we can build more of an audience for it.
Shakespeare fans of the world unite. The only thing you have to lose is the silly notion that Shakespeare is stuffy and inaccessible. Share the video with your friends and family and convert some new fans. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be transcribing this for students to perform at a local Shakespeare festival next school year.
What do you think? Is The Real Housewives of Shakespeare a keeper? I’d love to see a short run web series, to be honest. Then they can bring in Ophelia and Desdemona and really stir up trouble. Sound off below with your own thoughts.
The first rule of making a bad film is realizing that you made a bad film.
The second rule of making a bad film is not blaming anyone else for making a bad film.
Not every film is going to be a home run and no film will every please everyone. I mean, I hear tell that some people will defend Exorcist II: The Heretic as a masterful adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” masquerading as a religious horror movie. I will not confirm or deny who has argued that before. I will just say that the Internet is forever and I’m bound to slip up and do it again where you can find me. Whoops.
Anyway, Lee Daniels isn’t getting love it or hate it reviews for his film The Paperboy. He’s getting “hate it” or “hate it so much you love it” reviews.
Even before the film debuted, writers were ripping him to shreds for leaked footage using dated editing techniques and grainy film stock. The gimmick card was thrown out, same as it was when Precious was released.
Where silence or a statement on the intentional low-budget 1970s quasi-exploit style of The Paperboy could have been good options, Lee Daniels speculates about another option.
His interview with GQ is an interesting read for a number of reasons. One, you see a director experience the absolute extremes of festivals. Huge standing ovation for Precious followed by boos and hatred for The Paperboy. Two, he gives you a look into his process as a director and admits he doesn’t know how to respond to the reaction just yet.
The third is the icky part. He even admits that, too:
I think, too, that, and it’s so politically incorrect to talk about racism—you simply can’t—but I think that if it were Pedro Almodóvar or some Italian director telling the story we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in. I should be doing Precious—urban stories that make sense for me. How dare I step out of my comfort zone and tell a story like this? That’s the way I think it is. But, that’s not my destiny.
He contextualizes the statement throughout the rest of the interview. Too bad we live in a 140 character media zone where the headline becomes “Does not liking The Paperboy mean you’re racist” and not “Lee Daniels calls The Paperboy campy fluff, compares himself to Pedro Almodovar and John Waters.”
How can you think a movie with a poster like this is serious business?
I can only hope people remember that Lee Daniels admits to creating a super-stylized piece of bizarre entertainment and don’t keep falling back on the quotation about race. That’s blurring the issue.
Daniels admits to making cult film and needs to be evaluated for that. Let’s give him some respect and discuss it in that framework. Whether it’s the next Female Trouble or even Death Proof–another intentional cult/exploit tribute that split critics at Cannes–has yet to be seen.
I just hope he remembers to discuss the film from his work on the film, not his perceptions of the critical undercurrent.
I love a good sideshow or freakshow act. One of my favorite parts of any multi-haunt Halloween attraction is the main stage where these entertainers are brought up to make the attendees go wild. I’ve seen Lady Diabla swallow swords and Insectavora climb up a ladder of swords. I’ve seen contortionists, fire dancers, and performers who have bloodied themselves thanks to lying audience volunteers. It’s like watching a living horror film. Nothing can really go wrong, but it sure does look that way even during the most practiced stunts.
America’s Got Talent has a checkered history with freakshow/sideshow acts. Sharon Osbourne is almost always a guaranteed no when people start hanging tea kettles off their piercings and eating glass onstage. That’s ok. It’s not her thing.
But the audiences always goes nuts for these performers. They’re screaming in terror one minute, laughing the next, then routinely chanting “Vegas” if the act ends on a high note. At the same time, a sizable portion of the audience is turning away, booing, and crossing their arms to “x” the contestants out.
Is the art of the freakshow/sideshow act too disturbing to gain mainstream acceptance? I remember saying something to that effect last year when the glossiest sideshow act yet, Captain & Maybelle, performed live. They were put through to the Quarterfinals as Judges’ Favorites and then were eliminated without fanfare. The act was funny and cute, but still involved abuse of piercings and assumed pain. My exact quote was “Can they survive the producers undoubtedly toning down their sideshow act to appeal to a wider audience? I’m not holding my breath.” I was right.
A good freakshow/sideshow act on a show like America’s Got Talent is a tricky situation. I can’t imagine many people drawn to these performers would regularly tune in to watch a show like this. I can’t imagine the people who vote a safe solo male singer as the winner year in and year out on a variety show are dying to see human blockheads and suspension artists live.
The freakshow performers belong on the show because they’re talented. I just struggle to imagine a scenario where they’ll garner enough votes to win the crown. If the right team does a high stakes act that you can’t ignore and builds to the finale, it could happen. Otherwise, we’ll have to settle for terrible editing with constant crosscuts to the judges/audience/Nick instead of letting us see the hook meet the piercing.
Thoughts? Any favorite freakshow or sideshow memories? Should these performers even bother with AGT anymore? Let me know what you think.
One of my favorite South Park episodes is called “Over Logging.” The citizens of South Park wake up one morning to discover that there’s no Internet left. No one can check their e-mail, play games, or chat with their boyfriends. News stations cannot report on stories because everything is based on computers. A new Western expansion begins, with thousands upon thousands of US citizens working their way “Californee-way” to use the last remains of the Internet.
