Rock Band 3
We had an amazing 5 hour RockBand3 night last night with Bultark, Dr.G. and ootmian. Sadly we could only muster a band of 4 but with the new keyboard in RB3 this had the advantage that we could all move around between a variety of instruments or main/backing vocals. This makes it much less strenuous, although I stuck with Expert guitar all night long and my aching feet (for I stand when I’m playing) told me they’d had enough by the very end.
Harmonies though. Fantastic. We had 3 microphones so I was joining in on occasion when I knew the song. Never done any singing other than a little bit in the beginning with the original RB1 but I’m much more inspired now. Some harmony efforts were a bit p!ss poor though, as you can probably imagine. Some worked out brilliantly. You just know when it’s right…
One wonderful moment came as we were taking a short break. Bultark picked up the keyboard and had a go on “The Power Of Love”, trying out Medium difficulty just to take a look at it. The rest of us were all sitting on the floor to rest our weary feet from standing up all night long. One of our vocalists, Dr.G., grabs a microphone, hits <Start> to join in, and starts singing along to the song already in progress. I then crawl across the floor (to avoid getting in the way of Bultark bashing away on the keyboard) to grab my mic off the mic stand just as our other vocalist, ootmian, gets the same idea and grabs his mic off the floor.
Suddenly we have a keyboardist doing the song and 3 dudes sitting cross-legged on the carpet around the TV singing “The Power of Love”. Just by pressing a button and joining in. Utterly, utterly awesome. That was, to me, a quite unique RB moment. 
We also tackled some Bee Gees, including “Stayin’ Alive” and “Tragedy”. Harmony vocals on some of Bon Jovi’s tracks worked out well, but playing on Expert guitar I really need to know what I’m doing on vocals without needing to read the screen. On occasion I was able to take a glance at the vocal track but proper harmonising, with different vocal parts rather than just singing along, takes some concentration and practise.
We ended the night with a rendition of “Freebird” which just absolutely rocks. I’m so glad we have that in RB3 with keys.
New Telly Season
I wrote this a while ago but never got around to publishing it. As it’s mildly out of date I won’t add in the pictures I normally would.
Lots of new shows on telly at the moment. As usual I check them all out to see what sticks.
Lone Star
So I watched “Lone Star” last night, BOTH eps in fact. I really, really enjoyed this one, despite Tara only being in the odd bit. Possibly one of my favourites of the new season I think. However, after tweeting about it last night I’m told it has been cancelled already. Think this is the one he was referring to anyway. Pantie Knickers.
No Ordinary Family
I also really rather enjoyed “No Ordinary Family” with the super duper exceedingly lovely Julie Benz in it (Dexter’s wife). I’m a mahoosive fan of hers so that probably helps. But it made me laugh several times so I’ll take it. I also instantly knew that I recognised Benz’ assistant/confidante from somewhere, something about the face/voice in particular. Turns out she was in TheOC.
The Whole Truth
“The Whole Truth” has ER’s Abby as the lead female lawyer vs Numbers’ Don Epps. She has a very different image from before but I almost instantly recognised her from voice/face. Not sure on this one. Not sure I like the Numbers boy’s character yet either. Too shouty, prefer him in Numbers. Looks like another procedural but one that is sprinting along trying to keep up with itself.
Boardwalk Empire
I’m not normally one for period pieces e.g. from the 1920’s like this one, but as this has more to do with something like Goodfella’s or The Soprano’s, features Steve Buscemi, and comes from HBO I was very interested. Definitely one I’m wanting to see more on.
Hawaii Five-Oh
This is quite wham-bam-thank-you-maam! It also has Grace Park from BSG. In a bikini. But she’s a bit too skinny for my tastes. Nice bhum shot though! Otherwise it’s as predictable as you’d expect.
The Event
This is a puzzler. It’s all over the place in the timeline at the start but it pulls it together gradually. Really have no idea what’s going on. You’ll probably hate it for that reason! You know, unanswered questions and such, just the stuff you don’t like. Very FlashForward/X-Files. I want to see more.
Outlaw
This appears to be a standard Lawyer drama. It has the blonde hottie from Crash in it (she got her baps out in that which I was very happy about) but it looks very typical so I decided to delete this after a few minutes.
