I updated three of my regular restaurants with additional meals, dishes, and photos. These are all great places. Click each photo for the detailed reviews.
Rustic Canyon
La Cachette Bistro
Josie Restaurant
Author Archive for agavin – Page 91
Title: Forbidden Mind
Author: Kimberly Kinrade
Genre: YA paranormal
Length: 134 pages
Read: January 18, 2012
Summary: Fast and fun. Recommended.
This little novel caught my attention yesterday while running a Kindle Select free day. I was sold by the tag line, “She reads minds. He controls minds. Together, they might get out alive.” I like the notion of a couple stuck together by the inherent nature of circumstances. I tried to build this dynamic into my second novel, Untimed — only it’s time travel, not mind reading.
I pounded through this book in one sitting, as it is only 134 pages, making it more a novella. This is a new trend made possible by the Kindle store. Previously novellas were basically impossible to sell and besides, I was never really into them, being more the 400,000 word per volume, ten volume fantasy kind of guy (I have actually read all but the last of the Wheel of Tedium). But now, being older and having less time, I’m finding I dig ’em.
Forbidden Mind is written in tight first person past. The prose is very snappy and light, the way I like it. Perhaps it could use the tiniest bit of further line editing, but it’s good. We drop right into the character and the story and race from there. In a 134 pages, there isn’t room to dawdle and Kinrade doesn’t. Things are lean, with the bare minimum description. The protagonist is very likeable. She isn’t super complex, but she has a nice non-snarky teen voice. The setup here is that she’s a mind reader who lives in a kind of Professor X’s school for the gifted — but they aren’t so altruistic. In fact they rent out the paranormal kids for clandestine missions (slightly Dollhouse like). The scenario is very intriguing and the book so breathlessly fast that we race right through the “school” scenes and into Act 2 and the B story (romance), which likewise blur by.
I’ve always liked mind readers and what’s known in the literature as mind controllers, pushers, or coercers. Some of my favorite books are Firestarter, The Case of the Vanishing Boy, Carrion Comfort (best horror novel I’ve ever read, and Stephen King agrees with me), and Intervention.
In Forbidden Mind, the story is the girl’s perspective and so we get more of the mind reading than the controlling. This part is well handled, but I thought there was some juicy potential in the synergistic relationship between a mind reader and a coercer that was left on the table. Things move fast and character is more Kinrade’s strongpoint than complex action so their extraction from their predicament is quick and straightforward. Being a crazy nerd I’ve spent an insane amount of time thinking about physic powers and their ramifications. I love books that deal in complexity with a system of powers. The Julian May books do, as does Sheri S. Tepper’s remarkable True Game series. I would have loved to see this pair escaping using a mental version of the three legged race. Plus, this is a powerful pair of powers: unlimited mind reading and mind control, so they could easily overshadow obstacles without a very threatening antagonist (a Heroes Sylar type) or significant limitations (like Firestarter’s cerebral hemorrhaging). We don’t have these. But Kinrade constructs the story in such a rapid and straightforward way as to avoid the problem. And the ending comes equally quick, but satisfying.
Which leaves us room to explore this interesting dynamic in the sequel. If you like paranormal teen adventure, try it out.
Restaurant: Tropicale Lounge
Location: 330 East Amado Road, Palm Springs, CA. (760) 866-1952
Date: December 26, 2011
Cuisine: American
Rating: 50s fantasy
Continuing our brief Palm Springs foray we decided to check out a classic dining destination. And classic it was, so much so that it almost seemed like a 50-60 year time warp.
Even the sign is totally old school.
And the Neptune’s Lair style interior bar. The Cuban jazz music only added to the ambiance.
This was sort of a cosmo like drink. Not bad.
And a passionfruit mango one. This one tasted a little fake fruit flavored.
The menu.
“Salt-Roasted Beet Stack. Imported Gorgonzola & Toasted Pistachios.” Sort of attempt to be more contemporary.
But not this. The “pupu platter. An ‘exotic’ combination of chicken & beef satay, Vietnamese spring rolls, ahi nori rolls, and coconut shrimp.” Everything feel into that half-tasty half-lackluster category. But the sauces were pretty yummy. Edible, but not high art.
Cheese pizza.
“Miso glazed Atlantic Salmon Rice Bowl. Broccoli, snow peas, tomatoes, shitakes & soy.”
“Pan-Roasted Wild Sea Bass with Gingered Thai Red Curry. Pineapple rice, stir fried vegetables, Asian sprout slaw, gingered tomatoes.” This dish was entirely made by the red curry sauce, which was half-decent (not fantastic). I could have used more of it. The vegetables were pretty old-school steamed.
This was a fun evening, even if our three year-old was a handful, but this joint is running on pure kitsch!
For more LA dining reviews click here.
I’ve official “sold” all 100 tickets in ROUND ONE of the Naughty Dark Contest. So I fired up the Ruby interpreter and asked it to compute the appropriate pseudorandom number, which turned out to be 6.
