Review: Lawless

Cast:

  • Tom Hardy as BaneVoice McBootlegger.
  • Shia LaBeouf as LessAnnoyingThanYou’dThink McBootlegger.
  • Guy Pearce as TypicallyWeird AgentMan.

What’ll happen when their world’s collide? Heads will be shot! Stills will be exploded! And bad guy annoying ticks will become ALL TOO MUCH!

Still, not bad though. Hardy’s pretty good, as always, and Shia ‘LaBeouf’ The Beef didn’t make me want to get all stabby like he usually does. Plenty of blood and violence and a insightful look into 1930’s, Prohibition-era blah blah blah.

Really, just watch it for heads getting shot.

 Lawless – IMDb

Hypercritical: Nintendo in Crisis

Siracusa on Nintendo’s current woes:

Nintendo needs to do what Nintendo does best: create amazing combinations of hardware and software. That’s what has saved the company in the past, and it’s the only thing that will ensure its future.

via Hypercritical: Nintendo in Crisis.

I hope Nintendo survives, I really do. I’m not convinced that them producing iOS versions of their most popular games (or even bespoke iOS games) is the path to salvation – I’d much rather see them survive in the vein that John Siracusa mentions above.

For a long while I was a Sega man. I yearned for a Master System when I was young, and having finally got my hands on one for my (10th, 11th?) birthday, me and it were inseparable. I played the hell out of that console. Everything from Italia ’90 to Wonderboy III, from Alex Kidd in Miracle World to Shinobi, I just couldn’t get enough of it. I remember my Dad watching me play Hang-On and commenting on it being so realistic – after coming from a green-screen Amstrad CPC6128, it was as though we were watching real motorbike racing on the TV.

However, as much as I loved my Master System, my friend James had a NES. Outwardly, I liked to mock his blocky, boxy console, compared to my contoured, sloped beast. Inwardly, however, I was crazy jealous of his games: Super Mario Bros., Mega Man, The Legend of Zelda. The list went on. Sure, Wonderboy III was good but c’mon, Super. Mario. Bros.

Eventually, I gave in to the Sega marketing machine and persuaded my parents to allow me to trade up my Master System and raft of games for a Mega Drive. Woah. The Mega Drive was a different beast entirely. An altered beast, if you will. The graphics, the music, the game complexity, all light years ahead of its little 8-bit predecessor. I spent what seemed like years playing that puppy. I couldn’t get enough of Sonic the Hedgehog, the Street Fighter II series, every Madden game, the EA NHL series, Castle of Illusion, and probably a thousand others I’m forgetting. It was around this time that I started buying all the associated magazines, too, like C&VG and Mean Machines, and pored over their pages for the latest rumblings about upcoming games and systems from the Far East, a mythical land that got all the best stuff years before we Westerners did. I remember calling up some of the advertisers in these mags to get a grey import of a certain game that wasn’t out in the UK at the time (the region lock on the Mega Drive was that each region had a differently shaped cartridge, a fiendish system that could only be overcome by removing the corresponding piece of moulded plastic within the console’s cartridge slot), and being simultaneously thrilled and petrified. Thrilled at the thought of getting an awesome new game, petrified that I, an early teenager, had to actually talk to someone on the phone.

But I wanted more. So I went big and, as it turned out, I went wrong. I carried on believing the Sega marketing, and managed to find the cash required for a grey import Mega CD. Oh dear. The only game I managed to afford for it was Earnest Evans, which turned out to me a mediocre Castlevania rip off with a ridiculous soundtrack, and even more ridiculous animated cut scenes. Not cool. The prospects for future Mega CD games didn’t look too hot, either. What to do, what to do…

