Hooray for History Fans!

And I mean fans in the fangirl/fangent/otakuish sense. Hmm. I just realized something. I used "fangent" to mean a tangent indulged in by fans (a more random and less canonical relative of the fan theory) but when paired with fangirl, it could also be a gentleman who is a fan. This all makes me very happy.

BUT!

Not as happy as this web comic, which I stumbled across by way of Twitter (because random steampunk tidbits soothe my fevered brow better than actual sleep {my brow is fevered because I recently became a computer teacher, while keeping my part-time job at Barnes and Noble.})

It reminds me in a way of Five Fists of Science, but, dare I say(?) better. I feel that there should be a question mark in the previous sentence, so I put one in. And I do dare say it, because FFoS is pretty entertaining, but kind of meh. Any hoo, "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" is about Charles Babbage, creator of the first computer, and Ada Lovelace, creator of the first computer program. Apparently they fight crime? It's fantastic.

Even more fantastic (but actually less fantastic inasmuch as it's actually true) are all the links to Primary Source Documents by about the protagonists. I dare not start clicking on any more of them tonight or I really won't get any sleep. And then I won't be able to set up the computers for next week's classes. Maybe I should give the middle school kids a project later to research the history of computers on the interwebz. Whoever can go back the farthest gets a prize.

Of course, depending on how broadly one defines computers, there were even earlier examples of machines that used basic logic, but not to do math. So, since a computer ought to compute, the Difference Engine was the first one.

The Coming Thing! (I want it)

So, the new version of the Mac OS X came out recently. It's called Lion. I read this nineteen page review of it, and I totally want it! Now! Unfortunately, I would need to install the previous OS X, Snow Leopard, in order to install Lion, because of some kind of magic regarding how it partitions some disk space for itself. Oh, I wish I had money, then I would just get a fancy new Mac that already had Lion.....

At first I was a bit distressed to see that they'd really flattened the look of all the buttons and widgets and icons and things, because I liked the candy-coated look of the OS X. But when they got to the part about the scroll bars, I began to think it was really beautiful and clean, like the more recent versions of iTunes. On the whole, I like Apple's design philosophy, and I like that this is more on the sleek side, rather than the cutesy side. The only caveat I have is, they got rid of the clicky arrows for the scroll bars - I hate having to move the mouse if I don't want to, although you can still use the arrow keys of course. However, I think this is more than made up for by the fact that you can resize windows from any edge! Not just the bottom right corner.

It has autosave on everything (everything native, that is, you still have to hit apple-S for most third-party programs). Now, ordinarily, I turn autosave off, because half the time I make changes I'm not sure about, and only save them if I'm sure. I get really paranoid about saving over the good version of things. But Lion makes a previous version every time it saves, so you can go back and recover stuff in a neat new application. It also saves your last window arrangement from the last time you were using it. That is cool. I'm looking at you, Final Cut Pro....

The second half of the review is about technical stuff. I only understood part of it, and it took me a couple nights to get through, but it's pretty amazing how smart they made it. The way it uses memory, the way it allows applications to talk to each other, and the way it lets you customize different screens are all quite cool. As I was reading it, it totally seemed like Tron.

Also, at first it seemed like they were getting it a little too dumbed-down for new users, but the fact that it is actually more customizable than previous Macs, and has much more powerful tools, is awesome. I think it's important for computers to be intuitive enough not to intimidate new (usually old) users, but offer enough depth to get them to do all the stuff you need without jumping through hoops and wasting time.

Yep, if I ever get a real job, the first thing I will buy, even before a new tattoo, will be a sweet new Mac....I can dream can't I?

A Coming Thing - the eReader!

So - eReaders. I think they are the coming thing, especially the Nook and sort of the iPad (not because it is a particularly good ereader, but because it can run ereader apps and also does a bajillion other things). I say "sort of" for the iPad because it's dead to me. When Mac comes out with a computer where I can draw on the screen in Photoshop and dump my drawings into Final Cut to animate them, then we'll talk.

