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Hello world, it’s Monday morning.
The past week, as you may have gathered from the cunningly hidden link in this post, I’ve been interning here as part of my uni degree. It’s been great, it really has, and I can almost delude myself into believing that for these few weeks I have a job in the media industry.
Good points thus far have been the people, who have been really nice and willing to help wherever possible, the work itself, which has been an interesting blend of production work and the true nitty-gritty of media administration, and the experience, which has been, like I said, akin to truly having a job in the world of media production.
Bad points have been the travel. I guess that’s bad point, really, isn’t it, as there is only one of thus. But incorporated under the moniker ‘travel’ is an assortment of lack of sleep, early starts, late finishes and the moulding of my normal life (well, as normal as one could call it) around the internship.
Video Ezy is still around, and along with the four days I’m at Onion this week, I’m there four nights too, and that’s before the weekend. I was originally going to be here every day, but decided that in the interests of my need for rest and at least minimum mental stability a day off would probably do me good – that’s Thursday.
So, it feels like I’m at work at the moment. And it’s great.
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Sometimes the people on the Book of Face really do bring a smile to my dial. Particularly when they’re just poor netizens trying to run a coherent conglomerate of like-minded individuals.
PLEASE STOP WITH THE SPAM! People are here to discuss Vegemite, not to buy handbags or try to change their appendages. If you post it, I will delete it, block you, and hex your goat. You have been warned.
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Hey hey. Hey. Ha. Ho. Mmm.
Apologies for the lack of poh-stahj. I’ve been doing some internship work here for uni, and due to its being located in the northern suburbs of Sydney, and myself way out west, the two hours’ travel, early starts and late finishes don’t lend themselves much to blogging, let alone anything else really.
The whole Neal/Dellabosca thing’s gone on a bit too long, in my opinion. My perfect utopian alter-reality would see the whole thing done and dusted in a weeks’ worth of news. But yeah. Allegation after allegation just gets a bit boring after a while.
Latest awesome things found on this great and almighty cyber-platform we call the interwebzeh:
OnePlusYou A bunch of actually-quite-good personality quizzes, as opposed to the amateurish drivel you find on most quiz aggregator sites.
Without A Box Awesomely handy and mostly cost-free, this site allows young, up-and-coming filmmakers to submit their films to festivals all over the world from one handy site. Even Sundance. AWESOME.
Anyway, after so much travel I’m somewhat buggered, so there’s nothing left to do except make more Spore creatures before dinner and bed.
For the most part, I’m against vandalism on Wikipedia. It basically goes against everything the mighty Wiki stands for in terms of a completely accurate and up-to-date user-generated and user-moderated encyclopaedia.
But once, just once in a while, I think it’s quite amusing.
See first line. Got it here. Someone might wanna take a look at that.
On a much sadder note, as of around half an hour ago, I finished watching the final episode of The West Wing. It’s taken me fourteen months, since April last year, to get through all seven seasons, and it’s been one hell of a ride. The show lost something when Aaron Sorkin left after the fourth season, but the team rallied round and brought it home with a thrillride of elections, transitions and futures.
When you spend fourteen months with a cast of characters, with their lives and stories, their comings and goings, you feel a little sad when there’s nothing new to watch, no new stories to tell, no further hints as to what they might be up to. It’s a sad night in the Hovel tonight.
But to John Wells, Thomas Schlamme and the incredibly talented cast, crew and writers of that amazing show, I have nothing but admiration and gratitude. My only wish is that as a writer and filmmaker, one day I’ll make at least one person feel like I do right now, and every time I hear that opening theme.
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I mentioned yesterday that I’d been mucking around a bit with the newly released Spore Creature Creator from EA and Maxis. It’s been a riot… you can see some of my creations below. And you can bet that I’m about to go pre-order the full version of the game three months in advance.
I’m a lover of open-ended adventure. And anything that lets me create something is bound to be in my games collection. That’s why I’ve always looked forward to games like The Movies, Fable, Morrowind and SimCity, because they give the player a certain amount of creative freedom.
The Movies was good fun. An odd mix of SimCity, RollerCoaster Tycoon and 3D Movie Maker, you got to build your own film studio the way you wanted, cut together short movies and export them as WMVs for upload to YouTube or wherever. The community built around it, however, was lacklustre, despite a high level of hype, and fizzled out after only a couple of years.
Morrowind remains one of my favourite games on the old Fatbox. A great adventure, coupled with almost realistic travel times over an enormous landscape teeming with plants to harvest, animals to kill, eat or sell product from, you could play the game however you liked. The main storyline was fun and intriguing, but you could totally ignore it if you wanted to hone your skills as a merchant, wizard, monk, thief or warrior. But it lacked the complete creative control that gives games the edge for me.
Fable, originally titled Project Ego, was an incredible game – until it was actually released. Pre-release hype centred around the ability to create your own character from scratch, then play the game however you wanted. Be a hero or a villain, cause children to mimic your hairstyle and catch-cries, play the game however you wanted. Think The Sims meets Morrowind. The actual game was short, fun, but gave you almost no control over the character of, well, your character. In short, a massive disappointment.
