I tried the Lancaster Brewing Company’s Milk Stout about three months ago. It was solid, but I knew then that I would need to wait awhile and try the beer again in order to pass judgement. Today, I picked up a six pack at the local grocery store and opened a bottle after dinner. This beer is fantastic. Although not at all a session beer, it is eminently drinkable. Granted, this is a real beer and not Keystone Lite, so it will fill you up, but it doesn’t sit quite as heavy as other darker brews. The taste separates this beer from what you’re used to drinking: it’s got a bit of an acidic bite when it first hits your tongue (lactic acid, I presume? ), but that quickly gives way to flavors of burnt caramel — similar to bittersweet chocolate. It finishes with a hint of coffee.
Lancaster Milk Stout
January 19th, 2010Quick Movie Reviews – “The Lovely Bones”, “Whip It”, “Up in the Air”
January 13th, 2010Director Peter Jackson of “Lord of the Rings” fame is back with his first movie since the bold, but ultimately disappointing, remake of “King Kong”. ”The Lovely Bones”, based on the book of the same name, revolves around the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl and her transitional journey through the afterlife. Her story is told in parallel with that of her family’s, who are struggling to cope with her untimely death.
Despite some gorgeous visuals and great performances – notably by Stanly Tucci playing the creepy-as-hell murderer – “The Lovely Bones” stumbles over a lot of secondary character development and has a lot of trouble maintaining a proper pace. There are many tense scenes in this movie in which Peter Jackson’s directorial skills shine, but the rest of the time, the film is unfocused. Perhaps the content suffered some severe trimming when it moved from the pages to the screen?
Not recommended.
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Actress Drew Barrymore makes her directorial debut with 2009’s “Whip It”. Starring Ellen Page as a high school girl who decides to take up roller derby-ing (derby-ing?) both to fit in socially and to vent her frustrations with her overbearing mother. Nothing really new here: Ellen Page is playing a slightly subdued version of every character she’s ever played thus far in cinema, and the story is pretty much your basic high school coming-of-age tale. Despite that, I enjoyed the movie. The derby scenes were a lot of fun and the supporting cast is often at least a bit humorous. The cast looked like they were having a lot of fun on set and that energy translates onto the screen.
Recommended.
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“Up in the Air” is the best film that Jason Reitman has directed and may be the best drama of 2009. Here is George Clooney at the top of his game playing a man who is handsome, charming, a bit mysterious, and deeply damaged. His job requires him to be on the road constantly, so much so that he feels more comfortable in busy airports and luxury hotels than he does in his own home. He prefers his life to fit into a carry-on bag. At a hotel bar, he meets another traveler, a middle-aged woman and the two flirt by comparing promotional airline cards and the size of their respective sky mile balances.
I won’t discuss the plot in any further length, but the movie is less about narrative and more about character. There is very little that “grounds” Clooney — he may be able to travel light, but that comes at the expense of having nothing of substance on which to rely. It’s a great performance, and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t garner him and Oscar nomination.
Recommended.
A Drunken Clown Juggling Pineapples
December 8th, 2009He knows how I feel.
“Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune”: Thoughts
October 19th, 2009Released in 2007, “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune” (Naughty Dog) was one of the first games for the PS3 that made gamers sit up and pay attention to the console after its lackluster launch. The game was, at the time, quite beautiful and still holds up well today, although it’s level of detail has become common among big-budget titles.
An action/adventure/platformer/cover-based-shooter, “Uncharted” is a modern fusion of Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones. The premise is nothing new: a charismatic treasure hunter searches for a mythical (and priceless) piece of history while being shot at by rivals and narrowly escaping impossible situations. Oh, and there’s a girl, too, of course. And Nazis. If this sounds like the plot of your favorite Indiana Jones flick, then you’ve got the idea. “Uncharted” borrows its themes liberally from Indy. Thankfully, the game avoids degenerating into a mindless shooter in the final stages (as many 3rd-person action/adventure titles often do) and keeps the plot moving at a steady pace throughout. Yes, the final two chapters of the game feel rushed, but overall the thematic of the construction of the game is a step ahead of most.
The gameplay is a hybrid design, consisting mostly of a “Gears of War” style cover-shooter and partly of a Tomb Raider/Prince of Persia exploration/puzzle solving aspect. There are a few vehicle sequences, but these don’t last long and are fairly enjoyable. By today’s standards, the shooter part of the game is the roughest. Throwing grenades is an exercise in frustration and it’s just poor game design that the player is not given a targeting reticule when aiming from behind cover. Even so, this makes the game irksome in only the most intense of gun battles.
