Happy 5th Anniversary Terri!

Can you believe it?  5 years…  It doesn’t seem like that’s even possible.  Seems like only yesterday we were walking down the aisle together…

Slashdot | Verizon Offers 20/20 Symmetrical FiOS Service

Wow…  20 Mbps symmetrical…  That’s insane!  I want it!

Slashdot | Driver Update Can Cause Vista Deactivation

Aparently Windows Activation doesn’t actually use information pulled directly from your hardware to build its profile of your computer…it uses the information reported by the drivers installed.  And updating your drivers can change the information that is being reported, which can result in your Windows install being deactivated.

I wouldn’t expect this to be a terribly common problem for your average desktop user…  Most folks hardly update anything.  A well-run business network might see some fairly frequent updates…but I wouldn’t expect their drivers to change much…  But I can see this hurting a lot of gamers.  Most games require absolutely bleeding-edge driver support.  When I worked at Electronics Boutique we were constantly telling people to update their drivers.  Sound, video, network, storage…all those drivers can dramatically impact your game performance, and are updated fairly often.

Microsoft claims that this is essentially the same activation process that was in use in XP, and that Vista is actually supposed to be more forgiving when it comes to changes and deactivation…  But I can’t say I’ve ever actually seen an XP machine deactivate itself.  I’ve personally swapped out video cards, hard drives, RAM, processors, NICs, sound cards…and never been asked to re-activate Windows.

I recently wound up with some reading time available, so I thought I’d continue the Ender’s Game series with Xenocide. The only problem is that Xenocide wasn’t the next book in the series…Speaker for the Dead was. Now, having read through Speaker for the Dead, I’m still left with the impression that I missed a book somewhere.

When I last saw Andrew Wiggin, at the end of Ender’s Game, he’d just discovered the Hive Queen’s cocoon on a newly-colonized alien world. There was vague talk of him eventually writing her story…of finding a new world where she could live…but none of that had happened.

At the beginning of Speaker for the Dead we find Andre Wiggin teaching classes on Trondheim approximately 3,000 years later – and he’s been busy in those years. He’s written the Hive Queen’s story and turned Ender into the villainous Xenocide. He’s written another book explaining the Hegemon’s life as well. He’s traveled the stars looking for a suitable home for the Hive Queen. He’s discovered an artificial intelligence named Jane living in the communications network between planets.

Andrew himself doesn’t even seem to be the same person that we knew in Ender’s Game. He becomes quite a bit more familiar as the story progresses…as pressures mount, and you see more of Ender peeking out around the edges…

And everyone is intimately familiar with the Hive Queen’s story and that of the Hegemon. Everyone talks about the books. Everyone talks about how greatly they changed the way the Hive Queen, Ender, and the Hegemon were viewed. It’s described as a genuinely world-changing event, and we missed it.

Beyond that fairly large (3,000 years!) gap in the storyline…Speaker for the Dead was a terrific story.  Humanity has discovered another alien species – the Piggies – and is trying to decide what to do with them.  Of course the Piggies can’t make things easy…they go and kill a couple humans and nobody is quite sure why…  Thrown into the mix is a horribly dysfunctional family, lots of religion, some forbidden love, and a strange plague that affects everyone living on the planet.

I only have two real complaints with the story of Speaker for the Dead itself…

First off, it took them a very long time to figure out what was going on with the Descolada/Piggies/trees.  I had my suspicions about halfway through the book, and had them confirmed long before anyone else figured it out.  Well, maybe that’s not fair…  I suppose people did figure it out, but they died.  And then Novinha wasn’t being terribly forthcoming with the information, so I suppose nobody else had access to what the reader knew.  Still, when you’re presented with so many people who are supposedly the brightest of the bright and they can’t figure out what you’ve known for 10 chapters…it gets a little annoying.

