"Another" An Anime Series Review

Contrary to my usual practice, I will be avoiding any spoilers in this review.  Primarily because the show in question is, at it's heart, a mystery.  The main pleasure to be found in this mystery is in learning the rules and seeing how things play out.  Therefore, I will speak only obliquely about the details and record instead my general opinions of the piece.  If anyone's interested in a spoiler version, leave a comment and I'll see what we can do.

If you want the elevator pitch for Another, a 12 episode anime series, it would be "Final Destination with a brain."  In both series death itself is stalking the cast, rather than a standard serial killer.  However, rather than focusing on inventive and gruesome deaths, as the Final Destination films do, Another is really more about the beleaguered cast trying to figure out what the hell is going on and peeling back the layers of the onion one by one until the truth is revealed.  Which isn't to say that Another doesn't have some shocking deaths, just that they're not the point of the exercise.

No, the point of Another is in the details.  The atmosphere of dread that builds from episode to episode is balanced by the revelations that clue you in to what the deal is.  The two elements combine well into a mix that makes you want to watch the episodes one after another.  Hell, I found out about the show on Sunday, and watched all 6 hours of it in a couple of days.  It's really quite addictive.

Furthermore, the show has the guts to play it straight.  Like most good mysteries, there are a number of twists in the tale, but they're set up well.  The final twist in particular caught me off-guard, but looking back over the show, I realized that the clues had been there, I'd just misinterpreted them.  Which is the hallmark of a fine mystery.

That said, I'm not sure I really need more of the show.  I understand that there's a sequel planned, as well as a prequel episode, but I don't think either are really necessary.  The show has a beginning, middle, and end, and while there are unanswered questions, I am content with the story as it exists.  It's sort of like Babylon 5.  I loved that show.  Indeed, all five seasons of it are sitting a foot behind me in DVD format.  But no effort to return to the universe of Babylon 5 has ever succeeded.  That's because Babylon 5 has beginning, middle, and an end, and having ended, the story is best left concluded.  Another feels the same way to me.  They should leave well enough alone.

One other thing that I found was interesting about Another was the story's path through multiple media sources.  Another began as a serial novel that was released in Japan from 2006 through 2009.  A manga version appeared in 2010, followed by the anime version in early 2012.  And now, thanks to the magic of Crunchyroll, there's a subtitled English version.  You have to admire that kind of efficiency.  Six years from first published chapter to international anime release?  That's good work.  Compare that to the way things were back in the day.  To get even a hugely popular work like The Dirty Pair into the USA took something like six years and the work of bootleggers with dubious quality translations.  Now, you can watch shows within days or even hours of its release in Japan in as high a resolution as you system can take done by professional translators.  That kind of service would have been inconceivable back in the late '80s when I first got exposed to this stuff.   

What a world we live in.  

So, if you're a mystery or horror anime fan, I strongly recommend you take a few hours and watch Another.  Sure, it's yet another anime set in a Japanese school, but like Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the show twists the genre conventions so far out of bounds that the familiar becomes horrible.  It's not for everyone.  There's blood and gore to be found throughout.  But for the right kind of fan, this is the kind of show that challenges your brain, and for that, I salute it.

State of the Site, May 2012

Well, it seems unlikely that I'm going to catch up on the Write Everyday Project.  Nevertheless, I do have a few things to say, so I'll continue posting here to say them.  With luck, I can get my ass back up to a post a day sometime in the near future.

In the meantime, I'll be doing a review of the anime series Another in the very next post.

WEP '12, Day 76 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis, Ep. 5

You should know the drill by now.  Spoilers for episode 5 of season 20 of The Amazing Race.

There's something that occurs at the beginning of most episodes of The Amazing Race that can be a big clue as to what's going to happen in that leg of the race.  It's what veteran race watchers call the Loser Edit.  In a Loser Edit, the team that's going to be eliminated at the end of the episode is given some interview time at the beginning of it to explain a little more about who they are and why they're racing and so on.  Presumably every team gets interviewed like that all the time to provide Loser Edits for whichever team actually loses, but the one they show is a clue as to who's going out.  The reason they do it, especially for teams who haven't had a lot of screen time, is to try to make that team more sympathetic, so that you feel bad for them when they leave the show.

This week's episode had a Loser Edit for Kerri and Stacy.  Let's see how it turned out, shall we?

First off, we have some travel.  There's a huge eight hour gap between the Fast Forwarded Team Border Patrol and the saved by non-elimination Bopper & Mark, but almost all of it gets eaten up by various travel related delays as the teams take trains across Europe to Bavaria.  Most of the rest of it is lost by a good old fashioned Hours of Operation Bunching, so pretty much everyone is all caught up as they finally pick up clues and get rolling again.

That leads to the first decision point, a Detour.  What's faster, sculpting an old German's beard into something really complicated, or following a trail of gingerbread then using it to complete a gingerbread house?  It turns out that, like all the very best Detours, the answer is "it depends on who's doing it!"  And if they're representative of the breed, my respect for the Border Patrol is growing in leaps and bounds.  Who knew they were such good hair stylists?

Art & JJ prove to be good at beard sculpting, gnome curling, and perhaps most importantly, not getting lost, and manage to come in first.  Again.  That's three in a row for Team Border Patrol, and if that doesn't solidify them as the favorites to win it all, I don't know what does.

The rest of the leg plays out with relatively few surprises.  A few teams get decoyed by the wrong castle, there being two on either side of the highway they're all travelling along, but in the end it comes down to  race for last between Team DEA and Kerri & Stacy.  Kerry & Stacy manage to finish the task, sliding a gnome along ice into the middle of a circle, first.  Nery of the DEA girls has a horrible time of it, just being unable to get it right despite something like two hundred attempts, but to her credit, Jamie doesn't get down on her, and instead is encouraging as team after team races past them.  They finally pull it off by a millimeter and rush to try and catch up with Kerri and Stacy, which any veteran race watcher will tell you almost never works.

Except that this time it does.  Kerri & Stacy managed to get lost for the very last time, letting a relieved and nearly broken Team DEA hang on by their fingernails.

Loser Edit confirmed.