Anyway, ereaders: In the interest of full disclosure, I work at Barnes and Noble, but even if I didn't I would think the Nook is better than the other readers, including Kindle. Sadly, Kindle is the next best one, but it's miles behind the Nook. This post isn't really about consumer information, but just a quick note - the Kindle uses a proprietary format so you have to get your ebooks from Amazon, and that is not and will never be the coming thing (that's not to say it won't become more common in the future, but that is not what makes something the coming thing. I also don't think it will be more common - I've heard Amazon is going to cave and start allowing epub on the kindle). Nook is open-source and uses epub and pdfs, so you can get books from every site except Amazon, including libraries for free. That is the coming thing.

As much as I like the Nook Color, I really think the new Nook, with the e-ink touchscreen is the best. What I like about it is how it seems very simple, and in fact it is, but only because it's very high tech.

When the Kindle came out, followed closely by the Nook, e-ink was pretty new, with a really slow refresh rate, and a longish black flash when you turned the page. The cool thing is, during that black flash, magnets are pushing ink around into little grids, like an etch-a-sketch, basically. Now the refresh rate is much faster, and the screen looks crisper and more contrasty. The old Nook had an e-ink reading screen on top and a touch screen on the bottom, and weighed about two ounces more than the kindle, which only has a keypad on the bottom. The touchscreen allowed for menus to be rearranged and added via software updates so people can get much more use out of the same hardware. It's a little awkward, however, to perform tasks such as highlighting passages using two different screens.

Then the Nook Color came out. It's really fun! It has a full web browser, and it has apps (don't start playing Angry Birds or Flight Control - they're like crack. Actually Angry Birds reminds me a bit of Super Artillery, an Apple II game I loved in my childhood). It has better reading software and tools because the whole screen is touch. It also weighs a pound and has only eight hours of battery life, unless you kill the battery faster playing Angry Birds. Still, at $249, it's one of the best Andriod Tablet values on the market. If I had the money I might get one just for Epicurious.

But, really, if I had the money, I'd get the new Nook and be glad I waited. It's the most advanced, since it's an e-ink touchscreen. They stacked them on top of each other, yet it's thinner than both other Nooks and weighs just under 8 ounces. This is because the new e-ink parts are so small and the touchscreen is infrared, rather than detecting the electricity in the salts on your skin. It uses so little battery that you go up to 2 months without charging it, and it has a much more consistent sensitivity than the color LCD touch screen.

Ereading is the coming thing, especially for people who like old or unusual books, or are poor. It is not for everyone, like people who feel the need to snort the musty fragrance of paper books. My response to them - buy the ebook of stuff you kinda like, and save your money for the hardcover of books you will treasure. It's like people who only buy DVDs and refuse to rent them. It's weird. I think e-reading is awesome. For example, I like to write in books, especially since I read nonfiction for fun. Some books, like the Summa Theologica, are too big and printed too small to write in. A double spaced version would be prohibitively massive and expensive. There is a beautifully formatted eBook of it for 99¢, and you can put as many notes as you want, highlight it different colors, and send your notes to your email or facebook (or to your friends). It even adds the notes to the book's table of contents so you can find them easily. That's why it's awesome.

e-ink is also the coming thing. I'm very impressed how fast they got it to be in a touch screen, and I can't wait until they have color e-ink. I hear they are working on it, but I imagine the refresh rate on all the colors you'd have to mix would be very very slow. Also, the screen is opaque, so you could not stack black, magenta, yellow and cyan screens on top of each other, which is basically how printing is done, as well as real Technicolor film. I love how it looks though, and I think it is more futuristic than backlit screens. Anybody can imagine how an LCD screen is to read on, having at some point stared at a computer screen for hours (it's not very nice), but having changing ink is very cool and new. It also shows that the companies thought about how people like to read, and what they might enjoy. The best thing about e-ink is that it is very human, and very easy on the eyes. Ereading is a pleasure, and that makes me feels good about the future, which is precisely what "The Coming Thing" is all about.

