In a previous installment of FTI, I informed you that we bought a new television. We also bought an amplified antenna for it so my wife wouldn’t have to constantly change DVDs for our daughter while feeding our son.
Our daughter watches a lot of television. And you know what? I don’t care what you think. I’m on record as stating that TV itself isn’t an evil. It’s what you let your kid watch, not how much of it. Or, at least, it doesn’t matter how much TV the kid watches if the kid remains active and engaged while the TV is on. Sitting slack jawed on the couch = bad. Running in circles whilst playing with wooden puzzles and trying to match the dance steps of the characters on screen = no problems at all.
But the question remains: What’s good television? Well, I’ve had an opportunity to observe some modern children’s programming, and I have a handy-dandy guide for you! Don’t you feel special?
It’s a Big Big World. A giant sloth named Snook acts as a guide through the world of natural science. It’s all puppet based, and the puppets are exquisite. More than once I found myself wondering how the puppets work.
Why you should show it to your kids: The colorful world, the wonderful music, but most of all the excellent writing. Characters are not sanitized for your child’s protection. Any given character is apt to be stubborn, petty, vain, ignorant or just plain grumpy. They’re not always role models, but they provide object lessons. They model the behavior that your child should work to avoid well, but without making the characters vile or abhorrent.
Why you might give it a miss: Newer episodes went all Elmo on us and delivered a mildly obnoxious character with a squeaky voice. My wife informs me that they’ve also done away with Oko, an old, vaguely Asian howler monkey who practices Tai Chi and dispenses wisdom to the young characters. Seriously, Oko is awesome and if they’re going to boot him from the show, I’ll stick with DVDs of old episodes.
Bear in the Big Blue House A giant bear teaches children about living in polite society. From the post-Henson Jim Henson Workshop.
Why you should show it to your kids: It’s not for nothing that this show won a ton of awards back when it was on. It’s a fun show with likeable characters that teaches about life and living. At least the early seasons do, but since it’s only watchable on DVD, you get to pick which episodes you show your kids so it’s all good. Also, Doc Hog is an absolute riot.
Why you might give it a miss: The songs are a little uneven. There’s a gospel song about words that seems out of place; especially when Bear bellows “hallelujah” for no apparent reason. Also, the characters aren’t as well written as they might be. Treelo is annoying (though, typically, the young child’s favorite) and Ojo falls into the “We only have one girl, so she can’t be flawed or interesting in any way otherwise we’ll get sued” trap.
Curious George. The monkey made famous for sniffing ether and getting high comes to the small screen to teach kids exactly the opposite lesson that he should have learned in the books. I.E. That curiosity is always good thing. And it’s not a wrong lesson, exactly, except when George starts playing with idle construction equipment to retrieve a ten dollar bill that fell into a hole.
Why you should show it to your kids: George and the Man In The Yellow Hat have lots of adventures and sort of learn about stuff. I say sort of, because the lessons can sometimes seem to be tacked on to the action after the fact. They reinforce the lessons between stories with segments involving live kids putting the lesson of the episode into practice. Also, George is voiced by Frank Welker. Sold!
Why you might give it a miss: While each live-action segment is always prefaced with the statement “George is a monkey, so he can do things you and I can’t do,” I’m not so sure about the whole “follow your curiosity no matter what” vibe the show gives off. The original books made it clear that George got into real trouble following his curious nature. The show… not so much. Fortunately, the George of the TV show is a wiser monkey than the one in the books, and he tends to not destroy as much property.
Sid the Science Kid. A frightening abomination of a child meets up with other frightening abominations and apparently teaches kids about science and stuff. I’ve never been able to figure out what exactly they teach, because my daughter bursts into fearful tears whenever the show comes on.
Why you should show it to your kids: You can practice your quick-draw remote skills by changing the channel as quickly as possible whenever Sid shows his hideous, misshapen head.
Why you might give it a miss: Seriously, the characters on that show are freaking terrifying.
Zula Patrol: Space Aliens teach about science from their space ship while battling grumpy aliens who want to litter and stuff.
Why you should show it to your kids: The characters are cute, and the stories are interesting enough for adults to not lose their minds watching. The science lessons are a little more blunt and instruct-y than other shows, but the antics surrounding the lessons are entertaining.
Why you might give it a miss: The characters can be annoying if you’re in a certain frame of mind, particularly the pilot who seems to voiced by a woman trying to swallow a ping pong ball while high on blow after attending the James Kirk school of overemoting (note to actors: Only William Shatner is awesome enough to get away with acting like William Shatner. The rest of you are just overacting.) The theme song is an earworm to rival all others.
Electric Company: Who knew? They brought back the Electric Company. Now it’s a much more narrative driven show with a story interspersed between the old “Ssss,” “Tuff,” “Stuff” routines. The new Electric Company are high-school superheroes whose powers revolve around learning and stuff. They can throw balls of words, unscramble scrambled words, and play back overheard words. Basically, there’s a lot of do about words. Their foes are called “the Pranksters” and they consist of people with the opposite powers (scrambling words, etc).
Why you should show it to your kids: Two words: Danny Rhebus. You need more words? Okay, but I won’t explain Danny Rhebus. He must be observed first hand to be appreciated. The pacing is well done, and the storylines are corny but so earnest you won’t care. Also, there’s this dude who does beatbox that must have had bionic lips installed or something because he’s amazing.
Why you might give it a miss: The show went in the hip-hop direction, so there’s a lot of rapping about words. Also, two of the four members of the Electric Company (who are in high school, I must remind you) appear to be in their mid thirties, so I’m not sure why we should trust what they say about spelling.
Miss B.G.: Grammar school aged girl attempts to climb the social ladder with a series of schemes that usually involve misbehaving and then lying about it. It’s narrated by the girl; named B.G.; in the style of the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The show is 3D computer animated, but cheaply done. The character models for the kids are okay, but the adults are comical. Every grown woman in the show—even the high school girls—are built like Barbie after working with Pam Anderson’s plastic surgeon. Seriously. You see those coming around the corner, you’ve got time to comb your hair.
Why you should show it to your kids: The show teaches about consequences and about how doing the right thing immediately can make things easier in the long run. B.G. has a little brother who is cute, and his pet hamster is even cuter.
Why you might give it a miss: Watching the show, you can’t help but wonder why B.G. goes to such lengths to impress her friends. They’re all such jerks. Of course, she’s no prize herself, so I guess it evens out.
Cyber Chase: Three normal kids go into their computer and try to protect the benevolent MotherBoard from the notorious Hacker. Teaches about science, critical thinking and problem solving.
Why you should show it to your kids: It features the voice talents of Christopher Lloyd and Gilbert Gottfried. Lloyd plays the evil Hacker, while Gottfried plays the kids’ sidekick and helper while providing sarcastic commentary. Neither actor is phoning it in, particularly Lloyd who really seems into it. The kids in the show approach everything very scientifically, explaining in full detail their thought processes in a way that make Basil Exposition look like a deaf mute.
Why you might give it a miss: Memo to kids: When a (cyber)volcano is erupting about to engulf you in (cyber)lava, this is not the time to whip our your (cyber) notebooks and (cyber) pencils and draw blueprints of what you’re going to build to escape the eruption out of (cyber) logs that just happen to be lying about, and it’s certainly not necessary to provide a fully dimensioned (cyber) drawing with (cyber)units in (cyber) feet. Oh, and by the way, they’re in a computer. Can you tell by my judicious, reserved use of the word cyber to describe every freakin’ thing under the (cyber) sun?
Rescue Heroes: Hey! It’s G.I. Joe without any of the stuff that made G.I. Joe interesting! Basically, it’s an advertisement for a line of toys that replaced Husky Helpers because someone took offense at burly construction workers being called “husky.”
Why you should show it to your kids: The show features exaggerated versions of real-life heroes (policemen, firemen, etc) saving imperiled people from some of the slowest moving natural disasters in the world. The segments teaching about emergency preparedness are informative. It helps you to realize why the action genre usually involves people shooting at each other.
Why you might give it a miss: The show is boring as heck. There’s never any real tension, because you and I both know that nobody’s ever going to get hurt. And don’t think the kids watching don’t know that. This show just serves as a reminder of how neutered we are as a society that we can’t show our children heroes unless the thing the heroes are “fighting” is the weather.
Jane and the Dragon: Another CGI show! This one is set in a pseudo-Arthurian version of England that has dragons living in it. The main character (Jane) is a young girl who wants to be a knight.
All together now: “You Go Girl!”
Jane’s best friend is a dragon named Dragon. He’s wry, sarcastic—everything you’d expect from a friendly version of something with no natural predators. The shows generally revolve around using teamwork, trying your best, and not being a major tool.
Why you should show it to your kids: Despite the premise, the show uses a light touch with the GRRL POWAR!!!! Stuff. Jane wants to be a knight, but it’s not the focus of her every waking moment and in practice she just comes across as tomboyish. The animation is reasonably well done, if obviously motion-captured, and the stories feature a good balance of action and wit to keep kids and adults interested.
Why you might give it a miss: Some of the character models look… wrong somehow. Your kid may not like the dragon much—kids can be scared of unexpected things. If you’re not big on Renaissance festivals, you might skip this one since the whole show feels like an animated LARP session. Other than that, the show is a pretty good bet.
Word World!: Cartoon animals made out of letters learn about spelling and reading by literally building things out of letters. Want a spaceship? Spell the word “Spaceship” out of the letters that litter the landscape in Word World. The economy in that place must be seriously messed up, seeing as how easy making M-O-N-E-Y would be.
Why you should show it to your kids: The character design is simply brilliant. Making a frog out of the letters F-R-O-G couldn’t have been done before CG animation became this cheap and easy. The stories are pretty good, and as a way to teach about spelling and what words actually mean, it’s very well done. Sure, they can only do nouns, but there are a lot of nouns.
Why you might give it a miss: The show features dozens of characters and three voice actors: One for the girl characters and the rest for the boy characters. So if you don’t like, for example, Ant’s voice, you’re probably not going to like Duck’s, Dog’s or Monkey’s voices either. Also, Sheep appears to be doing a bad impersonation of William F. Buckley, Jr. because she says “uh” every 1.5 words.