1st - JJ and Art (Border Patrol) 
2nd - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys)  
3rd - Vanessa and Ralph 
4th - Blonde Rachel and Dave 
5th - Red Rachel and Brendon 
6th - Bopper and Mark

7th - Nary and Jamie (DEA)  

OUT - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins) 

OUT - Eliott and Andrew (Twins) 

OUT - Dave and Cherie (Clowns) 
OUT - Misa and Maiya

Dead Team Obituary: Kerri & Stacy

Kerri & Stacy had a pretty quiet race, all things considered.  There was a brief fear of heights thing when they got fooled by the first Roadblock about who had to jump out of the plane, but other than that, they were rarely interesting enough to earn much in the way of screen time.  What we did see of them was reasonably pleasant, certainly there was little of the overblown drama that infects the couples teams on this season.  But that doesn't mean that I'm really upset to see them go.  It's like that sometimes.  With twenty two people racing around, the edits favor the most dramatic people and situations.  Kerri & Stacy never had much drama.  That's good for them in a way, because the drama is almost always ugly on this show, but it costs them the chance to be seen very much.  C'est la vie.  

WEP '12, Day 75 - Old Republic Log XXVII

The funny thing about this log is that I canceled my Old Republic subscription last Monday so I wouldn't have to pay the $15 on Tuesday.  And yet, here I am, writing a new log...and not even a epilogue either.

I suppose I should explain how we got to where we are.  Morgan canceled his subscription with three days before the next payment.  He just wasn't enjoying his character, and it was impractical for him to get another one up to speed.  Besides, as Bioware must have feared when they moved it back to March, Morgan decided he'd rather play Mass Effect III.  And frankly, if my 360 weren't dying and I thought my PC could handle it, so would I.

The funny thing is, this is a Free Trial Weekend for Old Republic.  So I was able to create a brand new account yesterday and I can play through Sunday.  I'm not going to play all that much, to be honest, but I wanted to give the Imperial Agent storyline another try.

So now I've got a fifth character, Alisera, the Chiss Imperial Agent.

All told, while her story ain't bad, it ain't exactly thrilling so far either.  What's more, I'm not a fan of the cover based combat, which can get really frustrating very quickly.  I may squeeze in a few hours more today or tomorrow, but there's been nothing here that really compels me to stick around.

I guess we'll see.

Alisera, Level 7 Imperial Agent, Hutta

WEP '12, Day 74 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis, Ep. 4

With episode six on the air tomorrow, I really need to get my ass caught up on this one.  Same deal as always, read the recap at TWoP or view the episode itself at CBS.com.  Oh, and spoilers.

Episode four of season twenty involved three major race concepts, one of which we've discussed before, the Travel Fail.  That came up before when the second bus blew a window and re-shuffled the teams.  This time, though, the Travel Fail was self-inflicted, with Mark and Bopper failing to read the part of the clue that told them that they need to get their plane tickets to Italy at a travel agent instead of at the airport.  That costs them time.  So much so that they end up on a plane an hour and change behind every other team.  The big question to this leg of the race was whether or not they could manage to erase that deficit.

I'll save you the suspense, and anyway you should have already seen the episode or read the recap, right?  No, they can't.  To their credit they do manage to get within line of sight of one other team, but it's as that team is leaving the location of a challenge that the boys from Kentucky are just arriving at, and they never get even that close again.  So our beloved boys from Kentucky come in last.  I'll deal with the fallout of that at the end of the analysis.

The second concept we have to talk about is the Fast Forward.  The Fast Forward is a game mechanic that allows teams to try to complete a side challenge.  If they pull it off, they can skip all other tasks and head right to the Pit Stop.  The catch?  Only the first team to complete the challenge gets the benefit of the Fast Forward, and each team can only use a Fast Forward once per race.  In the first few races there was a Fast Forward available on every leg of the race except the last one.  When you used your Fast Forward was a big part of the strategy of racing.  For the most part, the Fast Forward was used defensively.  In other words, you saved it until you were in danger of getting eliminated.  Then you gambled that no one else had tried to use it ahead of you.  It was a moment of tense decision making for teams that added to the drama of the show.

Alas, that drama is dead now.  Why?  Because in the more recent races they've cut the number of Fast Forwards down to only a couple per race.  That means that whichever team is in first place when they get to a Fast Forward just grabs it and pads their lead.  Rather than an interesting strategic choice, the Fast Forward's been reduced to a reward that guarantees the team in first place will stay there.  That's what happens here, letting Team Border Patrol surge to a second first place finish in a row.

So we know who came in first and who came in last.  Was there anything else interesting going on?  Not really.  Both teams with Rachels in them had inter-personal breakdowns, showing once again why it's a bad idea to race with your spouse/dating partner.  Other than that?  No, not really.

At the end, then, Mark and Bopper came skidding into last place.  There they got a couple of surprises.  The first was Art & JJ, having heard that Bopper was racing for money for his sick daughter, deciding to split the cash they won for coming in first with the Kentucky boys.  Which was cool of them, I have to admit.

The second surprise was today's third and final concept, the Non-Elimination Leg.  You see, sprinkled tow or three times per race is a Non-Elimination Leg where coming in last doesn't kick you off the show.  The first such leg in Race 20 was this episode.  That means that Mark &  Bopper live to race on.  However, they will have to do an extra challenge on the next leg, called a Speed Bump, as their penalty for failure.  That's well worth it to have a shot at staying in the race, though.

I should also point out that for a veteran race-watcher it was obvious that this was Non-Elimination when Phil didn't eliminate them right off the bat.  The man's not an asshole.  If you're gone, he doesn't drag it out to make you suffer.  He gives it to you right to your face.  If he tells you you're last and doesn't immediately follow it with "I'm sorry to tell you but you've been eliminated from the race," then either some other team fucked up worse than you did or it's Non-Elimination, as it was here.

It does lead to an interesting scenario, though.  If Mark & Bopper manage to beat the odds and win the race and the million bucks, are they going to give Art & JJ their money back?  Hopefully, we'll get to find out.

Episode four standings:

1st - JJ and Art (Border Patrol) 
2nd - Blonde Rachel and Dave 

3rd - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys)  

4th - Vanessa and Ralph 

5th - Nary and Jamie (DEA)  

6th - Red Rachel and Brendon 

7th - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins)  

8th - Bopper and Mark 

OUT - Eliott and Andrew (Twins) 

OUT - Dave and Cherie (Clowns) 
OUT - Misa and Maiya


With no team eliminated, we'll be skipping the Dead Team Obituary in favor of an updated look at the surviving teams.

Blonde Rachel and Dave

Alas, after a promising start, Blonde Rachel and Dave have degraded into bickering.  Mostly, at least as far as what we've been shown, this is Dave's fault.  The Army pilot keeps insisting that they need to "communicate" better, but what he seems to mean by that is "you do what I say."  That's perfectly acceptable in the Army, less so with your wife.  Likability: Medium.  (And dropping fast if they don't quit fighting.)

