Street Fighter V - The starting grid is complete (and then some).

The last of the starting 16 Street Fighter V characters have been announced. The new second in command of Shadaloo, F.A.N.G (pronounced like "flan" without the l), appears to be very sneaky and able to keep opponents at a distance.


He's sneaky for being able to move quickly in a snake-like fashion under opponent's attacks. (0:30) He's also very sneaky for using poison projectiles, (0:33,0:36,0:39,0:45), turning into a big flappy bird (0:53), and for not having a fourth period in his name.

His poison attacks come in a few different flavors - both straight and arched projectiles like some of Dhalsim's fireballs, one that stays on the ground, and a cloud that surrounds him that does repeated damage to any opponent who gets too close.

In the last little part of the video (1:15), they also tease the first wave of unlockable/purchasable characters. They are:

• Alex, who you've only seen in Street Fighter 3 and Tatsunoko vs Capcom. He splits the difference between being a grappler and a rushdown character by combining command throws with shoulder tackles, chops, and a flying grab.
• Guile, a series regular, who appears in Street Fighter 2 and 4 and some of the versions of Alpha 3 series. He uses projectiles and a powerful somersault kick to keep opponents from coming at him.
• Balrog, a powerful boxer who started as an unplayable boss in the first version of Street Fighter 2, who became a playable character in the second version of Street Fighter 2. Like Guile, he was also in 4 and some of the Alpha games. He is one of Shadaloo's top ranks - look for a giant statue of him in the background of the video above.
• Ibuki, everybody's favorite schoolgirl kunoichi, who previously appeared in Street Fighter 3 and 4.
• Juri, a relatively new fighter in Street Fighter 4 who has elements of taekwondo and strange projectiles that don't always do what you think they're going to do.
• Urien, Street Fighter 3's most agressive rushdown character who also has large projectiles and a unique anti-projectile barrier. It will be interesting to see how they implement his special moves.

The way that I understand it at the moment is that these characters can be locked by completing challenges in the game, or by direct purchase. They are trying to encourage people that are playing the game on a regular basis to improve their skills, and they will unlock the characters as a bonus of being engaged with the game. It's not supposed to matter whether or not people are playing online against other people - the in-game currency that allows these unlocks can be accumulate offline as well. It will be some time before the new characters become available, since I think that the intent is to get the first sixteen characters correctly balanced before they start adding other characters.

Capcom is still continuing their beta program, so people that preorder the game for PS4 or on Steam will be granted access to early versions of the game, and Capcom will use the match data to try to determine what changes need to be made to balance the game. Due to the nature of how Street Fighter works, it may take some time for all of the possible techniques to be discovered. They are also using the beta to test the netcode, making sure that people are going to be able to play well online.

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In other news, Ash vs. Evil Dead has really been fantastic, and the thing that Lucy Lawless did in the last episode (yesterday) was so unexpected and amazing that I can't really hint at what it was and I have to tell you to just go watch it already.

Now if you can't stand horror in your comedy, or comedy in your horror, or women kicking butt and still getting objectified by the protagonist once in a while, or dismembered hands crawling around on their own, or anything to do with the occult, then please don't watch it because I wouldn't want to be responsible for television destroying your moral fiber.

However, if you like Deep Purple or the Amboy Dukes, you like comedy and horror together to the point that you want to make a movie about The Three Stooges coming back as zombies, you know that a balanced weapon loadout includes a chainsaw and a shotgun, and you're well-versed enough in literature to know what's funny about "A Farewell to Arms" and who originally created the Necronomicon, then by all means get right on watching this show.

In case you weren't in the target demographic...

...the LEGO movie was Awesome^TM! Actually, I thought it was just rather cute, but for some reason I can't stop saying Awesome^TM!
My kids really enjoyed it even though some of the parts were, as they tend to say, "derp". I was amazed that some studio exec hadn't managed to hijack the narrative and kept it close to what we understand the LEGO toys to be. I'm not going to spoil any details here since it's still in theaters, (*cough* Batman-is-kind-of-a-jerk *cough*) but I can definitely say that if you enjoy the basic free spirit of play you will enjoy the LEGO movie, and if you are too busy trying to teach your three-year old calculus on the way to his piano competition, then you're going to be mad that you wasted 100 minutes at the movies.

