Secondly, don’t think this is some condemnation of the people that do these jobs. It’s more a condemnation of the culture that’s in place at their environments.

Lastly, this sort of culture exists, in a reduced form I think, in corporate IT.

I was prompted to think about this while talking to a teller at my bank. Apparently her PC got infected, sounds like one of the fake antivirus things that have been plaguing everyone recently, and it sounds like a family member in the military, specifically in military IT, took it to fix it.

He reported back that she’d need a new hard drive because “it’s too persistent”.

This is, quite simply, ridiculous. I’ve seen the behavior, it’s caused by a rootkit planted by the rogue application. If you try a repair install it just picks it right back up. If you do a clean install without formatting, thanks to some genius move inside Windows, it can still pick it up as it installs drivers.

Thankfully there’s a number of tools, written by people far smarter than myself, to fix these issues without even resorting to a reinstall. So why the failure on their part?

Essentially it boils down to troubleshooting versus checklists. Checklists are handy, no doubt, but if you don’t take the time to understand how computers actually work then you may be left with a mindset that if a problem is not resolved by following the checklist, then it is beyond understanding. Sadly, this is usually taken further and you may allow your imagination to fill in the gap when explaining it someone, because you’re afraid to say “I don’t know”, and then, the worst part, you buy into what you just made up.

Instead of doing research, instead of learning new things, I think they way they’re taught encourages a decidedly skeptical view of information outside of official training.

This likely isn’t helped when government systems are usually several years behind, in one or more ways, and kept very static. I understand why this is so, but it doesn’t really help someone develop useful skills for dealing with the outside world.

Meanwhile, a lot of the civilian world is somehow convinced that these people are more qualified to help them or know what they’re talking about simply because they’re government workers. You shouldn’t trust anyone based solely on where they work.

Just my thoughts on the matter.

There isn’t a single compelling feature for the thing, at least for me. True, I’m not the target audience because I expect a computer to be, what’s the word, oh, right, more useful than a thumb on my ass. I hear people go on about how it’s for casual computing, whatever the hell that is. Let’s cover some points.

Cool stuff-

It’s light and runs a long time.
Very nice screen.
Syncs with iTunes (who the fuck knows about Banshee).

Retarded stuff-

There doesn’t appear to be a way to organize apps.
OS is a crippled joke OS.
Form factor and material is perfect for not being able to hold it securely while moving around.
Menu button conveniently located nowhere near where you’d like it to be.
Not USB ports. Not a single fucking one.*
No support for Adobe Flash.**

*- Some people have mentioned some bullshit theories about this, like having to support device X, Y, or Z. Let me ask you, has Apple ever bothered supporting any fucking thing just because it can plug into something and should work? No. This is just some bullshit aesthetics choice that also conveniently makes people buy accessories if they want to use it to get pictures off a standard fucking device.

**- On this one I’ve read some nonsense about how it’s a tactical decision because they’ll be leveraging HTML 5 for media. Well good for fucking them. Thank goodness there’s no games, web site menus, or anything but videos on the web in Flash format. Don’t get me wrong, I think people fall back to Flash for shit quite too readily, but really now, not having support for it is stupid. Probably related to the stupid joke OS.

Now then. What do I want in a small computing device? A real OS is a good fucking start. I hate to say it but even Windows is better than some shit phone OS, and least if it runs Windows I can likely jam linux on it. A USB port. On the outside. Where I can get to it. 4+ hours of battery would be good. More is nice, but not required by any stretch. A battery I can change. Wireless should go without saying, but I’m saying it. Some kind of camera and mic would be good, if for no other reason than the parts cost about a nickel and take up about the same amount of space.

That’s kind of it. The nice thing about a real OS is that I can just use my normal real applications. For me there’s plenty of options, from netbooks to the direct iPad competitors, and predecessors, such as JooJoo and this one that’s been out for a couple years but the name is escaping me.

Thank goodness for the options too, because I’d break my own collarbone before buying something as nailed shut as the iPad.

So far I have literally no complaints about it. Which, if you’ve ever talked to me, is amazing.

Made two characters thus far- Fex and Rivet. Each with wildly different senses of style, powers, and whatnot. Fex is level 9.

