Tag: media

Gears of War

Thus it is with Gears of War. Every element is simultaneously totally familiar and a bit surprising. Sure, you have to dodge enemy fire, just like every shooter in history. But the mechanics of hiding behind objects are executed with iPod-like elegance. A single button lets you feint from object to object, and a single trigger lets you pop out to fire off a shot before ducking back again. The ease of dodging transforms each rubble-strewn scene into a spatial puzzle: What can I hide behind? Where can I scootch over to get a better shot?

not being a gamer made me miss that the gaming industry has totally taken over from hollywood in creating compelling ideascapes. this stuff ropes you in.

Hollywood Eats Scifi Brains

Hollywood is afraid to produce true scifi. Instead we get little boys on broomsticks

Why has Hollywood stopped making serious scifi? It is all about risk and money. “Scifi is hard to fund — it’s never a slam-dunk. You have to put a certain level of budget into these films.”

If scifi has always been hit-or-miss with studios, investors these days seem less willing to gamble. Who knows if The Terminator could have gotten the green light in this environment? It was made in 1984 for $6M — the kind of midrange budget that rarely exists any more — and starred a little-known weight lifter with an unpronounceable name.

Star Wars, a monumental struggle for George Lucas to produce, would likely be a non-starter these days. Blade Runner? Perhaps too dark to get financing. And 2001: A Space Odyssey? With its cast of unknowns, enigmatic ending and (in inflation-adjusted figures) more than $50M budget, it just wouldn’t compute with today’s backers.

Gather

Gather, which is a bit of a cross between Vox and Newsvine, emphasizes personal publishing and offers rewards for members of popular in-network blog posts and articles. (We’ve also written similar companies Multiply and Topix.net recently.) Gather’s substantial resources haven’t paid off with substantial popularity, especially considering the competition: 120K registered users and 700K unique visitors per month.

what do they need all that money for? to fail more spectacularly?

All the news that fits the print

“The great challenge was to edit those things as short as they could be and still have them make sense”. Great acclaim came to the editor who could artfully reduce wire stories to their absolute essence. One favorite K-heds, which ran in the Times in the 1950s, read in its entirety: Most snails are both male and female, according to the Associated Press.

the art of boiling a text down to its essence is being lost in the infinite room the internet affords