Galaxy Rangers

I watched this when it aired and bought the DVDs recently. It's a short-lived animated series (why is this out on DVD? I have no idea), done in the US, sci-fi with a lot of Western in it, about interstellar law enforcement by these guys with implants that have super (or... not so super) powers.

What I remember is that it was amazingly better than what else was on. In particular, the stories and plots were great: sometimes they didn't win, and were lucky to escape alive. There was continuity from episode to episode, and all kinds of good stuff.

Not surprisingly, the series as it actually exists is a lot different.

• Jerry Orbach does the voice for Zach, the head Ranger. Yeah, Jerry Orbach. It's strange to hear this well-known Law and Order actor say things like "We must find the Queen's psychocrypt!" and be serious.
• There's a strange mix of the stupid and the entirely serious. In the first episodes, there's a an implication that the evil Queen has killed millions of people on one planet, Goose (who is the Clint Eastwood-esque one) kills their enemies left and right (and is willing to shoot their horses). No G.I. Joe-style jumps-out-of-the-helicopter-the-instant-it-explodes. Then in another episode, a town is haunted by an electrically-animated/possessed scarecrow. An entire episode ("Mindnet") revolves around Goose being framed for a crime (so the Rangers have 24 hours to solve it before, presumably, he gets thrown in the hoosegow) while Goose is hanging around in a super-high-tech Ranger training facility -- and he's there to take the call when the authorities contact the facility immediately after the theft.
• There's an occasional level of humor about the whole thing, usually in dialogue, that went way over my head as a kid. In one stupid episode, Doc's in prison and waiting to be killed by the locals, and spends his time composing a letter. "Dear Miss Manners. I am about to be executed on a backwards frontier world and have a terrible dilemma. What does one wear to one's own funeral?"
• Or, if you like your humor a little more obvious, at the end of one episode in the occasional "everyone ends up dancing or laughing" endings, we see a robot do the robot. No, really.
  

Still, I have a soft spot for it. When it aired, it inspired me to start trying to write sci-fi, which eventually led to all kinds of interesting things. When it's good, it's quite good, though I still think Robotech has held up better. Or even Star Blazers, for that matter. Desslock! Desslock! Desslock!

Ahhhh

103m today, Bellevue - Issaquah-Hobart-Black Diamond-Enumclaw-up 410, back

Hilly. More hilly from Bellevue to Enumclaw than I'd thought it would be. Cold, too, and dark, which sucked. Good ride though, the first time in a while I haven't hit The Trough at 80m.

Halfway home

The book's 50% submitted, and another vast chunk just needs re-write and massaging. As Steve Goldman put it, "Starting and finishing a book are great. Everything between is terrible." I can't wait to get this thing done.

Also, if I disappear and no one knows where I am, the publisher's got me in a basement somewhere with an intern holding a gun to my head as I pound out the last chapters on a manual typewriter, the only thing that won't short under the nervous sweat of an author under the gun. Don't send help, they're likely to be jittery.

The corruption of eBay

I got back from vacation and suddenly dropped a fat chunk of money on a bunch of used video games, which brings me to two points:
- old games need to have a smoother price curve. There are older games out there I'm interested in circling around and playing even though I've heard mixed things about them (like Wild Arms 3 -- something where the story, or gameplay, or whatever is interesting but it's flawed enough you don't want to pay $50 for them). But the pricing for games seems to run $50.. 50.. 50... 50... $20, out of print. Trying to pick them up off Ebay is futile, they're either selling for slightly less than retail or if it's out of print, much, much more. I would happily pay $10 for those kind of games, or even rent them... crap, I totally should be renting through Gamefly or something. Anyway...
- Ebay is corrupt. It's totally corrupt, and they must know this. And this is beyond "illegal stuff is on Ebay" or the many, many people selling diet pills of various flavors. Feedback, for instance, is faked out.

It's almost addictive to find them. Find someone who looks fishy... for instance, someone selling computer software (claiming it's legit) but the sale says "to save on shipping costs, we ship only the jewel case and CD..."

