folk-tronic, what ho?

I continue to enjoy Ill Lit (official site, myspace), a band that nobody seems to have heard of, probably because Stephen Colbert's cabal of truthiness feelers have conspired to keep them from having a wikipedia entry. Oddly, they were a band which I encouraged Pandora to lookup, and they actually responded in email, and now have the band in their catalog. While looking for similar bands, like Summer at Shatter Creek, which also has no entry there, I found a band with a great name: Bling Kong

(no subject)

::thisismattfractiondotcom:::

NICK HORNBY: Every time I think, Man, I'd love to write for The Wire, I quickly realize that I wouldn't know my True dats from my narcos. Did you know all that before you started? Do you get input from those who might be more familiar with the idiom?

DAVID SIMON: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

“throw me the yellow brick, and i’ll throw you the whip!”

Travelers Tales, makers of the Star Wars Lego games is currently working on Lego Indiana Jones. Though those games were quite fun, I found myself playing largely to complete the game, not just for the joy of it. In the end, I was unable to convince myself to play through each level enough times to get all of the Xbox Live Achievements.

In the end, it turns out to have been a fairly simple miss - in trying to make a game which plays identically on any of its many platforms, they failed to take advantage of the features which are specific and beneficial on particular platforms. The Load Game dialog is suspiciously similar to the Playstation 2's process, which fails then to account for the possibility -no, probability- that a consistent data storage unit will be present and tied to the logged in user's account. Every boot-up, instead of referring to the User Account's save data instead makes you locate the storage unit, then select the Save Data file, then confirm that you really want that Save Data... Does anyone really accidentally load the wrong Save Data file? The Achievements in the game are really lazily implemented - instead of tying in to a number of different stats that are already tracked in the game, it instead tracks whether or not you've died during completion of a level; a fact which is entirely de-emphasized in regular play, and nearly impossible unless you've got the reflexes of a 12-year-old who's hopped up on a brick of Hershey's and mainlining NoDoz through a nasal tap.

The other measure for Achievements is a base check on percentage-completion of the game, which is tied into several variables, but also affected by purchase of unlocked characters, some of which cost over a million Lego bits. So it's a short game which ends up overcompensating by requiring obscene amounts of repeated play, which manage to rob the all the fun of the initial play-through in the name of completion. And all of it could have been avoided if they'd just tied Achievements in to the tasks which award Gold Bricks and Power Bricks.

So, yeah; I started off loving the game, ended up getting kind of sick of it, and if an Achievement Junkie like me won't jump through those hoops WHILE PLAYING WITH LEGO AND STAR WARS FIGURES, they've screwed the pooch.

In retrospect, this post is mainly about how happy I am that the implication is that there will be Indiana Jones themed Lego - though I suspect they'll replace the more generically pulp-themed Adventure! sets, and that's a little sad. But it may mean we get Nazi Lego - and that will just be... weird.

18 Practical Tips for Living the Golden Rule

From zen habits, via LifeHacker

It’s true: the rule of treating others as you would want to be treated in their place will ultimately lead to your own happiness.
Let’s say that you apply the Golden Rule in all of your interactions with other people, and you help your neighbors, you treat your family with kindness, you go the extra mile for your co-workers, you help a stranger in need.
Now, those actions will undoubtedly be good for the people you help and are kind to … but you’ll also notice a strange thing. People will treat you better too, certainly. Beyond that, though, you will find a growing satisfaction in yourself, a belief in yourself, a knowledge that you are a good person and a trust in yourself.

“May I gain no victory that harms me or my opponent.
May I reconcile friends who are mad at each other.
May I, insofar as I can, give all necessary
help to my friends and to all who are in need.
May I never fail a friend in trouble.”