We watched it last weekend. Only a couple of dozen people were there for an afternoon show. I would have liked to see the 3D version, but I didn't want to give my younger child a headache. It was nice to see the adults and the kids laughing at different jokes.

For those of you that have seen the LEGO movie and are familiar with the works of Arthur C. Clarke, we have this video, done by a friend of ours and local LEGO expert.


For those of you that are thinking, "How did they not make a LEGO movie before now?" it's just that this is the first one in theaters. There were four Bionicle movies and a couple of Hero Factory movies that went direct to video. More recently there was the the LEGO:Ninjago TV series, a LEGO Star Wars direct-to-video movie, a LEGO Batman direct-to-video movie that came out at the same time as the LEGO Batman 2 video game, and a couple of movies starring LEGO hero Clutch Powers, one direct to video, and one 4D-direct-to-theme-park. Clutch Powers is voiced by Ryan McPartlin who most of us would know from the TV show "Chuck". He played Dr. Devon Woodcomb, Chuck's brother-in-law. Most often, he was referred to on the show as...

...wait for it...

"Captain Awesome".

Coincidence, or not?

And in other awesome news, speed cuber Kevin Hays totally destroyed the record for the 2x2x2 to 7x7x7 relay.

There is a force stronger than LEGO.

Based on my kids' behavior since the holiday break, I would have to say that there is one force in the world stronger than LEGO.

It's Minecraft.

For those of you unfamiliar with Minecraft, it's a 3D adventure game with whimsical low-res graphics with an emphasis on building structures, crafting objects from mined materials, and basic agriculture. While the graphics look like they came from 1995, I'm not sure you could have built a world as large as Minecraft's back then.

I got LEGO Marvel Super Heroes for PS3 this Christmas. Like most of the other LEGO games, they take a simplified storyline, infuse it with LEGO sets and characters, and have you play through it with the main characters, and then go back later for additional playthroughs with the other characters to find secrets and unlock even more characters. The LEGO Marvel Super Heroes story takes us to Manhattan just after the Avengers have saved it, only to find that the Silver Surfer has crash-landed on earth and Doctor Doom is hot on the trail of the broken bricks of his surfboard. Naturally, when the Silver Surfer appears, Galactus can't be far behind. With a possible grab for cosmic power and the fate of the Earth at stake, a lot of heroes and villains start coming out of the woodwork. All of the major characters from the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy make an appearance, along with some unsurprising additions. You know Stan Lee has to be there, since he's everywhere else.

Normally with that many days off from school my kids (or at least my older one) would have completely torn through the game by now. They had LEGO Batman 2 at 100% in a matter of days. However, they spent the majority of their gaming time during the holidays playing Minecraft, with Super Mario 3D Land for 3DS coming in a close second for my older child and Scribblenauts Unlimited coming in a rather distant second for my younger one. It's even gotten to the point where they're playing with actual LEGO less than Minecraft. Luckily, one of the LEGO sets my older son got for Christmas was a Minecraft set.

More so than for any other game, my kids are watching a lot of things on Youtube pertaining to Minecraft, and even sometimes while playing the game at the same time. I recall watching a few things for Resident Evil 4 in an attempt to improve my Mercenaries scores, but once I got the info I required I went back to playing the game. They're watching Minecraft videos like me binge-watching Community.

As a result of watching all of the videos, they have downloaded some of the texture packs for the game, but they haven't quite figured out the full mods yet. I suppose I'll have to work on that.

Over the last couple of weeks, they have played some of LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, and have completed all of the levels in Story Mode, but they haven't obtained all of the characters yet. My younger one still thinks that the hub area (Gotham) in LEGO Batman 2 is more fun than the Marvel hub area (Manhattan including the Statue of Liberty, The Baxter Building, the Daily Bugle, Central Park, and Grand Central Station), but he has fewer characters unlocked. It's nice that in addition to things like my kids finding out about Howard the Duck without having to watch the questionable film version, I can find out about oddball things like Superior Spider-Man without having to set foot in the comic book store to be berated about not reading enough titles.

Cube + Juggling = NPR?