Then their feedback, which runs largely positive, contains weird stuff... many scattered comments from someone else, who appears to have bought stuff only from that guy, and from other people who also bought from the software guy, all leaving each other positive feedback.

Ebay must know this. I know there's a huge number of users, and it's impossible to keep track of everyone, but it's not that hard to write some heuristic tools that go out and look for these pools and then send someone out to eyeball them.

Really -- if you're running a business selling something shady, what's your motivation to do a lot of business with someone equally shady? Does your cell phone booster business really require regular infusions of questionable Photoshop software?

Potentially, this is one more thing that can bring Ebay down. If Amazon can integrate used fixed-price auctions into their business (with higher commissions but no listing costs), and Google's keywords allow small resellers to target customers more efficently, that eats into the supplier side of Ebay, while trust and pricing can lead to erosion of the buyer base.

Ebay's momentum was based in its scale: if you wanted to reach the most buyers, you sold there, and if you wanted to buy from the most sellers, you bought there. Their momentum has slowed, and if this continues... natch.


And in other news, I think I totally should have joined Gamefly a long time ago. Doh.

Quitting WoW

I cancelled my account today, barely escaping another month charged for not playing. Tron 2.0 might have cost me $50, but at least when I wasn't playing it it didn't charge me $14/month.

WoW's a great game. It's well-balanced, it's fun to play (mostly), and I totally loved riding around on my kodo all over the place. For my first online RPG, I couldn't imagine a better way to get into it.

Here's the problem, though:
I don't have time.

Oh, sure, WoW's designed for the person without a lot of time. And it is, in a way: the rest meter does a lot to help keep things even. But at higher levels, all of the quests you can go on are elite or instances. When I quit, I had 18/20 elite/instance quests and the other two were actually elite/instance and not properly classified (go kill this one elite guy who spawns 90,000 normal guys of your level, should be a piece of cake).

This requires you to either be in a good guild, which I was before it merged, or find pickup groups, and pickup groups... hooooooooly mackeral, it really only takes one moron to make your life difficult, and then you've wasted a night.

But moreover, having friends/a good social network requires you to play a lot. I'm trying to finish a book project, I've got a challenging day job that requires me to work at work and then sometimes afterwards, and a wife I like spending time with.

One of the great things WoW does, though, and I talk about this every time I write about video games, is it gives a great sense of rising power as you go. At level 50, when I have to cross back through areas I remember were way hard before, they're a cakewalk now. The instances are more interesting and challenging, and your tactics have to get way better (which, again, goes back to the grouping thing).

The other thing is that I'm really moving away from PC gaming. Despite having to buy a second X-Box recently (thank you, Microsoft), I'm at the point where my not-that-old computer can't really handle what I want it to do for game performance (run 1600x1200 for my LCD and do it fast) without having me spend a huge chunk of money on it, and

• I'm cheap in my old age and
• As long as I'm spending money on random consumer items, I'd rather buy a nice TV or something

I suspect, of course, that when the next Call of Duty comes out, that'll be it for my new-found resolve. Man, I liked that game.

Make your passwords long

Technology is useless without proper implementation. Pick long passwords. If you want to choose something that's spelled phoenetically, that's better than being complicated but short. One of the things that's wrong with choosing "password" is not that it's easy to guess, but that it's only eight characters.

If a black hat is faced with trying to guess n passwords of length 5-10 digits, they can reasonably assume almost all of them are five. Unless the systems they're attacking requires special characters, that's 26 lowercase + 26 uppercars + 10 numbers = 62 possible characters/digit.

So let's take a standard one-way hash algorithm (call it FOO-1). FOO turns any string into a 20-character hash, which is used to sign it, whatever.

To build a database of all possible values of FOO for five character passwords is not hard:

52^5 * 20 = under a gig of data, and a six-character store becomes almost as easy and a seven-character attack well within affordable storage solutions.

Piece of cake. Now a data attack that exposes the hashes becomes quite lucrative: given the hashed values, an attacker then has a good chance of finding the five/six/seven character string that produces that hashed value.

