You may remember some weeks back when I proposed an alternative to Rickrolling I dubbed flipsiding. I tried it a few times myself to somewhat amusing results, but never anything so calculated and elegant as a well-executed Rickroll.

Fortunately, my buddy Keith has really gotten into the spirit of the thing, and has been deploying several flipsides left and right. It got to the point where I suspected that he had a script that sent that YouTube link after every other interesting URL he sent me via IM. He also caught some friends and co-workers, I hear. My favorite, though, was a follow-up to an email about a GTA IV glitches video that Dan sent us, which led to this exchange:

From: Keith
Subject: Re: GTA IV Glitches
To: Dan, Jason, Phil

Some more hilarious videos of GTA glitches:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq64MJKwElw

From: Dan
Subject: Re: GTA IV Glitches
To: Keith
Cc: Phil, Jason

I am going to fucking murder you.
-Dan

I declare Keith the official Master Blaster of the day.

In my opinion, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man is easily on par with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. Robert Downey, Jr. is an ideal choice to play Tony Stark, the flawed and vulnerable superhero who is, in many ways, the anti-Bruce Wayne (whereas “Bruce Wayne” is arguably a facade that Batman wears, Stark really is shallow and petty until his life-changing experience). But perhaps, somewhat anticlimactically, many of the things that excited me the most in the movies were the hints of things to come in the future. Rhodey’s covetous glance at the Mark II suit (a harbinger of War Machine), and Stark’s final proclamation of the film (which I’m intrigued to see how they deal with in the sequel). And, of course, the super-secret after-the-credits ending which, if nothing else, actually has me interested in seeing the new Incredible Hulk movie, which promises a similar intertwining (and also so I can finally wipe my brain clear of the atrocious 2003 Ang Lee version).

Like Jason, I’m still working taking my first steps in the larger world of GTA IV. This being my first Grand Theft Auto game, I thought I’d share with you some of the valuable wisdom that I’ve stolen along the way, just like many a sweet ride.

I’ve been working on editing a certain video lately, and I kept getting frustrated that the text in the exported file wasn’t as clean as what I seemed to be working on in Final Cut Pro. I googled around a bit, found the solution, and, figuring this might come up again (for me or for others), decided I might as well share this tip here.

1. Export the file to the desktop. (I exported as a Quicktime movie.)
2. Open the file in Quicktime. (It’s set to open in FCP by default.)
3. Hit command-J.
4. In the list of tracks on the top of the dialog box, pick “Video Track.”
5. Click the “Visual Settings” tab, and check “High Quality” in the lower right.
6. Close this window and hit command-S to save.

Works like a charm. Thanks to kuma16 on CreativeCOW for the solution!

The other day, I got a handy tip from a guy on the Xbox escalated service number. This was, of course, after getting the goofball treatment from a couple people at the normal number, including one woman who insisted upon transferring me to the Xbox Live division against my protests, which led to me getting “disconnected” while on hold. But the guy at the escalated number was friendly, knowledgeable, and a gamer himself, even hazarding some “unofficial” guesses as to why my game was screwing up.

One possibility, he said, was that recovering my profile a lot might have messed a bit with my Assassin’s Creed save file. And I do recover my profile a lot—just about every time I play on Keith’s or Dan’s machines, which is every couple weeks or so, and then again when I get back home to my own machine.

Now, I don’t know if this is actually corrupting any of my files, but it is a pain in the arse to recover gamer profiles. It requires typing in your gamertag, email address, and password, and if you don’t have a little keyboard attachment, that takes awhile (and shows off your password to all who can follow the cursor). And then it takes a good 5–7 minutes just to load the stupid thing, which doesn’t sound so long, but is kind of a drag when you’re sitting in a room full of people waiting to get their murder on.

One handy solution: Go buy an Xbox memory card, and next time you recover your profile, use that as the storage device. Yes, it’s 20 or 30 bucks out of your pocket, and yes, it fills up a USB slot, but now you can take your profile around with ease and never recover it again. You can still put all your saved games and downloads on your regular hard drive.

Neat trick, huh? Just don’t tell Gizmodo.

The trailers probably showed off all the best action scenes already, but there was still plenty to enjoy. In retrospect, I’m surprised to realize just how little time (relative to other superhero movies, maybe) the movie spends showing Iron Man all suited up and fighting dudes. That’s okay, though, because Robert Downey Jr. is such a great Tony Stark. And for you fanboys and fangirls out there, it had some nice (but unobtrusive) comic book in-jokes, too. I won’t cringe when I they come back with the already-announced sequel.

The other day, I blogged about the most efficient way I’d found to get past the stupider elements of Xbox customer service. This turned out to be a mistake. Allow me to present an object lesson of how internet journalism might (not) work.

Read More…

Being on a space sci-fi kick, I’ve been wanting a book that was intelligently written enough to not bore or frustrate me, but light and fun enough to read before bed. Dan suggested Young Miles, a compendium of two novels and a short story from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, a serial adventure about a “deformed” nobleman in a military society (IN SPACE!). It focuses more on character interaction and mystery than your standard space opera, but still has its fair share of punch-ups and laser fights. (I’m convinced that Bujold plays or has played role-playing games, especially due to the familiar “an adventuring party suddenly forms” scenes.) Actually, it had been so long since I had read a book that wasn’t of the “single novel with a point” model that I kind of forgot how much fun it could be to read adventure fiction—not scrabbling around for an intellectual meaning, but just enjoying an adventure and its characters for being witty, unpredictable, and fun to observe, like sitting down for a few episodes of Firefly.

The series has a previous collection of novels, Cordelia’s Honor, but I liked the blurb on the back of this book better, and this focused on a different protagonist, so I started here. I plan return to that earlier one later, treating it as a prequel; for now, I’m already on the next book, just because it’s what the store had in stock.

Coolest things about the “robotic suit that magnifies human strength” described in this Scientific American article:

1. White shell, glowing blue joints, like a human Wii (but deadlier)
2. Made by company called CYBERDYNE—all caps AND a Terminator reference!
3. Plans for mass-production

God bless the Japanese.

So much effort went into making this a totally sweet toy that everyone seems perfectly willing to forgive it for its failures as a game. Hey, neat, you can bowl in the game! But I don’t want to take a virtual girl with boring dialog out on a bowling date. And hey, neat, random stuff just happens in the city sometimes! But that’s a pain in the ass when you’re driving said date home and the cops chase some random dude into the street, who then runs directly in front of your car, scaring your date so badly that she bails into moving traffic and gets killed instantly. Oh yeah, and you can’t just jump back to the quick save you did after picking her up and bowling because there are no quick saves—you have to drive back to your cousin’s apartment and sleep for six hours to save. If you want to undo the weirdly accidental death, you have to jump back in time before the date even started. Great. Time for more bowling!

Well, at least the multiplayer is pretty awesome. Too bad you have to play the single player (at least until the first of the infrequent autosaves), or else it loads the intro credits and cut scenes every single time you turn on the game. Why is that again? Oh, right—because you can only access the multiplayer mode through your cell phone in single-player mode, the most mind-bogglingly stupid game interface decision since trying to quit Assassin’s Creed. Granted, these are my impressions only after a couple days of playing, and I’d normally wait until finishing a game to write up a quick review—but honestly, I don’t know if I even want to bother with the single-player drudgery much longer, knowing how much fun the multiplayer can be.