Looks like it’s going to be hell in here.

I want to go home and rethink my life.

I didn’t do as well in 2011 as I had hoped to. My performance in school was, to be put it bluntly, rather abysmal. General Patton once wrote after failing his first year at West Point, “You must do your damnedest and win. By perseverance and eternal desire any man can be great.”. That shall be my mantra for 2012.

I hope so for my own sake.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to declare “no games for 2012″, because I know I’ll still be raiding in Rift, still be playing SWTOR, and will definitely play Mass Effect 3 when it gets released. As for a certain game involving Deckard Cain, that I don’t know. I was never a huge fan of the previous two games in the series., and neither do I like the auction house idea.

Time to get serious.

The most authentic looking self-destruct sign I've ever seen. From Alien (1979).

When I was a kid, Christmas and the week leading up to it would be spent watching the holiday programming on free-to-air television. The same holiday programming was mostly repeated every year. My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas, so the holidays usually default to me playing a ton of games. This year however, it was back to a ton of movies.

I started by watching Alien (1979). This is the original Alien, before any of the Alien versus Predator crap, and it’s considered more of a space horror film than space action, which is typical of most sci-fi movies these days. It’s really good. Unlike most horror movies of today, which seems to rely on orgies of sound and visual effects, Alien doesn’t. It is the setting, the isolation and quietness of being on the frontier of unexplored space and the scenes of absolute nothingness that brings about an air of creepiness and unease. This is also the movie that showed that a strong female protagonist could work in sci-fi films. I’m not a fan of the horror genre, but I was willing to revisit it after watching Alien.

Reaching out on Facebook, I was encouraged to watch The Thing (1982), which falls more into sci-fi horror than space horror since the event took place on Earth. After watching it, I can understand why this movie has a cult following. When I read that there was a recent remake of it, I was rather hesitant. Most remakes have been lackluster, and a number downright bad.

The Thing (2011) was less of a remake, but rather a prequel to the original movie, and it’s extremely well done. This is perhaps the best re-make, or re-imagine, or prequel, or sequel to a movie I’ve ever seen. It’s not a remake in the traditional sense in that it has a whole new set of characters that has nothing to do with the previous movie, yet the story differs while remaining faithfully similar enough that it is like watching the previous movie all over again. The ending of the 2011 movie ties in seamlessly to that of the 1982 version that I thought the 1982 movie was going to start playing.

I thought maybe I’m starting to like the horror series, and tried watching some generic horror shows. 1408 (2007) was downright ridiculous and Insidious (2010) kinda meh. There are some really good horror movies other there, but most of them feel like B-movies, the really bad sort, but not bad enough that it becomes good. Just plain, downright bad.

I went back to the sci-fi genre with The Island (2005) and Cowboys and Aliens (2011).

The story behind Cowboys and Aliens seemed lacking. We know that gold is precious to the aliens, although we’re never told why. We know the aliens are the conqueror sorts, yet they only seem to have one ship on Earth. There seem to be too many sidequests for Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford’s characters to embark on, and for a while, we seem to forget that the aliens even exist to begin with. It’s not a bad movie on the whole though, but it could be have been a lot tighter had there been some sort of concrete back story. Better yet, make it into a TV series, or at least a miniseries. The pace of the story was too fast, with too many characters telling too many stories at the same time. If it were a TV series, there’d be time enough to explore all that. Furthermore, looking at how well Firefly is doing even after the show was canceled, we know that there’s an audience for space westerns. This could really work if picked up by the right studio. Nonetheless, it’s a good action movie that satisfied this Firefly, X-Files and V fan.

The Island started out really well, and then rapidly drove off a steep cliff in the second half. I’m a great fan of dystopian stories. 1984, The Matrix and THX 1138 are among my favorite works. The Island seems to follow many tropes typical of such works initially. At the start, we might even be inclined to believe that the characters are actually living in a post-apocalyptic world, and the protagonist’s journey, from sensing that everything is not what it seems to discovery and realization is every bit as interesting. If the movie had ended there, it’d been outstanding. Instead, we get a chase scene which started out impressive, and then spirals down to wanton destruction of property that dragged on for way too long, and an ending of missed opportunities.

