Welcome to the party, pal

Die Hard is the best action film ever made.

Hopefully that isn't a controversial statement. Certainly most people will consider it one of the best, but for me the are no other action movies that come close to John McClane's first outing. Except maybe his third¹.

There are probably a dozen reasons why Die Hard is so great. Chief among them is Alan Rickman's exceptional thief Hans Gruber; smart, witty and impeccably dressed, he's always looking at the bigger picture, at the end goal - any frustration with McClane's cowboy heroics is quickly dismissed as a distraction.

If the film was made today, I have a feeling Hans' true motives - which are openly stated in his conversation with Takagi right at the beginning of the Nakatomi incident - would be hidden even from the audience until much later². That might be a way to build tension, but the deliberate way that Hans manipulates the expectations of the LAPD and FBI elevates him from someone with unclear motives into a proper mastermind. He's got all these plates spinning, and we know it right from the beginning.

In fact, that's my favourite thing about Die Hard - all the major characters have a very clear goal that's motivating them. The overall story might not be the cleverest, but it doesn't assume that the audience is a bunch of gawping simpletons only interested in the next explosion. We know who John McClane is, what he does for a living and what his relationship with his wife is like. We like him before the shooting starts, and even if you're not actively rooting for him to get back together with Holly, you understand what his goal is and why it keeps him going when any sane person would try and escape.

I think the setting is a big fantasy fulfillment, too - unlike, say, Casey Ryback in Under Siege, John McClane doesn't have any special forces training or expert skills. He's not even especially fit or well-built. It's easy to leave the cinema thinking, "yeah, if that happened in my office I could totally take out the terrorists".

The overall message of the film - if you'll permit me to get a bit philosophical for a moment - is about facing a difficult situation head-on, rather than running or leaving it to someone else. It's why Al shoots Karl, even though he never wanted to touch a gun again: he's put in a situation where he has to protect himself and something he loves³, and he does it in the only way permissible in Die Hard.

By shooting the closest German.

¹ I actually think Die Hard With A Vengeance is my favourite of the series, but have to admit that the first film is objectively better.

² Like, for instance, in Die Hard With A Vengeance where - spoiler alert - Simon's entire bomb plot is a distraction from the bullion heist.

³ If you don't believe Die Hard's main love story is between Al Powell and John McClane, I suggest you watch their first scene together at the end of the film again.

Tiny Tina

This morning on Twitter I saw a link to this Kotaku article, which says that the writer of Borderlands 2, Anthony Burch, has gotten some criticism on Twitter for one of the characters in the game. Specifically, people are accusing him of writing a character whose use of language appears to be racist.

The character in quesiton is Tiny Tina, the "world's deadliest thirteen-year-old", and you can listen to a selection of her dialogue on YouTube. The primary issue for most of the complaints is her use of "urban" slang, which has been characterised by at least one person as amounting to "verbal blackface".

This strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Is it because Tina's white? Would it be more racist or less, if the character was black? Why can't a white person use "ghetto" slang? Surely there are lower-class white people in ghettos who have as much exposure to that culture as the black kids in those areas - is their use of local dialects somehow less authentic or less genuine?

What if it wasn't "black" slang, but sticking Japanese words into her sentences, like some otaku are known to? Is that level of cultural appropriation more, or less acceptable? What about yiddish words - would those be better? At what point does a colloquialism stop being associated with a particular ethnic or social group and become acceptable for use by people outside that direct culture?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions, but I don't believe for a second that Burch or anybody at Gearbox did anything deliberately offensive with Tina's dialogue. Of course when you're tackling issues with racial connotations there's a responsibility to make sure you're not doing anything inappropriate and it's possible this should have been looked at more closely.

But the language used by Tiny Tina isn't used in a racial context, so I can see why nobody would have thought of it as a problem. She's just using slang. I don't see why the origin of slang needs to come into the equation unless it's being used pejoratively, or to mock or belittle the culture that introduced it.