Counting from zero − I’m such a programmer − this turned out to be a ticket owned by Dorothy Beecher of New York!
She chose the following for her prize: A signed copy of The Darkening Dream!
Ain't it dreamy?
But just because ROUND ONE is finished, doesn’t mean you can’t win. Check out the rules and get submitting, round two is open. As soon as it sells out another 100 tickets, there will be yet another drawing. And the special prizes are available to anyone, anytime!
Which speaking of, Markus Grundnig of Austria is our latest special prize winner, having gone for the gusto and earned 25 tickets! He chose to get a signed copy of his (and my) favorite Naughty Dog game, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back.
Signed Crash 2 before heading East toward Austria
Crash 2, besides being the most painful year of my life (1997), represents IMHO the pinnacle of Crash gameplay. Some might enjoy Warped’s crazy vehicles (and they were fun), but I for one, like the classic platforming intensity of Cortex Strikes Back. Having cleaned up the crappy Crash 1 save system, revamped the technology, and smoothed the gameplay, Cortex really shines. Although don’t get me wrong, it’s a real close call.
HBO has pushed out another “behind the scenes” that features filming in Croatia.
You can see some of the King’s Landing and Qarth sets. Mostly the spoken content of this little video is what Jason Rubin and I used to call “Cinecrap”* which is the entirely positive marketing spew. In this case talking about how wonderful Croatia is. But actually, cinecrap or not, it’s probably true, as the place does look gorgeous. Even the Roman Emperor Diocletian thought so as he built his giant pleasure palace there, declaring it to be one of the nicest places in the Empire. And his conquests had afforded him the grand tour. Plus I’ve wanted to visit for some time myself :-).
That it looks medieval doesn’t hurt either.
* By the way, the origin of the “Cinecrap” term stems from us reading a lot of Cinefex magazine in the early 90s. This cool special effects journal went in depth on the making of movies like Terminator 2, Aliens, and the like. The articles had long interviews with the effects directors who spewed out a lot of praise for whatever film making team was paying their salary. Still, it was a fun magazine.
King's Landing... achem... Dubrovnik Croatia
Glamour shot of my trade edition
I got the latest proofs back from CreateSpace for my novel, The Darkening Dream, and they are looking great. While there are perhaps a few little tweaks possible to make them perfect, the presses are ready to roll, so I turned it on.
Now it’s winding through the mysterious process at Amazon.
You can buy it here!
Or if you’re an e-book person, those editions have been for sale for a couple of weeks and you can find them here. Amazon is in the process of linking the two versions together and the like. They have a big system where every component is on different server clusters and updated on different timetables. It might even take them a couple days to get the page 100% sorted. But you can still order.
Now I only have the hardcover edition to do. Because it’s print on demand there is really no reason not to do one for those who like hardcovers (like myself). The only extra hard cost is the dust jacket mechanical and some minimal Lightning Source setup fees (they being the POD printer I know that prints hardcovers). What we can’t really figure is the several hours of time it took to fill out their 80 page contract and application and fax it back to them. No web form! They need to get with the times.
You can the trade paperback front and back here:
or the spine here:
The interior looks great also with all the nice chapter heading illustrations and proper typography.
Restaurant: Colony Palms Hotel
Location: 572 N. Indian Canyon Drive Palm Springs, CA 92262. 760.969.1801
Date: December 26-27, 2011
Cuisine: American
Rating: Solid cafe food
During the holiday break my wife, son, and I made a quick little visit to Palm Springs and I would be remiss as a food blogger in not chronically the culinary aspects of the journey. Foodwise, as in many other ways, this little desert oasis is a bit of a throwback.
The view from our hotel restaurant, which given the gorgeous 78 degree clear December weather was pretty darn fine.
Veggie burger with fries. Apparently, this was a very good example of the beast. The fries sure were good.
Cobb salad (I left out the tomatoes). I’ve had a lot of cobb salads. This was a 6/10 as they go.
At breakfast, French toast with creme anglais and apple soaked in calvados. This isn’t the prettiest dish but it sure tasted great. The creme was superb and the apples lent some addition cinnamony sweetness to the mix.
A berry smoothy.
And my scramble, with ham, bacon, caramelized onions, and goat cheese. Again, not a looker, but it tasted good.
As hotel restaurants go the Colony Palms one was solid. The food was tasty and the setting nice. It wasn’t anything to completely rave about, but on average at hotels you can do far far worse.
Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Director/Stars: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara and Christopher Plummer, David Fincher (Director)
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Watched: January 9, 2012
Summary: Very stylish dark thriller
TGWTDT is a peculiar literary and cinematic phenomenon. Wildly successful, it’s not your typical story or route to success. It also proves that some people, at least, still have an attention span.
