The Last Candle

The gallery now has a bit of digital art, a bright, sparse piece dubbed “Bottle in the Sea.”

As for whether that’s a leaf or a feather in the bottle: whatever works for you. It’s not the clich�d rolled parchment, at least.

(The initial thought was to go a feather in the style of Micheal Whelan’s cover art for William’s Otherland: The River of Blue Fire. As it always goes, it didn’t turn out that way, but I still think the feather-leaf looks good in context.)

So uber-great Finnish metal group Nightwish released their new album, Once, in Europe a while back. How has it been doing, you might ask?

As reported from Nightwish.com, it has reached number one for album sales in Germany, Finland, Norway, Slovakia, Hungary, and Greece. Once has received gold status (100,000 albums) from Norway and Germany and platinum (300,000 sold) in Finland, natch. The single Nemo reached gold in Switzerland previously.

Once has also spent some time at the top spot in Billboard’s “Eurocharts,” beating out releases from Beastie Boys, Avril Lavigne, and Norah Jones. (Photo of the moment at left.)

The music video for Nemo has reached #1 in Brazil.

A “major label release” is in the works for the United States. (No release date yet.)

This group is tearing up the music scene in Europe. Here’s hoping that they get some serious recognition when they visit Stateside on the upcoming tour and domestic Once release.

Because they FRICKIN’ ROCK.

I’ve been getting more into playing Thief 2, due to a series of very slow, somewhat tedious levels in the middle part of the game that I just passed. The cavern/old stony ruin levels just don’t give me a very Thief-y feeling. Give me the city streets or large, lush-decoured banks or — my favorite — the multi-floored, well furnished, intricate mansions of nobles and high officials. The scenery changes often, the corners are tight, and the guards are ever vigilant.

The most well-done aspect of the Thief games is its totally immersive atmosphere. Even with the past primitive graphics engine, which was not on top of the field even during release, conveys a sharp-angled tension and visual style due to fairly diverse and smart texturing. Never can you say, “This game looks awful!” because the designers manipulated the craft so well. Creative skill supercedes technological inferiority in Thief to our great benefit.

However, while the graphics are at the least “good enough,” the sound quality and use is the best I’ve ever seen in a game. Emotive, highly illustrative, and placed perfectly in everything from discussions between guards to the contextual footstep sounds to environmental ambience. The SFX in Thief is the main atmosphere draw, not the graphics.

Here’s a short FRAPS’d video of a particularly spooky part just to show off the proficiency of the game. The scoop: Hu-uge mansion to explore. (A mansion! Hooray!) Great facilities: there’s a big pool, dining area, ballroom, and so forth, which indicates that a very wealthy owner lives within the wood and stone walls of this abode. But in a 3-story, fifty room house, there’s only a half dozen guards, and most of the furniture is covered with dusty sheets. The bedrooms and congregation areas are completely empty. The pools and tubs are drained with water. The kitchens ovens are cold, the counter empty of food. It’s an unsettling place to say the least, but somebody’s supposed to be there, and it’s easy enough to avoid the sparse array of guards en route to riches and adventure.

So, I’m snooping around secret passages within this huge but eeriely barren mansion. Turns out, there’s something living in the mansion after all. In the library. (Loud PAANNNGG! of a minor organ chord here.) Xvid decoder required, ~8 MB. (The film cuts short because the 30-second limit FRAPS imposes was up. If it hadn’t expired so quickly, the video probably would have extended more than a minute as I explored around. Alas. Although, I bet I could easily string multiple videos together. Hmm…)

(If you watch carefully, you can see the screen jiggle fiercely as I get a serious scare from the events on-screen.)

The Thief games usually aren’t that unsettling and spooky, but when the creators want to crank up the tension to eleven — and it never goes below a six — they don’t relent. Excellent stuff.

“I�m not used to books writting so thoughtfully and long-drawn, but the historical atmosphere and careful narrative keeps me reading. “ - Me, couple weeks ago

First thing about that: typos! Second: the honeymoon is over. “Thoughtfully and long-drawn” has changed into “dense and dreadfully sluggish.” I’m reading Master and Commander at a blistering pace of about 25 pages a week with the same kind of forced but reluctant interest .