Chuck
S4 is just silly. But I was struggling to stay awake by this time of night so I struggled through.
Nikita
This is reasonably interesting to me. Maggie Q is again too skinny but also hot. Lots of big guns, which we like.
: [ A week passes, another episode of a few things ]
The Whole Truth
Half-way through episode 2 of The Whole Truth and I’ve decided to can this one. It’s a ‘case of the week’ procedural where a few minutes is allocated to The Defense to see their side of the investigation. Then a few minutes to The Prosecution and how they mingle into the previous few minutes from a different perspective. Then things merge together to show the final threads being pulled together before they argue their case.
Tendrils pierce through one episode into the next to offer some character development but it’s not what I’m after. I tend to like these things when there is a more substantial back-end than just a few threads of character development. The Good Wife is another lawyer drama but there’s far more back-story and character development that is superbly balanced with its ‘case of the week’ format. Everything interweaves brilliantly and I’m completely engaged.
Hawaii Five-Oh
I’m wavering over this. It’s got the picturesque setting of Burn Notice and CSI:Miami, the team of outsiders like Burn Notice, and the tech of CSI:Miami again, but it seems mostly ‘case of the week’. There’s a bit of friction between the two leads which I like a lot, but it’s trying to work in quite a lot of ‘pride in the force’ and it seems a bit clumsy in this respect.
If I didn’t have tons of other things I wanted to watch I might keep this on.
Blue Bloods
I was all set to can this one as yet another Police procedural. But actually it’s almost less about the case of the week and more about the drama between all the members of the family. There’s a sinister organisation underlying it all which gets touched on at the end of each episode and presumably will become something more later on, and there’s a lightly used DA. But the most interesting character by far is the homicide detective played by Donnie Wahlberg.
The first episode had a A-B-C solved crime. The second episode was similar but felt like it had more room to breath. As a result I really enjoyed episode 2! Maybe because it was an interesting case they were trying to solve.
Stargate Universe
I love this show. Being proper SciFi (with space ships and stuff) it’s almost certain to be a hit with me, but it’s much better than that. There’s lots going on that I want to know more about, but one of the new episodes was a particularly tough watch, I thought.
Speling Erors in Game Manuels
Gahh,
Rock Band 3 … Platform or Track Pack
Chatting with Chuckstudbuckle the other day had me considering what Rock Band 3 is to me. He mentioned that because the RB3 track list looked so uninspiring (“particularly uninspiring” being the exact quote!) he was going to pass on it.
I wondered if he was missing out on the bigger view. There are, I believe, over 2,000 songs in the RB song library now. So RB3 isn’t simply about the 83 songs it ships with on the disc, it’s more about the platform it presents for the future, something Harmonix tried to do with RB2 as a platform for DLC – something they’ve achieved given the sheer breadth of DLC available including over 500 songs on RBN.
Personally I think RB3 is about Pro mode. RBN2.0 (for the most part – no Pro guitar, sadly) and DLC going forward will target normal and Pro players. Hopefully select existing DLC will be updated for the new Pro mode.
This means, to me at least, that RB3 is a very significant release. The 83 songs on disc are merely a taster. What the game as a platform opens up is tremendously exciting, with something for all skill and interest levels. I know that Dornorn is super excited by a lot of the RB3 track list because it features the sort of thing he’s wanting to learn on real guitar. There are a couple of real stand-outs for me, including “Freebird” and “Radar Love”.
At the end of the day, I am deeply excited by the prospect of pro guitars, keyboards, drums and a vocalist plus 2 backing singers! Oh yes.
Speaking of Rock Band a cool thing happened the other night when an old friend came over for an almost annual visit – he doesn’t get let out all that often, poor lad. While looking at various bands on YouTube he saw Amberian Dawn mentioned and commented that he’d been meaning to check them out. I went, “oooo, hang on to that thought,” and promptly fired up Rock Band 2 which has the awesome “He Sleeps In A Grove” on RBN.