Broadly, this is a serial killer mystery blended with a taunt character driven thriller. The story itself has an odd structure. For those of you that don’t know, we have an old Swedish billionaire who hires a brilliant investigative journalist to investigate the forty year-old unsolved murder of his niece. This is wound together with the life of a hacker/investigator (the titular girl) who investigates first the journalist and then the murders. But oddly, they don’t even meet for half of the film. The first half is driven by the journalist’s investigation and by dark character study of Lisbeth (the girl).
Be warned, this film contains crime scenes, grisly crime photos, crazy homicidal dudes in their dungeons, and a very harrowing rape sequence which is all too graphic. Director David Fincher lends his natural taste and talent for the creepy to the material with great success. No surprise, he directed my all time most disturbing film, Seven. This TGWTDT is much more stylish than the Swedish versions (and that was good too). Plus this style doesn’t trivialize the material at all, but only serves to heighten the emotional impact. The story is somewhat streamlined from the earlier film and the book, but also without significant sacrifice.
Daniel Craig is highly competent in the role and the excellent supporting cast makes fine work of the host of swedish creeps (and occasional decent human being). But it’s Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth that absolutely steals the show. Of course this character is probably to a good degree responsible for the success of the franchise, but Mara does her justice. Her Lisbeth is detached, yet sexy and vulnerable, but also kick ass physically and intellectually. She’s a very complex character and both her striking visual presence and subtle performance are riveting. I particularly liked her sexual relationship with Craig. Here’s a man who clearly is used to being a man, and then she reverses the whole deal on him. He likes her, but doesn’t really know what to make of the whole thing.
But for us, that’s great movie making. Just be warned, this is not a film for the squeamish.
The “beta” of The Darkening Dream‘s Trade Paperback cover has come in and I submitted another proof. With any luck I might get it on sale next week, the week after for sure. The interior layout has been complete for almost a week too. I can’t wait to see this puppy in the flesh. It should look great.
You can see some of the old paper test versions below. My long standing Lulu (ick) ARC on the left and an older CreateSpace proof on the right. Even with that hybrid cover the CS proof is looking and feeling great.
Apple also finally turned on my iBooks account today and so the iBookstore version should be up in… well however long it takes them to approve it. Given that it took ten days just to validate the account it might not be instant. All the sites except for Amazon and slow slow slow. For example, I uploaded the new cover to Barnes and Noble a week ago and it still hasn’t updated!
It’s probably hard for younger gamers to recognize the position in gaming that Japan occupied from the mid eighties to the late 90s. First of all, after video games rose like a phoenix from the “great crash of ’82” (in which the classic coin-op and Atari dominated home market imploded), all major video game machines were from Japan until the arrival of the Xbox. Things were dominated by Nintendo, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Nintendo, Sony… you get the picture.
And in the days before the home market eclipsed and destroyed the arcade, Japan completely crushed everyone else. Only the occasional US hit like Mortal Kombat even registered on the radar.
Miyamoto, creator of Mario, playing Crash 1. I’m standing behind him off frame
All of this, not to mention the cool samurai/anime culture and ridiculously yummy food (see my sushi index!), made us American video game creators pretty much all Miyamoto groupies.
But on the flip side, American games, if they even made it to the land of the rising sun at all, almost always flopped.
Japanese taste is different the wisdom went. Special. Foreign games even had a special name over there (which I have no idea how to spell). These “lesser” titles were stocked in a seedy back corner of your typical Japanese game store, near the oddball porn games.
So it was with great enthusiasm and limited expectations that we approached the mutual Naughty Dog, Mark Cerny, and Sony decision that we were going to take the Japanese market really seriously with Crash. Sony assigned two brilliant and dedicated producers to us: Shuhei Yoshida and his then assistant Shimizu (aka Tsurumi-0600). They sat in on every major planning meeting and we scheduled the whole fall for me to localize the game in exacting detail (while we were simultaneously beginning work on Crash 2!).
For the most part, Yoshida-san made things happen and Shimizu, who has literally played like every video game ever made and read like every manga, worked the details. I (with a bunch of help from the artists) had to put in the changes.
Yoshida-san front and center, Shimizu on the far left, Rio (joined the team during Crash 2) on the far right
Somehow Yoshida-san was able to maneuver the game into being not one of those funny foreign games, but an official bona fide release of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. the first party Japanese studio. And it was to be sold and marketed pretty much like it had been made in Japan! Wow!
So to pull off this cultural masquerade Jason and I decided that Shu (as Yoshida-san was affectionately known) and Shimizu got pretty much whatever they wanted. They after all, knew the mysterious Japanese market. Which turned out to be pretty darn true. And, besides, both are really really smart and crazy hard workers (Shimizu is famous for sleeping under his desk) and so we all got along famously.
The gameplay itself wasn’t really too much of an issue. Shimizu did help us smooth out some sections and make them easier (often by adding extra continue points − opposite of Europe). But there were a lot of other changes.
The Crash 1 main titles, in Japanese
First of all, we had to translate the text. Some of this wasn’t so bad. But the main logo was a 3D object and Jason had to painstakingly create a version of the paper design the Japanese provided us — which required lots of checking from Shimizu as he doesn’t speak Japanese.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4XzmZyiIXA
Above is the opening in Japanese.
