Blogrhythm

The Happening, the latest movie by M Night Shyamalan heads off in the second week of June, and languishes. Mark Wahlberg stars as a teacher who is on the run from something happening. The thing that “is happening” starts in city parks and apparently disorients, stops, and causes suicidal tendencies. People stab themselves in the neck with pens, they drive into trees, they jump in front of lawnmowers, the dive off buildings and the list goes on. Then of course there are those that choose a slow and painful death who watch any of the M Night Shyamalan’s movies between Signs and this most recent one.

There is a lot of watching the wind….closeups of Zooey Deschanel’s face as she looks freaked out, and a lot of bewilderment and speculation about what is causing “the happening.” The fact that it is not global, but regional is part of the thing that has everyone puzzled. Is it a terrorist attack? Or is it a natural phenom like the blooms of alagae in the ocean that suddenly creeped up out of nowhere.

I knew we were in trouble in this movie when early on Wahlberg is asking students in his science class about theories concerning the disappearance of honey bees and then remarking that “The fact is, we don’t know what causes it, but later we will write down our theories in science book like they were facts.” I knew this was a Shyamalan rationalization.

The problem with this movie, and this is the spoiler, is there is no satisfying answer to this question. I think this is because Shyalaman wants to get away from “the big twist” endings of his movies because he realizes that as far as that goes…he has had about two hits in this matter, and its hard to keep coming up with something that keeps people on their toes.

And that is a problem, because we expected something of a twist. The twist in this case is there is no twist. There are guesses, speculations. And in the movies, unless it is a movie about a historical event, we really don’t want something that has no real satisfying ending…especially in the horror genre.

There were great moments throughout the movie. Some good acting from Wahlberg and Deschanel, but 2/3 of the way through the film it felt like the writers packed up and went on strike. So, you are left there with this hollow feeling at the end of the movie. The satisfying end to this review is, don’t go see this unless you are a big Shyamalan fan and just have nothing else better to do than go to the movies…you know, like me.

Harrison Ford reprises his role as Indiana Jones in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Once again George Lucas managed to take a perfectly good movie franchise and make material that should feel comfortable and warm seem alien and awkward. From the opening credits there are things that make the movie seem a bit “off.”

First of all, I think it was set in the wrong era. Because of the Elvis song, the nuclear age references, it didn’t feel right. Dragging Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in the age of the Cold War felt like grave robbing. But there would be no way to explain Harrison Ford’s age otherwise which definitely screams out that they should never have even made this movie. Or, even more unlikely, they find a replacement for Ford similar to a replacement to James Bond.

Secondly, the CGI of this movie is even more noticeable and painful than the Star Wars prequels. Part of what made the Indiana Jones films great is that they were a departure from the alien worlds of Star Wars. They used models, green screen, rubber snakes, and it felt “right” in those movies. CGI in an indiana Jones movie would be as alien as making the Big Chill take place in space…or replacing Jaws with a CGI version.

In this movie, the CGI sticks out like a sore thumbs from the gophers/prairie dogs, to the semi sentient monkeys who apparently were patriots, to the scampering cgi ants. It turned the movie into something artificial and surreal.

Because of the CGI that was at times gratuitous, it brought down the rest of the film making it sub par and torpedoing it below the other three movies by more than the span of decades. While I am not strongly saying that it ruined by childhood by seeing this movie, it did not make me think warm feelings about anything else Lucas might release in the theaters.

In World of Warcraft there is a time and a place when we gather and fight each other known as PVP or Player vs. Player. If you are on a PVE server or Player Vs. Environment server, you probably are not too interested in round the clock PVP play: most of your day is spent gathering stuff for quests, like centaur ears(nasty), as well as killing creatures and demons and other denizens of the world. You also get XP by exploring new places, and donating materials to the local alliance faction.

There are two types of servers, or realms. Think of realms as identical but separate versions of a world. Or perhaps, it would be like different hard drives that contain the same data for a world, but has different characters or players on each of the realms or servers. The PVE server is one where you voluntarily go flagged for attacking another player. On the PVP realms, you are only unflagged in uncontested safe areas, such as alliance/horde towns and cities. The rest of the time you’re on your own.

In the PVE server I am on, PVP occurs a number of different ways. You enter an enemy city, and you will get flagged for PVP. You heal someone else in battle with a player of the enemy factions, you get flagged. You attack a player who is flagged, or a guard of a major enemy town or city, you get flagged. There is also a glitch whereby an unflagged person can get attacked by a hunter’s snakes and thus will become flagged and summarily killed, but that is unusual, and a player can get banned for such activities.

I am not a big fan of PVP, I think I could also be said to not be that good at it. Still, I despise the practice of high level characters going to low level towns and basically going “War of the Worlds” on those towns, killing quest givers, flight masters, etc. So, I make it kinda my duty while playing an alt(alternative character) of a lesser level to turn into my level 70 rogue(my main character) when this occurs.

The other night, as luck would have it, such a thing occurred while my dwarf paladin was heading back from a quest in Desolace. Nigel’s point was getting hammered. If it had been by the level 38 alone, I would have let it go. The town was definitely a challenge for a level 38 player, and it would have been admirable had the blood elf come alone. Sadly, she (I am estimating here since a lot of dudes apparently play female characters) came along with a level 70 hunter who mowed down pretty much everything in town that could synthetically or artificially breath.

