And this angers me! I mean, I understand they don’t need shortcuts in the Programs folder because they have their dedicated Games Explorer ones. Yet developers still forget to create shortcuts in the Games Explorer! Stuff like the Readme, Launcher, Websites, Extras and other such that we used to have with the good old Programs folder. Come on, get a grip.
So I went off to watch the Simpsons movie today. Now, we’ve all seen Simpsons. The TV show. The moral start. The golden middle. The declining present… so clearly, expectations for the movie were mixed. Though FOX has been pimping the crap out of the movie with tons of trailers, photos, videos, games, popular character creator, elaborate site and what not.
So, is the Simpsons Movie good? Yes. It’s good. Possibly even really good. It’s not really good movie-wise, but it’s really good Simpsons-wise. It’s enjoyable. It’s funny. It looks good. It definitely shows what Simpsons is (or at least, should be) all about.
One thing I think is that they really took a risk was at making the movie focused at the Simpsons audience. I mean, the movie might still be good if you’ve never watched Simpsons, but there’s definitely a lot more to be earned if you have. A lot more jokes that’ll seem a lot funnier or make a lot more sense. Though given the extent of the movie, it’s probably a good thing that they did. That way they could spend all the time they wanted making the movie funny. They also took the time to make sure all the known Springfield characters make a joke (or show up) at least once, showing they didn’t forget any. It also makes you realize just how huge Springfield really is.
Now, the main point of the movie is, of course, the humour. It’s Simpsons. It’s all about the funny. And the humour is definitely much better than the one from the TV series as of late. It’s a mix of crude, unexpected, clever, sophisticated, political, american and mindless humour. So they’ll be sure to please everyone even if not everyone will get all the jokes. As an example of this is one of the jokes in the beginning which you’ve probably seen in the trailer. Homer is trying to hammer a nail in the roof and puts his finger over it, so you immediately expect him to hit his finger as tradition dictates. Yet, PLOT TWIST, he hits his eye instead! Also followed by Homer’s retort “I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny” as opposed to the traditional “I’ll show you funny”. There’s a lot of this kind of thing throughout the movie and it’s lovely.
I might as well warn you that if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll already have seen most of the jokes from the first half of the movie. They might be out of context and not have the full set-up so they’ll still be funny, but it’ll still feel odd. Though at least the trailer made sure to not give away the plot or anything like that so you’ll still enjoy it.
The production values are also very good. They’re obviously better than the TV show, but they’re still damn good. At first I was a bit warey of the 2D/3D mesh they did to keep the Simpsons style in a more modern setting, which seemed a bit tacky at first. But they make full use of it with all sorts of camera angles, special effects and make all of Springfield (and more!) look much nicer. The sound is also very nice, with the music keeping in with the Simpsons style and still changing according to the setting, with the theme still everlasting. The voice acting is also as good as always, with all of the original cast having done their best to make the characters in the movie seem that bit more lively than in the TV series.
Now, for the rest. It obviously can’t be all that good. The story is nothing extraordinary. It fills its role of having all the movie requirements like action, drama, humour, romance, suspense, etc. But it’s nothing breathtaking. But then again, plots were never the Simpsons’ strongpoint. Without spoiling anything, the plot and characterization focus more on the Simpons. Obviously, it’s their movie. But Springfield and extras all still do what they’re supposed to, each having a role in the movie either plot-dependent or just comic-relief. Luckily the show isn’t all about Homer, with every Simpsons character having an important role and Homer, while still his stupid loafy self, still manages to surprise us all.The first half of the movie will be mostly lots of humour and set up of the plot, while the second half will have all the unveiling, drama, romance, twists and whatever’s left, still with the occasional humour.
In the end, it’s no classic, but it’s got tons of humour, characters, guest characters and a fitting plot. It’s Simpsons any way you look at it, and you should enjoy it as such.
Protip: It only ends after the Credits.
You know what they are. That thing Microsoft introduced with Windows XP or so. How any folder with at least one image (or audio or video file. You can apply this generalization to all the following times I use this term) is immediatly classified as an “image folder” and gets attached all those useless tasks, special view options and what not.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand that if people have a folder full of images, it’s probably strictly for images, and they might find a thumbnail-view handy, as well as all the extra picture info like size, camera type and what not. But not everything that has an image is an image folder.
I like to keep a simple clean standard view. A Details view with columns for the common info like Name, Type, Size and Date Modified, all sized to make full use of my large resolution. It’s all I need and I like it. I might customize the view for other folders if I need, by myself. But Windows won’t let me have that. It’ll turn any folder into an image folder without my consent, resetting my standard settings and causing me havoc since whenever I open the folder, I have to get used to a completely different view.
To add to that, as handy as extra file info is, it only slows down Windows more as it queries all the extra info just to display the folder’s contents, since Windows only caches thumbnails. Plus, all these folder types are linked. If I try to change the view settings myself in one of these folders, chances are it’ll affect several other completely unrelated folders. Even bigger chances are it’ll quickly forget about them and re-apply it’s default view for “image folders”. Worse even, these view settings now also apply to the smaller Open/Save dialogs in which they mostly don’t even fit in.
