Time moves too swiftly.
I had 4 days of break, and I barely remember any of it.
Granted, I had enough time to go out with family to try Ippudo - some ramen restaurant down at Mandarin Gallery, and run some errands at the bank and enjoyed a really good ice tiramisu latte (espresso coffee latte ice cream float, spiked with marsala wine and some kind of liquor) at Coffee Club.
Also stopped by Cold Storage to load up on tortillas and mozarella cheese for homemade quesadilla, and yoghurt, milk, strawberries for homemade lassi.
Indoors, I guiltily didn't get any room cleaning done whatsoever. I got through half a 40k novel, and half a season or two of Charmed.
I moved along on Dawn of War II by leveling up from 12 or 14 to 16-18ish, and got through a couple of campaign missions. Ironically, I haven't even gotten to the point of being able to touch Chaos Rising, so I really should have waited for the Steam sale that is taunting me now, but ah well, you win some and you lose some.
ATITD-wise, I did quite a ton of building. I did a one-man 4-person quarrying the first day of the break. It was rather insanely delightful, if expensive in terms of monthly subscription. The Oyster Shell Marble quarry refused to break, and my boredom was threatening to set in after an hour.
Having gone through the trouble of setting up laptop and desktop and dual clients on both side by side made me persevere, so I mined out around 29 pieces of oyster shell marble.
Ordinarily, this would have to be divided by 4 people. Which leaves a measly share of 7 pieces of marble.
When I duo-quarried with an alt, I would get a lion's share of 14, which is respectable.
Getting to keep 29 pieces of OSM all for myself, in the same amount of time I would have wasted quarrying with other people, was crazy heaven. (Not to mention, the time saved waiting for them.)
I ran to my tavern and set up the other two ceremonial wine and beer tasting tables I had wanted for a long time. 12 OSM down to a good cause. My Egyptian bar countertop was finally complete!
Now all there is left to do is set up some more decorative sculptures to represent seating and tables and other such anachronistic medieval tavern trappings.
The other OSM was meant for Acid Baths to prepare Metal Salts for fireworks. Except when I finally ran to get the tech to unlock building it, I realised that each acid bath requires 1 OSM (no problem now) and 4 canvas.
Oh crud. Canvas was something I hadn't been weaving lately. So.. flax growing is in the works.
The good news is that I finally managed to refine my one-click flax macro some time ago. (Instead of click to bring up menu, and then click weed/harvest - I tap a key and it does the double-click movement for me.) This has enabled me to go up from about 30 flax beds manually double-clicking and risking carpal tunnel, to 42 flax beds manual tapping 'e' as I move the mouse.
This simulates the action of playing any other MMO or game and pressing a key to fire off a skill, which is much less hand strain for me personally.
I carry 126 flax seeds, and grow 'em for 252 flax in a fairly short period of time. The delay is now in harvesting enough seeds to make this worthwhile.
I experimented with planting 50 or 60 seeds at a go to harvest seeds, and found that I could pull about 200+ seeds per round.
It's doable. It'll be much better if crossbreeding was out and I actually had seeds that could produce 6 seeds 6 rotten flax and 6 flax, but well, beggars cannot be choosers, and 2 flax 1 seed nile green is all we have so far.
Along the way, wood treatment was unlocked, so I picked up the tech. Building the wood treatment plant/machine/thingy was surprisingly simple, given that I had 25 glass pipes left over from a pilgrim shrine donation and 25 copper straps already pre-made. I think they were meant for barrels, but I never got around to making more. I had to painstakingly make 10 more glass pipes, but I had soda and lime left over too.
As for actually knowing HOW to use it, that's for another time to experiment with. I never did anything with it last server, so I have no clue how it works.
I was in a massive sheet glass frenzy this holiday break, and did lots and lots of flax and leek burns for ash, to boil potash, in order to get normal glass, and finally sheet glass.
32 sheet glass per greenhouse and 12 sheet glass per beetle terrarium means lots and lots of sheet glass.
I built myself 2 more greenhouses and 4 more terrariums, essentially doubling what I had before this weekend. My camel pen has expanded into a 3 pen camel farm. I hope the greenhouses produce enough grass=>straw for them.
8 terrariums means I get to grow lots of cabbage. But I have a horrible beetle habit to feed.
465 beetles are in my pockets, and I cannot move. So I have to clean that up some time really soon and get very harsh on rejecting purty bugs.
In the grand plan are my very own deep well and barrel grinder.
The deep well is really ambitious. It requires 2000 leather for one thing. That's a lot of sheep and camels. I've been saving most of my camel leather for it, so I'm 1200 leather or so from it. A guy who quit and left his stuff to the guild I'm in has about 700 leather in his warehouse, so I think I'm almost there on leather.
The other problem is the screw gears. 20 screw gears. Each screw gear is made from 400 iron and 200 copper (or was it the other way around) so that is a LOT of metal to mine.
I had originally wanted to make it public, because the previous two were not. But a third party had come up with one somewhere along the outskirts of a nearby town center, and that one is public.
So I might just cut short the process for now, and just bring my group of 4 merry men over to that deep well and try digging out some petroleum for myself.
Speaking of the 4 merry men, I tried my own dig also. This was with only grilled onions raising me up to 2/2/2/5 endurance, though with very well made 9k shovels that I bought from an expert blacksmith. To my glee, I was able to burst dig and get cuttables and the odd medium stone.
All I need to do is make a recipe with greater than 2 endurance, and I should be able to run my own dig just fine too.
Towards that route, I forced myself to camp out every ATITD night looking for mushrooms, and tracked down Slave's Bread and Peasant's Foot mushies (FINALLY) and managed to unlock Cooking 4 for my main. Onwards to cooking 5 and rare herbs to find.
This bodes well for future bauxite, gypsum digs and cement stirs.
Barrel grinder, yes. I'm about 500 small quartz short. If I got off my ass and made a proper str/per recipe and went and hammered all my quartz mines, or just kept mining lots and lots of metal ore and hope to collect quartz along the way, I would be able to get a ways towards that.
Just haven't got around to it yet.
Pyrotechnics also opened up, so I need to build myself a star rack and fireworks mortar at some point. I haven't even -looked- at the ingredients necessary for those yet.
Busy busy busy. I have to say that I kind of like chasing behind technology and having something to strive towards... over getting completely bored because everything's already built though.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Hell Week Over, Going There Anyway
The annual student babysitting period is over. Yay!
We're headed for ever so slightly less chaotic times, though school holidays now bring their own set of troubles in the form of a dysfunctional volunteer system that I am now, unfortunately, in charge of.
Still, it was a good opportunity for me to grab some time to take a day off, stack it right up to a public holiday and a weekend, and indulge in a 4 day no-work stretch before jumping back into things.
Work-life balance and all that.
A brief attempt at putzing around with Aion some week ago have confirmed that I no longer feel that much of a draw toward it. It's a decent enough MMO grind, but the emotional payoff from being on top of a leaderboard, griefing and being griefed, and prancing around in uber-kewl armor doesn't really fulfill anything for my gamer type, which certainly isn't Killer-Achiever.
I get a far bigger serenity kick out of putzing in A Tale in the Desert, where my Explorer-Achiever tendencies work in tandem to grind out 210470 resources in order to play a relatively persistent SimCity.
The thought of being able to change the landscape of a world up to the point where it ends/resets somehow thrills me in a way that staying up 3 weeks at the top of a leaderboard wouldn't.
While being on a less competitive, emptier server is advantageous, it magnifies the problem of the group-reliant bottlenecks. There's less people around my timezone to do anything.
Let's be deadly honest. There's not that many people around my timezone in any case, original ATITD server, or any other game for that matter. This has ultimately been an interest killer for me in umpteen games which have a fundamentally group-reliant component, be it an MMO, pen n' paper D&D, tabletop wargaming or board games. Poor ol' adult Singaporean mundania.
