One of the Day-Lewis Entity’s earlier appearances in human guise. Superb.
1. There Will Be Blood
2. My Left Foot
3. Ratatouille
4. Cloverfield
5. Juno
6. 9 Lives
7. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
8. Charlie Bartlett
9. The Big Lebowski
10. Jumper
My friend Cory and I decided to check out the Screenburn Arcade at the interactive portion of SXSW. We were walking through the main hall outside the auditoriums and I saw Jonathan Coulton standing there with his guitar. We walked past and then I thought “No, wait, I can’t just keep walking.”
So I backtracked and said hi, asking if he was doing any gigs during the festival. He said he had done a non-SXSW show last night (curses!) and then he was playing at some party tonight. I didn’t have a pass, so I wouldn’t be able to get in. But it was cool to meet him and chat briefly and burst out in uncontrolled fanboy gushing. I did that later. In private.
I am officially boycotting the societally-sanctioned responses to “How are you?”
The answer is, “I don’t know.” This answer will be true and at the same time concise, freeing you from the burden of hearing any prolonged exposition.
Similarly, I am through with “How was your day/weekend/week?” If you’d like to see how I spend that time or measure its quality, just come over and hang out. Watch me do things. Then tell me what I did and how it was for you. Because I certainly am not keeping track.
Numbers change places. I have no other evidence that anything is happening.
A star went out this morning. Gary Gygax is gone. He didn’t simply help create Dungeons & Dragons. He created a whole paradigm. An entire industry exists because of him. His creation has impacted just about every arena I care about.
My present course was set by Gygax when I was but a child. He, along with Will Crowther and Don Woods, set my mind alight with the possibilities of a collaborative narrative, a story that could live and grow. I became a gamer and role-player at a very young age, but, more importantly, I became a storyteller and world-builder.
Thank you, Gary. You changed my life. One day you and Dave decided it would be cool to add storytelling to wargames and make people roll funny-looking dice. And it has meant everything to me.
Thank you.
This has been a hard day for me. This is the first time I have experienced the loss of someone who was so influential in my life, someone whose contribution helped direct the course of who I would become.
For the record, if Will Crowther, Don Woods, or Roberta Williams die, don’t ask for much of me that day. If it is George Lucas, Neil Gaiman or Stephen King, I’m not even getting out of bed.
I had foreseen the difficult contention between No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, two films that should have simultaneously won each category in which they shared a nomination.
Two moments really touched me and filled me with joy:
1. Glen and Marketa winning best song. “Falling Slowly” has haunted me since I saw Once, which was a wonderful film. They came and played here at Stubb’s this past November, but I was out of town.
2. Diablo Cody winning best screenplay.
If you’ve seen the trailer for Jumper, you have pretty much seen the entire movie. It is a fun special effects film populated with unlikeable characters that all act like dicks to each other.
1. There Will Be Blood
2. Ratatouille
3. Cloverfield
4. Juno
5. 9 Lives
6. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
7. Charlie Bartlett
8. The Big Lebowski
9. Jumper
10. Voices of a Distant Star
I grew up buying computer games that came in plastic ziploc baggies. The manuals had exotic cover art, depicting scenes that could never be reproduced on the limited hardware of that age. But I was a believer. For me, the experience promised by the cover of Temple of Apshai was delivered tenfold. The games I loved were often created by one or two designers working out of their garage, translating their passion for entertaining stories into something that fit on a 5.25″ floppy. Sure, they wanted to make some money off their efforts, but they did so as entrepreneurs, not at the behest of some gargantuan entertainment conglomerate. In those days, there was no real industry to speak of. These games were not products, they were art.
The video game revolution happened. Atari, Nintendo, Coleco and others fired their salvos for a few years and then went silent. But then the motherships from rival galaxies descended and their ground forces dug in, establishing the billion dollar revenue vortex we know today. Now it is armies of designers, artists and programmers laboring over the next blockbuster mega hit.
The indie game designers retreated to the PC, coding in Java or Flash or whatever got the job done. The work now done in this realm is the very definition of niche. Beautiful, innovative and commercially unviable games. Have you ever played, let alone heard of Facade, Knytt, The Blob, The Endless Forest, or Narbacular Drop? Well, most of you have seen Narbacular Drop. These days it goes by “Portal.”
To me, that was an important event. Portal was the poster child representing a group of games crossing over from the indie world to the mainstream world. I include Team Fortress 2 and Katamari Damacy among them.
Still, the developers of these games were uplifted by the investment of higher powers and remained beholden to them. The idea of an independent developer ever seeing their game running on a next gen platform was still an impossible dream.
Until last week. At the Game Design Conference, Microsoft’s Community Games section went live. These are homebrewed indie games created by anyone who can learn to use the free XNA devkit and pay the generously cheap developer member fee ($99/year). Games are reviewed by peers to make sure they meet certain standards and then show up on XBox Live where everyone can download them.
A handful of sample games were immediately available. Microsoft could have played it safe by selecting only side scrolling shooters or crowd-pleasing Sudoku clones. Instead they included games like Culture and Jelly Car. Culture is about growing flower beds and killing weeds. A video game about flower arrangement. Let it sink in. It is utterly engrossing, by the way. All I can say is, bold play, Microsoft. Well done.
Nintendo and Sony are launching similar initiatives, but, as far as I can tell, the ‘Soft has the tastiest offering in town at this point.
Welcome to the video game Renaissance. Go make something astonishing.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/events/gdc2008/xna/default.htm
So far things have been going pretty smoothly with the Something Real project. I have the venue, the website, a call for submissions, people to review films, and someone working on print advertising. I’m really fretting about the number of submissions, though. I really want to get a lot more films so there is a lot to choose from. I’ve received some definite contenders, but there are some that don’t really fit the theme.
I’ve started actively soliciting for specific films I found from other festivals and on YouTube. Hopefully that will help fill out the rest of the program.
Why am I just finding out about this now? How did this news slip by me, AICN?
The 4400 was one of my favorite shows. A smarter version of Heroes with a liberal dose of X-Files.
Hopefully Sci-Fi will do the right thing and pick this show up.
1. There Will Be Blood
2. Ratatouille
3. Cloverfield
4. Juno
5. 9 Lives
6. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
7. Charlie Bartlett
8. The Big Lebowski
9. Voices of a Distant Star
10. Rambo
1. Veronica Mars
2. Lost
3. Torchwood
4. The League of Gentlemen
5. The Mighty Boosh
6. Witch Hunter Robin
7. Robot Chicken
8.
9.
10.