Sun Microsystems

The other day, the computer science club here at SSU got to take a tour of Sun Microsystems (best known as the company behind Java, although they are behind Second Life as well).

We got so see various things that they are working on, including this setup they have where instead of having a whole computer you just have a terminal that connects to a server that you run things off of, which allows you to quickly and easily switch computers, to connect from any compatible machine, and so on. It looked like something pretty useful for working, but my friend and I couldn't help thinking how it would probably be horrible for gaming on.

We also saw another bit of hardware they are working on called Sun Spots, basically little bundles of sensors with some LED lights and built-in radios. You have to be somewhat creative to think of things to do with them (mostly they seem to be used for their motion trackers), but in the building where all this stuff gets developed there are a bunch of them all linked up to form a network that people use to send messages around, as well as some robots using them to keep track of each other and things like that.

Babylon 5

A few years ago a guy I knew told me about a sci-fi show called Babylon 5 that was, according to him, very good. Well, it took me something like 6 months, but I finally got around to looking it up and it is actually pretty good.

It only has 5 seasons (and 3 or 4 movies, and I think it has a spin-off series), but it manages to do a lot and be entertaining at the same time. It revolves aroun a space station named Babylon 5 that was created after Earth got into a war with an alien race known as the Minbari (it served a purpose similar to today's United Nations) and the station's crew.

As the show progresses, the plot slowly switches over to a war that I don't want to go too deep into for fear of revealing the plot (if you really want to know, I believe Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of it), but it features a bit of the essential fights and battles, but it revolves around diplomacy and politics more than most (which they actually pulled off).

while I have a few complaints about the show, namely that my two favorite characters have both left, it is still good enough that one would have to have a pretty good argument to convince someone that another sci-fi show is better than Babylon 5.

Anime Club

My friends and I here at college have started up an unofficial club known as anime club (it features the 4 of us and sometimes my roommate) where every friday, saturday, and sometimes sunday nights we stay up and play video games for a while then watch anime until morning.

It has proven to be rather fun, as I have gotten to see some shows that I otherwise would not have heard of (or not have watched) that have proven to be rather good - the most memorable being FLCL (also known as Fooly Cooly, Furi Curi, Foolly coolly, and probably some other names), an extremely random and funny show about a kid with robots coming out of his head and fights where people use guitars as weapons (trust me, it's entertaining. And only 6 episodes), and also Elfen Lied, a show about a guy and his cousin who get tangled up in a fight between some evil organization and these mutant girls with mysterious powers (I am being vague because it's so good I don't want to give away the plot. It's so good, in fact that I changed my desktop background to a picture of one of the characters from it), and of course there is the show we are watching now: Love Hina, a show about a guy who becomes the manager of a girls-only apartment-ish building.

In fact, anime club has gotten me into a game called counter-strike, which is probably THE iconic first-person shooter game in existence (after Halo, of course), as well as a few MMORPGs that I talk about in the video game section.

College

So I recently graduated from high school and now I am attending Sonoma State University. The room arrangements are actually pretty cool - my roommate is a friend from high school (there is this process where you can request a specific roommate) and there are another 2 guys in the other room in our suite.

Unfortunately, the building I am in is the one furthest from everything, so I have to walk further to get somewhere. But I did meet some fellow gamers and so we have been playing various things. Mostly, though, we play Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (a first-person shooter where you try to win battles with your skills) but I recently played an extended game of Counter-Strike, which is probably THE first-person shooter followed by an epically long game of StarCraft (another popular one, but this one is a real-time strategy game) which came to a draw because the other guy had to go somewhere and neither of us could win anytime soon (if ever).

Oh, and classes are nice too.

Pearl

A couple of years ago, my Mother (who had been doing 'bird stuff' almost as much as she usually did 'plant stuff') went to some sort of bird show and came back with a cockatiel named Pearl.

Pearl is a White Faced Cinnamon Pearl Pied Cockatiel, which (from what I understand) means she is somewhat rare (because she has 4 mutations). White Faced means that her face is white, rather than the typical yellow with orange cheek spots. Cinnamon ... I don't remember. Pearl (I think) means that the tips of her feathers are white, making it look like she is white with gray spots (instead of the other way 'round, which is what she really is). Pied means that she will have some sort of wierd coloration somehow, but she is still young and so that hasn't shown up yet.

