BloodRayne. You say that like it's a bad thing.

Yesterday, after getting my hair cut I wandered over to the Half-Price near the salon and cashed in the last of my credit from two bags full of old books, and found a super-cheap remaindered copy, still new in the box, of BloodRayne. With all the hoopla, and being down one first-person shooter to play, I picked it up.

And now I understand all of the reviews. Reviewers either uniformly liked it or hated it. There was no middle ground. I mean, consider the pros and cons.

• Con: you play a chick.
• Pro: you a really freaking hot vampire chick.
• Con: The combat moves are as complex as a martial arts game.
• Pro: The end moves have satisfyingly gory aesthetics.
• Con: game play slows down when she feeds on blood.
• Pro: she makes great orgasmic moans when she does this.
• Con: The game engine is old, with a primitive sense of camera.
• Pro: In tight spaces, the camera closes in on her butt.

And so on. Some (some?) of the cut scenes are pure gratuity, with the camera trailing up her legs, over her butt, spiraling around her waist to get a good view of her breasts (all encased in the most fetishy of red and black leather with silver buckles, of course) before coming upon her pale, youthful face with its mouthful of teeth.

The programmers spent inordinate amounts of time on Rayne's hair. It flies in defiance of all known laws of physics, and the two black ribbons she keeps tied in it flutter along, the pigtails of the damned, and when she flicks her head to focus on something it's animated as a kittenish, winsome glance with predatory chaser. The voice acting is so-so for most of the characters I've met so far, but the actress for Rayne was well-chosen and her delivery is much better than most. The script matches the visuals: characters getting shot use obscenities the way one would expect. And Rayne herself is the star, and the design team took pains with her dialogue; as a result, she comes across as likable, even good company.

Gameplay is better than average. I've played much worse and had a good time. Rayne may be a little too powerful for her role, but I'm at the point where she's obviously a killing machine trained to take out hordes of bad guys, and we're just waiting for the Anti-Supernatural Group to pull out the big guns. Some of the levels are maze-like and bewildering. Missions are per-area; there are no multi-segment game areas, and if you try and leave an area before you've accomplished your objective Rayne will shake her head and say, "No, not done here yet," and turn around. Half-Life this ain't.

Obviously, this is not the kind of game you'd play if you're a guilty liberal or a feminist with no sense of humor. (At least, you wouldn't confess to playing something so earnestly sexist.) But I think it'll provide a couple of hours of entertainment. And given that it cost me less than a movie, I have no complaints about BloodRayne.

Dark Skies: A Tool of SATAN!

The Dark Skies Initiative is a collaboration among several groups, notably amateur astronomers, professional astronomers, and people who are just plain interested in saving electricity and money, to modify many various sources of nighttime light. The idea is that by using motion sensors, reflectors, downward-facing shields, high- efficiency directional LEDs, and a lot of other simple technologies we have available, the amount of light wasted by being thrown up into the night sky can be severely reduced. This saves power and money, reduces maintainence costs (LEDs need replacing less often than lightbulbs), and, for the astronomers, returns the night sky to an earlier state full of stars.

Right now, less than 40% of the kids living in America can see the Milky Way galaxy. It's drowned out by light pollution. I used to think this was a sad thing, and that the Dark Skies Initiative was a good idea.

No More! I Have Seen The Light! This morning, Tim Kimmel, widely touted to be one of the more "accessible to the mainstream" Christian talk show hosts, explained to me in a ten-minute RANT that the Dark Skies Initiative was the work of the Devil! Yes indeedeedo. There is no such thing as light pollution! Light is the gift of the Lord, yessiree, and the Dark Skies Initiative is fueled by a force older than the lightbulb, a force that wants to keep us in the dark, keep our souls from being exposed to the light, allow us to scuttle about, stumbling over the obstacles of life, doing what men do under the cover of darkness. It is EVIL!

I am not making this up. I laughed so hard I had to pull over to the side of the road. Stuff like that almost makes the OECs look sane by comparison.

[Edit: It now appears that what I was listening to was a replay of an old, recorded message, since the date on the written version appears to be May, 1999.]

Imagine / Take A Walk on the Wild Side / George W. Bush

Here it is, gentlefen, a mash-up of Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, overlain with the lyrics to John Lennon's Imagine, as performed by our President, George W. Bush.

I'm not kidding.