eddyfate

Tonight: Dinner with Michelle and Charlie.

Tomorrow: Going to see The Wrestler and Canterbury Tales with the family and Kelley for her birthday.

Sunday: Chapter two of my Scion game.

Then, a flurry of work before I fly to Canada on Wednesday.

Saw Watchmen. Was pretty pleased with it, all told. Very faithful to the material, and where it deviates I think it works well.

It's a zombie movie. The protagonist has rescued his buddy from being attacked by a zombie, but he finds out his buddy's been bitten. Does he try to save him, or put him out of his misery?

This time, you get to decide.

The Outbreak is an interactive movie, a combination of good old "Choose Your Own Adventure" interactivity at key points combined with decades of frustration yelling at stupid horror movie protagonists. The idea, in retrospect, is very simple: construct a decision tree of events in a zombie survival scenario, film each option, then use the power of the Internet to show the options, allowing the audience to click at key points and make a simple but interactive zombie movie.

The site is surprisingly good quality and accounts for a lot of different ways to experience the movie. If you fail, you can start over from the beginning or try "Chapter Select" and get a tree of your previous decisions, and which ones are untried or led to your death (unlike, say, Dragon's Lair, which often kicks you back a notch and forces you to try again). As you go through, you'll see some similar scenes, but creative editing allows for subtle differences in certain scenes from time to time, and earlier choices can (and do) impact later ones.

The only downside I see is that the choices are fairly arbitrary. Move Furniture or Get Wood? Fuck, how do I know? There is a fair amount of clicking on choices at random and hoping they work out, but that's not too different from the source they're emulating (Choose Your Own Adventure books), so it's a minor beef. It's also really short -- I played through every option in about fifteen minutes. However, it's one of those head-slapping "why didn't anyone think of this before?" ideas that I'm hoping will take hold and propagate on the net.

Time to catch up on the life thing. Life is actually pretty sweet right now.

Work has settled back into a good rhythm (New York + Morocco + bronchitis really threw off my work flow for a while), and I'm making good headway on the development of the Scion Companion, which is turning out to be a very fun book. I'm also deep in research for a new book I'm developing with the help of Russell and Joe which also promises to be really cool. This is the third book I've developed from the beginning, but it's the first that's completely my idea and vision; Mind's Eye Theatre: The Awakening I was given a lot of leeway on, but I chose to be faithful to Awakening and Mind's Eye Theatre, and the Scion Companion was developed with a lot of insight and input from John and Rich. It's been exciting and nerve-wrecking to stretch some creative muscles that haven't seen use since Midway City.

One thing that combining my main hobby with my work has done is given me more time to invest in other interests (when I'm not working 50-hour weeks, that is). I've been playing Grand Theft Auto IV a fair bit, although I'm currently stuck on a couple of difficult missions. I've also been playing a lot of Rock Band, and with the new drum pads we got so we don't annoy the neighbors, I'm developing a solo career on drums to complement my career on guitar. I've also been catching up on some graphic novels that Kelley loaned me (as well as a stack I got at New York Comic Con), and I'm actually back to reading for my own enjoyment. I finally caught up on Torchwood Season Two, and I'm a few episodes into Doctor Who Season Four. I'm caught up on House (curse you, season ending cliffhanger!). I've been watching Raw every week, ECW most weeks, and Smackdown once in a while. I watch movies in the theater as well as at home. I had forgotten how much I gave up juggling a job and a freelance career.

Also, my social life in and out of work is far, far better than it was in St. Louis. Easily three times a week we're going out and doing something, whether it's dinner with friends, a movie with a group or just the three of us, or a party with my co-workers. Last Friday Michelle came to work for a BBQ at the office, and we expected to stay for only an hour or so, but ended up staying until midnight talking with some of the Icelanders before they headed back. This Saturday we're going to the Ren Faire with the company, and then there's a birthday party that evening. We've also been going to see live shows like Jon Stewart and Jeff Dunham (who will be in town next weekend). I've been playing in the local Camarilla LARPs, I'm in a Mage tabletop game that Joe's running for a few of us at the office (at least, in theory) and once again I've gotten that bug of kicking around a tabletop game of my own.

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See, here's an example of how cool things are right now. Russell just came into my office to talk about a project idea he had, and we spent ten minutes just talking about ideas for it, intermixed with just bullshitting about old Choose Your Own Adventure style game books (not the actual CYOA books, but the slew of knockoffs that had you rolling dice or characters fighting each other and the like) and the original Vampire: the Masquerade -- Bloodlines video game.