Peep and the Big Wide World: A newly hatched chicken named Peep learns about how the world works, at least from a physical standpoint, along with his friends a baby robin (named Chirp) and a baby duck (named Quack). The show features lessons about simple science, like where shadows come from and how levers work, and a goodly amount of humor to soften to schooling.
Why you should show it to your kids: The characters are simple and colorful, and are likely to appeal to younger viewers. Once the kids get older, they can enjoy the in-between segments that feature real live kids employing the lessons of the previous episode. For example, an episode about flowing water will be followed by a segment where kids play with water. The characters act like real kids, being at times curious, cranky, petty, or just self-centered. Also, Quack is a laugh riot. Seriously, get the DVDs for your kids and watch it just for Quack. He’s awesome.
Why you might give it a miss: There is no reason to miss this. You can watch free episodes daily on the website, and the DVDs come in three packs. It’s just a good, kid friendly show.
Bob the Builder: The man from whom a sitting US President stole a slogan works hard every day to keep his little town in good repair. Bob and his crew of anthropomorphic construction equipment (Lofty the crane, Muck the frontloader, Dizzy the cement mixer, Scoop the backhoe and Rolly the steamroller) build things, fix things, and generally learn about teamwork and hard work.
Why you should show it to your kids: The characters are well designed, as they should be since the show is basically an advertisement for a line of toys. Bob has a can-do attitude that borders on derangement, but he models a good work ethic, and that’s a good thing. Any show that instills in our youth the value of a good general contractor gets a thumbs up from this commentator. You can’t all be astronauts.
Why you might give it a miss: Depending on how recent the episode your watching is, the voice acting might be grating (When Greg Proops joined the cast as Bob, all of the other actors spontaneously became British). Most of the episodes are pretty similar: Bob starts working on something, and he gets called to work on something else, then he goes back to finish what he started earlier. Occasionally, Spud (a living scarecrow) tries to help and messes something up, causing Travis (a tractor) to have a panic attack and giving Bob and the crew more work. This happens once every 1.25 episodes.
So there you have it. A guide to children's programming.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have more research to do for the followup to this post. That national average for time spent in front of the TV isn't going to bring itself up.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Late to the Party Reviews: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
Like virtually none of my peers, I was raised on John Wayne movies. Dear Old Dad is probably the Duke’s greatest fan. In the wee hours of the night, when I was just an mewling wet ball of need and remained inconsolable regardless of how many bottles, diapers or pacifiers I was presented with, Dear Old Dad turned on the TV and found John Wayne Presents: The War Movie. I was immediately calmed, so the story goes (I was kind of young at the time) and thus my status as a John Wayne Fan was cemented from an early age. I was raised on El Dorado, McLintock and The Comancheros. (Indeed, it is told that, when preparing to slide down a slide, my two year old self would bellow “Charge Mon-soor!” before riding down.)
When our first was born, those late inconsolable evenings were soothed in like fashion. North to Alaska, The Comancheros, Rio Bravo. These are movies that I soothed my daughter to sleep with when acid reflux made her cry.
If I wasn’t a fan of The Duke before, believe me I would be now.
In later years, I would go see westerns in the theatres. My father won tickets to the local premier of Unforgiven. When Tombstone came out, we were all over it; and I maintain to this day that Tombstone is the finest western ever made that didn’t have John Wayne in it. My father and I even went to see Wyatt Earp, which was Kevin Costner’s failed attempt to make a movie as awesome as Tombstone. (He knew he failed too—Tombstone was released by a small studio because Costner got the bigger studios to drop it so it wouldn’t provide so much competition).
So my history with the American Western goes way back. Way back before I was born, in fact. As you can imagine, the dearth of western based video games cuts me deeply. I’ll try just about anything with a cowboy hat on it (well, except Damnation. I still read reviews, after all.) I owned Outlaw on the Atari 2600. I’ve played Outlaws on the PC. I’ve played Mad Dog McCree in arcades. I’ve even owned Red Dead Revolver for the PS2. For the most part (Outlaw and Outlaws being two exceptions), they all disappointed.
I’m not sure why the Western is so hard to pull off in video games. I suspect it has something to do with the lack of variety in the environment. Designers of western games almost always fall back on the dusty, half-abandoned town with maybe a foray into a monument valley type environment. That’s a whole lot of brown, and there are only so many brothels/saloons/general stores a player is willing to tolerate.
The problem here is the games are almost always based on the works of Sergio Leone. Sure, we all love The Man with No Name and a Fistful of Dollars, but there isn’t a whole lot of stuff going on there, from an environment standpoint. The movies basically all use the same caricature of the American West as a backdrop. At the end of the day, that makes a serviceable demo, but not a full game.
An antidote might be to watch The Searchers. In that movie, the Duke’s quest to recover his stolen nieces spans snowy mountainous regions, desert flats, monument valley, and yes, the odd dusty town. It’s rare to see a pine tree; or indeed any kind of living tree at all; in a western game. Let alone a snowflake.
This is where Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood does something right. While the game spends a fair amount of time in dusty towns, the environments your characters will venture through include wheat farms, mining camps, mountainous regions, a monument-valley-esque region, and lush pine forests. At one point you even get to blow up a dam and ride down a river in a canoe whilst being pursued by American Aboriginals.
The enemies are likewise varied. A lot of western games shy away from injun fighting. Call of Juarez: BiB gets around the PC objections by having the whooping aboriginals motivated by being rivals to a tribe that you’re working with. You’ll also spend a little time fighting the war between the states; wearing grey, if you can believe it. The main characters are Confederate soldiers who desert to defend their family farm in Georgia as General Sherman makes his famous ride to the sea. The result of your desertion come back to haunt you years after Lee turned in his sword, and any qualms you have about shooting Billy Yanks should be salved by the fact you also get to shoot Johnny Rebs later in the game. Oh, and while you’re at it, you get to fight Mexican bandits.
So I think Call of Juarez does a serviceable job if cheesing off just about everybody, from a stereotype standpoint.
And while we’re on the topic of variety, I should mention the variety of weapons. In the game, you get to play as one of two brothers, each with his own style of combat. Ray, on the one hand, is brash and impetuous. He can dual wield revolvers, or hold a revolver in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other, or use a long gun (rifle or shotgun). Ray’s brother, Thomas, takes a more measured approach. He only wields one weapon at a time, and while his brother might kick in a door and shoot everybody before they can stand up, he would rather find a good vantage point and pick the inhabitants of the room one by one. Be that with his revolver, his rifle, his throwing knife, or his bow. He also carries a lariat that can be used to scale buildings to get the drop on his foes. Throughout the game you’ll have the opportunity to replace the weapons in your inventory, either picking up new versions of what you already have, or buying better quality versions of them at a store. Weapons come in a variety of grades, from Rusty (not so good) to Superb (take out a hummingbird’s eye at thirty paces) and there are different versions of each. You have, for example, your standard revolver, your ranger (longer barrel, longer range) your quickshooter (lower accuracy, fast firing and reloading) your hybrid (sixshooter with a shotgun built in—and yes, they really made those) and your Derringer. For long guns you have your rifle, your sniper rifle (again, they did have them in those days) your shotgun and your sawed off shotgun.
Oh, and I should mention that you will have the opportunity to fire any and all of these weapons from horseback in the middle portion of the game. Horseback controls are handled rather like they were in Oblivion, only better. And if that means nothing to you, I don’t really have the patience to describe it better. (EDIT: Oh all right, Steering and movement are handled with one stick, looking is handled with the other so you can shoot the guy next to you without your horse trying to run through him.)
Also, you can ride your horse to death, so go easy on the spurs. You’ll rarely need to go anywhere at a full gallop.
The plot centers around three brothers: Ray, Thomas and William. William is a preacher who is trying unsuccessfully to save his brothers’ wayward souls. After their mother dies and General Sherman burns their family farm, Ray and Thomas vow to rebuild. But years later, not much progress has been made and the brothers are outlaws. They hear of a legend that tells of an ancient city buried underground and full of enough treasure to buy all of Georgia, let alone the family farm. So a prospecting they go, where Ray and Thomas share an uneasy truce regarding a woman. On the way they’ll fight bandits, aboriginals and their old commanding officer who refused to lay down his sword after the war and vowed to hang the deserters he believes cost the south the war.
I won’t spoil it more than that, but a lot of people get shot and/or blown up on the way.
The gameplay itself is your basic first person shooter. Nothing done wrong, but not a lot of standout moments. Unless you count the quickdraw boss battles. Which you really shouldn’t, because while they are interesting they aren’t all that fun. Basically, you and your foe circle each other, the camera stationed to keep your right hand and the revolver on your right hip in the foreground and your opponent in the background. With the left analog stick, you move your character’s right hand. When you hear a bell, move your hand to the revolver and shoot when the crosshair reticule moves over your opponent and turns red.
On paper it sounds good. In practice, your character’s hand moves too sluggishly and you’ll find yourself dying. A lot. Eventually you’ll catch a lucky break and take down your opponent, but this minigame really serves to break the illusion of your character as a western bad-a** outlaw.
Other than that, though, the game is a lot of fun. It’s unremarkable in a lot of ways, but the environments are well crafted, the hit detection is spot on, and all of the weapons feel exactly as powerful as they should given the technology of the era.
You won’t get the feeling you’re playing a John Wayne movie. But a game will never capture that, and I will beat anyone who tries it.
That includes you, Bethesda.
Yeah, I saw what you did with Dick Marcinko. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
When our first was born, those late inconsolable evenings were soothed in like fashion. North to Alaska, The Comancheros, Rio Bravo. These are movies that I soothed my daughter to sleep with when acid reflux made her cry.
If I wasn’t a fan of The Duke before, believe me I would be now.
In later years, I would go see westerns in the theatres. My father won tickets to the local premier of Unforgiven. When Tombstone came out, we were all over it; and I maintain to this day that Tombstone is the finest western ever made that didn’t have John Wayne in it. My father and I even went to see Wyatt Earp, which was Kevin Costner’s failed attempt to make a movie as awesome as Tombstone. (He knew he failed too—Tombstone was released by a small studio because Costner got the bigger studios to drop it so it wouldn’t provide so much competition).
