Newfangledness Versus the Coming Thing

So I was thinking about newfangledness, mostly because I really like the word. I also think a lot of things are newfangled, but that is not always such a terrible thing. However, I don't think every departure from old ways and tech is newfangled. Sometimes it's the Coming Thing.

I think the difference is why the thing is new. If it is new just for the sake of having something new, I think it's newfangled. Sometimes I like it though, and I think newfangledness is somewhat subjective. Take Mountain Dew flavors. Every year they have a contest where you can vote on which of their new flavors they will keep, although most of these seem to be a flash in the pan. Some of them are very gross, but some are good, like "Game Fuel". All of them are newfangled. Things like dark chocolate KitKats and Reeses Cups are, I think, a worse kind of newfangled, because the normal variety used milk chocolate to go better with peanut butter. Dark chocolate actually makes these things worse. Consider why Mounds bars have dark chocolate and Almond Joy have milk chocolate. These classic candy bars were painstakingly designed, and the newfangled versions with some swapped ingredients just mess it up.

I think the Coming Thing is new because there was a need to fill, or a real chance of doing something either better, or perhaps for the first time. Automobiles, computers, and the like are good examples, but they make it seem like the difference is one of scale or importance. It's not. The Take 5 bar is a good example of a candy bar that was a new type, and was designed with ingredients that match and contrast perfectly. It could become a new classic.

Another way to think of it is like the 1920s, one of my favorite time periods. We think of the twenties as a free-for-all, full of crazy kids doing crazy things. Flagpole sitting, bobbed hair, the Charleston - all these things were fads, and were newfangled (but occasionally awesome). Also in that decade, however, with the increase in real wages and record low unemployment, middle class families could finally get their hands on refrigerators, radios, cars, phones, fans, and the electricity to run them. That was the coming thing, and it lasted.

Some things are both. I previously said that I think the 3DS is a coming thing, and I still think so, although they better get some good games soon. It's also a newfangled contraption though. There's not really a need for 3D games (although, done right it could be fantastic), but the technological development of a glasses-free 3D screen is amazing, and it will be used for more than toys.

Anyway, yeah, this was supposed to be an a post about eReaders, some of which are the coming thing.... but I got hungry.

Who the heck are these people?!?!

So my brother has this writing style analyzer on his blog, and let's just say I got a bit carried away......

The problem is, it says I write like a bunch of people I've never heard of. It's not that this offends my ego (for real!), it's just that I have no frame of reference, so I don't know what to think of the results. It's quite annoying. I did get some famous authors, one of which made sense, and the other did not.

I pasted this story I did for a class, and it said I write like Ray Bradbury. I guess I can see that. But how about this: I pasted in my review of one of the Ideal Husband movies from this blog, and it said I write like H.P. Lovecraft. Now, I'd love to believe that's true, but I just don't see it in that review. I guess it has really long sentences.....?

Then I pasted in the prologue from a story I'm working on and it said I write like David Foster Wallace. Who is that? Apparently he's some kind of vaguely comedic well-reviewed person. One or two of his titles on Amazon look familiar.....

Most of my reviews from this blog came up as Cory Doctorow. I guess he writes sci-fi...? No idea. I assume the program just looks at sentence structure, maybe some word choices. Obviously not content.

Oh, well. I'll be going with this one:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

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:

Christmas Post! On time this year!

I found the cutest Christmas ornaments! They were 2 for $5 at Costplus! Yay cheap! And they aren't glass, so my darling kitties can't break them! Yay indestructible! There were a whole bunch, but I got the cutest ones, a pig and a zebra in dirigibles! There were also pandas and elephants, and there were also the same animals in hot air balloons, but aerostatic flying machines ought to be steerable. Here they are!

The pig looks like he's having the time of his life, but the zebra doesn't look so sure of this newfangled contraption.

Also, notice the pine cone behind the pig. It's still attached to the tree! That's why we got this particular tree.

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.

Not the Coming Thing

or, For Science!

~ a short rant ~

I was looking at light bulbs last night, pondering stocking up on a few more incandescent bulbs before they become illegal. But I was also looking at compact fluorescent bulbs, because I do use them in most of my lights, especially the ones I use for extended periods.

I couldn't find any that were the right color, only the hideous bright blue ones, or "Daylight". I prefer "soft white" whereas in incandescent bulbs I prefer "soft white", "Edison", or "reveal", although only in my living room, because it's already purple and looks lovely with the slightly purple light.

All these names are, frankly, ridiculous, with the exception of "soft white", which is pretty understandable. Another point of confusion is brightness. We are used to measuring brightness in watts (this hurts me) despite the fact that the coating on white light bulbs slightly affects the brightness. Watts are a measure of how much power they draw, which is different for fluorescent lamps. At least they tell you what wattage of normal light bulb they look like. LED lights are hopeless in this regard, and they will never ever be able to force me to buy one. They'll have to kill me first.

The proper measure of brightness is lumens, or, alternatively, foot candles. We have a standard, folks, why not use it?