I am delighted by the fact that Pearl usually prefers my company over that of my mother, who is the one who knows a lot about birds.

An annoying thing, though, is that whenever I try to take a picture of her, my camera makes a noise that sounds almost exactly like her chirping, so of course she stops what she is doing and looks straight at the camera.

Julio's Car

Julio, one of the other interns here, has this car that he, Eric, and I always use since neither Eric nor I have cars avalable to us. This car has so little power, though, that it is almost scary.

One time, we were going to turn onto a fairly major road and needed the traffic to have a big enough gap for us to get in safely. Eric saw a smallish gap and told Julio to "punch it," but Julio said no and waited for a bigger one. When a normal-sized gap appeared, Julio drove out at a fairly normal speed (a bit slower than normal, if anything). "That was me punching it," he says.

The street that PNN is on has a pretty substantial hump to it, and so the parking spaces on the side of the road are at a fairly steep angle. To get out of these spaces, Julio has to rev the engine basically as far as it will go before he slowly pulls out.

And today, we were turning at an intersection of our way to his house from In & Out, and to match the speed of the other cars he had to rev it hard enough that we smelled something burning a minute later, and he told us about the first time he burned out the clutch the rest of the way. At least nothing wa smoking, though.

Video Games

Earlier today Jennifer, one of the people who works here at PNN (she made and narrated the help video that appears on all new pages) told me that I have written (if I remember correctly) "as much as just about anybody on PNN."

I suppose this shows just how much I like video games, since I have so much to say about so many of them, and I haven't run out of stories yet. If you ever get into a conversation with me about video games you had better have some way out of it since I tend to go on and on and on and ... you get the picture.

Writing all this stuff down here on PNN has given me a way to talk about that in a way that people can simply go away if they don't want to hear about it, and I rather like that. Plus, it doesn't hurt that whenever I have nothing to do around here I just write something about video games or whatever...

Japanese versus English

For those of you who don't know what anime is, it's a style of drawing used by the Japanese to make... cartoons, for lack of a better word.

A lot of anime is made in Japan and then comes to America with all the dialogue replaced by english dialogue, but I (and my friends) tend not to like the English voice acting so we usually go for the Japanese versions of these shows.

My siblings were watching episodes 1-4 of the english version of Naruto (an excellent example of anime with bad english voice acting), which I had looked into before I got into the Japanese versions of shows and found that the english voice acting spoiled the whole thing.

I happened to be sitting on the couch reading a book, but Naruto was interesting enough that I decided to find the Japanese version and watch a few episodes (if only to see the end of this one fight). It was pretty good, especially since the voices in the Japanese version actually worked for the characters.

It's actually a pretty good show, and it illustrates the point I am trying to make very well: anime is better in Japanese (with english subtitles of course). I was watching an episode of a show named Eureka SeveN (yes, that n is supposed to be capitalized) in English since I by that time I hadn't found a source for the Japanese version, and some of the dialogue in there had me cracking up. With some shows the difference is pretty subtle (Fullmetal Alchemist, for example) but others... this reminded me of watching old episodes of the original Star Trek series and cracking up at the special effects, the costumes, and even the fight scenes.

Then, soon after that, I was watching the Japanese versions of a show called Bleach and I realized that the English version was on TV. The English version is almost 100 episodes behind the Japanese version, but I figured it would be interesting to compare the two. When I started watching, I saw that the English voices just didn't work. The scene I saw featured 3 of the main characters talking, and their voices were SO similar. It was pretty funny (but only because I knew I had access to the Japanese version). One of them, a large, strong, semi-crazy guy who loves a good fight and has scars on his face and so on had a voice virtually identical to that of a 15-year old kid.

Then, of course, there is this one voice actress that I have heard in 3 shows (the english versions, anyway). I first heard her in a show called Ghost in the Shell as the character of Kusanagi Motoko, then she popped up in Eureka SeveN as the 'ship's doctor' type thing of the show, and finally she was the voice of one of the high-ranking ninjas in Naruto.

This brings up the running joke that my friends and I have that all of the english versions of anime shows use the same 5 voice actors. We know that isn't true, but sometimes it certainly seems that way.

