Just Alley

I just got this new iPhone app “Flight Control“, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. It’s an Air Traffic Control simulator where you route planes to land by drawing paths with your finger, and you have to avoid having the planes crash into one another. It’s not free, but it’s currently only 99 cents and I used to be a huge fan of “TRACON” on the Amiga so I thought I would try it out. It’s obviously not as deep as TRACON, but it’s pretty fun and I find that I seem to be enjoying it more as I play it more, it kind of grows on you. My high score so far is 43 planes landed, but boy does it get hectic trying to do that many. Prior to that run I think I was at 21. They have planes at three speeds that I’ve seen so far and helicopters. You have to land the jets on the long runway and the small planes on the short runway and the helicopters on the helipad, and since they travel at different speeds you have to watch that they wind up not running into one another as their paths cross. There’s no altitude separation, more’s the pity, but that does make the interface simpler. My biggest problem seems to be that I get a nice route set up with everybody running along in order and a plane comes in from the edges and my route is going too close to the edge and I have a collision as soon as the plane appears.

Anyway, I think it’s well worth the 99 cents and I really seem to be enjoying it. I hope the developers make a lot of money and make more games for us!

April Fools day is bittersweet for me. I never really got into the whole “prank” thing, but there were some jokes that were funny. Sun Microsystems used to have a fake web page on April 1st and the fake page always amused me. Alas, they don’t do that any more. Too corporate now for that bit of silliness, I suppose.

But April 1st was also my parents anniversary. And I loved to relate the story of how, as they left the wedding chapel, my father turned to my mother and said, deadpan, “April Fools!”. And she always said that she took off her shoe and threw it at him. And they both told this story with such laughter and light in their eyes whenever they told it, a wonderful moment in their life and a great story for the kids.

But now April 1st is different. The very existence of the holiday means everywhere you go people talk about it, and I can’t think of the jokes without thinking of my mother and how much I miss her. It’s just after midnight and so it’s officially my parents anniversary, a day no longer celebrated in our family. He has a new wife now, and I don’t even know if I can mention the anniversary to him. He probably feels it more than I do, he was there after all. But it seems so impolite to mention the anniversary of his first marriage, it feels like it would be seen as a slight to his new wife.

Nonetheless, I am reminded of how much I miss my mother and I wanted to tell the story of the April Fools day wedding one more time, even though instead of making me laugh, it now makes me cry. Happy Anniversary Mom. I miss your laughter.

Here’s a picture of my mother and I, and the thing that always gets me about this picture is how all my memories of her are of her smiling and laughing, and this, this picture of the two of us taking in one of those photo booths in a mall, turns out to be a picture that I always associate with her, that is emblematic of her to me.

Mom and Pat

Went and saw “Monsters vs Aliens” today in IMAX 3D. I have to say it was the cleanest 3D I’ve ever seen, with almost none of the ghosting you occasionally get when something gets “too close” for your eyes to ignore the alternate image. This is likely due to the fact that it hardly sent anything towards you, but mostly used 3D to create depth into the screen. The opening panorama of the rings of Saturn was simply stunning and the scene with the F-15s attacking the alien robot made me really hope that someday we get a solid aerial dogfight movie in 3D!

The movie was decent, with far more humor than I was expecting and lots of little nods to the SF and Monster film fan. There were Close Encounters, E.T, Star Trek and even a Spaceballs reference. The “Monsters”, of course, were patterned after the monsters from the ’50s movies, including “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman”, “The Fly”, and “The Blob”. I laughed more than I expected to, and the animation was top-notch.

Dreamworks Animation plays second-fiddle to Pixar and this movie doesn’t change that, but it does show them moving in the right direction, and closing the gap a little bit. I highly recommend it, especially if you can see it in IMAX 3D.

I do not understand Twitter, I admit. What, really, is the point of following a feed of someone answering “what am I doing” all day? “Got Up”. “Went to the bathroom”. “Went to work”. Really? This is entertaining somehow? I can’t imagine a more banal pastime, except perhaps watching Golf.

Nonetheless, I was reading Glenn Greenwalds blog and he had a similar comment, except that he had an update that someone had pointed him to Christopher Walkens Twitter feed and said he enjoyed it so I went and read it and it is absolutely marvelous. Walken doesn’t bother telling us mundane things, and most of his posts have a sort of twisted quality that make them well worth reading. Here’s just one excerpt so you can get a feel for it:

She said I should talk more about my cat; that people like that sort of thing here. I didn’t know I still had a cat. Explains a few things.

With stuff like that, I might have to reconsider my opinion of Twitter. That is definitely worth following.

Edit: It turns out that the Christopher Walken Twitter account was a fake and Twitter has Suspended it. I hope whoever was writing it starts his own feed, because it was very funny, even if it wasn’t really Christopher Walken.

My nephew and I went and saw “The Watchmen” last night in IMAX. I had re-read the graphic novel in preparation but he had never read it, and knew nothing about it except the previews. Like many fans I went in with a mixture of hope and dread. Hope, because Watchmen is so brilliant and it would be amazing to see it on the big screen, and dread because…well, I couldn’t imagine how it could be turned into a movie. A mini-series, perhaps, but a movie? The book is just too dense for your standard Hollywood film.

I have to admit that I was impressed. Sure, it’s not a fast-paced action ride, and it has some slow parts, but so does the book. All that exposition has to go somewhere, right? And Watchmen, as I said, is dense. It has a LOT of exposition. I don’t mind the changes at all (unlike, say, “The Two Towers” where I begrudgingly forgive them), as they were concessions to the film format. They don’t even attempt to shove it into a standard hour-and-a-half film but give us two hours and forty-five minutes, and it’s two hours and forty-five minutes of “wow”.

I was worried that those who had not read the book would be lost, or would not enjoy it. It’s not “Iron Man”, after all. It turns the entire idea of superheroes upside down. So I was most interested to see how my nephew would react. As the credits rolled he leaned over and said “This is an AMAZING movie”. He loved it. He followed it, time juxtapositions and all, and he even picked up on things I did not expect the average moviegoer to get if they hadn’t read the book (he identified Rorschachs civilian identity before the reveal, for instance). He, obviously, did not pick up on the 1985 references, not having been alive at the time, but I certainly enjoyed the little celebrity cameos, and the recreation of “The McLaughlin Group” in particular.

I am still worried about the general audience reaction. A couple next to me left after less than an hour. Another family brought young children (THIS IS NOT A MOVIE FOR YOUNG CHILDREN!!!!!), and at least one woman found herself unable to refrain from commenting every time Dr Manhattan appeared in the nude, almost like she was keeping a running count of penis appearances. I don’t think the general public really understands what this movie is. There were an awful lot of fans there, though, who knew what it was going in. I worried that the movie won’t make new fans, but my nephew told me on the way home that he was going to go to the store and buy the book to read it and he never, ever, buys a book to read after he’s seen the movie. He wants to make an exception for this one. He’s also planning on dragging his girlfriend to see it when he goes back.

So I end with  more hope and less dread. Exactly as Adrian Veidt intended.