Now that my initial excitement has waned to a deep, purple coloured throb in the centre of my soul, the stark reality of GOG.com‘s Thief port has settled in. It runs, which is the big step up from my original version, but it’s not widescreen, the resolution is stamp sized, and it’s a bit grimy. Fret not, lovely Taffers, for I’m about to tell you how to make it work. And it’s ridiculously simple.
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Thanks to a good supply of facepaint, trick contact lenses, and sewing magic trinkets into his jacket, this is how Cage became a creature from Hell.
In an open interview with Empire Magazine, the actor took questions from the internet. And it didn't take too long until his skull cracked open and we were able to swim inside the madness that is Cage's mind.
What were the biggest challenges physically or psychologically to perform both parts of John Blaze and Ghost Rider?
It was the first time that I played Ghost Rider. Blaze was easy; I knew he was a man who had been living with a curse for eight years of having his head light on fire, and the tone that would take. I compared him to a cop, or a paramedic who develops a dark sense of humour to cope with the horrors he has seen. But Blaze has also caused the horrors, so he's hiding out because he doesn't want to hurt anyone else.
Ghost Rider was an entirely new experience, and he got me thinking about something I read in a book called The Way Of Wyrd by Brian Bates, and he also wrote a book called The Way Of The Actor. He put forth the concept that all actors, whether they know it or not, stem from thousands of years ago – pre-Christian times – when they were the medicine men or shamans of the village. And these shamans, who by today's standards would be considered psychotic, were actually going into flights of the imagination and locating answers to problems within the village. They would use masks or rocks or some sort of magical object that had power to it.
It occurred to me, because I was doing a character as far out of our reference point as the spirit of vengeance, I could use these techniques. I would paint my face with black and white make up to look like a Afro-Caribbean icon called Baron Samedi, or an Afro-New Orleans icon who is also called Baron Saturday. He is a spirit of death but he loves children; he's very lustful, so he's a conflict in forces. And I would put black contact lenses in my eyes so that you could see no white and no pupil, so I would look more like a skull or a white shark on attack.
On my costume, my leather jacket, <strong I would sew in ancient, thousands-of-years-old Egyptian relics, and gather bits of tourmaline and onyx and would stuff them in my pockets to gather these energies together and shock my imagination into believing that I was augmented in some way by them, or in contact with ancient ghosts. I would walk on the set looking like this, loaded with all these magical trinkets, and I wouldn't say a word to my co-stars or crew or directors. I saw the fear in their eyes, and it was like oxygen to a forest fire. I believed I was the Ghost Rider.
But wait — amongst the magic talk Cage, has a brilliant idea.
Is there any character you'd like to revisit? Do you ever wonder what happened next to Stanley Goodspeed or Cameron Poe?
I would like to hook up with one of the great Japanese filmmakers, like the master that made Ringu, and I would like to take The Wicker Man to Japan, except this time he's a ghost.
A Bee Mouth Ghost! Brilliant idea. Make it happen, Hollywood.
In this study, researchers from Saint Peter's College discovered a particular carpet that exhibited "nauseogenic properties" (there's a patch of it at right, sorry). Naturally, they exposed a group of unwitting saps to its stomach-churning ugliness:
Naive observers viewed a 1:1 scale image of the black-and-white patterned rug and a homogeneous gray region of equivalent luminance in a counterbalanced within-subjects design. After 5 min of viewing, symptoms were assessed with the simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ), yielding a total SSQ score and sub-scores for nausea, oculomotor symptoms, and disorientation. All four scores were significantly higher in the rug condition. Observers also reported significantly more self-motion perception in the rug condition, even though they were seated during the experiment. Results are consistent with findings that suggest that neurologically normal individuals who view a repeating static pattern can experience unpleasant symptoms, some of which are similar to motion sickness.
The researchers conclude the study with the valuable warning that consumers must be vigilant of unseemly floor coverings. This here is but the tip of the iceberg — I wager there's an entire CIA subdivision devoted to the subliminal powers of shag carpeting.
[Via Discover]
Many expeditions are lost entirely, or all of their members died. And since nobody came back, there's no telling how their adventure turned out, or what they found. So these real-life stories are crying out for a novelist to make them better, by adding zombies or strange forgoten realms to the mix. Here are 10 real-life journeys that would make terrific science fiction or fantasy books.
Top image: ~Yanimator on Deviant Art.