Chap Hop! Ukuleles! WAR!

This is kind of weird.... so, I've meaning to write a post for a while about ukuleles. No, really. I find it is impossible to feel sad when someone is playing a ukulele, particularly if it is 20s-ish music. For example, this is a delightful song I stumbled across on youtube.

Then I was reading The Chap, one of my favorite magazines of all time (on their website), and they mentioned Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer, who is performing at this year's ball. I remembered him because of the Chap Manifesto, which he set to rap in honor of the publication's tenth birthday. Anyway, here is one of his videos:

I think his banjolele is quite catchy, but apparently there is already a king of chap hop, and he is Professor Elemental. Here is what he has to say:

And the response? I think it's a response....?

Apparently some of the fans are pretty die-hard, but I like them both. Although, Prof. E. does have an album called Indifference Engine, so that gets him brownie points. Anyway, there is one thing we can all agree on:

Some Reviews

I just read what may be the best fantasy story I've seen in years! It's called "Nine Pound Hammer", and it's the first book in the Clockwork Dark Trilogy, by John Claude Bemis. Yes, "clockwork dark" is as cool as it sounds! The author is a musician from the south, so he naturally knows about John Henry, and decided to turn the story into epic fantasy, using all kinds of American folklore, and steampunkish flair. The main character is a boy named Ray, who was is headed south on a train with many other orphans, following the pull of his father's mysterious Lodestone. When he sleeps with the stone, he has dreams about being chased by a monstrous clockwork hound. He runs away and joins a traveling medicine show, where he learns some very interesting things. There are some very cool twists and the characters are all awesome. I couldn't put this book down, and I can't wait to read "The Wolf Tree"!

On to games! I played Red Dead Redemption a while back, and I really liked it, with a couple of reservations. First, the bad, then the good, then the ugly:

The minor complaint I had about this game was the lack of depth. Heresy, they'll say! It's a huge sprawling sandbox style game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sandbox style games tend to be very repetitive, and this was no exception. Sure, the different environments looked different and had different animals (freakin' mountain lions!) but you pretty much do the same things all the time. I wanted more control over the story - since morality is a big feature of the story, it would have been nice to be able to make a few choices, pick out who your allies are, that sort of thing. They managed it in Steambot Chronicle (not that that wasn't repetitive).

Also, while they do an excellent job establishing time and place, it manages to feel very static. A major feature of the setting is the end of the wild west, the spread of the railroad, the introduction of the car! And yet, I never got a sense of the tension, excitement, or melancholy that should go along with this change, outside of a couple of scenes where it was specifically mentioned.

My more overarching problem was a typical one for Rockstar. Although it seems like their hearts are starting to be in the right place, they still have the puerile tendency to substitute the sordid for the mature. This doesn't make it any edgier, and it certainly doesn't make it any deeper. I would have liked for even one of the Stranger subquests to have a happy ending.

Now for the good: This game is beautiful! Sure, all kinds of games are pretty to look at, and all kinds of games use it as an excuse for lousy gameplay. But this is different - it is like being drawn into the pages of Arizona Highways! It makes the game so immersive and engaging, you can almost smell the greasewood and pinetrees, and feel the gritty wind shift from hot to cold when a monsoon blows in. The graphics and sound design really make a difference here.

I love the story too! The premise is your character used to be an outlaw, and he tried to settle down and be a rancher with his wife and son, but federal agents kidnapped them in order to force you to hunt down your old gang. You have a whole bunch of missions where you do just that, with a few twists and obstacles thrown in. It's all tons of fun, and there's enough variety to keep it interesting - everything to storming forts to herding cattle, from robbing trains to dueling in the streets! There are sidequests too, which start off fun, but after a whole bunch of them ending badly, I started to dread them popping up. Your actions determine both your fame and honor ratings, which change how the random characters and especially law enforcement interact with you. It's way easier if you behave yourself (Hint: if you see a guy running and screaming, make sure the guys chasing him aren't wearing silver stars before you shoot at them.) If things get too hot you can pay off your bounty.