Despite a terrible third leg where they came in 6th, we can't ignore the back-to-back first place finishes, and even with the in-fighting, they still came in second on this leg.  Survivibility: High.

Bopper and Mark

They've done nothing to cancel their initial hero status, they don't fight among themselves, and they're friendly and interesting to watch.  Likability: High.

On the other hand, they've been 9th and last in two legs, while 3rd and 4th in the other two.  That's not a recipe for long-term success, but they're better off than some other teams.  Survivibilty: Medium.

Nary and Jamie (Team DEA)

I've gotta say, I've been expecting more from this team.  Certainly they've been pleasant enough for what little screen time they've gotten.  They've done or said nothing to change my initial appraisal of them as people.  Even the whole "going undercover as kindergarten teachers" bit is more cute than insulting.  Likibility: High.

However, they might as well be kindergarten teachers for all their performance to date has shown.  They've come in 4th, 6th, 5th, and 5th.  That's a pretty middle of the road showing, so that earns them Survivibilty: Medium.

Brendon and Red Rachel

With the last couple of legs, this team has proven to be increasingly fragile.  Unfortunately, that's manifested by Rachel whining and screaming at Brendon which in no way endears to me a team that I didn't much like in the first place.  Likability: Low.  (And if I had a more flexible system, I'd call it Non-Existent.)

That fragility has hurt them in the last leg in particular, with them threatening to quit.  Those kinds of teams almost never survive for long, as a desire to quit makes you less likely to give the kind of effor that's required to stay in the race.  Still, they do have a pretty impressive record with two 2nd place finishes to go along with a 4th and a 6th, so we can't count them out entirely, as much as I'd like to.  Survivibilty: Medium

Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Team Jersey Boys)

To my surprise, I haven't found the Jersey shtick as annoying as I thought I would.  Maybe they just look better in comparison to the Rachel teams, but they just aren't on the Hate 'Em List anymore.  That doens't mean that I want them to win, though.  Likability: Medium.

 After a rough start, 10th and 8th, the Jersey Boys have picked it up lately, coming in 3rd for the last couple of legs.  Split the difference.  Survivibility: Medium.

Kerri and Stacy

Still haven't seen much of this team.  Still seem nice, if uninspired.  Likability: Medium.

Can't say I'm impressed with their performance, though.  Coming in 7th, 5th, 7th, and 7th doesn't suggest you're long for the race.  Survivibilty: Low.

Vanessa and Ralph

This team presents a quandary for me.  On one hand, they seem to be petty people, fond of insulting other teams over things like dress sense and the way they wear their hair.  On the other hand, the team they lash out against most is Red Rachel and Brandon, a team I don't care for either.  Still, Ralph and Vanessa's behavior aggravates me.  Likability: Low.

If trends continue, I won't have to worry about it for much longer.  Coming in 5th, 7th, 8th, and 4th doesn't inspire much in the way of confidence.  Survivibility: Low.

Art and JJ

They've cut down on the boorishness, and the offer of cash to Bopper and Mark was pretty redemptive.  Not my favorite team, but they're rising in the standings.  Likibility: Medium.

As far as actual racing goes, they've been awesome.  Third, 2nd, 1st, 1st is a great record by anyone's standards.  Survivibilty: High.

WEP '12, Day 73 - Time Management II, The Cycle of Sloth

Something I've noticed as I've carried out the time logs I mentioned last week is that my time expenditure seems to be cyclical.  And borderline obsessive, for that matter.  It's not the one and done time expenditures like the webcomics (10 minutes today) or a run through the blogosphere (23 minutes) that really consumes my time.  It's the things I do over and over that really wastes minutes.

For example, today my email inbox was unusually full, and I had to type out a couple of responses.   That took 34 minutes.  Then I browsed my selected forums over at Something Awful.  There wasn't much going on, so that was only 3 minutes.  I took care of some one-and-dones, including Dominions 3 and my webcomics and blogs run, then checked my email again.  There was something else there to take care of and that was another 16 minutes.  Then I hit Something Awful for another couple of minutes.  Then I browsed past the War of the Clans site and there was something going on there, and that was 26 minutes.  So then I looked at my email another time, and that was another 15 minutes.  At long last my inbox was empty again, there was no new posts at WotC or SA, and I finally was able to get down to the business of writing this post.

What's more, even as I write this, I have to force myself not to glance at my email...damn, there's another email there.  Going to have to ignore it for now.  I get a little twitchy, though.  I want to head over to SA to see if anything new's popped up, but dammit, I'm busy.

So what's there to do about all this?  We'll I've been trying the gradual weaning process.  I've declared more and more things to be spam.  I've reduced the number of SA forums I'm tracking from sixteen to five.  I'm playing fewer Dominions 3 games.  I'm also trying to get more sleep.  They say that you have more willpower available to spend if you're well rested.  That's why Interrogation 101 involves disrupting the target's sleep cycle.

But it's still a struggle.

One solution would be to try and go cold turkey.  Except that I need a lot of that stuff.  Email is how I coordinate much of my life, for example.  Facebook and Twitter are potential markets to sell to, as are the Something Awful forums, actually.  Maybe I'm just rationalizing...that's always a danger...but it seems I've cut down quite a bit already.

Maybe I just need to go to bed earlier?

WEP '12, Day 72 - Hanging Ten off Google Beach

So I was reading an article online, as I often do.  This particular one was about ways to increase your creativity, and one of the suggestions was not to get out of bed right away after you wake up, but rather, to lie there and contemplate before getting going.  The idea is that the urgency of leaping out of bed stifles creativity and replaces it with a more directed fight or flight state that may be good for getting you to work on time, but isn't as good at allowing you the luxury of thinking up new ideas.  Along a similar vein, the same article recommended taking baths rather than showers.

The stay in bed idea seemed like a low cost way to stimulate the creative mind, so I gave it a try this morning.  After I awoke, I lay in bed and tried to relax and let my mind enter a more creative state...

And woke up for a second time an hour and a half later, having fallen asleep again.

In its own way it was a valuable lesson, though.  The internet is an incredibly powerful tool.  You can find vast amounts of information on virtually any topic you can care to name.  Whole books, movies, and television shows are only a handful of clicks away.

The problem is that there's so damn much of it.

Take my Twitter feed.  I'm following some 220 different people, most of whom are entertainers of one stripe or another.  But there are also political ones, the Real Time World War II feed I blogged about, oh, and a few actual friends and family who also use Twitter.  But I almost never see that, anymore.  These days Twitter has become a way to get interesting links from different people, and almost never a source of actual communication.  Plus the volume of tweets makes it impractical bordering on impossible to keep up with anymore.  There's too damn much.