Ravi Fernando is a name that's already made the rounds among cubers, but it would appear that NPR has finally taken notice of him after this video posted a few days ago.


I'd seen Ravi do something like this before - check this out from last year. This trick goes on for a while since he's messing with three cubes. It's clearly not designed for a short news segment, but he's working on his craft here more than his showmanship.

Arguably, this cubing plus juggling thing has gone on for some time - here's Shotaro Makisumi (usually referred to as "Macky") doing an early version of this trick.
 Since cubing at its fastest is a combination of visual recognition and muscle memory, it would stand to reason that it's not that tough for the best cubers to engage the brain in other activities while cubing, since the actual cubing part doesn't take up a lot of working memory once mastered. This is largely the same technique I use to carry most of a conversation while I'm doing my relatively slow solves with a corners-first method. I have so much time while I'm doing moves that I can easily hold up part of a conversation, or if I'm talking about cubing itself I have enough mentally pre-scripted material that I can just explain what I'm doing while I'm doing it without slowing myself down in any noticeable way.

That being said, I'm not ready to start juggling anytime soon.

A wild Llama appears...

Now I'm going to preface this story with this: Lots of things here are not the way you would do them. I am aware of it.

Last night (Friday) my younger son, who we'll refer to as 'Bub', got to sleep by about 7:45, which honestly is a touch early for him especially in light of the fact that it's the weekend. I read to my older son for a few minutes, said goodnight, and then headed to bed myself knowing that I might be woken up again by barking dogs when my wife came home from work. Luckily, my younger son was not woken up by the barking dogs. So then let's fast forward to 1AM. I hear Bub say "I need a drink" and I go get him some water and then go back to sleep. The next time I wake up is somewhere around 3:40, where I hear him telling my wife that he's going to go watch a movie on the computer and that he needs to find some headphones. He's awake, so arguing with him about how he should go back to sleep will only result in waking up the one person in the house who is still asleep. Bub suggests that all the headphones are in the room of the person who is actually sleeping (his older brother), so at that point I get up out of bed and successfully locate the pair of headphones that are in the computer room already and help him get his movie started. I did think that it was rather considerate of him to want to watch a movie far away from the people trying to sleep, and with headphones on to boot. He's watched DVD's on the computer before, and he can usually manage to operate Windows Media Player most of the time, so I figure I can go back to bed, and this is where (for me) it all goes terribly wrong.

By chance, this is a DVD that he hasn't watched on the computer before. From a statistical standpoint, I didn't figure that was a big deal, since we have several dozen kid's movies and he's only watched five or six of them on the computer. The movie he picked was Robots, a CG animated feature from 2005 made by Blue Sky for Fox. It's a movie that I'm fond of, but I would watch sock puppets in black and white low frame rate Flash video if you told me that Ewan McGregor and Robin Williams were doing the main characters. I like this DVD more than most of the kid's movies we have because it has a very well-mixed DTS audio option and good soundtrack music including a marching band rendition of "Get Up Offa That Thing". I had no idea that once we put it in to the computer that I would find that it didn't act like a normal DVD.

Windows Media player knows that there's a disk in the drive, but it won't start it because it's not convinced that it's a DVD. There's a program asking to run that I had not encountered before called "HOTLLAMA" which at this time of the morning seems rather suspicious. The logo is a bright red llama-shaped silhouette. Since I just want this to be over and done with, I go ahead and install it, knowing that I will be removing it after the sun comes up when I come to my senses. I am ecstatic that it doesn't make me restart the computer when it installs, but when it starts the first time it a) checks for updates (expected) and b) tries to configure TurboTax It's Deductible 2006 (rather unexpected, and honestly edging over into Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot territory). My first thought is that it will check for updates and find that the page isn't even there and the company packed it up years ago, leaving me with a hung install that knows that there's an update and can't get one. As it turned out, it just wasn't any good at talking to the internet unless I had a browser window open. Having done that, the update downloads and installs in a minute or so, give or take a dozen extra mouse clicks to get the aforementioned Turbo Tax module to stop trying to reconfigure itself.

Before HOTLLAMA runs the second time, I spot something in the EULA that says that if I don't agree to it that I should uninstall the program and just watch the movie in my regular DVD program. Since I have a six year old sitting next to me, I exercise some restraint and do not vocalize the idea that if it would just play on my regular DVD program, I wouldn't be messing with this stupid Llama program in the first place regardless of how Hot it is.