~ Spoiler alert! Highlight to keep reading ~

I really like the last few missions, where you finally find the last bad guy. And then the game keeps going! You go home to your ranch, and do missions for your wife, and teach your boy to shoot and rope, and bring supplies to the neighboring ranch! You start to build a real life, and offer your son more than you had. He wants to be a writer, and is enchanted with novels of the wild west. Or he wants to be a rich industrialist. You tell him he be whatever he wants, but he has to bring the cattle in first. I actually thought this was the most enjoyable part of the game. Of course, the g-men won't just leave you alone, and they come after you. You get your family to safety and a Butch and Sundance style stand-off, and get killed. Your family comes back, and the credits play as they bury you, and the soundtrack is "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie". I cried. It was a great ending.

Or was it?

The ugly: They had to go and ruin the ending. After the credits, four years have passed, your wife has died, and your son has become a gunslinger. You play as him now. You hunt down the retired agent who set you up and murder him in cold blood. Then you ride around and do nothing - no more missions, no more story, no nothing. What the hell did this guy's father fight and die for?!?! It is the worst possible ending they could possibly have had. It pretty much ruined the game for me.

New Abney Park Album!

After long weeks of waiting, I finally received "Aether Shanties" the new Anbey Park CD in the mail (It's the first album of theirs that I actually got the physical CD for). It's quite good. Not as industrial or tribal sounding as some of their other stuff, but all the tracks definitely sound like them.

There is a steampunky version of the traditional pirate song "The Derelict", with all the verses in their gruesome glory, and they wrote their own pirate song too, "Aether Shanties". It's definitely my favorite song on the album. They have another pirate song, "Ballad of Captain Robert", that is on Youtube from an acoustic set at a convention, and I think they should put it on a CD in the near future.

There is even a Steampunk anthem! That's right! It's called "Throw Them Overboard", and it pretty much sums it up. Any anthem that say "newfangled" is all right in my book, dang-nabbit!

One thing that came as a nice surprise were a couple of 1920's sort of jazzy numbers. When I heard them, the first thing I thought of was a sort of Bertie Woosterish character in a garish club full of aeronauts, but that is probably because I have just begun reading all the P.G. Wodehouse I can get my hands on. It makes me want to write a story I have had in my head for a while...

What's with the Lafayette Escadrille movies?

So now I have seen (I think) all the World War I flying movies there are, at least on video and DVD. I saved the ones that are actually about the Lafayette Escadrille for last. And I gotta say, meh.

First, I rented "Lafayette Escadrille". I had high hopes for this one, since it was directed by William Wellman ("Wings"), who was actually one of the pilots who was in the real thing. I was a little suspicious of the fact that it was made in 1958, which is a little close to the 60s for my taste. The problem with this film wasn't that it seemed like a sixties movie, because it didn't. The problem was that it seemed like the first act of a bigger movie, and the Lafayette Escadrille was barely in it. In fact, it had very little flying at all. I suppose saying "I wanted more" isn't exactly a bad review, but when there isn't any more, it does mean the film is disappointing.

First, though, the good parts. Even more than "Wings", this film shows how the pilots lived, and how they were trained. It showed them trying to steer "penguins", basically plane bodies with stubby wings, and trying to follow orders and instructions in French. It also had the characters briefly meeting such awesome figures as Lufbery and Guynemer. The story was engaging, until it ended, and I was left going "Wait, where's the rest of the movie?" I was pretty into it, but it just wasn't satisfying. I'm not going to do a summary, since none of the issues I have are with the aviation-related parts, which were OK, but no "Hell's Angels" (curse, you, Howard Hughes - all dogfighting films are boring now!!!)

The best thing about "Lafayette Escadrille" is how it shows the reasons why they did what they did. Partly, they were young and seeking adventure, and fighting in the air force was the ultimate way to do that, but mostly they felt they should do something in the war, and they were angry the U.S. wasn't getting involved. That's not usually portrayed in movies.