Disclaimer: I'm a white, middle-class male, so I'm willing to admit that I'm going to have overlooked some kind of cultural-sensitivity issue with this as a result of my built-in privilege. I'm genuinely open to someone explaining why Tiny Tina is a problem, other than "I'm uncomfortable with a white girl saying 'badonkadonk', so you should change it".

Revisiting favourites: Blue Gender

It occurred to me today that I've only seen most of my "favourite" anime shows once. Or once the whole way through at least; I've restarted some a few times, but have never managed to get more than a few episodes in without getting distracted and leaving it unfinished¹.

Now that I've discovered a few new shows through Crunchyroll, and either finished or caught up to them, I've finally got the interest to try and rewatch some of the stuff that I've been meaning to get back to. The main reason I'm keen to revisit stuff - especially the shows that I watched very early on - is that I'm curious how much my enjoyment will have been affected by the additional stuff I've seen since. I have very fond memories of some of this stuff, and would like to know if it holds up.

I'm going to start with Blue Gender; the impressions below are based on a single watch-through around ten years ago and a rewatch of the first episode that I've just finished.

In addition to the slightly dodgy title, Blue Gender also has one of the more questionable ending animations I've seen, while the the episodes themselves contain more gore and sexual content (both implied and overt) than is probably necessary for the story. It's an unrelentingly bleak series, with absolutely no comic relief and the constant threat posed by the Blue is, frankly, kind of exhausting.

The Blue themselves - the possibly-alien insectoid creatures that have pushed humans to the brink of extinction - have much more interesting and varied designs than I remembered, but their generally impressive size and armoured appearance is let down by the "core", an uncomfortably-vaginal opening (usually on the face) that acts as a one-hit-kill weak point. The pulsing animation and sound effect used for the core is pretty gross - which I assume was intentional - but only really serves to draw attention to this hugely convenient visible weak point. It's not as though the humans' weapons have a whole lot of trouble penetrating the Blue exoskeleton anyway, and since the show takes such delight in showing the bloodspray from every bullet impact it seems redundant from a story perspective as well.

There's a lot to like though; as far as I remember the overall series arc, while padded in places, is compelling - even if the ending did leave me scratching my head. The Blue designs are great, and I really love the aggressive lines of the Armored Shrike mecha. The wheels built into their feet is an especially nice touch, which allows them to move around more quickly and quietly than by running. The character designs are generally not great, but I've always liked Marlene's hairstyle (and she's a great character generally, from memory - hopefully she isn't ruined for me by new things I notice this time through).

I've already got some vague memories of storylines and character arc creeping in after that first episode and I'm worried that the show's sexual politics, especially later on, are going to blow a hole in my enjoyment. Fingers crossed it's not as Neanderthal as I'm convincing myself.

¹ The only series' I've definitely been through more than once are Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, Princess Nine and FLCL. They're all amazing.

Assassin's Creed III, part 2

Yeah, I definitely hate this.

It's like the people who made it didn't want me to enjoy it. Every time I get into some element of the game - the free-running, the fighting, the ship sailing (which I really liked, actually) - they throw something in my way to break it up. The ship stuff is a good example: pretty much at the exact moment I thought to myself, "hey, this is pretty awesome," it threw stupid side-winds at me. When I got back into the fun bit, then it starts the cannon tutorial. Would it be too much to ask for just some sailing around first, let me get used to that?

Running through the city, I'll cut a corner and smack into guards before the camera has a chance to catch up; there's twenty minutes gone for combat, escape and tearing down Wanted posters. I'm in a good flow with a fight and suddenly the musket line across the street is ready to fire, right when I'm too far to grab one of the other enemies to shield me. It's like there's an AI watching me, making sure that I never get to enjoy too much at once, in case my blood pressure drops to a reasonable level.

I'm still annoyed by the story, too, although I really should know better than to expect coherence from Assassin's Creed at this point. It's not even so much the plot - which was never going to be any good, if I'm honest with myself - as the non-existent characters. I don't give a shit about anybody in this game. I didn't like Ezio, but Jesus at least I had an opinion of him. I could understand why he was doing this stuff. Connor's been told he has this great destiny and seeks out the Assassins, but he doesn't really know who they are or why it's important. Even the story's feeble attempts early on to justify his eagerness to murder these particular Templars doesn't really figure into his actual motivation when he comes down to it¹.

