This video consists of nothing but every curse word in every episode of The Sopranos. It takes 27 minutes.

[Tags: sopranos remix ]

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Video games have gotten one rev away from awesome. While the graphics on PC games are not yet truly photo-realistic, they are good enough that, in the hands of superb graphic artists, they are not only immersive, they are stylistically interesting. Bioshock is a terrific example of this. Far Cry 2 is realistic enough that you want to pull over and watch the scenery now and then. The new Call of Duty is visually good enough that killing Nazi and Japanese soldiers was too gruesome. The human figure, facial expressions, and even dirt and dust are getting very close to being good enough for drama.

So, here’s the movie I’d like to see using these tools. It’s a drama, possibly a mystery. Multiple narrative threads and interdependencies. All set within a single city, or in sites that I can teleport between (unless travel becomes more rewarding than it is in most games). I want the characters to enact the plot. And I want to be free to wander around the city, eavesdropping. I want to be a ghost, a disembodied eye and set of ears, a camera, moving around the room where characters are now interacting, choosing where to look and who to listen to. The first time through, I’m not going to be in the right spots at the right time. Eventually, though — and perhaps with some guidance from the plot or extrinsically (“Go here now!” arrows) if necessary — I will see and hear everything, and I will understand what happened.

I don’t want to interact. I don’t want to choose my own ending or help characters find the key or move the crate. I want to watch a movie, but be completely free to move through its settings as I want. And, perhaps the software will let me record the movie as I’ve seen it, and share my path with others.

I wouldn’t know how to write a movie like this. Maybe it can’t be done in a way that makes for a satisfactory experience. But I’m curious. I’d like to see one. [Tags: movies video_games theater art narrative ]

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Fresh from last August (so I’m a little slow) comes the Demake competition, in which you’re asked to turn a high-power computer game into a weenie side scroller or less. Grand Theft Auto becomes Large Scale Vehicular Stealing. Portal becomes Super 3D Portal for the Atari 2600, which could not be any less 2D if it tried (well, literally). S.T.A.L.K.E.R becomes S.T.A.C.K.E.R, a version of tetris.

Quite droll.

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1. Heath Ledger for Best Actor Oscar? Not once you’ve seen Milk.

2. Trying to rank superb actors in vastly different types of roles is pretty ridiculous.

Please pick #1 or #2. They’re inconsistent, but I’m pretty sure one of them is right.

[Tags: heath_ledger sean_penn oscars milk dark_knight ]

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Great set of user-chosen top animal videos of the year over at the Wired blog.

It makes you realize how inadequate our categories are for understanding animals. For example, is the gibbon “playing”? There’s no way we can answer that question, because if the gibbon could speak, we couldn’t understand it.

But the videos are durn cute!

[Tags: animals videos wittgenstein ]

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Did I ever mention Tic Tac Two? It’s a version of Tic Tac Toe I invented about ten years ago (which probably means 15 years ago), that has only two twists on the original. First, you have to have two counters in a square to own it. Second, once per game each player can deploy two counters in a single turn. I suppose there’s a variant in which you can deploy the two in separate boxes.

Anyway, Tic Tac Two is more fun than Tic Tac Toe, although so is counting.

(Way back when, I wrote a program to let a computer play against a human. The only interesting thing about it — and I was very proud of this — was that the computer automatically played 10,000 random games with itself to determine what the winning moves are in every situation. Purely for flash, when it was going through this data-building exercise, I had it display its moves, so that it looked like that scene from WarGames, except in this version, Global Thermonuclear War looked a lot like Tic Tac Toe.)

[Tags: games tictactoe tic_tac_toe ]

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Every inspirational moment — well, 40 of them — you will ever need, all wrapped in one maudlin, ridiculous package:

All I can add is: Hang in there, baby

[Tags: victory mashup ]

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I haven’t listend to this (I’m in an Amtrak station riding on some good soul’s free but flaky wifi), but here’s a podcast interview I did a couple of days ago as part of the LeWeb prep ‘n’ PR. I talk sort of about what I’m going to be talking about there, which (unless and until I rewrite it yet again) has something to do with leadership as the age of information ends. In the current draft of my overheads (Yes, I called them “overheads.” I’m old.), the connection seems to be that both the Information Age and leadership as we’ve generally known it assume/create scarcity. When the scarcity goes away, so does the primacy of information and the old idea of leadership.

I’ll try to say more about this as my overheads (Yes, overheads, dammit! And dittos that come from the mimeo machine!) go from draft to locked-in objects of fear and self-loathing. [Tags: leweb leweb2008 leadership information_age abundance overheads mimeo ]

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Amazon’s own review of the director’s cut of Oliver Stone’s Alexander (the worst major movie ever?) includes the following note:

In Stone’s final cut, epic battles remain chaotic (although Alexander’s strategy is somewhat easier to follow, with on-screen titles indicating left, right, and center during his army’s greatest maneuvers)…

Yes, those are the sort of advanced techniques they just don’t teach you in film school.

[Tags: oliver_stone film alexander bad_movies ]

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Saturday Night Live, which I have been watching since its first Saturday night, is the finest Tivo show around: Unwatchable live, but often excellent if watched with a fast forward button. And now that SNL is posting many of its segments online, I thought I’d save you those precious fast-forward moments by reviewing the links, in best-first order:

Clear-Rite ad. Loved it. Might have loved it more if they’d ended it before Tim’s entrance, but I’m not sure. Definitely will be on the Best of Kristin Wiig reel.

Country James Bond. Tim McGraw is excellent in this fairly funny, wandering sketch.

Keith Morrison. Funny, and would have been funnier if I’d known this was an imitation of a real guy.

Blizzard Man. Unfunny recurring character, but this one was slightly chucklish. T-Pain and Ludacris were good in it.

Turkeys. Good example of sketches that give SNL a bad name. Not funny.

Bill Clinton. Bill is a horndog. Wow, is this tired, lazy and not funny. Embarrassingly bad.

NBC is also providing an address by Rahm Emanuel as a Web extra. Predictable but slightly funny. I’d put it a giant step above Turkeys in the list.

So, now I’ve saved you 83 minutes of your precious time. You’re welcome. [Tags: snl saturday_night_live reviews comedy ]

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