This leads to a Little Annoyance. A Little Annoyance is, by my view, worse than a Large Annoyance, because you avoid the latter the minute you run into it. With a Little Annoyance, you cope with it, live with it, slowly dragging you down until it eventually grows into a Large Annoyance anyways and you avoid it completely. Navigating a file system is vital to any user, and the more this is clogged, the worse. I cannot avoid such a vital task without having to resort to something like typing the whole file path myself, and if I wanted to do that I’d switch to Linux.
Do us all a favour and go jump off a cliff.
If you’re gonna have a storyline navigation, use it properly! Stop using them if you’re only gonna bother updating it for a few storylines, and stop using them when you don’t even have properly defined storylines and end up coming up with vague names which nobody knows where they lead!
Gawd, if that’s too much for you, there’s plenty of simpler navigations you can use. If you’re not gonna do something right, don’t do it at all.
NO-SPOILER POST, because it’s not the kind of movie you can spoil. I tell you what it’s like, but no specifics, because really, the movie has no specifics. It’s all about the watching.
Ok, so I watched the Transformers movie. I’ve never watched any of its cartoons or read any of its books or any of that (or I did and I don’t remember. I’m old!), though I got the general idea through the wonderful world that is Teh Interwebs.
So anyways, the movie. It’s pretty cool. It’s action from start to end, no stops, no holding back. If you were expecting one of those movies that takes you through all slow-paced like, slowly uncovering the story, drama, romance, occasional humour, and then the big finale… nope, none of that here. No long character development, no tons of plot twists, no huge deep story about transforming robots, no nothing. It’s all about robots duking it out and lots of special effects, so you’ll be fine if you don’t expect anything else.
It’s pretty much 90% action and 10% everything else packed tight. You might think this is a bad thing, but really, the story doesn’t need to cover half the movie. Good robots, bad robots, a cube, FIGHT TO THE DEATH! It’s not rocket science. You still have your classical bits with drama, romance, suspense, etc. Because, you know, it’s DA RULEZ! But each bit doesn’t last more than a couple of minutes, which might feel forced at times, but it doesn’t really matter, you’ll know what’s going on.
Now, the action. Well, it’s action. You’ve got your explosions, your special effects, your robots beating up everything and then some, your rampant destruction, your people panicking, everything. And you’ll get it all full blown to your face! You can’t even blink or you’ll miss something. Probably nothing important, but who cares, it’s shit getting blown up, you don’t want to miss it. It’s not something I can easily describe. It’s all kinds of It’s all pretty fast-paced though so it won’t even feel like a two-hour movie, but all the sudden camera changes, fast-motion to slow-motion, various angles and scenes… can get pretty confusing. It’s pretty much a flood of every special effect and CGI they could pull off, really.
It’s all intertwined with the bits of “everything else” though, as mentioned earlier, just so it doesn’t get repetitive or anything. Most of that is humour, which might be considered rather “mindless” humour if you’re one of those snobby fancy sophisticated humour types. But then why are you watching this? This movie is all about good old mindless fun. If you can’t enjoy that, sucks to be you.
Oh yeah, and there’s still some bits of movie after the credits start rolling. Three bits, to be precise. After that, you can bail out of the theatre worry-free. Or your living room, depending on how you got the movie, but this is really the kind of movie that has to be watched in a big fat screen. You’re really missing out if you don’t.
My computer now has 5 coolers to stop it from exploding, at a grand-total of 7 fans, 2 of which are of different colors.
It’s like there’s a party in there and I’m not invited. 
Open-source. It’s a great concept. It’s free, it’s open, it’s for everyone. Who wouldn’t like that? But one thing many fail to realize is that open-source, like everything else, isn’t perfect. In fact, it can be a very bad thing. For the sake of not writing “most” in every line, I will now be generalizing. It’s something I do a lot. Get used to it.
So, you have your Average-Joe. He has some coding skills, he has an idea, he puts those two together, sets his goals and starts working on a project of his own. If his idea is good enough (and even if it isn’t), he’ll publish it online and make it open-source. He’ll work on it for the users that start popping about. Releasing new bug fixes, new features, all following his little goals until v1.0 and possibly moving on from that. More people join him in his work, the user community works, and a new successful project is made.
However, many things can happen in open-source. Usually the founder will eventually leave the project once he’s done with it or just doesn’t have time anymore. This leaves the rest of the team free to set up their own goals, their own rules, slowly taking the project away from its original intent to their own scheming. Or maybe the founder himself decides to take another angle on the thing, or take his goals too far. The community that grew with the project will commonly follow wherever the project takes them and blindly obey whatever’s set, creating some kind of locked community, a secluded society.