I don't know how much longer I can keep playing. There's undoubtedly a lot of stuff in there that's executed better than the original Assassin's Creed, which I've never gone back to since the second was released, and I can tell there's a good game in there somewhere under all the tedium and awkwardness. But while I was willing to forgive a lot in the first game because of that buried kernel of potential, by this installment - the fifth in the main console Assassin's Creed series, they should have figured all this crap out.

¹ Spoiler: I was incredibly disappointed that Connor knew who his father was right from the start. They missed out on a potentially very interesting "I am your father" revelation - for both Connor and Haytham - when they finally meet. Even though the audience knows, that "twist" could have been something worth sticking around for.

Warcraft, Duncan Jones and videogame movies in general

I don't play World of Warcraft, but I am a big fan of Duncan Jones so far. This was originally posted as a reply to a comment on the Badass Digest story about Jones' opinions on how to make a "proper" videogame film.

Posted by "FuckYouAsshole"
I feel like Nevaldine and Taylor pretty much gave us the blueprint for making a good video game movie- Crank and Crank 2.

This strikes me as a fundamentally flawed way of thinking about videogames. Those films seem, to me, a blueprint for making a film that feels like you're watching someone else play a certain type of videogame, rather than how to make videogame movies generally.

In the last few years it feels like there's been a concerted effort across the games industry to tell compelling narratives in games - whether it's something linear like Uncharted 2, an atmospheric anthropological discovery like BioShock or an emotional grinder like The Walking Dead.

Even Grand Theft Auto 4 tried to tell a more complex story than most of its predecessors, although in that instance the extreme juxtaposition of Niko's character in cutscenes and his actions while under player control did a lot to undermine the moral complexity the writers seemed to be going for.

The problem with translating a lot of those linear cinematic stories to film is that they're already aping other movies in a lot of ways - if not lifting character developments and plot points directly, they've certainly been heavily influenced by genre conventions. So yeah, you could make an Uncharted movie, but what's the point? A film version would just cut out the "game" bits, so you'd have the cutscenes plus some minor new connective tissue. I've seen that already.

Something like World of Warcraft is a much bigger challenge to translate in a way that everyone who plays the game will recognise. It's got mountains of lore and backstory, but a large number of players probably don't care about that in their day-to-day gameplay. Which side of the Horde/Alliance divide you play on is going to change your perspective of characters (depending how much RP you do) too, and while the actual mechanics might be similar the experience of playing one class or race is going to be different from another.

How do you tell a story in that world that players are going to respond to, but that isn't going to alienate non-players? Is it going to be a canon story? Is it going to feature known characters, or follow a small group of amateur adventurers drawn into the larger conflicts?

There are a lot of ways this could go down, and even though I don't play WoW (I've installed it twice, but never bothered actually starting it up) I'm intrigued to see which route Duncan Jones takes with it.

Truth to power, with dick jokes

I've been watching The Daily Show, on and off, since about 2004.

I'd like to follow it through official channels, but as much as I love Jon Stewart's work I don't think I could justify upgrading our entire TV package to get the Comedy Central sub-channel that airs it in the UK. Can't watch it on the US website either, and the UK site doesn't have entire episodes.

The show was at its peak in the Bush years, with Stephen Colbert's frankly astonishing testicular fortitude when facing interview subjects¹. I'm not entirely sure when I stopped watching regularly, but it's only in the last year or so - mostly due to the John Oliver co-hosted Bugle podcast - that I've started putting in the effort to keep on top of it.

I've mentioned before that I find anger amusing, but the kind of directed frustration in the best Daily Show pieces is different. When I lose my temper at something, I wish I had half the righteous fury and elegant expression that Stewart gets to deploy.

That same anger - part rage, part disbelief, part disappointment - is the driving force of all my favourite satire; The Onion's 6 Best Dresses At The Golden Globes is so close to the bone that it couldn't have been anything but the product of frustration with the world.

