Two things come to mind for today. Google and last night's rehearsal.
What's up with Google? Well, they've been doing this thing where they're taking over various websites and implementing this sort of standardization of the logins across all of them. This login standardization is wreaking havoc with my logins because I had accounts on all these different sites before Google got to be a part of them. I did not always use the same email address when setting them up, so passing between these sites is nothing short of a chore. For instance, blogspot was not always a Google property, but Google adsense was. So I had a Google adsense account under my home email address, but this blog is actually setup under a completely separate email address to preserve its rather transparent anonymity. Then Google acquired blogspot. Adsense is an actual deal you can put on the blog, but since this blog is under a different email address than my adsense, I can't do that.
Even worse than that, though, Google acquired Youtube, and recently killed all the old logins to favor the email address it was setup under. It linked this email address to any other Google properties that also use that address. YouTube had my home address as the contact, so it linked that to the adsense stuff along wth the other Google stuff there. Where it gets really complicated is the Queen uses the home address for her Facebook login where I use yet another email address for mine. When Google came up with +, I figured it would be good to just use the same email addresses for that (not that we ever use it). Oh, and did I mention that I had used that home address on a completely different blogspot account to write some stuff up once?
This means that Google has managed to make a mess of my online life by trying to make it easier. In order to write this blog, I had to log out of the Queen's Google account (you know, cause it took the Google + account holder's name and made it the primary name) because I had logged into my YouTube account earlier today and login to this one. You could say I did it to myself, but at the same time, we share the home email address. This whole thing was only further complicated by the requirement of setting up a Google account for our Android phones and linking that to everything else.
Anyway, last night, I had my Wednesday night rehearsal for church. These days, I alternate between keyboard and bass, and last night I was on keys. We primarily worked on a single new song, but at the end of the rehearsal, the leader wanted to try playing through the song again on his electric guitar rather than his acoustic. He said anyone who wanted to go could go and anyone who wanted to stay could stay. Naturally, I wanted to stay because I like playing with people. I moved myself to piano to play the missing part since the piano player left as soon as she could get out the door.
It was very fun. It was just fun to just play because that's what it felt like. We decided we needed to get together and just jam, so he figured we'd wait till the first days of school wound down and maybe do something in the fall on a Saturday. I hope we can, because playing together when you're not cramming for a performance is invigorating.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Present Day 2012
My life has gone about as one might expect it to since the last post. Though I get older, I continue to play video games obsessively. I even created a list to ensure I work my way through almost 50 games one at a time without getting too distracted. My present games are Bioshock and Arc Rise Fantasia (along with Final Fantasy IV which I'm playing on my phone). I'm alternating between those two games because they are very different from each other, and I find I need a break from the claustrophobic first person shooter occasionally.
On Bioshock, I'm nearly done. On an 87 page walkthrough, I'm on page 77. I'll be following Bioshock with Gears of War 2. I'm primarily going through the games' storylines along with some basic sidequests for as long as I remain interested. This applied most definitely to Assassin's Creed Revelations and BAtman: Arkham City where the games complete their storylines and then allow you to continue working on sidequests almost indefinitely. With Arc Rise Fantasia, it's a game I borrowed from a friend of mine who insisted it was completely awesome. It's okay. A decent JRPG to offset the pounding from the shooter is nice.
I don't know if I have mentioned my 3 books, but they remain stagnant. No real movement online, nor have I found an agent to help publish them. I have pretty much determined the only reason is because I can't get anyone who can do this for me to read them. Everyone else, almost without exception, has liked them. And some of these are people who don't need to like anything I've done, nor do they need to tell me. But they do.
In addition, we've got a sort of summer movie marathon going with the Princesses to watch a bunch of movies they've never seen, and we've opened up the world of PG-13 to them all, as opposed to just Rock Girl, who just turned 13. They're really enjoying them, though the younger pair do occasionally hide their eyes from gross or scary parts.
