raphael.longbournprods.com

Like many CSS-based web designers, I don’t have tons of whiz-bang gadgetry in my arsenal of tools.In fact, after finishing the graphical elements in Photoshop, really all that I use is my trusty text editor (*) and FTP upload software. Any of that kind of WYSIWYG stuff — like Dreamweaver — doesn’t really work for CSS, so it’s useless to me. I just keep Firefox open as I’m uploading and keep refreshing the design in the browser as I tweak my CSS into shape (of course, I’ll avoid really long parentheticals about the “and next” with IE6, and the horrors of then mangling your design until it at least kinda works in the Browser of Great Evil).
But there is one additional tool in my kit which bears mention, without which I would be stranded, helpless, sobbing like a babe as the unkind waves of the web world buffetted me on the ocean of the internet.

That tool is the Web Developer toolbar extension for Firefox, written by designer Chris Pederick. As the name implies, it is a toolbar extension in the Firefox browser which essentially allows you to strip, expose, debug, investigate, explore, test, and otherwise disassemble the page you are viewing. When that page is a page you’re in the process of designing / revising, it is an invaluable tool for tracking down errors and experimenting with solutions to layout issues. If you’re doing CSS-based designs, I would say that it’s nearly invaluable in solving design issues with your pages.

There’s fifty trillion commands and options, so I won’t go into all of them here. But I will highlight some of the commands I use the most, which include:

• View Style Information: the ability to click on any element in the page and view the CSS statements which Firefox have applied to just that element in a new tab. I find this really helpful in determining why, for example, some statements are not being applied to an element that I’ve defined in the CSS (like text not going bold, or an anchor not being displayed as a block). If the statement you expected does not appear in the new tab, it means that for some reason Firefox does not realize that the CSS definition applies to that element — probably because of a typo or oversight (like accidentally defining a class as an id in your stylesheet). I’ve solved countless boo-boos this way.
• Display Line Guides: much like guides in Illustrator or Photoshop, a horizontal and vertical guide appear laid over the page, which you can move anywhere in the viewing window. I sometimes use these to verify whether the tops of floated columns really do line up to the pixel, or if something I’ve overlooked is throwing them off (like forgetting to zero out standard margins).
• Outline Block Elements: perhaps the most powerful tool in the toolbar, you’ll see this used in countless web design books. Every block level element in the page gets outlined in a variety of color-coded boxes, and labelled. Structurally, turning this function on can be the most elucidating of all effects, as you suddenly realize, say, that those dls are overlapping across that div, or whatever. Because the colored outlines show the true dimensions of the block elements in your page’s design, you can really see what the underlying structure of the page is, and where these block level elements are meeting (or colliding).

There’s tons more, like a really handy set of what amounts to bookmarks so you can jump to various validators with nothing more than a single click, or all the commands which help you disable functionality on your site (like seeing how your page looks with images disabled). But the best way to see if it works for you is to load it in to your Firefox and start to play with it.

It’s become one of my most cherished and important web design tools, because it greatly facilitates the debugging / revision process, a process which can be extremely frustrating and time-consuming. It even helps me when I load up my design in IE6.0 (which I always do after nailing it in a more compliant browser), because I bounce back and forth from IE6.0 to Firefox, using the Web Developer toolbar to assess those elements (and the underlying CSS governing them) which are causing IE to choke. So, while it’s not actually designed for use with IE, it greatly speeds that part of the process which we can all agree is the least rewarding part of CSS-based design.

Think of it as a kind of Swiss Army knife with a first-aid kit built in. I’d probably be drowning in that unkind internet ocean by now if I didn’t have it.

* Most designers use BBEdit as the text editor of choice, but since I don’t have a Mac I use the “source code editor” functions in Adobe GoLive CS, which I got bundled with my copy of the Creative Suite Pro CS upgrade. Although GoLive can be a major pain in the ass, and I wouldn’t touch the WYSIWYG stuff with a ten meter pole, the source code editor is very good, color-coding HTML, CSS, and PHP, and pretty helpfully pointing out code errors — it’s particularly helpful when your HTML is wrapped up in layers of nested if or while PHP statements, because you can quickly ascertain to which statement a given closing bracket belongs, and so forth. It’s also a so-so FTP uploader, containing trees that form a particular site, and it saves some time that would be consumed constantly jumping over to SmartFTP to upload my revised files.

