The Path to 9/11

This movie is apparently showing on ABC tomorrow and Monday, and apparently it’s a bit of rightwing revisionist history that tries to pin the blame for 9/11 on Bill Clinton. You’ve heard the rightwing pundits moan how WJC had Osama presented to him on a silver platter and he didn’t take the opportunity? Well apparently that’s not true, and this movie apparently has a scene where Clinton’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, hangs up on troops who are practically looking at Bin Laden through their gunsights. This scene as played in the movie is fictional and did not happen.

They would like you to think that Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinsky scandal … well, who was responsible for that? I saw a YouTube video that asserts the Repubs spent millions of dollars investigating Clinton’s extramarital affair and only $600,000 on forensics at the World Trade Center ruins. They’d love you to think that Clinton dropped the ball and George W. Bush is the man who made terrorism fashionable again. You know that Cheney was involved in a National Security Advisory Panel that *did not meet* until after September 11th? Have a look at this link where the Repubs refuse, in fact *scoff* at Clinton’s request for authority to do something about terrorism:

http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/30/clinton.terrorism/

and have a look at an excerpt from THE CLINTON WARS hosted by Buzzflash:

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/08/18_blumenthal.html

William Rivers Pitt from TruthOut has an exhaustive document regarding Clinton’s work on terrorism:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/101303A.shtml

The Bush administration was so concerned with not doing anything like Clinton that they tore down all the work he had done. Cheney focused the CIA on Iraq exclusively right when they got into office. Bush ignored a memo that spelled out plainly “Bin Ladin determined to strike in US” and went on vacation. 9/11 happened and the next day Bush wanted to know how they could involve Saddam Hussein. They cherry-picked the intelligence they wanted to go into Iraq, Joe Wilson published an article in the New York Times basically saying they were full of crap and basing their WMD claims on a bogus document regarding Saddam wanting to purchase yellowcake uranium in Niger, and then it suddenly becomes common knowledge that Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame is a secret agent with non-official cover (that’s the most dangerous, it means the government will not acknowledge anything you’re doing for them) and it turns out her area of expertise was tracking the movement of WMD in the Middle East.

In New Zealand the promos for The Path To 9/11 have title cards reading “THE OFFICIAL TRUE STORY”. Rightwing pundits such as Rush Limbaugh have screened the movie, but Bill Clinton is unable to obtain a copy and has sent two letters from his lawyer regarding the fabricated lies in the movie and suggesting that ABC is more than likely going to be hit with the biggest libel suit in the history of mankind.

So don’t watch The Path to 9/11. There’s football, and the season premiere of FAMILY GUY on … Fox. I can’t believe I’m recommending you watch Fox…although they are the network of That 70′s Show and Temptation Island. The news must be in a different building.

Prey approaches hypercube-like complexity (spoilers)

Prey is a shooter by the people who brought you DUKE NUKEM, which was a 2.5D game where you play an action hero who one-handedly saves the world from slightly goofy pig-like aliens. That game raised some eyebrows in that part of the geography of the levels included strippers as decoration who when shot burst into a clouds of money and dollar bills. It was off the wall, but you couldn’t take it seriously when you have a row of F-keys that each utters a catchphrase. 3D realms also did an asian-themed shooter that again teetered on stereotype but was allegedly a lot of fun to play, and BLOOD which strived for the most graphically bloody methods of carnage to dispatch enemies that was available with the technology at the time.

From what I read of PREY it’s allegedly been worked on for about eleven years. It’s changed engines several times, and there’s a demo movie from several years ago where you can see an E3 presentation that’s completely different. Apparently it’s had rabid fans the whole time, and I didn’t initially see what the fuss was about.

The game has gone gold and they’ve released a demo. First of all, it contains some of the bloodiest and most sickening imagery your 3D card can bump-map. You play a Cherokee native American who wants to get off his reservation and away from what he seems to see as a stereotypical “pow wow” heritage. Things aren’t helped by his grandfather who monologues like Pat Morita in THE KARATE KID. The bar closes, and you end up having to pulverize two drunks who won’t leave your girlfriend alone using a pipe-wrench that becomes shockingly bloody. Then aliens come down and suck the entire bar up into their mothership.

Apparently these aliens like the taste of humans, and they’re not much for chewing, so you and thousands of other people are strapped into a conveyor contraption that endlessly pulverizes bodies into moist paste, I suppose for canning. The ship is black metal and grinding gears, but when another human (?) manages to free you from your slab, you tumble down into this sickening bio-organic portion of the ship in front of what can only be described as a sphincter. Yeah. It opens when you approach it and closes when you back off. The ship is partly biomass and partly mechanical and this is what Looking Glass (rest its soul) meant to do with the Body of the Many in SYSTEM SHOCK 2.

Okay, this race of aliens has discovered the secret of controlling gravity. Direction means nothing to them. They have built curved walkways up the walls and over the ceiling like an Escher construction. You are sometimes ambushed by enemies standing on the wall above you. Then a box tumbles down an incline and out runs a hideous creature. The creature wasn’t in the box, he’s just jumped through a wormhole that exists on one surface of the box from another location on the ship.