As you grow up, it seems you end up with more spending money, less game-playing friends and less time to get together.
Nor am I much of a socialite anyhow. Having to interact with so many people to function in an acceptably normal fashion at work means my highly introverted side craves burial in the solitude of my room over the weekends.
So I find myself in ATITD approaching an interesting slippery slope. Dual-boxing has always fascinated me. Not the least because it is both legal and non-ToR-breaking in most games (who are only too happy that you've bought a second box and a second subscription), as well as a massive macro / control challenge.
I've always found it a supreme thrill to be your own functioning team, getting past the artificial group roadblock, and having all your characters work in tandem in fantastic cyborg fashion. It captivated me from the moment I watched Rathain and Axius and other such pioneers on the MUD vroom their 8 stacks of characters from place to place, and #all circle a mob.
I never took the habit to MMOs in part because I've always been too stingy to buy a second copy of the game, and in part because the hardware required is often too prohibitively expensive in cost and in space. (My one computer takes up a good part of my room. I have no place to put another CPU or mount any more monitors anywhere, let alone buy special hardware to control two mice/keyboards at once.)
Didn't stop me from secretly admiring all those husband-wife teams and dual,triple-boxers who did though.
ATITD, though, is a game that makes dual-boxing easy. Most likely by purposeful design. An alt account allows you to navigate all those pair challenges placed for husband-wife teams with ease. Having experienced the convenience of spouse warp with two alts whose minds I control, I definitely can never go back to a single character.
I swapped beetles between my alts without having to beg someone else and wait for them to run to me. I got my worship initiation done on my own time, without having to PUG it. Unsoweiter.
Ah, but, but... a pair cannot achieve everything in ATITD. Obviously, those requiring 7 or 21 characters will still necessitate me social schmoozing a little. Everyone else has to too, because those numbers are too big and force them to look outside their mini-groups.
BUT, what of the magical number 4?
A husband-wife team who run dual alts each make up their own self-sufficient ATITD unit. Ditto a good pair of friends who do the same thing. There are also many social-seeking people who get themselves into guilds that provide opportunities for size 4 PUGs to form.
I could always just ask for a group on the global channel. I'm sure there are many broke loners who are stranded just like I was on the previous server. I could practice my powers of observation and make friends with those who dual-alt or are best-friend or husband-wife pairs.
It's not impossible. The problem with the above solutions is that I run into the curse of playing with multiple people. WAITING. For other people to be ready. For other people to need the same thing as I. And if they play in other timezones, they find their own PUGs to feed their resource need far more easily than I.
Then there's having to divide the cut after.
Dual accounts showed me that I could spend half the time to get a resource I wanted when both characters are controlled by me and thus willingly donate to the 'make me benefit' fund.
I suppose it was inevitable that the next thought would follow.
I've grown comfortable with the idea of paying for two subscriptions for this game. While I certainly would not run 4 subscriptions for a whole year (even though I could afford it, it objectively is about the cost of subscribing to the overpriced Starhub World Cup channel), no one said that you cannot cancel whenever you want.
What's to stop me from paying for 2 more characters for a month, and milking the 4-person team for all the group resources they are worth?
Essentially, it would be paying $40 sgd extra for how ever many group resources I was going to commit to digging up. A kind of DLC or premium content, if you will.
The only thing half holding me back is a naive and vague notion of 'morality.' Nay, morality is the wrong word. Call it a set of social mores that suggest one character=one player is the only proper way to play a game, and that anything else is 'cheating' or 'gaming' the system.
Whose expectation is it really? Is it carried over from some other game's culture?
"Other people do it too" is, of course, no real kind of defense. Other people do all sorts of things too, right, wrong or otherwise.
Is it really so important to do the morally 'right' thing in a game? Or the socially-perceived 'right' thing in a game? Or because this is a multiplayer game, I shouldn't be using the word 'game' for its implications and replace it with the following questions:
Is it really so important to do the morally 'right' thing in social interactions with other people? Or the socially-perceived 'right' thing when interacting with other people?
To make things doubly interesting, I'm not really directly interacting with other people if I were to quadruple-account. What I would be affecting is the game world, and the proportion of resources to belonging to various groups of people. I would be placing myself nearer to the proportion of folks who powergame, and stick in large corporate or communal style guilds.
And I would be making myself self-sufficient (I hope.)
It's an experiment with a different kind of gaming experience. I'd have to run two clients on my laptop and two clients on my desktop.
I already set out on my road to damnation a couple days ago by creating a third character and paying for him. Amusingly, by having my established character feed him resources and making use of the beginner teleport ability, I finished the "Welcome to Egypt" part in under an hour.
Very soon now, once I gather enough quarry resources and hit a few more milestones, I'm going to make the fourth character and drag them all to start marble quarrying.
Mwahahaha...
We're headed for ever so slightly less chaotic times, though school holidays now bring their own set of troubles in the form of a dysfunctional volunteer system that I am now, unfortunately, in charge of.
Still, it was a good opportunity for me to grab some time to take a day off, stack it right up to a public holiday and a weekend, and indulge in a 4 day no-work stretch before jumping back into things.
Work-life balance and all that.
A brief attempt at putzing around with Aion some week ago have confirmed that I no longer feel that much of a draw toward it. It's a decent enough MMO grind, but the emotional payoff from being on top of a leaderboard, griefing and being griefed, and prancing around in uber-kewl armor doesn't really fulfill anything for my gamer type, which certainly isn't Killer-Achiever.
I get a far bigger serenity kick out of putzing in A Tale in the Desert, where my Explorer-Achiever tendencies work in tandem to grind out 210470 resources in order to play a relatively persistent SimCity.
The thought of being able to change the landscape of a world up to the point where it ends/resets somehow thrills me in a way that staying up 3 weeks at the top of a leaderboard wouldn't.
While being on a less competitive, emptier server is advantageous, it magnifies the problem of the group-reliant bottlenecks. There's less people around my timezone to do anything.
Let's be deadly honest. There's not that many people around my timezone in any case, original ATITD server, or any other game for that matter. This has ultimately been an interest killer for me in umpteen games which have a fundamentally group-reliant component, be it an MMO, pen n' paper D&D, tabletop wargaming or board games. Poor ol' adult Singaporean mundania.
As you grow up, it seems you end up with more spending money, less game-playing friends and less time to get together.
Nor am I much of a socialite anyhow. Having to interact with so many people to function in an acceptably normal fashion at work means my highly introverted side craves burial in the solitude of my room over the weekends.
So I find myself in ATITD approaching an interesting slippery slope. Dual-boxing has always fascinated me. Not the least because it is both legal and non-ToR-breaking in most games (who are only too happy that you've bought a second box and a second subscription), as well as a massive macro / control challenge.
I've always found it a supreme thrill to be your own functioning team, getting past the artificial group roadblock, and having all your characters work in tandem in fantastic cyborg fashion. It captivated me from the moment I watched Rathain and Axius and other such pioneers on the MUD vroom their 8 stacks of characters from place to place, and #all circle a mob.
I never took the habit to MMOs in part because I've always been too stingy to buy a second copy of the game, and in part because the hardware required is often too prohibitively expensive in cost and in space. (My one computer takes up a good part of my room. I have no place to put another CPU or mount any more monitors anywhere, let alone buy special hardware to control two mice/keyboards at once.)
Didn't stop me from secretly admiring all those husband-wife teams and dual,triple-boxers who did though.
ATITD, though, is a game that makes dual-boxing easy. Most likely by purposeful design. An alt account allows you to navigate all those pair challenges placed for husband-wife teams with ease. Having experienced the convenience of spouse warp with two alts whose minds I control, I definitely can never go back to a single character.