Here’s what it seems like I’m reading sometimes:

“Come, come,” the man said, who Jack noticed to be exceedingly fat and exuding a strange sickly smell, which reminded Jack somewhat of the wharfs tucked in the ports of the North, but also a faint hint of a lovely pepper-sauce salmon luncheon once relished within a small herring-town West of Hastings. Resounding within the company of the two mean, the gentrysow [or hern’s-rail or buckjiver or two-toothed ricebridge] vibrated and creaked in a passing warm wind. The bickerwhale of the ship, passing close to the two discoursing men while upon a present but not immediate duty, paused briefly to glance up at the mumbling gentrysow, which had now twisted to become lodged against numbers two and six of the boat’s most top-sound finehooks. The bickerwhale peered upwards for a brief moment at the gentrysow and finehooks, then sauntered off, mumbling, “…could be a problem, problem…carry the four, two tablespoons…” Jack, hearing this most recent irresponible discourse, one of many that had slowly been cause for Jack to rise to an executive decision, made a mental note that he should have the ship’s resident deathsquad eliminate the man quietly, silently, discriminately as he slept.

“…pudding, as they French might say it, may come from England, but you can only tell by the lumps,” concluded the smelly man opposite Jack, who in the midst of Jack’s inattentiveness had moved his posture and was now leaning over the zoombang, gazing starbord into the blue froth and gloom that sped by the ship. Jack furrowed his brow, but as he began a bitter retort for his beloved pudding, setting this man of minute class upon a solid record, a recollection of a consultation with an Irishman and a rather large glass of ale came bubbling up into his thoughts…

Or something like that.

The writing is still fantastic (quite unlike my own silly parody), but it’s not the kind of thick fantastic that captures my present fancy. Years down the road, maybe I’ll revist Aubrey — or Hornblower — but this evidently isn’t their time.

I don’t have problems giving up games or especially movies in the middle if my attention isn’t held, but something about books makes me very hesitant to quit and regroup elsewhere before getting to the finish. Probably more than a dash of foolish ego in there — book are smart! or some other rubbish you get inadvertently mixed into — but after a small chat with my Dad about the subject of ditching halfway through the journey, I’ve realized that reading Master and Commander is just a burden now, a irritant in the way of spending my time more happily. Best to cut the losses now and get onto something where my time is well spent.

Kinda sad, but now I get to peruse around and choose a read thatlooks more likely to capture my interest and, y’know, enjoy for a while instead of dead-ending into monotony. I’m looking for a new one to pick up — some more Asimov is in the lead, along with Joe’s offering of his copy of The Da Vinci Code — but I’ve started on The Dragonbone Chair for the interim. And it’s still as gooo-od from when I first read it. Maybe I’ll end up going through the entire series for a second time. And that’s a lengthy 3000 page journey I wouldn’t mind taking at all, even for the second time.

I thought Orrin Hatch was just being a temporary nutball when he previously said he’s in favor of literally destroying the computer of copyright infringers, but with his recent introduction of the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (S. 2560, previously known as the INDUCE Act), his nutball status has been extended.

Here’s the phrase within the proposed IIAC Act that could cause some real trouble:

(g)(1) In this subsection, the term `intentionally induces’ means intentionally aids, abets, induces, or procures, and intent may be shown by acts from which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement based upon all relevant information about such acts then reasonably available to the actor, including whether the activity relies on infringement for its commercial viability.

“Intentionally aids, abets, induces, or procures, and intent may be shown by acts from which as reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement”, eh? As has been said elsewhere, this wording could be used to tether in any device where the user has their own unrestricted storage or playback permissions. VCRs, optical media writers, hard drives. But how about streaming radio stations. Or even P2P networks? And lots of people are wary of digital music players (‘specially the iPod) being nuked from production. All of these have used with legal and illegal goods, natch, but they’re being treated by Hatch and the lobbying groups behind him — usual suspects RIAA and MPAA — as absolute tools of destruction upon the market. C’mon folks: quit being draconian luddites and use your heads and take advantage of a cutting-edge, blossoming market instead of trying to kill it.

Advancement of technological and personal freedom — to make our own choices and mistakes — means nothing to the folks lobbying for this bill. Control and power is their pursuit. If the IIAC Act passes, they’d better prepare for the oak trees that’ll take root between the cracks in the sidewalks.

For additional information, LawMeme is keeping track of a tech/law pundit, Ernie Miller, who has written extensively on his opposition to the IIAC. (Via the everlasting Instapundit.)