But if you're a smart user, even weak hash algorithms like FOO protect you with sufficently long passwords. Say you decide to pick "password" for your password and then pad it out with zeros to the maximum allowed by any site (in this case, ten). At ten characters, there's no way a black hat gets it:

52^10 * 20 = 2.89E + 18.

It's untenable to store that much data (and okay, so at this point, you're probably going to argue that FOO, with a 20-byte output, isn't all that fun, but you get my point). The black hat's going to pick off the many easy targets and leave the long-passworded guy alone.

Which, of course, raises another intersting dilemma: should ecommerce sites be required to get user passwords of at least n-length and meeting certain standards, in addition to using industry-standard algorithms? Or do users have the right to expose themselves to harm?

The dumb man's version of a smart man

The Tulalip Casino's running ads that claim that they're the casino for smart people. I understand people make their living at poker, or even in handicapping horse races. But the games offered at your local casino -- blackjack and a hundred variants, roulette -- they're particularly costly entertainment. Play long enough, and you will be left with nothing. Las Vegas wasn't built on buffets. Smart people can gamble knowing the deal and yet still enjoy themselves. They may choose their casino based on which ones offer the best odds to minimize their losses, but if they're doing it for entertainment, that's only part of the trade-off.

The casino for smart people is like "the cigar of healthy chain smokers" or "the nine pound hamburger for your active lifestyle". It almost immediately sets the audience up to say "What? No it isn't."

I don't understand how these things get out in the world and in front of people. Did they really test well before survey groups or something? And if so, can I get the names of whoever was on that panel?

Appleseed and relative ratings

I finally got around to watching Appleseed (the 2004 movie). It was a really strange experience.

I watch a ton of movies, and I watch a lot of animated movies. I'm particularly fascinated by movies that do crazy things, that show the viewer a new world. While I understand that Howard's End may be a quality movie, it's unlikely I'm going to flip over it.

But back to my point -- I love seeing something entirely new in a movie. So I loved the Matrix, and (like many) was disappointed by the sequels. I didn't like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but I was smiling while watching it, enjoying the sheer head-first energy that showed in its creation.

Appleseed was both good and terrible.

The graphics are beautiful, as great as any I've ever seen in an animated movie. There's a great sense of style: the landscapes are beautiful, if sometimes too shiny (which along with "weight" is a endemic problem to animated films). But the characters are flatter, looking more like traditional cell-shaded animation. And some of the scenes are just amazing, I was floored at how good they looked, they were almost electric to watch. I don't get that back-of-the-head tingle very often, so it's notable for that if nothing else.

The downside was that it's based on an animated series (or possible a comic book?) so there's a long plot that possibly makes sense in context, but here's my plot summary, with spoilers:

Deunan's a soldier, fighting these evil armored dudes (robots? cyborgs?) in a destroyed metropolis. During a reaaaally cool fight scene, she's trapped but rescued by armored dudes in white suits. They take her to this utopia city.

One of the people who rescued her was a former fellow soldier who got blown up and is now mostly dorky-looking robot parts. In this utopia city, there are two races: humans and genetically engineered clones called "bioriods" who are tweaked. In the utopia, the humans control the army (these humans are anti-bioroid), and there's this council that works with the supercomputer that controls everything.

New story begins: someone tries to kill Deunan. Her comrade aids and then betrays a regular army/terrorist coup. That coup turns out to have been engineered by the council, who is trying to destroy all humans for some reason. Their scheme is stymied by Deunan, and the utopia city is saved.

There were times during the movie that I was swept up in a scene or even just looking at the city and didn't care, but particularly during exposition scenes I kept thinking "that doesn't make sense, how would they have known that at the time? Why would that character do that then, if they knew... whaaaaat?"

By comparison, take "Kung Fu Hustle". Not as deep -- you're not intended to watch KFH and contemplate the essential horror of man's inhumanity to man, or whether humanity's warlike nature dooms us. But it's a much more fun movie, with the same kind of nutty sense of the world it lives in, and after I'd seen it I felt a lot more happier and satisfied.

So Appleseed: wacky.