My other complaint is with the treatment of Miro towards the end of the story.  He’s been injured and crippled by recent events and that somehow renders him unable to continue his work as Zenador…  He can still walk, talk, and use a computer – slower than before, but he can still do it – so why can’t he be a Zenador?  Is it just because he can’t stand to be around Oanda?  So they send him off into space, to meet Andrew’s sister halfway, and then come back…so that the relativistic speeds will keep him young…so that he’ll still be around to help out when the battle fleet arrives…  What is a crippled Zenador going to do against a battle fleet?  He has not been presented as an especially brilliant tactician or diplomat throughout the story.  In fact, compared to many of the other characters we meet, he doesn’t even seem that extraordinary.  Pipo, Libo, and Novinha are extraordinary…Ender is extraordinary…Jane and the Hive Queen are extraordinary…  Miro is competent, but you never see any kind of genius in him.  Certainly nothing that screams “I’ll save the world!”

So, now I’m moving on to Xenocide…

1UP | Wrath of the Lich King preview

World of WarCraft’s first new class is also its first ever Hero Class — though the implementation may not be exactly what you were expecting. “One of the ideas we had for the Death Knight was that you’d convert your character into a Death Knight,” says lead game designer Tom Chilton. “That you would stop being a level 80 Mage or whatever and become a Death Knight. But when we were running that around the team, it was too common a sentiment to feel like, well, I don’t want to lose my existing character. What I’m going to actually do is create a level 1 Hunter that I intend to turn into a Death Knight, and power him to level 80…and this would become a weird hoop you were going to have to jump through.”

So instead, you unlock the ability to create a Death Knight by finishing a quest chain — comparable in difficulty to the Warlock’s epic mount quest — with any of your existing level 80 characters, at which point you can make an entirely new, wholly separate Hero Class character starting somewhere close to level 60 (the exact number hasn’t been decided). “Some ideas that are still under consideration are that you’d start in Stratholme and have to break your way out of there,” says Chilton. “Maybe you’ve come to your senses and said, ‘Wait, I don’t want to serve the Lich King.’”

…interesting!

Another terrific movie from Netflix last weekend – Dead Silence.  This movie was directed by James Wan, the same guy who was responsible for the Saw movies – which I did not like at all.  So, when I heard he had a part in this movie, I was not expecting much.  I certainly didn’t expect the kind of quality storytelling that I got.

The movie starts with a happily married couple going about their lives.  He’s trying to fix a broken sink, and she’s making fun of him.  The sink doesn’t work, so they order take-out.  And just before the husband can leave to pick it up, a package arrives.  It contains a very creepy looking ventriloquist’s dummy.  Hubby goes to get take-out, and wifey gets killed by the dummy while he’s gone.

It looks like the set-up for a typical killer doll story – something like Child’s Play, Demonic Toys, or Puppet Master.  The police, of course, blame the husband…who sets out to find out just who actually did kill his wife.  But where you expect to see a series of bloody murders revolving around the dummy you are instead led on a tour scenic Raven’s Fair – the town where this couple grew up.

It seems that Raven’s Fair has more than it’s fair share of skeletons in the closet.  Hubby is the son of a creepy old man who lives in a mansion and has his dead wives painted out of pictures.  Most of the town is close up and deserted, about the only people left is the undertaker and his loony wife.  And apparently the town was responsible for lynching a nice little ol’ lady after someone’s kid disappeared.

What really impressed me with Dead Silence is how complete the storyline for the antagonist is.  Normally your villain is hardly developed at all…  It’s some monster that shows up to eat people, or a ghost that’s been stirred up by new construction, or an ancient curse…  Maybe you get some backstory to explain where the beast came from, but you seldom get a real character.

Our villain in Dead Silence is Mary Shaw – a ventriloquist who brought fame and money to Raven’s Fair.  Some stupid kid heckled her during a performance and went missing soon after.  The townsfolk assumed it was the slightly-odd Mary’s doing, and she was lynched.  They cut out her tongue and left her to die.

So…  It looks like Mary was wrongly accused and is now back for revenge.  At that point I was expecting some kind of a touchy-feely reconciliation ending where the ghost is put to rest by finally exposing the town’s sins.  They were somehow going to make amends with the ghost.  Somehow right that ancient wrong.