As any of you who bother to watch movies through the end credits will know, in the last thirty years there has been a huge increase in the amount of contributors to a film who get credit.

In the Golden Age, you had a couple of screens worth of primary contributors before the story got going, most of these being the above-the-line people (actors, director, writers, etc).

Nowadays, virtually everyone is contractually entitled to be credited in the film’s end credits, from the production runners through the personal assistants, drivers, caterers, accountants … enough personnel that bigger movies need ten minutes or more to scroll all the names past. Even the managerial staff of the visual effects companies get credit. They’re all covered, right? Right?

Wrong.

There’s one major group of professionals who virtually never receive credit at the end of a motion picture. They are, so far as I can tell, the last group of professionals to regularly contribute to films who are not contractually entitled to appear in the credits. I’m talking, of course, of the motion picture score musicians.

Play a few of your favorite flicks, and skim through the end credits. Found one that listed all the violinists, oboists, cellists, percussionists, French hornists, and so on whose performance appears in the score? Didn’t think so. You may, perhaps, see a featured soloist or two, but probably only if that soloist is a famous name in his or her own right (like, say, Yo Yo Ma).

Now, go back to one of those favorite flicks, and find the section in the end credits which lists sound and score personnel. If it’s a movie with a big score (like the Lord of the Rings trilogy), you’ll see credits for people like score producers, orchestrators, orchestra contractors, score preparation people, music programmers, and of course music editors. They all get credit, and I believe they’re all contractually entitled to it.

So why aren’t the musicians themselves?

If you forward ahead, to the songs credits, even the most incidental of songs, like a snippet from Handel’s Concerto Grosso Opus 6 No. 6 that lasts for five seconds, or Tom Cruise croaking out a lullaby to Dakota Fanning, will get complete mention, including composer, performer, and publisher (where applicable). Handel has been dead for two-hundred and fifty years, and his music is in the public domain. But they dutifully list his or any other composer’s contribution in the credits, no matter how incidentally it appears during the movie.

So why not the musicians?

It’s been a question that’s really puzzled me big-time, for a long time. Is it because somehow the individual musicians are not perceived of as being contributors, but the orchestra itself? If so, why are orchestras themselves not often mentioned, unless they’re a “name” orchestra, like the London Symphony? Is it because the musicians’ contribution is not considered material enough to warrant inclusion? I’ll argue with anyone who thinks the value of those musicians’ contributions is somehow less than the petty cash accountant, or the Teamster driver.

Or perhaps it’s because the guild(s) to which these musicians belong doesn’t have the clout and sway of the Teamsters Union, or the SAG union, or the WGA. Perhaps there is no unified voice standing up and saying, “put us in the credits, or we walk”.

Occasionally, if the composer is feeling nice, or someone thinks to do it, you’ll see the list of musicians in the compact disc release of the soundtrack. But not always. I’m a big soundtrack collector; many of my discs have no listing of musicians.

I think that sucks. I think it sucks that the musicians appear to be the last professionals in the industry excluded from the end credits, and I think it sucks that the composers, like Hans Zimmer and John Williams and Danny Elfman, don’t push the producers to put those musicians’ names in the credits, whether they’re contractually obligated to appear or not.

Just take a second to imagine Star Wars without the orchestra. John Williams conducting to a room full of empty seats.

People filled those seats, people with names. And their contributions really mattered. So put their fucking names in the credits.

Technorati Tags: music, movies, soundtracks, motion picture scores, film music

So I’m sitting at the computer late this morning with a client, looking over some of the sample logos I’ve been doing for his upcoming website (he has this notion of making the logo look exactly like the Sapporo beer logo, and I was feeling very smug that I totally nailed it) when the following exchange occurred:

Me: do you smell that? A sweet smell, like honey.