And things got even harder (for me) with the in game text. The Playstation didn’t have a lot of video memory and we were using a medium resolution 512 pixel wide mode anyway. What little there was, we had pretty much consumed. But the Japanese language has four alphabets! One is Latin, two are similar but different looking phonetic alphabets, and the last is the giant Kanji pictographic database. Kanji would’ve been impossible, but we needed to cram the two extra phonetic sets in. Plus the characters are more intricate than the Latin alphabet and need more pixels. I can’t remember what I did to squeeze them in, but I do remember it was painful. One part I do recall was implementing the sets of letters that vary only by an extra dot or ” mark by drawing them with two sprites (hence saving video ram).
Once the font was installed we had to input the crazy looking “shift JIS” text. One of the problems in those days was that the text editors all 8-bit, unlike today were 16-bit typesets dominate. And with a European language you can usually tell if a line of text had gotten swapped or mangled, but in Japanese… and even worse, in shift JIS it just looks like a bunch of garbage characters.
So again, Shimizu had to check everything. A lot.
Our opening and closing cut scene dialog was recorded in Japanese using very high profile Japanese actors (so they told me). We replaced those audio files (using one of my automated systems of course!). There were also a good number of cases throughout the game where we had placed text in textures. The configuration screens, loading screens, load/save screens and all sorts of other ones. These all needed new versions. We collected all of these textures, shipped them out to Japan and got back Shimizu certified versions in exactly the same sizes with the Japanese text. I used and upgraded the system that I had built for the European version so that any file (texture, audio, etc) in the game could be “replaced” by a file of the same name in the same directory with a .J on the end (or a .S, .E, .F, .G, .I for various European permutations). The level packaging tool would automatically suck up the most appropriate version and shove it in the J versions of the levels. I’m not sure we left ANYTHING untranslated. Even Japanese games usually had more Engrish. Achem, English. I so remember a Castlevania with “Dlacura’s grave.”
Then the Japanese came up with this idea of having Aku Aku explain various gameplay mechanics to you when you break his boxes, much like the raspberry boxes in Super Mario World. This was a great idea, except it meant that the game was suddenly filled with about 200 extra paragraphs of text. Undecipherable text. I had to squeeze that into the levels too. More problematic was the seemingly simple fact that when a big block of text comes up on the screen the game effectively needs to pause so the player can read it. You can’t just “hit pause” but need a separate state. This simple feature caused a lot of bugs. A lot. But we stomped them out eventually.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WojXNCbHOmY&feature=related
Above you can see a walk through of the first level. A lot of the PITA localization work was in the save screens (big fun: character entry screen in three Japanese alphabets) and the various statistic screens at the end of the level. I think the Japanese allowed us to do away with the horrible password system and use memory card only.
The Japanese box and CD with its very strange Crash and Eve painting — it was nice and colorful
The Japanese also had some famous actor record a whole collection of really zany sounding grunts and noises that Crash was to make. Shimizu lovingly crafted long lists of extremely specific places in the game where exactly such and such exclamation was to be uttered. He was never one to spare either of us from a great deal of work 🙂 But his willingness to tackle any task himself, no matter how tedious, made him hard to refuse. I also had to squeeze all these extra samples into the extremely tight sound memory, mostly by downgrading the bit-rate on other sounds. This caused Mike Gollom, our awesome sound design contractor to groan and moan. “3.5k is pure butchery” he’d complain. I found this SGI tool that used a really advanced new algorithm to downgrade the sounds, they sounded twice as good at any given bit-rate than the Sony tool.
Anyway the really funny bit about these Crash sounds was the subjective feel they left us Americans with. Strange! They made Crash sound like a constipated old man. But the Japanese insisted they were perfect. I guess they were right because the game sold like crazy over there.
Another weird audio difference was that five of the songs were swapped out for new ones. Josh Mancell the composer put it this way:
An 11th hour decision made by the Sony people in Japan. They felt that the boss rounds needed to sound more ‘video game-like’. The only reference they gave was music from the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland. I only had a day or so to write all those themes. My favorite comment was about the original Tawna bonus round music. It roughly translated into ‘the sound of the guitar mixed with the tree imagery is too nostalgic-sounding’. I’m still scratching my head on that one.
You can find the different tracks here.
There were also a host of minor but strange modifications we needed to make. One was that a few characters originally had four fingers, which is typical of most American cartoon characters. Apparently the Japanese have a more than usual dislike of disfigured humanoids. Fingers were added (to make them the normal five). There were a whole bunch of little visual, audio, and gameplay changes Shimizu had us make to the game. Most of these I felt were neutral, different but not really better or worse, so I just trusted him and put them in. Occasionally if they were a really pain I pushed back.
Eventually, right around Thanksgiving, just in time for Jason and I to head to Japan to promote it, the Japanese version was ready!
