Friday Henry Blogging

Why, it's Henry VIII!

New Disc Rotator

Well, my poor old DVD player (seen above beneath a heap of Wii peripherals) has been with me for almost a decade now, and it's been getting increasingly sick. Today saw its retirement - replaced by a cheap new model from the same brand. No Blu-ray for me, no thanks.


I had help, of course.

Monday Movie: 13 (Tzameti)

While working on the roof of a morphine addict, Sébastien, a Georgian immigrant to France, overhears discussion of a shady job that the addict hopes will earn him a large amount of money. When his employer then dies of an overdose, leaving him out of pocket, Sébastien manages to obtain the secretive instructions for this mysterious job and follow them - with little idea just what he's getting into.

Director Géla Babluani says that 13 (Tzameti) was inspired by his own experiences emigrating from the violent and turbulent Georgia of the 1990s to peaceful and stable France. The result is a minimalist and noir-ish film that depicts a French underworld where the rich bet on the lives of the desperate. Tense and draining, there's a terrible veracity to the way Babluani imagines Western Europe as a place of obvious civility and hidden brutality.

Zzzzzap!!!

Credit: Bre Pettis
Some rights reserved

30 Ways to Die of Electrocution features scans from an old book about, well, electrocuting yourself in weird ways.

I'm not much of an electrical engineer, but apart from being really unlikely, a lot of these diagrams seem to show a questionable understanding of electrical current.

Spawn more overlords!

I know Starcraft is only getting a sequel because the game's multiplayer is now pretty much South Korea's official sport. And I know that Blizzard is in the grip of Activision's drive to turn video games into soulless, mass-produced consumer goods bereft of any kind of creativity.

But I really liked Starcraft's single player campaign (at least until Brood War, when the missions suddenly required actual strategy and I flailed like mad). I think it's a great example of a well integrated narrative, and nicely defines a universe that steals all the best bits of your favourite science fiction books and movies, and mixes them up into this glorious mash of trailer trash in space; biomechanical alien infestations; dying elder races; and allying, back-stabbing factions thereof. So... consider me hyped.

Not sure how I feel about Tricia Helfer as Kerrigan, though.

Million Kilometre Siblings

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image source with more information

This view provides a stark view of Mimas' Herschel crater. Dione, in the foreground, looks quite plain by comparison, its "wispy" terrain hidden from view.

Both moons were over a million kilometres from Cassini when this image was taken.

Friday Dordrecht Blogging

Image source

Dordrecht circa 1650, by Aelbert Cuyp.

Thursday Book

Winged Victory - V.M. Yeates

Tom Cundall is a pilot flying Sopwith Camel scout planes in France, 1918. The novel methods of aerial warfare have stabilised somewhat, and with four months experience, he's avoided becoming part of the terrifyingly large fraction of flyers who die during training or on their first few missions. It's not a pleasant lark, certainly, and Tom is no hero or 'jingo', but he's confident that he can see out a war that, after the entry of America, seems to be close to its finish.

Of course, with American troops pouring into Europe, Germany knows that it will have to move soon if it is to stand any chance of winning. When the inevitable offensive arrives, Camel squadrons are ordered to bomb and strafe the advancing troops. Suddenly, Tom's experience in the air counts for nothing, suvival becoming a matter of simply failing to occupy the same point in space and time as any of the thousands of machinegun bullets being fired from the ground. For one reason or another, it seems that Tom's last few months flying on the Front will be the ones to see him physically or psychologically undone.

Yeates wrote Winged Victory in 1933, hospitalised for the tuberculosis that would kill him a year later. The book was initially praised, and then forgotten; briefly revived by pilots during the Battle of Britain, who adored its uncompromising realism; and then out of print for the rest of the century. Only after seventy years of praise from historians citing it as an honest, realistic and almost autobiographical novel, did it finally seem to catch on, now readily available to anyone interested in the First Air War. For example: me.

And if that is your interest, this book will certainly see you well served, but it deserves to be far more widely read than that. Although the operational details of the Royal Flying Corps (and then, midway through the book, the Royal Air Force) are fascinating, they're merely the backdrop for a deeply human story that mixes satirical farce with the blackest of humour, and the most terrible tragedies with a spark of vicious wit. It's a platonic love story between three fast friends, whose brilliant and terrible philosophies and politics make up pages of inspired or ridiculous banter, and whose tragedies are heart-wrenching. It's a portrait of the toll of war on lives and minds. And its a historical indictment of the way that millions of men across Europe suddenly started killing one another, as efficiently as possible, for four long years.

Monday Movie: Apocalypse Now

Captain Willard lies in a drunken, post-traumatic stupor in his room in Saigon. He wants nothing more than another mission. And, for his sins, they give him one. Colonel Walter E. Kurtz has, the general says, gone rogue. He's operating out of Cambodia with an army of Montagnard natives who worship him like a god. Willard is to travel up the Nung River, infiltrate Kurtz's group, and terminate the Colonel “with extreme prejudice”. But as Willard travels through Vietnam, observing the absurdity and brutality of the American war, he begins to wonder just what his superiors can have against Kurtz.