Him: it is the growing season in this hemisphere of the planet, Captain. There are doubtless many pollen aromas.

Me: (distracted) It was many years ago … on another planet …

Whoops — not that one. Actually, it went like this:

Me: Do you smell something burning?

Him: Dude, how do I know? It’s your place.

Me: Holy fuck, it’s coming from the computer!

Him: Cool. Did it melt?

I turned off the computer in a panic and got down on my hands and knees, inwardly cursing myself for letting so many weeks go by without vacuuming away the dustballs. I was sure that my lack of cleanliness had resulted in a a dustball the size of a tribble getting jammed into the CPU fan, grinding it to a halt, turning my CPU into a silicon swamp.

It wasn’t the CPU fan. And no dustballs were in sight. Instead, what I discovered was the graphics processor fan blades hanging askew and lifeless by a thread, dangling from the card’s heatsinks. Wonderful.

Fans do this. They start making weird noises and then they just … die. And this one died, the tiny little motor melting away to nothing like Toht’s face at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Okay, I thought. Don’t panic. It’s an nVidia 6600GT, a popular card, not too recent to be scarce and not too old to be forgotten; it’s easy to get replacements. I’ll rush out and get a new fan.

Four computer shops and more than four hours later, without having had any luck in finding a replacement, and I realized that I could well end up with a weekend without a computer, without the soft glow of its gentle company, without the tools I needed to chase after work I was already hopelessly behind at. Jesus, without Oblivion.

Fine, I thought, as I stood in my local PC Club, the clock by this point well past 6:00. Nobody has my exact model of fan? I’ll just get another fan and jury rig something. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just get me through the weekend until I can call up my card maker and have them send me the replacement. And then get through the extra couple of days until the replacement arrives.

I grabbed a cheap-o three-pin fan (sized for bios chips, I think), took a few minutes to chat geek-style to the two guys on duty at the shop, then drove home, determined that, if MacGyver could build a flying dirigible out of an old shoe and some toothpaste, then I could coax the wrong model of fan into my GPU to keep it going until the real replacement arrived.

So here I am. It’s approaching midnight. The soft glow from the computer monitor is warm and inviting. There’s a faint whiff of warm, toxic plastic; a comforting aroma. All throughout Los Angeles people are partying, going to movies, eyeing up potential conquests. But not me. I’m staring at the GPU core temperature readout in my Geforce 6600GT properties dialogue box. It’s resting gently at 47 degrees Centigrade. Warm, not too warm. If I reach my hand down into the case (which I’ve left open) I can feel the gentle breeze from my makeshift GPU fan. A cheerful breeze. The heatsinks are still there, snug and warm but not hot, not in danger of melting like cheese all over the GPU.

For a few hours today I was in a panic — the panic of nearly losing a loved one. But like that time on the island when Sun used aloe vera to make Shannon’s asthma attack subside, I made do with what I had to hand. To make everything okay. That’s what people do for their loved ones.

I just took my computer’s temperature again. Still 47 degrees. The fever is gone. The crisis, for the moment, is over. I can go to sleep now, knowing my loved one is healthy.

I used to be a big fantasy novel fan.

In the mid-Eighties and onward, I voraciously consumed the big series by the big names, people like Eddings, Robert Jordan, Brooks, and others.

Then, for some reason, the well began to dry. New volumes in series I had once held in high regard left me disappointed. New authors I tried were poor enough that I couldn’t bring myself even to finish books for which I had actually paid money. The fantasy genre had taken a right turn while I, it seemed, had turned left, fallen into a ditch, and broken my ankle.

Years passed. The sands of time spilled grain by grain through the hourglass. Occasionally, with the longing of what once was, I would wander through the fantasy section, wistful, occasionally stroking reprints of great books I had already read and loved. More occasionally still, I would pluck a mass-market paperback from the shelf, plunk down two platinum pieces, and try anew the genre which had once been such a favorite. Most of the time, I failed to find something to renew my love of the genre. There were occasional breakthroughs, as with Elaine Cunningham’s first few installments in her Forgotten Realms books, which are very good. But the breakthroughs didn’t come very often.

