Untrust worthy people

Ever have those moments when people link you to random stuff? Well this page is made exactly so i can randomly link to said page.

My raving thoughts on hawaii 5-O

... It's epic! The music is great, the acting is great, jack lord is  great and the remake sucks.

Okay, so first off, sorry to anyone that likes the new show but i've tried to like it and well... i hated it.
The actors look bored, the script was chewed up by a dog and the director might as well be drunk. That's what i see when i watch the new one. I have nothing good to say about it except the actors from my understand are actually really good, and seem like the writers and the directors are wasting them.

Anyways back to the classic show. Just about every episode you can tell a lot of heart was put into the acting, the script, and the directing. Even episodes' i would call bad, are unique and a lot of times are trying to tell a message. While normally shows that try to shove a message are annoying as all hell but some how this show is not and it can get preachy.

For instants, in one episode, a run away rich kid stages his own kidnapping for publicity as he's trying to become a rock star (if you could call it that). Well they find the kid, the main character, Steve McGarrett sits him down and lays it down on him hard saying stuff like "Punk kids like are always sorry, when face with the consequence of your actions but never during.". The character is a no nonsense guy, and it's believe able that he would say something like "You're not sorry; you're sorry you got caught!".

Anyways for the show itself, it follows around 4 cops that work for a organization called "Hawaii 5 O" which is the states police force.

Steve McGarrett is the head of the organization and plays the Cop that always knows what's happening and how to handle the situation.

One of his partners, Danny, is kinda of a inexperienced cop. It's not that he's new to the task force but he's obviously less experienced and he's rasher than McGarrett but he's not a total hot head and in fact is normally very level headed. There is a episode where McGarrett gets shot and Danny takes over; you watch as he's slowly slipping into the crooked cop, trying to find the would be murder of his friend. You watch as he's about to go over the edge and i believe beat up the suspect (who in fact, did not do it... Shocker!) and Kenny (get to him in a second) makes a friendly statement  that keeps him from going out of line. The actor doesn't just drop the anger act like you'd expect most would. In fact you can tell he's still vent anger out of this suspect still but it's in a more controlled manner.

Chin Ho Kelly is the Asia of the group, and plays a long time cop that's seen it all. He normally has all the information about the Asia areas of the island, known and ready at the snap of a finger. He also acts as translator for Chinese. It also seems the actor was a cop for 14 years. Don't know how accurate that is, but just a fun titbit.

Zulu is the last of the standard characters that you see in nearly every episode. I can't say much about him since he's kinda a supporting character more than the others. It's kinda like the writers had to many characters to write for and he got the short end of the stick. He's better seen in episodes where there is a native influence. He also serves as translator.

I'd say this show has held up the test of time, fairly well; but that's just me.
You wont be seeing DNA and you get the feeling these characters are doing some real leg work and not just relying on a lab like some other show i could name. It's not that they don't use CSI, and in fact some case down right require them to get the CSI boys to help. However the information doesn't give them the full story and they have to work out the rest on their own.

It also deals with a lot of social relevant to the time and strangely enough still relevant. For instants being drafted in to a war you don't agree with. I would say this does date the show a bit but it's still worth a watch.

I suggest, watch the old show and watch more than the pilot episode. Also, i suggest you don't bring up the new show because i will rant and rave about it.

Examining something are culture doesn't.

I want to talk about judging people by just looking at them, and this might seem like I'm going to stand on a soap box and pull out a race card when really i just want to explore something that culturally we think and/or know is bad, but yet don't really talk about it, unless it's in contrived ways with after school specials on TV. Not sure if i have anything meaningful to really say other than "Why don't we talk about this?"

Let me start with a experience i once had for a example of what i'm talking about.
My next door neighbor and I were and still are good friends; anyways he has this friend that basically looks Irish with a red beard and is about 25 to 30's. at the time we both were in are mid teens so i'm guessing i was 16 max, so my friends must have been 15. Now i have no problem with hanging out with people not in your age bracket, since I have one a good friend that I met at college who is at least 30 if not 35; I use to hang out, a lot, with my neighbors little brother who is awesome and about 10 years younger than me. Anyways i see my friend's, friend and i take a instant dislike to the guy. The thought that passed though my mind are that he's immature yet he had said nothing, and really hadn't done anything. I'm fairly sure he also took a dislike to me at that same moment or maybe afterwards. Could be my mind playing tricks on me.

We have never had a conversation, but I still have a dislike for him. Originally i wouldn't be shocked if i felt threaten and had been possessive but now, it seems like more like a dislike like of this persons life style or i guess this assumed maturity level i see him at. I'll give examples that i am fully aware don't show him in a good light, and in fact make me look horrible for having these problems but they are all i have to compare him with. Don't look at these as confirmations that i am correct, but look at these as my point of view.

