Harpsdiscordia

Newsroom stuff

2012-06-26T01:51:44Z

Stuff like this essay on The West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin's new telly-prog is largely why I have a soft spot for Warren Ellis:

But, as a middle-aged white man, I take issue with the notion that it takes a Great White Man to fix the culture, and that shitting on every woman in the room to do it is just quirky, grumpy collateral damage. I’m pretty sure that’s been tried, over here in the real world. And here we are.

Go read the whole thing as well as the interview with Sorkin by Sarah Nicole Prickett (Globe&Mail comments: abandon all hope etc...etc... but it's a great article beyond merely the Sorkin interview bit), where he spends the entire thing lurching wildly from being pre-emptively defensive about a project I think everyone kinda hoped would be good and openly patronising and talking down to the interviewer and her shockingly post-modern lack of testicles, which pretty effectively torpedoes any hope that America was about to produce a show that could step into the long emptied shoes of satirical news sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey.

Which to be fair was in and of itself a forlorn hope at the mention that it was going to go the alt history topical news route, as DtDD went with the afaik still unreplicated feat of building the "News" background of each episode around events that had happened during the week immediately prior to that particular episode aired – though that would have meant that the show couldn't cheat and that it had to have opinions, which US shows can't really do lest it cause Teh Outrages from conservative viewers (which thereby forbids pretty much anything that isn't rape for some reason, bearing in mind that Sesame Street was at one point during the 70s banned in The South because it upset the same conservatives by daring to have a black man in a position of authority over muppets).

Of course if it had been topical it also couldn't have EVERY episode be a didactic rant about how to properly cover $DEEPLY_SERIOUS_EVENT... because then it'd have to address the main reason why 24 news is so shockingly bad; i.e. that the quality of the newsroom behind the cameras and the people in front of them is largely due to the 24hours being forced by their format to hire people because they're very good at spinning a woman who dumped a cat in a recycling bin into something that can fill 24 hours a day worth of rolling news coverage with, because that is basically the bulk of their programming. And then these poor idiots who get hired behind the cameras have to try their best, given no one in the newsroom with the appropriate experience or knowledge set becuase they all were either fired becuase they wanted to be paid in money or left because the 24hours' work ethos sucks on toast, to find a way for these vapid news-douches to report about the occasional war that happens in a region that no one at the 24hours has heard of nor knows anything about, during the fleeting moments when actual news occurs.

Modern News is dull turds polished to a shine with the occasional golden nugget that was supposed to justify the whole thing but which poor reportage from the turd polishers renders more shitty than the actual turds.

That's before I point out that this whole Great Man myth is what Piers Morgan believes in as well, is in fact what he belives to be reality as performed by himself as the Great Man – really; when he was harassing celebrities or stalking grieving relatives or engaging in insider trading or trying to cash in on the coalition torture scandals or calling all the models too thin and all the actresses too fat, he thought that he was genuinely doing journalism properly, doing it the right way, the News of the World way, unlike those commies in the guardian or those sycophants at the Times. Sorkin's Newsroom is thus not merely an alternate history show, but is in fact a weird psychedelic trip into an alternate dimension that only Piers Morgan is normally able to contact, where all his delusions are true and he was always able to know ahead of time important facts about a story that allow him to tell it all the Right Way.

What if Piers Morgan is right?

What if Piers Morgan was American all along just like a real boy?

Only Sorkins is the Great Man capable of asking such hard hitting questions and then answering them within the context of a fictional world of his own creation.

comments

How to end Mass Effect 3 properly

2012-04-08T00:45:45Z

I know I know, jumping on a sucky ass bandwagon that's gotten totally out of control, so let me caveat this:

The "outrage" and "controversy" over the mass effect 3 endings is bullshit - it's a reasonably decent game to be honest, yes the endings suck, especially as they're chosen in a "you beat the last boss, and then you have three buttons, each of which starts a particular end game sequence" move that is bad game design...but this is bioware, who's endings always suck (Hell, System Shock 2 had a sucky ending.

You see, bioware made its name as a gaming company who basically created the best villain in computer game history, SHODAN, who was a precursor to GlAdOS, who starred in two games before bioware abandoned that property forever because it was good. And that's pretty much what Bioware can generally do well; Characters.

And Mass Effect 3 provides that and pretty much nothing else but that, honestly, so though the endings suck the game leading up to those? Not bad, 3 provides those wonderful character moments and that's basically what Mass Effect games are all about, because it's otherwise a rather boring game where you spend most of the thing hiding behind walls, occasionally shooting at things until you can move to another wall and start shooting things again. And the endings to the previous 2 games was also linear as fuck.

So I was thinking aimlessly, if I had to come up with a good ending, or several good endings, for Mass Effect 3, one(s) that would not only work and provide players the sense of choosing the ending in a non-bullshit fashion, but also be able to achieve the seemingly impossible: Satisfy the whiney, entitled manchildren that started all the wank over the mass effect 3 endings, what would those endings be?

But to answer that question, one has to think about writing and endings to stories in general a bit more than Bioware bothers to. (maybe there is also spoilers) ( Read more... )

comments

misc

2011-07-26T07:33:48Z

- ~~Livejournal is down apparently ONLY FOR ME, maybe it's a UK thing, but it's been down for more than a day now.~~ Ignore that, ~~Livejournal managed to find some yarn to replace the string the old women had stolen from their server.~~ Ignore that ignore that, the little old ladies apparently needed some yarn as well as some string.

- there needs to be a Capcom Vs. Marvel style side scrolling fighting game called "BBC Vs. FOX".
imagine the matchups: Paxman Vs. Bill O'Rly, Geraldo Vs. Kate Adie, Victoria Coren Vs. Glenn Beck, Director General of the BBC Vs. Rupert Murdoch. It would be awesome.

- I'm surprised I haven't seen this character concept used: Hipster Ariel as an actual fantasy setting character. She left the ocean because it was too mainstream, but now travels the land in a wheel chair made out of $fantasysetting tech because of her well known views about legs (or possibly she has some problem with morphing spells that would give her legs). Possibly a spellcaster because physics is also too mainstream for her (though she liked Conjugation spells before they became popular) but could also be a silver hoard style barbarian, mowing down other hipsters with her spikey war-chair.

comments