17 October 2005

Word nerd

I am a word nerd. With some words I just adore the sound and the look and the mouth-feel, and I can't completely explain it. One word I keep thinking about lately is "ample". It just sounds so right. Some words are so closely linked in sound and root to their meaning that I cannot vizualize them meaning something else ... words like "abhorrent" and "lubricious" and "pizzazz" and "moxie".

It's great to discover foreign words that also hit the spot; I recently found out that in German "Morgenmuffel" is a person who can't wake up in the morning.

Another wordy thing I was reminded of recently is that Shakespeare invented tons of words in his plays. What a bad-ass. I know he was popular and influential and everything, but still -- 2000 words and phrases that survive to this day are credited to him. I'm so jealous. "Madcap". "Moonbeam". "Bloodstained". "Besmirch". "Hint". "Hobnob". "Scuffle". "Savagery". "Salad days". "Vanish into thin air". "Tongue-tied". "Short shrift". What a bad motherfucker.

And at the moment I'm also reading a history of the Oxford English Dictionary (did you know it took over 70 years to create the first edition?) The history is just okay so far. At least it's a lot easier to carry than the actual OED.

13 October 2005

Random stuff

I burned myself again last night while boiling noodles. I was standing over the stove, trying to break in half a stack of noodles so they'd fit in the pot, and when they finally cracked, my right hand jerked into the pot of boiling water. Fortunately I got lots of cold water on my hand promptly (after I got the noodles all squared away) so it looks like I'll avoid the nasty blisters I had from my last cooking incident.

Right now I'm listening to "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill", a CD which I only bought and got into a year ago, six years after it came out. I was just thinking about how it's not uncommon for me to catch up to cultural phenomena only years after they're relevant. I only really started to like "Beavis and Butthead" and Nirvana after their cancellation and Cobain's suicide, respectively. I'm probably almost ready to start appreciating "South Park" by now (in my defense, I've only rarely seen it, but I know many people who adore it, so I expect I will someday too). I'm skeptical of any heavily-hyped new thing ... it took me years to get around to reading the Harry Potter books (which I now enjoy).

I used to be legitimately worried that I liked the music that I liked only because it was (mostly) obscure; that being a snobbish culture asshole was more important to me than appreciating the innate value of things. I've decided that's not the case though. I'm definitely a snobbish asshole, but my snobbery is completely justified. People (and here I'm not talking to you, the blog reader, but the unwashed masses), get some taste why don't you!

My girlfriend occasionally peruses MTV when she needs some brain candy, and I've taken the opportunity to make a careful examination of the many and varied shows that they offer. My analysis: all of the shows on MTV are complete ass and I hate them, except for The Andy Milonakis Show, which is surprisingly watchable.

The Lauryn Hill album is really damn good, by the way.

Oh, and someone made a model of the Sears Tower using Jenga blocks. It's not clear if they used glue or something -- if not, that takes huge balls. It falls over, it could kill someone.

07 October 2005

I have an addiction

I have a severe addiction, and I've been a sufferer since I was about 1987 (or whenever it was that "Ultima 5" came out). I have an almost zombie-like longing to play computer games, and in spite of myself I'm always reading about what the cool new games are and then lusting after them. I used to be loyal to professional PC games, but the last couple years I've been trying more "indie" games (I have most of Chronic Logic's offerings), and last Christmas I was lucky enough to receive an Xbox for Christmas. The latter has allowed me to install Linux on my PC without impacting my game-playing possibilities (except during those times that my girlfriend wants to watch something on TV). My current obsession is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which is hilariously profane, cartoonishly violent, satirical, varied, open-ended and has lots of great songs you can listen to. It contains voice work from Peter Fonda (as a spacy pot-growing hippie), Chuck D (as an angry DJ), Samuel L. Jackson (as a corrupt cop) and other famous people. It's practically the perfect game, except for the mild distress I cause my girlfriend when I run over innocent pedestrians willy-nilly while on the way to put out fires or initiate gang wars.

I've also gotten hooked on a couple of web-based games. One is Kingdom of Loathing, a low-tech role-playing game where the only graphics are the hand-drawn stick figures from the game's creator. It is nevertheless an engrossing, must-play-every-day experience -- KoL is both a funny parody of past RPGs while offering a challenging (if simple) role-playing experience in its own right. After you finish the game by defeating the Naughty Sorceress, you can "ascend" -- i.e. start the game over as another class, carrying over one skill from your previous class. Over multiple ascensions, you can build up quite a powerful character as you amass different class skills. You can also play "softcore" (where you can trade with other players and use items from your previous incarnations) or "hardcore" (where you have to find everything yourself, which takes far longer). I have two characters, one playing each style. You can buy and sell stuff from other players in the "mall" (which I do a lot) or chat with them (which I never do). Ingeniously, the game is free, but if you donate $10 you get powerful items which are prohibitively expensive if you buy them from other players within the game. I've donated $30 so far. Also ingeniously, there a loads of "leaderboards", both for big things like "most ascensions", and trivial things like "most martinis consumed" (mixing drinks plays a big role in the game). This gives every player a chance to be on some leaderboard by eating or drinking one particular thing to excess, or amassing a hoard of one particularly useless item. There are many facets to the goofy fun. I've taken a look at some other web-based RPGs like this, but KoL is by far my favorite.

The other web game I've been playing a lot lately is called Troyis. It represents another genre, the play-in-one-sitting Flash-based web game. I've played a bunch of them, but for some reason I've really gotten hooked on Troyis. It's a simple game where you just move a chess knight around a chess board using chess-knight moves, trying to hit each square at least once in 45 seconds. It's dead easy at first since you begin with a 3x3 board, but each level the board size increases by one, but the time limit remains the same. I've gotten up to level 10 or so (a 12x12 board), where you have to click frantically around to even have a hope of finishing in the time period. The first ingenious part of this game is that each board is missing some squares -- you don't have to land on the missing squares, but they're also not available for you to jump on to help you reach the ones you do need to land on. Each time through, different squares are missing, so you can't just learn one pattern as you play the game -- every game you have to take a different path to complete a board. The second ingenious part is that the game records your high score and tells you your global ranking -- I am currently the 1694th-ranked player in the world, just missing being in the top 100 among players in the Netherlands. The drive to improve one's ranking is strong, but after playing the game every day for a couple weeks, it gets very difficult to improve one's high score. The highest-scoring player has completed level 25 -- a 27x27-square board -- which I have a hard time accepting unless they cheated, which I think would be possible with some technical tomfoolery that slows down one's computer or otherwise fools the game into giving you more than 45 seconds to finish a board. It's still an absorbing and addictive game though. Try it and get hooked!

(Edit -- D'oh, I just noticed that the Troyis board never gets bigger than 10x10. That's a pretty challenging size to finish in 45 seconds, but not impossible -- you just have to be very good to do it about 15 times in a row to get to level 26.)

05 October 2005

Movie trailers lie

You ever watch a movie on DVD, then go to the extras and watch the trailers? It's eye-opening how misleading they often are. There's even a neat website which critiques movie trailers.

In that vein of trailer-based deception, I just found out today that there is a contest called Trailer Park where the goal is to cut spoofy new trailers for old films, using new music and editing to cast it in an entirely different genre.
This one was the winner: http://www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov

Here are some other good ones:

http://www.ps260.com/Trailer/westsidestorytrailer_small.mov
http://www.ps260.com/elfollador/Scary%20Titanic.mov
http://www.movietrailertrash.com/views/demos/psycho_hi.mov