Facebook is much the same way these days.  Sure, of the 78 Facebook friends a much higher percentage are people I'd actually consider friends, but there's a lot of people I've never met on there too.  And again, there's too much of it.  I can't keep up with all the posts and game requests and what nots associated with Facebook anymore.

(On the other hand, the Google+ ghost town has the opposite problem.  No one's there.  I see posts there from four people on a regular basis.  Two of them I know, the other two are Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day.  No one else is home.)

So, you say, do the obvious.  Cut down on who you follow or friend, right?

Not so fast.  Because, as a writer myself who would like more people to read (and, eventually, pay for) my work, it behooves me to have as wide a net as possible.  Besides, that brings up a second problem with the 'net.  Quality control.  If I did want to trim the hedges of my social network, who would I choose?

Or, taking it to the broader question, how do you know what you find on the internet is worth your attention?

Not only is it possible to run into random advice that sounds good, as I did, but it's also possible to be completely unable to find the article for linking purposes only a few days later!  Even sites that get used every day like Wikipedia are considered so unreliable as to be ineligible for legitimate sourcing in any kind of respectable journal or magazine.  Yes, there's a huge amount of information out there, but how much of it is fact-checked or edited properly?

This all makes me think that if we're going to reform the educational system in this country, and God knows we really should, then maybe we need to be teaching our young people less about what to know and more about how to find what you need to know.  Data mining over rote memorization, in other words.  Because it sure seems to me that the former is more useful than the latter where anyone can get a bullet point summary of the Hundred Years War in moments from their phone.

With so much information out there, victory goes to he (or she) who can find it.

WEP '12, Day 71 - Old Republic Log XXVI

Here's to the session that wasn't.  Luke and I both use Wide Open West for our cable and internet, so when a major fibre-optic line in Schaumberg got cut and disabled WOW's service for much of the Northwest Suburbs, we were both screwed.  They finally got the 'net and phone back online around 2am, and cable around 4am, some 14 1/2 and 16 1/2 hours after the line was cut.  Sounds like they weren't prepared for a disaster of that magnitude, and I find myself wondering how a major line like that gets cut in the first place.

But this entry really isn't about all that.  After all, between Luke and I having no 'net and Matt having a house full of sick kids, only Morgan was even able to make our Midnight Runner game, and odds are, he just played Mass Effect 3 instead.

No, what I'd like to talk about is the degree to which The Old Republic starts to waste your time after you've completed your first story.

As you may recall, I've adopted a "log it as you go" system of time management.  That means I've been jotting down how long I spend on various endeavors, including how I game.  And that includes how much time I spent playing Old Republic last week.

Last Thursday, for example, I got Kelynn back on track after a couple weeks off playing Tasia.  I finally restarted my vicious Trooper's main storyline.  That involved heading back to my ship and contacting my boss from the holoterminal on board.

Now you have to understand that, despite my best efforts when buying the damn thing in the first place, my machine seems to be on the low end vis a vis playing Old Republic.  In particular, my loading screens seem to take much longer than everyone else's.  Pretty much every time we're doing a Guild run that includes a conversation, everyone else loads first and gets to the first dialogue option, then waits around for my slow ass machine to catch up and get involved.  Once I've loaded the conversation, we're good....everyone moves at the same pace until the end.  But that first load is a bitch.

What's more, that extends to every load screen.  I'm always the last to arrive at a Flashpoint and, because it takes so long for me to load back to the fleet and then back into the instance if I die, standard procedure during a wipe is to just wait around as a corpse and get revived by one of my guildmates when they get back in to the zone.

In other words, every load screen I see is a serious pain in the ass, even more for me than it is for most other players, and it's no picnic for them.

Right, so load screens suck.  Let's count how many I had to go through to get my story started again, shall we?  There was the one going from the main part of Carrick Station to the hanger.  A second from the hanger to my ship.  I have a conversation with General Garza, and she tells me to meet her on Coruscant.  So load screen three gets me from my ship to the Coruscant hanger.  Four gets me from the hanger into the spaceport.  I talk to Garza and get my mission.  I need to go back to Tatooine.   Fine.  Load screens five and six take me back to my ship.  Seven and eight get me from my ship and out of the hanger onto Tatooine proper.  I rescue my contact without any more load screens, but getting into the hanger of my ship where my other contact is waiting is number nine.  I find out what I need to know and get back on my ship with number ten.  Garza wants to debrief me on Coruscant.  Despite the fact that she was perfectly willing to discuss the disposition of known Republic traitors over the holoterminal before, this mission needs a face to face.  Okay, so eleven and twelve get me back onto Coruscant.  Garza tells me to get my ass to Balmorra.  Thirteen and fourteen to my ship, fifteen and sixteen to get to the surface of Balmorra proper where I can finally get shit started.  At which point I'm too tired to actually do anything and just park in the cantina and call it a night.

I've got it logged.  That whole runaround took two hours and sixteen minutes!  In that time, I scored a tiny fraction of the experience points I needed to level up.  I spent all but a handful of minutes of that time either staring at load screens or running around through places I've already been.  What's galling, however, is how unnecessary it all was.  If they'd just had the decency to put the contact on Balmorra and have Garza brief me onboard my ship, they could have eliminated 75% of the load screens and not wasted so much of my time.

And maybe I'd have played Old Republic since last Thursday.

Gabe from Penny Arcade had the same complaint about the bullshit runaround.  When I first read his post, I thought he was being overly dramatic.  Now that it's happened to me, I can see his point.  My time is precious.  I've become even more aware of how precious lately.  Have I got time for a game that thinks my time is valueless?  I don't know anymore.

This question comes to me at a crucial time.  My paid for time runs out one week from today on March 20th, and I'm not sure if I'm going to renew.  Old Republic holds a lot of attraction for me.  I like the stories.  Granted, I like Tasia's story more than I do Kelynn's, but keeping up with the Runners demands that I play Kelynn more.  And there is the guild.  We've had some fun times Flashpointing our way across the galaxy.  Hell, we came up with our own bullshit tactic!  As a subset of the guild is the fact that I get to play with my brother once a week.  Time being what it is, especially on his end with the 4 1/2 year old and 1 1/2 year old underfoot, my ability to game with Matt is pretty limited.  Being able to shoot shit up in Old Republic together is a pretty rare thing.

On the other hand, there are other games.  Guild Wars 2 is on the horizon.  So are Mechwarrior Online and Mechwarrior Tactics.  Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online are all free to play and available now.  So it doesn't have to be Old Republic.  