Speaking of movies that miss the point, after several weeks I finally worked up the courage to rent "Flyboys". In those weeks I read the Red Baron's book, Eddie Rickenbacker's book - Fighting the Flying Circius, and James Norman Hall's series of magazine articles, in order to form a perfect picture in my mind, a picture that could withstand the thrashing that film would inevitably give it.

It actually wasn't as bad as I expected (not that it could have been). It was nice-looking, and the dogfighting bits were fun. Not good, but fun. Let us bear in mind that it was made by the guy who did "Independence Day" and "The Patriot", so yeah... The characters ranged from meh to lame, the acting was kind of appalling, and the story was totally predictable, except where it was surprisingly absurd.

The characters would have been OK if they had actually been developed. They basically had the usual mix of guys you have in a war film - the hotheaded guy, the religious guy, the nerdy skinny kid, the black guy, you know. They also had a rich snobby guy, a clumsy guy, and a guy whose family were all soldiers and he was eager to go carry on the family tradition... he was kinda weird. They had a leader, and he was distant and disillusioned - more on him later. The main character was pretty likable, but I hear he was inspired by Frank Luke. Let's just say he's no Frank Luke. This is mostly a personal pet peeve, but he should have been a miner from Arizona, not a rancher from Texas. What can I say - the Arizona Balloon Buster has a special place in my heart. The leader of their squadron was quite wanksty and needed to grow up and get over it. He was all "all my friends are dead and I only keep doing this for revenge and (the usual speech) no one even knows why we're in this war. You'll be dead in a few weeks too." Mr. Morale. None of the other characters were anything to write home about except some of them had some very strange (stupid) things happen to them. I did like their instructor, who was played by Jean Reno. My biggest problem with characters was that they each had their own personal reason for joining the Escadrille, each of which was all right, but not a single one was there for the actual reasons why most the real guys were, like doing the right thing for your country even when it hasn't figured out what the right thing is. It seemed very shallow.

I'm not even getting into the story. I do recommend watching this film though - it's worth a few laughs, and I would hate to spoil any spit-take worthy surprises. Seriously. Watch this movie.

Now for the technical things. First, the good parts. They show some training stuff that's not in the other films, and they have a pet lion, which is, strangely, almost historically accurate (there should have been two pet lions). Also, they have a very exciting attack on an airship. It's not quite as cool as the one in "Hell's Angels", but some parts were kind of interesting, such as how it's actually harder than it sounds to blow one up, even with incendiary bullets (basically because you can't get near it). What you have to do is upload a virus from your Mac to the German dirigible. I personally wish they would have shown some actual balloon busting, sticking with the whole Frank Luke thing. They also explain why Fokker triplanes were so formidable.

It's a good thing they do explain that, since the entire German air force apparently consisted of bright red triplanes, because, you know, the Red Baron wasn't special or anything. The main bad guy had a black one at least. They shouldn't have been using triplanes at all. But whatever - they did it on purpose to make it easier to tell the planes apart during the action sequences. I'm sure they could have found another way to do that. Like editing. Or painting big black crosses on some of the planes and red, white, and blue circles on the others...

The dogfighting scenes were fast-paced, but not really chaotic enough. They did try to show some tactics, like to get in a good firing position before shooting, using the sun and clouds, and things like that. There were some nice visuals, like when a bunch of planes come out of the sun, and when all the planes are fighting around the airship. A lot of the maneuvers they do are kind of stupid. For example, one time an American has a Fokker on his tail, maybe ten yards behind (and somehow unable to shoot him?) He does some kind of airbrake thing (not invented yet), pulls up, and uses his wheels to tear the triplane's top wing off. Uh-huh. Also, after making a big deal about how agile the triplanes are, and how fast they climb, the Americans proceed to fly circles around them, sometimes literally, in their Nieuports. Two or three times they do a move where they basically flip upside-down, let the triplane go under them (over their heads) and then finish the roll to drop onto the German's tail. It's shown in this video about Werner Voss, at 4:30. Except notice that in real life, Voss did the move in the triplane. That's the point of a triplane, and Voss was one of the most daring pilots when it came to the maneuvers he would do. He seems to have been a showboating rival character for the Red Baron.