Coming soon, I plan on a part 2 covering Japanese marketing and promotions!
If you didn’t catch it, I have a similar detailed post in the European localization of Crash.
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    My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
Cover of the hint guide in Japan
Restaurant: Takao [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
Location: 11656 San Vicente Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90049. (310) 207-8636
Date: December 10, 2011
Rating: 9/10 creative “new style” sushi
I’ve already covered Takao in some detail HERE and then separately here, here, and here, but we went back (we go often). The full menu and some information on the history of the place can be found through the first link.
This particular meal is another take on the medium sized omakase, which is a very good deal (in a relative high-end sushi kind of way).
We started off with a lovely “shaved rice” style cold sake. I’ve become increasingly fond of this old-school premium form of sake.
A starter trio. Some crab in miso, fresh salmon sahimi with onions, and marinated ginko nuts.
Spanish mackerel salad with spinach. The fish was marinated and grilled and they formed a nice fresh contrast.
Scallop sashimi with a trio of sauces.
And fresh octopus sashimi with the same sauces for contrast.
Then some top grade toro sashimi. Like butter baby!
New style sashimi with warm olive oil, sasame, chives, ponzu, and sliced truffle.
King crab legs with a sweet vinaigrette.
Traditional Japanese egg custard with mushrooms and fish. Like creme brulee without the crust or the sugar and with fish!
Seared at the table beef (in a teriyaki-style sauce) cooked as you like it in a cast iron plate.
Eel tempura. Tasty, I think this was the first time I’ve had eel as tempura.
Classic miso soup.
A little sushi flight. Left to right. Toro, yellowtail, salmon, tai (red snapper), and tomago (sweet omelet).
And finally green tea creme brule for dessert.
Another intensely satisfying Japanese meal down the gullet. As you see, we keep going back to Takao and while the style remains the same, the ingredients mix it up substantially each time. Awesome place. More reviews here: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
Title: Sucker Punch
Director/Stars: Abbie Cornish (Actor), Emily Browning (Actor), Zack Snyder (Director)
Genre: Action
Watched: January 5, 2012
Summary: Style over substance
The concept for Sucker Punch, whacked as it is, is actually pretty decent. The movie is also gorgeous and stylized. Yet… it just doesn’t really work at any rational level. Part Kill Bill, part Pan’s Labyrinth, part Inception, part Sin City, part video game cut scene, this film is all CGI glitz and fetishistic style. It’s also worth noting that the writer/director, Zach Snyder, brought us those other style over substance “classics”: Watchmen and 300.
As to the plot. Wait, I can’t really use that word because as I’ve discussed at length before plot is the action created by opposition to the protagonist’s desire. The characterization in this film is about as solid as a whiff of gunpowder and we have only the most basic desire: escape. The film opens with a comic book style summary of the setup: girl has been orphaned, framed by her evil step-father, committed to a mental asylum (in the late 40s), and scheduled for a lobotomy. From this grim — but actually dramatically interesting — setup we devolve into a series of nested fantasies.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love reality bending films. Pan’s Labyrinth is my favorite film of the last decade. They’re just hard to get right and it’s key to overlap and contrast the inner and outer worlds. In Sucker Punch, the outermost (or real) world is seen for about three minutes at the beginning and again for about three minutes at the end. Oddly, a middle layer in which the girl (named only Babydoll) imagines herself a prisoner not in a mental institution but in a stylish brothel serves up what little plot and characterization we have. This itself parallels with the real world and might have been interesting if we spent any time there. Instead we are propelled one after another into a series of really cool looking fantasy set pieces. Oddly, the “plan” to escape the institution (brothel, asylum — both? neither?) is broken down into a quest of five video game like steps, conveniently provided by Scott Glenn in a role known only as “The Wise Man”. Each step, which in the midworld amounts to things like: “steal a lighter from the fat-cat mayor who is visiting to have his way with the fifteen year-old hotties” is instead rendered into an “action packed” fantasy that has very very little bearing on the task. Also, this setup, which is pretty awful but intriguing is whitewashed due to a pansy PG-13 rating.
We have a big fight in a cool asian temple against three giant robo-samurai-knights. Each has his own weapon! Yah video games. This even includes a Doom-style gatling gun.
Immersion in a steampunk super-sized World War I trench battle, which honestly for about one minute took my breath away.
A return to the assault on Helm’s Deep, complete with orcs in danger of lawsuit from WETA and big fire breathing dragons (the dragon is the lighter — yeah, that’s deep connection).
And a sci-fi shootout bomb run on a super high tech train filled with killer robots. Snooze!
The first three of these, particularly the WWI fight, are gorgeous. I mean really cool looking. But they are ten-fifteen minute fight scenes with almost no dialog set to ethereal music like a version of “White Rabbit” sung by Emiliana Torrini. (NOTE: I did order the soundtrack, that part was awesome) For a minute or three each they seem intensely cool. But they’re just shooting, jumping, slicing and more shooting. We don’t know who these characters are. They’re in a dream within a dream. And we don’t care. They are shooting at thousands of horde-like video game style enemies. We don’t care. Somehow each of these fights results in achieving the fairly straightforward midworld objective. The connection is highly non-obvious.
