While I’m under no illusions that this blog is widely read, I’ve recently been promoting it through Facebook, Twitter and such. However, since I’m allergic to comments, it’s hard for me to tell who’s out there.

You’ll now notice in the header a tab named “Guestbook.” I hope that you’ll take a moment to tell me who you are, where you are and what drew you to this page. Unless you came here by Googling “Neil Patrick Harris penis,” in which case I really don’t want to know.

Dave Website guestbook, Neil Patrick Harris penis

My good friend Dave Lartigue has just embraced the purpose for which he was born, mewling, onto this earth. Beginning today, he is retelling every adventure of DC Comics’ premiere space taxi driver, Space Cabby!

Read it while you have the chance! Because, once he’s completed this final task, the stars will begin to go out, one by one…

Dave Comics obsessions, Space Cabby

I spent much of my week off immersed in the world of Fallout 3. I’ve now witnessed my digital me die dozens of times. It’s still weird.

Here are some random observations regarding my travels in the D.C. Wasteland.

• There’s no crippling injury that can’t be cured by an hour’s sleep.
• I applaud the game designers’ inclusion of restrooms in most of the houses and public spaces. For me, nothing breaks the verisimilitude of an imaginary environment more than the lack of a place to poop.
• Robby the Robot-style mechanoids are cool. Robby the Robot-style mechanoids in powdered wigs are awesome.

• I still hate Moira. But at least I’ve stopped trying to kill her.
• Some of those rotting ghouls are surprisingly well-stacked. (“Don’t look, don’t look…”)
• Killing slavers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is satisfying, but not as much as gunning down the head slaver with Lincoln’s own rifle.

• Apparently, making pretty much the same decisions that I would in real life makes me a saint in Falloutville.
• Being a saint means that you can steal stuff with impunity.
• Lincoln’s rifle is sweet. Lincoln’s hat? Priceless.

Dave Videogames Abraham Lincoln, Fallout 3, post-apocalyptic, robots

My obsession du jour is the PC game Fallout 3, a role-playing experience set within the post-apocalyptic ruins of Washington, D.C.

While this is not my first exposure to the Fallout franchise–I played through a Playstation 2 spin-off called Brotherhood of Steel–I never tried either of the PC-based installments. I know that some old-school Fallout fans were turned off by the new game’s switch from a turn-based combat system to something resembling a first-person shooter, but I don’t have the grounding in the originals to make a proper comparison.

That said, I’ve played my share of FPS games, and it rarely feels like one of those. There are long, lonely stretches of exploration between combats. While running-and-gunning is certainly an option, Fallout 3 evokes its roots by employing a targeting system called V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, don’t ya know). Going into V.A.T.S. mode pauses the battle and allows one to pinpoint an enemy’s limbs–or, more likely, its head. The player has a pool of action points to expend by queueing up multiple attacks, which are subsequently executed in a slow-motion, grisly ballet of death once the game is restarted.

Fallout 3 literally starts from the moment of birth, as part of its unusual character creation system. I traditionally use a female avatar, as I feel that if I’m going to spend 50 hours staring at someone’s ass, it might as well be a nice one. However, on this occasion I took a different path and made a digital me. For me, a big part of the appeal of a post-apocalyptic scenario is personal: how would I fare in such a world? So there’s now a digital David running around a nuke-ravaged landscape, a David with much more charisma and a better selection of guns than his real-world counterpart.

The storyline begins in one of the underground Vaults that were intended to protect humanity during a final, nuclear war with the Chinese. But pretty soon the main character escapes into the wild. I was very impressed with my first glimpse of the new world: the distant ruins of D.C. bathed by the morning sun.

Pretty soon I arrived in Megaton, a Bartertown-inspired village built from scraps of old planes and centered around an unexploded nuclear bomb. And right away I got my first sense of the open-ended nature of the gameplay, when a well-dressed stranger offered me a bunch of money (bottle caps are Fallout‘s currency) to rig a detonator to the warhead. I’m told that you can indeed set off the bomb and nuke an entire community of non-player characters and their associated missions into a huge, smoking hole. The player is frequently asked to make moral choices which often have consequences affecting later storylines. There’s even a sliding good/evil scale that changes in response to one’s actions, and influences how the player is viewed by others.

I chose not to set off the bomb, having taken an instant liking to the scruffy suburb. I would, however, come to regret that choice.

Soon I met Moira, keeper of the local supply store. She’s a daffy greasemonkey who seems to be inspired by Kaylee from the TV series Firefly. One of the major side quests is built around her efforts to write a survival guide, with the player as a human guinea pig. Challenges include getting radiation sickness, receiving a crippling injury or activating an entire building full of killer robots and being forced to fight one’s way out.

