Filed by Richard on Sunday, February 24, 2008 at 4:54 pm

Here’s my final, final, last, can’t change’em, guesses for the oscars:

Best Film: “No Country for Old Men” CORRECT
Director: Coens CORRECT
Actress Marion Cotillard CORRECT
Actor Daniel Day-Lewis CORRECT
Supporting dude: Javier Bardem CORRECT
Supporting chick: Cate Blanchett WRONGO FRIENDO
Screenplay: Diablo Cody CORRECT
Adapted Screenplay: Coens CORRECT
Animated: the rat movie CORRECT
Cinematography: “There Will Be Blood” CORRECT
Art Direction: “There Will Be Blood” WRONGO FRIENDO

In a weird year, I think I did pretty good with my picks…

Filed by Richard on Sunday, February 24, 2008 at 2:46 pm

Even the most uncomplicated minds can see that I am better than Matt at Xbox; After all I have consistently outpaced him in overall Xbox gamer points since my purchase of an Xbox 360 about 15 months ago. But comparing overall gamer scores is a fool’s errand. To find out how much better I am at Xbox360, we must put on our green eyeshades, sharpen our pencils, and crunch some numbers.

Matt and I have each played dozens of games on the Xbox360. But for an effective comparison, we must limit our examination to the games that Matt and I have both played and earned points with. This narrows the selection down to 12 games: Orange Box, Halo3, Texas Hold’Em, Bioshock, Project Gotham Racing, Crackdown, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Test Drive Unlimited, Call of Duty 2, Gears of War, Hexic, and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.

Just comparing these titles directly, it’s fairly clear that I have significantly outpaced Matt. Matt’s total Gamer Point score is 3882 for these games. My score however, tops out at 4975, or a full 1,100 points higher. In fact, in purely statistical terms, I am 28.16% better than Matt.

But let’s dig deeper into these scores. Is it fair to lump in a game like Project Gotham Racing for Matt, given that he clearly barely played the game (he scored 20 to my 320)? So in a effort at fairness, I have crunched the numbers again, this time pulling out the results of PGR, as well as Gears of War (a game that I didn’t make much effort with, and didn’t finish). The result? I am 28.5% better than Matt, a tiny, but discernable uptick in my previous score analysis.

In conclusion, the numbers conclusively show that Matt has benefited from my unemployment these past few months (and resulting inability to purchase new games); or there would be many more points of comparison and many more opportunities for me to increase my lead. But as it is, I remain contented with my mathematical proof that I am better than Matt.

28% better.

Filed by Richard on Sunday, February 24, 2008 at 2:20 pm

The latest edition of the Mustardayonnaise Podcast has Matt and Richard talking about the coming oscar telecast, and lots and lots of other stuff.

 

 Mustardayonnaise 69 [55:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Filed by matt on Monday, February 4, 2008 at 6:20 pm

I watched the Super Bowl yesterday and I think the funniest bit was when they were showing the half-time analysis with Terry Bradshaw and chums. (Or might have been post-game – doesn’t really matter.) Normally when they do remote shows like that they take great care to position the stage so that random chuckleheads can’t be seen in the background mooning the camera or something. Either there’s no one in the background at all or there’s a backdrop or they’ll even have security guards stand in the way as an impromptu wall.

But yesterday there was a group of un-blocked fans off to the right waving at the camera madly. One of the guys eventually decides that waving is clearly not ambitious enough so he starts making faces. Like sticks his fingers in his mouth and pulls his lips around kind of making faces. You see the camera guy zoom in trying to crop out the people, but it wasn’t working. Then the faces guy pulls his hands out of his mouth long enough to flip the bird with both hands.

Finally they managed to get Howie Long in the middle to start talking so they could do a tight shot on him but it was too late; once again America’s moral fiber had been shaken to the core by Super Bowl antics. I expect society will be collapsing momentarily.

When Richard and I used to work together he had put together a presentation on looking professional when being interviewed by the media and it included numerous examples of what happens when you film in an uncontrolled environment and man, this would have been right at home in that presentation.