I swapped beetles between my alts without having to beg someone else and wait for them to run to me. I got my worship initiation done on my own time, without having to PUG it. Unsoweiter.
Ah, but, but... a pair cannot achieve everything in ATITD. Obviously, those requiring 7 or 21 characters will still necessitate me social schmoozing a little. Everyone else has to too, because those numbers are too big and force them to look outside their mini-groups.
BUT, what of the magical number 4?
A husband-wife team who run dual alts each make up their own self-sufficient ATITD unit. Ditto a good pair of friends who do the same thing. There are also many social-seeking people who get themselves into guilds that provide opportunities for size 4 PUGs to form.
I could always just ask for a group on the global channel. I'm sure there are many broke loners who are stranded just like I was on the previous server. I could practice my powers of observation and make friends with those who dual-alt or are best-friend or husband-wife pairs.
It's not impossible. The problem with the above solutions is that I run into the curse of playing with multiple people. WAITING. For other people to be ready. For other people to need the same thing as I. And if they play in other timezones, they find their own PUGs to feed their resource need far more easily than I.
Then there's having to divide the cut after.
Dual accounts showed me that I could spend half the time to get a resource I wanted when both characters are controlled by me and thus willingly donate to the 'make me benefit' fund.
I suppose it was inevitable that the next thought would follow.
I've grown comfortable with the idea of paying for two subscriptions for this game. While I certainly would not run 4 subscriptions for a whole year (even though I could afford it, it objectively is about the cost of subscribing to the overpriced Starhub World Cup channel), no one said that you cannot cancel whenever you want.
What's to stop me from paying for 2 more characters for a month, and milking the 4-person team for all the group resources they are worth?
Essentially, it would be paying $40 sgd extra for how ever many group resources I was going to commit to digging up. A kind of DLC or premium content, if you will.
The only thing half holding me back is a naive and vague notion of 'morality.' Nay, morality is the wrong word. Call it a set of social mores that suggest one character=one player is the only proper way to play a game, and that anything else is 'cheating' or 'gaming' the system.
Whose expectation is it really? Is it carried over from some other game's culture?
"Other people do it too" is, of course, no real kind of defense. Other people do all sorts of things too, right, wrong or otherwise.
Is it really so important to do the morally 'right' thing in a game? Or the socially-perceived 'right' thing in a game? Or because this is a multiplayer game, I shouldn't be using the word 'game' for its implications and replace it with the following questions:
Is it really so important to do the morally 'right' thing in social interactions with other people? Or the socially-perceived 'right' thing when interacting with other people?
To make things doubly interesting, I'm not really directly interacting with other people if I were to quadruple-account. What I would be affecting is the game world, and the proportion of resources to belonging to various groups of people. I would be placing myself nearer to the proportion of folks who powergame, and stick in large corporate or communal style guilds.
And I would be making myself self-sufficient (I hope.)
It's an experiment with a different kind of gaming experience. I'd have to run two clients on my laptop and two clients on my desktop.
I already set out on my road to damnation a couple days ago by creating a third character and paying for him. Amusingly, by having my established character feed him resources and making use of the beginner teleport ability, I finished the "Welcome to Egypt" part in under an hour.
Very soon now, once I gather enough quarry resources and hit a few more milestones, I'm going to make the fourth character and drag them all to start marble quarrying.
Mwahahaha...
Monday, May 17, 2010
Setbacks
I am in a hormonally stable period at the moment, which is good, since I can thus face setbacks with equanimity, with only a shrug, a sigh, and a vague optimism that things can be better and that I can craft actionable steps to get on with stuff.
Catch me at the wrong period of my period, and gargh, PMS causes some really terrible depressive episodes.
So what's up now?
My boss is being kaypoh. Her words. She decided to send a bunch of email on Saturday and Sunday, and me being in a very Zen state of mind decided to indulge her. With frankness.
I'm tired of being political. I'm barely holding on to diplomacy.
The issue in question is that of a particular staff assignment to a development task, but there are bigger underlying unsaid things behind this.
It starts with my boss asking me if I have 'identified' someone for this task over the Saturday email. The unspoken hint is that I am a disorganised incompetent with time management problems and that I haven't done so.
Well, actually, about a month ago, I submitted a document of staff assignments (which, of course, bear little to no resemblance to the reality now) wherein I had assigned two staff for the task.
My boss comes back and disagrees with my assignment. Oh, you shouldn't assign two people for it. Oh, this person is not the best suited for it. She doesn't actually come outright and say who she thinks is suitable - she just finds fault with the assignment, and then after that, shrugs and goes "Well, you know what you are doing."
Fucking passive-aggressive guilt trip. Since I have better things to do, I leave it as is.
My other colleague, having no clue about this, takes the initiative to assign one of HER staff to the task. My boss says, oh, P has assigned someone already. So my other colleagues goes, okay, and takes the staff off the task.
Now this email comes to both of us, asking me again, have you identified someone for this, and then snidely insinuating to my other colleague that her staff are doing absolutely nothing.
"..." What exactly do you want here?
Well, in the first place, when is this bloody assignment due? So I ask that in my return email, explaining that my staff are presently swamped. I name specific examples. I repeat again my original assignment of staff, and then just in the off chance that she wants me to do the developmental work, I offer the alternative that I can take on the task too.
The boss' email comes back as "Oh, I'm not sure when it needs to be completed. I am just being kaypoh and preparing for it. And actually, this sort of developmental work originally was done by the managers, blah blah, long story."
"..." Ok, is that an insinuating hint that I am doing absolutely nothing?
My second return email outlines exactly what is on my plate (about 23 item's worth just within these two weeks alone), and suggests that if the deadline is not immediate, that we push back the development task till after this peak crisis late May period ends.
The mail comes back, "Oh, such long emails are not helpful. Sure, we can discuss this face-to-face all together like you suggest."
Haha. Meanwhile, my poor colleague has reiterated the offer to put the staff she originally assigned to the task back on.
What we have here is a classic case of projection every time the woman accuses me of lousy time management. Ok, ok, so maybe there is a grain of truth involved, which is why it hurts every time someone says I have lousy time management. But damn, I am trying. And actually, I think I'm starting to maybe get the hang of sorta kinda juggling it all, and maybe putting things out on paper.
But seriously, I communicate down information a helluva lot better than -other- people, my boss included. Why? Because I have to DIG out the information from her in order to pass it down. By the time I get the info, it's already time-sensitive and expiring fast, so I end up communicating last minute stuff and tight deadlines.
Which, of course, the blame falls squarely on me. For lousy time management. *rolls eyes* Let's face it. It's everybody's fault.
Anyhow, I have never believed in this ridiculous blame game. I've always believed in taking positive steps to fix the situation, fix the system, make things better, not repeat the same mistake twice.
It kinda sucks that the person in power gets to fling all kinds of lame accusations around, but sighs, it reflects back on the person more than on me.
I have to keep myself positive, calm, and self-improving my own systems. Because I benefit a lot more from improving me than trying to do stuff in order to please other people.
---
Speaking of which, I had a classic "oops, fuck" moment yesterday.
I was mapping ATITD dowsing points with a Mine Pattern Explorer program which records down coordinates onto a text file.
In my excitement to quickly record down points before my bonus stat food wore out, I forgot to load the old text file to overlay points on, so the data was recorded onto a new text file.
The pattern of titanium/antimony was rather puzzling. It wasn't concentric rings as some folk suggested. I couldn't find the entire pattern with the limited time food I had, but my hypothesis now is that the titanium vein is a spiral, that ends in antimony at the middle.
When the food bonus wore off, I sighed, and reached to save. Mysteriously (or so I thought at the time), it asked me which file I wanted to save on.