So, I let the movie run and go back to bed, and guess what. The program misbehaves - Bub says that it "randomly rewinds" when he comes in to tell me about it - and he ends up watching it on the DVD player in our bedroom anyway. Suffice it to say that I've already uninstalled HOTLLAMA and did some registry cleaning. Now I think I have to go find a Mac user with a copy of Robots.

EPILOGUE: Upon further inspection of the DVD case, I noticed that it specifically says that is not compatible with the Apple Macintosh. Also, around 11:30 Bub poured himself a bowl of Cheerios, ate it, and then promptly fell asleep behind me at some point while I was folding laundry on the bed. Since I wanted to tie this up neatly, I put on 'Robots' again. 

Heavy on the rambling

I managed to finish "Ghost Rider:Spirit of Vengeance" and "John Carter", despite thinking that I wouldn't. The second half of the Ghost Rider movie was much more focused, and all of the things that they set up in the first part of the film paid off. The influences from "Crank" that the crew carried in became more pronounced, and Nicholas Cage had a little bit more one-on-one time with the other characters to develop a little more perceived chemistry.

With "John Carter", I actually had to re-watch a couple of chapters to figure out why I wasn't getting it. I realized that being distracted by my kids talking the first time through caused me to miss a couple of big chunks of dialogue. Once I solved that problem, I liked the movie a lot more.  To be fair, a lot of the scenes that followed the spot where I stopped the first time are more dialogue driven and only have a few characters in them, so they were inherently less confusing than some of the early action-based sequences where we were still trying to figure out the characters. It's still no Pirates of the Caribbean, but considering that this was Andrew Stanton's first go at a real big-budget live action feature, and he was trying to make a movie on par with Star Wars, it was a gutsy attempt. Yes, I realize that it was a box-office dud and expensive to make. (It cost $250 million to make - nearly 4 and a half times as much to make as Ghost Rider:SOV at a paltry $57 million.) If I was the head of the studio, I would have sent Stanton to go make some music videos or some commercials before I bet the farm on him, since directing animation is not the same as directing people. However, having watched the movie I can't point at something in the film and say that there were any specifically bad performances. Certainly, all the main actors in "John Carter" outshine any of Hayden Christensen's "Star Wars" performances.  It's possible that different editing and screenwriting could have tightened up the film some, but ultimately this is down to the story. Sadly, Pixar is usually really good about refining the story first and I think that's the lesson that Andrew Stanton may either have forgotten or didn't have time to realize. I did see that some critics complained that it was derivative. Did they forget that the whole 'space opera' thing practically started with Edgar Rice Burroughs?

So now the real question is, now that Disney is Pixar is Marvel is Lucasfilm, will we see some consistent improvements in their filmmaking?

Movie watching, heavy on the rambling.

I have been trying to make good use of our public library as a resource for movies that I think that I want to see but have no current intention of owning. Every once in a while I get lucky and find a movie that warrants repeat viewing, but I'm perfectly fine with some movies just being a one-shot deal.

Since I own the first Ghost Rider movie (Don't laugh. I got it for $4.00.) and have been trying to keep up with the current wave of Marvel movies I figured that the second Ghost Rider movie "Ghost Rider:Spirit of Vengeance" was worth a watch. I didn't notice right away that the producers of the film thought that it would be important to say "From the guys that brought you Crank". I found that rather odd, seeing as 'Crank' isn't exactly in the superhero genre, but I presume it's to attract the 20-something male audience that thinks that they're too cool to watch a superhero movie. Between the cold open that's supposed to tell you something about what Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider (played by Nicolas Cage) will have to deal with later in the film, and the long expository narration during the opening credits, it's clear that the story is not particularly streamlined. It also suffers from the possibility that hardly anybody watched the first film so they have to re-explain a lot of things in a way that develops the character but without making too many specific references to the first film. I have made it approximately halfway through last night and don't particularly care if I watch the rest of it now.  Since Ghost Rider is sort of an antihero, it's hard to care whether he wins or not, and the chemistry between Mr. Cage and the female lead is not as good as it was in the first film. (Actually, the chemistry between Nick Cage and anybody in this film is not as good as it was in the first film.)