But the magic moment, the moment when the prodigal returned to the fold, the moment where the lost traveller at long last saw the light of the welcoming inn through the darkness of the trees, happened a couple years ago when I chanced upon a new name (for me), David Gemmell.

David Gemmell brought the magic of the fantasy fiction genre back to me, and he did it in about fifteen pages. I started with Legend, his first book, and the first book any new reader should begin with, and knew within something like ten minutes that I’d found someone who could restore my faith in a genre I’d long since given up for dead.

Restore it he did. Not just with Legend (originally published in 1984 — and no, it has nothing to do with that weird Tom Cruise movie), but with every novel I’ve read since, all of which are in the same fictional setting as the first (he’s written novels in other settings, I just haven’t read them yet). These loosely-connected novels, which Del Rey term “The Drenai Saga”, take place up to a millennium apart from one another, vary in terms of their ties to events in the other novels, and can be read in any order you choose (I recommend reading in publication order).

Some, but not all, of them have recurring characters: Druss the Legend, Waylander the Assassin, Skilgannon the Damned. Many of these heroes die a hideous death at the end of one novel, only to be revisited down the road in a “prequel” novel chronicling events which occur before the events of the previous novel. Or something; that last sentence confuses even me.

In Gemmell’s world, life is brutal and harsh, violence has severe consequences (like actually causing pain and death), and people try to be good and sometimes fail. Guilt and loss are permanent, not fleeting, and revenge, though frequently practiced, is not always sweet. Magic is rare, mysterious, frightening, and very spiritual. Evil is present in human beings, and it’s present in fell creatures who live in shadowy, malignant places. There’s a Mongolia-type desert nomad race, and there’s a China-like decadent, sophisticated race (remember playing AD&D in the Eighties with all those Far Eastern lands? Yeah, it’s like that). There are no elves and dwarves. Indeed, Gemmell’s fantasies are what you might describe as Sword and Sorcery, in that they follow the tradition of authors like Michael Moorcock (a great favorite of Gemmell’s). Sort of; all these sub-genre things always confuse me.

Regardless of how you define them, you can find Gemmell’s books in the fantasy/sci-fi (yeah, that’s right, I said sci-fi, not SF, which excludes me from the true über-SF geek club, who are too snooty to use a term like “sci-fi”) section of your local bookstore, or here (pretty please click? I get a little commission and I love you for it). Go on. Give it a try. You’ll be glad you did. I’m the guy who recommended Gamma Ray, remember? I’d never steer you wrong.

As a kind of aside, one of the things for which I admire Gemmell is his remarkable consistency. He’s written a bazillion books, and I have yet to find one which seems dashed off, or stuffed with filler, or rambles on or seems like it needs lots of editing. Partly I think this is thanks to his journalistic background, which helped give him that most desirable of all author’s skills: self-criticism. He has the capacity to evaluate his work, pull out the knife, and chop it to smithereens. His books almost never ramble beyond four hundred pages, they almost never sidetrack into interminable characters’ inner-voice thoughts or endless pages of worthless dialogue. They stay on the straight and narrow like an episode of Lost, and they’re lean as Tom Hanks after he got rescued off that island.

Consistency leads to trust, and Gemmell has spent the entirety of his novel-writing career building a hell of a lot of trust.

Technorati Tags: fantasy, David Gemmell, books, Legend

Hamburg-based Gamma Ray have long been one of my very favorite long-haired freak bands. All of their albums feature strong songwriting, muscular musicianship, and that tricky combination of variety and dependability which is so difficult for most to achieve.

Early next month, the Rays will sweep through So Cal for two live shows; on May 9 they will be in Santa Ana (performing at the Galaxy Theatre) and on the 10th they will settle on Hollywood, at the Key Club. These two dates will mark the first time that Gamma Ray have ever made a live appearance on the West Coast.