…except that it turns out Mary wasn’t wrongly accused – she really did kill the kid.  Turned him into a puppet in fact.  And has been going around and killing everyone in town, not just those responsible for her lynching.  She wasn’t slightly-odd, she’s downright evil.

It’s rare to get that kind of character development even in the protagonist these days.  We’re so often given flat and dull characters that never grow or change.  I’m always surprised to see a character suddenly change or reveal deeper waters.  To see it in the antagonist – the monster that’s killing everyone – is absolutely unexpected.

Additionally, the visuals are terrific.  Mary’s ghost looks absolutely frightening.  The creature effects are subtle and very effective.  The setting is downright evocative…  From the town’s name, to its cemetery, to Mary’s deserted theater/home on the lake…  It all just screams dread and doom.

And, the cop isn’t an idiot.  I’m so tired of the police officers in a movie like this being nothing more than cannon fodder.  Never showing any intelligence or persistence.  Never investigating, never digging deeper, always just doggedly insisting that it’s just a regular ol’ homicide.  The cop in this movie shows some remarkable insight and forethought…  Enough to actually develop into a likable character by the end of the movie.

We got a couple absolutely terrific movies from Netflix over the weekend. Both of them were much better than I expected – thoroughly enjoyable, downright creepy, well acted… You get the idea. It’s rare to come across one movie that good, but two in a weekend is almost unheard-of.

The first one was Sick Girl, and I’m really not quite certain I could call this movie a horror film. Yes, it’s part of the “Masters of Horror” series… And it was downright creepy at times… But it was also very funny, lighthearted, and endearing at times.

The basic idea is that we’ve got an awkward scientist who’s a little too interested in bugs for their own good – to the point of making it difficult to get a date. Somebody mails this scientist an exotic bug from a far-off land, the scientist finally meets a nice girl, the bug bites the nice girl, and chaos results. Sounds familiar, right? That’s what I thought when I first read the description of the movie… But it was really surprisingly fresh and different.

To start with, our bug-loving scientist is a woman – played by Angela Bettis, who delivers a stellar performance. She’s so shy and awkward around people that it’s almost painful to watch. She speaks with an odd hesitance and monotone, almost as if she’s afraid of her own voice. But around her bugs she’s happy, smiling, doting. It seems odd to see anyone, but a woman especially, babbling babytalk to something with more than four legs… But it somehow works for her character.

She’s a lesbian, which really isn’t as important as it might be in other movies. This means, of course, that we’ve got two female characters… But their relationship really isn’t used for shock value. It provides fuel for a few jokes, and serves to enhance the conflict with another character…but it could just as easily have been a man in the role of awkward scientist (as is more typical).

Erin Brown plays the scientist’s love interest… A weird girl that we’re never quite certain about. She just sort of hangs out in the lobby of the scientist’s office all day long, sketching pixies and fairies. Throughout the movie it’s not clear how much of her odd behavior is her, and how much of it is due to the bug bite.

The bug itself plays a truly minimal role in the story. Usually a movie like this would be all about the creature effects, gore, screaming and running, and eventually gunning the critter down in some dramatic battle for the survival of humanity. Not this time around… We see a couple quick glimpses as the creature runs for cover… And the “sick girl” starts to look fairly unwell towards the end… There are a couple deaths, and one of them is very messy… But the creature effects have almost no impact on this movie, and the gore is virtually nonexistant.

What really carries this movie are the characters. They’re cute, interesting, lively people and you really can’t wait to see what will happen next. Will our scientist get up the nerve to ask the girl out? Will the girl accept? What will happen when she sees the bug collection? Will their relationship last? Will they get evicted? Is her girlfriend crazy, stressed, ill, or mutating?

Frankly, it’s been a very long time since I saw a movie where I actually cared what happens to the characters – normally they’re just stereotypical cardboard characters acting out a generic role. And more often than not lately I find the characters too annoying to watch, and I can’t wait to see them die.