We were led in to the theater, which was a lot smaller than I imagined, and also circular. A thick fog covered the center stage. We took our seats and I waited for my first Vegas show to start.

When one encounters something new, there is a natural tendency to place it within context of prior experiences. Watching Le Rêve for me was like two videogame elements made liveaction: Final Fantasy, and Cho Aniki. Everyone knows what Final Fantasy is:

Le Rêve. From PR Newswire

Final Fantasy VI

Le Rêve

Final Fantasy

Cho Aniki is a series of homoerotic shmups. How homoerotic?

Pretty Homoerotic Actually

But Le Reve couldn’t possibly be as…

Oh...

Wow...

So yeah, it was quite the show. At the end, a few people in the crowd stood up to applaud, but the other 97% did not. To be honest, it was mindblowingly spectacular. Early on I saw one of the fruits of the man-tree above try to leap for a branch and epic failed into the water. The show also had a bizarre plot, kinda like Final Fantasy actually. There’s this girl, and this guy proposes to her or something but she’s not sure about it she trips out of reality and is taken through some weird scenes of devilry, water, and dance by the bad guy in Temple of Doom. Oh and a creepy 3D rendered baby was narrating. Then she wakes up from this stupor and says yes to the guy (duh!). Then they’re salsa dancing and all of the figments are happy. The end.

Ater the show I blew the $20 I won before, and then the rest of my gambling allowance. I retreated to the hotel room and worked on my dissertation, my plan to escape to financial security having been foiled by probability.

Monday was the first full day in Las Vegas. We had lunch in Chinatown again and drove to the MGM Grand to see the lions. Unlike at a zoo, these lions are treated like pets. Two or three keepers are actually in the exhibit with the two lions. One of them was actually playing with the lions like they were house cats! He tossed a toy around and later was shaking a toy in front of a lion’s face to get it attention. While this looks very exciting, the keepers actually had very apathetic expressions the whole time. I think it’s to seem non threatening to the lions. One toothy smile may send the wrong signal to a lion (namely, “Let’s fight!”) so the keepers loaf around with blank looks.

From there my parents and I split up for the day. I took a bus a few blocks off the Strip to see the Pinball Hall of Fame, culminating a dream years in the making. Ok, not really. Well, there’s some truth in that statement. Once Kristin and I had a major pinball kick, and we found out about the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. We joked that we should make a pilgrimage one day, and years later, here I am! The Hall of Fame is definitely fueled by the love of the game. Inside nondescript building (across the street from the Liberace Museum!) are over a hundred playable pinball machines from the 50s up to the newest ones. The older games were great to experience. I could really feel the mechanical parts that controlled everything, like the flippers and the plungers. Each move had a physical impact that could be felt in each hand. The old games were also brutally hard. The flippers tend to be smaller than in newer games, and the gap between them were larger. The ball also went blindingly fast past the bumpers before I could even react.

In contrast the latest games have a lot flash. The use of magnets seems to be the latest thing. In the Indiana Jones (2008) game, once the Ark is activated, a magnet kicks in, invisibly stopping the ball as the Ark opened and five (!) balls spilled out.

I took the bus back to the Strip. I walked to New York, New York based on a tip that there was an arcade there. It was bigger than I thought, filled with the usual array of claw games, large arcade games, and… a drum game? I saw an electronic drumset in a booth blaring rock music. The side said “MTV Drumscape.” My interest was piqued so I sat on the drum stool and put in $2. I picked a song, “Smoke on the Water,” and got ready to drum to a track of colored blocks. Aaand… there were no blocks. Instead of a drum game like Drum Mania or Rock Band, this setup was freeform drumming! I’ve only drummed to instructions so I was lost trying to make my own beat. But, I did get the hang of it by the first chorus and from then on it was crazy fun drumming along with Deep Purple. Even though I did a lot of fun things in my Vegas trip, playing MTV Drumscape was by far the highlight.

I made my way back to the Encore hotel to meet my parents for dinner and a show. That’s… another post.

Flickr has more pictures of the trip! There some especially good pinball ones.

