Have some weird: The 'Zardoz' Trailer

You know, looking at that I wonder how people could have ever thought that Zardoz was going to be a weird movie, what possible reason could they have had for thinking it might be strange? /sarcasm

And now a Swedish man commits Tequila Suicide

With thanks to Luke Whiting for showing me this.

So they're making a Mass Effect movie...

WHY?

I enjoy the Mass Effect series, I mean really enjoy it, its probably safe to say that I've sacrificed a few percent of my final mark for my degree with the time I've spent on it. So, it may initially seem surprising that the idea of a favourite thing of mine being adapted so that more people can enjoy it, is what I am officially considering my front runner for Worst Adaptation idea of the early 21st Century.

Allow me to expand on this; no film adaptation of a Video game has ever been a real success, and it would be naively optimistic to assume that Mass Effect will do any different. But in the mainstay, games that have been adapted already have had a major advantage over Mass Effect: none of them had as much freedom of choice available.  

Everyone who plays Mass Effect plays the game in a different fashion, Choice is a major part of the game, and personally it's one of the big draws of the game, that for once your actions have definite consequences in the games' Universe.  Whereas the vast majority of games that have been adapted have single linear path from start to finish, that can be easily adapted into a script, event A neatly ties into event B. This is not the case of Mass Effect, which follows more of a tree structure with the plot, from even before the game begins, you're faced with choices that will govern how the game turns out: what gender do you choose? what background? what specialisation? All of these allow you to tune the game to yourself, and how you want to play, and the choices become more and more frenetic after that: 

Do you go to Feros or Noveria first?

Or do you go and rescue Liara?

Do you kill the Rachni queen or not?

Do you leave Alenko or Williams behind to die?

Do you do all the side quests?

Do you romance Ashley/Alenko or Liara?

Or do you bide your time, hoping they make a certain Quarian mechanic romanceable in the second game?

Do you let the Council die, or sacrifice the Alliance fleet to defend them?

These are just some of the choices available, and everyone I've spoken to had a differing set of responses, to these questions, meaning that everyone has a different version of what the "true" Mass Effect story is, the odds are dramatically against the screen playing managing to make anyone happy, I predict many comments of "They clearly don't understand the real story of Mass Effect" being made when the film gets released (hell I'll probably be making them as well).

Then there are the actors, who are they going to cast? If they don't have the original voices, then there will be a lot of complaints made by people, and they'll be right. Every character already has a voice associated with them.  There's also the problem with how the cast will look, in general, with the majority of the rag tag bunch of misfits that you put together being aliens, CG is going to be extremely prevalent, but for the humans how are they going to work on that? Will they use actors who look vaguely like the characters? Or will they decide to use CG for the humans as well? If so, will they just use the CG from the game? Carrying on down this avenue of exploration, will they reason that most of the film has therefore been built for them already? If so, why not just use someone doing a play through of the game as the film?

This is something I can really see them considering, and the reason it won't work, is that the story of Mass Effect is one that needs to be interacted with, in order to get the most worth out of it.

All kinds of creepy

Okay, I'm gonna establish a few things before I get onto the meat of this post

1. I do not consider myself a prude, despite using terms like "Man Reaction" (purely because it's funny), or think of myself as one to get freaked out by peoples lifestyle choices.
2. Although some people wouldn't think so, studying Artificial Intelligence means that you get to look at certain very strange concepts, and the idea of a sexbot is nothing new to me, in fact I've listened to several talks on whether this would be a good idea in the past.
3. Without sounding like I'm a sociopath in a sweater-vest the sheer complexity of correctly programming a machine to perform this task is tantalising, and certainly something I've pondered doing as a future career (usually after watching too many episodes of Dollhouse).
   

 That established, I read an article on the Telegraph today, which, while certain parts are interesting, other parts just contain high-octane nightmare fuel.  The story is about a robotic sex toy that can "communicate" with it's owner.  Now, this in and of itself is not the scary part, that gets reserved for the following lines:

"a young unnamed doll with a naïve personality"

 I mean wow, just wow can any one say paedophilia starter set. That's the kind of thing that Chris Hansen would want to have a talk with you about. The second is this immortal line:

"Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks, he said, where a friend died and he vowed to store his personality forever."

Yeah, that's just wrong. I mean, why would you do that? I mean I understand, he lost a friend under tragic circumstances, but what would have to go through your mind to generate that chain of logic, I mean it just seems to end up like this in my brain:

 Given:
    The Death of my friend,
    and that I didn't want my friend to die
Then:
    I will design a system to store my friends personality forever.
Therefore:
    A high-tech sex toy is probably the best thing to get to work on.

IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!

I don't believe in an afterlife but, if I'm wrong, I'm fairly certain the inventors friend is desperately trying to find some way back from the dead to kick the ever loving crap out of the guy. I mean is that what you would want as your legacy? "I died so that someone can get some virtual nooky!".

I mean, okay I haven't lost a close friend in a terrorist attack, but even I know that if you're going to improve a scientific field so that others don't have to go through your loss, you work on something like cryogenics, or the ability to download a human brain into a computer, or advanced cloning, not a sex doll!