Work is what it is. I continue to single-handedly support the programming side of several products in the company I work for. The powers that be have promised a few times to get me more help, but so far it has all come to naught. I have another new person to learn one part of my job, and we'll see how long she lasts.
We recently came off a vacation to Oklahoma City. On the way there (and back) we visited a store called Pops (http://route66.com/). Its claim to fame is having 600 varieties of soda pop. Yeah, who knew there were that many forms of liquid candy out there? My bright spot was that I finally got to try Bawls, the geek's choice of caffeinated beverage. The original flavor was really good, the cherry was ok, and I didn't like the sugar free. No aspartame, which was fine, but it used sucralose to try to sweeten it. My first thought was that it was some kind of beer. Another piece they did well was the hamburgers. Sure, burgers are burgers in most cases, but with these, you could actually tell they were hand made from the ground beef. No perfectly machine rounded burgers here. I don't mind rough edges on a burger at all. The restaurant is 90 minutes from home, but we'll have to visit again at some point. Long way to go for a burger and soda, but it was cool.
With the blog, I'm promising nothing, but as always, I would like to keep up with it. I once obsessed over trying to write something clever, but I think it would be better to simply write something. I'm not really promoting anything, nor am I really hoping for anything, so if I can remember to write about anything at all, I think that will be a good start.
So whatever I write might not be clever, insightful, or otherwise worth reading, but if I start somewhere, maybe I'll get somewhere else.
On Bioshock, I'm nearly done. On an 87 page walkthrough, I'm on page 77. I'll be following Bioshock with Gears of War 2. I'm primarily going through the games' storylines along with some basic sidequests for as long as I remain interested. This applied most definitely to Assassin's Creed Revelations and BAtman: Arkham City where the games complete their storylines and then allow you to continue working on sidequests almost indefinitely. With Arc Rise Fantasia, it's a game I borrowed from a friend of mine who insisted it was completely awesome. It's okay. A decent JRPG to offset the pounding from the shooter is nice.
I don't know if I have mentioned my 3 books, but they remain stagnant. No real movement online, nor have I found an agent to help publish them. I have pretty much determined the only reason is because I can't get anyone who can do this for me to read them. Everyone else, almost without exception, has liked them. And some of these are people who don't need to like anything I've done, nor do they need to tell me. But they do.
In addition, we've got a sort of summer movie marathon going with the Princesses to watch a bunch of movies they've never seen, and we've opened up the world of PG-13 to them all, as opposed to just Rock Girl, who just turned 13. They're really enjoying them, though the younger pair do occasionally hide their eyes from gross or scary parts.
Work is what it is. I continue to single-handedly support the programming side of several products in the company I work for. The powers that be have promised a few times to get me more help, but so far it has all come to naught. I have another new person to learn one part of my job, and we'll see how long she lasts.
We recently came off a vacation to Oklahoma City. On the way there (and back) we visited a store called Pops (http://route66.com/). Its claim to fame is having 600 varieties of soda pop. Yeah, who knew there were that many forms of liquid candy out there? My bright spot was that I finally got to try Bawls, the geek's choice of caffeinated beverage. The original flavor was really good, the cherry was ok, and I didn't like the sugar free. No aspartame, which was fine, but it used sucralose to try to sweeten it. My first thought was that it was some kind of beer. Another piece they did well was the hamburgers. Sure, burgers are burgers in most cases, but with these, you could actually tell they were hand made from the ground beef. No perfectly machine rounded burgers here. I don't mind rough edges on a burger at all. The restaurant is 90 minutes from home, but we'll have to visit again at some point. Long way to go for a burger and soda, but it was cool.
With the blog, I'm promising nothing, but as always, I would like to keep up with it. I once obsessed over trying to write something clever, but I think it would be better to simply write something. I'm not really promoting anything, nor am I really hoping for anything, so if I can remember to write about anything at all, I think that will be a good start.
