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I’ve been thinking long and hard about this post for awhile.  With my recent flurry of geeky activity, it’s apropos to write about what it would take to, as they say on Slashdot, turn in your geek card.  It started while madly trying to catch up watching BSG (that’s Battlestar Galactica for the uninitiated) and being emotionally tossed around.  I only wish I could say it was for the gripping drama.  Don’t get me wrong, it has good shows, but even in Season Two, they stringed along three stink-burgers in a row.  It got to the point where we looked at each other and thought that if there was one more aimless, over-dramatic story told with the kind of ham-fistedness you would only find in a butcher shop during their yearly “Ham-o-rama”, we would kindly pack the DVDs back in the box and not feel bad for not watching the rest of them.  Fortunately, a merely adequate episode followed and so we continue watching.

But where the geek cred gets it’s test was this weekend during the opening weekend of Watchmen.  I kid you not.  I was not looking forward to this.  Here was a story that when I first read it in the early years of my college career, I was stunned by it’s power.  Perfectly encased in a single story, I neither wanted or needed to know the backstory (that wasn’t already provided) or wish for a sequel.  It was the rare entity that stood on it’s own, the mere thought of a follow up would diminish it’s greatness.  And twenty years ago when I read it, I also thought that there was no way that this could be done in movie form.

And then they made it.

I was weary from the start.  The thought of taking something so deep and complex and try to jam it into even a three hour movie seemed to be impossible.  Friends of mine sent me photos, saying that it looked like it was going to be fine and I sneered because I know what Hollywood does to movies, what directors do to things to “make their stamp” on the world.  The movie would not live up to the hype, it would not be true to the story and end up being a bad film overall making millions of dollars.

Then Wil Wheaton, whom I respect as a fellow geek, liked it.  Suddenly, it had cred.  It had geek cred.  I hesitated and gave it a moment.  It might not suck after all.  And I had read on Wikipedia that Alan Moore had thought the guy who wrote the screenplay got it as about as good as it was going to get, even though he still wasn’t going to see it.

The reviews poured in, decidedly mixed.  Most “serious” critics thought it was a mess.  Some, like the guy who does reviews for the Star Tribune, didn’t like it because of all these theories he threw out there, all of them sounding like shit I heard in my literary criticism class in college, none of them actually hitting the mark.  Reading it was kind-of funny because he was so far off about what the graphic novel themes were.  It got some good marks from Ebert whom I tend to agree with more than I disagree.

When Saturday night rolled around, I went with my wife and a couple friends.  I watched.  I laughed, cried, winced and wondered throughout the movie.  It was okay.  They didn’t screw the pooch on the story…it wasn’t perfect, but it was damn close.

But, oh…as a movie.  I don’t know what to say.  The music choices were all wrong, out of place, out of time.  No atmospheric music I can remember from the show, but I remember thinking when they played Mozart’s Requiem 1) “this is the stupidest use of this song I’ve ever seen” and 2) “this is the most blatantly obvious music-as-message cheap trick I’ve seen in a movie” and 3) “they completely misinterpreted the scene and the music with it”.

They got the damn story right!  How can they get the other things wrong?  Some of the casting was spot on (Nite Owl, Rorscharch, the body of Dr. Manhattan, the Comedian) and others were weak (everyone else).  This movie won’t go down in geekdom like Lord of the Rings did…it will be passable.  Not a total embarrassment, but not truly showing the emotional and psychological side of Watchmen as a story.

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I was listening to NPR the other day (as I’m wont to do) and I heard Diane Rehm talk about Twitter and tweeting.

I about fell out of my chair.

AAAND, the funny thing about the above two sentances is that it would have been more efficient to post those two sentances from Twitter.  *sheesh*

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I have in various points of my career, toyed with various flavors of Linux.  Starting off with Slackware, dabbling with Fedora and giving openSUSE a whirl.  I even spread my wings a bit and tried the Unix variant of FreeBSD.  I liked them all.  I’m not even including several others I’ve tried.

However, the one thing that was missing for me was mainstream games.  I’ve become more and more a social gamer.  Oh, it’s nice to play a single player game now and then, but after a bit, either you beat the game or you tire of it–at least with me.  More and more games are including some sort of social element, whether that be a simple chat interface or fully formed avatars hanging out virtually.

I was excited last year when I heard my favorite game, EVE Online, came out with a Linux client.  At last, people thought, this could be an in-road to more people gaming on a Linux box.  Only not so much.

Turns out the client was based on something called Cedega, a part of Transgaming.  Cedega had gotten the old EVE client to work, the one without the premium graphics content…only not well.  In fact, it was quite buggy and at times impossible to play.  I know this because I tried to get this to work at one point and gave up on the Cedega client.  And I wasn’t alone.  Most EVE players decided that the official client wasn’t worth the trouble, considering that there were a number of players who were able to get the premium client working on WINE.