“Uncharted” has great music. It was recorded by an actual orchestra at the Skywalker Sound studios. Although it is a critical component to the overall experience of entertaining, music is often overlooked or undervalued by many video game productions. Many times, you’ll get a single theme or two that just repeat through the entire game (see: Halo), but “Uncharted” has separate compositions for many scenarios that compliment one another beautifully and experiment playfully with the game’s main theme.
The voice acting is also superb. Naughty Dog (the game’s publisher) brought in — *gasp* professionals — to do the voice work. These aren’t the Seth Green style “Oh it would be cool to be in a video game” voice actors — these people must have taken their jobs seriously because they put out a quality product.
“Uncharted” is an awesome action/adventure game. The entire time I was playing, I kept thinking “this is what Tomb Raider should have become”. If nothing else, the game was definitely more entertaining than Indiana Jones 4.
Virginia Baseball 2010 Flash Project
October 19th, 2009Because of the Cavalier Baseball team’s 2009 College World Series run, the hype surrounding the 2010 season has been phenomenal. We here at UVa Athletics felt like we should do something special for our initial season ticket offering, so we put together a flash site that was a little bit more entertaining than the traditional “here’s how to order your tickets!” website. I was responsible for the motion graphics compositing, most of the initial asset production (artwork), and all of the ActionScrip 3 coding. Video services provided the intro/promo video as well as the background music. Our promotions department supplied the text and several of the player cutouts.
It’s a pretty cool little piece considering it was put together in a few days. Check it out if you’ve got a minute or two to spare: http://www.virginiabaseball2010.com/
Playstation 3 – Quick Impressions
October 16th, 2009After salivating over “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune” when it first came out back in 2007, I decided that I would eventually need to get a Playstation 3. I never owned the original Playstation, but picked up a PS2 when GTA3:SA was released (I then sold both the console and the game at only a $20 loss after I finished the game). Because of the PS3’s capabilities as a Blu-ray player, I decided it would be a nice addition to the Xbox 360 once I got the cash. After reading that Naughty Dog was planning on making the “Uncharted” series a trilogy, I tentatively planned on picking up the console once Uncharted 2 was released.
“Uncharted 2: Among Thieves” was released this past Tuesday and, on Wednesday, I purchased a new Playstation 3 (the slimmer, 120GB model). After connecting the console to the internet and downloading the latest system update from Sony, I popped in the first game in the Uncharted series and waited eagerly for the game to load.
Nothing happened.
After doing some basic troubleshooting and then giving Sony Tech Support a quick call, they determined that the blu-ray drive was probably shot, or at least faulty. I took it back to Best Buy the next day and exchanged it for another console. That one has worked perfectly so far.
I’ll post some impressions of Uncharted and Uncharted 2 once I have some time to sit down and play them, but here are some quick observations (mostly comparisons vs. the Xbox 360) about the PS3:
- The PS3 wallops the Xbox in aesthetic quality. It looks better sitting on the shelf under the television. The white LEDs are nice.
- Rechargeable wireless controller is nice, though my irrational hate for the dualshock has not changed. The 360 controllers just feel perfect in my hand. The dualshock isn’t far behind, but I wish it felt a bit more “solid”.
- The new Xbox 360 menu works better than the PS3 system menu
More stuff coming down the road eventually.
WBB vs. Tennessee – Simple Flash Project
October 13th, 2009Today, I finished a promotional Flash project that I’ve been working on for a few days. I hadn’t used Flash seriously for about four years (at least — actual dates are fuzzy), so I had a bit of catching up to do. I’d done a few projects with basic AS3, which is a far more sophisticated language than the Action Script versions before it. It’s a little trickier to pick up, but far more rewarding to work with.
This was also my first serious try at pre-rendering movies in After Effects and then importing them into Flash. I really didn’t know After Effects, but with the help of some great online resources, I was feathering my masks like a pro. I already realize that I did a lot wrong for this project (my next project is already far better because of it), but at the end of the day, I’m satisfied with what I did for the amount of time I had to do it (like a couple of days).
Flash CS4 is fantastic. It’s so much nicer to work with than any version before it. Blending modes work really well and PNG transparency (from Photoshop PNG-24s) are damn near perfect. Granted, I’m sure a lot of this stuff was implemented in earlier versions of Flash, but I hadn’t seriously tried any motion graphics stuff with it since like.. um.. Flash 5? 6? I dunno, but it was back before AS3 and it just wasn’t much fun.
As with any promotional project at UVa, many people need to give their approval before it goes live. Below is my initial draft of the site’s layout:
This was my reference for the flash animation. It changed fairly drastically in appearance (but is still obviously related) after a few key people had their say, but it still survived mostly intact. Below is a link to the final product. I’ll be posting a much cooler flash project in the very near future, so stayed tuned for more.
