Weekend

[prog]

Had a great weekend. Saturday classicaljunkie and I drove to the south shore to meet my mom for her birthday. We drove around the area together and looked at the houses I grew up in, which still look quite the same, though Cliff Top is smaller than I remember! It still has a nice "Cliff Top" sign; I'm glad that its name has survived whatever sequence of owners it's had over the last two decades.

We walked around Nantasket Beach a little. It looks a lot different without that roller coaster, man. The two arcades I so fondly remember both still seem to be there, though. I want to return soon, after the summer season starts, to see what they're like now. Honestly, I'm surprised that the Penny Arcade is still there; in the 1980s that's where you'd find all the low-rent arcade games, while the nicer and newer stuff was in Dream Machine. I'm assuming they're not actually boarded-up vacant properties with the signs still on!

We saw "The Illusionist" on DVD, and I didn't like it very much. We watched the finale of Survivor Fiji, which made me subtly upset, becuase (a) the wrong guy won because a third contestant played kingmaker for irrationally selfish reasons (though at least the winner was one of the "good guys"), (b) half the people in the final jury acted like total assholes, and (c) I still don't have a million dollars and here this other guy does now. Though I bet he doesn't actually, coz of how these things work, but still.

Everyone played too much Puzzle Quest. Blaaargh. It is a really good game.

---

Starting this week, I'm rolling out out a new way to parcel my time. I had been vaguely holding onto a model from when I started at ITA, but that's been outmoded for months and it's high time I tried something that reflects my current actual lifestyle. Here's what I'm trying instead:

Mon, Tue, Wed: Make money. For now, that means contract programming work, and activities that support same.
Thu, Fri: Volity furtherance, of any kind. Can be coding, or project management, or just reading a relevant book.
Sat: Free day. Wheeee.
Sun: Video projects. Edit, write, or plan. Whatever needs doing next.

I can be social and whatever on any day; this schedule just defines where my default stance lay on any given day of the week. It also gives me some soothing mental sorting: if I'm fretting because I have three fairly heavy things to accomplish, lo! here is an arbitrary but good-as-any order to accomplish them in, based on where we happen to be in the calendar.

Comments

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

what didn't you like about the illusionist?

i was really disappointed in the adaptation. neil burger and i got something different out of the story, that's for sure. it was disappointing to see this story that reads like a victorian horror on the page turned into the usual suspects with magic tricks for the screen.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read the short story, and in fact hadn't even heard of it before CJ picked it off the shelf and said that the film was contemporary with The Prestige - which I did enjoy - and got eclipsed by it despite good reviews.

I was put off from the get-go by the dopey, over-the-top magic effects, with fully three-dimensional ghosts walking around and so on. I wondered if maybe this was what the illusions looked like when filtered through the credulous perceptions of Eisenheim's audience, but the film never gave me any credit for running my suspension of disbelief so actively.

I felt the twist ending didn't need to be there at all. To me, the movie made less sense with it than without. My reaction towards the end was like "Well, this movie wasn't all that bad, I guess, and at least WHAT OH COME ON."

[prog.livejournal.com]

And I'm well aware that NYEERRRR STAGE MAGIC DOESN'T LOOK LIKE THAT is about as valid a reason to dislike a film as UNNNNH SPIDERMAN WOULDN'T TAKE OFF HIS MASK SO MUCH but whatevs.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

We were discussing this on Friday: isn't Hull/Nantasket really considered "the cape" rather than "south shore"? Or does "south shore" really mean "everything between the Charles and Rhode Island"?

I still don't know what to make of Dreamz. He claims he never really intended to keep his promise, but he sure seemed to agonize over the decision to break it. Was that all an act? He doesn't seem to be that good an actor. I am totally for the it's-just-a-game ultra-deceptive style of playing Survivor/Big Brother (a la Richard Hatch or Johnny Fairplay), but something about his betrayals seemed too... clumsy to be rewarded, even if it did get him to the final three. (And how was anyone surprised that it would be a final three instead of final two? Did nobody watch the previous season? Was it not a huge hint that Rocky made it onto the jury?) And how could Dreamz have ever believed he could win against Earl in the final vote? I guess that was groupthink—everyone was talking about "sympathy votes", which has never happened in Survivor as far as I can remember—or else he really somehow convinced himself that Alex, Edgardo, and Mookie would still think of him as being on their team.