It's debatable how much of an impact something like satire has in the real world, though; in the UK, Have I Got News For You is probably more noted by politicians than The Daily Show is likely to be in America, mostly by virtue of how many politicians appear on it, but there are regular polls that trumpet the importance of Jon Stewart's output on the way young people in the US get their news. Stewart himself is more trusted as a news source than a lot of "real" new anchors.

It's kind of a shame that a lot of it gets dismissed - even by Stewart himself - as "just comedy", as if telling a joke about something automatically means it's not important any more. The best comedy lowers your defences with a laugh just enough to let the truth get in.

¹ I've never been as big a fan of Colbert's spin-off show; I don't think his character works as well in a longer form. But his speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner - a hilarious condemnation of George W. Bush's policies delivered fewer than twenty feet from the man himself - is probably the best example of his style.

Rant on Rails

This isn't going to be particularly interesting, or make a whole lot of sense, to a lot of people. Probably best to just ignore it.

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been two major vulnerabilities identified in the parameter-parsing in Ruby on Rails - first in the YAML, then in the JSON bit. I don't really understand the ins and outs of it myself, but essentially it allows a malicious user to run unapproved code by forcing the Rails app to read input as if it was an object created in the application. This has knock-on risks for the database, which obviously isn't ideal.

Upgrading recent Rails apps is pretty straightforward; you just update your Gemfile to point to the new Rails gem, then bundle install and deploy your app.

One of our sites, however, runs an ancient version of Rails on an ancient version of Ruby - so old that I can't actually get it working right on my own PC at work. And that's without even trying to update Rails.

Long story short, I spent pretty much all of today trying to get things working on my own machine, and didn't get anywhere. I attempted to use a simpler solution to the problem on the live server, but that went horribly wrong and I had to roll it back pretty quickly.

I'm still not sure how I'm going to get this problem sorted. I don't think my preferred solution is going to be acceptable given the number of our customers who would flip out if this particular offering was to disappear - but it's getting so very, very tempting.

Assassin's Creed ZZZ

I'm pretty sure I hate Assassin's Creed III.

The process for even getting into the thing - insert disc, would you like to update?, downloading update, installing update, installing game, would you like to pay for an online pass?, please sign into/up for uPlay, all before the main title screen - was a pretty tedious affair, but I'm tempted to say that the game itself is surpassing even that snoozefest so far.

It's just tutorial after tutorial, with all-too-regular loading screens and badly-designed cutscenes. I'm pretty sure every cinematic so far has had at least one shot where a speaking character's face has been partially or entirely obscured by a low-poly wine bottle in the foreground.

And that's once I've made it into the Animus; all this Desmond nonsense at the start is skating on the very thin-ice notion that anybody actually gives a shit about the ridiculous scifi conspiracy/apocalypse story supposedly underpinning the narrative. I'm not here for the story, goddamn it, just f--king let me stab guys.

Oh what's that? I've got to play through the entire 16th-century voyage to America? F--k you, Assassin's Creed III.

Even when I have gotten to actually play a bit of murder, the game seems so determined to hold my hand the entire way through that my slightest deviation from its exact instructions has caused me to repeat a couple of sections several times. Maybe my memory's wrong, but I don't recall being spotted by guards having such a disasterous insta-fail outcome in the original game (my favourite) or Assassin's Creed II (objectively the best).

I'm going to force myself to get to the Conor stuff. I'm hoping the world opens up a bit once you get to the guy on the box, but I have a bad feeling it's not going to be any different.

Just give me a target and an environment. That's all I've ever wanted from Assassin's Creed, but the series has become so obsessed with micromanaging your progress that every two minutes you're interrupted with a checkpoint or cutscene or loading screen and you're rarely trusted to do things by yourself. Except hunting for flags, feathers or Benjamin Franklin's almanac pages.

So long as it's not important, knock yourself out. But don't get any bright ideas about how you're going to approach the actual game. Ubisoft has a script, you know.

Practical makes perfect

A couple of nights ago, The Matrix was on TV again. And I had to watch it all, again. It'd be rude not to, when it's there. I've already written about The Matrix here, but long story short: it's really good¹.

