The Thing from Another World was on TV last week…  We DVR’ed it and watched it a couple days later.  Decent movie…  Dated, but still fun.  And it’s great to see where what the original looked like, before Carpenter got his hands on it.

What was even more interesting was listening to John Carpenter talk about the movie…  Apparently it is one of his favorites.  I can’t imagine what it was like for him to be able to re-make it.  Must’ve been a lot of fun.

Then we watched The Thing a few days later.  This remains one of my favorite horror movies – right up there with Alien.  I love the isolation and the paranoia.  You can’t just run away and escape, you can’t just wait it out, and you don’t know who is still human.  Great fun.

The new Thing comes out next week, and we’ll be going to see it.

I’ve really gone back and forth on this movie…  Carpenter’s film is one of my favorites, and I’d hate to see the story sullied by a bad prequel (like Star Wars).  And the early teasers and trailers didn’t look terribly impressive.

But the more recent trailers look far better.  And it’s being done by the same folks who did the Dawn of the Dead remake, which was terrific.  I think the thing that makes me most hopeful for a decent movie is this bit from Wikipedia:

After creating the Dawn of the Dead remake, producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman began to look through the Universal Studios library to find new properties to work on. Upon finding John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing, the two convinced Universal to create a prequel instead of a remake, as they felt that remaking Carpenter’s film would be like “paint(ing) a mustache on the Mona Lisa” Eric Newman explained; “I’d be the first to say no one should ever try to do Jaws again and I certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone remake The Exorcist… And we really felt the same way about The Thing. It’s a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It’s the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter’s movie – they’re already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible.”

Sexual Intelligence | When a Chicken is Too Sexy…

I used to have a subscription to NewsWeek.  Used to be a pretty decent magazine.  Well, I thought so at least…  I was younger, maybe I just didn’t know any better.

Regardless, I let that subscription run out years ago when I stopped caring about the magazine.  The articles seemed less and less substantial, more and more sensational.  There just wasn’t much point in reading it.

And, it seems, things haven’t changed much in the last few years.  Or, if they have, they’ve changed for the worse.

NewsWeek has a new, sensational article about The Growing Demand for Prostitution.  Except that it doesn’t actually talk all that much about prostitution…  It lumps pretty much every kind sex entertainment together and calls that a “growing demand” for, specifically, prostitution.  But, what can you expect from an author who calls herself a sex work abolitionist?  She’s obviously got an axe to grind.

Which isn’t to say that biased people can’t do good research and write good articles…  Honestly, everybody is biased in some way.  And good reporters are constantly putting aside their biases in favor of objectivity.  But this article doesn’t do that.  She doesn’t quote any real sexologists or sociologists or anything.

And then she rolls out the whole “human trafficking” thing…  Somehow she leaps from legal sex entertainment like strip clubs to children being sold into sexual slavery.  Without, of course, a trace of actual evidence.

Somehow “Nearly 100% of men in the study said that minors were always available for purchase in Boston” even though about half of the men she interviewed had never seen so much as a lap dance.

I guess I’m not surprised that garbage like this is getting written.  The United States is going through another Puritanical phase…  Or maybe it’s always been this way, but less obvious.  Regardless, there are a lot of folks out there who don’t want you to enjoy sex, who don’t want you to drink alcohol, who don’t want you to have an abortion, who want to make sure you go to church – basically who want to turn the whole of the nation into some kind of fundamental Christian state.

But I am surprised that something like this made it into NewsWeek.

Then again, when CNN’s breaking news revolves around a new viral video on YouTube, I guess maybe I shouldn’t be.

Just got back from seeing the local display of fireworks.

We tried to avoid some of the crowds by parking a mile or so away.  Looked like a good spot – a secluded chunk of lakefront.  I figured we’d have a good view, and it’d be less crowded than down at the monument.  We showed up over an hour early so we could get a decent spot.  And then we had some time to kill…

The fireworks eventually started, and it turned out that we had a pretty bad spot.  I thought the fireworks would be going off more-or-less in front of us…  But it turns out that the monument, and the fireworks, were behind us.  And behind some trees.  So we didn’t get a very good view.