So my history with the American Western goes way back. Way back before I was born, in fact. As you can imagine, the dearth of western based video games cuts me deeply. I’ll try just about anything with a cowboy hat on it (well, except Damnation. I still read reviews, after all.) I owned Outlaw on the Atari 2600. I’ve played Outlaws on the PC. I’ve played Mad Dog McCree in arcades. I’ve even owned Red Dead Revolver for the PS2. For the most part (Outlaw and Outlaws being two exceptions), they all disappointed.
I’m not sure why the Western is so hard to pull off in video games. I suspect it has something to do with the lack of variety in the environment. Designers of western games almost always fall back on the dusty, half-abandoned town with maybe a foray into a monument valley type environment. That’s a whole lot of brown, and there are only so many brothels/saloons/general stores a player is willing to tolerate.
The problem here is the games are almost always based on the works of Sergio Leone. Sure, we all love The Man with No Name and a Fistful of Dollars, but there isn’t a whole lot of stuff going on there, from an environment standpoint. The movies basically all use the same caricature of the American West as a backdrop. At the end of the day, that makes a serviceable demo, but not a full game.
An antidote might be to watch The Searchers. In that movie, the Duke’s quest to recover his stolen nieces spans snowy mountainous regions, desert flats, monument valley, and yes, the odd dusty town. It’s rare to see a pine tree; or indeed any kind of living tree at all; in a western game. Let alone a snowflake.
This is where Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood does something right. While the game spends a fair amount of time in dusty towns, the environments your characters will venture through include wheat farms, mining camps, mountainous regions, a monument-valley-esque region, and lush pine forests. At one point you even get to blow up a dam and ride down a river in a canoe whilst being pursued by American Aboriginals.
The enemies are likewise varied. A lot of western games shy away from injun fighting. Call of Juarez: BiB gets around the PC objections by having the whooping aboriginals motivated by being rivals to a tribe that you’re working with. You’ll also spend a little time fighting the war between the states; wearing grey, if you can believe it. The main characters are Confederate soldiers who desert to defend their family farm in Georgia as General Sherman makes his famous ride to the sea. The result of your desertion come back to haunt you years after Lee turned in his sword, and any qualms you have about shooting Billy Yanks should be salved by the fact you also get to shoot Johnny Rebs later in the game. Oh, and while you’re at it, you get to fight Mexican bandits.
So I think Call of Juarez does a serviceable job if cheesing off just about everybody, from a stereotype standpoint.
And while we’re on the topic of variety, I should mention the variety of weapons. In the game, you get to play as one of two brothers, each with his own style of combat. Ray, on the one hand, is brash and impetuous. He can dual wield revolvers, or hold a revolver in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other, or use a long gun (rifle or shotgun). Ray’s brother, Thomas, takes a more measured approach. He only wields one weapon at a time, and while his brother might kick in a door and shoot everybody before they can stand up, he would rather find a good vantage point and pick the inhabitants of the room one by one. Be that with his revolver, his rifle, his throwing knife, or his bow. He also carries a lariat that can be used to scale buildings to get the drop on his foes. Throughout the game you’ll have the opportunity to replace the weapons in your inventory, either picking up new versions of what you already have, or buying better quality versions of them at a store. Weapons come in a variety of grades, from Rusty (not so good) to Superb (take out a hummingbird’s eye at thirty paces) and there are different versions of each. You have, for example, your standard revolver, your ranger (longer barrel, longer range) your quickshooter (lower accuracy, fast firing and reloading) your hybrid (sixshooter with a shotgun built in—and yes, they really made those) and your Derringer. For long guns you have your rifle, your sniper rifle (again, they did have them in those days) your shotgun and your sawed off shotgun.
Oh, and I should mention that you will have the opportunity to fire any and all of these weapons from horseback in the middle portion of the game. Horseback controls are handled rather like they were in Oblivion, only better. And if that means nothing to you, I don’t really have the patience to describe it better. (EDIT: Oh all right, Steering and movement are handled with one stick, looking is handled with the other so you can shoot the guy next to you without your horse trying to run through him.)
Also, you can ride your horse to death, so go easy on the spurs. You’ll rarely need to go anywhere at a full gallop.
The plot centers around three brothers: Ray, Thomas and William. William is a preacher who is trying unsuccessfully to save his brothers’ wayward souls. After their mother dies and General Sherman burns their family farm, Ray and Thomas vow to rebuild. But years later, not much progress has been made and the brothers are outlaws. They hear of a legend that tells of an ancient city buried underground and full of enough treasure to buy all of Georgia, let alone the family farm. So a prospecting they go, where Ray and Thomas share an uneasy truce regarding a woman. On the way they’ll fight bandits, aboriginals and their old commanding officer who refused to lay down his sword after the war and vowed to hang the deserters he believes cost the south the war.
I won’t spoil it more than that, but a lot of people get shot and/or blown up on the way.
The gameplay itself is your basic first person shooter. Nothing done wrong, but not a lot of standout moments. Unless you count the quickdraw boss battles. Which you really shouldn’t, because while they are interesting they aren’t all that fun. Basically, you and your foe circle each other, the camera stationed to keep your right hand and the revolver on your right hip in the foreground and your opponent in the background. With the left analog stick, you move your character’s right hand. When you hear a bell, move your hand to the revolver and shoot when the crosshair reticule moves over your opponent and turns red.
On paper it sounds good. In practice, your character’s hand moves too sluggishly and you’ll find yourself dying. A lot. Eventually you’ll catch a lucky break and take down your opponent, but this minigame really serves to break the illusion of your character as a western bad-a** outlaw.
Other than that, though, the game is a lot of fun. It’s unremarkable in a lot of ways, but the environments are well crafted, the hit detection is spot on, and all of the weapons feel exactly as powerful as they should given the technology of the era.
You won’t get the feeling you’re playing a John Wayne movie. But a game will never capture that, and I will beat anyone who tries it.
That includes you, Bethesda.
Yeah, I saw what you did with Dick Marcinko. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Wrapping up the decade.
So, 2010 is upon us. We just figured out how to refer to what year it was in shorthand (sadly, “oh 9” beat out “ought 9”) and now we have to figure out how to refer to the teen years of the current millennium.
My vote is for the “oh’s” to continue. So I christen the new year “Oh 10.”
A whole lot of crap went down, didn’t it? The United States suffered the biggest sneak attack since 1941, and today there sits in the white house a black president.
I wonder what science fiction writers will do now to indicate that the future is a bizarre, far flung place outside the realm of our experience? I'm going to go with Jewish lesbian.
But enough politics. This was a momentous decade for geek culture. We may not have flying cars, or crazy red-eyed computers that break and try to kill us (oh… wait.), but we got a lot of great stuff with in-jokes a plenty. So let’s have a look at what the first decade of 2000 brought The Geek.
1) Firefly and Serenity. Sure, it only lasted one season, but the affect on the geekiverse was massive. Joss Whedon made a space western with actual horses, and managed to remember that sound doesn’t travel in space.
2) And while we’re on the topic of Mr. Whedon, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Weblog came out during a writers’ strike and completely blew our socks off. Plus, Ben Edlund finally got to use Bad Horse in something. Everybody wins!
3) Felicia Day. The Guild, Dr. Horrible, and Sears all discovered Ms. Day at the same time. ‘Nuff said.
4) Comic Book Movies. The first decade of the 21st century was very good to comic book fans. We got a watchable Superman movie, two good Spiderman movies and a third one that’s watchable if you skip the ending, two good X-men movies, two solid Incredible Hulk movies, two watchable Hellboy (of all franchises) movies, a decent Ghost Rider movie, and a really good Iron Man movie, two excellent Batman reboots and two Frank Miller originals in Sin City and Thermopylae. If you like comic book movies, this has been a good decade.
5) Speaking of Movies, I simply cannot let the passage of the Lord of the Rings movies go buy uncommented. Peter Jackson took a rich and complex world and brought it to the silver screen in a way that, honestly, I didn’t think possible. I went to see the first movie fully expecting it to stink, but it didn’t. Not only didn’t it stink, it was awesome. The movie trilogy is proof that a good book-to-film translation is possible; it just takes someone who’s invested in the core material. On behalf of geeks everywhere, I must say: thank you, Mr. Jackson.
6) Television shows. In the last ten years there has been a surprising amount of good television. House M.D., Monk, Chuck, Mythbusters, the aforementioned Firefly. And that’s just the stuff I’ve watched. The last ten years have also seen the establishment of the “Reality Show” which, for good or for ill, is now part of the cultural landscape. Or wasteland, depending upon your perspective.
7) Video Games. This has been the Mother Lode of all decades. Nostalgia for the 1990s (aka: the decade of a thousand side-scrolling-platformers) notwithstanding, let’s just consider what this decade has brought us. First off, we’ve seen EA go from being a blight on the industry to the friend of gamers, while Activision has won the title of corporate succubus and convenient target for corporate haterade in the gaming forum community. We’ve seen the creation of new and phenomenal intellectual properties (Bioshock, Mirror’s Edge, Mass Effect, Far Cry, God Hand, God of War, Sins of a Solar Empire, Dead Space, Portal, the Pixeljunk series, Katamari Damacy) and the competent and loving continuation of old franchises (New Super Mario Brothers, Sam and Max, Fallout 3, Tekken 4 and 5, Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, GTA 3, all the new Zelda and Metroid games) and some truly excellent uses of existing IPs from other media (Batman: Arkham Asylum, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Spiderman 2, Ghostbusters). This decade has shown us that the independent developer can do wonderful things (Sins of a Solar Empire, Dwarf Fortress, Runman, Audiosurf). We’ve seen the resurrection of forgotten genres with the return of Sam and Max and the Monkey Island reboot. We’ve seen the merging of multiple genres, mostly with RPGs (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Borderlands) but also with RTS games (Brutal Legend). We’ve learned that it’s possible to have games where you can go anywhere and do almost anything (GTA3, Red Faction: Guerilla, Far Cry 2 and pretty much every open world game out there). We’ve even become rock stars in the comfort of our own living rooms (Guitar Hero and Rock Band). And if that weren’t enough, we’ve learned to play games on two screens (DS), with a stylus (DS, iPhone) and they’ve finally tapped the potential of the Power Glove… sorta (Wii). Sadly, not all the news has been good. We’ve also learned that console games can and will need patches, and the DRM isn’t just something PC gamers have to deal with. We’ve also learned that most of the people you’ll meet playing online console games are not the sort of people you want to, you know, meet. Taken as a whole, though, a positive decade.