10. Henry Every
This list is full of tragedy and so it should start out with a person who ends up happy. Or should it? Henry Every was a notorious pirate, in the decidedly uncomedic and unromantic sense of the word. Inside one year of piracy, Every ruled the seas around The Cape of Good Hope, with a pirate fleet of as many as five boats. His biggest catch was the Gang-i-Sawai, part of the Grand Mogul of India's convoy. Every's ship fought for half a day, before the other vessel surrendered. Henry's crew then came aboard and did various horrible things to the passengers, including torturing them for information about where the loot stashes around the ship were. In the end, Every and his crew sailed away with 600,000 pounds worth of for-real, gold-and-silver treasure. They bribed governors and tried to barter for pardons, and a few were caught and hanged. In the end, despite a huge bounty put on their heads, Every and many of his crew disappeared. Some say they set up their own country somewhere. Some say they lived as fake aristocrats. Some say Every died, penniless, a year later. Whatever their actual fate, what we have is a sociopath with a lot of ill-gotten gold.
This could set the stage for a morality play, in which the Devil comes to get his due, or a dark, fantastical drama in which Every tries to bribe his way into heaven, or standard cursed gold fantasy fare.
9. Lawrence Oates
If you thought 'Keep Calm and Carry On,' was the best example of Brits stiffening their upper lips, you have never heard Lawrence Oates' last recorded words. He was part of Captain Robert Scott's ill-fated race to the South Pole. They found that Roald Amundsen's team made it there first, and on the way back encountered one difficulty after another. The team and their dogs died off one by one, until at last four men were in a tent, in a blizzard, with dwindling resources. Oates had weakened severely, and recognized that his weakened state was holding up the other men in their attempt to reach a supply station. They refused to leave him, so he decided to leave them.
Seeing the blizzard outside, he got up from his sleeping bag, didn't bother with his boots, since his feet were too frost-bitten to be able to put them on without pain, and walked out of the tent with the words, "I am just going outside, and may be some time." I will have a few choice words about the Scott expedition further down, but even I have to recognize that, if there were an award for dying nonchalantly, Oates would have won it twice. Once for the words he uttered when he left the tent, and once for the fact that his body was never found. No doubt he felt it would have been 'carrying on about it too much,' to have his body turn up months after the fact. Fantasy is too florid for this guy. He had to have walked into a crack in reality and disappeared into some other realm. He was suited for that. I think, no matter what weirdness the universe threw at him, he would have considered it 'a bother' to get riled up about it, and would have just cooled his way around spacetime, exploring things and being casually heroic.
8. Ninth Legion
The 4,000 men in the legion were raised near Pompeii to fight for Rome. The Ninth Legion was a well-disciplined and well-traveled group that went up from Pompeii, that fought across Europe, and that ended up in Scotland, where it disappeared in 109 AD. Although the Ninth Legion had been continuously in records from 65 BC, suddenly all mention of it vanished. This legion's story has been imagined many times, but usually, it's little more than the Picts wiping out most of the men while the last survivor finds love with a comely Scottish woman who displays remarkably little body hair during the love scenes.
This story cries out for an alien abduction, a time warp, a wormhole which leads to New Rome being established on an alien world, or any other type of crazy science fiction spin. I'd even take them being exposed to some early form of asteroid, mutating, going subterranean, and running an underground empire that lasts to this day. Just not another comely Scottish love story, please.
I'm putting Roald Amundsen at seven and Lawrence Oates at nine because there just have to be some lists, somewhere, in which the guy who actually made it to the South Pole outranks the guys who didn't make it to the South Pole. Amundsen's team was the first to make it to the South Pole. He is constantly overshadowed by Scott's team because a tragic death often is more interesting than actual achievement. (I suspect that he's also overshadowed because if you're able to read this language, you share a cultural link to a nation that has an interest in Scott over Amundsen.)
But if you want a tragic story, try this one on for size. Amundsen made it back from the South Pole. He spent his life hearing complaints that it wasn't fair that he didn't let Scott know that he was racing him to the Pole (and you can bet that if he had let Scott know, 'the competition drove Scott to his death,' would have been the story of the day). In June of 1928, a team of different explorers went missing near the North Pole. Amundsen could have shrugged and gone back to his tea. Those guys were his competition, after all. Instead he grabbed a plane and flew off to find them and bring them back safely. He wasn't seen again. Since then, debris thought to be from his voyage has been found in the area. A map with a mark showing where the missing team was meant to have been. A single board. Nothing more. A novel should be written about Roald, maybe, flying off to somewhere where they could appreciate his achievement. Valhalla, maybe?
6. Felix Moncla and Robert Wilson
In 1953, Lieutenants Moncla and Wilson were sent off in a F-89-C Scorpion to chase after an unknown aircraft come down from the Canadian border. They were over Lake Michigan. Wilson was the radar operator, and tried to track the UFO, but was unable to. Radar operators at Truax Air Force Base near Madison, Wisconsin tried to guide the Scorpion to the flying object. The two dots on the radar screen merged, and both faded away. Other planes were dispatched, but no trace could be found of anything. The Air Force's statement was that Moncla got vertigo and crashed, and that the plane he was after was a Canadian Air Force plane. Canada denied that any plane of theirs was in the area. What really happened, whether it's in the sky or under Lake Michigan, is up to the novelist.
5. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Well, this one just flat-out writes itself. He's the author of The Little Prince, a story about an intergalactic traveler who mysteriously appears and disappears into the stars. The entire point of this book is that the world depends almost entirely on how you choose to look at it. And on July 31, 1944, the flying ace took off on a spy mission for the Allies and was never seen again. They claim to have found the wreckage of his plane, sixty years later, but even if that is the plane, they don't know why it went down, nor why there was no attempt at communication before it did. And of course there's no body. What happened? Look at the stars, figure out if they're bells or tears, and decide what you believe. Then write it down.
This, being one of the more modern disappearances, deserves a more modern, science fictional approach. Glenn Miller was a band leader and jazz musician. His most famous recordings, like In the Mood, Chattanooga Choo-Choo, and Pennsylvania 6-5000, have been heard by people in every generation, if only in the trailers for movies of a certain time period. And that time period was drawing to a close at the end of World War II, when Glenn Miller was flying, along with a few other people, in a plane from England to the recently liberated France to entertain the troops. He never arrived in France.
There were many rumors. One was that Allied planes, unloading their bombs at a certain area accidentally caused so much air disruption that they crashed Miller's plane. Another tale claims he died in a French brothel and the military made it look like a mysterious plane crash to cover it up. Whatever it was, his plane was never found. This would be an excellent time-travel novel, with Miller kept in an era that needed him, brightening spirits, righting wrongs, and fighting Nazis. Alternately, he could flash around time to every era, seeing the differences in the way society worked over time, and bringing the best (or worst) of the wartime spirit to each time period he visited.
3. Sir John Franklin
In 1845 Europeans were still looking for ways around that pesky continent known as North America. Looking for The North West Passage, Sir John Franklin lead a crew of 128 men off through the Arctic. The first bodies were found in 1854. Over the next century and a half, other relics from the expedition were found, but the final indication of what happened to the crew wasn't discovered until the 1980s, when actual preserved bodies were found frozen in the ice. The largest intact find was a group of bodies beside a sled loaded with curtain rods, button polish, handkerchiefs, and a writing desk.
The most widely-held theory is that the lead that had been used to solder the cans of food on the expedition leached lead into the food supply. Lead poisoning causes hallucinations. That might explain the miscellany on the sled. Another theory holds that the distilled water supply they used had been contaminated by some hallucinogen. Either way, the men were not in their right mind when they loaded up a sled with button polish, and so they were seeing something. The intersection of madness, a harsh environment, and the fact that most of the wreckage and crew were never recovered could be turned into a humdinger of a fantasy novel. What if, in their delirium, they were seeing things that other people couldn't? What if they saw things that were manifestations of their personal truth, or their secret religious convictions? There are a dozen ways this novel could go.
2. Theodosia Burr Alston
Here's a great American mystery in which pirates and curses intersect, but not quite in the traditional way. Pirates may have kidnapped Theodosia, but she was the one to bring the curse. She was the daughter of Aaron Burr, the man who shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel. While being the Vice President. Dueling, by the way, was a crime in New York, the state both Hamilton and Burr were in at the time. Burr was charged, but fled the state, and eventually returned to Washington DC to finish his term as VP. Now that's the stuff that riles up a ghost. Theodosia was the apple of her father's eye, and by all accounts something of an intellectual prodigy, learning many languages by age twelve. She was married to James Alston, but still very much acted as her father's agent and in his interests.
In 1812 she boarded The Patriot, a steamer going from South Carolina to New York. The boat, and everyone on it, disappeared. The curse angle is set out quite clearly. The pirate angle? Well, the theory was that Theodosia became the mistress of a pirate captain (you know the loose morals of those intellectual prodigies), whose ship also disappeared into the blue. That's how amazing this story is. It has a person on a ship that disappears going on to board another ship . . . that also disappears. Actually, forget pirates and curses. This is some Inception-grade stuff.
1. Percy Fawcett
In 1925, Colonel Percy Fawcett, who had explored extensively in South America, went off into the Brazilian jungle to find The Lost City of Z. He didn't know exactly where it was, but he was sure, after studying old records and listening to legends, that it was in there somewhere. He was so sure that he took his son, Jack, along to help look for it. At the last outpost that maintained contact with the western world, he wrote a letter to his wife telling her they were moving into new territory. They didn't come back.
