Game Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Topic: Video Games
2:39 am EDT, Jul 6, 2007
"Disappointing" is a word I don't like to use about a video game--mainly because this means I was just "disappointed" out of fifty bucks when this happens, but nonetheless it applies to EA's new Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix game.
Not even the magic of the Wii-mote could save this one, because somehow EA's code manages to have trouble differentiating frantically waving the thing in counter-clockwise circles from frantically waving the thing in clockwise circles. This is pretty dire, considering that I've got at least three other games that handle this task just fine.
It is neat to see characters which mostly resemble the ones from the movie on your screen and presumably vulnerable to said frantically-waving wand, but no... except for a few rather baffling (because of the hideous wand-movement parsing and lack of effective tactile feedback) battle scenes, you're not allowed to zap anyone at any time. The best you're allowed is to point your wand at people and look at them menacingly to make them run away. This is important because the AI controlling the other characters makes them about as aware of their surroundings Helen Keller, so you'll be shooing students out of your way on a regular basis--including your two ever-present tag-alongs, Hermione and Ron. Rest assured, it won't take you long to decide that perhaps if one of them were to "fall" and wind up in the hospital wing, it wouldn't be such a terrible thing.
Gone is, sadly, most of the plot from the book, which might explain why it is that the thing feels like a mood-stabilized, Disney-esque version of the book. It also might explain why it is that Sirius Black is somehow now a cheerful, upbeat guy. (For those of you who have forgotten, Black has just spent the last several years being tortured around-the-clock by Dementors in Azkhaban). There's a moderate-length cutscene near the end where Dolores Umbridge gets taken away by the centaurs, which makes no real sense at all, and somehow a screwey-looking giant is involved in this, making his second blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance, which seem to be glaring evidence that at one point there was a lot more game planned here than was actually shipped. Adding insult to injury is the "Room of Rewards"* which contains the now-standard plethora of useless junk meant to represent you having seen all 9/9 of the Jade Thimbles Of Sewingness and having set new records in the nostril mining mini-game--roughly half of these "rewards" are simply trophy items which you're shown close up for almost two full seconds (not exactly long enough to admire much). The other half are basically the anemic stepchildren of DVD "extras" about the already lackluster video game where you get to see things like Emma Caufield gushingly admit that the game showed her new levels of realism in how video games can be. Clearly, Ms. Caufield has never played a video game before this one--or perhaps it's more of the w... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]
The defeat that made Britain great - International Herald Tribune
Topic: Society
1:47 am EDT, Jul 6, 2007
Today, of course, the United States finds itself in much the same position as Britain in 1781. Distracted and diminished by an irrelevant, costly and probably unwinnable war in Iraq, America could ultimately find itself challenged by countries like China and India.
by
Michael Rose, a retired British Army general, commanded the United Nations forces in the former Yugoslavia from 1994 to 1995.
For some reason (I suspect insanity) Cheney is attempting to argue that the Vice President's office is not within the Executive Branch of gov't, and therefore is exempt from the regulations for safeguarding classified national security information.
I suppose it's really only a matter of time now before Cheney and Bush formally declare the formation of the new Maniacal Overlord branch of government (which, rather obviously, has no checks on it's behaviour) to go along with the "signing statements" Bush uses to ignore all the checks and balances from the Legislative branch.
So I guess this is why he thinks it's okay they lost all those emails they were supposed to keep. Well, all but the 500 or so really incriminating ones they accidentally mailed to a third party...
'Voters are going to be mad with us until we end the war.'
Topic: Miscellaneous
5:44 am EDT, Jun 19, 2007
"I understand their disappointment," said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. "We raised the bar too high."
This pisses me the fuck off. You raised the bar too high? Fuck you, Harry. Dems took congress because people were fed up with the war, and then on the first major opportunity, a giant funding bill you could have simply refused to pass, you FUCKING CAPITULATED to the president.
I'm sick of this bullshit talk about working together. The Republicans didn't give a flying fuck about working together when they were in power, and they're using current Democratic good will to continue fucking the country in the ass. It's time to stop being polite. It was time about 5 years ago.
Fuck them. Don't pass any more funding for the war, period. Make the public understand that the reason there's no money for domestic priorities like health care, research, roads, or anything else is because Bush and the Republicans refuse to listen to the American public and GET THE FUCK OUT NOW. Stonewall until we get what we fucking elected you for.
For those people still on the fence about what should be done about Global Warming, or if anything should be done at all, here's a video that will explain a very simple, and well-nigh irrefutable chain of logic that leads to one and only one conclusion on the subject...
...that we'd damn well better do something about it.
The Concept: King Plow has been transformed from an antiquated plow factory into an arts community and center for commercial, performing and visual arts. In 1990, the owners designed a plan to build affordable Live/work studios, commercial artist spaces, art galleries, areas designed for the performing arts, and a restaurant within the buildings while preserving their historic and architectural significance. The project started with eleven different buildings. Several of the buildings were built at different periods of time throughout the Plow Company's existence. The oldest, as well as the only two-story building, was built circa 1890. Most of other buildings were built between 1936-38. Because of the different types of architecture involved the renovation of the building created spaces that are truly unique.
The Reality: The King Plow Arts Center has more than sixty-five tenants representing fine, commercial and performing arts. Tenants representing six fine art areas include: photographers, sculptors, writers, painters, metal smiths and printmakers. The commercial arts are represented by a floral sculptor, architectural firms, a modeling agency, graphic design firms, a film production company advertising agencies, a set designer, multi-media designers, art galleries, and several product and fashion photographers. Representing performing arts are a theater company, a dance school and circus arts school Also located in the center is the City of Atlanta's Clearinghouse.
King Plow Art Center is pleased to serve as a model of adaptive reuse of historic structures and a catalyst for the proposed Marietta Street Arts Corridor. King Plow is the largest center of its kind in the city and has become a significant part of Atlanta's Arts community.
The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ... To make it possible to see without seeing.
About this book:
In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author Jose Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.
Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.
And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human.
"I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they're doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."