8) Three Words: World Of Warcraft. This one is so big it deserves its own slot in the list. Since 2004, WoW has amassed millions of subscribers, making the MMORPG such a staple of gaming that nobody even calls them MMORPGs. They’re just MMOs. In fact, Wow has become so big that I am willing to bet that you’re surprised it only came out in 2004. Fess up: you thought it was older than that, didn’t you?
9) Lemon Demon. So let’s follow up something that everyone has heard of with something that almost nobody has heard of. Neil Cicerega started his musical career in 2003 under the name Trapezoid. Following some dustup over copyright infringement and who came first, he changed the name of his one-man band to Lemon Demon. Boasting influence from multiple sources, notably among them They Might Be Giants, I remain convinced that young Mr. Cicerega is a genius. An actual, “I could get into Mensa if I wanted to” genius. I have no proof, but I would gladly bet money on it. His lyrics are delightfully clever and he has a bizarre knack for poking fun at things in such a way that he really shouldn’t be insightful enough to do. The song “White Bread Boyfriend” is a prime example—nobody who began his musical career in high school should be able to write something that bitingly satirical. Likewise “Geeks in Love,” which I suggest you Google immediately, reveals an old soul while still retaining a healthy dollop of whimsy. And while you’re Googling, look up “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.” You won’t regret it.
10) Schlock Mercenary. And speaking of obscure things that cropped up this decade, Schlock Mercenary started up in 2001 and hasn’t missed an update since. I’ve already written about that, however, and you should go read my earlier thoughts on the webcomic.
11) And do you think I could possibly forget to mention that the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons was released in this decade? I have a copy of the books (Player’s guide, DM’s Guide and Monster Manual) sitting in my bookshelf awaiting the day when my daughter and son are old enough to participate in a quest. Having no experience with the previous editions, I can’t tell you what’s different. What I do know is that, from a beginner’s perspective, 4th edition is very accessible, and the books are just a good read even if you’re not planning on playing anytime soon.
And that’s just a taste of what happened back in the first decade of the 21st century. Imagine what I could have written if I’d have taken the time to do any research at all!
Of course, the most important thing that happened in this decade, from the perspective of the author, is finding, marrying, having children and buying a house with The Missus. We met in 2003 thanks to the power of the internet, and have been inseparable pretty much ever since. We got married in the fall of 2005 wearing Converse all-stars (mine were formal black, hers were pink). Our first child was born in 2007, and our second was born in 2009. Who knows what wonders the next two years may bring us? I look forward to sharing that adventure, and the rest of my days, with her.
That two geeks from different states can find each other, fall in love, get married, start a family and put down roots in the space of ten years is truly the wonder of the decade.
My vote is for the “oh’s” to continue. So I christen the new year “Oh 10.”
A whole lot of crap went down, didn’t it? The United States suffered the biggest sneak attack since 1941, and today there sits in the white house a black president.
I wonder what science fiction writers will do now to indicate that the future is a bizarre, far flung place outside the realm of our experience? I'm going to go with Jewish lesbian.
But enough politics. This was a momentous decade for geek culture. We may not have flying cars, or crazy red-eyed computers that break and try to kill us (oh… wait.), but we got a lot of great stuff with in-jokes a plenty. So let’s have a look at what the first decade of 2000 brought The Geek.
1) Firefly and Serenity. Sure, it only lasted one season, but the affect on the geekiverse was massive. Joss Whedon made a space western with actual horses, and managed to remember that sound doesn’t travel in space.
2) And while we’re on the topic of Mr. Whedon, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Weblog came out during a writers’ strike and completely blew our socks off. Plus, Ben Edlund finally got to use Bad Horse in something. Everybody wins!
3) Felicia Day. The Guild, Dr. Horrible, and Sears all discovered Ms. Day at the same time. ‘Nuff said.
4) Comic Book Movies. The first decade of the 21st century was very good to comic book fans. We got a watchable Superman movie, two good Spiderman movies and a third one that’s watchable if you skip the ending, two good X-men movies, two solid Incredible Hulk movies, two watchable Hellboy (of all franchises) movies, a decent Ghost Rider movie, and a really good Iron Man movie, two excellent Batman reboots and two Frank Miller originals in Sin City and Thermopylae. If you like comic book movies, this has been a good decade.
5) Speaking of Movies, I simply cannot let the passage of the Lord of the Rings movies go buy uncommented. Peter Jackson took a rich and complex world and brought it to the silver screen in a way that, honestly, I didn’t think possible. I went to see the first movie fully expecting it to stink, but it didn’t. Not only didn’t it stink, it was awesome. The movie trilogy is proof that a good book-to-film translation is possible; it just takes someone who’s invested in the core material. On behalf of geeks everywhere, I must say: thank you, Mr. Jackson.
6) Television shows. In the last ten years there has been a surprising amount of good television. House M.D., Monk, Chuck, Mythbusters, the aforementioned Firefly. And that’s just the stuff I’ve watched. The last ten years have also seen the establishment of the “Reality Show” which, for good or for ill, is now part of the cultural landscape. Or wasteland, depending upon your perspective.
7) Video Games. This has been the Mother Lode of all decades. Nostalgia for the 1990s (aka: the decade of a thousand side-scrolling-platformers) notwithstanding, let’s just consider what this decade has brought us. First off, we’ve seen EA go from being a blight on the industry to the friend of gamers, while Activision has won the title of corporate succubus and convenient target for corporate haterade in the gaming forum community. We’ve seen the creation of new and phenomenal intellectual properties (Bioshock, Mirror’s Edge, Mass Effect, Far Cry, God Hand, God of War, Sins of a Solar Empire, Dead Space, Portal, the Pixeljunk series, Katamari Damacy) and the competent and loving continuation of old franchises (New Super Mario Brothers, Sam and Max, Fallout 3, Tekken 4 and 5, Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, GTA 3, all the new Zelda and Metroid games) and some truly excellent uses of existing IPs from other media (Batman: Arkham Asylum, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Spiderman 2, Ghostbusters). This decade has shown us that the independent developer can do wonderful things (Sins of a Solar Empire, Dwarf Fortress, Runman, Audiosurf). We’ve seen the resurrection of forgotten genres with the return of Sam and Max and the Monkey Island reboot. We’ve seen the merging of multiple genres, mostly with RPGs (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Borderlands) but also with RTS games (Brutal Legend). We’ve learned that it’s possible to have games where you can go anywhere and do almost anything (GTA3, Red Faction: Guerilla, Far Cry 2 and pretty much every open world game out there). We’ve even become rock stars in the comfort of our own living rooms (Guitar Hero and Rock Band). And if that weren’t enough, we’ve learned to play games on two screens (DS), with a stylus (DS, iPhone) and they’ve finally tapped the potential of the Power Glove… sorta (Wii). Sadly, not all the news has been good. We’ve also learned that console games can and will need patches, and the DRM isn’t just something PC gamers have to deal with. We’ve also learned that most of the people you’ll meet playing online console games are not the sort of people you want to, you know, meet. Taken as a whole, though, a positive decade.
8) Three Words: World Of Warcraft. This one is so big it deserves its own slot in the list. Since 2004, WoW has amassed millions of subscribers, making the MMORPG such a staple of gaming that nobody even calls them MMORPGs. They’re just MMOs. In fact, Wow has become so big that I am willing to bet that you’re surprised it only came out in 2004. Fess up: you thought it was older than that, didn’t you?
9) Lemon Demon. So let’s follow up something that everyone has heard of with something that almost nobody has heard of. Neil Cicerega started his musical career in 2003 under the name Trapezoid. Following some dustup over copyright infringement and who came first, he changed the name of his one-man band to Lemon Demon. Boasting influence from multiple sources, notably among them They Might Be Giants, I remain convinced that young Mr. Cicerega is a genius. An actual, “I could get into Mensa if I wanted to” genius. I have no proof, but I would gladly bet money on it. His lyrics are delightfully clever and he has a bizarre knack for poking fun at things in such a way that he really shouldn’t be insightful enough to do. The song “White Bread Boyfriend” is a prime example—nobody who began his musical career in high school should be able to write something that bitingly satirical. Likewise “Geeks in Love,” which I suggest you Google immediately, reveals an old soul while still retaining a healthy dollop of whimsy. And while you’re Googling, look up “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.” You won’t regret it.
10) Schlock Mercenary. And speaking of obscure things that cropped up this decade, Schlock Mercenary started up in 2001 and hasn’t missed an update since. I’ve already written about that, however, and you should go read my earlier thoughts on the webcomic.
11) And do you think I could possibly forget to mention that the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons was released in this decade? I have a copy of the books (Player’s guide, DM’s Guide and Monster Manual) sitting in my bookshelf awaiting the day when my daughter and son are old enough to participate in a quest. Having no experience with the previous editions, I can’t tell you what’s different. What I do know is that, from a beginner’s perspective, 4th edition is very accessible, and the books are just a good read even if you’re not planning on playing anytime soon.
And that’s just a taste of what happened back in the first decade of the 21st century. Imagine what I could have written if I’d have taken the time to do any research at all!
Of course, the most important thing that happened in this decade, from the perspective of the author, is finding, marrying, having children and buying a house with The Missus. We met in 2003 thanks to the power of the internet, and have been inseparable pretty much ever since. We got married in the fall of 2005 wearing Converse all-stars (mine were formal black, hers were pink). Our first child was born in 2007, and our second was born in 2009. Who knows what wonders the next two years may bring us? I look forward to sharing that adventure, and the rest of my days, with her.