So I sat my dwarf down in the inn and became the level 70 rogue, and had to fly like six minutes to reach Nigel’s from Darnassas (This is a long way for game time…something that I think the hordie was counting on to dissuade retribution). Six minutes later and I thought perhaps the hordie had left, but didn’t. The level 38 wisely went unflagged; not the hunter. So it was vindication time for my rogue. He killed the level 70 twice, once as he was trying to flee the scene. Both times, I avoided the hunters pet and went after Mr. Ranged attacker with a sense of exhilarated glee.

It could have ended there, but didn’t. The thing about PVP is that it is a coin toss. I have been mauled by level 70 hunters, and I have mowed a couple over in my time, and this one I could tell wanted an easy time of it and was not expecting trouble. It doesn’t end there though, the guy logged on using a level 15 alliance alt and berated me for ending his fun.

There are constant insult tactics used when an enemy player gets his karmic return a little earlier than expected. This person called me uptight, immature, too serious, cold, callous, etc. The first thing he asked me though was if I had no life. That actually made me laugh about the South Park WoW episode where the people from Blizzard sat around a table and asked the question “How do you kill that which has no life?”

With PVP, you got to expect anything. And if you whack anything, you have to expect coming whackation. It is going to happen. You might escape here and there, if you are lucky, but it’s going to happen. Yes, it is just a game, and that is precisely my point. I like getting miffed when hordies attack low level towns and then I get a chance to retaliate. It is FUN to me and I also feel like I am performing a service. The re-spawn times for the return of these soldiers and quest givers is a mild annoyance, but when it is my character waiting for that quest giver to rise from the dead, it amps up the irritation.

From an honor standpoint, I think if I were to rp an alliance character the thing is that I should defend those that cannot defend themselves. Although it is hard to get really into the Role Playing aspect of the game when horde characters have names like “Jason” and “Cheeseburger.” What kind of name is Jason anyhow? Be like me going through a great effort to be an alien on a different world and name myself…well…Jim.

The bottom line is, when you go PVP you can’t cry over spilled milk. The damage is done. You can resurrect at a graveyard, wait out your five minutes and flee the town when you go unflagged. In the end, it is all part of the game.

Somewhere between a chat client, a blog, email, and facebook lies twitter. Who could know that something so simple could also be something so complex and far reaching. As in a place to get questions answered, to stay current with the state of “social media” or Web 2.0. A place to meet with a diversity of individuals but with some similarities that cross cultural and geographical bounds.

I have probably been “really” part of it for about a month now and I see that part of the fun is having a lot of people to follow. You get to see the feeds roll by, their interests where they lay. One person that I follow is very much into the Chinese culture, another is into the debunking of Twitter and other “Web 2.0” memes, and another simply wants to give her play by play at what happened to the Junior prom they threw.

Twitter has the ability of being a chat client without feeling the pressures that go along with having a chat client. I love to chat, have done it since the early days of AOL and have to say one of the hardest things about chatting is the etiquette. It is hard to leave, hard to know how involved you have to be in it. Twitter, you don’t have to answer right away, you really don’t have to answer at all. You can just give your own part in the pluralistic version of what your day is like at 140 characters or less.

It also has some of the same pitfalls then as chat. Flame wars that can erupt. Only this time, the audience potentially can be a lot bigger and more attentive than a chat room or a forum. Because unlike a chat room, you follow who you follow, that is your niche, and a flame topic cannot be buried in the depths of a forum somewhere far away. There are no official chat rooms, another good thing. You can ignore people or “unfollow” them if need be, so there is that benefit as well.

As far as being an email client, twitter can solve that as well. You can group together as friends, coworkers, and just drop them a line about where you are and what you are doing. I also think that Twitter is beneficial by being a little more informal than an email or a form letter as well.

Although it will probably not replace any of these services, it might make things like giving work updates, light tech support, etc., a whole lot easier. In a way, it is also like subscribing to certain channel.

I finished the Audible version of “The Appeal” this past week with Michael Beck at the helm as narrator and as far as Grisham books go, it had me conflicted. The first thing I think I picked up in the book is that the head of a chemical company, or rather, the primary shareholder of a chemical company was the anti-hero. The second was that it was not going to end well. Anyone looking to get the satisfying ending of “The Runaway Jury” or “The Firm” will be disappointed with this one as it sticks fairly close to reality.

Grisham has taken a lot of giants in the past such as big tobacco, Jury tampering, Insurance Fraud, Torte reform. This book again deals with Torte reform, but also deals with the politicization of a branch of government, the supreme court, that should above all things not be politicized. The question as to whether a judicial body should even be “elected” is a good one. But I think no matter what, there will be politics in selecting justices because somewhere along the line an elected official of a certain political ideology will be the one doing the appointments.

The best balance in my view no matter if election or appointment are involved is that the justice themselves simply legislates the laws that the legislative branch makes but with also with the realization that despite the “word” of law, one must be able to read the spirit and context in which it was written.

The only thing worse than big government, or on par with big government, is big business.

Grisham deals with a lot of hot button issues in the course of his book like Gay marriage, Gun control, the death penalty. It de