ZOMG!!1! - Two movies I want to see in one day

This is a very nice job from secretsaucetv

New from the writer/director of Brick - The Brothers Bloom

Brick was easily one of the coolest films that I saw in 2005 - a clever suburban film noir set in an American high school. It gets extra cool points because most people have never heard of it and my knowledge of it therefore makes me superior :)

Seeing the "from the writer/director of Brick" at the head of the ad for The Brothers Bloom was all I needed to mentally add it to my mental must see list. All I know is what I have seen in the trailer - and that's pretty well all I want to know.

It's a con-artist movie with some amusing slap-stick moments and what appears to be a big bucket of style.

Playing Plants Vs Zombies - from an educational perspective.

Casual gaming wunderkinds Popcap have just released their latest game, Plants Vs Zombies.

It takes the classic Tower Defense game mechanism of placing a variety of offensive and defensive objects in a space to prevent enemies from making it all the way through your space to your house. In this instance, it pits cutesy (but not sickeningly so) plants - including energy generating sunflowers, potato landmines, pea-shooting vines and obstacle providing walnuts against a horde of increasingly difficult (yet lovable) zombies. This video gives a sense of the aesthetics of the game.

Popcap are also the producers of smash-hit casual games including Bejeweled and Peggle, so they know a thing or two about casual games.

The success of casual games, particularly among non-gamers, is something that educators interested in using games in learning should give close attention. From my experiences - including a moment of "where did the last two hours go?" last night playing Plants vs Zombies - the core elements of good casual gaming are a simple interface, comfortable learning curve, regular rewards and pleasant aesthetics.

All of the Popcap games that I have played involve the player using one button - left mouse click. When you look at "hardcore" cames - particularly in the Real Time Strategy (RTS) and Role Playing Game (RPG) genres, it is possible to have different actions mapped to the majority of keys on the keyboard. Clearly a fairly daunting entry point to someone not familiar with gaming controls and conventions. Even the consoles (Xbox 360 and Playstation 3) have around 12 -15 usable buttons on their controllers. (The Wii on the other hand has 2 or 3 in most games - and leads the console market on sales by a wide margin).

In Plants Vs Zombies, you have a front yard which is 9x5 squares. You click one of a range of plants in a top menu and click again to place it on the lawn. From here, it's largely a matter of managing resources and adapting your plant placement to the oncoming zombie hordes.

The learning curve is gentle - each level introduces another fundamental element of the game and gives you an opportunity to succeed with it before adding another element - be that a new type of plant weapon or a new, tougher zombie. This reinforces prior learning experiences and adds a need to continually learn new skills. The increasing challenge keeps you engaged and motivated and new weapons/obstacles provide new forms of entertaining feedback. These are the first two levels and a later one, which show you how the gameplay evolves.

Regular rewards are another key element of casual games - these don't have to be big things, just pleasing aesthetic elements such as score boosts, cute noises and perhaps most satisfying so far in this particular game is the whump of an exploding potato landmine and the mound of mashed potatoes (and zombie) it leaves behind. (In a cute way, of course). Games such as Peggle are much more demonstrative in this regard, flashing and dinging almost like a pinball machine with virtually any successful action and offering praise and reinforcement for positive player actions. (Perhaps a little behaviourist but it's hard to argue with the success of the game). An interesting story that came out of the initial playtesting of Peggle is that players who were initially "meh" about the game found it much more engaging when the points values of their rewards had a few zeros added to the end, making them seem more valuable.

The aesthetics of the PopCap games are generally pleasing to the eye, bright (but not to bright) colours and cheery (but not annoying) music and sound effects. These clearly mark the experience as one of play rather than work and I feel that they tap directly into the need for escapism that brings people to these games.

Not all of these thing will work in educationally oriented games but in terms of creating a space that is welcoming to new gamers and which provides motivation, it is hard to see a better approach.

Have I mentioned recently that Skynet is here?

Yes, my mildly disconcerting obsession with our future robot overlords continues.

