Kickstarter Monday: Flag and Hadean Lands

Ages ago, I wrote up a few posts to see how various Kickstarters I backed had turned out. Starting this month, I'm going to make the first Monday of the month about reporting on a couple of the projects that I've backed since then, or catching up on previously mentioned incomplete projects. There was a time when Kickstarting was probably my number one way to spend money frivolously, and while these days I’d say that hobby has given way to room escapes, I’ve still backed or attempted to back over 80 projects. 

My first instinct here was to draw this series out and cover all of them, but I stand by just about everything I had to say when I wrote the previous reviews. Here's the digest version: 

• Video games are second only to films as bad projects to back.
• First-timers making hardware gadgets are probably going to fail.
• Sometimes I back artists more as a way to thank them for previous work than because I want their new thing.
• I like things that light up.

So here's what's new:

The Glif, and also The New Glif - These are well-made and practical gadgets for sticking your phone on a tripod. The original was built for the iPhone 4, which means it is now a piece of plastic trash that I will move from junk drawer to junk drawer until I die. The "New" version is built to be phone agnostic, and although I don’t use it often, it’s a big help when I do have a need for it. 

Flag - This was a startup that did a huge faceplant leading its founder, Samuel Agboola, to try to scrub himself and the project from the internet.  The idea was for you to get free prints of your photos in the mail, as paid for by advertising that would appear on the reverse side of each print. I guess their problem was that you can’t attract advertisers to a platform with no users, and they didn’t have enough cash to burn on giving away prints until they had a respectable amount of users. Plus they promised a bunch of dumb and expensive frills. They ran a second (and third) shady crowdfunding campaign, totally failed to keep up with shipping prints to their existing users after a couple of months, and then shut down as much of their web presence as possible. Backers have been left to post pleas for refunds on the campaign comment pages like an extra sad chain letter.  For what it’s worth, the first photos I received were actually very nicely done and encouraging of the service as a whole. The second month was four months late in delivery and of noticeably lower quality. Neither batch had any ads, and I never saw anything else from them except apologies and promises.

Hadean Lands - This wonderful text adventure (ahem, interactive fiction) is like a Thanksgiving dinner - Andrew Plotkin spent years developing it, and when it was finally served I gulped the whole thing down in a tiny fraction of the time. It’s a story of alchemy-powered space travel gone awry, and it’s the reason I have TextExpander snippets for things like “orichalcum,” “anaphylaxis,” and “anti-Tellurian distillate,” along with some especially long and complicated series of commands I used time and again. I am perfectly pleased with myself to also mention that I was among the first players to complete the game in the week it was released, before the internet filled up with hints. This was one of the very first projects I ever backed, and it's pretty much a best-case scenario for how happy I was with the end result.

Escape Room Reviews: Da Vinci's Challenge

Company: Quest Room
Room: Da Vinci’s Challenge
Date Played: 7/30/17
Player Count: 3
Success:  Success!

Premise: Leonardo’s apprentices must prove themselves by solving elaborate puzzles!

Immersion: It’s always tough to make a centuries-old setting feel ‘real,’ but this room is very nicely designed and consistent with the idea of the times - no grocery store padlocks and electronic safes here!

Highlights: Where this room really shines is in the prop design and construction. There’s custom tech in the room, but even more impressive are the custom built low/non-technical items. 

Lowlights: One or two interactions were a little weak. Some sequence-breaking is possible, which is kind of a waste of time. 

And Finally: This is a room that starts with the team divided into two areas so even numbers of players might be better, and If you’re the sort of player that hopes to get to see everything you might be disappointed. I wish there was a kind of hobo code that escape rooms would use on their websites to indicate basic information to enthusiasts in the know. I would make the signs for divided team, dark room, magic objects, and low-to-medium difficulty. Out of 30 games played, I’m going to rank this #14

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://questroom.com/rooms/da-vincis-challenge/

#2,381: Spider-Man: Homecoming

Alien: Covenant - ★★★☆☆
This is a movie that draws a lot from its heritage. Even the disappointing stuff like killing off the non-returning cast off-screen is kind of in keeping with the traditions of the series.

I was on board for the chunk that's just a re-telling of Alien (and all of them, really). The part where we just throw away all of the ideas from Prometheus is a little bit of a drag though, and I'm not sure how it's all meant to connect to the other movies anymore. I know it's nerdery to worry about inter-film continuity, but I'd rather think that if someone's going to go to all this trouble that it's done with intention. If everything in the other movies is still true, it could be that David is just plain wrong, that he's not shaping the monsters, they're taking their inevitable form.

The movie itself ends up in a way that is not so much surprising as inevitable.

War for the Planet of the Apes  - ★★★★☆
I think I said this about the last one, but this doesn’t feel at all like a summer movie. I wanted to see it because I knew it would be good, but I also had a little bit of dread because I knew it wasn’t going to be fun.

Dunkirk - ★★★☆☆
The further away I get from this movie, the more I like it, I think. I understand why the layering the stories works better than telling the whole thing chronologically, but I still found some bits in the middle confusing. I think the trouble is that the stories don't cross one another at the same point in the movie. I bet there are good practical reasons for this, but I think that's what tripped me up. (Also, I don't understand why the pilots would rather land in untenable situations than bail out. Maybe jumping from those lower altitudes is super dangerous.)

