Thoughts
So, like everyone else I’ve seen the movie Avatar, in 3D of course. As everyone else I agree that the story could have been a bit better and less predictable at times. But the visual quality, effects, and the whole 3D things is simply amazing. Seriously. I’m not going to be able to watch any other movie the same way again. It’s that good. No, the 3D isn’t perfect, there are occasional flaws and there is still room for improvement in the technology… but as for perfection – it’s a damn big step in that direction. I truly feel that this is going to be the future of movies and games but later on television as a whole as well.
(For those who think that won’t happen or don’t see the advantages… remember that there were lots of you when the internet or computers or cell phones or cars or many other such things were first introduced!)
I’m really looking forward to an Avatar sequal (which is coming, by the way! Mr. Cameron has confirmed that already).
I’ve also tried the game. It’s a good way to kill a some time and for a movie tie-in it’s actually not that bad, but it could have been much better.
Let’s start with this: you can choose to play for either tha Na’vi or the RDA, this is decided somewhere after half an hour or so of gameplay. You have to arrest one guy who does ‘secretly’ work for the Na’vi but gets caught. He points in the distance and say ‘look what you’re doing’ and you have to decide right then and there, based on pretty much nothing, whether you’re going to betray your own species or exterminate another.
Anyway, I played through the game on the Na’vi side. The Na’vi in the game seem really eager to trust you (except for one guy, but he’s turned around later on) and saddle you up with various things that their own kind only goes through after many years. It also caught my attention how quite a lot of them just happen to speak English (and how often the subtitles are different from the actual speech). In fact, very few seem to ever speak their own language in the entire game, and when they do, it’s usually pretty poorly (more on that later). The storyline of the game is not particularly interesting (I dare use the word generic), and the ending is less than impressive. Near the end you get to fly the Toruk (I use that word because the ‘human’ name is way too long to remember), which seems awesome at first but after 200 meters or so you get off again and that’s it. A flight you could just as well have done on your own Ikran (which you receive fairly early in the game, after which you only get to fly it ‘manually’ a few times, which is fun even though the controls are terrible), and I really have the impression (as with a lot of things in the game) that they put it in just because you’ll probably recognize it from the movie and you’d be disappointed if it wasn’t in the game. But they could have done so much more with it.
Also the main character is as tactful as an untrained dog when faced with a yummy treat most of the time, and the game is pretty simple. The soldiers barely pose a challenge and if you just need to get past them to reach some place, you just jump on one of the horsy creatures, send it into a gallop, and you’ll run straight past anything and barely take any damage at all.
But all in all it’s not a bad way to spend your free afternoon (though I’d never spend the full € 50 on it. Seriously.)
The Na’vi language is actually really interesting and I’ve taken some time to learn more about it. It has some really nasty things in it though – word order within a sentence is pretty free for instance, but that’s mostly because a lot of information goes into the verbs, which use infixes (rather than pre- or suffices which are used by most languages). Infixes can turn a root verb into s omething that is barely recognizable. Except for the basic verb, it may contain things like how the speaker feels about it, when it’s happening (which can be the present, immediate future, distant future, immediate past, or distant past) and who it relates to (me, you, me and the other guys standing here but not including the guy being spoken to, and a whole lot of other variations). You can basically say ‘Im going hunting this afternoon, the guy over there is coming with me and I think it’s a pretty good idea’ in a single verb.
But what really bothered me in the game is that, even with my basic understanding, the Na’vi used in the game is done pretty poorly. Nearly every NPC you come accross has a different way of pronouncing things (especially the really characteristic sounds like the kx, tx and px) and if you compare all of the speech, it’s a miracle that these guys even understand each other at all. I understand that the voice actors for the game didn’t get the thorough training and exercise that the actors in the movie did, but still, they could have done so much better.
One awesome thing I’ve noticed is a fun reference in the (rather good) TV series Farscape. In I believe it was episode 7 of season 4, there’s an elevator (or rather, a guy on a screen in the elevator) talking about how boring it was to go up and down all the time and how he’d like to go sideways just once. That quote, plus the entire idea of a sentient elevator, is yet another awesome reference to an awesome trilogy that is currently made up of six books.
2010
2010 is already going pretty quickly (hell, its almost time for 2011). I was reminded by the fact that an arbitrary number advanced by one by the yearly e-mail telling me I need to renew this domain name (which is done by the way – damnleet.com is mine and stays mine!). Not that counting years means anything to me. The earth made (approximately) one revolution around the sun from completely arbitrary and meaningless starting point. And at a completely random moment in history (or well, not entirely random – mankind made a couple of other really stupid decisions at the time, most of them involving a carpenter and a few pieces of wood) we decided to start counting those revolutions. But guess what, the earth’s gonna keep doing that for a couple billion years to come. Big deal. Looking at it like that, it’s kinda like celebrating every time you’ve taken a step on a 50 km hike. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not significant in any way, and yet, we celebrate it.
That can only lead me back to the conclusion that lots of things lead me back to: people are weird.
But I can understand that they need to celebrate something. There is so much going on that isn’t worth celebrating, that we try to make the most out of the things we can be more or less happy about. On the grand scale of the universe it’s as significant as a single drop of water is on a planet filled with nothing but oceans, but for a creature as proud of himself as a human, one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of perspective.
On a smaller scale of things, I’m (temporarily!!) taking a few things offline (specifically some of the more space-consuming parts of the photo album). I really need to upgrade the disk space I have on this server (a few minutes ago there were 7 megabytes of it available), and getting a few GB’s freed up will help to keep everything going until there is more space available. Don’t worry – everything will be back online as soon as possible!