So. Let me start off by saying that my previous review largely still stands, in that the intro area is sort of terrible. It feels mashed together and does nothing much to actually get you into the game, at least not for me. One thing I have to go back on is the block function. Turns out you can hold shift to maintain that, as I finally noticed after seeing the tiny sh in the corner of that ability. It also works rather well, which is nice. You can also dick around more with the controls and graphics, and for me it was critical to dick with the graphics since apparently the game assumed I’m running on a six year old computer or somesuch. I may try fiddling with the controls some more, because having mouselook always on would be wunderbahr, but since the rest of the game makes a different assumption about the interface it can be a bit bothersome. I also don’t care for the way you interact with things, like picking up a big rock to throw, because you either have to hit a key or click a little onscreen button. It’d be nice if, say, double clicking would make me pick it up, then click to throw, as opposed to again having to click the little button or hit a key.

Onward. Time to eat some crow. Holy fuck is this game deeper and better than City of Heroes. I would still love to see some better initial stat control, and explanatory text, when building a character, and I still don’t really grasp all of the underlying fundamentals, but I love that they’re there. The best thing, however, is the “builds” system.

A build is, essentially, a game role and determines things like how your offense and defense work. In CoH you picked one when you made a character, and that character was always that way. In Champions you can save various builds for each of the roles, including your various accessories that buff your stats, then switch between them on the fly.

The travel powers. These are the things  that got me into this mess. Why? Because they actually have some variety. Like there’s at least four ways to fly and three of them do it with unique speed and maneuvering and general feel. The other is Fire Flight, which is identical to regular flight but, well, you’re on fire, so that’s fair enough.

The power stuff is all very cool, and has surprising depth. You level up at The Powerhouse (which sadly makes it feel sort of generic, like a K-Mart) but you can buy new powers, try them out, then undo that expenditure if you don’t like it. You also aren’t stuck in one specific power path. While powers may have pre-requisites, they’re fairly easy to fill and you’re otherwise free to pluck from the tree of ass-kickery. You can also go into your powers menu (also never described or pointed out to you) to adjust effect colors and, at least for some powers, where they emit from, such as palm, fist, eyes, so on.

I’m a slave to concepts, I have to admit. Fex is a person turned demonic by the black flames he was forced to feed souls to while enslaved in some hell dimension. His abilities are all based off his flesh and spirit being saturated by the flames and the shadows they cast. So when it came time to pick a travel power I knew it had to be either something very spry and athletic or teleportation. I really enjoyed teleporting (which is awesome in this game), but acrobatics just felt like a better fit, so I went with it. I could have bought one of many different powers, but so far all he’s gained is a shield made of shadow (to replace the standard block) which can be upgraded to do some really interesting things, a new level of his basic shadow blast, and a passive power called “shadow form” which kicks in to make me hard to see and take less damage. I figure, should I play that long, his second travel power will be teleport because by then he’ll be powerful enough for it to make sense. See what I mean? I choose to run around and hop like a retard instead of the safer, cooler power because it fits. Now Rivet is a dude in power armor, inspired by Megas XLR actually, and I am so glad that I can assign him a number of abilities, because dude does he beg for an array of small attacks and the like.

Rivet has jetboots, which is sort of tough to control but goes like a bat out of hell.

The fighting and missions are fairly nice, though also pretty standard.

We’ll see how it goes. I tend to lose interest in these things fairly quickly.

Character creation is ok in general, and good for an MMO, at least within my experience of the genre thus far.

Obviously there’s the cosmetics, which I’ll spare you the details of, and then you select your powers. There is virtually no information on the power selection screen. You can pick a package of powers or customize. Since you only get two powers I figured what was the point and just went with “Darkness”, which seems more like a melanin condition, but whatever. It startled me to see that there are attributes to the character, yet they were totally untouchable by the player, again leaving me to wonder what the fucking point is.

Onward. I made my character, he looked ok, then entered the game proper. Everything looked like ass and for a bit I was concerned my vision or display was going. Looking in the options I see a “use half resolution” checkbox. So my options are fuzzy detail lacking hell or full throttle quality. Thankfully(?) full throttle quality wasn’t anything special and even my little laptop was up to the task. Still, why not give me some real options here, like a real game?