Photos of the Bike
October 12th, 2009Just a few quick photos of the bike. I’m pretty sure that my Skyline Drive photo shoot isn’t going to happen — it gets damn-cold up in the mountains and — trust me — even 50F is downright freezing on a bike when you’re going 55+ mph.
Dumping HyTek Hosting
October 12th, 2009I’d been with HyTek Hosting for about 3 years now. They came highly recommended via the SomethingAwful.com forums, and, at the beginning of things, they were great. In the last 6-8 months, however, I noticed that my site was experiencing increased downtime and poor performance. Several support tickets later, I’ve decided to take my business elsewhere. When your web host’s response to your website being down is: “We restarted the server — everything looks good now,” you know it’s time to get the hell out of Dodge. (Explanation: there is really no reason why a professional web host should be “restarting [production] servers” on a regular basis.)
The latest-and-greatest host around, according to the Forums, seems to be NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Granted, they wouldn’t be terribly useful for high-volume stuff, but for a personal website such as this, I’ve found them to be great thus far. I’m currently doing the actual hosting of the site myself, but NFS.net made the process of transferring my domain and getting the nameservers straight surprisingly simple. If you know your shit, this is definitely a great place to host a personal site.
The site is currently running on a Dell Optiplex GX280 with 2GB of ram / CentOS / Apache2.
MSF Course – Retrospective
August 24th, 2009After completeing the MSF’s Basic Rider Course earlier today, I figured it might be a good idea to share my thoughts and highlights of this mildy intense (Oxymoron alert!) weekend.
Day 1
This was a classroom “day” consisting of four hours in a local highschool classroom. We were given handbooks and stepped through them, answering simple questions in groups of approximately six people. This was a gigantic waste of four hours, considering that, in anticipation of the course, I had already read the handbook, which is available on the MSF’s website.
Day 2
Arriving early, I was greeted by my two instructors (both of who would’ve been visually recognized by anybody as “biker dudes”). After the group assembled, we ran through a few basic “rules of the range” before choosing our bikes. I, naturally, chose a Honda Rebel 250. As we started to identify the controls (a prerequiste step before we were allowed to mount the bikes), the rain began to fall. It was roughly 1:15pm. The downpour would not abate until roughly 3:15pm. We learned about things like “the friction zone” and “slow-look-press-roll” during periods of both light rain and thunderstorms. Despite not being waterproof, I was well-dressed, thanks to helpful advice from the good people over on the SomethingAwful.com forums. Rain aside, I had a good time during Day 2. I learned a bit — mostly that I needed to trust the bike and not be afraid to lean during the corners.
Day 3
The fun began here. It was as good of a day as one could hope for during the middle of August in Virginia: 80-degrees with low humidity under partly-cloudy skies. We took a few “warm-up” laps on the bike and I’m sure that I was grinning like an idiot the entire time. Now that the road surface was dry, I wasn’t afraid to push it through the corners and really feel the speed (even though I doubt that I ever broke 20mph). Our exercises on Day 3 were more aggressive than in Day 2 (regarding what we were expected to perform). At the end of the day, we went through the final riding evaluations one-at-a-time. There were four tests:
(1) “Figure-8″ — in a rectangle, we had to make two U-turns at low speed. This was easily the toughest required maneuver that we were required to perform. Oddly enough, I had been having a pretty easy time of it during practice, but when it came time to perform my run during the test, I ended up putting a foot down (5pt off).
(2) “Swerve” — we were asked to accelerated to about 15mph and then perform an emergency swerve to the right. I lost no points on this and had been doing it fine all day. Actually, I thought it was alot of fun.
(3) “Quick stop” — we were asked to accelerate to about 15mph and then stop as quickly as possible once we passed a set of cones. During the stop, we had to down-shift into first gear and stop using both front and rear brakes. Although it sounds easily, I’d actually had the most difficulty doing this exercise smoothly during practice. When it came time to do my test run, however, I nailed it. I lost no points and seriously did an awesome job of stopping quickly without locking my rear wheel.
(4) “Turn at speed” — we had to speed up, slow down for a 135-degree turn, and look and accelerate properly through the turn. This was fun and I’d been having a good job performing it throughout the day, but I ended up losing three points because I didn’t go fast enough. :(
Still, I passed the test with less than ten points deducted. I earned a perfect score on the (extremely easy) written test. I now have my Virginia motorcycle Driver’s license and have successfully completed the MSF Basic Rider Course. I have to do some basic maintence on my bike before I am ready to take her out into traffic for the first time, but I hope to do that and get some riding in during the week.
Updates to follow.