Here’s the dilemma;  does a player try to make a buggy and at times an infuriating client running on older graphics to work or do they work with the active community within EVE to get the premium graphics client running with WINE?  It’s not really much of a question really and most people went with the WINE solution.  This was coupled with the lack of developer help in getting the client to work in the first place.  Then came this post from the EVE developers, essentially ending official support for the Linux client.  Of the reasons they gave, one was the lack of growth of players using the official client.  Their numbers essentially derived from the official client reporting, not the number of players running Linux.  It puts the developers, CCP, in a bad position as they can only really address the official client rather than the number of players who might be playing under Linux.  However, I find some fault here as they didn’t seem to achieve accurate numbers of Linux players, so the numbers may seem skewed.

However, using the reasoning from the developers, it’s hard to blame them.  With both WINE and the EVE client itself being moving targets, it’s difficult to pour more man-hours into something that could be put to use somewhere else, especially since the community seemed to be picking up the slack.  Speaking of, the Linux community within EVE has taken it well, rolled with the punch and promised to soldier on, with the exception of a few pointed, and seemingly spot on posts, about the dearth of developer support over the last several months.  The problem here is that there is no easy path for people who are not as technically inclined as many Linux users currently are.  The ease of install may still elude beginning users and that remains a problem for Linux to break out as an OS for the common person.

It comes down to this question though.  What will it take for cross-platform gaming?  Microsoft has shown no interest in providing ways that promote actual competition with other systems and seems destined to shoot itself in the foot as more and more people turn to console gaming.  However, the largest hurdle to jump over is the available APIs for game development.  I’m not a developer, but from what I’ve seen on various sites, it just seems that DirectX is about as robust of an API on the market today and no other API seems to come close.  Plus add in the various issues with Linux distros and in particular it’s struggle with audio, it seems an uphill battle.

What seems to be the future though may lie in virtual machines being able to support gaming.  It’s not a perfect solution as you can run a Linux machine but have to buy a Windows license to play games.  One has to wonder if there will ever be a groundswell of support to get quality gaming on the Linux platform.

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I know this has been discussed before.  In fact, I know that Issac Asimov wrote a story about a society that basically forgot how to do math.  It’s an interesting story and one that makes me think occasionally.  I used to be better at math, but even now challenged by basic adding of anything over two digits, I reach for the calculator.

Such is what we are brought to when we rely on technology.  When Google today started behaving badly and sent every link to a page saying the site might harm your computer, it had me worried.

I actually thought for awhile that I just wouldn’t do any search this morning.  I didn’t want to go to Yahoo or, God forbid, MS Live search.  I wanted Google.  This is the power they hold.  And it’s a scary one really.

The thought now is that people just don’t know how to do research properly because Google is the first, and usually last, place that people look.  In the course of my job, I use it nearly every day to find out the answers to my technical (and not so technical) questions.  If Google were to go down, what would fill the gap?  Would we actually try to learn to research again?

In a way, it makes me want to at least learn again how to do math.  It’s not like I forgot everything, but the speed and ease of my youth have frittered away.  It can be reclaimed, but it will take work.  I hope I’m up to this, something which should be relatively easy.

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It’s been almost a year since I posted last on the blog.  What can I say?  Although, to be honest, I feel a bit silly.  I got a number of responses on that last post!  Well, most of them were from Caps fans defending their team.  Good for them!  I would post too if someone had the gaul to pick on their home turf.  Still not a fan of the Caps myself, but I can appreciate the enthusiasm they’re generating right now.  My wife likes them, so there’s that I guess.

Anyway, time to switch things up a bit.  I don’t like staying static too long.  Regardless, I want to have a place to vent about certain things.  Most of them will be tech related as I’ve just thought to myself and written blog posts in my head about various tech items.  Oh, I might include the occasional review of food or a political take here and there, but rest assured, it’s easier for me to talk about techie stuff.

I’m currently looking for a more appropriate theme.  I like this one, but it reminds me of Seattle and it makes me sad.  I miss that place.  I know we’re going to visit, hopefully soon.  But I’d like to get one that looks a little more….techie.  That way, I can express myself a bit better when I’m thinking about stuff I see on Slashdot and not feel obligated to post a comment.  I’ll probably still post a comment, but I never have enough time to express myself it seems.

Plus, I can start with some other cool things I dare not miss, like Darth and Droids.  Silly stuff, but every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, I don’t miss it.

Look for slight changes on the site.  Hopefully nothing too much, but we’ll see how long we can keep this train a runnin’ this time.

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