Don’t be frightened away — I can’t speak for the audience but I can speak for the guys on-stage. Gamma Ray are energetic, upbeat, bloody nice guys, and about the best musicians you could ever realistically expect to find. If you have even the slightest twinge of curiosity (or even if you don’t) I strongly urge you to stop by and see their show. This is not music where the bandmembers barf on the audience and sing songs about how they love Satan. This is fun, brisk (sometimes intensely brisk) guitar-based jams that should prove entertaining to any fan of rock music.

A quick history lesson: Gamma Ray were formed in the ancient times (1989) by Kai Hansen, who had surprised the rock world by announcing his departure from rising stars Helloween, then at the peak of their popularity. In my opinion, it was all downhill for Helloween from there, but for Kai and his new group, it was the establishment of one of the most enduring and well-regarded of all bands in this little niche of the rock world. Gamma Ray’s most famous album, Land of the Free, was released in 1995, and the following year, the current stable lineup of Kai, Dirk Schlächter, Henjo Richter, and Daniel Zimmermann was formed, the lineup you’ll see on stage in May.

Their newest album, Majesty, was released last year through Sanctuary, an angrier album by the band’s own admission, one which was preoccupied with the war in Iraq and the infuriating idiocy of President Bush. I love the album, and I love how the band stayed within the conventional fantasy/sci-fi/horror type themes established for their genre while still making an effective — and stinging — condemnation of the Bush administration’s international policies.

I’m going to be sitting down for a chat backstage on both Southern California dates for an interview I’ve been asked to do for their official fan club. We’ll be talking about the forthcoming DVD, the forthcoming album, and anything else I can dredge up from the recesses of my addled gray matter. If any of you have any questions you’d like to see answered, drop me an email and I’ll try to bring them up.

But, if nothing else, do make an effort to stop by and see the Rays on their all-too-brief pass through North America (all the cities and dates are at their official website). You’ll be glad you did. I promise.

Technorati Tags: heavy metal, Gamma Ray, Kai Hansen, Los Angeles

There’s a new web design-related blog/magazine site on the interwebs, simply titled Vitamin, which has completely won me over after just a couple of articles.

One glance at the Advisory Board column on their homepage is enough to convince you of the weight of professionalism here: Dan Cederholm, Molly Holzschlag, Dave Shea, Eric Meyer, Shaun Inman … good grief.

It’s only just launched in the last handful of weeks, but already it’s filled with some truly substantial articles on the challenges of web design and development, the newest of which is Dave Shea’s challenging article on the risks of continued use of CSS hacks in the wake of the coming debut of Internet Explorer 7. Because Windows auto-update will begin to pester all registered Windows users to upgrade to IE7 when it ships (as well as being bundled with Windows Vista) it’s going to be well worth everyone’s while to make sure their public designs don’t split asunder when IE7 comes knocking at their doors. Dave emphasizes that the more hacks you have in your CSS, and the more you rely upon them, the more perilous and tenuous your designs will become as IE7, and other upgrades, spill into the market. IE7 is a big change in the landscape, long coming, but Dave argues that we will likely begin to see an acceleration of upgrades for most or all browsers; in other words, that the years of sterility and motionlessness are coming to an end, and the evolution could begin to bring growing pains.

The design of the site itself is, as might be expected, fresh and modern, and a relatively sophisticated deployment of CSS layout techniques. It has a very conservative min- and max-width, and uses a certain number of nested divs — all floated — to pretty good effect, isolating groups of content markup (like uls and the like) into logical blocks, bringing the divs as close to semantic concurrence as you can reasonably expect to get.

All of these chunks reside within the relatively conventional main and sidebar divs, floated in opposition to each other, widths defined in percentages, and no margins, which allow you to steer clear of older browser pitfalls quite smoothly.

This lame blog you’re reading now uses the same trick for basic content, except that I took the somewhat questionable route of making my sidebar fixed-width. But unlike this lame blog, Vitamin has executed a design which arranges far, far more content in a far, far clearer manner.