The question is, do I still want to play the game?

Kelynn, Level 36 Vanguard, Balmorra

Tasia, Level 29 Sith Sorceress, Alderaan

Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant

Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

WEP '12, Day 70 - Offline

Great things, bundles.  You get your phone, cable TV, and internet all from one provider with a discount to all three services.  What could possibly go wrong?  I mean, unless they all go down at once or something, but what are the chances of that?

Today?  Those chances are 100%.  I'm typing this at a local library.  It's like old home week.  I feel like it should be 1999 or something.  Anyone want to watch The Matrix?

I'm reminded of that big blackout we had last year.  You don't really notice how much you rely on things, especially the 'net, until they're gone.  I mean, look at the things I was going to do today.  Blog?  Nope.  Write fiction?  I've got it stored as a Google Doc, and that needs me to be online to access.  How about playtest that game I'm in the beta for?  Oh, wait, that needs Steam to use.  Can't Steam without the 'net.  Watch TV?  No, cable's down and I can't get to Hulu or Netflix.  Bulls game?  That's on TV, which is down.  Play Old Republic with the guild?  You must be joking.

At least there's still lights, heat, and water.  And since I'm in a library I can borrow a book and maybe a DVD or two and still have something to do tonight.  And with luck WOW (the cable company, not the game) will get their shit together and get everything back online sooner rather than later. 

How is it that we live in an age of such wonders, and yet can find it all so frustrating?

WEP '12, Day 69 - John Carter Review

Having caught the new film about a very old book, I've gone ahead and written a review about it.  Naturally, there will be spoilers.  You have been warned.

So the first big summer movie is out, albeit in winter.  Taking the 300 model of an early release, John Carter has hit in early March with the hope that by being released so far ahead of its big competitors like Avengers and Dark Knight Rises, John Carter will become at least a modest hit in a season where movies like it are rare.  Did it work?  And, more importantly, is the movie any good?

As far as the money goes, I read on Box Office Mojo that it's projected to come in behind The Lorax which isn't the kind of opening that a film hoping to start a franchise really needed.  I had thought it was going to do better than that, as the theater I saw Carter in was pretty full.  On the other hand it was also one of the smaller theaters at AMC Randhurst, and AMC are being real dicks about John Carter.

You see, the 3-D on John Carter is purported to be pretty bad.  It's a post-production conversion, and as a general rule you want to avoid those.  AMC appears to be aware of that, because they're only showing the 2-D version of the movie as a matinee in one tiny theater in the back.  So what's a theater owner who wants to to charge $13 a pop for John Carter to do?  Why make it as difficult as possible to see the 2-D version. 

This cynical and annoying idea played out by them making it so the last time you could see a 2-D version of John Carter at my usual theater was 1pm.  On a Saturday.  The last time you could see it at any AMC theater was 4:40pm.  So if you wanted to see John Carter on a Saturday night?  Well, I hope you don't mind a crappier experience for $3 more!  Or you do as I should have, and go to see it at, say, Arlington Theater which doesn't have 3-D capability and thus only shows their films in 2-D.  Hell, if I'd been smart enough to go there, I'd have seen Carter on a bigger screen, to boot!

So the film's been a disappointment at the box office, and AMC are being jerks about how you have to see it.  How's the film itself?

It was okay.  I liked it.  I'd see a sequel if there is one, though that now seems unlikely.  The story is competently told, the action is acceptable, the vistas appropriately sweeping.   Dejah Thoris, the love interest, is actually a more interesting character than John Carter himself is.  As played by Lynn Collins, she's a princess, scientist, and action heroine, and even manages to show some emotional depth at various points in the story. 

Sadly, the same isn't entirely true of the lead himself.  Taylor Kitsch does a decent enough job playing the early movie's "John Carter, bitter war veteran out for himself."  He can growl and look sad with reasonable skill.  Unfortunately, once he's supposed to transition into "John Carter, redeemed hero" it all falls apart.  Kitsch just isn't charismatic enough to play the inspiring hero.  He never feels like the kind of man you'd ride a war rhino into a war against a walking city for.  Give him a ride to the airport or let hm crash on your couch?  Sure.  Die in horrible battle for?  Not so much.

Furthermore, while the hero's motivation is pretty clear, as is Dejah's, the villains of the piece aren't so lucky.  All the bad guys want is power.  Except the "power behind the throne" guy who has power and is unclear as to why he's sharing it with the principal villain. 

So if the villains are unsatisfying and the hero kind of fades out in the second half of the film, what do you have?  Well the giant, four-armed green Tharks who have been the main reason it's taken around a century to get this film made look pretty good.  The other Martian creatures are impressive as well.  Granted it's all obviously CGI, but that's just where we are these days. 

So what have we got?  The film's been out three days and change and I'm already seeing articles calling it a flop.  So you're probably not getting any sequels to this one.  The acting?  Well the first half, maybe even first two thirds, is okay.  Not great, but not bad.  The last third, when Dejah is off screen being a damsel in distress while Carter is trying to become a Big Damn Hero is pretty dire, though.  That leaves the story, which is kind of a mess, and the action.  The action is pretty good, at least.

In the end, John Carter is gong to go down as a missed opportunity.  With a more charismatic lead, a better script, and a better idea of how to make something feel really epic, this really could have been the start of a new movie franchise.  Instead, I suspect it'll go down as another Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.

Too bad.

WEP '12, Day 68 - Time Management I

Over the last couple of days I've been trying out a technique that I once read about where you log every minute of your day to see how you're spending your time.  I'll not bore you with the full minute by minute breakdown...it's my life and even I'm not that interested in it.  I will share certain trends that I discovered, though.  Granted, with only two days worth of data, we're in small sample size territory here, but putting out the preliminary results gives us a baseline, right?

And hey, if it lets me knock out one more of my blog deficit with a quick and cheap post, so much the better, eh?

One thing that was mildly surprising was how little time I spend on email.  "Email addiction" was one of those terms that I've started hearing a lot lately, but it doesn't seem to be a big deal in my world.  I spent all of 21 minutes reading email throughout the day on Thursday, and 18 minutes reading it yesterday.

Likewise, I wasn't spending all that much time on Dominions 3, a turn based fantasy game that I've been playing for the last year and a half.  Even with three games going on, I only spent 18 minutes total on it over both days.  Granted, that's in part because I've made a conscious effort to reduce the number of Dominions 3 games I'm in...I once was in over a dozen simultaneously.  Further, all three are in the early stages where there isn't much to do yet.  Even so, I'd have thought that Dominions would be taking up more of my time.

