"What's wrong with Prey?," he asked

Prey so far has been okay. Not too spectacular but not a waste of my time. It's a little alarming when I shut the game off and go back to the OS to see that my poor little computer has reached 95C again, but I was warned when I bought it that it was prone to heat problems because it has two cores and an overpowered GPU.

I just finished the chapter entitled "All Fall Down," and I have to say that there's one thing about Prey that annoys me. In Doom 3, when you're walking through the Mars base, there is a moment where you're confronted with the ghost of a sobbing child, and her voice leads you into a very dark and bloody place, eventually winding up in the middle of a great, close-in firefight.

In Prey, in contrast, the big battle of "All Fall Down" starts in a room where you hear an off-key and ragged variant of "Pop Goes the Weasel." On the walls written with blood in a childlike scrawl are things like "Wanna come in and play?" and "Nobody will play with me." The lighting is low, and you sometimes here incoherent girlish whispers. In the middle of the room is a platform. Medical and ammo are scattered in corners.

In this genre, this set-up means only one thing: horror-tinted boss fight. Which is fine. The authors of Doom 3 trust you to figure that all out when you start working your way through the civilian communications center.

The authors of Prey, in contrast, do not trust you to be smart enough. Instead, they make your character say stupid stuff like "This is creeping me out," and "This is not good."

We know that, you morons. Why they have to inform us twice, I don't know.

The title, by the way, comes from a longstanding debate in the literary community: is it insulting to the reader to write "he asked" rather than "he said" after a question mark? The question mark already clearly indicates a question, so why inform the reader twice?

Pendorwright update

Hah! I've added an RSS feed of my new stories collection. It took about ten minutes to write, going from idea to implementation. The MySQL stuff was already in another program, and the RSS implementation in Ruby is surprisingly easy.

I also fixed the CSS a lot, tightening up lists and so forth, and edited the 'calendar' image into a PNG with proper alpha channel work.

I actually spent most of the morning working on some banner graphics for Tina's site, mostly for her people to put elsewhere.

Now I guess I gotta add more content, ne?

Ralph Freaking Nader?

Yesterday I had to go over to Kouryou-chan's summer camp to pick her up. It's at the Montessori program, so lots of the people who go there are politically crunchy in one respect or another, but sometimes it's a bit over the top. I don't know what's more disturbing: the seven-year-old boy in the "Property of Halliburton" t-shirt, or the five-year-old with the Che t-shirt.

The woman who came to pick up the kid in the Che shirt then tried to sell me on Ralph Nader. Ralph Freaking Nader. She talked about how The Democratic Convention is now officially sponsored by AT&T and so forth. And while I feel her pain, I'd sooner consider voting for Senator Palpitane than for Ralph "Here, Have Another Bush" Freaking Nader.

The Dark Knight, no spoilers

Omaha and I just went to see The Dark Knight, which really is as good as everyone is saying it is. I won't spoil it for you other than to tell you that Ledger, Bales, and Oldman really earned their pay, and it's a shame that Ledger is gone because he really nailed the part well.

On the other hand, I cannot freaking believe this got a PG-13 rating. The violence, especially the interpersonal violence involving knives and so forth, is completely not appropriate even for 13 year olds. There were parents who took their seven and eight year olds into this theater, for the 9:00pm-11:30pm showing for Set's sake, and this movie is completely not for those kids. I hope those parents deal with bedwetting-level nightmares of clowns with knives carving grins into their faces. For weeks.

This only shows how the MPAA is a complete and total sham, from their ratings system to their copyright madness.

Oh, and in the theater I saw a poster for a remake of Deathrace 2000. It's a little out of date, so this time it's just Deathrace. I can only hope they retained the cheese.