You kill a gun toting baddie and take his gun which is alive and squirms in your hand. You can collect other small three-legged creatures who are grenades that will chase down and latch onto your target.

These portal-frames you discover are one-sided; you can walk around one and see and walk through one side like normal, but moving the other direction through it seamlessly transitions you into the other area. Then you stumble across a room with a small rock globe inside a glass box. If you go through the portal you emerge on the surface of the rock in miniature and can run around the equator with the entire giant room turning around you. It’s an absolutely stunning and jaw dropping sequence.

PREY’s developers have put a huge amount of physics programming into the game and after blowing your mind with unceasing carnage, you then have it confounded spatially. There are buttons you can shoot which alter which direction in the room is the gravitational “down” and loose objects will respond accordingly. In one area you see what would seem to be two portal frames at right angles to each other, but it’s actually both sides of the same frame. If you crouch down to look in one, you see yourself from the side through the other. Crawling through the portal puts you right in the same place, turned 90 degrees from the direction you were facing before.

Oh, and if this isn’t enough to wrap your brain around, the first time you die your recently puree’d Grandfather whisks you away to a serene desert to issue you an astral bow and arrow, a hawk spirit familiar, and show you how to leave your body and manipulate objects in ghost form. You then have to shoot as many swooping demons as you can to recover your health and astral energy before you’re inevitably sucked down into a chasm and dropped right back into the action where you died. The ethereal hawk swoops around, guiding you, tanking a couple of enemies when they attack, and revealing the meaning of the plethora of computer readout screens with controls.

In the gravity room you even encounter the tavern that was sucked up and partly absorbed into the biomass, and there’s an epic upside-down battle with aliens while “Barracuda” plays on the jukebox.

It’s a disturbing and mind-blowing journey. Apparently the demo is only ten percent of the entire game and the developers say there’s plenty more whacky stuff in the full install. Many of these elements have been attempted in other games but none have combined them together so successfully. It’s such a hodgepodge that you have no idea what’s coming next. I got the same vibe from this demo that I got figuring out Ahnonay in URU which so far is in my opinion the most stunning mindfuck in computer gaming history.

happiness is a bagful of mangled brass

My shipment of fasteners and washers arrived today. How awesome is the Acco #5 solid brass brad? I’m sure they’re wonderful as packed in a case to the stores, but Office Depot threw a flimsy box full of singly insignificant but en masse heavy cardboard-chewing metal into a loose plastic bag, along with 5-8 boxes of washers. The washers for the brads are smartly and securely snapped inside sturdy plastic boxes which survived most of the trip; my roving swarm of brass caltrops managed to chew open only one and a half of them. So I fished the pitiful scraps of cardboard out and just am keeping them in the road-worn plastic outer “bag” they came in.

Hammering them into a script was joyous though. I’m never binding anything differently again. My greeting cards will be sent out hole-punched with a shiny holiday fastener for the lucky recipient to figure out how to undo.

 

 

I have two lives.

A first one and a Second one.

After Uru Live was cancelled I had grown fond of the online social aspect of games. I knew you could go online and blast people senseless or gangbang the baddies in Diablo with help, but in Uru I'd met people and gotten to know them.

There is a "game" called Second Life, and I hesitate to call it a game, because there isn't a set goal or levels or anything like that. Rather it's more of a playground where you get a body and essentially fabulous cosmic powers. You can create things out of easily manipulated "prims" (short for primitive, which means a single shaped piece of an object) which are spheres and cubes and cones and cylinders and pyramids which can be stretched and twisted and textured and joined together. You can also attach them to about forty-five different points on your body. So you could easily "rez" a prim (rezzing is the lingo for creating something, or waiting for the world and textures to load around you) shaped like a cone, texture it blue and attach it to your head as a dunce cap.

When you create something in Second Life, it has your name attached to it. You can set permissions whether it can be manipulated by other people, is copyable or unique, or what price someone has to pay to pick it up. You can sell anything you create to anyone in the world for Lindens — the game currency $L. The economy in the game is huge as some amazingly talented people create objects and clothing. You pay $L to upload textures and sound clips and take pictures in the game – pictures can literally be dragged and dropped onto prims to texture them.

So in this game you can create or buy wings, attach antennae to your head that flop around and light up, and dress in black and yellow to become a bumblebee. The "furries" have evolved into almost their own race in-world as many people choose to play anthromorphic animals. There are three layers of clothing on your torso, two on your legs, also socks, shoes, gloves and divided skin textures which each have a tattoo layer. The shoes I wear consist of the "shoe" layer which alters my foot to fit inside two prim shoes, (each made of about 12 detailed prims). Anyone in this game can make themself dazzingly attractive or bizarre and otherworldly.

Part of the game I've not gotten into is scripting. Second Life has it's own language that once saved can be dropped inside a prim to give it behaviors. The simplest makes text hover above, or particles erupt (particles are prims that appear briefly and disappear, so they can be smoke, sparks, water spray, or flying skulls; particle scripters are like Wizards in SL.) Scripts can also make a door slide aside when you click on it, or display a picture, or sell an object to someone.

