Virtual Reality

Many are calling 2016 the year of VR. If you're not in the know, VR stands for Virtual Reality and it's coming out this year. Now it's important to point out that this is not the Star Trek holodeck we're talking about here, but rather goggles.

So how does this work? Well you plug the goggles into your PC, or in the case of the PlayStation VR, your Sony PlayStation. Then you slip on your goggles and off you go.

But why should I do that, you ask. Good question. One of the most prominent areas of interest is of course gaming. Genres like racing, flying (air and space), first person shooters and indeed any first person game like survival and horror are going to be vastly enhanced by this technology. The immersion will be incredible, you should feel like you are there in person, or so I'm told. I should perhaps point out that I myself haven't tried any of the different systems, but we'll get to that.

If gaming isn't your thing, maybe you like concerts. Or sporting events. Imagine that. Feeling like you are in the crowd of the Superbowl even though you are sitting on your couch. Or perhaps you'd like to attend the Sydney Opera, but you are nowhere close to Australia. Well, with VR you can be there. All it takes is a 360 degree camera in the crowd and you can tune in. To be fair, streaming technology is not yet good enough to do this live without heavy lag, but a recording should be just as good. Keep in mind that this is emerging technology.

Another area is tourism. Google Maps in Street View is already a fun way to look at different places but imagine moving your head and seeing all the buildings around you, being able to stand in a museum as long as you like admiring the art or just wandering around in some of the most beautiful places on earth, all in your living room. Okay so actually going there is always better, but travel is both expensive and time consuming, and people who are handicapped will be able to experience the world in a never before seen way.

It is also necessary to point out that the Adult Film industry is already working hard on this. I'm not going into details here, use your own imagination, but it is none the less important. All media technology has been pushed forward by the porn industry. Youtube would not be what it is today without adult film. That's just a fact.

Apart from these wonderful recreational uses, there are also many therapeutic uses for VR. The virtual distraction could make painful treatments considerably more tolerable. And eventually there could be powerful educational uses as well. Reading about a historically significant event is one thing, but to actually be there in person? A whole other ballpark.

So what's stopping us from rushing out and getting these magical goggles? Well, most aren't out yet but they will be soon, so the price is perhaps the really big issue. The Occulus Rift is about $600, the HTC Vive is $800 and the mysterious Microsoft HoloLens will set you back a whopping $3000! But wait, that's not all. You will need a powerful PC as well. The goggles are playback devices, not computers. So apart from the buy in price, you will most likely need a $1500 computer as well. The money adds up fast here, and it is already too expensive for most people.

Now suppose you do have that money, keep in mind that there aren't yet that much to use them on. More will come, no doubt about it, but it takes time to create all the good stuff. Rome wasn't built in a day and all that, so you need to be a bit patient.

Like all emergent technology, time will tell. The goggles will get better and cheaper. Tablet computers were horribly expensive when they first came out, but today you can have a great tablet for round about $200.

There are of course tons of details I can't talk about here. Like the possibility of dedicating an entire room to VR game in, motion sickness, if the goggles work with glasses, etc. You get the idea.

Keep an eye on this if anything I said sound cool. In the mean time here is a link with a bit more info. For even more, Google is your friend.

So until next time, have an actually great week!

Black Mass

So a couple of days ago I watched Black Mass (2015).

No, it's not about satanism, but about James “Whitey” Bulger, a crime lord from Boston. The lead is played by Johnny Depp and it is directed by Scott Cooper.

The title is interesting in itself, since it could be referring to Massachusetts which is shortened to Mass, or it could refer to the deal Bulger makes with the FBI. The deal really is central to the plot, more so than the crimes committed.

The central plot you see, is about an agent, John Connolly, who makes the aforementioned deal. He grew up with Bulger, and wants to use him to bring down the Italian Mafia in Boston. Bulger in turn wants to use the immunity the FBI gives him to control South Boston, or Southie as they call it. But this is a complicated relationship, and you will have to watch the movie to see how it goes.

In my mind, the most interesting part of this film is not the plot or the acting or anything like that. It's the movie itself. It's good, it really is, but I don't know why. It certainly isn't great. But it's solid enough even though nothing happens here that you haven't seen before if you watch crime movies. Other films deal with the subject matter better, though Black Mass does nothing wrong.

When the first hour had passed, I was surprised. It didn't feel like an hour had passed at all. Twenty minutes later I started to wonder when it would be over. (There was 40 minutes left.) The pacing is a bit weird, I suppose, but in essence I'd say the movie does what it wants to with no regard for what you want. Pretty much like Bulger himself. I guess you could say the movie is Whitey Bulger, but that would sound pretentious, so I won't say it.

Would I recommend this film? Yes. It's well made on all fronts and Depp is on point again. So much so, in fact.

Did I like Black Mass? Yes, but will I ever watch it again? Probably not.

I think this story would have been better served as a TV series. There are nuances and complications that are left hanging, mostly I suppose due to time constraints, and the movie is already two hours long.

At the end of the line, I think you should watch it and make up your own mind.

Until we see each other again, have a groovy week!

Random Facts

It's a new week, so let's get those brains humming with some interesting and completely random facts.