This time it is a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) that can be picked up for between $900 and $5000 (U.S) which can carry a number of different types of video cameras and which is flown remotely by someone wearing video glasses that see exactly what the Draganfly sees.

(I am thinking how awesome it could be to have one of these for shooting movies)

Yet another reason why Firefox is best - Hyperwords

The astonishingly awesome Stephen Fry mentioned his love of Firefox add-on Hyperwords in a tweet this morning and I have to say that it's easily the coolest add-on I've seen since Ubiquity.



Nifty, no?

The coloured waterfall of the office

I could be the killjoy lefty who bemoans the pointless waste of natural resources that this represents but it's also very pretty, so I'll let it pass. It's also conceivable that they are still usable.


EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Dashing* towards the Script Frenzy deadline

*By dashing I am referring to my hopes and dreams.

Ok, so unless I start typing in my sleep, it's fairly unlikely that I'm going to knock out the 80+ pages remaining to be scripted in my magnum opus for Script Frenzy by the end of the month.

Script Frenzy is a month long screenplay writing exercise intended to get dusty screenplays out of drawers (real or mental) and onto paper.

In spite of my failure to get the writing done, I'm actually feeling pretty good about the work that I have managed to get done over the last 28 days.

I have completely reshaped the story behind the first draft of the script that I put together, incorporating virtually all of the good ideas I've had in the last #cough11yearscough#.

I've learnt how to use a very nifty piece of screenwriting shareware called Celtx that has freed me from the onerous script formatting conventions and I've also (eventually) got a sense of the best way for me to work on my writing. (Funnily enough, it's not a million miles away from the process that I developed to write uni essays over the last two years. I just need to develop a process for actually staying put in my seat during writing time now.)

All in all, it's coming together. I have a nagging suspicion that this draft will come in at somewhere around 3 hours long and with a $100 million budget, but that's for the producer to worry about, right?

Taking the spycam pen for the bikeride

A few lessons learnt from this - the pannier clips on the front of the bike are at more of an angle than I thought and the noise of the rubber hitting the road is surprisingly loud. The camera also appears to quit after 30 mins filming, which is good to know.

Anyway, this is the first 30 mins of the ride (which is approx 45 mins), compressed to a bit over 3 mins. (Which by rudimentary mathematics suggests that this is what it might look like if/when I ride my bike at 200km/h.

(Oh and the music in the clip is just some generic production music from the Ulead video editing software package)

Nice and elevating - Lost Generation

I'm not normally one to post motivational/inspirational stuff - indeed I'm far more comfortable cynically decrying it - but I was quite taken with this short video. It's a remake of an Argentinian political advertisement called "The Truth" by RECREAR and was placed second in the AARP U@50 video contest.

It's only about 2 minutes but has to be watched right to the end. 



(Thanks to Sue at work for sending this around)

Whatchootalkinbout? Mr Drummond gets creepy

Fantastic example of how much different music can make to setting the mood. I know find the opening credits of Diff'rent Strokes entirely unsettling - thanks Internetz

The most awesome fun ever - indoor skydiving

No doubt this guy is a seriously practiced professional indoor skydiving and a schmuck like you or I would spend the majority of our time slamming into the glass walls at the side, but how much would you like to find out?

It truly is a golden age that we live in.

I am not an upskirter

I got a little geeky yesterday when a gadget arrived for me in the post - it's a spypen - the MP9 Digital Video Pocket Recorder to be precise.

It came from gadget-bargain-a-day site Zazz.com.au and cost around $30 if memory serves.

The picture quality is surprisingly good, considering that it comes from a lens no bigger than the head of a pin. (That's it above the metal clip in the picture above). This clip was the first thing I filmed - it's a little all over the shop but gives some idea of the image.



The sound is a little problematic and appears to have gotten a tiny bit worse in subsequent filming but I think that running it through some audio software might help.

It connects to the computer using an inbuilt USB connection.