So whatever I write might not be clever, insightful, or otherwise worth reading, but if I start somewhere, maybe I'll get somewhere else.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
My Only Problem With The New Doctor Who
I love Doctor Who. I watched the show when I was growing up and fell in love with the concept of the Timelord going about universe in his antiquated time machine called the Tardis. Through reruns on our local station in Oklahoma, I saw most of the fourth doctor twice and everything from the third doctor through the sixth. We also taped most of those onto VHS and rewatched them, so I know a lot of Doctor Who. At the end of the sixth Doctor, OETA stopped running Doctor Who for awhile. I never saw any of the seventh Doctor and I also missed the movie in 1996. In fact, I was completely absent from the Doctor Who scene until last year, when I found the new Doctor Who episodes (from the series revival in 2005) on Netflix and decided to introduce my family to it.
We immediately loved it. We burned through all 5 series along with the specials on Netflix and got the first half of series 6 and watched it all before the second half ran late last year. Once we got through the new series, I took everyone back to the beginning and we've been watching all of the classic episodes beginning with the first Doctor (many of the first and second Doctor episodes I had never seen either). In fact, we only recently reached the classic season 10, which is where my parents' VHS records begin.
The two series are quite different. The original was written as long serial stories, and while they have clever plots and such, many of them move very slowly through the story. The new series keeps the action moving constantly, probably in order to cater to the faster paced MTV generation who can't sit still while the Doctor waxes philosophical. I still enjoy the originals and still find them engrossing in many ways, and the new one, with its superior special effects, speedier pacing, and long story arcs that tie multiple stories together serves the give the original a run for its money while acknowledging it as part of its history.
To put the two series into a sort of perspective on where we are, timewise: we just completed series 6 on the new series. The classic series ran for 26 seasons and the end of the 6th season saw the regeneration of the 2nd Doctor into the third. So while we're going into the 3rd series of the 3rd actor to play the Doctor in the new series, the classic had just started into its 1st season of its 3rd Doctor. Overall, the series is on its 11th Doctor, and the character acknowledges himself as such. This character also acknowledges bow ties and fezes as cool, so you can take that with a grain of salt.
However, there is one point in the new series that the original rarely had a problem with. We're dealing with a time traveler. This is someone who can go anywhere and anytime, and his only (personally imposed) limitation is not to cross his own time stream (though he has had occasion to break this rule). He does also meet other races, such as the Daleks, who also possess the technology to travel through time, and it is with the Daleks, among some other races, that the major breakdown occurs. In the original series, these guys were really the only offenders where the Doctor managed to always meet the Daleks (regardless of when he met them) after his previous adventure with them. While it seems reasonable for this to happen occasionally, you are dealing with meeting a race either before or after you met them before. You meet them multiple times that chances of always coming across them after the last time you met them seems more and more unlikely, yet it always happened that way.
The new series takes this one fault and multiplies it a hundredfold. In the new series, the Doctor has met exactly one character out of order, and that is just their individual plot to do so. EVERYONE ELSE has met the Doctor in his personal chronology, no matter what year he meets them, and there are races he runs into across many different times. But no matter when he meets them, they always know about the last adventure or conversation. This apexed, as it were, when all the Doctor's enemies banded together and in around 100AD (who knows why that date, but ok), they catch him. This means that all of those races would have to have a) possessed time travel and b) communicated together to meet at the same time and place. These races would have different present times, so having them all communicate and then meet at a time in their far distant pasts seems bizarre.
The point where this idea hit rock bottom was when the Doctor desired to visit Brigadier (ret.) Lethbridge Stewart, who is considered a companion of the third Doctor (along with the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 7th) despite having never traveled with him in the Tardis. The Doctor calls the place where he is staying and is informed that he died 3 months prior. Granted, actor Nicolas Courtney had actually died a few months prior to this episode, but within the "Whoniverse," the Doctor can simply set the controls back three months and visit his friend prior to his death.