Duh, my dowsing map file, of course. I selected and hit save.
And then I figured it out. Hang on, the only time it should prompt me to pick a file is if... the file isn't selected in the first place.
Sure enough, I managed to overwrite about 400 prior dowses that traced out a beautiful network tracery of iron, copper and tin.
I hadn't been paranoid enough to back up the file either, so it is entirely lost.
The only consolation is a little jpg I took to show a friend how the vein patterns around our area looked like. No coord info in those, so I will have to some day walk and trace out the veins again if I want a map.
That jpg and my memory of where the veins fell are all I have left.
*sobs*
As I said, I could be hysterical, I could be depressed, I could be angry, ragequit, or otherwise run around wailing pulling my hair and screaming in denial.
In my present state of mind, my reaction seems pretty much to be a resigned shrug, an "easy come, easy go" sort of acceptance, and maybe a desire to share the story and get a few ":("s in commiseration.
Ah well. Step by step we go.
My next project is to build myself a gyration cell.
The public works guild set up one amazingly fast. Me, I have been slacking on alloy preparation, so I lost out somewhat. The only good thing is now I can use the public gyration cell to refine my metal at high ore efficiency.
I spent a blinding 243 pieces of leather in order to repair and mine a public antimony mine at a depth of 27. Very expensive metal, but alas, unless I want to run around in the far reaches of unexplored territory looking for an undiscovered titanium/antimony spot, that's what I have to put up with.
Catch me at the wrong period of my period, and gargh, PMS causes some really terrible depressive episodes.
So what's up now?
My boss is being kaypoh. Her words. She decided to send a bunch of email on Saturday and Sunday, and me being in a very Zen state of mind decided to indulge her. With frankness.
I'm tired of being political. I'm barely holding on to diplomacy.
The issue in question is that of a particular staff assignment to a development task, but there are bigger underlying unsaid things behind this.
It starts with my boss asking me if I have 'identified' someone for this task over the Saturday email. The unspoken hint is that I am a disorganised incompetent with time management problems and that I haven't done so.
Well, actually, about a month ago, I submitted a document of staff assignments (which, of course, bear little to no resemblance to the reality now) wherein I had assigned two staff for the task.
My boss comes back and disagrees with my assignment. Oh, you shouldn't assign two people for it. Oh, this person is not the best suited for it. She doesn't actually come outright and say who she thinks is suitable - she just finds fault with the assignment, and then after that, shrugs and goes "Well, you know what you are doing."
Fucking passive-aggressive guilt trip. Since I have better things to do, I leave it as is.
My other colleague, having no clue about this, takes the initiative to assign one of HER staff to the task. My boss says, oh, P has assigned someone already. So my other colleagues goes, okay, and takes the staff off the task.
Now this email comes to both of us, asking me again, have you identified someone for this, and then snidely insinuating to my other colleague that her staff are doing absolutely nothing.
"..." What exactly do you want here?
Well, in the first place, when is this bloody assignment due? So I ask that in my return email, explaining that my staff are presently swamped. I name specific examples. I repeat again my original assignment of staff, and then just in the off chance that she wants me to do the developmental work, I offer the alternative that I can take on the task too.
The boss' email comes back as "Oh, I'm not sure when it needs to be completed. I am just being kaypoh and preparing for it. And actually, this sort of developmental work originally was done by the managers, blah blah, long story."
"..." Ok, is that an insinuating hint that I am doing absolutely nothing?
My second return email outlines exactly what is on my plate (about 23 item's worth just within these two weeks alone), and suggests that if the deadline is not immediate, that we push back the development task till after this peak crisis late May period ends.
The mail comes back, "Oh, such long emails are not helpful. Sure, we can discuss this face-to-face all together like you suggest."
Haha. Meanwhile, my poor colleague has reiterated the offer to put the staff she originally assigned to the task back on.
What we have here is a classic case of projection every time the woman accuses me of lousy time management. Ok, ok, so maybe there is a grain of truth involved, which is why it hurts every time someone says I have lousy time management. But damn, I am trying. And actually, I think I'm starting to maybe get the hang of sorta kinda juggling it all, and maybe putting things out on paper.
But seriously, I communicate down information a helluva lot better than -other- people, my boss included. Why? Because I have to DIG out the information from her in order to pass it down. By the time I get the info, it's already time-sensitive and expiring fast, so I end up communicating last minute stuff and tight deadlines.
Which, of course, the blame falls squarely on me. For lousy time management. *rolls eyes* Let's face it. It's everybody's fault.
Anyhow, I have never believed in this ridiculous blame game. I've always believed in taking positive steps to fix the situation, fix the system, make things better, not repeat the same mistake twice.
It kinda sucks that the person in power gets to fling all kinds of lame accusations around, but sighs, it reflects back on the person more than on me.
I have to keep myself positive, calm, and self-improving my own systems. Because I benefit a lot more from improving me than trying to do stuff in order to please other people.
---
Speaking of which, I had a classic "oops, fuck" moment yesterday.
I was mapping ATITD dowsing points with a Mine Pattern Explorer program which records down coordinates onto a text file.
In my excitement to quickly record down points before my bonus stat food wore out, I forgot to load the old text file to overlay points on, so the data was recorded onto a new text file.
The pattern of titanium/antimony was rather puzzling. It wasn't concentric rings as some folk suggested. I couldn't find the entire pattern with the limited time food I had, but my hypothesis now is that the titanium vein is a spiral, that ends in antimony at the middle.
When the food bonus wore off, I sighed, and reached to save. Mysteriously (or so I thought at the time), it asked me which file I wanted to save on.
Duh, my dowsing map file, of course. I selected and hit save.
And then I figured it out. Hang on, the only time it should prompt me to pick a file is if... the file isn't selected in the first place.
Sure enough, I managed to overwrite about 400 prior dowses that traced out a beautiful network tracery of iron, copper and tin.
I hadn't been paranoid enough to back up the file either, so it is entirely lost.
The only consolation is a little jpg I took to show a friend how the vein patterns around our area looked like. No coord info in those, so I will have to some day walk and trace out the veins again if I want a map.
That jpg and my memory of where the veins fell are all I have left.
*sobs*
As I said, I could be hysterical, I could be depressed, I could be angry, ragequit, or otherwise run around wailing pulling my hair and screaming in denial.
In my present state of mind, my reaction seems pretty much to be a resigned shrug, an "easy come, easy go" sort of acceptance, and maybe a desire to share the story and get a few ":("s in commiseration.
Ah well. Step by step we go.
My next project is to build myself a gyration cell.
The public works guild set up one amazingly fast. Me, I have been slacking on alloy preparation, so I lost out somewhat. The only good thing is now I can use the public gyration cell to refine my metal at high ore efficiency.
I spent a blinding 243 pieces of leather in order to repair and mine a public antimony mine at a depth of 27. Very expensive metal, but alas, unless I want to run around in the far reaches of unexplored territory looking for an undiscovered titanium/antimony spot, that's what I have to put up with.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Damnatus
My Warhammer 40k frenzy over the weekend also had me trawling through Youtube hoping to find a decent WH40K machinima. I found some cheesy ones, even cheesier live action film, and a fan made movie which is both cheesy and in German, but still quite fun to watch despite it all.
Damnatus, Part 1
I'm not sure if a non-fan will be able to make any sense of it whatsoever.
Damnatus, Part 1
I'm not sure if a non-fan will be able to make any sense of it whatsoever.
Looking Back at Yesterweek
Wow, what a week. On Wednesday, I tried to take a morning off to rest, and came down with a distinct 38 degree fever instead.