Shawn

So, I have this friend from school, and I call him Shawn even though his name is Jason. Why? There is a perfectly good reason for that.

A couple of years ago, in spanish class, the teacher called him Shawn several times and he never did anything about it. He's been Shawn ever since.

Then, of course, there is my other friend Justin (aka "Town Boy"). I call him town boy only occasionally since it hasn't really caught on, but I have a good reason: his middle name is Townley.

One day in class, the teacher was taking roll, but for some reason he decided that it would be a good idea to use everyone's middle names. I snuck by with 'Daniel' but we got to have a laugh over names like 'Darius' and (of course) Townley.

Then, the next day, I was trying to remember his middle name so that I could annoy him, but I couldn't remember exactly what it was, so I called him Town Boy (since it sounds like his middle name and it is also something of a video game reference).

The Weekend Action Movie-Fest

This past weekend some friends of mine and I went over to his house to watch some action movies. First we decided on The Street Fighter starring Sonny Chiba, a movie with lots of fighting and fake blood (seriously, it's almost neon). There was a lot of making mean faces and whooshing noises when people punched, and it was dubbed, but it is still a very good movie.

Then we watched Django (pronounced 'Jango'), a spaghetti western (western that was filmed in Italy). It had a pretty dramatic beginning -- three mexicans are whipping some woman saying things about 'you won't run away from us again' until five guys wearing red bandanas shoot them and start to put her on a flaming cross but they get shot by the man who identifies himself as Django. He is wearing all black and dragging a muddy coffin, and casually shoots a survivor as he is talking to the woman (her name is Maria). The plot turns out to be that the leader of the guys who wear red and don't like mexicans (they look and act like KKK people with bad tailors and who like red too much) is named Major Jackson and he killed the woman that Django loved and now he wants revenge.

Surprisingly enough it got us laughing in a few places, mostly because the dubbing was ... amusing. One scene in particular has Django and Maria talking, and Maria says that Django "makes her feel like a real woman," to which Django replies that he is "glad that he makes her feel like a real woman." The really funny part of that is how serious the actors were when they shot that scene, though -- here is this guy who is completely serious saying things like that.

Finally, we ended with Shaun of the Dead. If you haven't seen it, you should -- it is a hilarious take on zombie flicks but also a credible zombie flick in itself. It is about a guy named Shaun and his immediate circle of friends and what they do as zombies swarm the streets of London. I don't want to say too much in case you haven't seen it, but my current survey is a reference to a recurring joke from Shaun of the Dead.

The party featured everything from pizza to chips to a dog that was much more interested in eating the cat's food than interacting with the cat, but it was a fun day and I got to see some friends of mine who I hadn't seen for a while (not since the Japanese monster movie party, I think...).

Stealing Fire from the Gods

Today I read the beginning of a book entitled 'Stealing Fire from the Gods' by James Bonnet. It was about Bonnet's journey to discover the essence of "story." He talks about how he sees extremely successful movies, books, and plays such as Star Wars, the Odyssey, and Death of a Salesman which have extremely good drama or metaphor or whatever, but everything else isn't that good. He even talks about the movie Beverly Hills Cop, his point being that Eddie Murphy is so good at playing his character that the movie was a success even though it didn't have very good drama or plot.

He sees people discovering one or two of these elements and that they are powerful, powerful enough that they alone can make a movie successful, and these people believe that they have found "it," that they have found that which will allow them to write great stories. But he believes that all of these elements are just that - elements, parts of a whole. He believes that the way to a truly great story encompasses all of these elements and he organizes them into something he calls the "Golden Paradigm" - a wheel with drama and comedy and character and what have you along the edges and change in the center.

            Basically what I got out of this book was that you need to remember that your audience doesn't have to watch your movie or read your book - they watch what they think is going to interest them and little else. So, first you need to stand out from the crowd - an innovative title or front cover is a good place to start (I know that the only reason I looked at this book was because it has an intriguing title). Then, you need to keep them interested, try to talk about your ideas or tell your story in such a way as to make them want to hear what you say next. Now, I'm not saying that you have to contribute to the short attention span that people these days have, but if you don't keep your readers or viewers interested, then they can always just go and do something else.