That two geeks from different states can find each other, fall in love, get married, start a family and put down roots in the space of ten years is truly the wonder of the decade.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
The Christmas Post
Author’s Note: Yes, I realize this post should have happened on the 23rd. The problem was sheer absent mindedness. I had queued up some posts to make sure that the blog was updated without interruption, not realizing that the queue overlapped Christmas. So instead of a post about Christmas, you got a post about Felicia Day.
And you’re complaining?
The hallway is dim in the early morning light. It’s just a little past seven in the morning, and the forecast called for rain. There’s a strange flickering in the living room. It’s colorful, but quiet and regular. Not at all like the glow of the usual morning cartoons.
She steps out of her room, a little bleary but smiling ear to ear. She doesn’t know it’s Christmas, she just knows that she’s awake and both Mommy and Daddy are in their pajamas, which means Daddy is staying home all day. This morning is a little unusual, because Mommy changed her in her room instead of the living room where the diapers are kept. But that’s okay, because it means she can go straight for the kitchen for breakfast, which she always tries to do but is always cut off by one parent or the other to change the diaper she’d been wearing all night.
Breakfast is pancakes, bananas and Reese’s peanut butter cup cereal. Her favorite. She eats each course in order, happy to finally be sitting at the table like a big girl instead of her high chair. As she eats, she looks across the table at her infant brother, who Daddy is feeding. He’s looking at Daddy, watching Daddy eat his own breakfast and wondering why everyone gets to eat brown gooey things but him.
He is, after all, almost three months old. He could totally handle cinnamon rolls.
After the last Reesey puff is deliberately crunched and swallowed, Daddy brushes her teeth and says something about going to the living room.
Who is this “Santa” and why should she care what he brought?
She holds Mommy’s hand as she walks down the hall she’s walked dozens of times before. Breakfast is over, that means it’s time for cartoons. The strange string of festive lights gives her pause, and she hesitates at the threshold. On the shelf sits a tiny tree, no more than a foot high, which was all that Mommy and Daddy had time to unpack and decorate. It wasn’t there when she went to bed.
The seven foot artificial tree sits sullenly in the basement, biding his time. Next year, he tells himself. Next year will be mine.
With some mild coaxing, she steps into the living room, and she sees it. Under the tree sit a menagerie of Fisher Price Little People animals, along with a purple SUV, a farm and a Noah’s Ark. If she remembers that she was given them when she was too young for them, and they were then packed away for a year, she doesn’t let on. Instead she sets upon them, smiling even broader than before, if that’s possible. She picks up each individual figure, regards it, and puts it into a line that has an order only she understands.
Then comes the box of puzzles. Another gift from last Christmas, and she’s thrilled to see them. She enlists Daddy’s help to slide the puzzles out, and she immediately takes out all the pieces, puts them in a pile on the floor, and then gets to putting them back into the puzzles.
Puzzles have ever been her favorite.
Then comes the truly new. Sliceable fruits and vegetables held together with Velcro ™. Mommy and Daddy palmed the little wooden knife that comes with the set, which is technically for an older child, but she doesn’t notice or care. She takes apart each item and lines the pieces up.
Last, comes the wrapped presents. Four large boxes, each part of a set, containing playsets of licensed PBS characters from the show It’s A Big Big World. There’s Snook’s treehouse, Madge’s library, Smooch and Winslow’s bedroom and Birdette’s nest. Mommy struggles with the packaging, muttering unpleasant things about the lineage of whoever thought a plastic treehouse needed eleven billion twist ties.
Seriously, it’s a child’s toy with maybe three moving parts, not a working model of a hadron supercollider.
She waits impatiently, but is tempered by the other goodies spread out under the miniature tree. Finally Mommy frees the molded Snook figure, and hands it to her. She’s thrilled.
While she’s playing with her bounty, Mommy and Daddy present a few gifts to her infant brother. He gets a Bumbo chair, which seems to amuse him and alarm him at the same time. It also enrages him if he’s left in it for too long, but such is the life of a three month old. He also is given an Ugly Doll (Jeero), and it’s the first thing he ever grabs and snuggles with his own hands. Well, he grabs it and smashes it into his face, which sort of looks like snuggling provided you spot him to make sure he hasn’t blocked off all the air to his face.
Mommy and Daddy then exchange gifts with each other. Daddy gives Mommy the new Professor Layton game for the DS. Mommy gives Daddy the latest Schlock Mercenary book.
It’s a light Christmas, but she doesn’t know that yet. All she knows is the living room is awash in fun stuff, and that Mommy and Daddy are both home to play with her. She couldn’t be happier.
After the presents are unwrapped and the paper bagged up and set aside, Mommy and Daddy put in some DVDs. They’re not the usual DVDs. The first one involves an orange cat that eats a lot. She likes him. The second features a kid with a big round head who looks a lot like Caillou, but isn’t as annoying or boring and has a fun dog. One has a kid in glasses who wants a rifle for Christmas. The rifle bears a striking resemblance to one that Grandpa brought with him to give to her when she was first born, but she doesn’t know that yet. Another one involves a tall man in yellow tights getting hit by cars and singing a lot. He’s funny. Later, she falls asleep on the couch while Mommy shows Daddy “It’s A Wonderful Life” for the first time ever.
Yes, really. Daddy is surprised to find that he likes it, even if he’s disappointed that Potter didn’t get his.
That night, after she toddles off to bed, Mommy and Daddy open the presents that they bought themselves with money they’d received earlier. Mommy gets a Pokemon Training Deck, which has enough cards to play a short game with half a deck, or to build a beginner’s deck. Mommy and Daddy try a game, in which they have some fun and manage to misinterpret enough of the rules that they’ll have to start from scratch next time they play.
Daddy gets Batman Arkham Asylum for the PS3. After they play Pokemon, Daddy fires up the PS3 and installs the downloaded content he’s had on his hard drive for months in anticipation of getting this game. It’s better than the demo.
The next day, Mommy leaves the house in the morning to do some grocery shopping and comes back with two additional theme decks for Pokemon, as well as a number of booster packs. In addition, she buys Katamari Forever and Eat Lead; The Return of Matt Hazard for the PS3 as well as Cooking Mama 3 for the DS, which Mommy didn’t even know was out. This finishes off the Christmas money they each got this year, and gives them both a queue of games that should last them for months given how little time there is for gaming with a toddler and an infant.
Mommy and Daddy are big geeks, but so far she doesn’t care. She’s just happy that everybody’s home.
Later that afternoon, she is asleep and Daddy gets a phone call from Grandma and Grandpa. They won’t be able to visit as they had planned, because Grandpa has a cold and the weather is going to make the three hour drive too difficult. Grandma and Grandpa tell Mommy and Daddy to go ahead and have a second Christmas Morning without them. While she sleeps, Mommy goes to the basement and gets the presents from Grandma and Grandpa.
When she wakes up, the room is full of colorful boxes again. She’s starting to get what this means. Grandma and Grandpa got her books. Her favorite thing in the world, except for puzzles, and maybe even above them. Two board books that appear to be made of MDF (Grandma and Grandpa are no fools), a lift-the-flap book, and a bundle of Sesame Street “magazines.” The next morning, on getting out of bed, she will immediately make for the living room couch and look at the magazines one at a time.
Mommy and Daddy got mostly clothes, which they seem to like quite a lot but she can’t imagine why. She’ll understand when she’s older and has to pay for her own clothes, but that’s a long ways off.
And that’s it for Christmas this year. She doesn’t even know the word yet, but next year she will.
I’m already looking forward to it.
And you’re complaining?
The hallway is dim in the early morning light. It’s just a little past seven in the morning, and the forecast called for rain. There’s a strange flickering in the living room. It’s colorful, but quiet and regular. Not at all like the glow of the usual morning cartoons.
She steps out of her room, a little bleary but smiling ear to ear. She doesn’t know it’s Christmas, she just knows that she’s awake and both Mommy and Daddy are in their pajamas, which means Daddy is staying home all day. This morning is a little unusual, because Mommy changed her in her room instead of the living room where the diapers are kept. But that’s okay, because it means she can go straight for the kitchen for breakfast, which she always tries to do but is always cut off by one parent or the other to change the diaper she’d been wearing all night.
Breakfast is pancakes, bananas and Reese’s peanut butter cup cereal. Her favorite. She eats each course in order, happy to finally be sitting at the table like a big girl instead of her high chair. As she eats, she looks across the table at her infant brother, who Daddy is feeding. He’s looking at Daddy, watching Daddy eat his own breakfast and wondering why everyone gets to eat brown gooey things but him.
He is, after all, almost three months old. He could totally handle cinnamon rolls.
After the last Reesey puff is deliberately crunched and swallowed, Daddy brushes her teeth and says something about going to the living room.
Who is this “Santa” and why should she care what he brought?
She holds Mommy’s hand as she walks down the hall she’s walked dozens of times before. Breakfast is over, that means it’s time for cartoons. The strange string of festive lights gives her pause, and she hesitates at the threshold. On the shelf sits a tiny tree, no more than a foot high, which was all that Mommy and Daddy had time to unpack and decorate. It wasn’t there when she went to bed.
The seven foot artificial tree sits sullenly in the basement, biding his time. Next year, he tells himself. Next year will be mine.
With some mild coaxing, she steps into the living room, and she sees it. Under the tree sit a menagerie of Fisher Price Little People animals, along with a purple SUV, a farm and a Noah’s Ark. If she remembers that she was given them when she was too young for them, and they were then packed away for a year, she doesn’t let on. Instead she sets upon them, smiling even broader than before, if that’s possible. She picks up each individual figure, regards it, and puts it into a line that has an order only she understands.
Then comes the box of puzzles. Another gift from last Christmas, and she’s thrilled to see them. She enlists Daddy’s help to slide the puzzles out, and she immediately takes out all the pieces, puts them in a pile on the floor, and then gets to putting them back into the puzzles.
Puzzles have ever been her favorite.
Then comes the truly new. Sliceable fruits and vegetables held together with Velcro ™. Mommy and Daddy palmed the little wooden knife that comes with the set, which is technically for an older child, but she doesn’t notice or care. She takes apart each item and lines the pieces up.