SimCity is of course one of the highest-selling games in history, and will always be great fun. Its evolution from the original SNES and PC versions through SimCity 2000, 3 and 4, then Societies, has been astounding. Will Wright has taken a simple city creation game and turned it into a complex balance of creativity with responsibility and fiscal savvy, turning the player into mayor, city planner, accountant and political mediator at the click of a mouse. SimCity is a fantastic idea, and has always been among my favourite timewasters.
But all that will probably change come the 4th of September, when Spore is unleashed upon the gaming market. Spore has been in the making for eight years. Originally titled ‘SimEverything’, its constant promise has been to give the player control over a species from the molecular stage right through to high-tech space-faring civilisation. My original discovery of the game was in 2006, when I saw this video:
From then I was, naturally, very curious, and have been following the game’s progress ever since. And unlike my tracking of Project Ego, later to be Fable, I have not been put off by any of the additions or subtractions to the original premise or promises put forth by the developers.
It’s revolutionary, or… dare I say it… evolutionary.
My only question is will the game live up to expectations, and from the look of the Creature Creator, my initial answer is yes. To take my creatures out of the little test ring that you see in the pictures above, and see how they fare with predators and prey, then creating a tribe, building huts, advancing through the ages, seeing which creations live or die, experimenting with different body parts and weapons, seeing a species that I created at the molecular level and played with through its evolution develop a city that I help design and launch off to visit other planets – the prospect of all this is enough to make an open-ended game lover cry.
This is a reminder to myself more than anything that tomorrow I must go unto the great halls of Aldi Supermarkets, the office of postage, and the Shop of Reject. A glorious and hitherto unsurpassed day of thrills and enjoyments, to be sure.
Otherwise I’ve been mucking around a lot with the limited version of the Spore Creature Creator. More on that soon. For now, I must shower for I am stinky post-work. I must also partake of food.
Afterwards I think I shall write. Or keep going with the West Wing. Or watch a movie. Oh zegads. The possibilities are, of course, endless.
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Sure – for the first time I actually knew what I was doing when I voted. Yes, I may have contributed, with that vote, to the greatest upheaval in the last ten years of Australian politics. But I’m afraid, in this case, I’m with ‘most voters’.
The situation is simply ridiculous. $1.60 a litre? Piss off. I remember Mum and Dad complaining about 80 cents a litre. Then it was 90. Then remember the news bulletins? ‘A dollar a litre! Surely this means the apocalypse is nigh.’ Then with Iraq again and everything, it’s just snowballed into the hideous situation in which we find ourselves now.
I need my car to get to uni, work and short trips around the area, maybe into the city once in a while. But it’s getting to the point where the 25-minute trip to uni is becoming a noticeable separate financial burden, no longer just a part of my fuel budget.
Something really must be done, though I’ve no idea what. What could the government possibly hope to do? Step in and wave their arms around going ‘Bad petrol people! Make price go down k?’ I think not. Entertaining though it would be.
So I turn it over to the readers of the Hovel – what could be done about fuel, short of nuking all OPEC countries and making them states of the USA?
One of the slightly more light-hearted film reviews of the past five years, which I only just discovered while – in a very… internet… kind of way – looking for something completely different, was the Guardian’s review of last year’s The Bourne Ultimatum.
The whole piece is essentially concerned with the portrayal of Guardian journalists through cinematic history, and how refreshing it is to finally see one get ‘to be an action man. Or at least hang out with an action man who reads the Guardian.’
Also hilarious are the comments on the Guardian journalist’s SOP when under a hail of bullets.
Worth a look.
Yes – I know I’m a few months late. Leave me alone.
One wonders what value one must place on art. On freedom of expression.
Having been watching the 2007 Steve Buscemi remake of the 2003 film Interview, I have, naturally, been steadfastly researching (i.e. Googling and Wiki-ing) the director of the 2003 original, Theo van Gogh.
Van Gogh was murdered in November 2004 by a Dutch Islamic fundamentalist who shot Van Gogh eight times, stabbed him repeatedly and then used a knife to fasten a five-page letter to his chest. I initially heard of van Gogh’s death in the book The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva, much of which is set in the Netherlands and focuses on the increasing Islamic tension in the region.
Being intrigued by the idea of an almost identical remake of the original Interview, as well as being a huge fan of both Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller, I had to get it out. I’ve never seen any of Van Gogh’s movies, but if the remake is anything to go by, the original must’ve been truly amazing.
It makes you wonder, though, why someone so talented would be targeted as a dissenter. It’s ironic, tragic. Theo van Gogh was no quiet man. He commented endlessly on the Islamic movement in the Netherlands, attracted attention from politicians, Islamic groups and others. He certainly did not go quietly. But like John Lennon, like Marvin Gaye, like Martin Luther King, he believed without question, almost without consideration, in free speech and freedom of expression. Editorial journalism and film were his weapons against oppression, against injustice. Like Lennon and Gaye, he paid the ultimate price.
I place infinite value on art. Be it painting, music, literature, film. Art can define a generation, lift spirits, drown sorrows, unsettle pillars of power. Art is forever. Use it, no matter what the cost. It may end up being the only thing we have.