I understand the need for continuity, but the point of bending time would be to create a sort of discontinuity. The one story that makes the most sense in context is River Song's who manages to meet the Doctor completely out of order to the point that he knows her future and she knows his...well, some parts of her know his, depending on which point in her life they meet.
Don't get me wrong, now. I love the show, and I'll keep watching it. Just felt like talking about that one thing.
We immediately loved it. We burned through all 5 series along with the specials on Netflix and got the first half of series 6 and watched it all before the second half ran late last year. Once we got through the new series, I took everyone back to the beginning and we've been watching all of the classic episodes beginning with the first Doctor (many of the first and second Doctor episodes I had never seen either). In fact, we only recently reached the classic season 10, which is where my parents' VHS records begin.
The two series are quite different. The original was written as long serial stories, and while they have clever plots and such, many of them move very slowly through the story. The new series keeps the action moving constantly, probably in order to cater to the faster paced MTV generation who can't sit still while the Doctor waxes philosophical. I still enjoy the originals and still find them engrossing in many ways, and the new one, with its superior special effects, speedier pacing, and long story arcs that tie multiple stories together serves the give the original a run for its money while acknowledging it as part of its history.
To put the two series into a sort of perspective on where we are, timewise: we just completed series 6 on the new series. The classic series ran for 26 seasons and the end of the 6th season saw the regeneration of the 2nd Doctor into the third. So while we're going into the 3rd series of the 3rd actor to play the Doctor in the new series, the classic had just started into its 1st season of its 3rd Doctor. Overall, the series is on its 11th Doctor, and the character acknowledges himself as such. This character also acknowledges bow ties and fezes as cool, so you can take that with a grain of salt.
However, there is one point in the new series that the original rarely had a problem with. We're dealing with a time traveler. This is someone who can go anywhere and anytime, and his only (personally imposed) limitation is not to cross his own time stream (though he has had occasion to break this rule). He does also meet other races, such as the Daleks, who also possess the technology to travel through time, and it is with the Daleks, among some other races, that the major breakdown occurs. In the original series, these guys were really the only offenders where the Doctor managed to always meet the Daleks (regardless of when he met them) after his previous adventure with them. While it seems reasonable for this to happen occasionally, you are dealing with meeting a race either before or after you met them before. You meet them multiple times that chances of always coming across them after the last time you met them seems more and more unlikely, yet it always happened that way.
The new series takes this one fault and multiplies it a hundredfold. In the new series, the Doctor has met exactly one character out of order, and that is just their individual plot to do so. EVERYONE ELSE has met the Doctor in his personal chronology, no matter what year he meets them, and there are races he runs into across many different times. But no matter when he meets them, they always know about the last adventure or conversation. This apexed, as it were, when all the Doctor's enemies banded together and in around 100AD (who knows why that date, but ok), they catch him. This means that all of those races would have to have a) possessed time travel and b) communicated together to meet at the same time and place. These races would have different present times, so having them all communicate and then meet at a time in their far distant pasts seems bizarre.
The point where this idea hit rock bottom was when the Doctor desired to visit Brigadier (ret.) Lethbridge Stewart, who is considered a companion of the third Doctor (along with the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 7th) despite having never traveled with him in the Tardis. The Doctor calls the place where he is staying and is informed that he died 3 months prior. Granted, actor Nicolas Courtney had actually died a few months prior to this episode, but within the "Whoniverse," the Doctor can simply set the controls back three months and visit his friend prior to his death.
I understand the need for continuity, but the point of bending time would be to create a sort of discontinuity. The one story that makes the most sense in context is River Song's who manages to meet the Doctor completely out of order to the point that he knows her future and she knows his...well, some parts of her know his, depending on which point in her life they meet.
Don't get me wrong, now. I love the show, and I'll keep watching it. Just felt like talking about that one thing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