All of that, including Moira’s skewed commentary on her ridiculous tasks, would’ve been okay if it hadn’t been for the voice acting. I call it a doi-voice. Try making the sound “doi.” Now imagine that everything you say sounds like you saying “doi.” That’s Moira.

As I mentioned, I found myself wistfully remembering the days when I had an unexploded atomic bomb with Moira’s name on it. Just for fun, I once saved my game and spent the next half hour or so trying to kill Moira in as many different ways as I had available. The flamethrower was the most satisfying.

Fortunately, most of Fallout 3 is set far away from Moira. There are miles of wasteland to explore. I’ve really enjoyed wandering around and looking forward to seeing what’s over the next rise.

I had read reviews of the game suggesting that it was really depressing, but I don’t find that true at all. To me, a post-apocalyptic story is less about the breakdown of society than about the people struggling to reform it. And indeed, there are all manner of candles in the darkness, including a Brotherhood dedicated to preserving past knowledge to an entire city built in the rusting hulk of an aircraft carrier.

So far, I’ve paid very little attention to the main quest and have been doing a lot of the side missions. I was intrigued by the spooky, ghoul-infested Dunwich Building in the southwest corner of the map. Ultimately it was kinda disappointing, as the quasi-Lovecraftian references that peppered that particular story paid off without once encountering an eldritch horror.

One particular moment of pride came last night when I finally took out the Super Mutant Behemoth that was hiding out near the rail tunnel. Sucker killed me a bunch of times, partially because the game’s “draw distance” kept it invisible until it was nearly on top of me. But mostly because it was fucking huge and had a mace with a fire hydant at its end. I finally got my hand on the “Fat Man,” a shoulder-mounted weapon that launches Mini Nukes. It took two atomic blasts to take that sucker down, but down he went.

I’m taking off this week to burn off some vacation time, and I expect to spend a significant portion of it exploring this strange, new world, seeking new civilizations and new weapons with which to melt Moira’s head.

Dave Videogames Fallout 3, post-apocalyptic, reviews

You know, I have absolutely no problem believing in giant robots from outer space that transform into sports cars and boom boxes.

Know what I don’t believe?

That this…

…is a high school student.

And that she would be dating this guy.

No, really, this guy.

Besides, he’s got other ideas.

Dave Weird ewwwww, highly unlikely, Megan Fox, Shia LaBeouf, Transformers

British broadcaster ITV has cancelled its sci-fi drama Primeval after three successful seasons. (The third and apparently final set of episodes is currently airing on BBC America.) It’s a strange move, considering recent reports of a big-budget Warner Bros. film adaptation and even a possible international spin-off series.

According to the report in The Guardian, it appears that the show may have become too expensive for the commercial channel on which it aired in the U.K. I can see why; the producers of the series also made the various Walking with Dinosaurs shows, and they leveraged their digital effects assets into creating some truly stunning CGI monsters both prehistoric and futuristic to stomp around contemporary London.

Primeval‘s premise–in which time anamolies randomly open to spew forth a variety of deadly creatures–is compelling, but the scripting is aggressively stupid. We’re meant to believe that the people best equipped to detect temporal wormholes and combat dinosaurs are a paleontologist, an assistant zookeeper who may or may not bother to wear pants when opening her front door, and a kid in a pork pie hat. Who only sometimes remember to bring weapons. We’re also supposed to accept that the team has managed to keep all of this, up to and including a mammoth appearing in the middle of a crowded highway, out of the press in an era of ubiquitous camera phones and social media.

I forgot that the series was back on and missed the first three episodes of the new season, but it appears that they’ve killed off the paleontologist and gotten rid of the hot public relations officer. Sadly, Pants-Free Girl and Pork Pie Hat are still around.

The overall plot, in which the batshit-insane ex-wife of the now-deceased paleontologist has been using the anomalies in pursuit of some unknown goal, has never quite coalesced for me. There was a bit of weirdness at the end of the first season in which the timeline was altered, giving the heroes a new base of operations and somehow replacing one of them with a new character who, despite having a different last name and presumably different parents, is played by the same actress. To my knowledge, they’ve still never explained that one. And now it looks as if they never will.

Sorry to see you go, Primeval. As a drama with a “plot” and “characters,” you weren’t much, but you certainly were a prehistoric treat for every dinosaur-obsessed schoolboy.

Dave Sci-Fi cancelled before their time, dinosaurs, pork pie hat, Primeval

Andrew Weiss offers up the only fan boycott that makes sense: the Fan Boycott Boycott!