Last, comes the wrapped presents. Four large boxes, each part of a set, containing playsets of licensed PBS characters from the show It’s A Big Big World. There’s Snook’s treehouse, Madge’s library, Smooch and Winslow’s bedroom and Birdette’s nest. Mommy struggles with the packaging, muttering unpleasant things about the lineage of whoever thought a plastic treehouse needed eleven billion twist ties.
Seriously, it’s a child’s toy with maybe three moving parts, not a working model of a hadron supercollider.
She waits impatiently, but is tempered by the other goodies spread out under the miniature tree. Finally Mommy frees the molded Snook figure, and hands it to her. She’s thrilled.
While she’s playing with her bounty, Mommy and Daddy present a few gifts to her infant brother. He gets a Bumbo chair, which seems to amuse him and alarm him at the same time. It also enrages him if he’s left in it for too long, but such is the life of a three month old. He also is given an Ugly Doll (Jeero), and it’s the first thing he ever grabs and snuggles with his own hands. Well, he grabs it and smashes it into his face, which sort of looks like snuggling provided you spot him to make sure he hasn’t blocked off all the air to his face.
Mommy and Daddy then exchange gifts with each other. Daddy gives Mommy the new Professor Layton game for the DS. Mommy gives Daddy the latest Schlock Mercenary book.
It’s a light Christmas, but she doesn’t know that yet. All she knows is the living room is awash in fun stuff, and that Mommy and Daddy are both home to play with her. She couldn’t be happier.
After the presents are unwrapped and the paper bagged up and set aside, Mommy and Daddy put in some DVDs. They’re not the usual DVDs. The first one involves an orange cat that eats a lot. She likes him. The second features a kid with a big round head who looks a lot like Caillou, but isn’t as annoying or boring and has a fun dog. One has a kid in glasses who wants a rifle for Christmas. The rifle bears a striking resemblance to one that Grandpa brought with him to give to her when she was first born, but she doesn’t know that yet. Another one involves a tall man in yellow tights getting hit by cars and singing a lot. He’s funny. Later, she falls asleep on the couch while Mommy shows Daddy “It’s A Wonderful Life” for the first time ever.
Yes, really. Daddy is surprised to find that he likes it, even if he’s disappointed that Potter didn’t get his.
That night, after she toddles off to bed, Mommy and Daddy open the presents that they bought themselves with money they’d received earlier. Mommy gets a Pokemon Training Deck, which has enough cards to play a short game with half a deck, or to build a beginner’s deck. Mommy and Daddy try a game, in which they have some fun and manage to misinterpret enough of the rules that they’ll have to start from scratch next time they play.
Daddy gets Batman Arkham Asylum for the PS3. After they play Pokemon, Daddy fires up the PS3 and installs the downloaded content he’s had on his hard drive for months in anticipation of getting this game. It’s better than the demo.
The next day, Mommy leaves the house in the morning to do some grocery shopping and comes back with two additional theme decks for Pokemon, as well as a number of booster packs. In addition, she buys Katamari Forever and Eat Lead; The Return of Matt Hazard for the PS3 as well as Cooking Mama 3 for the DS, which Mommy didn’t even know was out. This finishes off the Christmas money they each got this year, and gives them both a queue of games that should last them for months given how little time there is for gaming with a toddler and an infant.
Mommy and Daddy are big geeks, but so far she doesn’t care. She’s just happy that everybody’s home.
Later that afternoon, she is asleep and Daddy gets a phone call from Grandma and Grandpa. They won’t be able to visit as they had planned, because Grandpa has a cold and the weather is going to make the three hour drive too difficult. Grandma and Grandpa tell Mommy and Daddy to go ahead and have a second Christmas Morning without them. While she sleeps, Mommy goes to the basement and gets the presents from Grandma and Grandpa.
When she wakes up, the room is full of colorful boxes again. She’s starting to get what this means. Grandma and Grandpa got her books. Her favorite thing in the world, except for puzzles, and maybe even above them. Two board books that appear to be made of MDF (Grandma and Grandpa are no fools), a lift-the-flap book, and a bundle of Sesame Street “magazines.” The next morning, on getting out of bed, she will immediately make for the living room couch and look at the magazines one at a time.
Mommy and Daddy got mostly clothes, which they seem to like quite a lot but she can’t imagine why. She’ll understand when she’s older and has to pay for her own clothes, but that’s a long ways off.
And that’s it for Christmas this year. She doesn’t even know the word yet, but next year she will.
I’m already looking forward to it.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
World of EverHammer
Let me preface this by stating that I have never played World of Warcraft, Everquest, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online or Maple Story.
I’ll pause while those of you who know what I’m talking about recover from having thrown up in your mouths at that last juxtaposition.
Back? Good. I tried FreeRealms for approximately two hours in total and didn’t see the appeal. My wife and I played around with Toontown Online for about as long as it took to realize that there wasn’t much to do if you weren’t willing to upgrade to a paid membership. I have even, I’m ashamed to admit, installed Second Life on my laptop before I remembered that Second Life was developed as a kind of honey trap for griefers and perverts to keep them from intruding on real games.
So my MMO experience is essentially nil. I know enough of the jargon to fake my way through a conversation with someone who has a WOW subscription. (“So, how about those instances, eh? Those goldfarmers sure stink.)
So I’m not what you could call the target market for Felicia Day’s web show The Guild.
If you haven’t heard of Felicia Day, you have no business reading a geek-centric blog. I bid you good day sir.
If you haven’t heard of The Guild, I couldn’t say I’d blame you. The only reason I heard about it was because “Julian” Rabbit “Murdoch” interviewed Felicia Day in the aftermath of the googlebomb that Joss Whedon threw at us with Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Weblog. They discussed this webshow that she’d been producing, which was how Whedon found her to fill the role of Penny in HMDSAW.
The Guild is a show about a group of highly dysfunctional people who are members of a guild in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game that bears a striking, if not actionable, resemblance to World of Warcraft. The group is a cross section of the kinds of people who get obsessed with MMOs: There’s your fussy, 40 year old loser, your snarky power leveler, your faux confident teenager, your sheltered late bloomer, your bad mother and your mousy redhead with self esteem issues. Apart, they’re a bunch of losers without friends. Together, they’re a bunch of losers without friends known as the Knights of Good.
The drama of the show stems from the fact that a catalyzing event thrust the nature of their relationships with each other into meatspace. Not one of them knows how to deal with people in the real world, though each of them fails to deal with people in their own way. Vork, for example, is a shutin while Tinkerballa is a user. Their interactions with each other are the reason you want to keep watching.
Felicia Day writes the show, and it’s clear that there’s a little bit of Codex in her. She’s clearly had dealings with all of the characters she’s created, though I’m sure (I hope?) the characters on the show are exaggerated for comic effect. (If Clara is based on a real person, someone should call child services immediately.)
As I said, I’m not the target market for the show. To me, Aggro is something farmers do and a mob is something that involves Marlon Brando and Italian American stereotypes. But the show has appeal to the wider geek market; and not just because Felicia Day has become kind of a nerd sex symbol (Sure, she’s attainable. Just not by you.) My wife, for example, knows less about MMORPGs than I do, and my lack of EXP with the genre is clearly evidenced by the fact that I’m the only person who still appends the RPG to the MMO when writing about them. She has become hooked on the show, and is eagerly awaiting the next free episode drop.
And there’s a bit of a rub. Having devoured the last two seasons and been consistently pleased with the writing, I’m not entirely sure I like where the season 3 storyline is going. This season’s Big Boss, the Axis of Anarchy, just makes me want to put my fist through a wall every time I see them. From the moment they cut in front of the KOG at Gamestop, I wanted to personally curb stomp every last one of them.
Maybe games do make you violent. Or maybe it’s just that I was bullied as a kid and have less than zero tolerance for bullies. I don’t just want them stopped; I want them obliterated and their lines striken from the face of the earth. (Let that be a warning to anyone harassing my son or daughter ten years from now.)
And that was my reaction to them after just the first episode. Their transgressions have only escalated in the ensuing episodes. My wife and I have seen up through Episode 7 (Coping and stuff), and with so few episodes left in the season I am concerned. To date, Felicia Day’s writing has shown none of the trappings of the Sci-Fi channel nihilism that insists on putting sympathetic characters through the nine circles of hell only to flush them down Lucifer’s toilet to live in a kind of sub-hell where all demon offal coagulates to form the tenth through eighteenth circles of hell . However, I fail to see how sufficient justice can be rendered to the Axis of Anarchy to satisfy me. To simply destroy their status as a guild would be inadequate. The Knights of Good would have to take everything they hold dear, kill them, take a dump on everything they held dear, and have the befouled items delivered via singing telegram to the grieving families during the funeral. Then the harm the Axis of Anarchy has rendered unto the Knights of Good and countless other fictional characters in the fictional history of the AoA might begin to be atoned for.
I don’t think the Knights of Good have it in them. My lone hope is Tinkerballa.
UPDATE
Okay, so we watched the rest of the season. I won't spoil the ending, but I suppose it worked out okay.
No, the KoG didn't kill the AoA, take a dump on their computers, then send their computers to the funeral via singing telegram, but I didn't really expect that anyway.
I eagerly await season four, and I'm putting season 1 and 2 on DVD in my Amazon cart to be saved for until I have spare money to buy frivolous things (owning a new house is expensive)
I’ll pause while those of you who know what I’m talking about recover from having thrown up in your mouths at that last juxtaposition.
Back? Good. I tried FreeRealms for approximately two hours in total and didn’t see the appeal. My wife and I played around with Toontown Online for about as long as it took to realize that there wasn’t much to do if you weren’t willing to upgrade to a paid membership. I have even, I’m ashamed to admit, installed Second Life on my laptop before I remembered that Second Life was developed as a kind of honey trap for griefers and perverts to keep them from intruding on real games.
So my MMO experience is essentially nil. I know enough of the jargon to fake my way through a conversation with someone who has a WOW subscription. (“So, how about those instances, eh? Those goldfarmers sure stink.)
So I’m not what you could call the target market for Felicia Day’s web show The Guild.