(This after already having taken 2 days MC a week before when I felt the first beginnings of flu in order to stave it off with lots of rest... I ended up going back to work feeling okay, somewhat woozy-ish, with a running nose like a dripping tap that WOULDN'T go away until last Wed-Fri great fever burnout.)
I waffled through half an afternoon of work through an essentially half-lucid fever dream, hanging on for a brief talk at (not to, at) some teachers, and told my boss that I was essentially at H1N1 or SARS temperatures and that I really needed to go see a doc.
And I went. You'd think a clinic would be quite empty after leaving work at 4.30pm, but it was packed to the brim, so I ended up waiting until 5.45pm to finish up. One of the receptionists was rather grumpy about it seeing as the clinic was supposed to close at 5pm. Of course, she was the one taking my temperature with the point and shoot fever gun thingy. She did it from about one foot away, goodness knows what her aim was like, because she wrote down 36.4.
I went 'huh' to myself, and thought, uh oh, so much for early detection of potential H1N1 or SARS people. I went to the toilet since it was miles away from being my turn and took my own temperature with my digital thermometer and sure enough, it was 37.7.
Why was I being so neurotic about the whole thing? Well, my cousin had just collapsed in NS a couple days ago, freaking the whole family out, and he ended up in ICU with a 40 degree fever and literally on deaths's doorstep at one point where he was unconscious, feverish, shaking involuntarily, and with a racing heartrate of 150. He managed to pull through, thankfully, but tests came back to confirm it was indeed H1N1. Purty scary.
Seeing as I am probably far more overweight and unhealthier than he is, the only thing going for me is my age (which may have exposed me to a few more flu varieties) and my lack of baking in the sun and disgustingly seasonally hot/humid air doing anything strenuous, and hopefully, lack of exposure to the H1N1 virus in the first place. (Except a colleague's wife has H1N1 and he was all masked up as a precaution a couple days ago.)
So anyhow, the doc confirmed that it was indeed a pretty nasty case of flu. He should know, he had my records for the last week, where I was only at a 37.2 degree rise in temperature and having a bad case of sniffles. He also said that this seemed to be the pattern of flu folks had been having for the last couple weeks.
In between my misery and nausea, I did manage a slight smirk when the doc took my temperature, and went "yikes, 37.8" while looking down at the card that reported a "36.4". That outside thermometer not so accurate, he mumbled. I said, dunno how your nurse measure. :P
He decided to give me two days MC for Thurs and Fri so I could rest for a four day stretch. I wasn't going to argue.
He also switched to a stronger Ibuprofen rather than paracetamol. Yucky thing was, I almost ate up the whole pack, 8 hours at a time, before the fever was finally over.
---
So that essentially was Thursday and Friday. Most of it spent asleep, in an attempt to get rid of the fever. In between, spurts of 15 minute ATITD to log on to fertilize flowers (which can only be done every 2 hours), and grow onions for sheep (annoying, good thing I only maintain 4 pens now), and grow cabbage for beetles (somewhat annoying, but the harvest is 20 a time), and play with beetle patterns.
Ah, beetle patterns. I love beetle patterns. And beetle breeding. It's nuts, but it is amusing. Every 4-8 hours, I flip through the tanks staring at the 4-25 beetles that have popped up. I prune the oogly ones. I keep the patterns that look nicest and most alike, and then I leave them in there to interbreed. And they make little beetle offspring that look like a mix of both mama beetle and papa beetle, with a teensy sprinkle of unpredictable mutation.
And being surprised at what the unpredictable mutation generates is the fun bit.
---
On Saturday, the fever started to lift. Finally. I was still feeling kinda woozy and unable to stare at the ATITD screen for too long, so I didn't push it.
Started to read some WH40K books instead. Re-read Gaunt's Ghosts: The Founding series.
Later in the evening, I was oozing nostalgia. It was Welcome Back weekend in ATITD, so I logged Indra back on to see pretty much a deserted neighborhood. No one recognizable around. Oh well. Took a few screenshots for posterity and headed back off again.
It was also double xp in both CoH and Aion. I gave CoH up as a bad idea since the ATI graphics card issue was still giving me some lag the last time I tried, and I'm still waiting for Going Rogue and the new powersets anyhow. I poked my head back in Aion instead. Been chucked out of the guild there too. Did a quest or two, killed twenty or so mobs, got boring and logged off.
---
What had been growing as a terrible uncontrollable urge to let the galaxy burn started surfacing sometime Sat/Sun. Too much WH40K fiction. Needed to see Imperial Guard and Space Marines and Chaos duke it out.
So my will to resist until there was a 50% sale collapsed, and I bought the Chaos Rising expansion for Dawn of War II.
I also discovered that there was another online store called Good Old Games, and there, they sell old classics like Arcanum. As well as many others like Stonekeep, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, etc. Hmm... very tempting, but lack of disk space helped to resist that temptation until later.
The Chaos Rising expansion downloaded in a split second, so I bet there was already a pre-download to my Dawn of War II game months earlier.
I started, only to realize that my offline Windows Live account had completed the first game, and that my online Windows Live account had no completed campaign to import.
Trying to start a new commander fresh felt pregenerated, and I gave up after the first mission. After all, the POINT of the expansion is the whole corruption mechanic: to choose to (or not to) corrupt your marines so that they either turn into nasty minions of Chaos or stand proud and unsullied as purehearted servants of the Emperor.
I tried to play with the offline Windows Live account, and started twitching at the thought that I was missing some neat achievements. (Ah, the terrible addictiveness of a shiny meaningless badge!) What sealed the deal was an accidental discovery of the corruption mechanic because I'd tried to 'sell off to upgrade' a piece of valuable wargear.
Or rather, it was a weapon I was using - except there was a label on it that said 'sell to upgrade.' I thought that oh, this is my old campaign, so maybe the new expansion has a new version, and this is their method of converting old version 1 gear. (What, this happens in MMOs all the time!) So I sold it. And up popped in my inventory a new version of the weapon, a little stronger, and I went "oooh, nice" until I found out I could no longer USE the weapon, because of a little dinky footnote on it that said "Corruption + 3" required... Eeep! Now my Space Marine has no weapon because he's not corrupted yet!
Subsequent sell offs simply upgraded the weapon further to this big purple badass weapon that needed god-knows-what level and +20 corruption level to equip. It was un-get-riddable. Having little D&D flashbacks of cursed items, I stared glumly at the wart in my inventory disturbing my OCD impulse, and decided to delete that campaign as a bad idea too.
What the heck - there was a bunch of un-won achievements on my Windows Live account, I'd forgotten the backstory of the first game that the second campaign kept referencing...
... so I started the original campaign from scratch again.
Ironic. I needn't have bought the expansion for a couple days yet.
Still fun though. I seem much better at it the second go around. On the second-highest difficulty, and still having less trouble with the big bosses than the first time around.
(This after already having taken 2 days MC a week before when I felt the first beginnings of flu in order to stave it off with lots of rest... I ended up going back to work feeling okay, somewhat woozy-ish, with a running nose like a dripping tap that WOULDN'T go away until last Wed-Fri great fever burnout.)
I waffled through half an afternoon of work through an essentially half-lucid fever dream, hanging on for a brief talk at (not to, at) some teachers, and told my boss that I was essentially at H1N1 or SARS temperatures and that I really needed to go see a doc.
And I went. You'd think a clinic would be quite empty after leaving work at 4.30pm, but it was packed to the brim, so I ended up waiting until 5.45pm to finish up. One of the receptionists was rather grumpy about it seeing as the clinic was supposed to close at 5pm. Of course, she was the one taking my temperature with the point and shoot fever gun thingy. She did it from about one foot away, goodness knows what her aim was like, because she wrote down 36.4.
I went 'huh' to myself, and thought, uh oh, so much for early detection of potential H1N1 or SARS people. I went to the toilet since it was miles away from being my turn and took my own temperature with my digital thermometer and sure enough, it was 37.7.