Highly non-obvious = non-existent.
It’s also worth noting the extremely bizarre infusion of manga/game infused stylization. First of all, by including Comic book, 40s faux-gangster, Asian, WWI, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi we have a serious total complete massive buttload overabundance of style. Any one of these would have made for a highly stylized firm. Extreme too too too too muchness. But the girls in their weird “warrior schoolgirl” outfits is whacky — although I am a lover of midriff — and I could have gotten drunk taking a shot every time someone thunked down a gun in slow-mo or gotten rich with a penny for every giant CGI gun casing that flipped toward the camera. This is of the more is more school of filmmaking. Synder should have studied more closely what makes Pan’s Labyrinth a brilliant film: Two styles contrasting, with one being hyper realistic, a strong tie between the fantasy and reality planes. And most importantly: highly developed characters including one of the most terrifying genuine evil types to cross the silver screen in years.
Sucker Punch sort of totally could have been cool if we cared.
Title: Near Dark
Director/Stars: Lance Henriksen (Actor), Adrian Pasdar (Actor), Katherine Bigelow (Director)
Genre: Horror
Watched: January 3, 2012
Summary: Old fashioned 80s vamp fun
Somehow I missed this 1987 low budget vampire classic. Not only is it a stylish 80s take on the vampire legend, but it’s written and directed by Katherine Bigelow (very early in her career). She goes on to do Point Break, Strange Days (one of my favorite films), and The Hurt Locker. It’s also packed with a cast straight off the Aliens set. No surprise, given that Bigelow was shacked up with James Cameron in this period. This gives us the ever reliable B-movie king, Lance Henriksen, plus Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein.
This is a dark, road horror movie shot in the days before anything was digital. Still, it’s more watchable than many a newer film. It has excellent direction, stylish cinematography by Cameron alum Adam Greenberg, and an awesome moody Tangerine Dream score (which is going for $120 on Amazon!).
Remind you of Aliens?
The lead, armed only with a vampire name (Caleb) is just some Oklahoma hick. He falls in with a cute girl and a little necking turns into a lot of necking — leaving him daylight challenged. The film focuses fairly effectively on the “becoming a vampire” thing and the symptoms and consequences. It’s all pretty cool except for the “have to kill and drink someone every night” bit (or bite as the case happens to be). Poor Caleb has just too much of a conscience for the lifestyle, but still, he’s dragged alone on a murderous undead joy ride.
The red-neck bar blood fest is a particular highlight.
The vampires in this film stick fairly closely to some of the canonical rules: They catch fire in the daylight, drink blood, etc. But the more religious and bestial tones are dropped. No crosses, no invitations, no coffins, no fangs (that we see). They do heal fast.
I very much enjoyed the film, although in many ways it has more in common with a plain vanilla murder spree road trip movie than most supernatural films. My only beef was with the ending. Somehow Caleb and girl manage to just reverse the whole undead thing with a bit of a transfusion. Vampires should be dead. The dead don’t stop being dead.
For more Film reviews, click here.
Or read about my recently released vampire novel, in which the undead do stay dead.
In the mid to late 90s, Playstation games had three SKUs: SCUS, SCEE, and SCEJ, being respectively the US NTSC version, the European PAL version, and the Japanese NTSC version.
The American version shipped in early September 1996. We finished it in early August (manufacture took a month). From my perspective — and it’s worth noting that during the Crash period I personally did most of the localization work — the European version was finished at the same time. I’d killed myself getting it ready during July. But Europe itself liked to drag matters out with a leisurely testing schedule. I wanted it done, because until it was, I couldn’t do much else.
At Naughty Dog, we pioneered the idea of simultaneous international release. By Crash 2 and Crash 3 the same exact code, conditionalized very slightly, ran all three versions. Jak & Daxter was one of the first games where the American version included the European languages. By Jak II you could switch languages on the fly in the menu anytime. We wanted one code base, one art base, one thing to debug. We wanted it for sale simultaneously world wide. I wanted one gold master.
This goal and the tools to do it began on Crash 1, and were fairly well in place by Crash 2. The international groups weren’t quite as on board and year after year dragged out the European and Japanese editions for extra testing. As best I can tell this resulted mostly from a “this is the way it’s always been done” kind of mentality. Jason and I have never been big on that type of reasoning. Still, that personal caveat aside, even from Crash 1, Sony’s international teams did an awesome job, putting in a tremendous effort to ensure the product was really polished for each territory.
The front of the original PAL edition
Anyway, each territory had its own quirks. With the European version, they stemmed from PAL, the old European video standard. PAL actually has a slightly higher resolution and better color fidelity than NTSC (the US standard). But the kicker is that it runs at 50 hertz instead of 60. For Crash this meant that the frame rate would be 25 frames per second instead of 30.