If you haven’t heard of Felicia Day, you have no business reading a geek-centric blog. I bid you good day sir.
If you haven’t heard of The Guild, I couldn’t say I’d blame you. The only reason I heard about it was because “Julian” Rabbit “Murdoch” interviewed Felicia Day in the aftermath of the googlebomb that Joss Whedon threw at us with Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Weblog. They discussed this webshow that she’d been producing, which was how Whedon found her to fill the role of Penny in HMDSAW.
The Guild is a show about a group of highly dysfunctional people who are members of a guild in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game that bears a striking, if not actionable, resemblance to World of Warcraft. The group is a cross section of the kinds of people who get obsessed with MMOs: There’s your fussy, 40 year old loser, your snarky power leveler, your faux confident teenager, your sheltered late bloomer, your bad mother and your mousy redhead with self esteem issues. Apart, they’re a bunch of losers without friends. Together, they’re a bunch of losers without friends known as the Knights of Good.
The drama of the show stems from the fact that a catalyzing event thrust the nature of their relationships with each other into meatspace. Not one of them knows how to deal with people in the real world, though each of them fails to deal with people in their own way. Vork, for example, is a shutin while Tinkerballa is a user. Their interactions with each other are the reason you want to keep watching.
Felicia Day writes the show, and it’s clear that there’s a little bit of Codex in her. She’s clearly had dealings with all of the characters she’s created, though I’m sure (I hope?) the characters on the show are exaggerated for comic effect. (If Clara is based on a real person, someone should call child services immediately.)
As I said, I’m not the target market for the show. To me, Aggro is something farmers do and a mob is something that involves Marlon Brando and Italian American stereotypes. But the show has appeal to the wider geek market; and not just because Felicia Day has become kind of a nerd sex symbol (Sure, she’s attainable. Just not by you.) My wife, for example, knows less about MMORPGs than I do, and my lack of EXP with the genre is clearly evidenced by the fact that I’m the only person who still appends the RPG to the MMO when writing about them. She has become hooked on the show, and is eagerly awaiting the next free episode drop.
And there’s a bit of a rub. Having devoured the last two seasons and been consistently pleased with the writing, I’m not entirely sure I like where the season 3 storyline is going. This season’s Big Boss, the Axis of Anarchy, just makes me want to put my fist through a wall every time I see them. From the moment they cut in front of the KOG at Gamestop, I wanted to personally curb stomp every last one of them.
Maybe games do make you violent. Or maybe it’s just that I was bullied as a kid and have less than zero tolerance for bullies. I don’t just want them stopped; I want them obliterated and their lines striken from the face of the earth. (Let that be a warning to anyone harassing my son or daughter ten years from now.)
And that was my reaction to them after just the first episode. Their transgressions have only escalated in the ensuing episodes. My wife and I have seen up through Episode 7 (Coping and stuff), and with so few episodes left in the season I am concerned. To date, Felicia Day’s writing has shown none of the trappings of the Sci-Fi channel nihilism that insists on putting sympathetic characters through the nine circles of hell only to flush them down Lucifer’s toilet to live in a kind of sub-hell where all demon offal coagulates to form the tenth through eighteenth circles of hell . However, I fail to see how sufficient justice can be rendered to the Axis of Anarchy to satisfy me. To simply destroy their status as a guild would be inadequate. The Knights of Good would have to take everything they hold dear, kill them, take a dump on everything they held dear, and have the befouled items delivered via singing telegram to the grieving families during the funeral. Then the harm the Axis of Anarchy has rendered unto the Knights of Good and countless other fictional characters in the fictional history of the AoA might begin to be atoned for.
I don’t think the Knights of Good have it in them. My lone hope is Tinkerballa.
UPDATE
Okay, so we watched the rest of the season. I won't spoil the ending, but I suppose it worked out okay.
No, the KoG didn't kill the AoA, take a dump on their computers, then send their computers to the funeral via singing telegram, but I didn't really expect that anyway.
I eagerly await season four, and I'm putting season 1 and 2 on DVD in my Amazon cart to be saved for until I have spare money to buy frivolous things (owning a new house is expensive)
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Greg’s 2000” TV
So as regular readers may have surmised from my last post, we’re moving. I learned many things about myself while moving all of our worldly belongings from the third floor of an apartment building with no elevator to the basement and garage of our new ranch-style home. Mostly they’re lessons like “I don’t like carrying heavy crap” and “I really don’t like carrying heavy crap down stairs” and variants of that.
But I’m not going to talk about that this post. What I am going to talk about is my bitchin’ boss new TV set.
During the course of the move, I had to disconnect and reconnect and disconnect again the cables connecting my DVD player to my old TV. My old TV is a 27” Sharp CRT. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done. I bought it in 2002 or thereabouts, and it has served me well. But when I disconnected the RCA cables from the back of the set, one of the connectors (the yellow one—you know, the video input) pulled out.
It still works, but I took that as a sign to make this the secondary TV, relegated to the basement and dedicated to the PS2 , Gamecube and other assorted obsolete consoles (YAY! Somewhere to hook my Jaguar up again!). With digital broadcast a federally mandated reality, it was time to upgrade the primary set. And boy howdy, did we upgrade.
The first thing you need to understand is that our living room is enormous. It’s a good ten paces from the place where the TV is to the nearest place where someone can sit to watch it. In a situation like that, it’s time to go big. Fortunately, big TVs are on sale these days because retailers are desperate to sell anything in a down economy. So I moseyed on down to Best Buy and picked up a 42” plasma screen. Yes, it’s HD: 720p. The reason I bought 720p is because 1080i is much more expensive and I have doubts about the capability of the human eye to really tell the difference, even at 42 inches.
Plus, I’ve spent the last few years playing PS3 games on a classic cathode ray tube television; and not even a flat-screen CRT. No matter which resolution I chose, the difference was going to blow my socks off, so why spend the extra money?
Since I mentioned the PS3, I might as well mention that I bought an HDMI cable to use with it. The lads at Best Buy recommend a cable that costs $60. I bought one that cost $30 and it’s gorgeous. So a word to the savvy media customer: When it comes to cables, copper is pretty much copper. Don’t waste your money on premium cables.
I also sprang for an antenna so my wife could take advantage of the new broadcast choices afforded by the digital era. We get about a dozen channels, most of them variants of PBS, which means we can watch the annual pledge drive on seven channels instead of just the one.
We’re still using our old, SD DVD player, and the picture looks fine to me. At last count, I have something like 420 movies and TV shows in my DVD collection, and if you think I’m scrapping that for blue-ray you’re crazier than my hair when I got up this morning.
I would like to take a moment to talk about TV stands, because finding a decent one was more trouble than it should have been. First off, who the heck decided that it was a good idea to make the shelf you’re putting a heavy, expensive piece of electronics on out of glass? How does the design meeting for something like that go?
I imagine it went something like that.
The other thing I’d like to know is why the bases are all so short. This isn’t a universal condition, but at my house we have small children. As a result, we cordon off large, heavy, expensive things like televisions with baby gates like the Superyard. The problem is that the Superyard is 24 inches tall. Most TV stands on the market (that don’t cost more than the TV, at any rate) are 22 to 24 inches tall. That means that you’re likely to have the lower portion of your screen obscured by the baby gate. At least if you plan on sitting down while you’re watching TV, which I’m pretty sure nobody ever does.
Yes, we could mount the TV to the wall, but that requires finding a stud, and that would require finding a stud finder that actually works, which I don’t believe exists. Plus, if you decide to move the TV, it’s much easier to move a cabinet than to remount a wall bracket. And anyway, who wants to look up to see a TV screen? You know who mounts TVs up on a wall? Emergency rooms. Do you want your living room to feel like an emergency room? Me neither.
That minor aggravation is, however, well worth enduring for the ability to finally read the text in Fallout 3. I imagine it’s a completely different game when you can read the on-screen instructions.
It was a platformer, right?
But I’m not going to talk about that this post. What I am going to talk about is my bitchin’ boss new TV set.
During the course of the move, I had to disconnect and reconnect and disconnect again the cables connecting my DVD player to my old TV. My old TV is a 27” Sharp CRT. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done. I bought it in 2002 or thereabouts, and it has served me well. But when I disconnected the RCA cables from the back of the set, one of the connectors (the yellow one—you know, the video input) pulled out.
It still works, but I took that as a sign to make this the secondary TV, relegated to the basement and dedicated to the PS2 , Gamecube and other assorted obsolete consoles (YAY! Somewhere to hook my Jaguar up again!). With digital broadcast a federally mandated reality, it was time to upgrade the primary set. And boy howdy, did we upgrade.
The first thing you need to understand is that our living room is enormous. It’s a good ten paces from the place where the TV is to the nearest place where someone can sit to watch it. In a situation like that, it’s time to go big. Fortunately, big TVs are on sale these days because retailers are desperate to sell anything in a down economy. So I moseyed on down to Best Buy and picked up a 42” plasma screen. Yes, it’s HD: 720p. The reason I bought 720p is because 1080i is much more expensive and I have doubts about the capability of the human eye to really tell the difference, even at 42 inches.
Plus, I’ve spent the last few years playing PS3 games on a classic cathode ray tube television; and not even a flat-screen CRT. No matter which resolution I chose, the difference was going to blow my socks off, so why spend the extra money?
Since I mentioned the PS3, I might as well mention that I bought an HDMI cable to use with it. The lads at Best Buy recommend a cable that costs $60. I bought one that cost $30 and it’s gorgeous. So a word to the savvy media customer: When it comes to cables, copper is pretty much copper. Don’t waste your money on premium cables.
I also sprang for an antenna so my wife could take advantage of the new broadcast choices afforded by the digital era. We get about a dozen channels, most of them variants of PBS, which means we can watch the annual pledge drive on seven channels instead of just the one.
We’re still using our old, SD DVD player, and the picture looks fine to me. At last count, I have something like 420 movies and TV shows in my DVD collection, and if you think I’m scrapping that for blue-ray you’re crazier than my hair when I got up this morning.
