I’ve mentioned this before, but wanted to mention that the booklet is being released this month, and my contribution is indeed inside it.  Charissa is doing amazing work with this, work I’d love to do more of if I was’t so hung up and lazy.  I’m debating whether to read my contribution at the party, I’d definitely like to attend but we’ll see what happens.  The poster is of course the work of the incomparable Mike Budai.

As far as the story…eh…you basically knew what was happening from the beginning and I guess people were into the “twist” but the quality of the movie really came from the suspense, the fantastic imagery, and the sound.

Longo's Pizza Crust

• Played it on Normal and it was in no way a challenge.  Now I didn’t play it for the challenge.  I played it for the story and the choices I’d make and because I’m really into the universe, though I can’t say whether I’m into it because of anything beyond how richly developed it is.
• Doing a New Game+ on insanity and it is frustratingly difficult
• My Shepard had a relationship with a character from the first game, and she did not pursue anyone in this one.  This may pay off in part 3 but it also closes off a lot of possibilities as well.
• She opted to save a kid about to enroll in a mercenary squad.
• Managed to keep her crew member from being exiled as well as stall a potential war.
• Opted to kill off a band of rebels rather than brainwash their entire race.
• Finally, at the end of the game, my Shep chose to cut off relations with the group sponsoring her mission rather than allowing them to pursue their own agenda.

There are a lot of loose threads that I can not wait to see tied up.

As much as this is Bioware’s “blockbuster” game, there is something about the way it is presented that still lands it firmly in the domain of geekiness.  Certainly Farscape is a geeky show but I get the feeling that non-gamers would really be willing to sit through someone’s playthrough of the game.  Certainly the mechanics are part of it- watching someone shoot and shoot and shoot their way through a story isn’t fun if you aren’t doing the shooting.  But is there something about the choose-your-own-adventureness of the story that diminishes it in some way?  I’m really not sure.

The game does tell a good story, but I don’t think it really says anything new.  I suppose it doesn’t necessarily need to but when a game is this hyped and this loved one would hope that it might deliver something more than a good heist.

“The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive.”

The internet can be fleeting.  As we’ve all been trained to hop from link to link and pull information from a world of sources, depth can be hard to come by.  Its kind of funny to think that the magazine, a format considered fleeting itself in the old days, would be considered immersive.  But reading a magazine from beginning to end is something you just can’t replicate online.  What the print publishers fail to realize is…

A generation of people have grown up without that experience, they don’t understand it, and they don’t need it.

We read magazines because they were there for us to read.  Now there are other things to take up our time.  Everyone seems to forget that reading the way we do is not some natural human trait, but an adaptation to the way the written word is printed and disseminated.  As that has changed, so have our reading habits, and that change isn’t about to stop simply because some dinosaurs are fighting it.

We subscribe to the Sunday paper.  We have since we moved in together and Dawn already had a subscription.  There is nothing like a quiet sunday morning of going through the paper with a cup of coffee and a nice breakfast; it can be the restive moment you need to get ready for the week.  That said, we rarely read the paper, or at least rarely read it on Sunday.  We have the little one to thank for that.

So in our considering of what all we can get rid of to save money, time and our carbon footprint, the paper has come up a number of times.  At one point we got the local paper every day but could not live with the amount of newsprint we were accumulating and recycling every week.  We have stopped a number of magazine subscriptions and are purging our collections of magazines we felt worth keeping.  If we need them, most of their content is online and most likely we’ll never need them.  But getting rid of the paper is different.  Because we’re NYT subscribers we not only have access to their full archive but also their Adobe AIR based NYT Reader app that is actually quite pretty.  Of course there’s also the ad-supported iPhone app as well, should we need it in a tiny mobile format.  But both of these are missing something, or perhaps they’re adding too much?

I think the problem of trying to read the paper online is that its just too hyper. Sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, I can slowly make my way through each article, reading what I want and skimming the rest.  Dawn and I can discuss what we’re reading or point out something to look for.   We can do all this with our laptops, but we’ll also be doing a million other things, and we’ll most definitely not go further than the headlines on many articles we will choose to read if we’re looking at the paper version.  I’m not saying I read the paper end-to-end, but in its paper format, and in my Sunday state of mind, I can tolerate the slow progress through the medium.  On my laptop, I guarantee you that within a few moments of almost any article, some flashing light or link to click or url to type or status update to send will pull me away from the paper and likely never bring me back.

The printer paper model is obsolete and wasteful, and I’ll be glad to see it go, but I also can’t say what’s replacing it is better.