A film that could only have been made in seventies Hollywood, Apocalypse Now sees all the excess and bravura of a multi-million dollar budget directed at a story that is, in literal terms, small and personal - even if thematically it aims to represent the Vietnam War in totality, and even to get to the root of war itself.

Although the shoot was a notorious nightmare that overran both its budget and its deadlines (and gave star Martin Sheen a heart attack), Francis Ford Coppola flexed his directorial muscles to choerograph epic scenes involving A-list actors, hundreds of extras, military hardware on loan from a real war, tonnes of pyrotechnics and huge sets. Even if modern CGI ever allows us to duplicate these spectacles, no-one will deserve as much credit for it.

And then, once again, there is the fact that all this light and sound was not intended to dazzle and hypnotise the audience, but supports a predominantly low-key film that emphasises atmosphere and character, and tackles human nature head on. The modern tendency to dress up war in comforting lies is a dangerous hypocrisy, Apocalypse Now argues, and our only hope to move past violent conflict is to truly grasp what it entails.

Right!

Small project initiated!

Deadline for first draft: one month.

The Sky, by Hand

UP THERE from Jon on Vimeo.

Hat tip: Wooster Collective.

"The other therapist didn't work out for you."

Konami's Silent Hill series is essentially the classier, spookier cousin to Capcom's Resident Evil franchise, but although you may have noticed I'm a big Resi fanboy, I've never really had a chance to play a Silent Hill game until now. And I have to say that the series has never seemed more tempting. As Resident Evil devolves into standard shoot-em-up territory, Konami, having attempted to do something similar with Silent Hill, then decided to pull an about-face, getting British independent games studio Climax to make a Silent Hill game in which the protagonist can barely fight back at all.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories begins with Harry Mason driving through the snowbound and deserted summer holiday resort of Silent Hill, with his daughter Cheryl. When he skids off the road and crashes the car, he comes round to find that Cheryl is nowhere to be seen. Harry wanders off into the town in search of her, but as he explores and meets the few people around, he's confronted by facts that seem at odds with his own memories, and even his current experiences are frequently contradicted at a later point by other characters. And then there's the little matter of how, every time he seems to be getting close to the truth, the world twists and freezes over - strange, skinless beings appearing to pursue Harry relentlessly.

These latter sequences are the game's weakest point. I certainly found them unnerving, but this very fact, combined with their frantic nature, simply made me solve them by running around in a blind panic. Initially I found these sequences extremely incongruous as well, but actually, as the game progressed I thought they acquired a better sense of purpose while becoming much better married to the other parts of the game - which in itself is a part of the wider progression of the story towards conveying exactly what is going on.

Still, the game's non-chase segments are more my preference, involving simply exploring the town of Silent Hill, interacting with characters and solving puzzles by manipulating objects semi-intuitively with the Wii remote. As much as the chase sequences gave me the heebie-jeebies, it was these more sedate and grounded scenes that I found by far more scary - from supernatural chills such as chasing a shadow Cheryl with your flashlight, to more mundane scares such as internal bleeding following a blow to the head (the latter being a part of a sequence that I found genuinely very upsetting).

The third set of scenes are where it gets really interesting: the game's framing narrative involves sitting on a psychiatrist's couch and answering his questions and tests. The rest of the game comprises the story that you are telling him. As the very first loading screen makes clear, these questions and tests are used to shape your experiences in the rest of the game (although your behaviour is also analysed elsewhere). For example, my Cybil was a homely police woman wearing a realistic cold-climate uniform. A player who showed more interest in getting sexual images out of the game would instead have found Cybil to be a blonde bombshell whose stripper-esque outfit can barely contain her cleavage.

This is really interesting to me as a development in interactive narrative. Although the events you experience can change, the story is generally linear. The interactive part of this story is rather in that it shapes itself to be the story that it thinks you should experience. Looking through the Silent Hill wiki, I'm surprised just how much the game got right for me - I definitely think I was much happier getting the events and characters that I got from the game compared to some of the others that it might have given me. Of the three different Dahlias, for example, I found the “punk” version I got to be much more my kind of gal than the “seductive” or “tomboy” versions.

And then there's the ending. Holy fucking shit. I don't know if any others saw this coming, but I found it to be the perfect culmination of misdirection and foreshadowing. It was so surprising and tragic, but hopeful (again, something that the game selected based on its psychological profiling of me), such a beautiful shock, that I actually started properly crying. Which is a first for me and a video game.