I would like to take a moment to talk about TV stands, because finding a decent one was more trouble than it should have been. First off, who the heck decided that it was a good idea to make the shelf you’re putting a heavy, expensive piece of electronics on out of glass? How does the design meeting for something like that go?
Johnson: So, we want to design a stand that people can put TV sets on. They typically weigh 50 to 100 pounds, and cost a lot of money. What’s a good, sturdy material that can take a lot of weight?
Schwarz: I dunno, wood?
Johnson: Schwarz, get out. You’ve been warned about your flippancy. This company isn’t made of money. Do you think wood grows on trees?
Butterbin: How about glass?
Johnson: Butterbin, that’s the best suggestion I’ve heard all quarter. Glass is a fine, sturdy material that hardly ever breaks when large amounts of force are applied to it. Build the shelf out of glass. Just don’t forget to focus the support beams into as small an area as possible. I don’t know what PSI means, but more of it must be better. Okay gang, get to work. I’m going to lunch!
I imagine it went something like that.
The other thing I’d like to know is why the bases are all so short. This isn’t a universal condition, but at my house we have small children. As a result, we cordon off large, heavy, expensive things like televisions with baby gates like the Superyard. The problem is that the Superyard is 24 inches tall. Most TV stands on the market (that don’t cost more than the TV, at any rate) are 22 to 24 inches tall. That means that you’re likely to have the lower portion of your screen obscured by the baby gate. At least if you plan on sitting down while you’re watching TV, which I’m pretty sure nobody ever does.
Yes, we could mount the TV to the wall, but that requires finding a stud, and that would require finding a stud finder that actually works, which I don’t believe exists. Plus, if you decide to move the TV, it’s much easier to move a cabinet than to remount a wall bracket. And anyway, who wants to look up to see a TV screen? You know who mounts TVs up on a wall? Emergency rooms. Do you want your living room to feel like an emergency room? Me neither.
That minor aggravation is, however, well worth enduring for the ability to finally read the text in Fallout 3. I imagine it’s a completely different game when you can read the on-screen instructions.
It was a platformer, right?
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Movin’ Out. IIIIIIIIIIIIIII’MMM Movin’ Out!
In a previous installment of this blog, I discussed the process of buying a house. Well, once you’ve bought the house, now you have to move into it. You have several options.
The obvious choice is to hire movers. They can even be contracted to pack your things for you so you don’t have to worry about figuring out how to load a tape gun. The downside is that you’re hiring large men you don’t know who probably make too little money for the amount of work they’re doing, so you’re irreplaceable antique curio shelf might arrive at your new home in more pieces than a bookshelf from Ikea, but without the handy allen wrench to put it back together.
If you’re hiring movers, you want a binding estimate, not an hourly rate. A binding estimate is when someone comes to your current place, looks at all of the stuff you want to move, and gives you a sheet of paper that has the words “shall not exceed” written on it somewhere. The number at the bottom of that sheet is the number you pay. Period. Hourly rate means the movers come to your house and charge you based on how long it takes to move everything.
If you’re a lunatic, you can move everything yourself. This requires a number of understanding friends or family members who can help you. If you don’t have local family, and are a social misfit, it means you’re going to be lifting an awful lot of boxes.
There are three ways to move everything yourself.
1) You can load up your car and make fourteen thousand trips back and forth. This works if you’re moving within the same town or neighborhood. Not so much if you’re moving across the state. Rule of thumb: If it takes more than 10 minutes to drive to your new place, you need a bigger truck.
2) You can rent a truck. This is by far the most common method of self moving. Each moving company is different (Budget, for example, tends to be operated by businesslike people, while Uhaul appears to be owned and operated by a grue) but the basic process for renting a truck is pretty much always the same: First, you reserve a truck in the size that you want. Second, you arrive at the lot and find out they don’t have any of that size, so you rent a different size.
We rented a truck from a rental company that rhymes with “Aragorn.” We asked for a 16 foot truck, and they gave us a 25 foot truck. I have never driven anything that large in my life, and I knocked over at least three buildings and several old growth trees in the process of learning to back that thing up. Which brings us to an important point about renting a truck:
Insurance. Is. Not. Optional.
People will tell you that your insurance covers damages and all that other stuff. These people are idiots. Yes, your insurance does cover you in the event of an accident. But then your premiums go up, and you have to spend half your day on a phone trying to convince your insurance company that you have coverage for whatever they’re denying you coverage for. If you buy the rental agency insurance, as long as you can walk away from the scene of the accident, it’s not your problem.
So take my advice: get full coverage not only for the truck you’re renting, but also for liability. It’s only a fraction of the cost of the rental, and it makes your life so much easier if you do have a problem.
3) The third way of moving yourself is to rent something called a POD. PODS are relatively new innovations. Basically, somebody comes to your house with what looks like a moving truck. Only instead of loading up your stuff into the truck and driving away, they leave the back of the truck in your driveway. You can load it at your leisure, have it picked up and delivered whenever you want (except Sundays, because what kind of freak tries to move on a weekend) and driving it isn’t your problem.
The downside of renting a POD is the fact that you can’t really trust anything fragile to it, because you’re not driving it and the crane that lifts the pod back onto the truck isn’t the most elegant device you’ve ever seen.
Finally, if you’re made of money, you can just throw out all your old stuff and start over from scratch at the new place. This has the benefit of being extremely low hassle, but eating spaghetti-Os with your fingers directly from the can while you’re waiting for the new microwave to be delivered gets old very quickly.
You can also do a combination of these methods. For example, because my wife and I are social misfits with no family nearby that can be expected to carry heavy things down four flights of stairs; we couldn’t do a pure self move. So we hired movers (with a binding estimate) to move anything that required two people to lift (EG: our couch). Then we rented a POD to carry non-fragile, non-essential things. Finally, we rented trucks for two weekends. The first, aforementioned 25 foot truck, took all of our essential, gotta-have-it-in-the-house-now stuff. The second was a 10 foot truck rented to take care of the leftovers that weren’t gotten by the 25 foot truck.
As of the writing of this post, we’re done. It took four weeks of intensive lifting and stair climbing (my backside will never be this firm again—seriously; you could bounce a quarter off me), but it’s done.
Now for the unpacking. I predict we’ll be done somewhere around Christmas.
In the year 2014.
The obvious choice is to hire movers. They can even be contracted to pack your things for you so you don’t have to worry about figuring out how to load a tape gun. The downside is that you’re hiring large men you don’t know who probably make too little money for the amount of work they’re doing, so you’re irreplaceable antique curio shelf might arrive at your new home in more pieces than a bookshelf from Ikea, but without the handy allen wrench to put it back together.
If you’re hiring movers, you want a binding estimate, not an hourly rate. A binding estimate is when someone comes to your current place, looks at all of the stuff you want to move, and gives you a sheet of paper that has the words “shall not exceed” written on it somewhere. The number at the bottom of that sheet is the number you pay. Period. Hourly rate means the movers come to your house and charge you based on how long it takes to move everything.
If you’re a lunatic, you can move everything yourself. This requires a number of understanding friends or family members who can help you. If you don’t have local family, and are a social misfit, it means you’re going to be lifting an awful lot of boxes.
There are three ways to move everything yourself.
1) You can load up your car and make fourteen thousand trips back and forth. This works if you’re moving within the same town or neighborhood. Not so much if you’re moving across the state. Rule of thumb: If it takes more than 10 minutes to drive to your new place, you need a bigger truck.
2) You can rent a truck. This is by far the most common method of self moving. Each moving company is different (Budget, for example, tends to be operated by businesslike people, while Uhaul appears to be owned and operated by a grue) but the basic process for renting a truck is pretty much always the same: First, you reserve a truck in the size that you want. Second, you arrive at the lot and find out they don’t have any of that size, so you rent a different size.
We rented a truck from a rental company that rhymes with “Aragorn.” We asked for a 16 foot truck, and they gave us a 25 foot truck. I have never driven anything that large in my life, and I knocked over at least three buildings and several old growth trees in the process of learning to back that thing up. Which brings us to an important point about renting a truck:
Insurance. Is. Not. Optional.
People will tell you that your insurance covers damages and all that other stuff. These people are idiots. Yes, your insurance does cover you in the event of an accident. But then your premiums go up, and you have to spend half your day on a phone trying to convince your insurance company that you have coverage for whatever they’re denying you coverage for. If you buy the rental agency insurance, as long as you can walk away from the scene of the accident, it’s not your problem.
So take my advice: get full coverage not only for the truck you’re renting, but also for liability. It’s only a fraction of the cost of the rental, and it makes your life so much easier if you do have a problem.
3) The third way of moving yourself is to rent something called a POD. PODS are relatively new innovations. Basically, somebody comes to your house with what looks like a moving truck. Only instead of loading up your stuff into the truck and driving away, they leave the back of the truck in your driveway. You can load it at your leisure, have it picked up and delivered whenever you want (except Sundays, because what kind of freak tries to move on a weekend) and driving it isn’t your problem.
The downside of renting a POD is the fact that you can’t really trust anything fragile to it, because you’re not driving it and the crane that lifts the pod back onto the truck isn’t the most elegant device you’ve ever seen.
Finally, if you’re made of money, you can just throw out all your old stuff and start over from scratch at the new place. This has the benefit of being extremely low hassle, but eating spaghetti-Os with your fingers directly from the can while you’re waiting for the new microwave to be delivered gets old very quickly.
You can also do a combination of these methods. For example, because my wife and I are social misfits with no family nearby that can be expected to carry heavy things down four flights of stairs; we couldn’t do a pure self move. So we hired movers (with a binding estimate) to move anything that required two people to lift (EG: our couch). Then we rented a POD to carry non-fragile, non-essential things. Finally, we rented trucks for two weekends. The first, aforementioned 25 foot truck, took all of our essential, gotta-have-it-in-the-house-now stuff. The second was a 10 foot truck rented to take care of the leftovers that weren’t gotten by the 25 foot truck.
As of the writing of this post, we’re done. It took four weeks of intensive lifting and stair climbing (my backside will never be this firm again—seriously; you could bounce a quarter off me), but it’s done.
Now for the unpacking. I predict we’ll be done somewhere around Christmas.
In the year 2014.
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