Fuck. I have to remember to buy my Casino Royale tickets for this Friday. I cannot miss this.

garchangel, through his work, got two tickets to see the Aeon Flux movie. Last night we decided to use one of my Blingo free tickets and have all three of us go to see it.

To backtrack a bit, I've always been a more-than-casual fan of the original Aeon Flux cartoon (note: link has clearly-labelled spoilers of the series). Then I heard about the movie, and I had the same reaction I did to the Hitchhiker's movie -- I expected it to be terrible, but I was going to go see it to pay tribute to my fandom. Even though I have most of the series on VHS, I intentionally didn't watch it, because I wanted to watch the movie on its own merits.

Now when I watch a movie that I expect to be terrible and I get a movie that's mediocre, I'm initially very happy with the movie. I was entertained, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and so on. Considering there's only ever been one movie in a theater that I actually slept through (A Thin Red Line) and I actually found movies like The Scorpion King entertaining, I try to discount my initial impression of the movie. No, my real opinion of a movie comes in two stages: the conversation with the people I went to see the movie with soon afterward, and the next day. Aeon Flux was vaguely resembling the cartoon (and even less so after I refreshed my memory on some points of the cartoon), and as a stand-alone sci-fi action flick it is mediocre at best. I suggest renting it on DVD if you're interested.

What bothers me about this rash of recent "remade" movies is the heavy-handed fan service. Most any movie in the past few years that is based off of a comic, cartoon, etc. will have a few bits of fan service in the first fifteen minutes, then the movie pretty much either flushes the premise or gets on with the "real" plot of the movie, with potentially a last little bit of fan service at the end. Now, as a fan, I actually don't mind a little fan service, but I prefer that it be done in a way that actually enhances the movie, instead of just to push my buttons. In Aeon Flux, the fan service was either heavy-handed (catching a fly in her eyelashes) or simply rehashed stuff from the series (such as one entire scene early in the movie). On the flip side, Serenity had a few in-jokes for people familiar with the series, but people who have never seen the series said they were able to follow along just fine without knowing the jokes. That's responsible fan service.

The only thing Aeon Flux did for me was make me want to get the new DVD set so I can remember the good stuff about it.

I was very surprised to hear that they're making a Mutant Chronicles movie. I mean, I have the board game, the RPG, and I used to have some decks of the CCG, but that was all ten years ago. Why now?

Maybe I should submit a movie proposal for Midway City now so it can start shooting in 2016...

The actual nausea passed a couple of days ago, but I've been dealing with a lingering dizziness for days now. Yesterday I thought I was doing better, and then right before I left for work my dizziness got really bad. So, my plans to get some projects done at home instead became me lying down a lot and watching TV and reading. Tonight I expect I'll do more of the same, in the hope that I can use this weekend to actually get things done.

As a side note, The Muppets' Wizard of Oz is actually quite funny, especially Toto (who is a hispanic king prawn). There's even a few brief references to the classic Muppet Show, which was a nice touch.

Last night I actually got Lappy to connect to the internet (no idea how - just turned it on, and this time it worked). Decided that since this was going to be my main machine for a couple of weeks, I installed Firefox along with plugins (like Acrobat Reader), and then went to town on Firefox extensions. I hadn't looked at them in many months, so I was pleased to see a few new ones that I snagged (and a LOT of really worthless ones or ones that tried to be useful but ended up being not so good). greebotrill turned on BBC World News on BBC America, and I brought Lappy downstairs to work on upgrading, chatting, and drinking tea while watching the same 15 minutes of footage play a few times.

After that, I took a shower, spent half an hour researching something that got a hold of my brain, and then watched the last two-thirds of Million Dollar Baby. Normally I hate watching movies half-way through, but in this case I was sucked in, and the movie was surprisingly good, as well as not going in the direction I expected it to at all.

Afterwards, I cranked out an hour of Fable, finally beating that damned arena quest and inadvertantly finding new strategies to use against two of the tougher fights. Now that I'm nearly 30,000 gold richer, I need to figure out how I'm going to spend my ph4t l3wt. Maybe Saturday.

Tonight is D&D, and tomorrow is more D&D. Sunday is shopping for computer parts.