Author: Alex Doenau

I made a vague resolution that 2009 would be my exciting year of reinvention, which included kicking Batrock into shape and making it a consistent and entertaining website that I can eventually use to enslave thousands of fans and get them to do my bidding. (My business model – hey, at least I could get them all astir about DRM, right?)

In the works is supposed to be 12 Months of Movies 2008, but I was a bit lax with my ticket keeping this year. I would see a movie, and eventually the ticket would make its way into my drawer. In my Arrested Development fuelled “Alex Vista” excavation of 2009, I cleared them out and entered them into Excel. 89 tickets later (that’s including both Sydney and Japanese Film Festivals), it’s not right! I can’t have seen nothing in January! I recall that, just as Bolt was my first movie of 2009, I Am Legend was my first of 2008 (preliminarily, I’m saying 2009 has set a better precedent).

In the Final Push tomorrow (or “Once More Unto the Breach”, if you will), I will attempt to liberate January and a few others besides. I mean, 2008 wasn’t 2008 without Juno, There Will Be Blood, Atonement (also a 2007 movie for me!), No Country For Old Men (again, a crossover year hit), Charlie Wilson’s War or even Kung Fu Panda. Those are just the ones I remember! This cannot rest!

I’m doing this for you, faithful reader. But seriously, you can stop holding your breath. Self-inflicted brain damage isn’t a good look.

(Good lord! Sweeney Todd is missing, too! Both times!)

No one wants to end 2008 on Bedtime Stories! So let’s celebrate the good times, and never stop believin’!

Thank you, Petra Haden. As an egg, you taught me more about life than any human ever has. See you all next year!

The final shots of this movie can essentially be summarised thusly:

Yep, well, looks like we have to get real jobs now.

… but we’re flying! Soaring! The tale of the first group of Wildcats draws to a close in their interminable third outing, High School Musical 3: Senior Year. If you wanted to see a musical with no memorable songs, a surprisingly almost practical approach to end-of-high-school-in-America romance, and absolutely no sexuality whatsoever, this is it.
I’m just proud that I managed to trick three people into coming along with me to observe the phenomenon.

Last year, I didn’t get farther than writing about the First Day of the 11th Japanese Film Festival. With the 12th Japanese Film Festival starting tomorrow, this situation should be remedied at once, upon my honour as a Japanese Film Festival attender.

Rest assured! I will be brought to justice! And keep in mind that this is based on a few potted sentences I wrote at the time and my vague recollections of each film. I will try with all my might not to be a revisionist historian, because I hate when people do that with movies.

This is the list of the films for last year, for reference.

Having suffered a literal crash course in the mythology of Fallout, my play through of the third series is more informed by its spiritual predecessor, Oblivion, than by its more obvious antecedents. Where Oblivion’s environs were samey and boring, with needlessly twisting dungeons and insurmountably steep terrain, Fallout 3 benefits from flat, desolate lands, dotted with interesting locales. What’s more, the whole experiment has character about it, and doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Today we’ll study the case of the tiny town of Andale, proud recipient of the “Best Town” award every year … forever.

Contains spoilers for Andale, a tiny part of the game you’re not likely to see unless you look really hard!

I got caught up, as I sometimes do, in a fever. Fallout fever. I had to have it, so I went out and bought it. Paid freakin’ $90 for the thing. I never pay so close to full price for a video game. I am renowned for my collection of unplayed, cut-price video games. I can afford not to play them because they were all cheap enough for there to be many of them. It means I rarely catch the zeitgeist, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from the internet it’s that the zeitgeist is full of flames and crimes against grammar and spelling.

Karma is the universal law of “what goes around comes around”. It’s what got Jason Lee hit by a truck instead of winning $100,000. The problem with karma is it sees everything. It’s even got a precedent in RPGs: I know firsthand that in Ultima V many actions affected your karmic rating (and because I was about seven or something, almost always for the worse). So now it springs at us in Fallout 3.

It goes above and beyond the Paragon and Renegade system of Mass Effect, and I’m not really sure what I think of that. I think it’s perfectly reasonable that you get different receptions from people when you say “Nice to meet you” rather than “Well up yours too, buddy!”, but I’ve got a little problem: why is it that I can’t be nice to someone’s face, and then steal all of their stuff and wreck their shit when they’re not looking without getting penalised? You know, like in real life? I went to a bar, said hello to the family that ran the place, then I went out back and attempted to hack their computer (and another thing: I have no idea how computer hacking works in this game. I wish I was playing Pipe Dream … over and over and over …). I failed, I got negative karma. I reloaded my save.

I mentioned it before when I spoke about being a dick in Mass Effect, that I like being nice to people in video games where I’m given the choice. At the same time, because this game has a different scope, I’m counterbalancing it with my intense desire to steal all of their stuff. These two actions are directly tied to my perception in the game world, so to continue playing as the Post-Nuclear Envoy of Peace and Love, I can’t go around secretly doing evil shit.
In writing that, I just realised I’ve ruined my chances of ever being elected to high office.

There’s no left and right, up and down choice wheel here, though, although the tone of what you’re saying is clear. Your character doesn’t get fully voiced like Shepard did, so the choice of dialogue you make is exactly what the person hears, rather than Shepard’s artistic licence. Unlike in Oblivion, your character is given a history (more accurately, her family is given a history), but Clarabell feels much more impersonal than LL Shepard, my red-headed universe saving avatar, ever did.

Of course, I still don’t want people to think poorly of me, so there must be a level of projection. Certainly more than there ever was in Oblivion, where I essentially spat on everyone I could and they continued to love me unless they were railroaded by the script into hatred of my good self. Thus far I’ve only witnessed one action that had consequences, and I was so unhappy with what I had wrought that I had to reload to wash the blood of the innocent and idealistic off my hands.

Hopefully I’ll be able to play the game as I see fit, if there are instances when a response that would garner a positive karmic reaction seems inappropriate. Heck, diplomacy could only take me so far in Mass Effect before I got angry at the people trying to take my guns and I actively threatened them. A nuclear wasteland is rather different to intergalactic peace missions and incredibly boring dune-buggy travels, so maybe Clarabell will have to harden up and bust some skulls.

Side note: Fallout 3 features perks at every second level, that up certain stats or abilities and what have you. One of these is “Nerd Rage!”, described thusly:

You’ve been pushed around long enough! With the Nerd Rage! perk, your Strength is raised to 10 and you gain 50% to damage resistance whenever your Health drops to 20% or below.

Not naming any names, but that’s hilarious not just to the industry in general, but to the Fallout scene in particular. I may have laughed out loud when I read it in the manual on the train.

In honour of my graduation tomorrow, and the discovery of everything that is good and bad about the internet, I present Rock-afire Explosion‘s “cover” of Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”:

Yeah, uh … yeah. Strangely hypnotic and also, of course, terrifying. Thanks(?) to Bob Mackey for this knowledge.

Believe it or not, this is not simply laziness in place of something real (laziness is not posting anything for the majority of a month). I think that this video represents what the internet is designed for: sometimes you see something so simply, incredibly weird that it has to be passed along. A lot of the things that I look at on the internet are “discovered” by other people; I lead a second or third hand existence on the computer because I don’t have the patience to sift through all of the noise to get to the crux of the matter. Most of the time, I don’t even see what other people have brought to my attention.
Youtube, to me, represents time, and while I can devote hours to a video game, a movie, a TV series, somehow giving just five or six minutes to a video on the internet seems just like so much effort. Still, singing bears with soulless eyes can somehow pierce me to the core.