Open-source projects tend to have very strict goals and rules, which the developers will follow whether it will actually improve them on anything. Unlike commercial projects, open-source abides by the “you’re not paying me for this so deal with it”, leaving developers to do whatever they want with the project no matter how ridiculous. Maybe they’ll just focus on releasing version after version of shinier cleaner code that makes no visible change to users. Maybe they’ll just slowly make the project futile and no longer please as it did originally. Whether the users like it or not is none of their business, the goal is their own and to hell with everyone else. They will quickly dismiss any ideas, suggestions or tips from users, if they don’t abide by their strict plans, and aided by their locked community, the project will slowly become more and more exclusive, with new users and maybe even existing ones being driven off by a no longer wanted and loved project, assisted by a stagnant community, fueled by any slight bit of ignorance and with open ears only for their rulers, the developers.
You may thing I’m making this up, possibly even exaggerating. Perhaps. But there are plenty of examples out there. MAME, a popular arcade emulator went too far with their goal of “historical accuracy”, ruining a once good and easy gaming experience. No matter how or where you get the ROMs for it, there’s a pretty good chance they won’t work in the latest version, or even the next. Or maybe just work horribly bad. In fact I’m not the first to realize this, Stuart has caught on way ahead of me.
In fact, this accuracy thing is pretty common. Many projects remaking some popular / obscure / whatever game strive to reproduce the original by every pixel, or sometimes even by every original bug. This is silly. Just because it was good, doesn’t mean it can’t be better. Fix every bug, correct every flaw, hell, even update it to today’s standards with shiny new graphics or whatever. If you’re worried about the community, make it an option. Of course don’t go filling it with all your own wacky ideas and completely turn the original game around, or otherwise don’t even bother referencing to the original. No I don’t care if you’re just doing a lame attempt of scaring away any evil lawyers and if it’s “your own game and I’ll do with it as I please”, if it pleases nobody else you might as well just keep it, the Interwebs is rubbish enough, thank you.
Another thing there’s a lot of is multi-IM applications. Because with the huge variety and possibility of IMs, and with all your friends deciding to spread over all of them, you don’t want to lug around 6 different IMs. But if you’re gonna implement all the other protocols, implement them properly. If all you’re gonna do is have some plain window with a contact list and a textbox that allows you to send/receive text between them, well, I might as well just go back to e-mail then. The reason there’s lots of different protocols is because they all differ, each having their own unique and cool (or annoying) features. I understand you don’t have to support every single thing and it’s hard to keep up with paid developers, but at least don’t shrug off everyone that points out that Miranda IM still doesn’t support invisible messages even though WLM8 has been out for months. If more and more people keep pointing it out, then it’s because it’s that big a deal. Give us avatars, give us status, give us logs and emoticons and maybe even video and audio. Because if you all you want is plain text, 10 other things have beaten you to it. The fact that Trillian seems to be the only one that provides these options is truly a sad sight, specially because it’s a commercial application yet it’s still broken ten ways to Sunday.
And finally, there’s Firefox. Firefuckingfox. Yes it’s a browser. Ok, a good one. Get over it, it’s still just a browser. They’re not any holier than thou. So quit blabbering about it in every sentence. Quit advertising it. Quit making entire websites about it. Quit plastering it all over your sigs and have it fight it out with other browsers (or, more commonly, eating / biting / chomping and even saber-fighting Internet Explorer), and for crying out loud, quit drawing fuckin’ fanart of it! Next thing you know, people will be talking about making love to it. Oh who am I kidding, this is the Interwebs, I’m sure there’s a Firefox fetish site out there somewhere.
And no, just because it has plugins doesn’t make it the best application EVAR. In fact, that’s another thing common in the open-source world: plugins. Yes I get it, it’s pretty much your “get out of jail free” card for all those feature requests. “Want something? Add it yourself. Heck, feel free to add whatever crazy thing you want, I won’t stop you.”
So what’s wrong with them, you ask? Well, for one thing, people seem to think that an application that supports plugins immediately can do anything possible evar and should be valued as such. Or that developers can get away with implementing an application that does barely nothing but has plugins. And it’d sell. So I could go “this is a plain ol’ box, but it supports plugins, so worship me”. Eventually someone would turn it into a box on wheels with titanium armor, USB 1TB drive, time-travelling support, built-in toaster and a cup holder. But the Average-Joe would still get a plain ol’ box!
Plus as soon as something has plugins, any single feature request is completely brushed off with “make it yourself”. Or sometimes “get someone to make it” (because clearly, random users have nothing better to do than serve other random users). Because clearly, every single person is capable of knowing completely well the language the program was designed with (or the pseudo-language it created for plugins), as well as all the intrinsic knowledge about the program and its properties that are pluggable. And if they do, they might as well put their skills to good use and join the project, since after all, it’s open-source. Ok, so commercial programs do this too. But not a lot.
And then of course, you have the opposite end of the spectrum. People hellbent on adding every possible feature as a plugin, even if it has absolutely no relevance with the program in question. If I’m using a word processor, the last thing I’m looking for is some MMO game to add into it. If I’m using a file browser, I don’t give a rat’s ass that I could have it check my e-mail as well. Not to mention everything these days seems to be capable of checking your e-mail. Even computer viruses.