The resolution itself wasn’t much of a problem. Crash was mostly a 3D game and it wasn’t hard to adjust the projection matrix in the engine to render the game to a different resolution. But the aspect ratio of PAL pixels is also a little different and Crash did have a certain amount of bitmap graphics like the powerups and font. The PAL frame buffers were larger and the machine had the same video RAM so increasing the resolution of the sprites was rarely an option. Generally, we just had to live with a slight aspect shift or stretch them to fit. I developed notation in the original data so that different kinds of sprites could go either way in a fairly uniform manner.
The real kicker was the frame rate. One of the reasons why the animation in Crash is so so much better than most of its contemporaries is that we stored every vertex for every frame — then compressed the living crap out of it. This meant that each segment of animation was sampled from Alias PowerAnimator at 30 fps. I modified the tools to support making a second copy of every animation where the step rate was adjusted to 25fps. The pal version used these files instead of the originals. This worked about 80% of the time. Sometimes it became necessary to notate a particular animation segment as having a strange or custom step for PAL, or even hand code certain frames. I added special constructs to my custom language (GOOL) which made this stuff as automatic as I could.
It often came in these enlarged boxes to fit all those languages!
This had a number of big advantages. First of all, even without the PAL issue, it allowed the physics (and the enemies) to move in a fairly frame rate independent way. Special functions were used to deal with velocity and acceleration which took into account the current frame’s estimated real time (based usually on how long it took the previous frame to compute and render). This meant that the code which propelled Crash in a parabolic arc as he jumped would move him further per frame if the frame rate slipped to 20 or 15 (which, unfortunately, it sometimes did). This wasn’t a perfect solution, 15 fps still played worse than 30, but it helped.
And it really paid off with the PAL conversion. The hard work — and it was incredibly tedious — really only took me about five days. After running all the automatic convertors and debugging those I had to go through the entire game and check every single level, every creature, every behavior of every creature or object and make sure it stilled played and looked okay in PAL. If it didn’t I had to play with the numbers, or in the worst case add some special “if PAL do it a little differently” clauses to the GOOL code.
But this was in a world where most American games just played 16% more sluggishly in Europe and most European games 16% fast in America.
Crash played great in both — and looked great in both. The Euro version actually even looked a little better (higher resolution and better color) although the feel at 25hz was slightly inferior. But we didn’t invent the TV standard.
The final tricky bit with localization was the language(s). Crash 1 didn’t really have any voice (which was to become a huge deal in later games). But it did have some text.
This is Crash 2, which is the only picture I could find, but Crash 1 was similar, just with the C1 title page
In typical programmer fashion, I invented another system for this. All of the text was generated by literal strings in the GOOL code, and since I controlled the compiler, I added a feature where a mapping file could be created for each language specifying the English text and the equivalent phrases in each of our five languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian). I changed the way strings were handled to index into a table and to have five files on disk for the string buffer. This is typical now, but was very unusual then. Even on Crash 1 you could change the language on the fly. But Europe made me put the toggle only at the main menu because they didn’t want to have to test for weird bugs that came up when you switched languages in the middle of a level.
I systemized all of this stuff by having the tools and the game itself both have separate notions of: video rate (NTSC, PAL), territory (which country’s disc it actually was), and language. This separated the concept of language from territory, opening up the possibility of foreign languages in the American versions (which didn’t happen until Jak 1 for logistical and legal reasons).
As requests came in from Europe to do peculiar and territory specific things like “make the game harder because European gamers like a challenge” (after Crash 1 we refused to acknowledge this “truism”) I modified the tools to allow territory specific overrides in the files that controlled the game data. For example, CONTINUE_POINT_64_32 in the jungle level, “hide in europe.” While I’m not sure the frustrated Euro gamer appreciated it, the system did make serving the producer’s requests easier.
In any case, the Euro version of Crash was lavished with the same attention to detail with which we did everything, and Sony Europe did the same. This was one (if not the) first product for which the whole international organization was behind and where they controlled the worldwide rights. Each Sony territory really pulled out all the stops in supporting and promoting the game as “made here.” It was highly localized, not just the game itself but each little country in Europe doing its own advertising and marketing campaign. Even the Irish filmed their own ads with Irish accented actors. Traditionally game players were highly “nationalistic” with, for example, French games selling better in France. The attention paid by both us and at all levels of the Sony infrastructure to selling a worldwide product aimed specifically at each and every consumer group really paid off.
The game sold like wildfire everywhere. Although we had certain champion territories like France and Australia (Crash’s virtual birthplace) who really poured on the love.
The story continues with Crash goes to Japan!
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My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
Yes, Crash really took to the old country.
I can’t resist a little continued geek out and bringing you a video on the making of Renly Baratheon’s armor for season 2 of Game of Thrones.