So just because there is no real "game" doesn't mean there isn't anything to do. The residents of the game create the landscape that isn't already put there by the Lindens (they are the gods of SL who are employed to fix when things go wrong, and all have the last name of Linden). I currently own a beach house on the corner of a tropical island (paying rent to the person who owns the place) that has a radio that will stream internet broadcasts onto the property. There are dance clubs and sex clubs and game competitions and contests ("Best Beach Wear"), huge malls and vampire castles to explore. Someone created an attachment that makes your avatar (the body you control) swim in the water realistically. I have been playing in a Silent Hill-esque horror sim (sim is one of the square regions of the world) with an asylum. There is a recreation of Amsterdam, and there was a Peter-Pan event where you had to search all over London and then put on pirate costumes, jump out a window and fly to a boat where you could swordfight. I remember chatting with a group in an outdoor sex club that was suddenly invaded by giant alien killer bees who pushed everyone off the platform.

Oh, you can fly too. And teleport. Landmarks are objects that are freely traded to give someone a teleport destination. You can't die unless the sim you're in is marked as a combat sim, and if you die you teleport to your home location. Lately the combat in the game has been about "push" weapons. Since you usually can't kill someone, you can knock them back and send them flying for miles. There was a hairy incident where someone casually handed me a crudely made weapon which I just stuck in my inventory and forgot about. Later in a combat sim where someone was showing me all about different weapons, I pulled it out and everyone got really nervous and told me not to equip or use it — apparently this was a weapon that rezzed so many prims it would crash the entire sim region…knocking people offline and bringing the wrath of the Lindens and probably suspension. I deleted it and emptied the trash can.

So Second Life is pretty cool. It's the game if you get tired of you can always go back to later because everything will be different. I've met some of the smartest and ridiculously creative and funny people there. If you play late at night or very early in the morning you can meet people from Australia and England who are wicked cool. I've even sat in a nightclub and listened to someone play a live set of original music to an audience in a cafe that was themed like a lily pond with frog-shaped chairs. How often do people get that sort of opportunity?

Greetings from Miami

I am a hardcore road tripper. I love driving long distances and seeing the stuff on the way. Florida is about 1200 miles from St. Louis and I've done the trip before, but I don't recommend that children try this at home. I left at about 1230pm Friday and checked into my hotel at 530pm Saturday.

My goal is to make it to the Florida border without stopping for more than a half-hour at a time. Georgia and Florida are the two longest parts of the trip. You start by driving through Illinois whilst humming about "amber waves of grain" and seeing cows and the occasional car dealership. You'll pass Metropolis, which is proud to advertise that they have a "giant" statue of Superman, and Marion where the major prison facility in Illinois is. Then you cross a spectacular bridge into Kentucky.

Kentucky begins to get hillier and more wooded, and the first sign you're not in Illinois is the stretch of road cut through a hillside where you see diagonal strata of rock that represent millions of years of chronological history. Kentucky is nice, there's a nice rest stop with a lookout over a beautiful lake and you're not in it long enough to get bored.

Then you're welcomed to Tennessee but it's a false start because you veer into another state (I think Georgia) for ten minutes with a huge welcome center, then you're welcomed to Tennessee again. Tennessee is mysterious and slightly mountainous with amazing scenery. You're warned about falling rocks, and climb precipitously up a mountain, then they warn you again about how steep the descent is. There are two "runaway truck" ramps, which is a little disturbing. Everyone should go to Lookout Mountain at least once, and don't worry about finding it, because you'll see about thirty-seven billboards reminding you on the way. There's a cave tour to underground Ruby Falls, and Rock City which starts out kitchy with gnome dioramas but ends at the edge of a cliff where you can see seven states at once.

Then you enter Georgia, which is where you'll never ever be the fastest driver — I'm slow and I go 75 there (the speed limit is 70) and people pass like you're standing still. Atlanta is best seen in the middle of the night when you can drive straight through the middle instead of around the bypass (unlike 270, 475 is a complete loop east and west around the city). It's lit up like Rouge City from the movie A.I. and you whiz around and under buildings — seriously, they have built parking lots over the ten-lane highway and if you're in a group of competetive drivers it's like the Deathstar trench in Star Wars.

After Atlanta, there's not much except some of the largest discount fireworks and fueling stations in the south. Which is a little creepy if you imagine.

After I hit Florida I always park in the first rest stop and pass out for what seems like a couple seconds (this time was three and a half hours) while the sun rises. Then you stumble into the Welcome center and chug your free tiny paper cup of orange juice they give out — it's like communion for fans of Florida.

Whoohoo, you're here, but no you're not. Orlando is about 3 hours away, and Miami is about three more past that. Luckily Florlando is quite used to tourists, and most information is presented in friendly colorful signs with arrows that light up and move and glitter. Just so you know, purple neon is usually code for adult entertainment, and you'll see 24-hour WE BARE ALL cafes advertised on billboards alongside Sea World and Universal Studios.