I was playing Fallout: New Vegas this morning on my laptop. I had my iPhone on the speakers. I got a series of songs that I felt fit the western vibe of the game very well. I present those songs to you here:
The Raconteurs - The Switch & The Spur
Mark Lanagan - The Man In The Long Black Coat
The Dead Weather - So Far From Your Weapon
The Joel Plaskett Emergency - Written All Over Me
Hate Then Love - The Dears
Yeah. The last one doesn't quite match, but the next song that came on was Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" and that sort of broke the mood.
Anyhow, I'm still really early into New Vegas, but I'm finding it much easier to be a bastard in this barren Western-style world than in the Capitol Wasteland of Fallout 3. Shooting & looting are a higher preference.
In the magical world of Ca-Na-Da, where kids eat bacon with their maple syrup and dollar coins are bigger than 25-cent coins, they have a show called Just for Laughs. It's segments of the Montreal International Comedy festival, cut up into half-hour bites of several comics. It used to be on CBC, then was on the Comedy Network, just before Whose Line Is It Anyway.
It was on this weekly, then nightly bastion of rerun that I first saw Penn & Teller, stage magicians. This was far before my current interest in magic, which was reignited with Brian Brushwood's work on Scam School making it accessible (cutting through the curtain that made magic seem impressive, astounding, but overall difficult and the amount of effort put in inequal to the amount of interest given by those watching).
In the 3-minute sketch, Penn played bass and Teller moved through the motions of putting out a cigarette and lighting a new one. Thanks to the magic of Youtube, I don't have to explain it. Just watch:
You see? You see? My 14-year-old mind was blown. It was the mysterious and astounding being shown as ordinary, then it somehow, through critical thinking and explanation, tends to come back around to astounding. To imagine the amount of practice, brainstorming, stage design, rehearsal, and troubleshooting involved in making something look as absolutely ordinary as this... well, it's astonishing. And it's only once you know that you understand.
It may be bullshit, but hey, they tell you that it is. And once you know it's bullshit, it frees you to understand it.
I think I lost myself with that last sentence. But I think people understand.
It's very simple. It will occasionally, for no reason at all, without warning, not work. I'll load up Firefox, click on a link from my favourite toolbar, or type something into Google, or whatever, and I'll get this response:
Not just once, not twice, but three times I have to reclick the link (refreshing just reloads the error page). Then it remembers that, oh right, it's meant to be a web browser and yes, these are websites, so I'd better let Lucas browse them.
This has shown up in the last 3 revisions, and each time I hope they'll fix it. They don't. And worse, it won't happen all the time. Just every 6th or 7th link, and it brings my experience grinding and crashing to a halt.
I want to support open source developers and all that but god DAMN this is such a basic thing.
Further anger? MOV files. They look great playing at 720p on the Quicktime player, but no video editor I can find, including Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere Pro, or any of the free things I find can edit the suckers. The minute you try to speed up or slow them down, the framerate goes to hell and the video gets choppy. Any converter you get lowers the framerate. Argh.
Technology, why must it be two steps forward and one step back?
PS and by the by: Anamanaguchi's Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game soundtrack makes even the crappiest typing seem like epic haxxoring. Here are some snippets in this trailer:
