HAL do you read me, HAL?

Today marked not one, but two great losses.

Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a multitude of other classic novels, a true pioneer in the field of sci-fi literature passed away at the age of 90. He had a good run, but it's still sad to see him go, he truly was one of the greats. In fact, there should be a law or something against such people passing away.

Anthony Minghella, director of such movies as The English Patient, Cold Mountain and others, also passed away unexpectedly, at 54. While I was never his biggest fan -I especially find The English Patient to be insufferably dull- he was still a very accomplished director, with a lot of talent. Moreover, he was still relatively young and had a lot of productive years ahead of him. A true shame.

In other news, Euroleague 2007 champions Panathinaikos (and incidentally, my favorite team) managed to get knocked out of the competition during the group phase, but I'll cover the backlash from that tomorrow. Shame there's no media strike in Greece tomorrow as well, it ends in a few hours, in fact.

Instead, I'll close this post with a video that is probably quite popular on the Internet today, Arthur Clarke's 90th birthday reflections, which also served as a farewell to his friends and fans. I could commend on this, but it would be highly unnecessary, I find.

More on Facebook (and Heroes)

In an earlier post, I briefly talked about Facebook and its more shady sides. This is a few days old, but recently the New York Times had an article on another "interesting" new feature, namely a new advertising program.

What does this program do? It sends messages to users' friends about what they're buying on other websites. If that's not a violation of privacy, I don't know what is. Now all your friends will find out about that inflatable sex doll you just ordered!

*ahem* Anyway, I won't spend more time on this than I should. I generally don't jump on bandwagons, in this case the Facebook love/hate, but this felt important enough to note.

As for the TV show Heroes, it's really getting dangerously close to getting a second Notice, meaning it will become dead to me. Seriously, this second season is nothing short of a disaster. Horrible plots that seem to go nowhere, ridiculous characters, every single cliché in the book... Even when compared to comic books, it's become less Uncanny X-Men and more West Coast Avengers. Unoriginal, drab, dull, just plain bad.

The reason for this? Well, something comes to mind. Since the first ten episodes of season one or so, there was this rumor that there would be a whole new cast of heroes for season two, since the original bunch would have their storylines completed at the season finale. Which they did. But then the show started becoming more and more successful, and people started loving the characters. Why, I do not know. But that's besides the point, as the season progressed, we started hearing rumors than few, perhaps a lot, of the heroes would remain for season two as well.

Then season two came along, and we found out that all the characters had remained. Even Sylar, the main villain, who only survived thanks to the age-old cliché, "Why check the bad guy's dead body to make sure he's dead? That'd make too much sense!" Oh, except D.L. I guess, who never figured out how to phase through a bullet. I mean, seriously. Once, I'd understand it. But being shot twice?

At any rate, season two progressed, with most characters never really going anywhere. After all, they weren't really meant to, their stories were over. Their quests were finished.

And then people started resurrecting. If there's one thing you can do to make people lose interest, is killing characters and then bringing them back like it's no big deal. This isn't Dragonball Z, people. Not only it makes their deaths/sacrifices meaningless, it's also incredibly lazy. It's the easy way out of a tough situation for a character, and also the less interesting one.

I'm ranting, so the last thing I'd like to say is that if you thought the castaways of Lost act like morons sometimes, then the cast of Heroes must be really flippin' retarded. Honestly, you're about to make one of the biggest, most important, revelations in human history, you have not one but two mind-readers with you, and you fall right into a sniper's trap? Are you kidding me? Even if there will be an explanation for it (the killer could "cloak" himself) there's better ways to kill off Nathan Petrelli (Spoilers, hah!) than this. If he stays dead, nobody seems to do anyway.

Ah, nothing like letting loose of your frustration through blabbing mindlessly. It's oh so sweet.

Last thing for this post would be the following video, a good title for it would be "SUPRISE BUTTSECKS" and it's not really suitable for work. It's not really that funny, and I cannot imagine why the person filming didn't put down the camera to help... But if this happened to every snot-nosed kid that just won't shut his damn mouth when playing an online game, the internets would be a much better place.

I said what what?

My back is getting better, though sitting in front of the PC to write long articles is still not something I can do without some pain, so no big post for today either. Instead, here's a collection of strange/obscure/retarded happenings from around the world:

Firstly, you know how sometimes parents forbid their kids from playing videogames and/or watching TV when their grades go down the shitter? In most occasions, this isn't a solution to the actual problem, but it's a quick and easy solution. Kids usually complain or hold their breath in anger, but 16 year old Cory Ryder decided to be original and hired a hitman. As you can read in the article, he even stole money from his sister's piggy bank too, in order to pay the guy. I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry. Thankfully, the kid was caught.