Who would have thought that Matt Stone and Trey Parker would predict an actual technological phenomena? According to the FCC, spectrum crunch is caused by an increased demand for high speed Internet buffered through a limited spectrum of broadcasting frequencies. Smart phones, tablets, and WiFi are increasingly used in day to day life for all sorts of things. E-mail is one thing. Streaming movies to your cellphone or playing MMORPGs on your tablet is quite another.
The team behind Extra Credits, a animated-ish web series on game geek news, just released a video taking us through the grim basics of this rapidly growing problem. Unfortunately, you can’t embed Penny Arcade TV content, so I’m going to have to hope you click on that link and watch before you continue here.
Now you see why I said grim. The reason that we, the general Internet media consumers, can’t really do anything to help the bandwidth problem is the allocation of resources. If you just stop watching Netflix on your 3DS, you’re not doing anything but stopping yourself from streaming the entirety of Doctor Who during your daily commute. Why? Because the channels allocated to wireless Internet communications are already allocated or claimed. You not using it doesn’t stop program developers from creating more bandwidth zapping content.
You can't see it, but our bandwidth usage is all around us
Would reduced demand help slow things down? Only if everyone stopped getting smartphones and tablets or stuck to land line Internet connections for big data use–no WiFi for any live streaming or downloads. The problem with that is the growing smartphone and tablet market. A big draw is being able to download on the go and use wherever you have a connection. Shutting off those features cuts off demand, which drops sales, which hurts the pockets of the developers. I don’t think they want to lose money to save bandwidth.
So we’re in a strange situation where the proactive approach isn’t readily available. This isn’t like using a ceramic cup at the coffee shop or riding a bike to work. There is a finite scarcity of resources unless we accept random blurring of information ala a pirate radio station competing with the company that actually licenses that bandwidth. Do you want bad and grainy techno music playing over your WoW raid? Then you don’t want more frequencies shoved in where we’ve reached the closest usable proximity already.
As someone who didn’t get a real working computer in my household until the 1998*, I can remember how quickly home computers with Internet connections just seemed to pop up overnight. Working in schools since 2005, I can also remember how quickly WiFi came up out of nowhere. Now students are accessing their class resources and Facebook pages all day long. The former is encouraged by teachers.
If only there were a knockout magic bullet solution to spectrum crunch. There isn't.
WiFi, 3G, 4G, 4GLTE: these are data services that are not disappearing in the near future. Ok. Maybe 3G is. But I digress.
You don’t go from doubling usage every year since 2007 to a plateau. This is “oh, look, electric lights” or “wow. Check out that automobile” or even “well what do you know? A gas stove” levels of expansion. I don’t doubt the 2014 estimate by the FCC at all. Tinfoil hats be damned. The science behind the trend makes sense.
We rely on the Internet all the time now. People like me can earn a living sucking up bandwidth all day long. Other people have abandoned TV in favor of streaming online media for all entertainment. New technology is being developed every day that relies on the ability to use bandwidth at any time. It’s shiny, it’s new, and people want it.
Can anything stop Spectrum Crunch? There has to be a solution. Unfortunately, the solutions right now are limited to forcing TV networks to ditch antennae based programming bandwidths or cellphone carriers raising their data fees to discourage use. There has to be a more moderate solution.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my marathon of American Dad! episodes on my WiFi-enabled PS3 with the Netflix app isn’t going to start watching itself. I’d love to hear your thoughts on spectrum crunch. Sound off below.
*Why, yes, I did learn to type book reports and essays on a typewriter. I also learned to use carbon paper to produce copies of a final manuscript before turning the paper/story into teacher for grading. I still own all of that equipment. Shame about the chewing gum and sand incident ruining its ability to work.
Turns out this was news to William Peter Blatty. According to Bleeding Cool, Blatty owns the rights to The Exorcist. Morgan Creek, the alleged production company, does not.
You can almost hear Regan say, "U mad, bro?"
What does come out is perhaps a source for the rumor at all. Back in 2009, William Peter Blatty and The Exorcistfilm director William Friedkin began collaborating on a miniseries adaptation of the story. Blatty says he has a completed script but the project isn’t really in motion. Could a TV studio have contacted Blatty or Friedkin about the miniseries and then started seeing what their options were? Or is this simply a case of a fake story being thrown into the void to see what will stick?
And what about people like me who jumped at the story with open arms? Is there really a wide and enthusiastic audience for a new look at The Exorcist?
I know there’s a stageplay about to go off in LA with Brooke Shields and Richard Chamberlain as Chris MacNeil and Father Merrin. I also know that the original announcement of that play was followed by hundreds of theater fans rolling their eyes and going to Twitter to make pea soup projectile seats jokes.
Yet, that project has also amassed a large and impressive collection of artistic collaborators inspired by The Exorcist. Per Shock Till You Drop, Teller of comedy magic duo Penn & Teller (not to mention the man behind the mind blowing ghostly illusions in Play Dead) is acting as a creative consultant. John Doyle, Tony-winner for the recent Sweeney Todd revival, will direct.
So is the draw of The Exorcist the property itself or the man who created it? I’m curious to see how Blatty would approach the screenplay for a miniseries since he shifted so much focus onto Chris MacNeil and Father Karras’ angst to build up their dueling crises onscreen. Would he settle back into the rhtyhm of the novel and let other characters shine?
What do you think? Would you rather Sean Durkin’s take or Blatty’s? What about the story breaking at all? Sound off below. Love to hear from you.
