writhaus

In less than 10 days I will be headed off and will be out of pocket for two years. One of the myriad thoughts that passes through the mind when faced with something like that is simply, “How the heck am I going to find out what music I am missing and how do I keep that from happening?”

With that in mind, I have compiled a list of five songs from the summer of 2007 I feel are worth giving a listen if you’ve been overseas and missed the season’s sonic goodness.

1. Spoon – The Underdog
In a year where the classic cartoon was mined for a terrible movie, it’s nice to know something named Underdog didn’t suck this summer. From the album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon’s The Underdog features tight lyrics, hand claps and blaring trumpets set the tone for my summer: the appearance of light and airiness with plenty of things going on beneath the surface.

2. Modest Mouse – Missed the Boat
Modest Mouse is always pretty pensive and the moody tone of this song summed up my feelings as this summer fades into fall.

3. The Starting Line – Island
I always liked The Starting Line. When I heard this single, I was both happy they were back and relieved they were getting airplay again. Thematically, who doesn’t enjoy a song about just getting away and starting over? Songs like this allow us to vicariously do the things life usually doesn’t allow.

4. Moonrats – FLM
Until I graduated from high school in 1994, I listened pretty much exclusively to country music. This summer, Sirius DJ Demos introduced me to alternative rock pioneers Archers of Loaf. I mention them because this song from LA’s Moonrats reminds me of them. It has the same raw vibe, the same “new” feeling which is saying something for a song recorded long after Archers broke up.

5. Brad Paisley – Online
I don’t listen to much country music anymore. It isn’t the same kind of music I grew up with save for a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is Brad Paisley. With Online, Paisley infuses a country song with a timeliness usually reserved for rock acts. He submits his critique of internet culture with a knowing wink and a great video.

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The trend to make video games more like movies has brought along more baggage than perhaps game creators intended–and that’s a good thing. For many years, video games basically looked, felt, and played the same. You had your hero, you moved him through a side-scrolling maze o’ enemies and at the end of each level, you’d encounter a boss. Level maps would either scroll left or up, you had to leap over holes in the ground, and powerups would come at inopportune times. For these games (I’m thinking of Contra, Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Mario, Zelda, Bionic Commando…), the only substantial difference between them is the artwork. One is set in a fantasy world with odd and strange creatures, another is set in a different fantasy world with different odd creatures. Game creators didn’t think about aesthetic analysis or speak of their games with the same vocabulary one would use to discuss Chaucer or the films of Alfred Hitchcock. No, games were supposed to be fun, challenging at times, but entertainment none the less. These rules, however, no longer apply.

As the technology and innovation behind video games advanced, they began including cinematic sequences, more developed story lines, and allowed the player to be more creative in HOW they existed in the virtual world. Thus, games could no longer be defined by simple thematic differences but needed something more robust. Naturally, game makers began to think of their games in terms of genres, as their film counterparts had been doing for some time. Doom is horror, Call of Duty is realistic war simulation, Civilization is high-brow strategy. One could easily find films that would also fit these genres. Where games break from traditional cinema is clear to anyone: games are interactive and film is passive. This is why defining games by “genres” can only get one so far.

And then there are the games that become more than the sum of their parts. They become triumphs of a single creative idea realized with blistering clarity. You may wonder what I mean by this; simply that, films such as Rushmore, Rear Window, and Taxi Driver, take on the personality of their principle creator, so much that one can say, “yes, this is a Wes Anderson/Alfred Hitchcock/Martin Scorcese film.” As the craft of designing video games develops, naturally you have individuals that direct/impose their visions onto their games.

American McGee’s Alice is one such game. Our heroine is Alice, a deranged mental institution captive in a dark and twisted version of Alice in Wonderland setting. There is something compelling in taking a perfect little Victorian school girl and seeing just how unseemly she can be. The game is bloody, but not quite horror… it could be best described as a psychological thriller. The dialogue is deceptively menacing, the characters unsettling, and the whole experience puts one at unease. Again, this is a video game, remember? While playing, I keep wondering where the lines of reality blur into fantasy. Is Alice really crazy? If this game occurs all in her head, then what does it say to have her as the “heroine” of her own narrative? How far does the rabbit hole really go? While the graphic engine is a bit dated at this point, the games longevity is not because it looks super slick; no, it retains its playability because it touches on something deeper. The gameplay is challenging, yes, but you can become easily engrossed in this creepy and strange world.