It's a small detail, but there are parts where the propellers are spinning but the cylinders on the rotary engines are still. That's just an animation problem, but it's kind of lame. They should have grouped the engine to the propeller on the models, just like they were attached in real life. What's not a small detail is the way they show them flying through Archie, the German anti-aircraft guns. There's a funny part in Rickenbacker's book about what it's like to fly through artillery, and how it basically makes a bunch of shockwaves in the air. From as far as fifty yards one of those shells could knock a plane out of the sky. In the film they come considerably closer. It does make it more exciting, visually, and I would have done *almost* the same thing. What I would not do is have a shell burst right under the wheels of a plane, and the plane be OK.

My biggest problem with the dogfight scenes was the editing. They were done with computers, so there is nothing - NOTHING - they could not and should not show, and yet, they held back. It's not as though they had to put eighty planes in the sky with twenty-six cameras strapped to them and shoot miles and miles of film while endangering dozens of men's lives or anything. The usual (non-Howard Hughes) way of showing a plane getting shot down would be to do a couple of close-ups of guns and bullet holes, whatever intimacy with pilot death you feel your audience needs to see, the plane starts smoking and spinning down, you cut to it going behind a hill and cut to an explosion. The cuts are in there to protect the stuntmen, save the expensive real plane, and disguise your model. If you have an invincible digital model with an immortal digital pilot, you slam that plane into the ground and blow it up for all to see! Every maneuver should be shown in its entirety, since you don't need match-on-action cutting to construct the right moves, and you don't need clever angles to make the bad guys look closer than they actually are. The reason I love animation is that if you can imagine something, you can show it. It seems to me that the storyboarders, choreographers, and director weren't imaginative enough. They copied a bunch of dogfighting sequences from films with real-life limitations, instead of starting from scratch and showing us something we'd never seen before. Actually, there is a scene in "The Aviator", where Howard Hughes is shooting the big dogfight for "Hell's Angels", that has almost the perfect feeling of speed and stomach-churning acrobatics, and shots you could only get with animation. It seems somewhat ironic. Actually, the proper feeling in a dogfight scene might also be similar to the Quidditch games in the Harry Potter movies - truly dizzying action!

To me the "Flyboys" fights seemed detached, but that might just be the predictability of the story combined with the uninteresting characters, and I was the one who was detached. I just think a dogfight scene should be visceral and chaotic, but not like a Bourne movie. You should be in the pilot's head. You should be able to tell what's happening, but it should be blazing fast, and it should be scary!

Despite its sub-video game graphics and lack of any closeups of the pilots, History Channel's Dogfights series actually comes closest to this feeling, with the exception of "Hell's Angels". The dogfights in "Hell's Angels" are actually scary. They are some of the most intense and realistic portrayals of aerial combat - they show how unforgiving it is, how hard and frantic the most graceful movements are from the pilots' point of view, and how fragile those machines and the men who flew them really were. They used editing, not to disguise cuts between real planes and models (because there were no models), but to establish pacing and mood. Probably the longest shots were when a plane was going down, and they would show the pilot in the cockpit, dead or dying, or alive for the entire 15000 foot drop, with the shadow from his wings sweeping over him faster and faster as his plane went out of control. That, I think, is what made those scenes scary - death in a dogfight was lonely, and could come at any second, and even if you didn't make a mistake, you might just have rotten luck.

I, for one, am in awe of the people who fought in the air, and the ones who still do it to this day. (And it's not just because I kind of have a thing for airmen.)

This concludes what accidentally turned into a series about World War I films. Next up, Easter eggs (a month late).