What is eating my hours, however, is webcomics.  I spent 93 minutes reading webcomics on Thursday, and another 53 minutes on Friday.  I'd like to think that those numbers are atypical, in that I spent a lot of time on Thursday on a new comic that I was reading from scratch and a bunch of time on Friday re-reading some Order of the Stick.  Still, it's a trend I'll be keeping my eye on.

Another big time burner is the War of the Clans Play-by-Email game I've gotten into.  Between corresponding with other players on Thursday and actually completing my turn on Friday, I spent a good 144 minutes, or nearly two and a half hours, over both days!  By comparison, Words With Friends only took up 27 minutes over both days that I logged.

These trends are interesting, but what was even more so was the effect that observational bias had on my actions.  The fact that I knew that I was logging the time I was spending made me more aware of it.  It helped me be more productive, as I rarely found myself glossing over and losing myself in any one thing for too long.  I have to imagine it's helped my ability to get my blog posts in.  And, once I'm caught up with the blog, it should also help me get my fiction writing back on track.

So I'll keep posting occasional Time Management updates to highlight new trends and to help keep myself accountable for my time, if only to myself.

WEP '12, Day 67 - Ocean's Thirteen Retrospective

For this examination of the third, and likely final, modern Ocean's films, there will of course be spoilers.

Let's get something straight.  Ocean's Eleven refers to the fact that there are eleven people on the team to do the "Benedict Job."  Ocean's Twelve refers to the fact that, in desperation, they add Danny's wife Tess to the team, making a twelve person team.  And since Tess isn't in Ocean's Thirteen, her place as number twelve is taken by tech guy Roman.  In Ocean's Thirteen the thirteenth member of the team is not, as I've seen mentioned in various places online, Ellen Barkin's character.  She's as much a victim as Pacino's Willy Bank is.  No, the thirteenth member is Terry Benedict, the villain of the first two films who goes with the old "enemy of my enemy" routine.

Of course, there were always more people involved in the various scams than got credit as part of the Eleven, Twelve, or Thirteen.  There's Bruiser, the big guy who fakes beating up Danny in Eleven, gets Frank out of jail in Twelve, and places bets to help bring down the Bank in Thirteen.  Or Roman, who provides crucial tech support in Twelve before being promoted into a full member of the gang in Thirteen.  Or the girl who swipes the security card, or the girls who distract the real motorcycle jumper, or the one who works the front desk, or...well, you get the idea.

With all that out of the way, how does Ocean's Thirteen stack up to its predecessors?  Not great.  Oh it's an amusing enough film, but you get the feeling that everyone involved is pretty tired of it.  There's less energy, less chemistry, less pop to it all.  Part of it is the fact that rather than having any sympathetic female characters, the only woman with any significant screen time is a one note "cougar" who get victimized by the team.  Tess and Isabel are both missing from Ocean's Thirteen, and they're missed.

One reason the film may lack the energy of the previous films in the series is that it was the first one filmed less like an extended vacation than a regular Hollywood production.  The way I've read it, the original Ocean's Eleven starring Sinatra and the Rat Pack was more of an excuse to party in Vegas while occasionally filming a movie than it was a serious film shoot.  I've further read that the idea of getting together  a bunch of friends and colleagues for a similar, if less extravagant, fun time was a big motivating factor behind  all the big names who showed up in Ocean's Eleven and Twelve.  Eleven was the Vegas vacation, while Twelve was the European one.

Ocean's Thirteen, however, was where the party stopped.  By some accounts, Thirteen was a much more rushed production, allowing for less fun and games for the cast and crew.  Furthermore, series regular Julia Roberts wasn't in it at all, purportedly due to script concerns from the studio.  All that made it less fun for everyone, and that maybe comes out in the final film.

To me, though, the bigger problem is that there really isn't any mystery to it.  Danny and Rusty explain the plan to Roman early on, and that's what happens, with a couple of minor problems along the way.  It kind of kills the dramatic tension that way, clever and unusual as it might be.  I appreciate clever as much as the next man, and more than most, but sometimes you're better off being less clever and more dramatic, and this is one of those times.

What's more, the film feels much more like a sequel to Ocean's Eleven than Twelve did.  It lacks that spark of originality and difference that made Twelve my favorite.  We're back in Vegas.  Check.  We're hitting a casino.  Check.  The guy in charge is a ruthless bastard.  Check.  And so on and so forth.  Hell, they even recreate the scene from near the end of Ocean's Eleven where they pan across all the faces of the team as they stare at some Vegas attraction.  I get that it's sort of a homage and all, but it doesn't feel like we're going anywhere new.  The old ground may be familiar and comfortable, but that doesn't make it better.

Still, I enjoyed Ocean's Thirteen.  If there were to be another one, I'd probably see it.  Of course, since director Steven Soderbergh says that the death of Bernie Mac precludes his ever doing another Ocean's movie, and in fact says he's retiring after he shoots the upcoming Liberace film, even if there were to be another one, it wouldn't have the same feel.  And since the films have been doing progressively less well financially from installment to installment, I doubt there's much if any studio pressure to bring the series back.

Of course, I'd have thought that about the Men in Black films, and Men in Black III is coming out this summer, so what do I know?

All in all, the series probably would have been better served either doing something new, like some kind of heist in Asia maybe, but if you're going to do a bone standard sequel, then I guess this is a decent one.  I'd have preferred if they'd gone out with Twelve's ending, but I don't regret seeing Thirteen.  I do regret what I see as a wasted opportunity, but it's hardly the first nor last film to disappoint me in that regard.

Netflix should be getting me the Sinatra Ocean's Eleven sometime early next week, so I'll wrap up this series of retrospectives as well as give my final thoughts on all things Ocean's Eleven then.

I'll see you when I see you.

WEP '12, Day 66 - Ashes of Empire I

On Tuesday we began the new Song of Ice and Fire RPG campaign that I've named "Ashes of Empire."  It stars House Ashe, a minor noble house situated on an island in Lake Elenta known as The Star of Elenta.

The members of House Ashe are:

Lord Bregan Ashe, played by Victor - Honorable and militaristic, Lord Ashe is very concerned with reversing several years of failing fortunes of his house.  He seeks to bring in wealth and power to restore the glory of House Ashe.

Azamir Ashe, played by Morgan - The brains of House Ashe, and younger brother to the lord, Azamir is Bregan's legal heir, as the lord hasn't found time to take a wife as yet.  Azamir once plotted to take the lordship himself, but an encounter with kidnappers that cost him the life of his wife Annabelle convinced him that things are safer behind the scenes.