Tonight, Aliens was on. And I would've watched it all too, if we didn't have to go to the gym in the morning.

I could go into detail about how much I like Aliens (quite a lot, but less than Alien), but the thing that really struck me was how brilliant the special effects work looked, even in HD, 27 years after it came out. Especially compared to The Matrix, which was at the pinnacle of effects work at the time but looks frankly atrocious when they have to use CGI for exteriors.

Computer effects have come a long way even in the last few years though, and in some films it's difficult to tell whether something's a physical or CGI effect - it's actually surprising how many of the shots of GERTY in Moon are computer-generated. But that's on a closed, controlled set; once you get natural lighting involved things get very difficult. Even Gollum from Lord of the Rings - still probably the most realistic computer-generated character ever - is starting to look a little rough around the edges in HD.

Model shots are timeless. They'll always look good. Not just in big-budget films like Aliens, either - the effects in early series' of Red Dwarf look brilliant, and that's on a TV budget. They certainly look better, years down the line, than the newer series' computer effects².

I'm not sure why CGI ended up taking over so completely - surely it can't be that much cheaper to override the fact that models just look so much better?Movie budgets are getting bigger and bigger, and although there are some things that would be difficult with primarily practical effects, I'd love to see a resurgence in doing things "for real", even if it is only at 1:35 scale.

¹ Watching it with someone else - my wife, in this instance - changes the experience somewhat; suddenly all the little things you can forgive watching it alone become hilarious, unavoidable embarrassments. Tank's entire performance, for example.

² Which is probably why they went back to practical model shots for Red Dwarf X.

True North

When I was growing up, I didn't have much interest in music. I remember wanting to play guitar, but I can't remember liking any specific bands or musicians. It wasn't until I was nearly out of secondary school (so, around 16 or 17) that I started listening to stuff for the sake of it, rather than just what happened to be playing on the radio.

The first band I ever got into properly was Bad Religion. This was entirely thanks to their presence in Crazy Taxi, which I played to death on the Dreamcast. I was already aware of The Offspring, whose songs made up the other half of the soundtrack; I found a copy of a Bad Religion compilation album, All Ages, in the only music shop in my home town.

I can't remember what order I bought their "proper" albums in, but I know it wasn't chonologically accurate. I'm pretty sure I had all if not most of the Atlantic (aka, "sell-out") releases before I got a hold of any of the earlier Epitaph stuff (I remember starting with The Grey Race and Stranger than Fiction, which had all the Crazy Taxi tracks on them); it took me forever to find Against The Grain and I ended up getting a copy from one of my university friends (from Nevada) whose dad owned a record store.

Actually, that means I bought Bad Religion's entire discography (at that time, 12 years' worth of releases, from 1988's Suffer through to The New America, one of two discs I don't still have) in a little over two years. It suddenly strikes me as an awfully quick progression from "never heard of these guys" to "omg buy all the cds". While I was still at university I even went to Dublin to see them play, which I'm pretty sure I ever went to a gig where I wasn't at school with anybody in the band¹.

It turned out I was just in time for their return to Epitaph, the indie label the band had started in 1980 to sell their own stuff which meant a whole bunch of new albums in the intervening years. It's a bit like marathoning a TV show to catch up to a new season, though - I had a whole lot of new (to me) stuff to get through very quickly, then suddenly it was years between albums.

I'm still not sure what hooked me on Bad Religion in particular. I liked some Offspring stuff but wouldn't have considered myself a fan, and most of the other punk stuff I've tried since² hasn't really stuck. I'd like to think it's the balance of social conscience in the band's politics; unlike some bands, they're never preachy and often don't have answers to the problems they're frustrated by. The general perspective is probably best expressed by the song Do What You Want - I have enough of my own shit to deal with, so you do whatever you like so long as you don't wreck up my efforts at self-fulfillment.

The exact order of my favourite Bad Religion albums varies, but my top three (at the time of writing) are No Control (1989), The Grey Race (1996) and The Empire Strikes First (2004). I'm still not familiar enough with their latest album as it only came out last Monday, but it's a very energetic and angry punk album coming from a band that's been going for 34 years.