About half the fireworks were low enough that it was just a vague light in the sky, which kind of reminded me of the numerous sci-fi movies I’ve seen.  But the ones that detonated higher in the air were pretty.  Especially the sparkly ones.

I had a pretty good time…  But it seems to me that the fireworks display was pretty short.  Seemed like just 15-20 minutes.  Seems like they used to be longer.  Or maybe that’s just me remembering things wrong.

It was actually almost more fun to watch the people around us, than to watch the fireworks themselves.

One guy acted like he was triangulating a missile launch or something…  Made a big show of carefully positioning himself.  But he obviously had no idea what he was doing because he wound up pointed in the wrong direction just like the rest of us.

Then there was the lady who complained very loudly about how she couldn’t see anything and she was going home – while beautiful fireworks burst in the air above us.

There was a lull about halfway through…  The fireworks stopped for a minute or so…  And one family decided they must be over.  They started packing up, and were so intent on getting things stuffed into their car that they didn’t notice when the fireworks resumed.

Another family that arrived roughly the same time we did brought an absolute crapton of cold beverages.  Big cooler.  And they kept drinking.  It was warm out…  But we don’t live in the middle of the Sahara.  You do not need to consume a chilled drink every 15 minutes to remain hydrated.

Then there was a steady stream of people leaving all evening.  Some left before the fireworks, some left during…  But there was a steady stream of cars starting up and driving away.  Wasn’t so bad before the fireworks, and maybe they knew better than the rest of us…  But once the fireworks started, those headlights were pretty damn disruptive.  Hard to enjoy the show when you’ve been blinded by somebody’s highbeams.

Ultimately, Terri and I came to the same conclusion – if you’re going to do it, do it right.  Next year we’re going to have to just deal with the crowds.  Go early, leave the car a few blocks away, and do the whole 4th of July thing with all the other people for the afternoon.  Because the 15-20 minutes of vaguely glowing skies punctuated by actual fireworks really wasn’t worth the multiple hours it took us to get down there, park, and then get back out of there.

Greta Christina’s Blog |  Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, and with Endless Hard-Ons: Is Masculinity Impossible?

Imagine that…  The media’s ideal image of masculinity is no more realistic or attainable than their ideal image of femininity.

We’re planning on seeing Super 8 tonight…  Not sure how I feel about that.

It looks interesting, but the trailers don’t really reveal much.  It could be some kind of sci-fi extravaganza…  Or it could be a heartwarming coming-of-age story, set against a backdrop of alien hijinks.

Stephen Spielberg is on-board, which is usually a good thing…  But so is JJ Abrams, and I haven’t been much impressed with his work.

I finished The Witcher a few days ago.

I tried to fire up some of the bonus content…  The extra adventures and stuff…  And they just didn’t do it for me.  Most of them didn’t have voices, which was just plain weird.  I’d gotten so used to hearing people talk, just looking at text seemed wrong.  There were two that did have text…  But after battling against Salamandra for so long they just didn’t seem epic enough.  Didn’t hold my attention for long.

I’m not going to un-install The Witcher just yet…  I’m sure I’ll get around to playing all that bonus content eventually.  But, for now, I need a bit of a break.

I complained about the controls initially, and they really were weird.  Not bad, necessarily, but weird.  It took a lot of getting used to…  But I did get used to them.  I hit my stride partway through Chapter II, and it was smooth sailing from there out.  Quickly drawing the right sword, switching between combat styles mid-swing, chopping down enemies left and right.  Combat was really a lot of fun.  Especially some of the bigger fights.  Having different weapons and combat styles to switch between added a more cerebral aspect to combat.  There was more to killing something than just mashing a button over and over again.

I will say, though, that all the other weapons were completely useless.  I basically just used my steel sword and my silver sword throughout the game.  I got the occasional upgrade to each…  But all those extra weapons – axes, daggers, maces, weird swords – were useless.  I swung them once or twice, but never got any satisfaction out of them.  Anything that didn’t use a witcher combat style was a waste of time.  And most of the weird swords had penalties to damage, with no bonuses to offset it.  I’d haul those weapons back to a blacksmith and sell them for a few orens, which was nice…  But as far as actually equipping and using them?  No way.