What a great way to preview a song/band… play it in Rock Band! While in there I also showed Free Spirit’s first RBN song which I really enjoy. This was a novel experience all round, especially given that 20 years ago we’d have been doing exactly the same thing with cassette tapes, vinyl, CDs and VHS recorded episodes of MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball” instead of YouTube and Rock Band. We’ve come a long way.
iPad and Content Creation vs Content Consumption
Initially I’ve been looking at my iPad as a device for content consumption rather than content creation. But I’m finding the more I use it, the more uses it has, including, with the right apps, content creation.
The iPad has also opened up some things I didn’t think I’d ever bother with. For instance I could never be bothered to go over to my computer just to send a twitter message, nor even read the twittersphere given so many other RSS feeds to keep up to date with. But it makes so much more sense with a mobile device, especially with something like Flipboard which changes the viewing experience dramatically.
Yesterday I was sat in my comfy chair and decided to explore the Wordpress application for iPad. I ended up using it to pull together a couple of thoughts into a new post for this blog. Saved at the time as a ‘local draft’ it turns out to be easy to promote to full ‘draft’ status. Hey presto, there it is in my Wordpress draft posts list. Perfect.
I’ve also started taking it with me into meetings in lieu of printed materials. Combined with a cloud-based filesystem such as Dropbox this is just so easy.
Horus Heresy & Race for the Galaxy
Dornorn and I had a really interesting game of Race for the Galaxy a few weeks ago. I originally wrote this the day after but it has been a good couple of months since then. Freed from other regular obligations by a lack of numbers we decided to have a 2p game night instead, something that doesn’t occur very often. The last one was a first test of War of the Ring.
Horus Heresy
We opened with a look at Horus Heresy. This was only my second game so at least I knew what I was doing. Or so I thought anyway! My first game was a disaster after completely misunderstanding the use of the Port Landings order card and burying them in my orders deck, not to be seen again for quite some time. That left me on a hasty retreat around the map as my limited forces were slowly defeated.
Not intending doing that again this time I assaulted the defense lasers protecting the spaceports and landed new troops to defeat some troublesome hero characters. Then Dornorn tried a wild move to bring the game to a quick conclusion: he assaulted my flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, in the hope of killing Horus, my side’s leader. I promptly made a catastrophic error and moved Horus directly into combat supported by his nearby forces and some others I launched back into space from spaceports on Terra that I controlled. Horus promptly got beaten up by the hero damage special effects on the combat cards and it was all over, another defeat.
Race for the Galaxy
We moved on to Race for the Galaxy, a fantastic game that I never get to roll out all that often. I’ve heard different folks complain about not understanding the iconography on the cards and still others that mention just not ‘getting it’. While I can see that it’s a lot more complicated than something as basic as Dominion (which it seems everyone ‘gets’) it just fell immediately into place in my head after completing our first game many, many moons ago.
I’ve certainly struggled to figure out how to teach this game as it does have a hefty price of initial entry. But once the iconography unfurls its meaning in your head you can glance at yours or your opponents card tableau and just ‘read’ the cards. Even when upside down across the table! Brilliant. Despite that I rarely ever win at the game (unless I’m playing noobs I mostly get creamed every time!) it’s a fabulous brain bending experience that I enjoy immensely.
I’ve previously waffled about RftG and all of its expansions which add greatly to the card variety and options available. I recently picked up the most recent expansion, The Brink of War, and wanted to give it an outing. Dornorn and I decided to try just about everything all at once. He’s not played with any of the expansions before so he was seeing new cards, new icons, and new game mechanics such as Goals and Prestige. I left the rulebooks for all 3 expansions out on the table so we’d have a reference for new icon meaning and off we went.
Things got off to a very rocky start as we didn’t understand how the new Prestige system worked. Chips are passed out to track Prestige and whomever has the most gains bonuses as a Chip Leader tile is passed back and forth, and into the centre of the table when there is a tie. This sort of messes with the flow of the game and adds another resource to check and compete for. Possibly too much so, he says after but a single play! I get the impression that goals add a nice sub-feature to target alongside your main strategy, but Prestige may be a thing you need to focus on lest your opponent picks up a large stack of VP chips on an ongoing basis.