This notion of becoming invested in a game and even identifying with a game’s main character is well understood by psychologists. Freud helped us understand our development in terms of identification in three stages: primary, narcissistic, and tertiary. I mention Freud here only to highlight that indeed we can easy identify with Alice; indeed she is the heroine. You are her animus, you are what makes her move. In American McGee’s Alice, we are asked to identify with the villain, similar to films such as Scarface. Yet here is where the game transcends to a new level: the game has manipulated you to feel a certain way. The game’s creator wanted you to feel unsettled by your co-dependent feelings towards Alice. And boy is it powerful.

American McGee’s Alice is a triumph in tone and in style and has bent and twisted the notion of video game genre as it has defiled Alice and Wonderland. You’ll probably see it laying around in a bargain basement sale and if you do, do yourself a favor and pick it up. It’ll grow on you, as it did me and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

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I arrived home to mom and dad’s Monday evening, but was too tired to do much more than simply fire the new laptop up. I nearly have it set up completely now. The penultimate task was resyncing my iTunes library, which is now done. There was an interesting problem with Blu-ray playing along the way, though. It seems WinDVD 8 is quite the little bastard.

Initially I didn’t have any reservations when I saw WinDVD was installed on the computer for playing our friend the Blu-ray disc. Surely since it’s a Sony computer and a Sony proprietary format, the vendor would meet their standards, right? As long as you aren’t a tinkerer, I suppose that could be true.

Unfortunately for me, I bought this laptop with one idea being that I could hook my Xbox 360′s HD DVD drive to it and have both formats covered, if not while I am in the Peace Corps, then afterwards as I reintegrate into society. With that in mind, I hooked the drive up Tuesday and discovered the WinDVD wouldn’t do anything with it. No problem, I will just find an upgrade and that will solve things, right?

Wrong. The upgrade only worked to break the installation of WinDVD BD for Vaio. Since Sony keeps all your backups on a hidden partition, I had no idea how to reinstall the OEM version. A moderately quick call to Sony’s Bangalore office had my software reinstalled and Blu-ray functionality restored.

But I hadn’t succeeded in my task. What to do except keep trying, right?

On the Nero website, I bought a $25 license for HD DVD/Blu-ray playing for Showtime. That was Tuesday night. To this point, all Showtime has done is tell me that Blu-ray discs are unsupported, not to mention HD DVDs. Back to the drawing board, I supposed.

I did notice one interesting quirk in WinDVD BD for Vaio: A tab for HD DVD had been added. This gave me hope! I zeroed in on getting the rest of that functionality installed from the full WinDVD 8. Every time I tried to install it, though, I was struck with error 1721 and 1603. When I tried to uninstall everything and start over from scratch, the uninstaller didn’t work. Bah!

I searched the internet and found info on their user forums that helped remove the old version, allowing me to start over completely with the installation. Installation success finally came, but when I tried to run the software, I ran into an MFC error. Last night I began troubleshooting this problem. There were many posts across the internet about programs causing these errors. I read the solutions hoping to find something that would help me. Most of them ended with people getting new revisions of the software. This was not a good sign.

I turned again to the user forums from Corel. There were five posts linked from a related thread. I read in them the same solution I had tried earlier in the week. I was desperate though, so I tried again and again, looking for anything I might have done wrongly.

It’s worth noting, too, that I had embarked on a separate adventure, the Windows Anytime Upgrade, modifying my Home Premium installation into an Ultimate one. This left me unable to revert to WinDVD BD for Vaio, greatly increasing the need to have this problem solved.

Finally, I decided to try another alternative suggested offhandedly by a post on the AVS Forums…try PowerDVD. I went to their site and purchased the software. Unfortunate to today’s standards, the purchase had to be approved by a human being and it was in the wee hours of Saturday morning in Germany where Cyberlink appeared to be based.