If there’s any other movies that you think I might like, drop a note in the comments and I’ll get on it. Otherwise, I wish all of you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. History buffs would also remember that Mikhail Gorbachev resigned twenty years ago on this same day, bringing about the end of the Soviet Union. Bless you, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Back then, Robocop was about action, guns, and robots. Having grown up and understood more about the world, watching Robocop today means something completely different. Filmed in the 80s/90s, Robocop was sci-fiction then. Not so much today. OCP’s take over of Detroit city is no different from the dozens of multi-national corporations taking over of fertile farmland in Africa and the forced resettlement of natives. Having a police force run by private corporations who care nothing other than their own bottom lines? Check. We have private militias and private run prisons today.

Robocop might be just an action flick when I watched it in Primary school, but rewatching it now, there’s a whole new meaning to it.

For some reason, game releases have a tendency to cluster around my examination dates. This has been the case since secondary school, and the result is always the wreckage of my GPA. But let’s not let that worry us for now. On to the important stuff!

For games:

• Rift dailies (I hate them with a passion.)
• Dragon Age 2
• Witcher 2
• GTA IV
• Dead Space
• Portal 2

In the TV shows department I have:

• Vampire Diaries S01 and S02
• Twilight Zone S02 and S03
• True Blood S01 and S02
• Stargate Universe at wherever I left off in S02
• Twin Peaks S01 and S02
• Walking Dead from the start.
• The Prisoner (1967) all episodes

Looks like I’ll be glued to my screen a lot in the upcoming days.

As of today, I’ve completed my mandatory two years of military service and now walk this earth as a free man. I still have obligations as a reserve in armed forces but I can only hope that I never get called upon.

It seems like a long time had passed since my initial post about being conscripted. While in service, it feels as though I were trapped in a gravity field with its own definition of time with no regard as to what happens in the outside world. In the service, everything is constant, no moment indistinguishable from the next. Once released, it feels as though I’ve been riding on a slingshot, propelled into a world of chaos.

Where do I go from here?

1. The term ORD refers to Operationally Ready Deployment, the local mil-speak for “completed mandatory military service and now a reservist”.

It is past midnight. You’re sitting on a coach in front of your gargantuan plasma TV. The family pet stirs occasionally on your lap. The surrounding floor is littered with food wrappers from the stuff your dietitian explicitly told you to lay off. On the screen, it seems the character is doing the exact same thing. It is a moment of deja-vu, except for one thing. In the movie, the character is watching some old black-and-white film. It always is a black-and-white film that plays in the background of some scene in a movie. You scratch and head and wonder what that particular movie-in-a-movie is.

I was watching Leaving Las Vegas over the weekend, and about three-quarters through, the characters played by Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Sue were by the poolside doing lovey-dovey things, and across from them was a TV playing a black-and-white picture. Just as the head scratching moment was approaching, a subtle but unusual and distinct string instrument¹ started playing, belonging to the background of the black-and-white picture. There was familiar ring to it. As the camera swooped out and then back again to the scene of the picture, I leaned forward in my seat and yelled out.

“The Third Man!”

It was the first time I identified a movie playing in a movie.

1. If you’re curious, the instrument used was a zither. The use of it in the theme of The Third Man gave rise to its use in Western music.

I am aware of the argument that the web is an open bulletin board that anyone can publish on, and that information maybe at times, unreliable. However, I feel that institutions are living in the past and removed from the modern developments of the information age, refusing to acknowledge the changes that have been taking place. Knowledge and ideas are no longer distributed in the form of a pyramid, with the institutions at the top, and the people at the bottom, but rather, the pyramid has been flatted down to a plateau, where everyone, and anyone, can make an equally useful contribution. Ideas originate less from national research labs and more from the entrepreneur spirit of individuals in their basements, with the web acting as a platform for the exchange of these ideas. In 2006, Time magazine recognized this paradigm shift, acknowledging the contributions of the masses by naming the person of the year, “You”. Refusing to accept the open web as a source is tantamount to alienating a large source of information.

It is precisely the openness of the web itself that makes it such a valuable source. Ideas are published without being held back by funding, and are exposed to an even larger “peer review” process. If you ventured a look at the one of the ‘talk’ pages for a particular Wikipedia article, you’ll realize that there is a lot of meaningful discussion that goes on behind it.

There is nothing that makes Wikipedia less reliable than Encyclopedia Britannica, for example. On the contrary, Encyclopedia Britannica positions itself as an authoritative source on a subject, a bible of information which one has to accept as being ‘true’, when often, there’s room for debate.

As for the matter that only sources from academic papers are considered reliable and accepted, I have this to say. The very idea that knowledge has to come from a certain source, accessible through expensive publications and where opinions are limited only to an exclusive group of people, is repressive.

Then again, quoting Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.