My parents found a great deal staying at the Wynn-Encore, which included two tickets to their show, Le Rêve. We were going to stay three nights, from Sunday to Wednesday, to avoid crowds (spoiler: Las Vegas was still crowded).

I haven’t been to Las Vegas for over a decade. Arriving after the six hour drive, a lot of the Strip looks the same. There’s still a castle. And a pyramid. And a pirate ship. Our hotel was new to me though. When my parents checked in they opted to upgrade our room for a small fee. They handed me the key and said it’s the 59th floor. Surely I heard that wrong, I thought. But there we went, 59 floors up the Encore building:

View from our hotel room.

The room had a lot of cool features like drapes that are button-operated and a TV in the bathroom. The free wi-fi was good too!

That night we went out to dinner in Las Vegas’s Chinatown. My parents chose Anna’s Garden, a restaurant they had been to before.

Pig hock!

The food was wonderfully authentically Cantonese: pig’s feet, steamed fish, chicken, red bean slushees (or red bean ice), hot pot rice with spareribs.

Roast Duck!

The dinner meal also included a soup for a starter (with pork) and also a dessert of sweet tapioca. Our attempt to not overeat in Vegas was smashed the first night.

We went back to our hotel and hung out, tired from the drive and full from the meal. I forgot to bring the earplugs I bought (we’re a family of snorers) but the beds were so nice we had no problem falling asleep.

Next Part: My First Las Vegas Show.. er Pinball. Yeah, Pinball.
Oh, and the photos are being uploaded to Flickr!

My page count actually shrank in the past few weeks. I broke 300 a month ago, but I dropped back after getting some feedback. My original Results chapter was 95 pages of exciting… graphs. And graphs. And charts. My advisor suggested that I only show the most interesting graphs, and shrink them. Apparently the 100% view in Pages does not offer the same readability as a printed copy. One Photoshop macro later and I have a pretty easy workflow to go from SPSS tiffs to shrunken gifs (to reduce file size). Redoing the charts and enhancing the statistical tests took three weeks or so, but the end product is a sleeker 55 pages of Results. My advisor has it right now. While I wait, I rather not go to the Discussion chapter in case some analyses could be further improved. Counting chicks before they’ve hatched, and all that.

I’ve also been talking to my peers about the general academic process. It turns out that only chumps buy their own overly-expensive statistical packages. One of my tasks now is to find a small grant that would buy one for me instead. A friend suggested Systat. While I’m good with SPSS, I also hate it, so it might be worth my time to invest in a different program.

That’s all in the realm of dissertation to report! Next… more anthropology in games.

From Shadow Complex, an Xbox LIVE Arcade game .

Your argument is invalid. (Image credit: Kristin).

Three Crabs brand looks exactly like the name implies: three crabs arranged in a triforce of crustaceans. Golden Boy Brand’s logo has a boy, holding a bottle of his own sauce. My friend Sharon pointed out that his “thumbs up” gesture is offensive in the company’s home country of Thailand, so I’m not sure what is going on there. It’s possible that in Thailand, it’s Up Yours Brand.

Three Crabs and Golden Boy Brands of Fish Sauce. Image from Cooking with Kathy Man

The company with the craziest name, however, has to be Flying Horse on Earth Brand. As if the name isn’t weird enough, take a look at the logo:

Look at it. Look.

It’s literally a horse with wings, with his hooves landing on a tiny Earth (or is the horse planet sized?).

All these wacky names and logos made me want to have my own Asian food distribution company with a crazy name. I brainstormed some with Kristin and I made mockups of two of my favorite brand names. The first is Jade Hobo Brand:

Jade Hobo Brand Sauce

The part of the brand name that generates interest is the juxtaposition between the hobo’s destitution and the fact that he is made up of a valuable mineral. The other choice is UFOs Shooting Carrots at Tigers Brand Sauce:

UFOs Shooting Carrots at Tigers Brand Sauce

This one has a little more pizazz, almost futuristic and strangely somehow both anti-animal and pro-vegetarian. Be glad to know that if grad school doesn’t work out (possibly because I’m spending my time photoshopping clipart onto a bottle of oyster sauce), look for either of these brands at your local Asian market.