Why was I being so neurotic about the whole thing? Well, my cousin had just collapsed in NS a couple days ago, freaking the whole family out, and he ended up in ICU with a 40 degree fever and literally on deaths's doorstep at one point where he was unconscious, feverish, shaking involuntarily, and with a racing heartrate of 150. He managed to pull through, thankfully, but tests came back to confirm it was indeed H1N1. Purty scary.
Seeing as I am probably far more overweight and unhealthier than he is, the only thing going for me is my age (which may have exposed me to a few more flu varieties) and my lack of baking in the sun and disgustingly seasonally hot/humid air doing anything strenuous, and hopefully, lack of exposure to the H1N1 virus in the first place. (Except a colleague's wife has H1N1 and he was all masked up as a precaution a couple days ago.)
So anyhow, the doc confirmed that it was indeed a pretty nasty case of flu. He should know, he had my records for the last week, where I was only at a 37.2 degree rise in temperature and having a bad case of sniffles. He also said that this seemed to be the pattern of flu folks had been having for the last couple weeks.
In between my misery and nausea, I did manage a slight smirk when the doc took my temperature, and went "yikes, 37.8" while looking down at the card that reported a "36.4". That outside thermometer not so accurate, he mumbled. I said, dunno how your nurse measure. :P
He decided to give me two days MC for Thurs and Fri so I could rest for a four day stretch. I wasn't going to argue.
He also switched to a stronger Ibuprofen rather than paracetamol. Yucky thing was, I almost ate up the whole pack, 8 hours at a time, before the fever was finally over.
---
So that essentially was Thursday and Friday. Most of it spent asleep, in an attempt to get rid of the fever. In between, spurts of 15 minute ATITD to log on to fertilize flowers (which can only be done every 2 hours), and grow onions for sheep (annoying, good thing I only maintain 4 pens now), and grow cabbage for beetles (somewhat annoying, but the harvest is 20 a time), and play with beetle patterns.
Ah, beetle patterns. I love beetle patterns. And beetle breeding. It's nuts, but it is amusing. Every 4-8 hours, I flip through the tanks staring at the 4-25 beetles that have popped up. I prune the oogly ones. I keep the patterns that look nicest and most alike, and then I leave them in there to interbreed. And they make little beetle offspring that look like a mix of both mama beetle and papa beetle, with a teensy sprinkle of unpredictable mutation.
And being surprised at what the unpredictable mutation generates is the fun bit.
---
On Saturday, the fever started to lift. Finally. I was still feeling kinda woozy and unable to stare at the ATITD screen for too long, so I didn't push it.
Started to read some WH40K books instead. Re-read Gaunt's Ghosts: The Founding series.
Later in the evening, I was oozing nostalgia. It was Welcome Back weekend in ATITD, so I logged Indra back on to see pretty much a deserted neighborhood. No one recognizable around. Oh well. Took a few screenshots for posterity and headed back off again.
It was also double xp in both CoH and Aion. I gave CoH up as a bad idea since the ATI graphics card issue was still giving me some lag the last time I tried, and I'm still waiting for Going Rogue and the new powersets anyhow. I poked my head back in Aion instead. Been chucked out of the guild there too. Did a quest or two, killed twenty or so mobs, got boring and logged off.
---
What had been growing as a terrible uncontrollable urge to let the galaxy burn started surfacing sometime Sat/Sun. Too much WH40K fiction. Needed to see Imperial Guard and Space Marines and Chaos duke it out.
So my will to resist until there was a 50% sale collapsed, and I bought the Chaos Rising expansion for Dawn of War II.
I also discovered that there was another online store called Good Old Games, and there, they sell old classics like Arcanum. As well as many others like Stonekeep, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, etc. Hmm... very tempting, but lack of disk space helped to resist that temptation until later.
The Chaos Rising expansion downloaded in a split second, so I bet there was already a pre-download to my Dawn of War II game months earlier.
I started, only to realize that my offline Windows Live account had completed the first game, and that my online Windows Live account had no completed campaign to import.
Trying to start a new commander fresh felt pregenerated, and I gave up after the first mission. After all, the POINT of the expansion is the whole corruption mechanic: to choose to (or not to) corrupt your marines so that they either turn into nasty minions of Chaos or stand proud and unsullied as purehearted servants of the Emperor.
I tried to play with the offline Windows Live account, and started twitching at the thought that I was missing some neat achievements. (Ah, the terrible addictiveness of a shiny meaningless badge!) What sealed the deal was an accidental discovery of the corruption mechanic because I'd tried to 'sell off to upgrade' a piece of valuable wargear.
Or rather, it was a weapon I was using - except there was a label on it that said 'sell to upgrade.' I thought that oh, this is my old campaign, so maybe the new expansion has a new version, and this is their method of converting old version 1 gear. (What, this happens in MMOs all the time!) So I sold it. And up popped in my inventory a new version of the weapon, a little stronger, and I went "oooh, nice" until I found out I could no longer USE the weapon, because of a little dinky footnote on it that said "Corruption + 3" required... Eeep! Now my Space Marine has no weapon because he's not corrupted yet!
Subsequent sell offs simply upgraded the weapon further to this big purple badass weapon that needed god-knows-what level and +20 corruption level to equip. It was un-get-riddable. Having little D&D flashbacks of cursed items, I stared glumly at the wart in my inventory disturbing my OCD impulse, and decided to delete that campaign as a bad idea too.
What the heck - there was a bunch of un-won achievements on my Windows Live account, I'd forgotten the backstory of the first game that the second campaign kept referencing...
... so I started the original campaign from scratch again.
Ironic. I needn't have bought the expansion for a couple days yet.
Still fun though. I seem much better at it the second go around. On the second-highest difficulty, and still having less trouble with the big bosses than the first time around.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Movie "Real"
Oh, as an addendum, I watched the backlot vid again to admire the technical aspects of it (I never said that greenscreen tech wasn't cool) and figured out from the comments that some people are more than a little shaken to the core at the thought that what they were seeing wasn't real, and all made up in a computer.
Folks, NOTHING you see on film is 100% "real."
What the heck is real anyway, when your own two eyes can play tricks on you from time to time?
The camera angles are picked by the director and a (hopefully experienced) cameraman's eye. The way they spin a story is media/writerly tricks. Props and set designers have been with us since the beginning of movies, and so have analog special effects like pyrotechnics and tricksy camera perspective shots. Actors are replaced by stuntmen. Why not a backdrop?
It's not as if movie-makers haven't ever PAINTED a backdrop before and used it in lieu of a real one. Even if you film on location, stuff is cordoned off, the crowd you see isn't a real crowd, they are called extras.
Is it any less real if someone yanks a stuntman up on a wire, or has the background move digitally downward as the real actor just raises his hands over his head to fly?
It is the illusion of reality that movies are after. The suspension of your disbelief long enough to accept the story they are telling and experience some kind of emotion.
And oh btw, those sure as hell aren't real guns either. :)
Folks, NOTHING you see on film is 100% "real."
What the heck is real anyway, when your own two eyes can play tricks on you from time to time?
The camera angles are picked by the director and a (hopefully experienced) cameraman's eye. The way they spin a story is media/writerly tricks. Props and set designers have been with us since the beginning of movies, and so have analog special effects like pyrotechnics and tricksy camera perspective shots. Actors are replaced by stuntmen. Why not a backdrop?
It's not as if movie-makers haven't ever PAINTED a backdrop before and used it in lieu of a real one. Even if you film on location, stuff is cordoned off, the crowd you see isn't a real crowd, they are called extras.
Is it any less real if someone yanks a stuntman up on a wire, or has the background move digitally downward as the real actor just raises his hands over his head to fly?