So one Saturday morning, Dad and I set off in the car for a video game shop in Goldthorpe, South Yorkshire, the name of which unfortunately escapes me. With us, we had my beloved Mega Drive, my not-so-beloved Mega CD and the plethora of games for the Mega Drive that I’d accrued over the years. I’d found out that this video game shop would entertain part exchanges and, after countless hours hand-wringing and perusing of the video game magazines, I’d decided to cash in my chips and get a Super NES. Yup, I’d decided to switch my allegiances and, at the end of the day, it was all down to one game: Super Mario World. I’d read and reread the reviews of it when it came out, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. I cursed it and cursed it for being on a competing system, especially when I (or, more accurately, my parents) had invested so heavily in Sega kit. But I longed for it, and when I was wavering whilst deciding whether to dump my Sega systems, it was the thought of Super Mario World that swung it for me. Oh, the colours, Yoshi, the cape, everything about it seemed perfect to my eyes. The SNES controller, with all those colours and buttons, was the Super Mario controller (well, it was the 2D Super Mario controller; the N64 controller became the 3D Super Mario controller). So on that Saturday, on the way back from Goldthorpe with my new console and a copy of Super Mario World, I was like a pig in shit. Needless to say, I played the living hell out of that game, as I did with any others I could get my hands on. F-Zero, Pilotwings, Super Mario Kart, 4-player Super Bomberman and many more.

And that was the start of my Nintendo love. I followed up the SNES with a Nintendo 64 a few years later, after playing about 10 minutes of Super Mario 64 on my then-girlfriend’s family’s N64 and becoming instantly hooked. Super Mario 64 was the epitome of a company marrying hardware and software beautifully to create a near-perfect video game. Siracusa comments on this in the aforelinked post, too. Whilst in recent years I’ve dallied with Playstations 2 and 3 for “serious” gaming, I’ve also had a Nintendo DS, DS Lite, 3DS XL and Wii for “casual” gaming (I somehow missed out on the Gamecube, and don’t have any real desire for a Wii U. Yet.) And I’ve probably had more enjoyment out of the casual consoles than I have out of the grown-up Playstations.

So yes, I want to see Nintendo survive, and survive through creating killer new hardware and first-party software combos that show the big, serious boys at Microsoft and Sony how to do it, rather than dilute the brand by releasing their franchises on iOS or Android. It may be wishful thinking but, as Siracusa points out, if casual gaming isn’t going away, this is what Nintendo might have to do to survive.

Review: Beware of Mr. Baker

A fascinating look at one of the greatest drummers the world has ever seen, and, apparently, one of the most dislikable people about which to make a biography. That the documentary opens with Baker smashing writer-director Jay Bulger in the face with his walking stick tells you all you need to know about his character.

But that shouldn’t distract from the fact that the man is considered one of the most influential rock and jazz drummers of all time, and single-handedly created the template for the modern superstar drummer. Watch this, then go listen to a live version of ‘Toad’ by Cream. When you can play a 13-minute drum solo like that, it probably doesn’t matter how much of a colossal shit you are in real life.

Beware of Mr. Baker – IMDb

Review: Olympus Has Fallen

Why don’t you and I play a game of fuck off. You go first.

— Mike Banning (Gerard Butler)

That quote just about sums up the movie. It’s Die Hard with Leonidas in the White House. What more do you want? It’s simple, dumb fun that kept me more than entertained for a couple of hours but hey, let’s keep that a secret between us, right?

Olympus Has Fallen – IMDb

“Muso-wankers bore me senseless.”

My pal Matt telling it like it is in his review of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre:

Seeing what’s behind the curtain isn’t for everyone. Shitty metaphors aside, some people have no problem with appreciating art purely on the technical ability and execution.  I’m less inclined towards this.  Similarly with music. Virtuoso instrumentalists and muso-wankers bore me senseless.

via The King Long Read: Danse Macabre: 28th Nov 2010 – 13th Aug 2013.

Scamming Bastards

I’ve just taken a call from 01925 354565 on my mobile phone. The chap on the other end knew my name and told me he was from <garbled company name>. He asked me about a recent car accident I’d had, and that, as the other driver had accepted full responsibility, there was a payout I was yet to claim. Exciting times for me! Well, no. I’ve not had an accident recently, and told him so. Oh, he said. Had I been involved in an accident recently as a passenger? No, I said, and enquired ‘politely’ as to where he’d got his information. He told me that “several of the top insurance companies” supplied this information to <garbled company name> and he couldn’t pinpoint the exact one from his records. I pressed on and asked him to give me the details of this accident – the vehicle registration numbers, the date etc. He told me, due to data protection regulations, he couldn’t tell me that information. Well played, sir. I told him to take my details off his system and to not call me again.

That was a Public Service Announcement. Thanks for listening.

tl;dr – If you get a call from 01925 354565, you’re in for an attempted vehicular scam.