If the guys that brought me "Crank" learned anything from making that film, they should have learned a) have a good idea to center the film around and b) stick with it. "Crank" had a very clear albeit ridiculous premise, and they didn't take too many unnecessary side trips. "Crank 2" was actually better since it was more tongue-in-cheek than the first one. So, even though "Crank" is a ridiculous action film with a low maturity level, the story keeps cooking along, stays focused, and holds your interest. I cannot say the same for "Ghost Rider:SoV", so perhaps Jason Statham will be getting a pass from me more often than Nicolas Cage. At least I know exactly* what I'm going to get with a Jason Statham movie.

Tonight, instead of attempting to finish "Ghost Rider:SoV" we tried to start "John Carter". It starts with a crazy story-in-a-story exposition, and then gets around to telling the story. It's very visually polished, but there's a tremendous number of characters introduced over the course of the first act. By the time John Carter figures out the Deja was a princess, my kids were playing with plastic army men and ignoring the movie at point-blank range, so now I am wondering if we're going to finish that one either.

On the good side, the Ghibli animated version of "The Borrowers" by Mary Norton called "The Secret World of Arrietty" turned out to be fantastic and my younger son watched it a second time the day after we watched it the first time. It has very cute animation as per Ghibli usual, most of the story focuses on the title character, and the fantastic world portrayed feels totally natural in the context of the film instead of self-referentially being amazed at its very existence.

*Jason Statham film summary - He's a regular dude with a checkered past, or possibly a hidden past, some stuff happens to him, and then he beats the tar out of everybody that screwed him over so he can finally go on that vacation at the end of the movie.

It's Batman Day! Part 3

So, my older son had adequate opportunity to play his new copy of LEGO Batman 2:DC Super Heroes today, although without the villain pack installed. His favorite thing so far is the electric suit for Batman.

It was nice that once I logged on and redeemed the code on the receipt and everything installed that the villain pack worked on his profile, so he didn't have to replay everything from earlier in the day.  Oddly, I tried a playthrough and it locked up at the first save spot, so I'll have to see what's up with that later. The Lex Luthor minifig is cool.

I did not expect my older son to also come home with a Dalek minifig from the nearby bookstore.

 The only thing they had to report about the movie earlier in the day was that Mr. Popper's Penguins was better than Zookeeper, the movie they saw last week, and that the funniest thing in the movie was a penguin fart joke. I'm not sure what that says about Jim Carrey.

It's Batman Day! Part 2

At noon SuperMonkeyWife called me from the store to see if I want the $3 warranty. I made the John Casey noise, which I am quickly called out on. It was funny mostly because I was listening to the Nerdist podcast with Zachary Levi at the time. The kids had just gotten out of seeing a summer showing of “Mr. Popper's Penguins”, which I suspect that I will hear nothing about this evening.

Is it really HDTV?

It is currently estimated that around 10-20% of people paying for High Definition TV, and have a TV that could support High Definition, are still not actually watching any HD programming because their equipment is not correctly connected. What's odd, of course, is they haven't really noticed the difference. I would imagine that there is some amount of placebo effect – you are paying for HDTV, so it would be horrible to admit that you're not actually watching HDTV. On some level, perhaps some of our 10-20% know that there is something not quite right, but they don't know how to express it or they don't have any basis for comparison.

It doesn't help that between the switch to digital television, several format wars, and no less than six ways to hook up a television to a signal, the average TV watcher isn't really sure what the right way to connect the equipment is. Also, with the wide variety of devices out there, it's hard for the average person to know what the best way to hook them to their TV.

Coax – When we think of cable, as in cable TV, this is usually what we're talking about. This is the most common way that we get TV signals around in the analog world, but that's not to say that we can't get a digital signal through it. If you plug a coax cable into a device with a coax input, there's no guarantee that you'll get a visible signal, because the device you're plugging into has to be able to correctly decode the incoming signal. It's the proverbial box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get.