Forgot to mention, you’re asked if you’d like to use a control layout like a fantasy game, a something else game, or the one made for Champions. What kind of burnouts are they trying to get to play this thing?

Upon entering the game proper you’re dropped into a bullshit scenario, which is the norm but is always still retarded and ham brained. Some aliens have blocked off a chunk of city and are doing something something. Everything is weirdly static. Literally there’s a bunch of schmoe npcs just standing around while a hundred feet away monsters from the beyond idly ignore the fleshy bits and sort of halfheartedly attack you whenever you wander over.

Terminal boredom set in so I deleted the game. City of Heroes was actually better than this, in almost every way, even in the patch crazed days when I finally got fed up and left. No, wait, it was better in every single way aside from some of the character cosmetic options, leaving Champions to look like the unattractive, kind of stupid kid brother.

There are a few things that this experience led me to consider though.

Control idioms.

Why are these asshole controls the norm in MMOs? Is there some technical reason that I have to do weird shit to look around with my mouse? It’s not like there’s ever anytime where you have to click on something that you can’t look at, and walking around would be a lot easier.

Why do I have to click on the douchebag that’s weaving me a new scrotum from the bits of penis I have left before attacking it? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s important to stop that kind of thing.

What is with the shit all over the screen? Find a more elegant way people. Stacks of fucking menus, maps, pointers, shit over people’s heads, target boxes around things and whatnot all serve to take me out of the game.

If you’re going to have a “block” or “defend” style action, make that shit something that can be toggled or held down. This is a fucking MMO. Fine tuning the timing of shit is not your forte, so don’t make me try and guess when I need to block for exactly one second.

Artwork.

Why are MMOs ugly? You always hear it’s so as to run on as many machines as possible, but what the fuck does that have to do with it? You can set the detail for different machines just fine, just like a real game. I don’t expect it to be pushing the envelope, but it should at least look stylish.

Culture clash. Instead of having a number of different “origins” or “types” of hero, how about stem it all from a single event? Like the mutant gene in X-Men or the White Event in that weird spin-off reality or the mutagen from Static Shock.

Don’t mock me. Static Shock had some good times.

If you are going to have multiple origins for these guys, then make it count. Make the way things work different, instead of just “I fire a bunch of small, yet somewhat differently colored than my compatriot’s, projectiles”.

Anyway, in a nutshell, if you got bored with City of Heroes don’t come to Champions looking for a better time.

Edit: I decided to give it another shot, see what it was like with travel powers and beyond the intro area. Turns out that while you can muck about until level 15 in the intro area, you can’t actually leave the fucking thing. This is insane. I wasn’t expecting unlimited access, but wow man.

Now, the reason this really irks me are twofold.
1) You can gain levels in the intro zone but cannot actually level up, meaning upgrade yourself, see how new powers work, and so on.
2) Instead of a message saying “Sorry dude, this is the end of the line for free accounts” you just stand there like a jackass pressing the “Travel to <Canada or The Desert>” while nothing happens.

We’ll see if I feel like paying to experience this thing more fully. Not today though.

Edit 2: Fine. I’ll fucking buy it. Stupid videos tantalizing me with the larger world.

Enough about Wanted, though, this is about Kick-Ass. I went back and read the comic just out of curiosity spurred by the upcoming movie.

Premise- nerd decides to be a superhero. Not groundbreaking, but not common and a good place to start.

One of the biggest mistakes, in my opinion, is that Millar feels that being bored is enough to make someone go through all this. There is nothing further, there is no development. There’s only some narcissism, gore, and dick jokes. Even that description sounds better than it really is.

This is like trying to describe why Shoot ‘Em Up is awful. The descriptions fail to convey how shitty it all hangs together.

Throughout the 8 issue run the characters are never engaging, the action is just sort of a boring smear of blood, and nothing seems to stick, despite the premise hinging on only mild hyperbole of reality. Spinal trauma and severe blood loss? Forget about it. Testicle torture? What consequences?

The story proper doesn’t exist. The main arc consists of perhaps two key scenes, with a number of clips filling the space between without adding much.

Oh, and of course there’s some not quite racism combined with a “It’s ok, his dad is fucking a black chick” moment.