Once i was walking by his house and he barked at me to get away from his truck. From what i can tell, he parks it on the curb, and a bit on the road in fact.(He's totally EVIL!!!)
Near his house on the road, there is a crude chalk drawing of a penis that I assumed he or his friends drew. (flimsy, silly, and makes me look like a jerk for the assumption i know.)
While walking by his house one time, one of his friends tried to sneak up on me, and fire a airsoft pistol at me from i guess four feet away. He wasn't that stealthy.

Looking at these reasons I've written down, i sound like a crazy person who wants to hate this person just to hate him. I do think that for this instants there might be something else going on. I believe that some type of instinct decided that his person mentally or socially is unhealthy for me, and/or the people around me; so i've decided to protect myself by hating/disliking him. In a way this is also protecting my friend in a moderate way, because if we don't all hang out together, than it lowers his interaction with the person.

Now, is this person who I have had no real conversation with, bad, immature, or dangerous? I don't really know, beyond what my feeling tell me. I wouldn't say he's dangerous but immature, and bad, i guess so. Is this a reason to dislike him without talking with him? Well from everything I've learned from media, of course it's bad because the mother character says so; however is it really bad? take a electric stove, turn a burner to high, and the black coil turns red; it wouldn't be intelligent to place your hand on that burner. Now look at a black metal door knob and it starts to turn red, do i really need to touch it with my hand to figure out if this is painful to touch? Well yes, you do but it's not like i'm going to suggest you do such a thing.

DRM and blind fire at it.

So i have a strong dislike for DRM because i feel it ruins the experience of legitimate consumers and doesn't do much to stop illegal usage of the product. It's in fact possible to have a better experience from download to online multiplayer play session with a pirated copy .  However, aren't i just saying what people have been saying for a long time? (I forgot to cover the multiplayer part as the blog went on. Sorry!)

First off let's take a game like The elder scrolls oblivion which was popular in it's time; and I'll use it as a example. You can find ton's of torrents out there providing this game with a crack and thousands of seeds per torrent. Now i decide to download this game illegally and my download speeds start to hit over 2MB. I quickly have the game and all DLC/Expansions; so i install them and then replace the main .exe to run the game with the cracked one. I right now have a running versions of TES:4/O. In my Steam Library i own TES 3 ,4, and 5  i decide to download the game legally. I start up steam and what's likely the first thing to happen is that I'll have to install a update which i can't skip. next i start the download process and I'm guessing I'll get a speed of 500KB which is one/fourth of the illegal downloads speed. After I've completed the download best case i can run the game from a exe, but worst case requires that i activate the game, followed by only being able to play if i run it though steam.

Now I'm not trying to justify the usage of illegal downloading of a game based on this; and in fact it's a flimsy argument if i did. Steam is a form of DRM and it's convenient even though it has flaws. However there are other DRM services that one could easily make a argument to download illegally to get past.

For the fun of it, I'll make the argument that DRM is the reason why you should pirate however i don't support piracy but think the argument still has merit to be made. I would like you to remember before you say anything about what i'm about to say, that laws are made for a reason; you don't follow a laws because you they're the law but because there is a reason behind it.

 I will give three games that all had DRM that was similar at one point or another. Assassin Creed 2; Diablo 3; and Sim City 5. All of these games at one point or another, had always online DRM.

Assassin Creed 2 was released by Ubisoft and at one point hackers found out what the server IP address was; and i do use the word hacker very loosely.  Anyways, the hackers did a denial of service attack on their servers and people were unable to get into their legally bought game; while pirates were able to get into the game because there cracked versions didn't need to connect to Ubisoft servers. In this instants, pirates had the advantage; they could play the game when people who bought the game could not. Ubisoft from what i can tell has learn from this mistake and released a patch that allows you to play offline.

Diablo 3 also has this feature. At launch of this game, people were getting errors that was preventing them from playing the game. From what i understand, this was related to the servers getting over loaded. I don't know much about this nor do i know if this game was ever cracked, but wouldn't a pirated version be nice so we could play the game when it was released?

Sim City... oh god this failure. Of all three of these games, this has had to longest down time of any of them and it's the newest. It requires you to install a piece of software called Origin which in concept is EA's version of Valve's Steam (i won't get in to how much i loath origin) and you use it to install and run your game. Next after you launch the game and play it, you have to be online to start playing. Now if for some reason you lose connection to the server (for instance if the servers should go offline like they did) then you get to see a disconnected indicator for 20 minutes until the client stops you from playing the game (until you relogin). Now the game is built around the idea of multiplayer but here's the thing, alot of people don't want to play multiplayer; so what they do is create a private region as they're called and they just don't invite anyone into the region. All the information is stored on the EA/maxis servers even though all this person is doing, is playing the game single player but online.
There are about 5 official reasons why online play is required and some of them have easily been proved to be outright lies. All it takes is one line of code to remove the offline limitations; but granted you would need to right some code to do stuff like load maps which i believe are saved on your computer anyways after you disconnect from the server. I think the major problem is, the company made a bad decision that everyone told them was a bad idea, and all they've really done is lie or use straw man arguments to support. (In fairness to EA/Maxis, i think you should realize that I didn't check to see if i was correct about my statement.)