Legacy

Being a hypochondriac of outstanding proportions, I spend a lot of my time convinced that I’m about to be killed by a horrible and as yet not officially diagnosed disease, a disease that usually manifests as “a slight ache in the chest”, or “a funny feeling in the leg”, or something equally ominous-sounding. This quite often leads to me pondering my own mortality, in a fashion that ranges from the sobering (“My child will grow up without a father!”), to the practical (“I hope the life insurance is sufficient that Kath will lead a financially comfortable live from here on in”), to the absurd (“I hope Kath remembers that the green bin gets emptied every four weeks – miss that collection and the bin’ll be piled high and overflowing by next collection”). Sometimes, this pondering and musing transcends my potentially imminent death by an unrecognised illness, and I end up having an existential breakdown: what would I leave behind once I shuffle off this mortal coil that would be evidence for me having ever actually existed?

It’s unfortunate for me that the few friends I have are extremely talented, artistically. I have traditionally artistic friends who can draw or paint or shoot photos. I have musically talented friends, who can sing or play or write (or combinations thereof) far better than the auto-tuned-to-high-hell bullshit on the radio. Disappointingly, I have no artistic bent. My skills, limited as they are, are technological. I’m engineer, and more specifically a software engineer. I can write Hello, World! in a plethora of programming languages. I’m pretty good with a debugger. My object-oriented skills are there or thereabouts; my knowledge of the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns is sufficient, but improving. However, my skills are transient, and will not stand the test of time. A hundred years from now, a great song will still be a great song, and a well-executed painting will still be that, as art, as a corpus, accumulates over the years. Technology isn’t so lucky. As the years go by, and the advances occur, technology is replaced by the next generation, rather than be allowed to coexist. I can go to the National Gallery and take in the nearly 500 years old The Ambassadors by Holbein the Younger, and can still be wowed by the skill and talent it took to manifest that skull. However, send the average person to a computing museum and show them a ZX81, and one would suspect that the reaction would be akin to “Huh. Look at that crappy old tiny computer,” before said average person pulls out their iPhone to play a quick game of Temple Run 2 (or whatever the temporary game du jour is) on a device that’s likely double-digit orders of magnitude more powerful.

So if I lack any meaningful or tangible skill that’s going survive long after I’m worm food, what else is there? Well, one could say that a person’s experiences are their legacy – the tales they tell of their life, fat with excitement and adventure, are the things that they will be remembered for. My Dad is a prime example of this. Whilst whiling his days away being an exceptionally (exceptionally) talented engineer, he’ll occasionally regale us with stories of his youth that equal, or dare I say surpass (in my impressionable and hero-worshipping eyes), the feats he’s accomplished as an engineer. Every so often I’ll bug him to tell me the stories of when, in his early twenties, he was a test driver for the Ford Rally Team, for whom he’d take a week off work and go drive a prototype car across the dunes of the Sahara. Whilst barbecuing a couple of weekends ago, he was lamenting the lack of heat coming from the crappy old charcoal I’d supplied to cook our meat feast. I jokily threw in the idea that I’d go start my car and we could cook the sausages on the engine block. “Oh, we did that once with some eggs in the middle of the Sahara on one of the Ford test cars,” he casually, and non-egocentrically, replied. “We had to decide whether we were going to use the little remaining fresh water we had to drink, or to cool down the overheating engine after the eggs had finished.” Unbelievable. Same day, we were chatting over dinner about Paul McCartney singing at the Olympics closing ceremony, and how bad he was. This led to Dad proclaiming that “He was never any good back in the day, either,” and then telling us about the times his band shared a bill with The Beatles in Hamburg in the early sixties. Remarkable.

So where are my tales of adventure and derring do? Sadly, nowhere to be found. I spent my teens and early twenties drunk, what remained of my twenties sober and betrothed, and the start of my thirties attempting to be some kind of parental figure. I seem to be lacking an exciting back story that would serve as my legacy. Excepting, of course, all the usual drunken tales of a student, which are generally of no interest to anyone outside of the tale itself.

Maybe our legacy isn’t what we’ve done with our lives, more how we’ve set up the next chapter of life in general. Maybe our legacy is realised by the path that our children forge in the world, and that it is our sole objective to equip them with the best tools possible to achieve greatness in this task. If, perchance, my son goes on to cure cancer, or set foot on Mars, or solve nuclear fusion, then history may look fondly on me and proclaim my legacy of creating, nurturing and setting free a world-changing individual as one of note. Does that reduce us to merely vicarious hangers-on, whose only chance of being remembered is through the actions of our dependents? Probably not, but it’s another way to feel like a contribution has been made in the face of a dearth of notable, tangible personal achievements.