On that note for a moment, I’m of the ilk that heroes should be flawed, sometimes significantly, but that needs to be anchored to some substance worth contrasting it against.

So yeah, this crap gets a movie, while The Black Pearl is nowhere to be found.

The book starts out with our protagonist waking up in his hospital bed, eyes bandaged from an incident, not knowing if his sight will return, but knowing that something is terribly wrong. One of my few complaints about the book is we don’t spend very long with the character being blind, it would have been a neat trick. That said, everything is tense enough.

You see, everyone that watched these green flashes in the sky (which was most of the world) went blind. On top of this there’s predatory (as in walks around and stings you to death from ambush) plants, called triffids. Relatively harmless when managed, and providing high quality animal fodder, but the blind population is terribly exposed to the danger they present.

There’s other bits, but I won’t spoil them for you. The best part, for me, is that there is no external agency to this story. Aliens and wizards played no part, it was all the fault of our own hyper aggressive cultures.

I’m not sure how to feel about the despair and lack of functionality people in this story take on when blinded.

Oh, and I found the whole thing drew some strong parallels to 28 Days Later. I never saw the movie made from Day of the Triffids, and it’s certainly not unique enough to say for sure, but it wouldn’t shock me to find out that either movie or book lent a strong hand to the formation of Boyle’s movie.

For instance, something like- “Human brains evolved to cope with complicated language”

Or- “Kissing evolved to spread germs”

These things are said with authority, and go a long way towards shaping the public’s understanding, yet are completely backwards. Our language grew out of having complex brains, the brains themselves having been built up via selective pressures favoring individuals expressing complex cognition. Individuals that kissed, that had the urge to kiss, didn’t suffer fetus harming pregnancies, which is a pretty quick way to weed out other behaviors.

Nothing evolves to do anything. It’s just stuff that happens that is sometimes beneficial, sometimes detrimental, and most often totally neutral.

Here’s the basics.

Let’s skip how the banging together of chemicals gave rise to the initial organisms on the planet. They were really interesting, and swapped DNA like college kids, but I’m not getting into it.

So. Take a given organism and watch it over time. Variety arises in the genomes of the individuals as they reproduce, primarily through small mutations. If the species reproduces sexually that greatly enhances the variety of the genome, thanks both to drawing from two separate genomes and the DNA juggling done during gamete formation.

Now we get to selective pressure. Something happens that changes the environment in some way. This could be weather, food supply, a species foreign to the area, a dude in coveralls sterilizing all the pigs with long tails, or whatever. The point is that Something Has Changed.

Now our species is challenged, or even dying in droves. Some of them have some trait (or cluster of traits) that previously were neutral, but are now allowing these individuals to survive to one degree or another in this changed environment. This doesn’t always happen, hence extinction. There is no choice, there is no drive, there is simply individuals that live and breed or don’t.

Within our group of survivors there may be several variations on the trait(s) enabling survival, or even completely disparate mechanisms. Typically one will prove more able and overtake the others, though sometimes this just signals a point of divergence as one group of offspring meander off. Like the various primates, or weasels and otters.

Now, it’s important to note here, that this modified species isn’t “better” in any way, it’s just that these are the descendants of individuals lucky enough to have some trait that allowed them to live through this change. There is this commonly held fallacy that evolution is some progression towards a higher or more perfect state. It is no such thing. There is no “next step”. There’s just success or failure, in a biological sense, and it’s entirely dependent on the environmental context. Only through the incredibly hazy view of hindsight does it look like anything else.

Let’s take a real life example. We have a culture of streptococcus, aka strep, aka a bacteria you don’t want. There they are, reproducing away. Now we introduce some penicillin to the media, but not at a high enough concentration to kill the bacteria outright. Some individuals in the culture may die, because they were either carrying a trait that made them sensitive to the antibiotic or were otherwise weakened, while others will slow way down as they process the lethal agent, and still others may have a trait that allows them to perform more or less normally in this environment. A little time passes, and the most resistant individuals will tend to produce the most offspring, because they aren’t busy dying. Now we up the concentration of penicillin. Fewer members die, the next generation will tend to have a high concentration of the most effective coping mechanisms. Repeat this process until you have strep that cannot be killed by any amount of penicillin. Enjoy.