I have a feeling that some players now intentionally try to be as dickish as possible in the final jury interview just because they're following Sue Hawk's precedent in season 1. But it's not funny anymore.

[prog.livejournal.com]

This was actually the first time I'd ever watched Survivor, joining a little after they merged into the purple team, and long after all the openly jerky players got the boot. So seeing the jerk parade at the end was kind of shocking to me.

My best guess about Dreamz' thinking is that he ultimately went into a black-and-white analysis mode, figuring that it is always better to get closer to the end, with all other concerns (such as how a last-minute betrayal of the season's most charismatic contestant would play with the jury) falling by the wayside.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Also I didn't know about the final jury mechanic at all, where all the season's losers vote for which of the finalists gets to win. That's actually quite clever!

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I have deeply mixed feelings about it. It's basically a huge kingmaker situation, where players who no longer have any stake in the game decide the outcome. But what it really means is that the entire game is about figuring out the psychology of how to get these kingmakers to make you king. It's weird that such non-game reasoning becomes a game skill, and it's certainly not a game I'd ever want to play myself, but it's fascinating to watch.

If you like that, you should also check out Big Brother, which I think starts in June. It has the same jury mechanism, but a lot more interesting game structure leading up to it. Unfortunately the players tend to be more annoying than in Survivor, since the struggle to survive is replaced by the struggle to remain sane in a locked house, but it's still pretty entertaining as a game.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Also, if you're not sick of it yet, you might like to read Shannon Appelcline's analysis of Survivor from a game design point of view.

[prog.livejournal.com]

This is cool.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

The only openly jerky player during the game was Rocky (and to a much lesser extent, Stacy), and his final jury interview was pretty tame. Alex's diatribe really kind of came out of nowhere. For a while he was my favorite after Yauman & Earl, though near the end he did and said some stupid things that made me glad he lost.

It's true that the 3rd-place prize is better than 4th place. Actually, I guess 2nd and 3rd are both $100k now, since there's no way to distinguish them (especially when the final vote is unanimous), so it's probably even a bigger difference than in previous seasons. But the cost of losing all that goodwill, among the jury members but also among the TV audience, is probably a lot more than that difference. In fact, in some previous seasons they've had an additional "fan favorite" vote for $1mil, and if he had kept his word and then been voted out 4th, he'd almost certainly have won any fan favorite award. (It's possible that they don't even decide whether to give that award until the season is over, and if he had kept his word they'd have run the award just for him. That's sort of how it felt when Rupert won his award, at least.) If he had somehow made it more obvious in his confessionals that he was consciously playing everyone, especially the deal with Yauman, then he might have gotten credit for being a good manipulator, but it really looked like it was purely a last-minute giving in to temptation.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I grew up with Hull being identified as part of the south shore. It's a couple minutes' drive from Hingham and Cohassett, and a little further to Quincy, and those are hardly on the cape.

The Cape describes those eastern coastal areas of Mass that aren't part of the bay, no?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I just looked at a map, and now I realize I've been totally misremembering where Hull is. Yes, it's obviously nowhere near Cape Cod, it's on some completely different curled-north spit of land. IGNORE ME!

[dougo.livejournal.com]

As usual, Wikipedia clears up more of my confusion. I always thought "Shore" meant "bank of the Charles". For some reason it never occurred to me that it actually meant the shore of the ocean (harbor).

[prog.livejournal.com]

Ohh. Yes, that would be confusing!

Unlike too many things in this state it actually is a meaningful, if somewhat ambiguous, name.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

At least I figured out the Inbound/Outbound thing pretty quickly. But why the hell is Norfolk County south of Suffolk County?!