An Ideal Husband Part 2

A few posts ago I wrote about Oscar Wilde's play "An Ideal Husband", which is one of my favorite plays, although I have never seen it performed, because it's not that famous. I wanted to see it fleshed out somehow.

So I finally bit the bullet and rented the DVD of "An Ideal Husband", the one with Rupert Everett. I was reluctant to check out this version because I read so many bad reviews of it, but someone told me she liked Rupert Everett's performance as Lord Goring, and that it was a good movie. I suppose it was an OK movie, as long you have not read the play. I suppose Rupert Everett was good, as long as you don't know about Lord Goring. I suppose I should start at the beginning.

There were some good things about this film. The costumes were beautiful, as were the sets. As a production designer and a fan of Victorian fashion, this was a real treat. Some of the performances were very good, especially Kate Blanchett, but then again, she's always good.

Rupert Everett was good too, just as a performance, but not necessarily the way I picture Lord Goring. I liked a couple of parts where he gets philosophical and passionate, and yet still tries to maintain his airhead dandyish facade, even though it's painful, and he needs his friends to listen to him. However, other than that, I think he was miscast. For one thing, Lord Goring is supposed to possess an easy grace and disarming wit that is effortless, and it's pleasantly surprising and sort of thrilling when he turns he turns out to be intelligent and morally upright. It seemed more like he was trying too hard to seem frivolous, and he was sort of brooding. It's hard to put my finger on it, but he didn't seem very Lord Goring-like.

The biggest problem was simply the adaptation. Half the play wasn't in the movie, which is typical, but half the movie wasn't in the play, which is far worse! During the entire second half of the film, one thought kept going through my mind: "Not in the play!" If you took a drink every time a line of dialogue (or even an entire conversation) was not in the play, you wouldn't last halfway through the film, and the first half was relatively faithful. Not only was it annoying to not see most of my favorite lines and exchanges, but some of the changes were to actual themes and plot, and to the characters' motivations. I won't give any spoilers, but let's just say it was very shallow compared to the play, and many of the plot twists toward the end were over-explained, showing the screenwriters' apparent contempt for the audience's intelligence, or else rewritten, showing their apparent contempt for Oscar Wilde.

Steampunk games!

This being National Novel(a) Writing Month, I am writing a steampunk adventure story. Naturally that means I am spending an inordinate amount of time playing video games (as well as looking at airship videos on youtube, reading comics, looking at old photos and other "research"). So I thought it would be time well spent to write about a couple of steampunk games. One of them actually inspires me a great deal when I write my book (it's about flying, you see, among other things) and that is Skygunner for the PS2. Just the opening video for this game makes you feel like you are actually flying! It's just a beautiful game. The story is fair, and the cutscenes are a little flat, but it has wonderful, lovely airships, nice lighting, and very pretty dogfighting. Speaking of dogfighting, this game has a really nice feel to it. Now I am horrible at dogfighting games. This one has a simplified system that some die-hard flying game fans might find boring, but you can also choose a harder, more technical setup. The game has 3 characters with 3 levels of difficulty, and other characters are unlockable. (Actually the 3rd character must be unlocked, but you just have to beat the game with either character and you can play him) It starts out easy and rapidly becomes more difficult, keeping you on your toes. I am still trying to unlock my favorite character, but he's impossible! A nice touch for this game is you can choose English or Japanese.

The other steampunk game I like is Steambot Chronicle, also for PS2. It takes place at the dawn of the electric age, and it is a sandbox style game. It has a pretty good plot, with various endings and such, and you can run around and do all kinds of stuff and customize your robot. I spend a LOT of time painting my robot and putting an umbrella on top and taking the girl characters on picnics. It's also very pretty, particularly the lighting for certain times of day. Just a word of warning, you cannot pick the language on this game - there is only English or Off. Choose Off, because the dub causes internal bleeding and brain damage. It will make you embarrassed to be playing this game, even when no one is there. There is a sequel that looks soooo pretty, but I don't know if it's coming out here. . . .