Dornorn went after his usual Alien-based strategy while my opening was rather scattershot and undirected. Dornorn soon pulled out a lead in the Prestige race which I then spent much of the game chasing down. The second half of the game became quite the Prestige battle as the Chip Leader tile went back and forth, occasionally several times in a round as we executed each phase and moved goods from production planets to consumption powers, discarded cards or settled new worlds that offered us bonuses.
My second half of the games was pretty much pre-programmed. I knew how I would be ending the game (after a big opening 7-cost offset world placement Dornorn wasn’t placing as many cards as I was so I was well ahead and knew I’d likely hit the tableau size sooner) and I knew which two 6-cost Development powers I would be using to boost my score. Plus I knew head of time what phase selections I needed to place the cards. But I had to manage the VP chip pile which was being steadily consumed by the Prestige race/battle we were engaged in. I was carefully manipulating that limited pile with Consume/Trade vs Consume/2xVP selections, calculating how many I’d take vs Dornorn such that I’d have the time to play the cards I needed. There were a mere 3 VP left in the pile at the end of the game! This made the game super rewarding and involving I thought.
Dornorn seemed to sense the end of the game as we both played some big world settlements right at the same time, just as I double settled to gain an extra card in my tableau. His settling included some new card mechanics that I’d never seen before. Thus we had a big ending to the game and an opponent verified score, double counting because it concluded with me on 57 points to Dornorn’s 56!!! But had he not made some Prestige mistakes early on I’d have never caught up in the Prestige race and the Prestige Leader tile wouldn’t have moved around so much, so really the boy would have had more points. I don’t think any of my play errors were anything other than minor and hence nothing nearly so significant. Still, close game that ran very late into the night and produced the usual interesting post-game strategy comparison discussion.
What struck me the most was that we had the base game and 3 expansions in play, and not once did either of us have to refer to the rulebook to explain the mechanics of a card. The icons just made perfect sense along with any special text on the card. Perhaps it’s familiarity which teaches you the language of Race but I was slightly surprised by this. There is a huge list of updated icons listed in the various expansion rulebooks so this was quite a result I thought.
Oh for a single online identity
Tonight I wished I could manage some sort of solitary online identity. I guess Microsoft tried with their Passport, but other competing social media sites seem to have their own sign-up process, each with their own identity profile, contacts, email address, etc. I had cause to sign up to a site tonight that I discovered needed a Yahoo login. (I used to use Yahoo as a search engine, now it seems to be a portal that I simply never use other than for email groups).
I’ve long been trying to consolidate all my online activity under my “Tufty McTavish” handle, as you can see from the links on the right of this blog. This is an identity that has held consistent for many more years than I can easily remember – I used it way back when Ultima Online was first released for instance. Anyway, I decided I’d create a new Yahoo account with this basic identity and try to use that moving forward.
My first stumbling block was that at first I had to create a Yahoo email address, even though I have absolutely no intention of ever using it or publicising it to anybody, at all, evah. I don’t want to have an email address under somebody else’s domain – I have my own thank-you, domains that I fully intend owning for the rest of my natural life. IMHO people that have umpteen different email addresses make life awkward – which flavour do I use this week or when I need to sign somebody into something of mine via an email address? I simply do not know which variation they have used for such and such a service. I have to get them to do it, and, well, I find I’m usually more reliable at getting these things actioned! /sighs. And a lack of a domain name means a new email address when they change ISP as they lack that incredibly useful layer of abstraction between what we all see and what’s really used behind the scenes. I try to limit my own exposure to two core addresses – RL me (for friends) and Online me (for groups and such-like).
Later I was able to turn my new Yahoo account’s secondary email address, my actual easy to remember/very obvious email address, into my primary address. Google isn’t really any different in this regard, creating a confusing mish-mash of gmail and actual email addresses that are really awkward to link together. In fact, for my situation the Google secondary email address verification process was a showstopper and I gave up at that point, thoroughly frustrated.
Frustration returned again tonight when I saw the range of redundant crap in my new Yahoo profile. It’s a kitchen sink of settings and options for this, that and the next thing. Mostly duplication from umpteen other sites doing similar things, and all wrapped up in a frankly messy user interface experience. Grrrr, grumble, mumble.