Alchemy turned out to be a lot of fun.  Wandering the countryside, looking for plants, ripping bits out of defeated monsters…  Then brewing up something to help you kill more monsters…  Very satisfying.

I didn’t go anywhere without a full stack of swallow and blizzard potions, and both cat and white raffard’s decoction were insanely useful.  But I didn’t experiment with too many of the other potions.  I never once built a bomb, and I only got around to using an oil in the epilogue.  I feel like I probably missed out on some depth and complexity there…  But I still had fun.

Armor was kind of useless, too.  I mean, it did offer some protection, and it looked cool…  But there’s only three suits of armor in the entire game.  And you only actually purchase one of them.  It doesn’t seem like that really merits an armor slot in your inventory.  Seems to me that could’ve just been handled as a quest event or reward.

It doesn’t really matter how the game mechanics handle it…  But seeing an armor slot there sort of implies that you’ll be able to buy different suits of armor and equip them.  Which you can’t really do in any meaningful way.  And I didn’t realize this until I went out and read the wiki, because I was wondering where to go to buy armor.

Inventory management was kind of a miss all-together, really.  You had enough room for alchemical components that it didn’t generally matter.  You never really ran out of space.  And there wasn’t really much in the line of junk loot to deal with.  Most weapons were just useless.  There wasn’t any armor to speak of.

And I guess that’s not really a bad thing…  Lots of folks don’t like messing with an inventory, and more RPG titles are doing away with it entirely.  But I still kind of like the treasure hunting aspect of older RPG titles.  Looting interesting bits from slain enemies…  Comparing statistics between what you’ve got equipped, and what you just looted…  Debating over which items are valuable enough to haul back to town, and which should be left behind…  Debating over whether you need the stats more than you need the money…  And that just wasn’t a part of the gameplay in The Witcher.

The game world itself was wonderful.  Very rich.  Very interesting.  Lots going on.  The people and the locations felt genuinely alive.  Folks had things to talk about that werren’t necessarily related to some quest objective.  There were little problems and complaints that you couldn’t actually fix.  There were bits of interesting geography that didn’t really feature into the storyline at all.  It had the feel of a real, continuous world that you were just passing through.

The storyline was genuinely interesting.  Some great little twists and turns that I really didn’t expect.  It seemed to develop organically.  It all made sense, all tied together well.

I really liked that there were no clearly “right” or “wrong” answers to the dilemmas posed in the game.  You had choices, and some of them sounded nicer than others…  But it wasn’t like a normal game where you can clearly tell which is the “good guy” answer, and which is the “bad guy” answer.  They were all just answers.  And they had consequences.  Often consequences that really didn’t turn out the way you’d intended.

My only real complaint about the storyline or setting is that it all felt vaguely sexist…

I’m not talking about that misogynistic preacher back in Chapter I – he was obviously a villain and got his just desserts fairly quickly.  And there were plenty of strong women throughout the game.  I didn’t spend the entire game rescuing damsels in distress or anything like that.  The women had some real depth of character, they weren’t just window-dressing.

But Geralt is a bit of a womanizer.  You have the option of having sex with a couple dozen women in the game.  Some of them require courtship, some of them just about leap into your bed as soon as you say hello.  And then you collect a racy calling-card from each of your conquests.  All of which feels just plain weird.

That’s not to say that there’s no romance in the game…  You do have the option of pursuing a more substantial relationship with either Shani or Triss.

And it doesn’t seem like the women are being used or anything like that – they all seem quite satisfied with the encounter.

But it just seems weird to play a character like that.  Weird, and vaguely wrong.

Beyond that, Geralt was a genuinely interesting protagonist.  And they really did pull off the amnesia angle pretty well.  I liked running into past acquaintances that I’d forgotten, and hearing about my old exploits.  It really gave a feel for who Geralt was.  Or, at least, what he’d been like before I got my hands on him.  Because you have the opportunity to very literally define your identity in the game.  One of the quests is to come to grips with who you are and how you fit into the world.

All things considered, an absolutely wonderful game.

I’m eager to play the sequel, and I’m dying to get my hands on some of the original books.