The strep culture didn’t suddenly go “We’re under attack! Hurry, mutate! Fight back!”, it’s just mechanical principles at work. If your culture was totally lacking in traits to survive penicillin type attacks then it wouldn’t go anywhere, just like wishing you could fly, or falling from an airplane, won’t grow wings on you or your children.

This variety of strep isn’t even necessarily better in any objective way from the regular strain. It has extra proteins to code, which eats up resources that would normally go for normal life functions, and may even have other problems.

What kind of problems? Well, let’s look at another real life example. Malaria is a parasite that grows in blood cells (at one stage anyway), interfering with their functions and eventually causing them to burst. Very attractive. A group of humans had the good fortune of getting a gene that causes an infected cell to essentially implode when infected, stopping the infection there. This doesn’t grant total immunity, but it does generally mean the individual lives on and thus procreates.

Sounds good, right? Well. There’s a catch. Two catches, actually. If you have two copies of this gene you have sickle cell anemia. Even just having one copy can cause your blood to start freaking out under certain circumstances.

Now, here’s the thing, even if a trait has negative consequences, it will continue to be present in a species so long as the individuals live long enough, and are healthy enough, to spawn kids and raise them to a point where they can care for themselves, and if they happen to be the type of critter to raise strange children then it doesn’t matter if the individual even lives that long.

It’s like smoothing a branch by forcing it through a hole in a rock over and over.

Allow me to expand on that. Our protagonist, Hugo Danner, has blue black hair, superhuman strength on the order of lifting and carrying at least four or five tons, bulletproof flesh, leaps tall buildings in a single bound, and outruns a train. There’s even elements in there that you can see developed into the Superman character. At one point he goes on about how if he had even one weakness, an Achilles heel, it would humanize him, allow people to connect with him. He also builds a sort of fortress deep in the woods, and while he swiftly destroys it upon discovery, it reminds me so much of the fortress of solitude that it ain’t even funny.

Published in 1930, the language is a little distracting, but it’s nothing too troublesome. The actual character of Hugo is quite different from Supes. Imagine Superman, only a bit bipolar, and not naive.

I don’t want to spoil the arc of the book, so if the following analysis is too vague, just go check it out from the library and come back. I’ll wait.

Ok, back? Good.

There are, in my opinion, three main concepts explored here.
Science defeated by mysticism
Individual defeated by the group
Exclusion from the group due to an unusual level of prowess

The big thing tying this all together is, naturally, frustration. Science, of which Hugo is presented as a pinnacle achievement, is constantly presented as potent but horribly naive when it comes to the staying power of religion, politics, greed, and other petty matters. Every scientist in the book seems to believe that simply showing a truth to someone should be enough, that all it takes is more evidence, but as Hugo discovers this just isn’t true. He is an honest thing, a sort of living truth, and despite his power he is incapable of correcting or energizing anything.

I have to say that the hardest part is knowing that we still live in this world. Religion, mysticism, and plain old corruption continue to trump reason and, quite frankly, good will.

It’s a very depressing read, but I still recommend it.

The story is bound to be crap, so let’s look at these visuals. Yep. Sure are some blue fuckers running around. And some bullshit floating continents. Why are we mixing live action and cgi like this again? Don’t feed me shit about how good the cgi is either. District 9 had fucking amazing cgi, and the best part was that it was only used as needed. This is a bunch of shit that tries putting a vague bloom effect on everything to get your attention away from how the people and animation don’t visually mesh. Don’t get me wrong, it looks like a lot of hard work went into it and all, but it’s dumb to mix animation and live action on this sort of scale, unless you’re doing something like Cool World or Who Framed Roger Rabbit where that’s part of the setup.

So, it begs the question, why was it done this way? I think it’s because they didn’t want to be seen as making a cartoon, despite things like Reboot or Battle Planets being (presumably) more engaging because of the consistent visuals and rather less pretentious storylines.

Please, movie makers, stop ejaculating money onto the screen by the tera-gallon and calling it good. It’s usually just rehashed shit. For examples see the remake of King Kong, both Transformers, the Ang Lee Hulk, and so on.

Edit: Somehow I forgot to mention that one thing that absolutely angers me is how given a medium of incredible flexibility we’re given blue cat people.