But my biggest problem with all these different bulbs is the color and quality of light. LEDs are out of the question because the quality of light is just not there - it has a weird focus because of the shape of the plastic bubble, and this gives it hideous shadows that I find distracting. The color is also quite ugly - the white light from LEDs is just too blue for my taste, for most applications.

Fluorescent bulbs are ok in terms of quality of light - the shadows are a little murky, but I'll live. My problem with fluorescent bulbs is the color. Not all of them are hideous - they do come in a soft white that looks pretty good to the eye. However, usually they have a horrible green or yellow tinge to them that you can see on film or even in digital photos. It's why most photos taken indoors look yellower than they used to, unless your camera has a specific white balance setting for fluorescent.

One of the settings where they'll have to pry the incandescent bulbs out of my cold dead hands is the bathroom mirror. Fluorescent bulbs make me even paler, the circles under my eyes even bluer, and various blotches even redder. It also makes my makeup look gray and dull. The ladies room at my church has overhead fluorescents, which is a problem because that's where brides get ready. They are nervous enough without looking in the mirror and seeing a Tim Burton character!

But there is a solution, offered to us by science! Colors of light can be expressed in numbers! Any photographer knows this. It's called color temperature. Sunlight is 5600K, and incandescent light is 3200K. It's the reason why shooting indoor film outside gives you bluish pictures, and outdoor film will give you orange pictures if you use it inside. There are filters to correct this. Why aren't light bulb colors expressed this way.

Or maybe they are. As I was looking at light bulbs, I saw that some of them did in fact have the color temperature written on the box. The "Daylight" compact fluorescents had "6500K" written down the side. The only problem is, that's 900K bluer than daylight, which I can attest to, having accidentally bought two of the hideous things. One actually worked quite well up inside the ductwork in my former mad science lab. But I have no place where the other doesn't offend the eye. There is no bulb that looks like daylight, except those ones that plants like, and they're too hot to use. Now, color temperature is hardly common knowledge, but you would think that someone involved in the manufacture of light bulbs would have studied lighting at some point.

So, nice try, but until somebody puts a real measure of both brightness and color temperature on light bulbs, I don't think everyone should be forced to make the switch. It's just one example of ecomentalists making our lives smaller, meaner, and less beautiful. That and Sunchip bags.

The Coming Thing!

So, after watching the live broadcast of this year's E3, I believe I can safely say I have found another Coming Thing. And it's weird for me to pick this one out, given my skepticism for Nintendo's recent gimicky junk. Drumroll please:

The 3DS! Its marvelous! It's 3D, without glasses (I think the screen is polarized?) Now I am not a fan of 3D movies. I think it's a fad that should have died with poodle skirts and radium watches and stayed dead. The new gray glasses really don't make it any better. My biggest problem with 3D, as with any technology in a movie, is that filmmakers use it as a crutch. Look at the slew of really terrible CGI movies out there, before Pixar dominated that niche (not that people don't continue to make bad ones). If a movie needs 3D to make it fun to watch, then not only is it not worth the extra 3 bucks, it's probably not worth the regular price either. If the movie is good anyway, maybe 3D is kind of fun, but again, not worth the extra money. I like the use of 3D in one place - the Bug's Life show at Disney's California Adventure. Not to give anything away, but it's how William Castle would have done 3D if he'd had lots of money. It's the perfection of the technology used in "Honey I Shrunk the Audience".

Enough about movies and shows. We're talking games here! Going back to Disneyland (I wish I was) the Toy Story game is a good example of how this is successful. It's a shooting game, with 3D stages and projectiles projected on the screen, that totally look like they're coming out of your gun. The depth looks very realistic, and adjusting your aim is very intuitive. That's what Nintendo has done with the 3DS. One of the developers explained how they thought it was important to be able to judge the distance between yourself and your target. You can also adjust the level of depth, and even turn the 3D off (it's truly magical). I think games are better for 3D, since they would not just use it for a different look, but for a whole different way of interacting (imagine the Zelda puzzles!!!!!). Developers are going to have a field day making games for this.

And what game are they launching with the handheld? KID ICARUS!!!!!!!! I turned to my brother when they showed the 3DS and said "I hope they make good flying games for this" and then they announced Kid Icarus and I squeed. They made it specially for the 3DS, under a secret project called Project Sora (mysterious). The part with the lasers will look awesome in 3D.

Which brings me to Zelda..... no, there's not a 3D Zelda yet (can't wait though). I'm talking about Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword!!!!! For the Wii, and for the win! It's beautiful, and has realistic swordfighting! It's also pretty! It's bright, but not cartoony, keeping the realistic style but with nifty painterly cel-shading. It kind of reminds me of Ocarina of Time, but without the polygons. The environments are huge and gorgeous, and you can use items in awesome new ways. All my horrifying doubts and sickening imaginings evaporated in the glow of the new trailer. I can't wait!

Also, if anyone from Nintendo is reading this (one of my five readers is a Nintendo developer, right? Right?) .....Zelda.... has gone from sailboats....to steamboats.....to trains......there needs to be an airship Zelda games for the 3DS!