Over the ensuing decades, people have searched for the lost city, for Fawcett, and for both. Some claimed to have found them. There have been sightings of Fawcett, and some of his possessions were recovered from several different local tribes, which fueled rumors that he had been killed by them or had gotten amnesia and joined them. In 1996 an expedition went out to find Fawcett's remains, only to encounter a group of locals who weren't interested in people exploring near them. The expedition was held for weeks until they were let go, minus tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. One archaeologist, Michael Heckenberger, claimed to have found the remains of the city. Three other scientists, using Google Earth, claimed that they found the city somewhere else. A reporter, David Grann, travelled into Brazil and found a person who claimed to be the last person to see Fawcett. The person told him a simple tale about Fawcett: He went over the hill and never came back. Can you think of a better first line for a novel?
Oates Image: National Library of New Zealand
Amundsen Image: NOAA
Miller Image: Sweetlyrics.com
Burr-Alston Image: Yale Library
Fawcett Image: Wiki Commons
Percy Fawcett Image: Wiki Commons
Via CBS News, Straight Dope, Heritage Key, Travel Explorations, Aero-News, Royal Naval Museum, The Way of Pirates, About.com, Unmuseum and the NY Times.
Soon to be released is Badass, starring Danny Trejo as "Epic Beard Man," and recently at the Sundance Film Festival I watched Mark Duplass play the guy with the time machine in the internet-gag-based Safety Not Guaranteed. The age of movies based on web memes has begun. If somebody adapts a film from Hitler's Downfall reaction videos, the universe will clearly collapse into itself.
"Safety Not Guaranteed," for those with short memories, was a YTMND gag featuring a personals ad of a nuttily-coiffed man looking for a partner to join him on a time travel adventure. It inspired a number of variants and, as we now see, the imagination of writer Derek Connolly and director Colin Trevorrow. Indeed, Safety Not Guaranteed kicks off with a magazine reporter (a very funny Jake M. Johnson) who thinks there may be a story behind the man who took out the ad.
He hops in a car to investigate and takes two interns, introverted nerd Karan Soni, and the sarcastic, crying-on-the-inside Aubrey Plaza. They stake out the place, share a motel room and (I bet you didn't see this one coming) learn a lot about life.
Yes, for all of its Safety Not Guaranteed's cutting edge provenance, it is, at root, just another derivative indie comedy. And not even a consistantly funny comedy. It has some strong gags (the magazine pitch session of mundane top ten lists certainly tickled this writer) but the core of the film, the relationship between the young intern and troubled crazy man, didn't come together.
The main problem is that, well, there really isn't anything that cool that happens. Once we're up in the sticks and following our would-be time machine inventor, there are some great wide goal posts for virtually anything to happen. All that does is talk. Lots of talk.
Unfortunately, Aubrey Plaza, funny in supporting roles, doesn't have the goods to shoulder an entire film –- or at least a film with a screenplay lacking in dynamism like this one. Her flat delivery starts off amusing, but by the end is infuriating. I found myself unable to empathize with a character that was basically a plank of wood on the screen. Duplass is okay as the mad professor with whom she falls in love, but doesn't put any English on the ball either, sorry to say.
Oddly enough, the best part of this movie is the B-story – all the non-time travel parts with Jake M. Johnson reuniting with his old high school love. Not only are these scenes funny, clever and touching, they are more subtle in their dealings with the film's main themes: the desire to go back in time and fix what we perceive to be mistakes.
As the third act ramps up, hints are dropped that maybe Duplass isn't just a confused, lonely loon after all. Are there people really chasing him? Is he really going to do something with the lasers he's stolen? The film would like us to be rooting and cheering along as our two wounded heroes run toward their destiny, but I just couldn't get myself to care. There were some in the audience, including friends whose opinions I trust, who did, so it's possible you might still come away from Safety Not Guaranteed having a good time.
For me, this film is a waste of an opportunity. It just isn't original past the premise. I can barely recall any of the falling-in-love story beats (you know, the heart of the film) between Plaza and Duplass. It's like the story version of her delivery, off-puttingly unobtrusive. I respect that she's deviating hard from the "manic pixie dream-girl" cliché, but this dream girl put me to sleep.
Redditor adepssimius (that would be Ben) says he had to wait until the notices had been sent out before revealing his prank to his fiancée, along with the rest of the world. We're just surprised she didn't spot it before they got mailed out — she's obviously a clever girl. (I'm sorry, I had to.)
[Spotted on reddit]
Last week Valve released the Steam app beta into the wild. Within hours hundreds of Steam users were receiving messages through Steam chat on their PCs saying things like “OMG I’m sending this from my mobile can u tell?” except with more spelling mistakes, because their fingers were shaking with raw, on-the-go excitement.
It’s now freely available to everyone with an iPhone or Android device on the App Store and Android Market respectively. It’ll let you access Steam chat and buy games through Steam on the fly. A vital tool for Steam sales to come.
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