Dropbox, your files … everywhere
I’ve just started using Dropbox to access some of my common files at different locations. Its ability to synchronise my files between multiple disparate locations is just excellent. For a free signup you’ll get 2Gb of cloud-based disc space into which you can dump some of your stuff. A few PDFs later, however, and I was quickly running out of space. This forced me into sorting out my Dropbox folder into a neat file structure, pruning out what wasn’t strictly necessary. It’s a much more managable 900Mb now, with room to grow. You can pay for extra storage space if needs be though.
As an added bonus the contents of my Dropbox folder are readily accessible in many iPad applications such as GoodReader and Documents To Go, plus there’s a dedicated iPad Dropbox application. This makes accessing my files from the iPad or transferring data to the ‘pad a snap. Very handy for setting up a board game in the state you reached before you had to pack it all up in the previous session.
Highly recommended, and you can signup for free.
Podcast Book Recommendations
Continuing a recent trend of podcast book recommendations, I’ve just picked up copies of “This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession” by Daniel J. Levitin and “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain” by Oliver Sacks. The subject matter should be rather obvious from the titles.
I’m currently working on “This Is Your Brain On Music” in the garden at the moment and it wafts between somewhat heavy going music theory and general background on various brain related theories and observations. It’s an odd mix of musical definitions such as semi-tones, overtones, and fundamental frequencies, alongside optical illusions. Still, I now know about the white and black keys on a piano, something I never did before.
I wouldn’t say it’s fascinating reading yet. Some parts are more interesting than others and oftentimes it feels like a random wandering through a collection of the author’s thoughts, branching off into related areas before swooping back to his main topic.
Definitely a bit off the beaten track for my normal reading tastes.
A Tale Of Two Zombie Books
I love zombies. They make anything better in my opinion. Vampires, not so much.
A while back I was listening to a podcast when one of the podcasters commented that he was reading a couple of zombie-themed books. I immediately took interest and noted the titles and authors. Shortly after that they arrived from Amazon.
Unfortunately one of the books is in a larger format than typical paperbacks, something I find really aggravating as they don’t fit neatly on the bookshelf and, as far as I know, aren’t always ‘obvious’ from the online price. Publishers, stop with the mixed format sizing, please – I don’t get the need for it.
I’ll comment upon the two books in the order that I read them. There wasn’t any real preference for one over the other at the time, ultimately I just found one before the other on my bookshelf.
Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry
“Zombies – The New Bio-Weapon”
This is an action adventure thriller that might as well be made into a Hollywood summer blockbuster – it’s certainly written like one. Super action hero with a troubled past who can put down a group of top military specialists – the best of the best – inside 5 seconds, that kind of guy. He’s sooooo awesome, /deep sigh. Also, mysterious boss dude running the show that can get the team whatever they need. English bird as love interest. That kind of thing.
The plot appeals to me though. Terrorist scientists have created a means of infecting people, turning them into mindless zombies. Release one such weaponised human person and it spreads like wildfire into a pandemic. On the other side a super-secret US military organisation are trying to counter this plot against the US. Fight.
It’s all very gung-ho, whoop-ass action, told from the good and bad guy perspectives. As it says on the back of the book, “Patient Zero is a heartstopping techno-thriller, a coming together of 24 and 28 Days Later on the page.”
World War Z by Max Brooks
“An Oral History Of The Zombie War”
This is a much better paced and nuanced telling of a zombie world war. Told in the style of interviews with a great many different survivors it covers the initial outbreak in China, the spread across the world, the retreat, the fightback and the conclusion of the 10-year struggle. Stories come from all manner of people around the world, from South Korea to survivors in nuclear submarines. From Joe Ordinary to Military Pilot via Astronaut on the Space Station.
Each survivor tells their story in short individual chapters that together build a picture of events across the entire timeline. And their stories don’t interlock (except for a few character references when they’re made more famous during the blight), so you’re never attached to a character for too long. Each unique tale never outstays its welcome: the character is introduced, interviewed and his viewpoint explained before moving on to the next.
I found some tales more interesting than others. Musings on North Korea and the tough decisions that have to be made by governments were fascinating. Being individually quite short I was often left wondering what happened next or how some of the gaps were filled, but that wasn’t always the point.