What’s most impressive about this is not the look per se, but the incredible attention to detail lavished on each and every little item and prop. Truth is, you can’t obviously TELL that this is a unique “fashion prince” take on scale mail, but it’s part of what makes the show look fairly medieval, and not all lame shiny like say… King Author. Oh and then there is the fact that it’s well written. And that’s the most important thing of course.
My full episode by episode coverage of season 1 can be found here.
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My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
And if you believe I’m really done, I’ve got a bridge to sell you…
But anyway, I’m done for now.
Click to embiggen.
As you may have noticed if you were following the last cover post, I went with the orange — again for now. The gray is perhaps prettier, but the orange pops. I also changed up the author font to a more vintage typeface to imply the 1913 time frame of the novel. And we made various other tweaks like brightening the girl which is mostly for shrunken E-Book versions of the cover where she got lost in the shadows.
Anyway, I’ve already uploaded the new version to all three E-Book sites I’m currently live with. Amazon has already updated, but the lamer, slower other sites will lag behind. If you downloaded the old cover and want to upload I suspect you can just “delete” the book from your Kindle app and retrieve the new one from the archives. I’ll test that myself soon.
So you should just go and buy it if you haven't
The first round of the crazy Naughty Dark Contest already has not one, but two special prize winners! And these lucky guys are both from Crash’s home country, Australia.
Tyson Cleary of Tasmania
and
William Errey from Perth
For more info on the contest, a detailed list of prizes and rules can be found here!
Both guys also wanted copies of the original Crash Bandicoot and here they are prior to shipping. I signed both cover and CD, including my special unforgable “symbol.” Yes, like Prince, I have a symbol. But you’ll have to ask the Painted Man what it means.
Thank you both immeasurably!
It’s also worth noting that this has made the virtual hat for the first round even more lucrative for the rest of you. Due to their prize winning each first round ticket is worth at least a 2% chance of winning a prize now — and if someone else claims a special prize, it could be even greater. So read up on the rules and participate.
Start by purchasing The Darkening Dream!
My novel, The Darkening Dream, is now for sale at Barnes and Noble and the Google bookstore.
Buy it Now!
The Nook version is fine, but use Google only if the others don’t work for you. Google’s processing engine rips apart the EPUB and puts it back — with less than dazzling results. You can read it fine, but they mangle my nice CSS formatting and butcher the little chapter start illustrations. I’m still trying to get an improved version through their system.
Paper versions are coming in about two weeks.
Truly it’s no wonder Amazon is winning the E-Book war. I simultaneously started the process of uploading to: Amazon, B&N, Google, Kobo, Sony, and Apple. The results, from best to worst:
Amazon: Took 15 minutes, it was ready 7 hours later.
B&N: Took 15 minutes, nice previewer, took 7 days to post.
Google: Took 2 hours. The interface is one of the worst ever designed. I wasn’t even sure it was processing when I was “done.” Took 48 hours to post. Mangled the book and the price and have been struggling for days to get an updated version posted.
Sony, Kobo, Apple: Still waiting for my applications for accounts to go through. This should be instant! Haven’t even been able to submit the actual book yet.
As a note too, I refuse to use Smashwords until they allow a direct EPUB upload. Using their crazy meatgrinder is not appealing at all.
Title: Sugar & Spice
Author: Saffina Desforges
Genre: Crime Fiction
Length: 353 pages
Read: Dec 26 – 28, 2011
Summary: Disturbing, but gripping
I was slogging through a best selling YA historical fantasy when I finally couldn’t take it anymore. That particular piece of anonymous juvie trash was making me want to gag myself with a spoon so I needed to wash the bad taste out of my mouth with an entirely different kind of filth.
Enter the disturbing indie crime thriller about no less a subject then a serial killer with a taste for little girls. Apparently it’s been a runaway best seller in the UK (both the author and the setting are British). And you’d have to be a total whack-a-doodle like me to even pick up something like this.
Sugar & Spice doesn’t have the greatest writing in the world. The book has a peculiar distant quality — maybe a good thing — and the point of view changes are frequent, confusing, and totally jarring.
Still, I couldn’t put it down. Desforges sure did a lot of research into the dark unpleasant corners of the human psyche. And this book attempts to put you there. Full frontal. It’s not a comfortable place, but it does have all the fascinating quality of a colossal train wreck. There’s no brilliant storytelling here, although the prose is workmanlike and clear. The book could use a 15-20% trim-job. But it’s still a compelling journey if you like to read on the dark side.
If you don’t, stay far, far away.
This is the kickoff post for my new experimental — and hopefully permanent — giveaway program. Via this contest you, dear reader, will have the opportunity to win signed copies of Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter games as well as my books and cool toys. All you have to do is participate in my gleefully elaborate scheme to help sell and promote my new novel, The Darkening Dream.
A detailed list of prizes and rules can be found here!
Or by clicking anytime on the big contest icon in the sidebar.
So if signed copies of any of the following look up your alley, read the rules and participate! And even if you aren’t a collector they apparently have significant dollar value because a set of four signed Crashs sold on Ebay recently for over $453!