Delvan Eyerbaith, played by Linda - Heir to House Eyerbaith, the last remaining vassals of House Ashe, Delvan is a sneaky fellow that no one is quite sure what he has planned.  Which is how he likes it.

Helena, played by Luke - A master duelist and swordswoman, Helena is the house champion.  She has been working with Azamir of late trying to increase the readiness of House Ashe's troops.

Lucien the Black, played by Chris - Dangerous retainer to House Ashe, Lucien has concerns about House Ashe's rivals, House Sidrake.  To combat them, he has been training a spy that he plans to use to infiltrate their holdings.

To start things off, House Ashe had a small family get together on the eve of the new year.  This allowed the players a chance to interact and get to know each other.  And, frankly, for the players to start to get to know their own characters too.

After that had been going on, I presented them with some messages outlining major events coming up.  An invitation from a nearby wealthy widow to come to her holdings in late spring, a demand that Lord Ashe and some of his troops attend a wargame being held over the summer by his liege, Duke Florent, and the announcement of a tournament being held by Lady Sidrake, House Ashe's main rival.

After these things had been discussed, we went through a couple months of realm management, then started the trip to the widow's lands.  At which point they were ambushed by pirates!

I do love a cliffhanger.

Overall, we spent as much time finalizing everyone's characters as we did actually in play.  Fortunately, with that out of the way, we can move on to more interesting stuff.  It wasn't the most dynamic of campaign openings, I admit, but I felt it best to start slow as everyone was learning a new system.  We'll see things pick up in three weeks when we play next.

WEP '12, Day 65 - Ocean's Twelve Retrospective

As with my Ocean's Eleven retrospective, there will be spoilers for the Ocean's Twelve after the poster.

In many ways, Ocean's Twelve is my favorite of the Ocean's movies.  That's a minority opinion, I know.  Indeed, with the ways in which Ocean's Thirteen resembles Ocean's Eleven much more than it does Ocean's Twelve, you get the feeling that even the director Steven Soderbergh agrees that Eleven was better than Twelve.  Or if he didn't, then certainly the studios did.

But there's a certain European style to Twelve that I enjoy.  The BMI award winning soundtrack certainly helps, but it goes beyond that.  The story takes more time to develop than Eleven's did, which feels right when it's set in Amsterdam, Rome, and Paris rather than Las Vegas.  It also takes the time to develop Rusty and Isabel's relationship in a way that was merely implied for Danny and Tess in the previous film.  

What's more, Ocean's Twelve has a tension that's not present in either of the other movies.  That's because Danny Ocean and his crew spend Ocean's Twelve on the defensive.  You see, in a standard heist film, the protagonists are on the attack.  They're seeing a target, planning their assault on it, then executing said attack.  In this one, while there are multiple heists, the fact of the matter is, they're all (with one exception) failures.  The team is being pressured by Benedict's desire for his money, and under attack by the Night Fox's counter-operations.  That adds a level of difficulty that makes everything more dangerous.  Especially since, right up until the very end, things seem to be going catastrophically wrong.

Those elements change Ocean's Twelve enough to make it a very different film than Ocean's Eleven.  And that's a good thing.  How many times over the years have you been disappointed by a sequel that was just a carbon copy of the original?  Men in Black 2, anyone?  The very best sequels move the story forward = and change things up.  Ocean's Twelve does that.

That isn't to say the film is perfect.  People who complain that the ending is a cheat are correct.  It is.  But it's a clever cheat whose reveal I really enjoyed.  Particularly the bit with Linus and his mom.  I loved that when I saw it in the theater five years ago and I loved it in on DVD last weekend.  It was just so well done that I forgave them the cheat.  

Some of the other things are a little more problematic, though.  The way that characters are jailed a few at a time means that some of them, particularly Bernie Mac who had TV scheduling problems that kept him out of most of the film, end up doing almost nothing.  Also the whole "Tess looks like Julia Roberts" thing was just silly.  Obviously, Tess Ocean who is played by Julia Roberts, looks like Julia Roberts.  Just like Danny Ocean looks like George Clooney.  It breaks the verisimilitude of the film to play on that point, though.  Having Roberts play Tess playing Julia Roberts was just odd, and I don't think it worked as well as it looked on paper.

For all that, the movie remains a stylish and amusing tableau to me.  I wish more sequels would have the balls to really change things up while still remaining true to their characters the way Ocean's Twelve did.  

But was Ocean's Thirteen as good?  I'll tell you next week. 

WEP '12, Day 64 - Old Republic Log XXV

With Morgan back from the West Coast, we re-convened and did Maelstrom Prison.  And while we did wipe some four times, with a couple of extra individual deaths along the way, at no point did it seem like we were going to get shut out entirely the way we had the first time we did Hammer Station and Taral V.  It pretty much want about as smooth as one could have hoped for, really.

The shining moment of the night was the formalization of the Midnight Run, named after our guild, the Kessel Midnight Runners.  The Midnight Run is the bullshit tactic we used on Taral V where someone dies while fighting a boss and the survivors run for the respawn point and team up with the returning ressurected characters to finish off the already damaged boss.  It worked great on Taral V for the last boss.  Technically, we'd even tried it as far back as Hammer Station but that boss resets if you go to far from his starting point.

But here in the Maelstrom Prison it worked perfectly.  After I died to the guys crazy face-lasers, the rest of the team hoofed it, I caught up, and we put that bad boy down.  While we were doing it someone suggested calling it the Midnight Run, and so our new favorite tactic was perfected.  I'm not sure how often it'll work, since it didn't work on the last boss of Maelstrom Prison even, but it's nice that we've started to develop a repertoire of combat tactics.

Even if it is bullshit.

The other thing that was significant from our Prison break was the fact that Kelynn got herself a new outfit.  It's only green gear (both in item quality and actual color), so it'll be replaced sooner or later, but it does increase my offensive stats nicely.  Unfortunately, it also decreases my health, so I ended up switching back to the old armor for the end of Maelstrom Prison.  What's worse is the fact that while the helmet and breastplate work fine together, I never found a pair of pants for it, and the old yellow pants from Kelynn's old outfit doesn't go with this one at all.  Still, it's always nice to get new gear.  

The challenge now is to get Kelynn up to level 39 in time to do Colecoid Wargame, the next Flashpoint.  I'm not sure it's possible given how much leveling has slowed down since level 35, but I'll give it a go.  Worse comes to worse, though, we'll just do Heroics next time and hit the Wargame in two weeks instead.