Dave Sci-Fi boycotts, fanboy entitlement

I was just looking under the hood of my blog, and by happenstance discovered the reason someone arrived here through the search term “neil patrick harris penis.”

It’s here. Check out the tags.

Dave Website blogs, Neil Patrick Harris penis

Checking the web stats for thiel-a-vision.com, I am always amused by the search terms that bring wandering spirits here.

My Land of the Lost posts have attracted some attention. Current top search term: “the zarn.” Others inlcude “zarn lost,” “zarn lotl,” “land of the lost fred zarn,” “land of the lost zarn you make me feel bad,” “altrusians sleestak,” “sleestaks and pylons,” “land of the lost time schedule old vision not movie,” and “when i look all around i can’t believe the things i’ve found.”

There are also some puzzlers. For some reason, I got five hits for “crossdresser trekkies,” one more than for “dave thiel.” I just did a search of my site, and I can guarantee you that at no point does the phrase “crossdresser trekkies” appear on it. (Er, until now. Damn.)

People came here looking for oddly specific information, such as “directions how to make dr.octopus arms in lego.” You won’t find that here either, but to be honest, that sounds pretty interesting. There were also a pair of hits for “how to write film treatment for earth vs the flying saucers ?” (Yes, they included the question mark.)

The one search term that I can categorically state has never previously appeared on my blog is “neil patrick harris penis.” If you came here looking for “neil patrick harris penis,” you were sorely disappointed. You will never find “neil patrick harris penis” here.

I wonder how well “neil patrick harris penis” will fare the next time I check my web stats.

Dave Website crossdresser Trekkies, Neil Patrick Harris penis, search terms, the Zarn

Up has one thing in common with the film remake of Land of the Lost: it’s a wonder that either of them were given the green light. Imagine pitching Up in an executive boardroom: “It’s a kids’ movie…and the main character is a crotchety, old man living in a house full of memories and unfulfilled dreams. So then he attaches a million balloons to his house and flies off! Then there’s this boy scout who comes along for the ride, and they wind up on this South American plateau with a rare bird, a discredited adventurer and a bunch of talking dogs.”

But here’s the thing about Pixar. They can take the most unlikely premise and not only make it work, but make it sing.

There are a bunch of pretenders to their crown, some of whom have even been successful. For the most part, they’re content to follow a formula based (superficially) on Pixar’s earliest efforts: take a bunch of inanimate objects or talking animals and send them on a meaningless quest loaded with pop culture references. Oh, that can work. I quite liked Monsters vs. Aliens, but at the end of the day it really wasn’t about anything. Not in the way that WALL-E was about consumerism and personal responsibility. Or the way that Up is about fulfilling your dreams and letting go of your past.

Like a few other films I could mention (I’m looking at you, Babe), Up had me sobbing early. We’re first introduced to its hero, Carl, as a child meeting his future love for the first time. A montage takes us through decades of joyous times, dreams deferred and the eventual death of Carl’s adventuresome soulmate. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, and it sure had the rowdy kids in the audience settled down.

Not to worry, though, as things pick up again soon enough. Carl is off with his unwilling and unwanted companion Russell the boy scout to a mysterious plateau that not-at-all-coincidentally looks similar to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, specifically the 1925 silent film adaptation*.

The characters in Up are particularly well-drawn. Carl could’ve easily been a stereotypical grumpy old man, but the opening scenes clue us in to exactly why he acts the way that he does. At times, the little boy who dreamed of exploration peeks through, and we share his joy of discovery and his love for his lost companion.

Of course, the breakout star of Up is an animal, Dug the dog. Equipped with a collar which translates his thoughts into human speech, Dug is a galumphing Id who is both fiercely loyal yet easily distracted by squirrels. I cracked up every time he shouted “Point!”

Up is yet another example of what Pixar seems to understand better than Dreamworks or even latter-day Disney: jokes and 3D gimmicks are fun, but story and characters matter most.

* The 1925 Lost World had special effects by Willis O’Brien, who went on to 1933′s King Kong and other stop-motion animated monster flicks. While Up‘s visual reference to The Lost World is undeniable,  I’m less certain about another possible tip of the hat to O’Brien’s pioneering work. While touring his museum, the villainous Muntz calls attention to the skeleton of an Arsinotherium, a not-especially-famous prehistoric mammal. For King Kong, Willis O’Brien originally planned a sequence in which the hapless sailors were chased onto the log bridge by one of these creatures. (Stills from the sequence can be seen here; scroll down.) As possible references go it’s really obscure, but then again, so is the arsinotherium. And it’s not like a bunch of animators wouldn’t be very familiar with O’Brien.

Dave Movies reviews, The Lost World, things that made me weep uncontrollably, Up