I Need Some Spats

Tinkering with The Movies has been a joy.

It requires patience, large amounts of it -- it is not so much directing as it is remixing, so you must have the mindset of a DJ poring over samples, cutting and splicing and tweaking until everything is just so.

Some people might be disappointed to find that Sandbox mode doesn't even unlock everything, you still have to build up your studio and play the game -- though with considerable help. While I too would have liked all the moviemaking options laid out for me, I also find it fascinating to think of all the content that remains for me to discover.

And there is a lot of content.

What follows is a short-term wishlist:

1. Detailed light placement and color picker.

2. The ability to lay out routes for dolly shots and camera panning.

3. Freeze frames in postproduction.

I made a small film to celebrate my two-year wedding anniversary. I'm sure my wife wouldn't mind me sharing it (since it's uploaded on a public web page anyway).

Here you go.

And while it might still be debated by some whether or not videogames can make a person cry, I now know firsthand that things created with the aid of a videogame can turn on the waterworks.

Talk About a Trial

I decided to give the Star Wars: Galaxies Free Trial a go, because I'm a sucker and learned nothing from my initial experience with the game.

The installer works on a strange system whereby it puts up a completely arbitrary set of numbers to represent the time remaining to download -- and then those numbers increase at a steady rate.

I think at one point it told me that the download would finish a short time following the heat-death of the Universe.

I'm assuming that they are sending the information by way of a trail of ants marching their way through the modem cable, each ant carrying an orgone imprint of a 1 or 0 -- upon reaching my end, the ants self-immolate, the moment of their deaths transmitting the information encoded upon them through the ether, captured and translated into electrical signals by some type of Reichian collector.

Oh, and by the way: 200th post!