¹ Like I said, I wasn't really into music before this point; the idea of travelling any distance to listen to music I already had on CD was weird until I was a proper fan of something. I've now seen Bad Religion play three times live: twice in Dublin and once in London.

² I've got a couple of Offspring albums (mixed), three or maybe four Pennywise discs (very good, accessible) and have also tried Propagandhi and Anti-Flag (too preachy), The Bouncing Souls and The Vandals (a bit jokey) and NOFX (made zero impression).

Not today

Today has been too much effort. Spent a more of it than I'd have liked trying to figure out how to get information I don't have (but really kind of should) out of the database at work, and I'm pretty sure it's my fault so I can't even blame the last guy. Oh don't get me wrong: I'll do my best to pass it off as his fault. I just don't think it'll stick this time.

Then I had to get the bus home. Fairly certain that the driver of the first #17 I approached saw me, but decided to drive off anyway when I got within six feet of the door. Public transport is not condusive to a calm, rational mentality at the best of times; when it's my only choice thanks to the bad weather, the slightest mistake or oversight takes on the guise of a concerted, malicious act directed squarely at me.

From the New World

I've had a rocky relationship with Shin Sekai Yori. A lot of the early episodes felt meandering, but usually had an intriguing scene or revelation at the end to tempt me into the next one. It didn't seem to be going anywhere, and then there was a multi-episode arc that felt like filler, or at least a distraction from the massive unaddressed surprise in the preceeding installment.

There are some really interesting ideas in the series, not to mention utterly arresting mythology and terminology - naughty children being erased from existence by "Trickster Cats", for instance - introduced in the very first episode, but to begin with it feels like a lot of worldbuilding that's quickly forgotten about in favour of a storyline focusing on something entirely different.

It's only in the last few episodes that things have started to come together, with plot threads, minor character moments and even that apparently pointless arc all suddenly being massively important not so much to the plot, but certainly to the characters and what the show seems to be trying to say.

The second most recent episode in particular had a fairly accusatory tone, pointed squarely at two of the main characters' naivety and apparent recklessness. This in addition to questions about the nature of young democracies versus the preceeding structure or other competing societal models. The show also generally seems to be warning of the unforseeable and major consequences that come about following what seem like harmless lies or rash decisions - sometimes taking years after the fact to become apparent. There've also been a few moments about racism and imperialism into the bargain, and I've not even touched on the unusual sexual politics of the society the show is set in.

There's no doubt it's a much more complicated - and adult - story than the early, seemingly confused episodes had me believing; it's a bit of a pity it takes so long to get to the point, but at the same time rushing into such heavy moral quandries could have been even more off-putting.

I can see more than a little bit of Lain in the philosophy and even the art style, but really I can't think of anything quite as multifaceted as Shin Sekai Yori; if you've got the time to watch the fourteen episodes released so far, I highly recommend it. I would urge you to watch them in quick succession too, otherwise the slow pace might put you off altogether.

Internet slang: Another way the world makes me feel old

I've not been with the internet since it began, by any measure - I'm pretty sure we never had a modem slow enough to be measured in "bauds", for instance. I have been participating online for the majority of my conscious life though, mostly on forums but occasionally IRC channels too (not hacker ones; I've never had much of an interest in the misuse of computers).

I don't remember there being quite so much slang thrown around as easily or as widely as it is now, though. There was always a "lol" here and there (I made a conscious decision to stop using that particular acronym not long after I first encountered it), maybe a rofl or lmao, but there's a bewildering number of shorthand phrases around nowadays.

Okay, that paragraph made me sound (and feel) ridiculously old.

I'm a bit of a sticker for grammar, but for some reason the acronym shorthand common online isn't half as annoying as txt spk abbreviation or l337 5p34k letter substitution. I suppose it's because an acronym preserves the meaning and order of words, and although they've been cut down to a single letter each I don't have as hard a time deciphering it¹.

There's usually enough context in the words or familiar acronyms around jfc for me to figure out wtf it means, but it feels like a barrier designed to keep my fogey brain out of these youngsters' internet. Or maybe I'm just getting paranoid.