Composite Video – This is an RCA connector, usually marked with a yellow connector body or a yellow strip around the connector body. This is the lowest tier of analog video. I remember that this one is the single video cable because a 'composite' is something that is formed from more than one ingredient and the ingredients remain distinct. In this case, the ingredients are the brightness signal and two signals of color information all multiplexed together into a single signal. (You don't need three signals of color information because you can figure out the third signal of color from knowing the brightness and the other two color signals.) In decoding these signals from each other, there's a small amount of inaccuracy which mostly occurs in sharp transitions from one color to another or from light to dark. We perceive this as softer edges when we're viewing a video processed this way.

If you're watching something on a VHS tape, this is as good as it's going to get. A better cable won't help.

S-Video – This is a 4-pin mini DIN connector – if you didn't know it was supposed to be plugged in a television, you might think it was for a PC mouse or keyboard. (Pro Tip – Don't try it, you'll bend the pins.) This is a little better than composite video, because the brightness signal has been separated from the two color signals. It's a little sharper than composite because the brightness is separated out, but the TV still has to decode the color signals from each other. This is mostly found on larger analog TV's and older DVD players - although some of you may remember the awesome Commodore monitors that were small TVs that supported S-Video.

Component Video - Technically this should be called 'YPbPr video', but I've never heard anybody actually call them 'Yipper' cables and it would take somebody a lot more pedantic than me to call it something that strange. I do see 'YPbPr' marked on the jacks on TV's and DVD players. These are RCA connectors, just like the composite video cables, but they're marked with Green (Y) Blue (Pb) and Red (Pr) This is one step farther than S-Video. The brightness signal gets its own cable, and the two color signals also both get their own cables.

It is not until you get to this point that you can really expect anything like an HD signal making it to your TV, but as always, consider the source. If you have a Wii or one of the previous generation consoles (Xbox, PlayStation 2, or GameCube ), and a TV with a component video input, getting the console-specific component video cables will insure that you can get the best picture possible. One caveat - GameCubes manufactured after May 2004 were made without the output jack marked "Digital AV Out" and thereby cannot have component video cables connected to them. Nintendo made it so you had to buy the component video cable from them directly instead of making it available in stores, and then wondered why hardly anybody bought them, so they stopped making GameCubes that could output better video.

DVI - This stands for Digital Video Interface, and the likely place to see this is on a computer video card. There are a couple of different versions of this connector, but it's hard to tell them apart without counting all the pins on the end of the connector. The connector body is the same in all cases, it's just not all of them have all of the pins connected. It's a large connector, almost as big as the old 36-pin parallel connectors that printers had before USB. Some early cable boxes had this, presumably so you could show off your brand new digital cable on a LCD computer screen. If you are connecting a computer to a large flat screen display, DVI is the way to go - but if the display only has HDMI inputs, it is possible to convert a DVI signal into an HDMI signal - but just the video part, of course. You probably will want to know your display's native resolution before you try to hook it up - if you're not sure what that means, ask questions before buying cables.

HDMI - HDMI stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface. It's been designed to support a wide variety of video modes, and even allows devices hooked up via HDMI to communicate with one another for the purposes of detecting the correct video mode to display. If you have it available, use it. It also supports multichannel audio, but since I'm trying to keep the focus of this on video, we will save that discussion for later. Some newer DVD players use this connector, and most Blu-Ray devices and HD cable boxes use this connector.

Whew. I managed to make it all this way without using any of the video mode descriptors, but now I must explain them. The first two words I need to explain are interlaced and progressive.

A standard-definition TV picture as it is currently broadcast has 480 lines of visible resolution. Imagine 480 lines drawn horizontally across your TV screen, each one below the next. We'll call the line at the top of the screen "1" and the line at the bottom of the screen "480". Most television signals are 30 frames per second, so that's 30 pictures per second of TV, but the way that it is drawn is not 30 pictures in a row, one every 30th of a second. What happens is that all of the even lines of the first picture are drawn in the first 60th of a second (so that's line 2,4,6,8, etc. all the way to 480) and then all the odd lines of the first picture (1,3,5,7,...479) are drawn in the second 60th of a second. Then all the even lines of the second picture, then the odd lines of the second picture, and so on. This is called 480i. The '480' represents the 480 lines of resolution, and the 'i' lets us know that we're talking about interlaced video.