It’s well worth a read, but then once you’ve read the articles I would suggest a peek beneath the hood, and see what’s running the site. It’s a good ‘un.

Technorati Tags: web design, thinkvitamin.com, CSS, Dave Shea, IE7

It was time for Rick Berman to go.

I’d been feeling quite sure of that for a while now. Voyager was a monumental disappointment. The last episode of Enterprise is widely ridiculed as a complete cop-out piss-on-the-fans debacle. The last Star Trek movie aimed high and sunk low, and from my point of view had the shittiest director ever to helm a Star Trek film.

Fingers have pointed tentatively at Berman as the culprit of driving Trek into its grave for a number of years now, and with me, it’s been the middle finger. He’s blown his responsibilities time and again, and robbed the fans of a beloved franchise by wringing the life out of it.

See ya, Rick.

Yesterday, Variety broke Paramount’s announcement that they are attempting to revive the franchise under the guidance of a totally new producing team, the same team in fact that blew Oceanic Flight 815 apart and sent it careening down into a remote beach in Hawai’i so that dude from Party of Five could run around acting heroic.

I’m not going to mince words. Lost is, for me, the American television show of the last five years, if not longer. Indeed, until Lost, I had virtually given up on network television producing something I could really become involved with. It’s not that there wasn’t other good stuff or anything; it’s just that Lost was the first show in a long, long time that served up, without compromise or exception, exactly what I want and need in an hour-long series. And it did it in spades.

Now, Paramount has tapped J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Bryan Burk, the three tropical amigos, to resuscitate the medically-dead Star Trek franchise. Can they do it? Probably — they have both the geek quotient and the writing chops, if their work on The Island is anything to go by, to pull it off.

According to the Variety article, the concept is to go back to the halcyon days of the Academy years of James Kirk and Mr. Spock, or to put it another way, National Lampoon’s Star Trek Academy Years (”Streaking! We’re going streaking!”).

This concept has a long and storied history, as witness the following:

Harve Bennett, producer/co-writer of Star Trek II through V, declined to produce Star Trek VI when his idea for going back to visit Kirk and Spock’s Academy years was shot down.

William Shatner, sometime last year (sorry, I can’t remember when or where I read this or I would provide a link), announced that he would begin writing a series of novels set during Kirk’s Academy years. With the announcement of the forthcoming film, I have no idea if Shatner will continue with his plan, or if both projects are somehow interrelated.

Rick Berman, according to the Variety article, had been developing the next film with the same Academy premise when Sherry Lansing had headed up Paramount, during its troubled, Ashley-Judd-is-in-constant-peril years. I would assume that all this material will be scrapped by Abrams and Co. in favor of beginning from scratch.

This idea has been knocked around for ages, but with all this “reloaded” and “repurposed” business, Paramount probably thought that choosing now made it trendy. Regardless of motives, I think it really is the right thing to do, with what couldn’t be a more suitable group of peoples the which to do it.

Except one thing.

Who the royal fuck on this good, grand Earth are they going to get to play young Kirk and young Spock? Forget casting Batman, forget casting Superman, forget casting the fourteenth elf from the left in the second row on the battlements in The Two Towers, of all casting choices this must be one of the trickiest, testiest, most delicate of all casting choices of all time, in the universe.

I cringe at what could so easily go wrong, my bowels are all aquiver in terror of what might be. Heath Ledger as Kirk and Orlando Bloom as Spock? Oh god, say it must not be. Benjamin McKenzie and Adam Brody from The O.C. as Kirk and Spock? [whimper]

Please, Mr. Abrams and Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Burk, if you’re out there floating disembodied in the blogosphere and chance upon this lame little blog, for the love of pete please cast unknowns, total unknowns, and avoid the pitfalls of fashion and fad and cast young people with a timeless quality, not a flavor of the month quality. So that in twenty years we won’t have to endure seeing some precocious, fluffy-haired creep wearing clothes that purport to be in the future but actually date this movie to a three-month period of fleeting fashion dictated by Entertainment Weekly, actually daring to assume the role of a popular culture character in existence for over thirty continuous years.