Kelynn, Level 36 Vanguard, Republic Fleet

Tasia, Level 29 Sith Sorceress, Alderaan

Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant

Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

WEP '12, Day 63 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis Ep. 3

As always, this analysis presumes you've either watched the episode or at least read a recap.  As such, there will be no attempt to avoid SPOILERS.

Though I've since learned that other people, who are wrong, disagree on this point, I think that the leg run by Dave and Blonde Rachel in this episode was one of the worst I've ever seen.  Granted, I need to qualify that statement as "one of the worst legs I've ever seen that did not result in elimination."  After all, Dave and Rachel are still in the race, which makes it a better leg than the Momily collapse in the first race, or Misa and Maiya's pitiful efforts in the first leg of this race.

What made it so bad?  Well, let's see how things went.  This leg of the race started off with Travel Bunching at the Buenos Aries airport.  However, a few teams, including Blonde Rachel and Dave, Bopper and Mark, Team Border Patrol, and Team DEA (alias "Kindergarten teachers") all managed to get onto a flight that gets them into the next destination, Asuncion, Paraguay, a couple of hours before the other teams.

They'll need it.  This leg includes a Detour that has two choices, as always.  The first is to create a pyramid of watermelons.  The second is to string a harp.  Every team from the first flight decides to do the melons.  It turns out to be a bad call, because even if you can accomplish the task, it still takes a lot of energy and time. For Dave and Blonde Rachel this is Bad Decision #1.  Granted, it's a forgivable mistake in that virtually every team on this leg will make the same call.

To their credit, Team Border Patrol plans carefully as they lay down their watermelons, making sure that they're all facing the same direction as they go to increase stability.  And it works for them, letting them cruise through the stacking in one try, and after going through the Roadblock without much problem, nets them a first place finish.  I might find them a little obnoxious, but you've got to give the Border Patrol guys credit, they've never finished worse than third place so far.  My original analysis of them as a strong team remains a pretty good call.

But this entry is about Blonde Rachel and Dave.  Their melon pyramid collapses, as does those of Bopper & Mark and Team DEA.  However, while both Bopper & Mark and Team DEA take the hint and immediately bail out to try the harps, Blonde Rachel and Dave decide to try to fix their pyramid, despite the probability that they'll pretty much have to take it apart and start over.  They consider using the Express Pass that they earned for winning the first leg of the race, and decide against it.  I'm going to call this Bad Decision #2.  Either use the Pass immediately so you get the maximum value out of it, or put it aside.  Furthermore, if you leave the same time that the other two teams do, you're still in the pack and not likely to fall very far behind.  Especially since the teams from the second flight are arriving just as Bopper & Mark and Team DEA are bailing out on the melons.  Since you know it takes ages to to the melon pyramid, it's the perfect time to bail out and see how the harp goes.

What's worse, though, is what happens next.  You see, Blonde Rachel and Dave futz around with their pyramid even longer, and when it collapses for real then decide to bail on it.  They rush over to the harp, glance at it, and then decide to use the Express Pass at that moment.  Without even trying to do the task.  That means that they've wasted a ton of time that they could have skipped if they'd done the Pass at the outset, but that they're alos using it while in around fourth place, meaning they're not in great danger of getting eliminated.  They've pretty much done the worst thing they possibly could with that Express Pass, making this Bad Decision #3.

But the hits keep coming!  Next they get to the Roadblock.  The clue is "who's ready to use their head?"  Odds are good that this isn't going to be a running or strength based task.  Probably it'll be a figuring something out task, or something goofy if the clue writes are being clever.  Your team consists of one strong and buff man and one not very much of either woman.  So, logically, you should send Blonde Rachel in for this task and save Dave for a task where carrying or running is important, right?  That is, however, not what they do.  They send Dave.  And, as it turns out, the writers were being clever.  The task is to balance bottles on your head.  And, unlike most tasks where you can keep trying until you succeed, there's a fail state: You only get 20 bottles.  If you break them all, you lose.

Dave breaks them all.

So with Bad Decision #4 in the rear view mirror, Blonde Rachel and Dave make their way to the Pit Stop.  Had they not wasted their Express Pass, they could have used it on the bottle task when it became clear that Dave was never going to succeed at it.  If they had, they'd  have come in second this leg.  Instead, they wait out a two hour penalty and end up in sixth place for the leg.  If everyone had been able to get on the first plane, that penalty would have ended the race for them.

Truly, it was a miserable performance, which even Dave agrees with in a post-leg interview.  "We did everything wrong."

True.  Luckily for you, there was that two hour gap.  And because of that, the twins managed to botch both the harp stringing and the bottles badly enough that even Ralph and Vanessa, who got the bit in their teeth and fought through to finish the melons despite multiple collapses, passed them for eighth place, ending the twins' run.

But I'll remember this leg for Blonde Rachel and Dave's mistakes.  I've rarely seen a team that was doing so well manage to do so poorly and still survive.  Let's see if Nietzsche was right about getting stronger.

Episode three standings:

1st - JJ and Art (Border Patrol) 
2nd - Red Rachel and Brendon 
3rd - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys) 
4th - Bopper and Mark 
5th - Nary and Jamie (DEA)  
6th - Blonde Rachel and Dave 
7th - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins)  
8th - Vanessa and Ralph   
OUT - Eliott and Andrew (Twins) 
OUT - Dave and Cherie (Clowns) 
OUT - Misa and Maiya

There are some trends to note here.  First of all, the Border Patrol guys have, as mentioned, never finished worse than third.  Meanwhile, Vanessa & Ralph and Kerri & Stacy have never finished better than fifth.  keep an eye on that.  Also, I'd like to take a moment to compliment Red Rachel & Brendon and the Jersey Boys for coming in second and third, despite coming in two hours behind because of the airport situation.

Dead Team Obituary: Eliott and Andrew

Remember what I said last week about a team not getting much screen time early in the race meaning they'll be around for a while?  In particular, in reference to the Twins?  Yeah, that didn't work out.  Despite my expectations, the Twins went sixth, ninth, and last.  the only significant screen time they ever got was their final death spiral.  I guess they never did anything so interesting that the producers felt thy needed to be on screen.  There are teams that go that way, some races.  The first team ever eliminated from the race, Matt & Ana, went out like that.  I guess I was trusting the tropes more than I was the evidence of the twins' poor performance.  Good to know, I guess.

As for the twins themselves, we never really got to know them.  They didn't fight very much, they didn't interact with the other teams very much, at least as far as was ever shown, and they never did anything particularly cool or terrible except proving to be bad at harp stringing and balancing a bottle on your head.  I expected more of them, but that's the way it goes.  At least Andrew got to play some soccer with a Brazilian hero, so that's something right?