Alternately, there are video modes where all of the lines of the picture are drawn in a single pass. Your computer monitor does this, whether it is CRT or LCD or something else. The advantage of this is that contours drawn on the screen tend to look less flickery or less jagged. In interlaced video, a sharp line horizontally across the screen may seem to flicker up and down slightly, a diagonal line may look slightly jagged, and a vertical line might look ghostly. With the entire frame drawn at one time, these effects are reduced. Once you start watching DVDs in a progressive video mode, you might actually be able to read the credits instead of squinting at all of the blurry white letters on a black background! With DVD players that support progressive scan, you will have to use either the component video connectors or HDMI connection (if available), and then enable that feature in your DVD player's menu. This output will be 480p. 480 lines of resolution, and progressive scan output which means every line of video is drawn in a single pass. This, by the way, is still not HDTV. They give 480p a little bit of a break and call it 'EDTV'. The 'E' stands for 'Enhanced' - you can make up your own pharmaceutical joke here if you'd like.

If you're paying for HDTV, you're going to see that some of the HD channels are 720p, and some stations are 1080i. The nomenclature is the same - lines of resolution, and then an 'i' or 'p' to indicate whether it's interlaced or progressive scan. Of the two resolutions, 720p is better suited to fast-moving action like a football game, and 1080i is better suited to fancy-pants nature programming where the images don't change quickly and the camera pans slowly across the breathtaking landscape while Sigourney Weaver narrates.

Since the electronics industry can't leave well enough alone, they had to go and make the Blu-ray video format, which is best viewed on a TV capable of 1080p.

So, to categorize -

480i

Standard-definition TV, VHS, older game consoles.

Connects with coax, composite video, or sometimes S-Video.

480p

DVD players, Wii, GameCube, PlayStation 2 (but not all games), Xbox (all games)

Connects with component video cables.

720p

Sports HDTV, Some Blu-ray movies, Most PS3 and Xbox 360 games

Connects with component video cables or HDMI

1080i

Most HDTV

Connects with component video cables or HDMI

1080p

Blu-ray movies, some PS3 and Xbox 360 games

Connects with HDMI

Any higher resolution than 1080p, for now, assume that it will also connect with HDMI. Also, bear in mind that HDMI and component video can do lower resolutions, but they're overkill. Also, PS3 and Xbox 360 can display 1080i resolution, but most games are natively in 720p and would be rescaled slightly to display 1080i. While this is a long and involved post, I have not covered every possible scenario by a long shot. My intent is to cover the more common configurations.

And to recap - if you're not using HDMI, you might not be getting HDTV. If you don't know, have a look. If you can't tell what you're looking at, I hope you have enough information to ask the right questions now.

People just don't understand English.

...And I don't mean American English, in this case - I mean that American English speakers don't understand other-side-of-the-Atlantic English as spoken by regular people.

In support of my position, I give as examples:

1) The 1968 movie "Yellow Submarine" had non-Beatles playing the Beatles so their spoken dialogue would be understood by the audience.

2) Guy Ritchie's 1998 film "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" needs subtitles in at least one scene when shown to an American audience.

3) In the Dreamworks animated feature Monsters vs Aliens, dozens of people on the internet have to misquote Gallaxhar's best fake swear word as "Flagnog" or "Flagnnon" because they don't correct for the slightly upper-class fake English accent and spell it "Flagnard" like they should.

OK, so I checked the subtitles. I'm like that.

Now that I think of it, maybe Americans don't even understand regular American English. On the DVD of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, after you hit "play" but before the feature starts, there is a screen where they have two different stills of the movie that you pick one of. There's no explanation, just the two pictures that you choose one of. If you're watching the DVD on an old standard TV, you will probably think that you're choosing between full frame and widescreen. If you're watching the DVD on a widescreen TV, it looks like you're choosing between 1.78:1 and 2.35:1. As it turns out, it's the second one. Are we really there yet? Is everybody watching movies on widescreen TV's now? Are movie watchers afraid of math? Would have killed them to put a little bit of explanatory text on the screen, or does every interface have to be only pictures now? Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

More Holiday movie watching

I got my lovely wife the film Hot Fuzz for Christmas since she really liked Shaun of the Dead. Instead of turning the zombie genre on its head, Hot Fuzz turns the cop comedy genre on its head. That being said, this is not simply a film full of one-liners and big explosions. There are some slightly grisly scenes in there, more at home in a zombie film than in the action movies that Hot Fuzz tries to make fun of. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the bad guy is very bad, and the camera tends to show more than it hides.