It is the illusion of reality that movies are after. The suspension of your disbelief long enough to accept the story they are telling and experience some kind of emotion.
And oh btw, those sure as hell aren't real guns either. :)
Monday, May 03, 2010
Behind Appearances
We had another one of those training workshops today, and at the end of it, the trainer chose to show us a somewhat unrelated but presumably he hoped, inspiring, video with some kind of moral message.
My nose was having leaky sinus issues the whole full-day session and I'd finally run out of the tissue paper stored in my pants pockets, so I bolted out for a brief toilet break and honking relief, hoping I'd get back soon enough to catch the video because he was taking quite a while to introduce what he wanted to show us.
I managed to get back just in time to see some kind of singing reality tv show with Simon Cowell and two unrecognizable judges complimenting the heck out of a dowdy-looking singer called Susan Boyle and saying 3 'Yes'es but missed her actual song.
Being the internet savvy sort, I dug up the video on youtube myself to have a listen:
Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent 2009
Maybe I'm just trying to console myself that I wouldn't quite have the initial reaction as millions of other people who judge by appearances, but I frankly find the whole thing faintly smelling of one of those reality tv show setups, where there are behind-the-scenes folks angling for a good story and pulling strings on real people to manipulate them into certain emotional reactions.
Let's face it, they do makeup on these people before they film them. You think someone wasn't given instructions to keep the grey in her hair and make her look significantly middle-aged, somewhat messy and fat like a crazy cat lady. You think the intro questions aren't scripted by someone to instill a 'first impresions' hook in the viewer, oook, heavy scottish brogue, living in a village, stuttering like a village idiot...
After all, the "preliminary round = fat geeky people we can laugh at trying to sing but squalling like an alley cat" mindset having been built up by seasons and seasons of American Idol.
Then the choice of song... meant as a happy moral message juxtaposition to her image.
Come on, before they let contestants onto the show to get film, SOMEONE somewhere has heard her sing a few verses to at least establish that she can indeed sing. Someone has done a background check on her (which can now be read, after her fame, on Wikipedia) and realized that this woman has been singing since age 12, has had vocal coaching and a singing instructor, has been singing (and thereby practising) in church choirs and local bars, etc.
And if you think about it logically, as my mind was busy working during the viewing of the performance, if you watch a dvd of the Les Miserables singers in concert, they look amazingly like ordinary people because they were cast based on their voices first, their silhouettes and musical acting ability second, and their personal dolled-up facial beauty a further off third - because on a stage in a theatre, you hear the voice first, the figure second, and only the front row seats can stare searchingly into a stage actor's face anyhow. So it's not as if there hasn't been prior precedent before.
Not to mention, Susan Boyle's figure is amazingly akin to a stereotypical opera singer's. Now why is that? Could it be a certain amount of physics and body physiology at work, that the heft and big chest cavity allow the person to produce that sort of powerful operatic voice (training and practice needed too, of course), just as talented fast swimmers naturally have built up large muscular arms and broad chests and long powerful legs?
Yeah, the logical intellectual part of myself quite ruined the emotional moment for me - though I have to admit, the freaky video editing where they keep jump cutting to the judges' reactions and the stupid hosts going "hahaha, you didn't expect that, did ya?" like a pair of schoolboys in on the prank also played a part.
Here's the thing I do enjoy watching though. Simon Cowell. The man the world loves to hate. I always feel he's a lot smarter and sneakier and double-layered than the world gives him credit for either. To me anyhow, if you watch him carefully, this is a man that knows. Knows his good singing. Knows the music industry and what they really want, stage presence and good looks in addition to good singing. Knows that the twain don't meet in all folk, many folk even, and has to play a certain bad guy role.
He's not really surprised when Susan Boyle sings, imo. He's probably in the know already. All his broad beaming smile is the enjoyment of a man who really appreciates good singing and is glad this plucky woman is finally getting her five seconds of fame, despite all the crap in the music industry saying there's no way in hell she's making it based on how she looks.
You know what seals it for me? The finals video.
Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent 2009 Finals
Wikipedia says Susan Boyle didn't win. She placed second. Some band called Diversity or whatever placed first.
Listen to what Simon Cowell tells her, unlike the two other judges who are quite clueless and just wafting along on the general mainstream euphoria. Tell me that isn't a man who already knows that the execs and suits have made a decision that the band is the more marketable option, blardy blah, and that this plucky woman is going to place second, and that emotionally, she may not be able to take that, riding along on world euphoria as it were.
For the cameras, he says it can go either way. Maybe you'll place first or second. Blardy blah. You ask me, behind the superficial words, he's saying, "Girl, you listen to my words days, weeks, months later when you play the recorded video again. You did good. You can hold your head up high. First or second in this stupid contest doesn't mean shit. And fer heaven's sake, modulate your expectations now when you hear this, because you're very likely getting second. The underdog story arc only goes so far."
Anyhow, for the record, she has a pretty good voice. Frankly, so do a lot of other undiscovered people. I own CDs/MP3s of two very sweet-sounding ladies thanks to the magic of the internet, but they are barely known outside their small town/country/tiny but fanatical internet network (Laura Powers and Heather Dale). I found a Singaporean singer who moved to New York but is probably not known outside Singapore/Malaysia/other limited Asian areas + the Big Apple, and she's got a nice enough voice too (Corrinne May).
So I am not surprised that good voices can come out of extraordinary places.
But yeah, I occasionally watch reality tv shows for the superficial fun of it, feeling the mainstream emotional reaction and dissecting them intellectually to see where the producers/directors/writers actually earn their keep on these things.
P.S. I also never fail to be amazed at just how clueless most people are. Mid-training session today, one of our staff who works in the Movie Studio was using 'greenscreen/bluescreen technology' as a topic for lesson design. The trainer, who is a PhD in educational pedagogy and/or physics, expressed his total ignorance of what greenscreen was about. So did a goodly number of our other staff who are life sciences or physical sciences trained.
So the Movie Studio guy played a video that demonstrated greenscreen use.
Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel
The fascinated and awed gasps and "oh wow" comments that reverberated about the room were just a little bit scary.
Am I the only person who watches all those 'behind-the-scenes' dvd extras?
Greenscreen and CGI has been with us since the days of Babylon 5. And probably earlier, but that's my first faithful exposure to the tech. That's...*checks IMDB* 1994.
Admittedly, the tech has gotten a lot better to the point of reducing edge blur and what not, but is it really such a shocker? Every single damn George Lucas film oozes CGI out of its pores, you're hosting a huge PIXAR exhibition wherein there are 11+ films ENTIRELY constructed out of CGI... the Matrix, 300, Sin City, the LOTR trilogy, all the superhero movies that have plagued us, all use TONS of greenscreen with CGI filling in the gaps.
TV shows-wise... how'd you think those super-cool futuristic DNA projections turn up in people's hands in CSI? How do we get special superhero effects in Heroes? And for a blast to the girly chick flick past, we have the long lasting eight seasons of Charmed from 1998-2006, where demons phase in and out of existence, and lookie, a quote from the executive producer Brad Kern himself:
Brad Kern: Often times they're acting against a green screen and we're going to put in the demon later or the special effect and they have to somehow imagine what we're gonna be doing.
(Charmed - TV Scripts)
IT'S NOT NEW, PEOPLE.
If you're a Luddite or a staunch anti-TV person who's never watched a single episode of anything in the last decade based on your principles, I'd understand. Probably commiserate too.
But if you're the average guy just sitting on your couch and at the movies, devouring special effects and popcorn, watching TONS and TONS of it...
I'm REALLY REALLY SCARED that you find this all amazing and new and OMG.
How have you not known with all the "Making Of" documentaries flying around everywhere?