This could so easily be so, so good. I’d like to think that the planners of Oceanic Flight 815 have the sense and acumen to make sure that come 2008, it is so, so good.

Technorati Tags: Star Trek, Lost, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, television, film, movies

Time for the second of my world-famous pinball games of the week posts, read by a force of like three people.

Swords of Fury (1988) Williams Electronics

Williams Electronics always was a market leader in pinball, and indeed in video games, but the late Eighties seem a particularly prolific period for the producer, a period in which they produced a flurry of some of their most famous, beloved tables. Right in the eye of this quality storm stood one of my personal favorites, Swords of Fury.

The first thing that strikes you about the table is the magnificently artful, detailed graphics, depicting a series of crumbling stone staircases descending down, down, ever down. Runes etched in stone line the borders of the playfield, and the hilt of an opulent sword pushes its way past the flippers. It’s all very traditional heroic fantasy fare, but it’s the execution of the art which makes the table so unique to look at, like if Winsor McCay has been commissioned to draw DAW science-fiction book covers in the Seventies. It just might be the finest art ever produced for a pinball playfield. I’d argue it.

Play begins by launching the ball into a 5-bank drop target area with a mini-flipper at the upper left of the playfield. Each drop target represents some slathering foe against whom you are pitted in battle, all of whom die in the most satisfyingly noisy way as you knock the targets down (there are more screams of agony and despair in this game than when the roller-coaster derails at the state fair). There’s also a tight loop called Ogres Alley in the upper middle of the playfield which is activated by looping one direction and then scored by looping the other direction.

Unusually, Swords of Fury doesn’t actually have that most generic of all playfield elements: the bumper. There is, however, the second-most generic element, the spelling game element. A vairety of targets around the field beckon you to spell A-V-E-N-G-E-R for booby prizes and ever-increasing fame and fortune.

There’s also a hair-raising tiny little loop on the lower-left through which you rack up your bonus multiplier, a loop which savagely tosses the ball right back at the flippers, if you’re lucky, and down the hatch, if you aren’t.

It’s all great fun, well-balanced, challenging. But it’s the evocativeness of the game which makes it such a winner, the sense of involvement in the setting and the story, a story which, by the way, seems well-developed and complex and epic, pregnant with backstory — none of it ever revealed to the player so far as I know, yet resting behind all the plays and graphics, lending depth, frustratingly nebulous.

Oh, and the music. A noteworthy score plays along to your game, movie-quality stuff that sounds like it was written by Hans Zimmer’s cousin perhaps, building in steam as you initiate various modes, and really launching into high-gear during multiball. It’s layered over with almost constant shouting, taunting, screaming, and the great booming voice of Lionman (whoever he is) … and the voice of a woman who could so easily have been Ferris Bueller’s sister (you’d get it if you played it).

A true classic, a work of art, and the best bloodcurdling screams in any pinball game. Do you even need more of a reason to play?

Technorati Tags: pinball, games, fantasy, Swords of Fury, Williams

I was browsing the Star Wars page at the IMDb and was surprised to discover that only George Lucas is credited as the writer of the film. He’s the only official writer, but the IMDb is supposed to be about more than official credits.

Now, it’s an open secret that Lucas’ friends, Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, punched up the dialogue for the revised fourth draft of Star Wars, and in the process lent the movie some of its famous banter, particularly that between Han Solo and Princess Leia.

Remember the following exchange?

LEIA
Listen, I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, but from now on you do as I tell you.

HAN
Listen, your holiness … let’s get something straight! I take orders from one person … me.

LEIA
It’s a wonder you’re still alive.

Those three lines were written (or rather, rewritten) by husband-and-wife team Huyck & Katz (sounds like a 1930s comic strip). Much of the wisecracking in the script which has earned comparisons with Howard Hawks and his ilk is directly attributable to Huyck & Katz, and I think the movie would be the lesser without their contribution.