What I find most interesting is that the first reaction of the first two guys I showed it to was "oh, upskirting"
Not in a "that's a good idea" way or an "I assume that is what you got it for" way - at least I hope not, as the thought had and has never crossed my mind - I guess these kinds of gadgets have different associations than my somewhat naive mind gives them.

I just asked a female friend of mine what she would think if I told her I got a pen/spy camera and she was simply unsurprised - no aspersions cast at all. (She did also think about people cheating in exams but that's an occupational thing)

So maybe there's hope for me yet.

Me fail English - that's unpossible

(Click image for full size version)

Thanks to Matt for this one.

This is apparently an ad in South Africa.

It's like the Internetz heard my prayers

One of my first tweets (twits?) this morning told me that The Onion has put Close Range - The Game up online. (They're also selling a poster but I'm not that crazy about it)

It plays pretty well exactly as you would expect, with some great cutscenes to expand on the story in between.

As I played it, I was fully aware of how disturbed it was and what it says about our society but I couldn't help smiling. 

Hooray for the Internetz

Protest drummer get theirs

I realise that I might as well just turn this blog into a direct link to The Onion but this story appealed to me far more than it probably should. (I can't stand hippy drummers)

I know they're mocking me but I don't care.

The Onion folks have this nifty video up taking the piss out of videogames and gamers but I don't care, it's pretty funny and a small part of me still wants to play this game.  Hasta la vista, pony.


Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

Oh dear

Update: Apparently this was an April Fools joke - nice story though.

Good deeds

It's probably just the tiredness talking but if a complete stranger does you a good deed, without being asked, does it take something away from them to give them a reward?

I mean, if someone does something because it's the right thing to do (and perhaps also they get to feel like a good person) and then you give them something for doing it, does it create a hidden subtext that the receiver assumes they did it for gain - even if this isn't the case?

To get a little less abstract, I took $500 out of the ATM at the Canberra mall this afternoon - or rather I asked the ATM for that money and then in the middle of the transaction it flashed up a "Can't issue receipt, do you wish to continue?" message.

I said, yeah, sure, just display the balance on the screen afterwards. Now apparently this is some kind of funky whiz-bang silent ATM because I didn't get the whoosh whoosh whoosh sound of the money being dispensed, just a display on the screen that said account balance $168.

Now I've been juggling money around between accounts in the last few days so I assumed that this was the machine telling me that I didn't have sufficient funds for that withdrawal and to go away. Not entirely sure why I thought this but there was a queue behind me and I figured that I'd just do my shopping on the other card, that I must have transferred this money to instead.

Twenty minutes later, heading away from the counter at JB Hifi, some bloke stops me and asks if I was just using the ATM. I had no idea what I had done so I said yes, waiting for enlightenment. He paused for a while - I guess he was trying to make sure that I was the right guy - and asked me if I had completed my transaction.

Suddenly the penny drops and I realise that I've just left $500 sitting in an ATM and presumably this guy has it. So I tell my story and after a few moments he opens his wallet and starts counting out the cash. (Knowing how much money it was meant to be was a help to me here I'm guessing).

I am feeling so relieved and grateful at this time that I tell him that he can keep 50, figuring that if it wasn't for him that I would be out 500 bucks having 450 is a whole lot better than that.

He asked a few times if I was sure and mentioned that he was just trying to do the right thing. Anyway, he took (and I was happy for him to have it) but now I'm wondering if that might have cheapened the moment for him a little.

Oh well.

How do you defend yourself against a man with two dildoes?

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Borat when it came out so I'm holding more hope out for Sacha Baron Cohen's new film Bruno



I actually get the feeling that this isn't one of those trailers that gives away every good joke in the film (a rare occurrence these days)

We don't want zombies on the lawn

Coming soon from Popcap, the insanely successful developers of casual games like Bejewelled and Peggle, is Plants vs Zombies.

It looks somewhat like a Tower Defense style game, where you add different sorts of cannons and other weapons to a winding path that advancing enemy hordes stream down but who can say for sure.

All I know is that they have a hella catchy promotional music video which is rather cute (and features zombies with butter on their head)