I know, this movie has been out for a while, but like Shaun of the Dead, it's going to take time for everyone that should have watched this movie to see it. What I'd really like to be able to say is that the next time Edgar Wright makes a movie with Simon Pegg, if we liked these other two we should all see it right away because it's going to be brilliant and gory and hillarious - but the mere act of typing it may curse that somehow. By the way, that film is tenatively titled The World's End.

Simon Pegg will next be appearing in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, due out in 2009 as our favorite engineer Scotty. As much as I liked reading about this in the trade magazines, and as much as I would love to love a Star Trek movie again, I saw some trailers that filled me with hype, not hope. At least I can be sure that it won't be worse than Nemesis as I am certain that that is a mathematical impossibility.

Next post: Holiday Game Wrapup (If all of them are unwrapped...)

Christmas Movie Blowout

As most of you know, there are only two things that you can count on being open on Christmas Day. One of them is the movie theater, and the other is Chinese restaurants. Sure, there might be a few other places open - I know some pizza places were - but it's not a given. I didn't really feel like Chinese food today, so we went to see The Tale of Despereaux.

My oldest son was excited to see it, and wanted to wait until we could all go even though he could have gone earlier in the week since school is out. Frankly, I was happy to go to the movies since I can't really remember what the last thing I saw in the theater was. (Cars? Monster House? Well, I know I've seen at least a few movies in the theater since we've had kids.)

We were initally nervous because the reviews that we read gave the movie poor scores and complained a bit about that there were too many characters to follow. We were also prepped for the reviewers to dislike the movie by the fact that our oldest was reading the book that this moive was made from at school, and the teacher handed him a worksheet to fill out about the differences between the book and the movie. Clearly, the book had been changed a little to accomodate a screenplay. I always expect that to happen because of the intrinsic differences between books and movies. Usually, since changes have to be made, and they weren't the ones that the reviewer would have made, there's going to be several reviewers handing out bad scores purely because of a lack of objectivity. As far as the too many characters part, I didn't think that there were any more characters to follow than some ensemble comedies. Granted, those are for adults, but since my oldest son didn't have any problem with all of the characters then I have to assume that the reviewer needed something simpler to watch, like Waiting for Godot or perhaps some off-Broadway one person show.

I enjoyed the film for what it was and was not encumbered by having to compare it to the book.

On the other hand, we watched the Speed Racer movie after dinner - and I have no idea what someone unfamiliar with the source material would think of the movie. It was very much like watching a video game during most of the action sequences and jumped into flashback quite frequently in the first part of the film. I'm thinking that someone that never saw the original cartoon has no clear idea what is happening until about 30 minutes in, and it's still dodgy at that point.

Now I'm going to go shoot zombies parasite-infested villagers zombies.

Clone Wars vs. Clone Wars

Friday night during dinner, while we were waiting for Cartoon Networks' new Clone Wars show to come on - last week's episode is 8:30, new episodes are at 9:00 we watched the older Clone Wars from 2005 produced by Samurai Jack's animation team. The thing we appreciated the most about the new one now is that Anakin's got a less whiny voice actor. The action of the 2005 miniseries holds up well, and it doesn't hurt that Mace Windu get lots of lightsaber time in the old one, but the new Clone Wars seems surprisingly mature and well-acted by comparison. Maybe George Lucas is only writing plot outlines and is letting better directors and writers fill in the gaps.

Time Warp

Time Warp on the Discovery Channel was pretty awesome on Wednesday night. The guy juggling chainsaws and the lighters in the blender were pretty over the top, but all of it was pretty awesome. Everyday silliness combined with crystal clear high speed photography (filmography? - D'oh! That's not the right word, is it? - but it's film, not still photographs. Videography?) is a good combination. If you check the link to the show, I would recommend using anything but Firefox and be prepared to update your Flash Player, since they show a few movie clips on the page.

In other news, my Nintendo Wii is out for a tuneup.