1. The word “Anarchy” stands for “Without Rulers” instead of “Without Rules.”
2. 15 of the 25 largest hotels in the world are on the Las Vegas Strip.
3. The fake snow in Wizard of Oz was made of pure asbestos.
4. The phrase “Proprietary Eponym” is used to describe when a brand name becomes the commonly used term. Some examples: Coke=Soda | Kleenex=Tissue | Xerox=Copy | Rollerblades=In-Line Skates | Frisbee=Flying Disc.
5. Rust in old buildings can result in lack of oxygen, which can be dangerous to urban explorers. There have been cases where people have died and rescuers who attempted to save them have died too.
6. Exposure to platinum can turn snails into their evolutionary decedents the slug.
7. In Japan, you are equally likely to die from being struck by lightning as you are from being shot by a gun.
8. ‘Embiggen’ and ‘cromulent’, two words invented on The Simpsons have since been used in academic journals and added to the dictionary.
9. One liter of Motor oil can contaminate one million liters of water. It’s important to understand that when you dispose oil in sink, it affects a million liters of recyclable water.
10. XXX on cartoon jugs of alcohol originally denoted three times distilled, resulting in almost pure alcohol content.
11. In order to prevent everything from being named after mathematician Leonhard Euler, discoveries are sometimes named after the first person after Euler to have discovered them.
12. Norilsk is a city in Russia where the pollution is so severe that mining the topsoil is now economically feasible because it contains so many heavy metals.
13. Operation Vegetarian was a 1942 plan by the British military to drop linseed cakes infected with anthrax on German fields where they would be eaten by cows and thus infect the civilian population that ate them. The test site in Scotland remained uninhabitable until the 1990’s.
14. During her 67-year reign, Queen Victoria survived at least 7 assassination attempts. One attempt was by an 18-year-old hunchbacked dwarf, who was later caught when police rounded up every hunchback and dwarf in London.
15. A deaf British prisoner of war named Edwin Rose missed the liberation of his camp because he fell asleep on the toilet and slept through the battle. He woke to find everyone else gone, so he shaved, put on his best clothes and walked out to freedom.
16. The U.S. military has a 26-page manual for baking brownies.
17. When the Norse Vikings sailed for America in the 11th century, they fully expected (and hoped) to find a race of monsters to fight. Instead, they found the indigenous peoples. Disappointed at finding no real monsters, the Norse (known for being tall) called them Skræling, or pygmies.
18. In the Victorian Era, doctors prescribed beards to help keep men healthy.
19. At its peak in 2008. U.S. incarcerated 1 in 100 adults, exceeding the average incarceration rate in the Soviet Union during the Gulag system.
20. In 2011, a woman in Sweden found her wedding ring on a carrot growing in her backyard, 16 years after misplacing it.

There you go, tewnty interesting facts to start off the week. All facts are taken from Kickassfacts.com, so like last time, if you disagree with a fact, take it up with them.

Until next time, have an interesting week!

Game News

Alright, I have some gaming news for you today. Or maybe you already knew this, but I'm telling you anyway.

First up, EA has launched their Vault for PC. This is a subscription based game library, so for (as of now) €3.99 a month, you can play ALL the games in the vault as much as you want. Unlike Steam, you don't actually own these games, and they can add or remove games as they wish, but for less than the price of a AAA game at launch per year, you do get access to some good titles. I haven't tried this yet, since the relevant games at the moment aren't really to my taste. But do check it out. It seems like a good idea. Oh, and it's not just EA titles, they have some third party stuff as well. The future will tell.

In other news, here's an article that claims that Ubisoft has “dumbed down” the graphics for PC in Tom Clancy's The Division in order to be fair to console owners. This smells like what they did with Watchdogs, but that's another story. Interesting read though. It seems like the big triple A developers are constantly competing with each other to see who can be the biggest jerk to the customers.

That's all I have this week. It's not much I know, but I have the flu, and I feel like last weeks left over pizza; flat, gooey and generally unpleasant. See ya next week!

Did Poe have a time machine?

As I mentioned last week, today I want to talk a bit about Edgar Allan Poe.

He was born January 19, 1809 in Boston and died October 7, 1849 in Baltimore. In his forty years he did some remarkable things.

He was a pioneer of the detective genre, influencing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He kicked off science fiction according to Jules Verne and he is considered the father of modern horror, inspiring greats from Lovecraft to King.

Poe was also one of the founding fathers of what we today call short stories. But these achievements aside, I want to talk about some of the weird things that surround this strange man and his works.

In his 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a crew of whalers run out of food and are forced to resort to cannibalism. Their unfortunate dinner is a young lad named Richard Parker. Now in the real world in 1884, 46 years later, four men were cast adrift when their ship sank and they had to eat someone to survive. They snacked on none other than their 17 year old cabin boy Richard Parker... Creepy.

In 1840, Poe wrote The Businessman, in which the titular character suffers brain damage with the result that his entire personality changes. In 1848, a railroad worker suffered similar damage and his personality changed in the exact same way. Now people getting hurt is nothing new, but the remarkable thing is that brain damage was not understood in the mid-1800's. Modern doctors were astounded at Poe's understanding of all the symptoms of frontal lobe damage.

Then in 1848, Poe published a huge poem called Eureka, in which he postulates that the universe began as a single particle, and then in a flash expanded and indeed is still expanding. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Yup, Poe essentially came up with the Big Bang theory half a century before astronomers figured it out.

There is more to this remarkable and strange man, but you'll have to read up on that yourself if you're interested. I'll just finish with how he finished. He was found rambling in a gutter, repeating the name Reynolds over and over. To this day we don't know who that is. Poe was not wearing his own clothes, and since the medical records are lost forever, we don't know what he died from. There were no marks on his body, and no obvious signs of any particular illness.

That's it for this time. Until we see each other again, have a great week!