Or does it really matter at all? Is legacy only something that matters to the self-absorbed and self-obsessed? As long as one’s life is lived honestly, truthfully and with a heart of love, will that suffice to leave one’s mark on the world? I suspect so. Indeed, I think I’ve probably over-thought and over-typed what should have been a simple eight word thesis on legacy:

Forget legacy. Just be excellent to each other.

There’s not a situation imaginable for which Bill & Ted (or Rufus) don’t hold the inalienable truth.

(But that doesn’t mean I don’t still want my Dad to rock my world with awesome stories. There’s another tale he tells about the time he was rallying an overnight stage in the middle of nowhere in some snow-covered clime, when he encountered a queue of rival cars queued up at the bottom of an icily unpassable hill. Each team syphoned a small amount of petrol from their cars, providing sufficient fuel in total to cover the equivalent of two car tyre-width tracks up the hill. They all stood back, lit the fuel and, in a manner only slightly less spectacular than the end of Die Hard 2, watched the ice melt sufficiently that the cars could then ascend the hill on the freshly-exposed tarmac, and subsequently carry on rallying. Amazing. I can only assume Dad stood back and shouted “Yippee-ki-aye, motherfucker” whilst this was happening.

I really, really, hope all my Dad’s stories are true…)

Review(s): A Non-Fiction Round-up

After Gatsby put me off reading ‘classic’ fiction, indeed fiction in general, I’ve decided to go on a non-fiction rampage. I maintain an Amazon wishlist of non-fiction books that I’d like to read, should time permit, that I’ve seen mentioned in one of the hundreds of news feeds I superficially scan every day in Google Reader, and as I’m too lazy to scroll down the list, I ended up just reading the topmost additions, which happened to be the following:

Manhunt: From 9/11 to Abbottabad – the Ten-Year Search for Osama bin Laden – Peter Bergen

These kinds of books play right in to my still-present boyhood fantasy of being some kind of spy or secret agent (though, if I had the choice, I’d still prefer to be an astronaut). It goes in to great detail about the movements of bin Laden pre- and post-9/11 and the herculean intelligence efforts that went into hunting him down. A worthwhile read, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Inside Job: The Financiers Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century – Charles Ferguson

An epic treatise on how everything went to shit in the financial crisis of 2007/2008. If you liked the documentary of the same name, but lamented the lack of a thousand more examples of really shitty people and practices, and simply wanted more financial acronyms, then this is the book for you. Read it if you want to get a well-informed insight, or if you just want to get plain old angry at banking shysters fucking up the world.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Wonders of the World) – Llewelyn Morgan

For some strange reason, I’ve been mildly obsessed with the Buddhas of Bamiyan (and the Minaret of Jam, since seeing it on a Dan Cruickshank show) since they were destroyed in 2001, so this book was an obvious choice. Morgan does a pretty good job at recounting the history of the area, why Bamiyan was so important in years gone by, and why two Buddhist icons were allowed to exist for so long in the middle of a country controlled by the Taliban. If I had the chance/balls/time/money (choose three), I’d love to go to Afghanistan and see all this first hand – Morgan paints an evocative picture that makes it difficult to not want to. However, having none of those four means I’m content with his book instead.

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science – Jim Al-Khalili

Strangely, this book was recommended to me by the author of the previous book, Llewelyn Morgan, in a brief Twitter exchange. And what a recommendation, though not for everyone, I appreciate. A crazy-detailed history of Arabic (and not-specifically-Arabian – a distinction Al-Khalili explains and encompasses in his history) scientific advancements over a several hundred year period. He seems to be attempting to put right an oft-quoted scientific timeline of Greek science -> Dark Ages -> Renaissance by illustrating how much further Arabic scientists and philosophers advanced the scientific cause in those apparent Dark Ages. The key players, al-Khwārizmī, al-Bīrūnī et al., are portrayed as peers, or even superceders in terms of actual advancements made, of their Greek and Renaissance cousins. Again, a fascinating read, but provides the greatest return to fans of Arab history, science history or history history (choose two).