Until 3:30am, I worked and finally gave up. I went to bed with all my hopes pinned on Cyberlink.

When I went back to the computer at about 9 Saturday morning, I had a verification of my purchase along with the download link and my serial number. It took only a few moments to download and a few more to install. I rebooted my computer anxiously.

As Vista Ultimate whirred to life, I noticed something going on…PowerDVD recognized my disc! It started playing The Road Warrior, which had been living in the drive the last few days. Success!

Or at least partial success…I still needed to see what would happen with the 360′s HD DVD drive.

Skip ahead a day. I have just finished watching The Big Lebowski in high def on my new laptop. PowerDVD recognized the drive perfectly and played it’s disc like a champ. Finally, complete success!

I am glad to report that this is a story with a happy ending. This whole Windows Vista thing is a strange journey. I won my first trial, even if it meant kicking WinDVD to the curb.

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For the longest time, I eshewed laptops. They were weaker. They couldn’t be upgraded. You had to swap out the drives. The list of things I didn’t like went on and on.

I’ve been forced to reassess, though. In another month, I move to Ukraine for two years. I wanted to have a computer there and a) couldn’t take my tower and monitor and b) didn’t want to shop for a computer there and risk a Cyrillic keyboard layout.

First, I decided what features were going to be important to me. I didn’t want a mammoth-sized system because I need portability. I would want to be able to at least consider some gaming, so it needed to be moderately capable in those regards. I did want to investigate into the new high def era optical media.

One interesting thing is I found very few builders that even had a next gen storage option at all. Thankfully, three companies had options with them. I started exploring the websites for Dell, HP and Sony. The cheapest Blu ray enabled Dell was well over two grand. Sony’s Blu ray started at $1500 and HP had an HD DVD burner I configured just a hair over $1900. Survivor-style, Dell was voted off the island. This left me with a home theater enthusiast battle between HD DVD and Blu ray.

I looked thoroughly at the pros and cons of both formats. Ultimately, Blu ray won because of it’s higher storage capacity. While movies will surely be watched on this laptop, I wanted the ability to archive media and back up internet music purchases. My entire music collection will fit on a dual layer BDR. That was the key decider.

With the base system, I began tossing around whether to get a preconfigured system or custom build. Sony’s FZ180 was very close to what I wanted. It had a solid 2ghz Core 2 Duo and 2 gigs of ram, two things I was committed to. When I tweaked the FZ190, though, I got what I wanted for a few dollars less plus a nice freebie: a Location Free Base Station. Depending on how well it works, that might enable me to see American television while I am overseas.

The system was ordered a week ago and should be in my possession in another week or so. I will write up a review at that time.

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I have a friend who was incensed when Wash was killed at the end of Serenity (sorry if I just ruined it for anyone, but that movie is kind of old now). He can enjoy more of Alan Tudyk’s acting in the (relatively) recently released film Death at a Funeral. Sadly Tudyk isn’t a lead member of the ensemble, but he steals every scene he is in and helps tie the story together.

These ensemble pictures are sometimes hard to summarize plotwise, and I am afraid that’s the case here. The briefest, spoiler-free runthrough I can give you is that Daniel’s (Matthew MacFadden) father has passed away. There is going to be a funeral. At that funeral will be psychedelic drugs, grumpy old uncles, a blackmailer and a casket that gets opened way too many times. Ewan Bremmer is here (that would be Spud from Trainspotting, as if you didn’t already know) in a small part as well as Rupert Graves as well as the afore mentioned Tudyk, laying on a sly British accent.

Both I and the friend I saw the film with laughed out loud multiple times over the course of the movie. That’s saying a lot from a black comedy that I expected to be wittertainment. The script by Dean Craig and the direction of the masterful Frank Oz really bring this film to life. Oz has definitely soaked up a great deal of Britishness over the years. The proof is right up there on the screen.

I highly recommend Death at a Funeral. It features all the sorts of things you wish movies had more of…crisp dialog, great acting and a special friend in the form of a dwarf. You will laugh and perhaps be moved by the end. How’s that for an (extremely) late summer picture?

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