¹ The trick, I've found, is to work out one of the words from the context and work from there. Also, and "f" is usually pretty obviously profane.

BTOOOM!

Unopposed recipient of the "Dumbest Title I've Ever Seen" award, and with one of the least likeable casts I can remember, BTOOOM! essentially boils down to "Battle Royale with a videogame tacked on". A group of random strangers are sent to a deserted island, given bombs and told to kill enough of their fellow hostages to earn their escape. No indication if multiple "winners" can emerge in a game, or how often players are refilled to replace dead or victorious players.

The game being played for real on the island is based on the hugely popular (in the story) online shooter BTOOOM! (hence the name of the show) and is being inexplicably run by the same company as published the computer game version, overseen by its lead designer, and livestreamed to a shadowy cabal of unidentified silhouettes.

A central part of the story is that everyone on the island was nominated by someone they knew in their "normal" lives. While there are (literally) a couple of ordinary, likeable people who've been dragged into the game, the majority of them are brutish thugs or sociopaths who would almost certainly have happily killed others in their everyday existence anyway. Plus the handful who were were actually remorseless murderers to begin with.

The bombs - referred to as BIMs (the acronym's never explained), come in several varieties, and every episode seems to introduce a new type. As of episode 9, there have been timed grenades, proximity mines, impact explosives, remotely-detonated traps, sound-activated bombs, smoke grenades and gas bombs.

The cast is constantly shifting as players die or escape from encounters, but nobody in the show is worth rooting for. The main character - hikkikomori online shooter nerd Sakamoto, who has conveniently high social skills for a shut-in - has a self-righteous streak a mile wide which comes primarily from his experience in the online game. This also means he's a strategic genius, with a Jack Bauer-esque knack for escaping hopeless situations.

The female lead Himiko - coincidentally Sakamoto's online wife from the BTOOOM! MMO - is a terrible mix bad stereotypes, swinging from terrified schoolgirl to man-hating killer to damsel in distress from episode to episode. I have a feeling a lot of my disappointment with her character "arc" so far is that she bears more than a passing resemblance to Marlene from Blue Gender¹ but Himiko lacks the interesting traits and personality.

I don't know why I'm still watching this garbage. It's caught up with the manga so there's no end to the story in sight, and I'm highly doubtful that this setup is going to be interesting for much longer.

I blame Crunchyroll. It's almost as easy to keep watching this rubbish as it is to find a new, better, show.

¹ Marlene is one of my favourite characters of all time. I really need to rewatch Blue Gender at some point; I don't think I've seen it through since it aired on SciFi back in the day.

I am a jerk

The other morning, BBC Breakfast ran a piece about gamers that apparently got some complaints. I didn't see it, but I can imagine I'd have been shouting a the TV if I had. This is not unusual when I'm watching BBC Breakfast generally, so it's not a stretch to imagine.

Today, they ran a piece about elderly gamers, which you can still see on the BBC News website.

I missed the start of the article (I came in about 20 seconds into the video linked above). I saw an 85-year-old lady talking about videogames and rolled my eyes, chuckling inwardly about how much Wii she must play, or other casual games.

Then the camera panned over a stack of PS3 games, before showing her playing Disgaea 4, which is fairly high on my list of "hardcore games I can't get into". On a 65" high-def TV.

This octogenerian is a better gamer than I am¹.

There's been a lot of coverage lately about gaming as a cliquey, hostile "boy's club", and there's plenty of evidence, both anecdotal and probably scientific, to support the assertion. The self-identifying hardcore nucleus of "gamers" is predominantly male, unreasonably aggressive, and visciously territorial. Every conversation about a game with a suspected Outsider is a chance to boost your own ego by belittling or downplaying the Other's achievements.

I had thought of myself as being better than that. I see myself as open-minded and fair, as someone who'll make a rational judgement rather than a knee-jerk reaction based on preconception. Maybe most people do.

But when I think about my automatic dismissal of Hilda just because she didn't meet my expectation of what a "real" gamer is, it's kind of an asshole thing to do.

¹ Turns out she's been playing games for 40 years, which is longer than I've been alive.