So that was my non-fiction run to end the year, all bar Jake Humphrey’s The Inside Track, which was a simple concession to my twin love of Formula 1 and books that can be lazily read with absolutely no thought or understanding required. Guilty as charged.

The New York Times Crossword

For some, inexplicable reason, I’m addicted to the New York Times Crossword. For the past three-and-a-half years, I’ve sat down every day and found 10 minutes to attempt it. Some days I finish it, and some days I don’t. Well, for a lot of days I don’t. What’s most peculiar about my addiction is that the New York Time crossword is incredibly slanted towards, well, Americans. There’s copious questions about baseball players, college football teams, rivers in sparsely-populated states and US daytime soap operas. So why the hell do I subject myself to it?

There’s a couple of reasons, I guess. The first is the reason that I suspect most people attempt crosswords: bragging rights. Well, not directly bragging rights, I suppose, but the ability to stretch oneself mentally sufficiently to finish a crossword is a most enjoyable feeling that can manifest itself in myriad ways, the least of which isn’t adding a little pep to your step. Many a times I’ve walked, nay swaggered, down the street, having polished off the Wednesday crossword in 10 minutes, looking incredulously at people who don’t seem to realise that they’re in the presence of crossword genius. The poor fools. I offer them the hem of my garment to touch and they don’t even know.

I suspect that feeling of awesomeness at completing the New York Times crossword doesn’t have the same impact in the suburbs of Leeds as it does on a commuter train out of Manhattan of an evening, or of finishing the (London) Times cryptic on the overground to leafy Surrey at home time. No matter, the New York Times have us covered. The iPhone app with which one can solve the crossword is Game Center enabled, meaning I can compare the size of my wang, sorry, my time for the day with all manner of people around the world. Unfortunately, this isn’t as satisfying as I’d have hoped for. It would appear there’s nefarious work afoot with the iPhone app – suspiciously low times (3 minutes for the Sunday puzzle that took me over an hour? Come on…) imply someone solving on paper and merely entering the answers in to the online version for kudos. The cads.

So I guess I don’t get bragging rights, then. So I guess the real reason I do the New York Times crossword is that’s it’s a thing of beauty. Yup, I said it – it’s beautiful. Whilst each puzzle is generally designed by a different person, the puzzle editor is Will Shortz, who ensures that each puzzle, whilst wildly different, keeps to the high standard of its forebears. Most of the time, the puzzle is an engineering miracle. Most crossword puzzles require you to know every answer in order to complete the grid; not so with the NYT puzzle. The grid is laid out such that each answer can be revealed by simply knowing a number of answers in the opposite orientation that cross it. It’s in this layout, and the skill required to pitch the level of difficulty of these crossing clues, that the genius lies.

Add on to that the usual panoply of crossword tricks (themes, pangrams, rebuses (man, I hate rebuses), word ladders etc.) and the NYT crossword is remarkable. The difficulty level of the puzzle increases as the week progresses: Monday’s is a gimme, 7 minutes tops. Thursday is just about the limit of my solving ability, and I usual have to cheat only a little to finish that. Friday and Saturday puzzles are ridiculous. I’m constantly in awe of the crossword puzzle sites (yes, there are websites devoted to solving the NYT crossword, with my favourite being Rex Parker) that manage to post sub-10 minute times on Fridays and Saturdays. I’m lucky if I manage a handful of answers. Sunday is the doozy. Sunday is a substantially larger grid, and is comparable in difficulty to a hard Wednesday. It’s usually heavily themed, and the finesse of the theme (and it’s familiarity to me) usually dictates whether I’m going to solve the Sunday puzzle. It usually takes me slightly more than an hour, and finishing it is always exciting as it sets me up for a potential 5 puzzle streak, if I can successfully complete and submit the Monday-to-Thursday puzzles. A 5 puzzle streak week is a good week in my books.

So that’s my confession. I’m a tragic New York Times Crossword geek, who now knows the following:

  • Mel OTT was a famous New York Giants baseballer.
  • EMIL Jannings was the first Best Actor Oscar winner.
  • The ESPYS are an ESPN award ceremony.
  • An OLIO is a mix of things.
  • NABISCO make Oreo cookies.
All useful and fascinating trivia, I’m sure, and crossword staples.
Additional fun fact: Jon Stewart proposed to his wife via the medium of a specially-constructed puzzle, designed by Will Shortz. That’s some next-level geekery that I’m fortunately not quite at. Yet.