Spider-Man: Homecoming - ★★★★★
This might not be a perfect movie, on a second viewing it leaves me excited for the future of the MCU. It's an odd thing to say, but I'm really excited about the possibilities that are in front of us for a sequel. We skipped the origin story, right? So this is already kind of like a "part two" movie, which of course, is the 'oops, lost my powers!' movie. BUT! We've already done that too! And we improve on the concept when Peter doesn't lose his powers, he loses that Stark suit, and uses his powers to the max. So we a) get around that boring trope and b) don't have to put off a potentially interesting story until the third movie, in which the cast is bored, expensive, and ready to move on. Bravo!

Escape Room Reviews: Bugsy's Nightmare

Company: Xterious Escape (Las Vegas)
Room: Bugsy’s Nightmare
Date Played: 7/13/17
Player Count: 7, 2 of us and a group of 5 strangers
Success:  Success! (Although perhaps a bit overtime)

Premise: It’s Las Vegas, 1945. You must steal some macguffin documents from your boss the mobster before he comes back from his errands!

Immersion: The room was nicely built, if a touch plain. The puzzles were more of the game show variety. 

Highlights: A lot of the puzzle mechanisms were things I have not seen anywhere else. Some of the object interactions were pretty satisfying. A few of the people in the group that joined us called my dad “Pops” a lot. 

Lowlights: There was one puzzle that, even with a hint and then an explicit answer, I have no idea how we were supposed to solve. The customer service wasn’t great - it seemed like the few employees there were spread pretty thin (and that this is why my group and another were combined, even though the other group reserved a different room). On the plus side, their inattentiveness gave us a couple of extra minutes to finish things up...

And Finally: With the exception of that one puzzle, this room is pretty well-designed, and bigger than I expected. Our team consisted of a couple of experienced players and a couple of first-timers that . I think my usual group would have come out of this one satisfied and smiling. Out of 29 games, I rate this one #16.   

How to book this room yourself: Visit http://www.xteriousescape.com/game/3

Media Monday: Boooooooooks!

This isn't necessarily meant to be a frightening post, but instead of the next Movie Monday, let's talk about a few books I read recently:

Cinema Alchemist, by Roger Christian
I do think it's interesting to learn how so many of the props and set pieces of Alien and Star Wars came to be, and I like the notion of this guy getting regular work because he was great at his job, but holy cats does this book need an editor. I assume books like this usually come together through a series of taped interviews more or less transcribed by a ghost writer, and so you might get a couple of things mentioned more than once as they come up in different conversations. Christian constantly repeats himself, in the space of a couple of pages, describing the same things in the same way. It's an irritating read.

Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh
At first, I kind of hated this. I found myself powering through in the quest for a meaningless 'I finished a book!' point, and gradually came to see how it could probably really help someone to make a book like this. I'm sure there must have been one story in there I liked. I don't know, I probably shouldn't even include a capsule review here.

Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, by Alyssa Mastromonaco
This is the memoir of a deputy Chief of Staff in Obama's White House. The fun part of this book is reading about how a woman who absolutely knows not only where her towel is, but where to find the towels of every member of a presidential campaign, or indeed, the White House, gets her job done. While it might be a matter of personal taste, I think that true tales of logistical efficiency can sound exciting. 

While the book was written before our last election, there are some passages that are just teetering on heart wrenching in light of our current situation. To wit, 

Obama does not hold a grudge... As a boss, he isn't someone who makes you feel like you have to prove yourself; there's no external pressure to make you procrastinate or take shortcuts. He never yelled or demeaned people–even if you let him down, he would move on if you admitted it up front.

and

The quickest way for people to lose confidence in your ability to ever make a decision is for you to pass the buck, shrug your shoulders, or otherwise wuss out. Learning how to become a decision maker, and how you ultimately justify your choices, can define who you are.

Oof.

The Freelance Manifesto, by Joey Korenman
When I was in college, I used to read all of these expensive British art magazines. I'd sit in my local Borders for hours not buying anything (it's so weird those stores are gone now) and read Computer Arts and probably, like, the official Photoshop Magazine, and a bunch of others, and figure if I picked up a couple of shortcuts I didn't know or a good technique I use on something, then it was pretty much worth it.  

Each year they'd run down the same general topics - here's the summer typography issue! And eventually, I saw this article about how to do a guy-getting-hit-by-lightning visual effect. It talked about the After Effects 'lightning' effect and how you can show the flash of a skeleton by matching your actor's movement with a skeleton in Poser, and how you can composite those elements together, and the most important thing about it to me was that it was pretty much exactly how I'd already done the effect on my own a year earlier for an episode of my hockey-themed talk show, Around the Boards. 

It felt great to confirm that I was on the right track, but a big part of what I got from that issue was that maybe I don't need to spend all my time absorbing 101-level advice. If you read enough self-help books, hopefully you stop needing so much self-help. Or at least, you're already familiar with what you're going to find inside. 

So a decade later and I'm reading this book about how to find, develop, and maintain freelance clients, and of course I'm not doing every last thing the book happens to recommend, but I felt like, hey, I'm on the right track over here. I'm not sure if it would have been better or worse if everything the book had to say was a huge surprise to me. It'd be exciting, but... no. It's easy to say that I wish I'd gotten ahold of this book years ago, I think it's even better to see that things are going okay.