Secondly, if you're into media in the least, you've probably already heard about the Hollywood Writers' Strike. Cynics around the world proposed a collective "Hollywood has writers?!" but that's besides the point. The first big casualty of this strike is the action-drama show 24, which will not air at all this season. A major disappointment for fans of the show, but personally, I've stopped caring about it since last year's disastrous season. Alright, maybe I'm being too harsh, I would have liked to see how much of a revamp this season would be. But I'm still not hyped about it in the least.

Thirdly, a 13-year old girl in Mascoutah, Illinois got detention for... hugging two of her friends. Apparently, as the school student handbook suggests,

“Displays of affection should not occur on the school campus at any time. It is in poor taste, reflects poor judgment, and brings discredit to the school and to the persons involved.”

This is obviously open to interpetation, but I'm sure it was written with situations like kids making out and groping in public view, not hugging. Smiling is a public display of affection too, why hasn't anyone gotten detention for that? Not that I'm against kissing in public, mind you, but I could understand a rule against it in a school with specific "moral" (let's not start defining morality right now) rules. But come on. Detention for hugging someone? These people giving out such punishments need to get laid more often, quite frankly.

Lastly, and the most outrageous, downright frustrating news of the recent days is this: In the near future, all mages in World of Warcraft, regardless of specialization, will get Iceblock as a trainable spell!

What.

WHAT?

Revolting. Shocking. Scandalous, even! THANKS FOR LETTUCE GNOMES BLIZZ.



In all seriousness, it just shows that Blizzard cannot balance this game for both PvP (Player Versus Player) and PvE (Player Versus Environment), especially since the day they decided they want WoW to be an e-sport. And this talk suggesting that this change will happen with PvE in mind is just bull. People playing mages have complained about their survivability in PvP forever, and instead of coming up with something original (while also neglecting that mages have always been designed as glass cannons instead of survivability monsters like druids or paladins) they just decide to bite the bullet and give them complete invulnerability for a certain number of seconds every five minutes. Shut up about Cloak of Shadows already, it's fine.

*Phew* I really wanted to get that off my chest. Hey, if a man can't rant on his own blog, then what? Anyway, it's changes like this that make me think that at times not even the people at Blizzard are sure where they're going to with their game, or at least that at some point in the early/mid designing parts, they had no idea how it would evolve in the process. Which is kind of understandable, since MMORPG's are a very special kind of gaming genre, but still not the way to go if you're really trying to brand your game as an e-sport.

The PASOK presidential elections are on Sunday, in which even 16-year olds will be allowed to vote. Interesting, that. Still not quite sure what to make of it. I just hope they'd get over with it already, it's all a big publicity stunt, and we all know George Papandreou is going to win in the end.

Catching up

I'm back in Athens, after a relatively fun weekend (despite the fact that I hurt my back and it makes me feel like an old guy right now) which I spent playing... Halo 3.

I played through the whole thing in two days, on heroic difficulty in co-op mode. It was an amazing experience, the co-op helped of course, but the game felt so well-designed throughout, with definitely fewer low points than the previous two games of the series. The battle with the two Scarab tanks was epic.

There's a few valid criticisms about it, such as its length. Honestly, the game feels (and probably is) shorter than Halo 2, which was pretty short for an FPS as well. Still, I'd rather have a shorter game than one filled with filler missions such as Halo: Combat Evolved, its name was uh... something about a Library. My memory isn't what it used to be.

I really can't understand how people are criticizing the game's graphics. While it might not be significantly better than everything else in the market right now, or as (I guess) as good as its fans have hoped for... They are still really fracking good. Some of the textures are insane, and you can't argue with the draw distance of the game, as with all Halo games.

I haven't had the chance to play the multiplayer part of the game online, but even the offline mode is good fun, I can only assume it's even better online.

Lastly, I loved the amount of options you're given when fighting. Close-quarters combat with machine guns or melee weapons, sniping fools from afar, a combination of the two with the Carbine/Battle Rifle, it's there. Personally, I love sniping people and then finishing them off with the Elites' energy sword, I love this combination of both long-distance and close-up combat. It's actually kind of funny in a sad way that an FPS can offer you such level of customization, when RPG's force you to specialize in a specific way (hello, World of Warcraft.)

In other matters, the local media have finally caught up with Stephen Colbert and his presidential run, even if the Democrats have already declined him. The person writing the article in the local "Kyriakatiki Eleftherotypia" newspaper had his facts about Stephen a bit messed up as well, but I guess it's good enough that they actually had a report on this.

This is also the 100th post in this blog, didn't quite make it in time for October, but better late than never, no?