My hope for the human race keeps dying a little every time I run into incidents like this.
I seem to be one of the lone maniac geeky freaks around who actually cares for and collects knowledge. Thank goodness for the internet and the knowledge there are 1-3% of us out there.
My nose was having leaky sinus issues the whole full-day session and I'd finally run out of the tissue paper stored in my pants pockets, so I bolted out for a brief toilet break and honking relief, hoping I'd get back soon enough to catch the video because he was taking quite a while to introduce what he wanted to show us.
I managed to get back just in time to see some kind of singing reality tv show with Simon Cowell and two unrecognizable judges complimenting the heck out of a dowdy-looking singer called Susan Boyle and saying 3 'Yes'es but missed her actual song.
Being the internet savvy sort, I dug up the video on youtube myself to have a listen:
Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent 2009
Maybe I'm just trying to console myself that I wouldn't quite have the initial reaction as millions of other people who judge by appearances, but I frankly find the whole thing faintly smelling of one of those reality tv show setups, where there are behind-the-scenes folks angling for a good story and pulling strings on real people to manipulate them into certain emotional reactions.
Let's face it, they do makeup on these people before they film them. You think someone wasn't given instructions to keep the grey in her hair and make her look significantly middle-aged, somewhat messy and fat like a crazy cat lady. You think the intro questions aren't scripted by someone to instill a 'first impresions' hook in the viewer, oook, heavy scottish brogue, living in a village, stuttering like a village idiot...
After all, the "preliminary round = fat geeky people we can laugh at trying to sing but squalling like an alley cat" mindset having been built up by seasons and seasons of American Idol.
Then the choice of song... meant as a happy moral message juxtaposition to her image.
Come on, before they let contestants onto the show to get film, SOMEONE somewhere has heard her sing a few verses to at least establish that she can indeed sing. Someone has done a background check on her (which can now be read, after her fame, on Wikipedia) and realized that this woman has been singing since age 12, has had vocal coaching and a singing instructor, has been singing (and thereby practising) in church choirs and local bars, etc.
And if you think about it logically, as my mind was busy working during the viewing of the performance, if you watch a dvd of the Les Miserables singers in concert, they look amazingly like ordinary people because they were cast based on their voices first, their silhouettes and musical acting ability second, and their personal dolled-up facial beauty a further off third - because on a stage in a theatre, you hear the voice first, the figure second, and only the front row seats can stare searchingly into a stage actor's face anyhow. So it's not as if there hasn't been prior precedent before.
Not to mention, Susan Boyle's figure is amazingly akin to a stereotypical opera singer's. Now why is that? Could it be a certain amount of physics and body physiology at work, that the heft and big chest cavity allow the person to produce that sort of powerful operatic voice (training and practice needed too, of course), just as talented fast swimmers naturally have built up large muscular arms and broad chests and long powerful legs?
Yeah, the logical intellectual part of myself quite ruined the emotional moment for me - though I have to admit, the freaky video editing where they keep jump cutting to the judges' reactions and the stupid hosts going "hahaha, you didn't expect that, did ya?" like a pair of schoolboys in on the prank also played a part.
Here's the thing I do enjoy watching though. Simon Cowell. The man the world loves to hate. I always feel he's a lot smarter and sneakier and double-layered than the world gives him credit for either. To me anyhow, if you watch him carefully, this is a man that knows. Knows his good singing. Knows the music industry and what they really want, stage presence and good looks in addition to good singing. Knows that the twain don't meet in all folk, many folk even, and has to play a certain bad guy role.
He's not really surprised when Susan Boyle sings, imo. He's probably in the know already. All his broad beaming smile is the enjoyment of a man who really appreciates good singing and is glad this plucky woman is finally getting her five seconds of fame, despite all the crap in the music industry saying there's no way in hell she's making it based on how she looks.
You know what seals it for me? The finals video.
Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent 2009 Finals
Wikipedia says Susan Boyle didn't win. She placed second. Some band called Diversity or whatever placed first.
Listen to what Simon Cowell tells her, unlike the two other judges who are quite clueless and just wafting along on the general mainstream euphoria. Tell me that isn't a man who already knows that the execs and suits have made a decision that the band is the more marketable option, blardy blah, and that this plucky woman is going to place second, and that emotionally, she may not be able to take that, riding along on world euphoria as it were.
For the cameras, he says it can go either way. Maybe you'll place first or second. Blardy blah. You ask me, behind the superficial words, he's saying, "Girl, you listen to my words days, weeks, months later when you play the recorded video again. You did good. You can hold your head up high. First or second in this stupid contest doesn't mean shit. And fer heaven's sake, modulate your expectations now when you hear this, because you're very likely getting second. The underdog story arc only goes so far."
Anyhow, for the record, she has a pretty good voice. Frankly, so do a lot of other undiscovered people. I own CDs/MP3s of two very sweet-sounding ladies thanks to the magic of the internet, but they are barely known outside their small town/country/tiny but fanatical internet network (Laura Powers and Heather Dale). I found a Singaporean singer who moved to New York but is probably not known outside Singapore/Malaysia/other limited Asian areas + the Big Apple, and she's got a nice enough voice too (Corrinne May).
So I am not surprised that good voices can come out of extraordinary places.
But yeah, I occasionally watch reality tv shows for the superficial fun of it, feeling the mainstream emotional reaction and dissecting them intellectually to see where the producers/directors/writers actually earn their keep on these things.
P.S. I also never fail to be amazed at just how clueless most people are. Mid-training session today, one of our staff who works in the Movie Studio was using 'greenscreen/bluescreen technology' as a topic for lesson design. The trainer, who is a PhD in educational pedagogy and/or physics, expressed his total ignorance of what greenscreen was about. So did a goodly number of our other staff who are life sciences or physical sciences trained.
So the Movie Studio guy played a video that demonstrated greenscreen use.
Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel
The fascinated and awed gasps and "oh wow" comments that reverberated about the room were just a little bit scary.
Am I the only person who watches all those 'behind-the-scenes' dvd extras?
Greenscreen and CGI has been with us since the days of Babylon 5. And probably earlier, but that's my first faithful exposure to the tech. That's...*checks IMDB* 1994.
Admittedly, the tech has gotten a lot better to the point of reducing edge blur and what not, but is it really such a shocker? Every single damn George Lucas film oozes CGI out of its pores, you're hosting a huge PIXAR exhibition wherein there are 11+ films ENTIRELY constructed out of CGI... the Matrix, 300, Sin City, the LOTR trilogy, all the superhero movies that have plagued us, all use TONS of greenscreen with CGI filling in the gaps.
TV shows-wise... how'd you think those super-cool futuristic DNA projections turn up in people's hands in CSI? How do we get special superhero effects in Heroes? And for a blast to the girly chick flick past, we have the long lasting eight seasons of Charmed from 1998-2006, where demons phase in and out of existence, and lookie, a quote from the executive producer Brad Kern himself:
Brad Kern: Often times they're acting against a green screen and we're going to put in the demon later or the special effect and they have to somehow imagine what we're gonna be doing.
(Charmed - TV Scripts)
IT'S NOT NEW, PEOPLE.
If you're a Luddite or a staunch anti-TV person who's never watched a single episode of anything in the last decade based on your principles, I'd understand. Probably commiserate too.
But if you're the average guy just sitting on your couch and at the movies, devouring special effects and popcorn, watching TONS and TONS of it...
I'm REALLY REALLY SCARED that you find this all amazing and new and OMG.
How have you not known with all the "Making Of" documentaries flying around everywhere?
My hope for the human race keeps dying a little every time I run into incidents like this.
I seem to be one of the lone maniac geeky freaks around who actually cares for and collects knowledge. Thank goodness for the internet and the knowledge there are 1-3% of us out there.