As someone with a penchant for interactive storytelling, I think Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is one of the most powerful and well devised examples of how to shape a story in tandem with your audience that I've yet encountered. Its chief flaw is that it perhaps tries a little too hard to be a video game. Although I enjoyed the puzzles, and the chase sequences did grow on me, ultimately they were never as powerful as the experience of exploring a convoluted and deeply psychological narrative. If you're interested in survival horror games, this may or may not be for you. But if you're interested in storytelling, then you owe it to yourself to check this out. You may not find the story as deeply moving as I did, but it will definitely teach you something about how it can be done.

Friday Houseboat Blogging

Image source (Credit: Rhaessner)
Some rights reserved

Also pictured: ducks.

So did anyone in England get work done this afternoon, or was it essentially an unofficial holiday?

Also, what are those two blokes doing at Wimbledon?

Space Rocks, Clouds

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Cassini captured this group photo of two of the Solar System's best looking moons, with the varied terrain of Dione standing out especially sharply against the thick clouds of Titan.

Time Tube

When the lifts at Notting Hill Gate tube station were replaced with escalators, the passageway leading to them was sealed off, along with the late-fifties advertisements plastered to its walls. This passageway has now been rediscovered, along with its remarkably well-preserved posters - images of which have been posted to a Flickr gallery.

(Saw this on London Tonight - not sure if the video's viewable outside the UK.)

What have I done?!

Adiós old NASA headers, hello brand new Blogger template. I probably wouldn't have gotten around to this if Google didn't seem to be on a quest to prettify everything up. These new templates are pretty cool, although a lot of the background images suffer from the same issues as the ones available for the Google homepage - they're gorgeous images by themselves, but they don't fit so nicely around the content.

Still, this image of Earth is rather nice, although if I can figure out how to upload my own background image I'll probably change it to something from Cassini...

Let me know if you have any issues with functionality/readability/accessibility etc.

Top 25 WW1 aces and their ages

Name	Age
1.Manfred von Richthofen	25 when killed
2.René Fonck	24 at end of war
3.Edward Mannock	30 when killed
4.Billy Bishop	24 at end of war
5.Ernst Udet	22 at end of war
6.Raymond Collishaw	24 at end of war
7.James McCudden	23 when killed
8.Andrew Beauchamp-Proctor	24 at end of war
9.Erich Loewenhardt	21 when killed
10.Donald MacLaren	25 at end of war
11.Georges Guynemer	22 when killed
12.William George Barker	24 at end of war
13.Josef Jacobs	24 at end of war
14.Werner Voss	20 when killed
15.Robert A. Little	23 when killed
16.George McElroy	25 when killed
17.Fritz Rumey	27 when killed
18.Albert Ball	20 when killed
19.Rudolph Berthold	27 at end of war
20.Bruno Loerzer	27 at end of war
21.Paul Bäumer	22 at end of war
22.Tom F. Hazell	26 at end of war
23.Charles Nungesser	26 at end of war
24.Georges Madon	26 at end of war
25.Oswald Boelcke	25 when killed

Order as per Wikipedia. It was going to be the top 20 until I noticed I could get Nungesser and Boelcke on there too.

Edward Mannock was the oldest of this group, at 30. He was an exceptional pilot in a lot of ways, not least with the amount of effort he devoted to ensuring that the younger pilots under his command (who knew him simply as "Mick") were properly schooled in how to survive. His devotion to his comrades manifested as an intense hatred of German pilots, and his actions and beliefs were a stark contrast to the perception of the First Air War as chivalrous.

Albert Ball and Werner Voss are the youngest listed, both aged 20 when they were killed.

Voss was a close friend and rival of Manfred von Richthofen. His final dogfight became legendary, as he single-handedly held off a squadron of planes led by James McCudden, before finally being shot down. "His flying was wonderful," McCudden said of Voss, "his courage magnificent and in my opinion he is the bravest German airman whom it has been my privilege to see fight."

Ball was a loner who was valued highly for his propaganda value. He spent his time on the ground gardening by himself, and the letters he wrote home showed a young man struggling with the repressive nature of his role, and his growing unhappiness at killing so many pilots. He crashed while pursuing the Red Baron's brother, Lothar von Richthofen, although it's unclear who (if anyone) shot him down.

Yes, Yes I Think So

Given my interest in interactive naratives and environments, you could be forgiven for thinking I might rate the original Deus Ex more highly than I do. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot I love about it, but there's also a lot I didn't think worked so well. Still, the basic concept of a globe-trotting cyberpunk game with an emphasis on letting you play the way you want to gets huge props from me for being a bold step in an ambitious direction.

There's no telling if Deus Ex: Human Revolution will be more my style than the original, but this trailer has me pretty juiced - neon cityscapes, cyborg modification, civil unrest... and driving music that lends it a Christopher Nolan-esque feel.

ESA Dazzles

Credit: ESA

Although I wish they were as open as NASA, I'm still glad that the European Space Agency exists and does good work. And every so often we members of the public do get a little reward - perhaps none greater than this beautiful video taken by Mars Express, showing an "astronaut's eye view" of an orbit around Mars.

Go watch it immediately.