Yet it’s rarely discussed or commented on, which I find a shame. By WGA (Writer’s Guild of America, the screenwriter’s union) rules, you have to rewrite at least 50-percent of a screenplay in order to earn film credit. It is not at all uncommon for many more writers to have their fingerprints on a produced script than those which appear in the credits. Still, given Star Wars‘ immense legacy and enduring popularity, I would have expected more references to these contributions, which are, to my eyes, extremely valuable.

Lucas has often stated that he does not think he’s a good writer, that the process does not come easily to him. He is, I think, a magnificent plotter, and even the largely-disappointing prequel trilogy is, if nothing else, deeply-layered in its plotting and thematic development, even if much of that is lost onscreen. But, to be blunt, he’s not a magician at conjuring fabulous dialogue. So it was with tremendous foresight, I think, that he called on his USC friends to do what essentially amounted to a production rewrite, giving zip to a number of scenes that are quoted every day by a bazillion Star Wars fans.

Though not credited for their work on Star Wars, Huyck & Katz do appear in the credits on American Graffiti, sharing them with their director. Things kind of go down hill after that. They wrote what is generally considered the worst Indiana Jones film (Temple of Doom), the dreadful Radioland Murders, and reached their creative nadir with the execrable Howard the Duck (which Huyck also directed), often cited as one of the worst movies ever made.

But it’s not these blemishes for which I happen to remember them. It’s for those little moments of zip in Star Wars, those little moments of banter and repartee, moments so glaringly absent from the prequel trilogy. And at those moments, I always give a little nod to the Huyck-Katz writing duo. Credit where credit’s due, IMDb be damned.

Technorati Tags: Star Wars, movies, films, screenwriting, Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz, George Lucas

Last December or thereabouts, on BBC2 — or thereabouts — an entire evening was devoted to the demise of the British situation comedy, and why. And then a bunch of other stuff celebrating this “dead” art form.

They came to the conclusion that the reason for its demise was due to the following factors:

• the rise to dominance of the American sitcom (with tons more episodes per season, huge writing staffs, large budgets, and Eddie)
• the rise of alternative comedy, like The Royle Family and The Office (which are sitcoms without a live audience, but that’s just me)
• other reasons that I can’t remember because I have a low attention span

Boy did they time their declarations badly. Because, just a handful of weeks later — early February of this year to be exact — Channel 4 dropped an atomic bomb on the tv comedy world, and half the planet is still reeling from the fallout.

I’m talking about The IT Crowd, which is not only a ray of sunshine, a beam of hope, a warm spot in a progressively colder world, for fans of British comedy, but also a phaser stun blast, a nibble of Soylent Green, a surprise ankh in the Ultima box, for geeks.

Because, you see, The IT Crowd is absolutely jammed with more geek references than a Wil Wheaton blog post. Ever wanted a sitcom with Linux references, with Atari 2600 references, with Boing Boing and Slashdot references, with vintage computers lying all over the set and a star who wears Space Invaders characters on his t-shirt? No? Well, too bad, because you got it.

Here’s the premise: a dork, Roy, and a super-dork, Moss, work as IT engineers in the basement of a London corporation. Different-type-of-dork Jen, newly recruited to the company, is sent to head up the department. She knows nothing about computers and is a “people person”. The dorks know nothing about people and are “computer persons”. Comedy ensues.

There’s something sexy about Jen, as well, in the midst of all her totally fearless self-deprecating comedy, which is awesome. A woman who is terribly funny, and completely unafraid to totally humiliate herself in the most absurd ways on television, who somehow is sexy through it all. She’s like Gillian Anderson with a silly laugh that turns into a snort.

For Brits, congratulations, you got an awesome show. For Americans, unless you Torrent it or something, sorry. At this point, I’m not aware of it being picked up for any North American channels.

Other people beside myself and my friend Danny must have liked it as well: it’s been commissioned for a second series. I’ve had to make room at the Table of TV Godliness, right next to Spaced, which is great, because Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson were getting lonely up there all alone.

Technorati Tags: The IT crowd, Britain, sitcom, computers, geek, television, comedy, Spaced